The Imagine Dragons sound is big on beats, both on record and on stage. So it’s almost expected that their encore of ‘Radioactive’ climaxes with all four band members pounding on some type of drum. Less expected is the might of lead guitarist Wayne Sermon. Relatively low-key on their albums, in concert he’s as integral to the Las Vegas quartet’s sound as Dan Reynolds’ voice and, yes, even those pounding rhythms.
London’s Hammersmith Apollo isn’t what you’d call intimate. And yet Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder makes the 3,600-seater venue feel like a living room, or a cosy campfire singalong. And it’s not just because he’s surrounded by a vintage radio, reel-to-reel tape player, battered suitcases (complete with The Who sticker), various old-timey speakers, assorted instruments, and, later, an actual campfire complete with starry sky backdrop.
It’s midway through Spoon’s set at Forum Kentish Town. A fired-up Britt Daniel has just led the band, backlit in orange, through a ferociously jubilant ‘Do You’. Multi-instrumentalist Alex Fischel begins a moody keyboard piece that gradually swells to Sigur Ros levels of intensity.
‘Be Myself’, the title of Sheryl Crow’s latest album, says it all. After flirting with soul and classic country on her last two outings, ‘100 Miles From Memphis’ and ‘Feels Like Home’, she’s gone back to her roots, embracing the sound that first made her a household name. The decision to be herself once more was clearly personal, as lyrics like “Hanging with the hipsters is a lot of hard work” make abundantly clear. But there’s the added benefit of the new material slipping seamlessly into a live show that, from the get go, leans on her first three star-making LPs.
“I want to talk to you, but I have a problem,” Oumou Sangaré tells an adoring Village Underground crowd who greet each of her songs with jubilation. “My problem,” the Malian songstress laughs, “is English.”
But, when it comes to “The Songbird of Wassoulou”, something as trivial as language is no barrier. After all, the vast majority of people rejoicing inside this packed Shoreditch venue don’t understand a single word of the Bambara language she sings in. That’s a testament to her glorious voice, refined and finessed over almost five decades of performance. A singer from the age of five, she knows how to pack a single phrase with more emotion than most vocalists get into an entire song.
A lot’s changed for Mike Doughty in the 20 years since he lived in London. He split Soul Coughing, the “deep slacker jazz” band that brought him success and anguish. He quit the drugs that helped him cope. He went solo. He wrote a memoir. He wrote a rock opera. And he started taking selfies with various food products.
But what’s not changed are his feelings towards the city he called home for most of 1996.
How would you recover from a gruelling US tour? Goldfish’s David Poole went surfing in the Maldives. Dom Peters, the Cape Town electronic duo’s other half, attended a music festival just outside his home town.
“That was probably the wrong thing to do,” Peters laughs on the line from the group’s studio. “I wore a hoodie, which helped, because everybody kept asking me what time I was playing.”
Paul McCartney’s been at it for over half a century. He’s long since lost the element of surprise – yet tonight, during what’s billed as his 50th London show, that’s exactly what he delivers.
Dan Patlansky won’t soon forget 1 February 2014. It’s the day he opened for Bruce Springsteen at Johannesburg’s FNB Stadium.
“That was fantastic, even though it was one of the most daunting things I’ve ever done,” he remembers. “The scary part wasn’t the actual number of people, it was that none of those 80 000 people were there to see me,” he chuckles.
London in January is cold, dark, and miserable. Yet Arno Carstens is excited to be back in the city he called home while making his third solo album.
“My memories of recording ‘Wonderful Wild’ are that there was a lot of serious thinking and kind of hard work but amongst the angst was just great fun and partying,” he says, thinking back to 2009. “Most memorable was all the good friends I made.
Nils van der Linden