Category: Music

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Interviews Music

Spandau Ballet come dancing back

They were the darlings of the ’80s, the pretty boys of pop who – alongside Duran Duran – topped the charts with hits like ‘True’ and Gold’. But the good times turned bad with an acrimonious split and, later, a bitter court battle over royalties.

However unlikely it seemed, the reunion – almost 20 years later – was inevitable.

Now in a Cape Town hotel suite fit for superstars on the comeback trail, bassist Martin Kemp and multi-instrumentalist Steve Norman tell us about their rocky past, their surprising return, and their bright future.

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Interviews Music

Chasing Snow Patrol

Gary Lightbody still remembers the first songs he ever wrote.

“They sucked big style,” he grins.

“I was 15 maybe. There’s a little room down underneath the kitchen in our house, like a little dungeon. I would go down there and turn my amp up and my parents would be in the kitchen going: ‘God, what have we done? What child of Satan have we spawned?’

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Music Reviews

Dave Matthews Band sip ‘Big Whiskey’

The Dave Matthews Band’s seventh studio outing, ‘Big Whiskey & the GrooGrux King’, smoulders into life with an impassioned sax solo — only fitting, really, for an album dedicated to the man playing with such fire in his belly.

Yes, the memory of Leroi Moore, who died suddenly last year, looms large over the album named after him. Quite appropriately then it’s a focused, no-nonsense affair — like the man himself.

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Music Reviews

‘Who do you trust?’ demand Cassette

“What was it that you slipped inside my drink?/ Maybe poison?” Jon Savage demands on the enigmatic fist-pumper ‘Who Do You Trust’.

No need to be so paranoid, man. His group’s second album – a quietly confident collection of steroid-enhanced stadium rockers, sleek pop anthems, and genuinely heartfelt ballads – is what few others achieve: intelligent, adventurous and damn near impossible to get out of your head.

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Music Reviews

Depeche Mode find the ‘Sounds Of The Universe’

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Depeche Mode, reasons driving force Martin Gore, are “a subversive pop band, able to get away with anything”. Theirs have always been twisted songs of faith and devotion, sex and death. Musically not much has changed either, the past decade spent trying to reach the heights of best work ‘Violator’ and ‘Songs Of Faith And Devotion’.

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Music Reviews

U2 look to the horizon

Larry Mullen pounds away like the Eveready Bunny on speed. Adam Clayton’s fingers stampede up and down his bass guitar’s fretboard. With his amp dialled up to 11, The Edge fires off savage riffs of mass destruction. U2’s misfiring ‘Get On Your Boots’ certainly relies on a shock and awe approach. And yet what hits hardest is an almost throwaway line from Bono: “I don’t want to talk about wars between nations.”

And, for most of the band’s 12th studio album, the man who never shuts up about poverty, Aids, third world debt and wars between nations actually keeps his word. The Big Themes are edged out by character studies of ordinary people, himself (“Napoleon in high heels”), and, clearly unable to ditch the political entirely, an Afghan man wounded in a bomb blast.

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Music Reviews

Springsteen still ‘Working On A Dream’

Something’s wrong with Bruce Springsteen.

“Is there anybody alive out there?” he recently demanded on ‘Radio Nowhere’; now it’s a repeated “Can you hear me?” on ‘Outlaw Pete’.

The man must be going deaf, because it’s sure as hell not insecurity. Within two years of the chest-thumping ‘Magic’ he’s released the even ballsier ‘Working On A Dream’ which, despite its title, is no boring state of the nation address set to pomp and circumstance. Instead, The Boss’ 16th studio album is a muscular rock record that sidesteps politics to bask simply in the hope of the ‘yes we can’ generation.

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Music Reviews

340ml are sorry for the delay

There’s something undeniably depressing about the bleak apartheid architecture – the tatty Regent’s Park Hotel; Triompf’s faceless flats; Parktown’s cold concrete constructions – that comprises the artwork of ‘Sorry For The Delay’. And yet, in Ross Garrett’s striking photographs, the gloomy buildings have a haunting beauty.

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Interviews Music

OneRepublic are dreaming out loud

12 December 2008. The last show on OneRepublic’s 15-month world tour. Backstage at the Grand West Arena, minutes before his band go on, singer Ryan Tedder is clearly relieved.

“All I can say is I’m excited (A) that I’m in Cape Town and (B) that tonight is the last time I have to play these 12 songs together. We’ll always be playing some of them but we’ll never play this many songs off this album after tonight,” he grins a little wearily.

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Music Reviews

‘Day & Age’ comes in for the kill

The Killers are not from the Caribbean. Nor are they sadists. So what the hell are those steel drums doing on ‘I Can’t Stay’? A shuffling Calypso track that’s all pink cocktail umbrellas, palm fronds in the breeze, and the hangover from Barry Manilow’s ‘Copacabana’, it just takes the band’s new “anything goes” approach too far.

Sure, there’s nothing wrong with a bit of experimentation — elsewhere on their ’80s-obsessed third album, the Vegas quartet actually get away with ‘Careless Whisper’ saxophones and Howard Jones keyboard fills. But there’s real trouble when the song sounds best in an elevator or on call-waiting.

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