During festival season in Edinburgh, anything goes. Oxford students ride stationary exercise bikes, leafleters dressed as Victorian gentlemen heckle passers-by and opera singers cover pop classics for loose change on street corners. Yet only meters beneath the chaos, in a…
Category: Gigs
Live | Rufus and Loudon Wainwright at the Royal Opera House
Central to the Royal Opera House’s opulent setting, three words oversee the gilded balconies and small red aisles. HOUSE OF RUFUS. They refer only in part to the similarly-titled nineteen-disc boxset Rufus Wainwright released earlier this month, but more than…
Live | Sea of Bees @ Portland Arms, Cambridge, 13 July
Sea of Bees, aka Julie Ann Bee, is a musical entity so adorable you want to cuddle her, but her haunting, elegiac melodies leave you in no doubt she’s seen a bit of life – and boy has it hurt sometimes.
Live | Avi Buffalo @ Brudenell, Leeds, 14 July
The ever-sweaty Brudenell Social Club played host to these knob-twiddling, bench-loving, bacon-lipped, monstrously talented Americans, and FFS had a good long look.
Live | Ed Sheeran @ Guildford Boileroom, 19 July
Seriously deft on the loop pedal, with the voice of a choirboy-turned-rockstar and a guitar that hasn’t left his side in years, it’s not hard to see why Ed Sheeran’s show at the Boileroom sold out in less than twenty-five…
Live | Arcade Fire, Mumford & Sons, Beirut, The Vaccines, Owen Pallett @ Hyde Park, London, 30 June
Arcade Fire played a pleasing smattering of hits, the best for me being ‘Roccoco’ (lots of good ooh-ing from the crowd), ‘Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)’, which made me a bit teary, ‘Haiti’, ‘Intervention’, ‘We Used To Wait’, ‘Keep The Car Running’ and ‘Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)’. The band have written so many good songs, and seem to nail a half-disillusioned idealism that’s very definitive of music now, agreeing with Fleet Foxes in wanting to escape ‘the sprawl’ but not being sure if that’s possible. They’re also slightly in love with the dead shopping malls, the emptiness of the suburbs; their protesting edge is questioning, searching.
Live: Yo La Tengo @ O2 Academy, Oxford
“SPIN THE WHEEL!” No, we’re not in the audience for Wheel of Fortune, but the wheel is the key decision maker onstage with Yo La Tengo tonight. Needless to say, this tour is unlike any other, and even though the…
Live: Best Coast @ Thekla, Bristol
After Kurt Cobain’s death, a gathering was held where his rival, and apparent nemesis, Eddie Vedder noted that the fame of Seattle’s grunge contingency might well be down to Cobain’s genius. Whilst Best Coast’s Bethany Cosentino has the same love…
Live: Anais Mitchell @ Brudenell Social Club, Leeds
Anais Mitchell leapt into our consciousness with last year’s stunning folk-opera Hadestown, a sprawling masterpiece with a lengthy cast of distinguished contributers, not least Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, the Low Anthem’s Ben Knox Miller and Ani DiFranco. Lush instrumentation and…
Live: Fleet Foxes @ Hammersmith Apollo, London
There really was no chance that Fleet Foxes were not going to deliver a stunner of a tour this year. And there was no chance that we were not going to wax lyrical about it. After being met with almost…