Music news

• Band Aid 40 fails to reach UK Top 40 in opening week

  29-11-2024 19:00
  
  All-star version of Do They Know It’s Christmas?, spliced together from previous versions, falls short of the No 1 success of those earlier hitsThe 40th anniversary version of Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas? has failed to enter this week’s Top 40, reaching No 45.The new version of the song was made up of performances spliced together from three previous versions, in an arrangement by producer Trevor Horn. But despite featuring the unusual A-list juxtaposition of G
  
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• Kendrick Lamar: GNX review – amply backed-up grandstanding

  29-11-2024 12:00
  (PGLang/Interscope)
  Fresh from his feud with Drake, the US hip-hop star’s latest album finds him on imperious formAppositely named after a vintage model car that’s dear to his heart, Kendrick Lamar’s sixth album would sound great with the top down and a back seat full of friends nodding in sync to this album’s taut Sounwave productions and bullish self-belief. Lamar ropes in just three famous pals – SZA, Kamasi Washington and, notably, ubiquitous pop producer Jack A
  
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• Kneecap: UK government acted illegally in withholding funding from Irish rap trio

  29-11-2024 10:55
  
  The Department for Business and Trade said Kemi Badenoch’s decision to rescind funding had been ‘unlawful and procedurally unfair’Irish-language rap trio Kneecap have won their case against new Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch after she blocked an arts grant to the band citing anti-British politics.They took Badenoch, then business secretary, to court in the summer and at a hearing in Belfast’s high court, the new government said the refusal of £14,250 in fun
  
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• Auntie Flo: In My Dreams (I’m a Bird and I’m Free) review | Global album of the month

  29-11-2024 09:30
  
  (A State of Flo Records)
  Brian d’Souza’s genre-crossing curiosity takes him from propulsive disco to nursery-rhyme melodies and Tiësto-worthy tranceBrian d’Souza has always had a wandering ear. Since the 2011 release of his debut single as Auntie Flo, the DJ and producer has released four albums that traverse everything from South African kwaito to Ghanaian highlife, Ugandan pop and Afro-Cuban jazz. In 2020, he launched an online radio station playing exclusively ambient e
  
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• ‘I just had to rejoice’: the brilliance and tragedy of ‘fifth Beatle’ Billy Preston

  29-11-2024 09:00
  
  A magnetically vibrant keyboard prodigy who played on Let It Be and worked with George Harrison, Preston later lived through years of addiction. A new film aims to find ‘the dark and the light’ in his storyIn the 1960s and 70s, Billy Preston was the musician’s musician. A self-taught prodigy who grew up playing the organ in his Los Angeles church, he was accompanying Mahalia Jackson and appearing on The Nat King Cole Show before he was 11. By high school, he was travelling with
  
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