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• On my radar: George the Poet’s cultural highlights

  29-03-2025 16:00
  
  The author and podcast host on a favourite restaurant, adventures in scholastic research for his PhD and the second series of Squid GameBorn George Mpanga in north-west London in 1991, George the Poet is a spoken-word artist, author and podcast host. He studied politics, psychology and sociology at King’s College, Cambridge and is now doing a PhD at UCL about the economic and cultural potential of black music. Aged 22 he signed with Island Records and released an EP before stepping away fr
  
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• Post your questions for folk music legend Peggy Seeger

  04-05-2025 12:24
  
  As she marks her 90th birthday with a UK tour and new album, the singer and activist will answer your questionsAfter a long career which has established her as one of the most significant folk singers on both sides of the Atlantic, Peggy Seeger is about to celebrate her 90th birthday with a final tour and album – and will answer your questions.Born in New York to a musicologist father and a modernist composer, and with siblings including future folk legend Pete Seeger, she started out on p
  
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• ‘Everything we built – gone’: how the wildfires decimated LA’s music scene

  04-05-2025 11:00
  
  January’s blazes in California have devastated the livelihoods of performers, technicians and other music industry pros. They reveal what they lost – and how they’re rebuildingWithin the ashes of what used to be Christopher Fudurich’s home in Los Angeles, some objects from his garage music studio were still identifiable. Microphones charred and blackened, a scorched keyboard and melted cables among the toxic debris. Not just objects; a life’s work, passion and creat
  
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• ‘I was the only person who didn’t know the words to Coldplay’: Anoushka Shankar’s honest playlist

  04-05-2025 10:00
  
  The musician on her love of cheesy R&B, hating karaoke ‘with a fiery passion’, and the people who have sex to her sister Norah Jones’s musicThe first song I fell in love with
  Tana Mana by my dad, Ravi Shankar. In the late 80s he was experimenting with synthesisers and released an album called Tana Mana, an anomaly in his discography. I remember my imagination would light up with the title song – I would picture a village dance, and I’d be acting it out in my liv
  
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• Who is behind the great rock’n’roll ripoff? How Ticketmaster swallowed the live entertainment scene

  04-05-2025 07:00
  
  From grassroots gigs to stadium shows, there’s no escaping the ticketing giant, making billions from hiking up prices (and whacking on fees)Even Donald Trump knows that the price of concert tickets is too damn high. Recently, flanked by the preposterously dressed Maga rocker Kid Rock, the president signed an executive order to protect fans from “crazy prices” by cracking down on scalpers and hidden fees. “Make America Fun Again,” Kid Rock declared.It will take more
  
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• ‘He lived his whole life in that fire’: the tragic story of ‘lost’ singer Jackson C Frank

  02-05-2025 11:20
  A school fire, a shooting and mental health issues plagued a man whose legacy is remembered in a new documentaryThirty years ago, when the music writer Jim Abbott tried to track down the “lost” folk singer Jackson C Frank, he had no idea what he’d find. All he had to guide him was a tip from an old associate of Frank’s to go to a housing facility in Queens, New York, where he was told he was living. When he finally arrived there, the man he saw bore no relation to the Fra
  
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• ‘Music is never fixed in me’ … cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason on surviving a ‘volcano of racism’

  02-05-2025 11:00
  A remark about Rule, Britannia! led to uproar but the star musician is concentrating on the joy and power of classical music. As his first book is published, he talks to Charlotte Higgins• Read an exclusive extract from Kanneh-Mason’s new bookI saw Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s cello case before I saw him – strapped to his back, making him taller. While we talked, the instrument sat beside us, like a temporarily silent twin. A few weeks before, though, I’d heard it sing in th
  
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• ‘I don’t want to die in a hotel room somewhere’: Black Sabbath on reconciling for their final gig – and how Ozzy is living through hell

  02-05-2025 06:00
  Heavy metal’s godfathers are preparing a star-studded farewell – but will Ozzy Osbourne, after ‘horrendous’ surgery, be well enough to perform? In their first interview for two decades, the original lineup talk about their hopes and fears for rock’s ultimate gigOn a video call from his home in Los Angeles, Ozzy Osbourne is struggling to recall the exact details of recent years, ones he calls “the worst of my life”. “How many surgeries have I had?&r
  
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• ‘I need to get out there’: wrongfully identified in drill music video and jailed, he now wants to study law

  01-05-2025 16:14
  Ade Adedeji, 21, from Manchester, served three years for a crime he did not commit before his conviction was quashedOn his release from prison earlier this year, after serving three years for a crime he didn’t commit, 21-year-old Ade Adedeji had only one thing on his mind – a trip to Burger King.“The first thing I wanted to do was eat a Burger King. And hug my family, of course,” he said. “I thought I was getting out in 2027, so I had planned out the first three da
  
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• ‘Do something with your actions. Don’t just write a cheque’: Bonnie Raitt on activism, making men cry and 38 years of sobriety

  01-05-2025 15:00
  Going back out on tour, the 13-time Grammy winner recalls stark inspirations and steamy studio sessions as she answers your questionsYou’ve had a decades-long career. When did you first feel that you had “made it”? LondonLuvver
  I wasn’t expecting to do music for a job. I was into social activism in college, and I just had music as a hobby. My boyfriend managed a bunch of blues artists and I asked if I could open for some of them – just to have fun and hang out with
  
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• Model/Actriz: Pirouette review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

  01-05-2025 13:30
  (True Panther Sounds/Dirty Hit)
  Inspired by Mariah and Kylie but full of jackhammer rhythms and noise, the quartet’s second album could attract a big followingYou can see why Model/Actriz’s 2023 debut album Dogsbody attracted a lot of approving critical attention. In an era when rock music largely leans towards familiarity – where originality has essentially come to mean rearranging recognisable sounds from the past in a relatively fresh way – here was a band who genuinel
  
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• ‘Jazz isn’t about perfection’: drummer Billy Cobham on Miles Davis, Massive Attack and still learning at 80

  01-05-2025 10:45
  After a grounding with genre greats, he fused jazz with rock to outrageously funky effect. Ahead of UK dates, he explains why two prosthetic hips aren’t slowing him downBilly Cobham speaks the way he plays drums. Words pour out of him in a great, rhythmic rush, every sentence alive with energy and ideas – and so interviewing him can be as overwhelming as his music sounds. I ask about a recent sojourn to his birth nation of Panama and he’s still answering 15 minutes later, altho
  
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• Kendrick Lamar and SZA review – powerhouse duo make their mark in Atlanta

  30-04-2025 16:50
  Mercedes-Benz stadium, AtlantaThe record-breaking Grand National tour brings together two stylistically opposed stars and continues an internet-breaking feudJust when it seemed as if Kendrick Lamar had dropped his grudge against Drake, it turns out his “game over” coda to the Super Bowl half-time show was just the end of regulation. On the Grand National tour, a four-month stadium circuit for the Grammy-sweeping album GNX and SZA’s reissue album Lana, Lamar takes the music indu
  
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• Beyoncé review – ever-evolving star kicks off electrifying Cowboy Carter tour

  29-04-2025 15:46
  SoFi Stadium, Inglewood, CaliforniaThe singer delivers a rousing, seven-act spectacle as she performs many of her country songs on stage for the first time while also harking back to her previous dance-leaning eraBeyoncé doesn’t just take the stage – she takes the narrative back. On opening night of her Cowboy Carter world tour at the four-year-old SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, she brings forth a sweeping, theatrical spectacle that reclaims country music, reframes Ame
  
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• Mark Knopfler on Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing: ‘I wrote it in the window display of a New York appliance store’

  28-04-2025 15:38
  ‘A big bonehead of a delivery guy was looking at all these TV screens tuned to MTV and the lines he was saying were too good to be true. So I borrowed a pen and paper, sat down and started writing’I was in an appliance shop in New York and there was a big bonehead in there delivering gear. All the TVs were tuned to MTV and I overheard this guy sounding off about the rock stars on the screens. He had an audience of one – the junior at the store – and some of his lines were
  
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• Add to playlist: Kashus Culpepper’s ‘southern sounds’ and the week’s best new tracks

  25-04-2025 12:14
  Welcome to our new series highlighting the best emerging artists – first up, a former firefighter and US Navy recruit who counts Samuel L Jackson as a fanFrom Alabama
  Recommended if you like Luke Combs, Tony Joe White, Charles Bradley
  Up next Supporting Leon Bridges in the USKashus Culpepper’s story has something of the Hollywood movie about it. A former firefighter who went on to enlist in the US Navy, he only picked up a guitar five years ago to entertain his fellow troops when the
  
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• Maria Somerville: Luster review – a vivid and vital entry in the shoegaze revival

  25-04-2025 10:00
  (4AD)
  The Irish artist’s folk-inflected sound is both unnerving and alluring on her luxuriant second albumMaria Somerville’s second album of folk-tinged shoegaze arrives at an apposite time. TikTok has turned the genre into a lifestyle for alt teens, while the internet radio station NTS has made itself synonymous with hazy, deadpan underground pop. But the Irish musician’s sound feels distinctive: both slightly alienating – cool to the touch, unnervingly atmospheric &ndas
  
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• Zoé Basha: Gamble review | Jude Rogers's folk album of the month

  25-04-2025 09:30
  (Self-released)
  The Dublin-based French-American singer and guitarist’s heart is in the Appalachian mountains – but her songs swim from country to blues and French chansonBookended with canonical traditional songs and sung in eerily bright a cappellas, Gamble is a confident, self-produced debut by an exciting new voice. This is Zoé Basha, a Dublin-based French-American singer and guitarist whose folk music swims deftly around country, jazz, French chanson and the blues.This is
  
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• Girl, so inspiring! Lorde’s 20 best songs – ranked

  24-04-2025 17:36
  As she releases euphoric new single What Was That, we assess the New Zealand singer-songwriter’s intense, irreverent oeuvreIf you wanted to take Lorde’s third album, Solar Power, as a farewell to chasing mainstream stardom, closer Oceanic Feeling was strong evidence: her trademark “cherry black lipstick” was “gathering dust in a drawer / I don’t need her any more.” Instead, she offered a beautiful, sun-kissed paean to stepping off the treadmill: “I
  
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• Harnessing chaos and charm, Pere Ubu’s David Thomas rewrote rock’n’roll

  24-04-2025 17:11
  The bandleader, who has died aged 71, created a vast body of work that influenced everyone from Ramones to REM, thanks to his absurdist energy• News: David Thomas, anarchic Pere Ubu bandleader, dies aged 71Rock journalism in the 1970s was never short on hyperbole, but when Jon Landau described seeing the young Bruce Springsteen as “rock’n’roll future” – a line which subsequently became part of Springsteen mythology – the singer felt so “suffocated&r
  
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• Self Esteem: A Complicated Woman review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

  24-04-2025 13:01
  (Polydor)
  After her big breakthrough and West End fame, Rebecca Lucy Taylor works through her worries in real time on her new album – to fascinating and confusing effectLast week, London’s Duke of York’s theatre played host to an elaborate four-night live staging of Self Esteem’s third album. Devised by Self Esteem herself – Rebecca Lucy Taylor – along with Tony award-winning theatrical director and designer Tom Scutt, it was rapturously received by critics, a
  
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• Central Cee review – UK rap superstar tentatively enjoys stadium success

  20-04-2025 15:47
  Co-Op Live, Manchester
  Cycling through a set of stiff hand gestures, the rapper sometimes seems unsure what to do on stage. But when mediated through screens, his connection to his fans is palpableCentral Cee has exported UK rap like no one else before, by sculpting UK drill for TikTok with fast-paced, bite-sized packaging that often remixes a recognisable hit, all sealed with his steely demeanour. An influential fashion figure and Gen Z icon, his success is global and previously inconceivable.
  
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• Self Esteem review – straight outta Gilead

  19-04-2025 15:00
  Duke of York’s, LondonA triumphant staging by Rebecca Lucy Taylor of her new album, A Complicated Woman, is part artistic statement, part power pop club nightHard-edged digital club music throbs from the theatre stage – a place mostly in darkness, its shadows hiding a drummer and a multi-instrumentalist. Standing in a row, glaring at the theatre audience, are Self Esteem and 10 dancers. They are not dancing. It’s a tense, delicious contradiction. The company stand stock-still f
  
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• One to watch: Jane Paknia

  19-04-2025 15:00
  Inspired by Alice Coltrane, Sophie and a certain Muppet, the New York musician lives out her dream on an addictive second EPOne of this year’s best EPs was partly inspired by a cryptic dream about a Muppet dying. As Elmo floated into the abyss, New York musician Jane Paknia unexpectedly realised she was living the musical dream that had always felt just out of reach.Paknia, 24, had been frustrated that she couldn’t connect her youth as a talented pianist (taught by her Iranian grandm
  
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• Davido: 5ive review – flashes of Afropop excellence

  18-04-2025 13:00
  (Columbia)
  The Nigerian superstar’s vocal prowess and smooth beats have their moments on his latest album, but at 17 tracks it could use an editOne of the lodestars turning Afrobeats into an international phenomenon, Nigerian supernova David Adedeji Adeleke isn’t as famous in the UK as Burna Boy, Wizkid or Rema – he’s yet to have a hit such as Last Last, One Dance or Calm Down. Also, as his fifth album hints, his appeal may simply not be as global as theirs.Davido’s
  
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• Various artists: Disk Musik – A DD Records Compilation review | Safi Bugel's experimental album of the month

  18-04-2025 10:01
  (Phantom Limb)
  The 80s label released hundreds of oddball DIY recordings. Their final compilation, now repressed, jerks from folk to punk to ambient – with moments worthy of great kids’ TVIn 1980, a group of friends in Japan started DD Records, a platform for amateur musicians to share bizarre homespun recordings across their network. The label released an impressive 222 cassettes and a handful of vinyl records in five years, then disbanded and faded into relative obscurity. Their la
  
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• Quade: The Foel Tower review – twisted Bristol band tap into the tensions between industry and nature

  18-04-2025 09:31
  (AD 93)
  Drawing on folk, jazz, ambient, post-rock and doom, the quartet’s new album shrouds cryptic, literate lyrics behind rumbling bass blasts and writhing stringsListening to The Foel Tower feels like tuning a weathered old radio – you’ll be rewarded for applying patience and concentration. On this second album, experimental Bristol four-piece Quade make a virtue of the slow build; Barney Matthews’ bassy, cryptic vocals are buried beneath shivering cymbals, gut-rumblin
  
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• Julien Baker and Torres: Send a Prayer My Way review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

  17-04-2025 13:00
  (Matador)
  The two deep south songwriters ditch country’s rhinestones for a personal, defiant reframing of the genre’s tropesThe origins of Send a Prayer My Way stretch back nearly a decade. The partnership between US singer-songwriters Mackenzie “Torres” Scott and Julien Baker germinated in 2016, when the pair performed together in Chicago. Scott subsequently suggested, in a text sent during the pandemic, that they make a country album. Accusations that the pair are jumpi
  
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• Max Romeo was a great social commentator, railing against inequality and discord

  13-04-2025 18:55
  The reggae singer best known for War Ina Babylon and Chase the Devil was most productive in the febrile political climate of 1970s Jamaica, but his influence remains undimmedJamaican reggae artist Max Romeo dies aged 80Max Romeo, who died on Friday aged 80 from complications related to a heart condition, was one of Jamaica’s most celebrated vocalists; critiquing the island’s pervasive class divides and wealth disparities with a distinctive tenor, he denounced punitive US foreign poli
  
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• Gigspanner Big Band: Turnstone review – an elegance unmatched in British folk

  12-04-2025 17:00
  
  (GS)
  The multi-talented six-piece soar on their most accomplished album yet, led by the exceptional fiddle-playing of Peter Knight With six members, the Gigspanner Big Band is not particularly big, though their collective elan has a forceful presence unmatched in British folk: a little classical, a little jazzy, highly inventive while their material remains almost entirely traditional. Founded by fiddle player Peter Knight, once of Steeleye Span, the ensemble contains two duos and a trio as well
  
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