2023
Brian Auger is a name that rings a distant bell to me but ought to ring a lot louder. He’s a bit of a zelig, turning up with his Hammond organ in the unlikeliest places ever since the ’60s. Not just his organ either.
Devon Ross is an American multi-hyphenate: model turned actor turned musician – not just an MTA but an ATM.
Here’s something weird and appropriately trippy from Wiltshire producer DJ Emma, celebrating the invention of LSD – or, to be specific, the world’s first acid trip.
Isabella Lovestory is a trailblazing new reggaeton star from Honduras, via Canada, and this is her self-styled “bad bitch anthem” called Fuetazo.
Here’s an autumn playlist to warm the cockles of the ear: from obscure ’70s rock to pioneering ’80s funk, first wave hip-hop and New Wave country, free jazz and doom folk, dub, blues and even some prog – plus tributes to those we lost in November, Shane MacGowan and Killing Joke’s Geordie Walker.
With a jazz background, a love of 1970s soft rock and a voice like Thom Yorke, former Midlake front man Tim Smith has always been hard to pigeonhole. A decade after quitting the band, the famously perfectionist Smith releases his first album as Harp – a new project with his wife, Kathi Zung.
I’d never say we were really friends, and we came from very different backgrounds. But as fellow punks of the same age (he was born on Christmas Day just 16 days before me) Shane and I had an acquaintance.
When I first heard them 40 years ago, I thought the Jesus And Mary Chain were the most exciting new band I’d heard since The Sex Pistols. They still sound great in 2023.
The Royal Hotel is a slow-building mystery thriller about two female backpackers who find themselves at the mercy of Aussie men at their worst after taking a holiday job behind the bar of an Outback watering hole, in Australian film-maker Kitty “The Assistant” Green’s second feature-length assault on toxic masculinity.
RIP Terry Venables (1943-2023)
Footballer, manager, writer, singer, Dagenham boy Terry played for Chelsea, Spurs, Queens Park Rangers and (briefly) Crystal Palace between 1960 and 1975. He then managed Palace (winning the Division 3 and 2 titles in successive years), QPR (winning Division 2), Barcelona (winning the Spanish league title) and Spurs (winning the 1991 FA Cup). He took over England in 1994 and guided them to the semi-finals of the Euro 96 tournament, where they lost on penalties to Germany.