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- New music at Iceland Airwaves: Retro Stefson – Kimba
Starting a week-long series of new music tips from Iceland Airwaves festival, here are six young pups who used to rap but now make a joyful, world music-inspired racket
Reykjavík's Retro Stefson are six young kids formed out of the ashes of an ill-fated rap group started by lead singer Unnstein Stefansson (their name derives from the fact that three of the band's members share the same surname). Born in Portugal to an Icelandic father and Angolan mother, Unnstein takes inspiration from world music for the Retro Stefson sound, mixing low slung bass lines with tightly wound funk guitar. Kimba is taken from their forthcoming album, and the video and song manage to mix Prince, Talking Heads, cowbells, guitar solos and gorgeous knitwear into one luscious-looking scene complete with a waterfall backdrop.
Retro Stefson play Iceland Airwaves on Saturday 16 Octoberguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Solomon Burke: gone but never forgotten
Though not as well-known as Marvin Gaye or James Brown, Solomon Burke, who died on Sunday aged 70, is perhaps the greatest soul singer of all time
Some things we can all agree on. The greatest footballer of all time? Pele. The greatest movie actor? Brando. The greatest boxer? Ali. When it comes to the question of the greatest soul singer, we will forever be arguing deep into the night. Sam Cooke or Clyde McPhatter? Marvin Gaye or Aretha Franklin? James Carr, Bobby Bland, Etta James, Percy Sledge, Levi Stubbs, OV Wright, James Brown, Bettye LaVette, Smokey Robinson, Dusty Springfield, Ray Charles, Don Covay, Tammi Terrell, Curtis Mayfield, Donny Hathaway, David Ruffin, Irma Thomas, Jackie Wilson, Roberta Flack … Whichever names are proposed, every last one of them has to reckon with the mighty, mighty Solomon Burke.
I came to him late. With the arrogance of youth I assumed that I knew all there was to know about the soul greats. Burke somehow slipped through the net, his name only familiar to me as a songwriting credit on the Rolling Stones' version of Everybody Needs Somebody to Love. One morning in 1983 I visited a friend's house in north London. A Solomon Burke compilation was spinning on the turntable. Just Out of Reach (Of My Two Empty Arms) was blasting out. I stood transfixed. Anguish had never been rendered so beautifully. I'd never heard a voice that combined religious intensity with such natural poise. This was pure emotion, the embodiment of soul music. I was an instant convert.
I first saw him perform in 1984. The previous 15 years had not been kind to him or his reputation. Having arrived at Atlantic Records in 1961 just as Ray Charles was leaving, Burke enjoyed a stupendous run of hits (Cry to Me, Down in the Valley, If You Need Me, The Price) without ever delivering the solid-gone signature song that would make his name universally renowned. Years of decline followed, a period he would call "throne in exile". In 1980, when he called up Jerry Wexler to complain that The Blues Brothers movie had attributed his Everybody Needs Somebody to Love to Wilson Pickett, Atlantic's founder expressed amazement that Burke was still alive. That's how far his stock had fallen.
In 1984 he released a much-vaunted comeback album, Soul Alive, a terrific live set, and I happened to be in New York when he arrived to promote it. The venue was a shabby supper club in one of the roughest parts of town. There were 20 people present, including the staff. Burke, wearing his customary crown and cape, simply stormed it. I've never seen anyone so monumentally possessed on a stage, not even Little Richard comes close. After multiple encores he retreated to a tiny backstage dressing-room and I dutifully followed, keen to pay my respects. At this time Burke weighed in at much less than the 30 stone he eventually ballooned into. Even so, he filled the entire room with his bulk and his presence. We started talking. He had all the time in the world. For the next hour he regaled me with stories. About the time he fled a Philadelphia lunatic asylum where he was employed, making his escape to California on a horse and wagon. About the time he worked on a meat market with Chubby Checker. About the time he hung out with Richard Nixon on Sammy Davis Jr's yacht. About the time he was accidentally booked to play a Ku Klux Klan rally in Mississippi, somehow winning over the 30,000 crowd and playing three encores. I've never met anyone funnier, before or since. As Burke talked, he munched away on a large plate of pork chop sandwiches. Ever the gent he offered me one. I gently explained I was a vegetarian. Burke winked and said, "If you don't tell I won't tell". What was a poor boy to do? How could you refuse the offer of a pork chop sandwich from Solomon Burke?
The last time we spoke was in 2006. He was smack in the middle of a late-career renaissance that had begun with Don't Give Up On Me in 2002. He retold many of the same stories, with some delicious extra detail thrown in for good measure. Who was I to complain? "Will people remember me when I'm gone?" he asked me as our interview ended. He seemed genuinely concerned that he'd quickly be forgotten. "You'll be remembered," I told him, "as long as people listen to music. And you'll be remembered as one of the greats." He chuckled loud and long at that, apparently convinced.
Whether it's true, as Burke often claimed, that the term "soul music" was first coined for him … well, it might as well be true. What the hell? I'll nominate him as the greatest soul singer of all time. Argue it out among yourselves.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Radiohead's Kid A: still not much cop
Ten years ago, I awarded this cultural cornerstone 1.5 out of 5. My opinion remains the same – it still sounds dull and frustrating
A popular pub game among music hacks is The Review I Got Wrong, where each player takes turns to admit when they were hopelessly off the mark in their opinion of a release or gig because they were drunk, seduced by hype or fancied the keyboard player. After everyone else owned up to the gushing plaudits they once showered upon Back to the Planet or the five stars they awarded Be Here Now, eyes turn to me expecting a shamed retraction of the vitriolic, sweary shoeing I gave to Kid A in Melody Maker upon its release, 10 years ago last week.
The trouble is, my opinion of Kid A – 1.5 out of 5, because I only liked three of the 10 tracks – has barely changed in the last decade. Having been struck off the Radiohead mailing list for my review (and obviously not inclined to part with good money for it), I've not returned to the record since 2000. Other than the bits I've encountered at festivals and the inordinate amount of time I've spent shivering along to my download of Motion Picture Soundtrack, the one song I found outstanding at the time and now consider among the most beautiful pieces of music ever recorded.
However, Kid A's status as a cultural cornerstone has proved me, if not wrong, then very much in the minority. It reached No 1 in the UK and US. It topped many 2000 end-of-year polls. It was named "album of the decade" by Pitchfork, Rolling Stone and the Times, and came second in the Guardian's own poll. People whose opinions I trust claim it to be their favourite album ever. Pop culture's most ardent lyrical analysts have sweated blood to deduce internet-era ennui, political tub-thumping and Generation ZZZ rhetoric in the line: "We've got heads on sticks/You've got ventriloquists." Celebrated US journalist Chuck Klosterman even wrote an essay claiming the album was a prediction of 9/11, so keen was the critical cognoscenti to cobble some link between Kid A and the defining event of modern-day fear and loathing.
So am I wrong to maintain my stoical disregard of its musical worth? Older, wiser and a little less sweary, I returned to Kid A this week to re-assess it in the light of a decade's veneration. And found it largely as dull, frustrating and sporadically brilliant as I did back in 2000.
For me, the "growers" have failed to grow. Everything in Its Right Place still sounds like a haphazard and pointless synth'n'laptop experiment. How to Disappear Completely mumbles and drags too drearily even for this die-hard Tindersticks fan. I found myself warming to the cutesy micro-melodies of Morning Bell, but still can't find anything in Treefingers or the title track that you, me or any trained monkey couldn't make with access to a keyboard, a vocoder and a box of squeaky animal toys. Yes, I felt a rush when the free-form jazz horns of The National Anthem reached their unified crescendo, but it was a rush of relief that the Mingus-in-a-tumble-dryer racket was finally over.
There's little real Millennial state-of-the-globe commentary here either, besides abstruse visions of climate change and oil wars on Idioteque. Even the demonic Tony Blair was hidden deep within the packaging. Otherwise there's nothing but Thom Yorke's personal alienation or the abstract images and hat-drawn slogans that would become their trademark over the next two albums. Wilfully impenetrable, emotionally inaccessible, encased in opaque aspic, saying nothing to me about my life.
But if Kid A unravels few fresh pleasures 10 years on, its standouts stand even taller. Optimistic is a cracking (and underplayed) tune and Idioteque is perhaps key to the album's continuing significance – one of the most groundbreaking, anti-populist rock/electro meldings since New Order, and a signpost to the future. Because if Kid A's sounds and textures were never fully adapted by subsequent bands for the mainstream, its attitude would come to forge a new alternative.
By the mid-noughties, just like the mid-90s, alternative and mainstream were conjoined by a frothing mass media and shrinking major-label budgets – there seemed little distance between Kasier Chief and Sugababe, between Arctic Monkey and Crazy Frog. There was nowhere for an underground to be. So the A Kids looked to Kid A's defiantly challenging and experimental stance for guidance, and then took to the internet, swarming around the prickly plaid of Pitchfork, creating the ever-churning blogosphere, championing similarly indigestible bands such as Animal Collective and Foals. A new cyberculture developed, and Kid A was its totem.
Ten years on, though, would I change anything about my original review of it? I'd make it less sweary, and cut about 5,324 exclamation marks. I'd give Idioteque more credit and Morning Bell more of a break. I'd maybe bump it up to 2.5, solely as thanks for all the goosebumps and tears I've experienced with Motion Picture Soundtrack.
But the Review I Got Wrong? I once made the Boo Radleys' 'C'Mon Kids single of the week over Neutral Milk Hotel's Holland, 1945. I hang my head.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать
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