rocknroll

Halfway through Muse’s set, probably the daftest thing that Groupama Stadium has ever seen happens. Frontman Matt Bellamy is wearing shimmering silver while perched at a light-up piano and playing booming horror cliche Toccata and Fugue in D Minor by Bach. Then his band break into You Make Me Feel Like It’s Halloween, replete with a three-storey-tall masked, hooded face behind them, the video screen inside it alternating between Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger and other scary movie villains. It’s the most high-budget…

“Last night I dreamed the whale Moby Dick swallowed up every woman and girl on the face of the earth, including me. All of us, pulverized into mush. My eyeballs were intact, so when the whale turned on its side I crawled into its head to peek through his blowhole. With all the women gone from the earth, the men’s heads and third legs exploded into nothingness – headless, third-leg-less bodies running amok and in circles like cartoon roadrunners.”This is a passage from Twist: An American Girl, a coming-of-age memoir by…

Tina Turner, the pioneering rock’n’roll star who became a pop behemoth in the 1980s, has died aged 83 after a long illness.She had suffered ill health in recent years, being diagnosed with intestinal cancer in 2016 and having a kidney transplant in 2017.Turner affirmed and amplified Black women’s formative stake in rock’n’roll, defining that era of music to the extent that Mick Jagger admitted to taking inspiration from her high-kicking, energetic live performances for his stage persona. After two decades of working with…

If Little Richard AKA Richard Wayne Penniman, was criminally underrated for much of his career, his legacy has burned bright since his death in May 2020. Last weekend, the BBC debuted James House’s Little Richard: King and Queen of Rock ’n’ Roll, a solid, feature-length UK/US co-production that’s now on iPlayer. Meanwhile, the Dee Rees exec-produced Little Richard: I Am Everything, which premiered at Sundance back in January, is in UK cinemas.Unsurprisingly, there’s significant crossover between the docs in terms of…

Lisa Cortes’s documentary is an irresistible tribute to the pioneering rock’n’roll genius, whose wild transgressive energy and explosive sexuality blazed a trail and created a musical and performing language for James Brown, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Prince, Elton John, David Bowie, and many other stars – some of whom had the good grace to thank him.And he is now considered a great queer artist, which is how many interviewees here describe him; Little Richard in fact described himself as gay, and the movie perhaps…

Even before singer Florence Welch materialises on the first night of her European tour, her arrival is foreshadowed by her set. At the back of the stage is a table – or possibly an altar – dressed with candelabras covered in gauzy white fabric, like a giant wedding cake made by spiders. (The “rotting grandeur” of Miss Havisham’s house in Dickens is very much a reference.)Half a dozen large chandeliers trail more frayed white chiffon, their opulence laced with a hint of decay and implicit danger. (What if they fell?) Since…

A man is on his hands and knees, scrubbing Florence Welch’s blood from a previously pristine white plinth. “No broken bones, they don’t think,” she says upon returning to the stage, her right foot bandaged after a conflab with a medic. She immediately launches into Choreomania, a song about a medieval phenomenon in which groups of people would be taken by the compulsion to dance themselves to the brink of death and beyond. It was, perhaps, always going to go this far.Florence + the Machine’s recent album, Dance Fever,…

Jerry Lee Lewis, the rock’n’roll pioneer who became one of the most infamous figures in popular music, has died aged 87, his publicist has said.He died of natural causes at his home in DeSoto County, Mississippi. “Judith, his seventh wife, was by his side when he passed away at his home in Desoto County, Mississippi, south of Memphis,” a statement said. “He told her, in his final days, that he welcomed the hereafter, and that he was not afraid.”Lewis’s energetic performances on songs including Great Balls of Fire helped…

From the moment they first graced a club stage in 1973, envisioning themselves as the star children of Alice Cooper, the Beatles and the New York Dolls, Kiss have introduced themselves as “The Hottest Band In The Woooooorrrrld!”, even when no one had ever heard their name. Never has anyone better worn the adage: dress for the job you want, not the one you have.“You wanted the best, you got the best!” booms a voice over the PA, and over the heads of 20,000 fans gathered at the stadium hosting the Sydney leg of the band’s…

The latest exhibition at the Modernist gallery in Manchester started with a dad joke. Designer and producer Andy Votel was DJing when someone requested some house music, to which he retorted: “We’ve got some records with houses on the front.” The Modernist’s Eddy Rhead asked him to curate a selection of album sleeves featuring architecture from his extensive vinyl collection. “I get as much from a record sleeve as I do from the music,” says Votel. “I…