Category: Music

The photo on the front of Linda Thompson’s new album, Proxy Music, is nothing if not striking. It features Thompson posing in an identical outfit to that worn by the model Kari-Ann Moller on the cover of Roxy Music’s eponymous 1972 debut, although her expression is noticeably different: in place of Moller’s smouldering look to camera, Thompson offers a faintly disturbing grimace. She looks a bit nuts. “Yes,” she nods. “The photographer kept saying: ‘Do that thing that she does’ and I couldn’t. I’d had some banana cake, and I think I was having some kind of sugar rush. I think it’s hilarious. The original cover is so daft, I just thought I’d make it worse.”

It goes without saying that this all runs very contrary to the image of Thompson forged in the 1970s, when she made a string of incredible albums with her then-husband, Richard Thompson. There was something rather stern and austere about the Thompsons even before they gave away all their money and possessions and retreated to a Sufi commune. Their exquisite music was vastly potentiated by Thompson’s voice, a hugely affecting cocktail of fragility and toughness. On their most famous album, 1974’s I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, she sang like someone who had been horribly wounded by life but resolved to carry on anyway. Their releases were no one’s idea of a barrel of laughs.

Even their love songs were oddly sombre, while the sheer bleakness of Withered and Died or The End of the Rainbow can take your breath away. The most famous footage of them comes from The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1975, performing the impossibly beautiful A Heart Needs a Home. They sing with eyes closed and somehow look as if they’re freezing to death, him in a ratty woolly hat and her in a headscarf and polo neck: no fans of glittery postmodern glam they. “No, I didn’t listen to Roxy Music at the time,” Thompson confirms. “I was probably listening to Bulgarian folk music. We took ourselves very seriously. We’d read Blavatsky and Gurdjieff – all those terrible old charlatans, but we believed the whole thing. Oh my God, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead … it was Pseuds Corner all the way. And Richard wrote the songs and he had quite a bleak outlook, you know. He’s not a barrel of laughs today.” She chuckles. “I’m kidding. We took things a bit seriously and now I can’t take any of this seriously.”

Indeed, if the image on the cover of Proxy Music is a little hard to square with the Linda Thompson of old, so is the 76-year-old currently plying me with tea, cakes, pastries and sandwiches – she really has laid on quite a spread – in her west London apartment. She is tiny, clad in a Louis Vuitton jumper (“a fake, from China, 15 bucks”) and very funny. Her voice is thin and husky and her grandson Zack is on hand in case it gives out altogether. She rarely gives interviews as a result of the spasmodic dysphonia that has plagued her since the early 70s, gradually robbing her of her singing voice. “I was 25,” she says. “I’d go for my mouth and nothing would come out. It started when I was pregnant with my eldest daughter, and I just put it down to the pregnancy, but it wasn’t a happy time in my life. I think my then-husband wasn’t that keen on having a baby, blah blah blah, it was a difficult time, which we got through, but I think it impacted on me a bit.”

Dysphonia can be a trauma response, she explains, but “once that trauma’s happened you can’t mediate it away. At first it was more in my speech, then my singing. Onstage, people would go: ‘You’re off-mic!’, but I wasn’t – nothing was coming out. It’s like a switch just goes off in your brain: you know you’re doing it, but you can’t stop. If I’m alone, I can speak OK, but if anybody’s in the room, I can’t. And it’s a progressive condition, there’s no cure. I could lose my voice entirely, but the progression is very slow and” – she laughs again – “I doubt I’ll live that long anyway.”

In the past, Botox injections in Thompson’s vocal cords have enabled her to sing long enough to complete albums – her last was 2013’s Won’t Be Long Now – and, very occasionally, perform live. On Proxy Music, however, Thompson commissioned other artists to work on her new songs: the Proclaimers, the Unthanks, Rufus Wainwright. John Grant finds himself singing a track called John Grant about Thompson’s love of his work. It works wonderfully, heavily underlining Thompson’s skill as a sharp, witty and occasionally heartbreaking lyricist, as on I Used to Be So Pretty, which takes a very dim view indeed of ageing. “Oh, it’s just scary, being this age – it’s the age you die, when all your friends are dying,” she nods. “I mean, you don’t give a fuck what people think about you any more, and that’s good, but the wisdom-of-age thing is fallacious. You just get stupider, you can’t remember anybody’s name. So that’s a complete crock.”

Meanwhile, Those Damn Roches ruminates on musical families, including the one of which Thompson is the matriarch: Proxy Music features contributions from her ex-husband, her son, daughter, son-in-law and grandson, but the song avers that the Thompsons “can’t get along unless they’re apart”.

“That’s what families are like, isn’t it?” she says. “We don’t spend hours and hours together at Christmas, we have a meal and everyone goes: ‘Bye!’ Nobody likes to hang around. I toured with the family once,” she shudders. “Never again. Too fraught. You can’t tell your kids and your grandkids they’re playing the wrong chord. But there are funny times as well, and I do like what they do.

“Plus,” she adds, “they’re free.”

The album also takes Thompson back to her earliest musical memories: Wainwright croons his way through Darling, This Will Never Do, a fabulous slice of pre-rock’n’roll pop. That was what her parents played when she was growing up in Glasgow, she says, along with folk and country. “There was nothing to rebel against, with my parents’ taste in music. They liked Hank Williams – you can’t rebel against him. They liked the Everly Brothers’ country records – nothing to rebel against, the best voices I’ve ever heard. Then Bob Dylan appeared and they liked him too.”

She says she loved rock’n’roll, but was particularly drawn to folk “after Elvis went into the army and rock’n’roll went tits up. God knows why, but it reached out to me. The Scottish airs and reels were part of my childhood, they were very plaintive, heartstruck. I loved murder ballads, although there’s more of those in English folk than Scotland.”

She haunted Glasgow’s folk clubs with her friend John Martyn before they both relocated to London: he to record his debut album, 1967’s London Conversation, she to study history. She lasted a matter of weeks. “My mum had made me go to school until I was 18 years old and now nobody did. I was out till 2am singing at folk clubs so I couldn’t get up for lectures.”

Instead, she was drawn into a group of young musicians that circled the Troubadour club on Brompton Road: a group almost preposterously overstaffed with talent. She shared a flat with Tim Buckley and became best friends with Fairport Convention’s new singer, Sandy Denny. She had a brief and fruitless relationship with Nick Drake, who she once suggested was “probably gay, but couldn’t deal with it … it was hellish for gay people then”. One incredible album after another seemed to tumble from the group – Fairport Convention’s Unhalfbricking and Liege and Leif, John Martyn’s Bless the Weather and Solid Air, Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left and Bryter Layter, and, after she married Fairport Convention’s former guitarist, Richard Thompson, their own trio of masterpieces: I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, Hokey Pokey and Pour Down Like Silver. “It was insane – we’d all be sitting in a room playing cards, everyone taking a turn at playing a song: Nick, John, Sandy, Richard, me,” Thompson recalls. “In fact, when Richard and I split up and I got to work with other people, it was much easier, because they weren’t of that level, they were just very good. I just took it as read that everyone was that talented.”

But it’s hard not to notice that, by the late 70s, Buckley and Drake were both dead from overdoses – heroin and antidepressants, respectively – and Denny from a fall down the stairs after years of alcoholism. Martyn had become an alcoholic, too, a violent one: his ex-wife Beverley’s account of their life makes for harrowing reading.

The thing was, says Thompson, it was an era before rehab and interventions. “It was hard to talk to Nick at the best of times, never mind give him advice,” she says. “Some of the most talented and savvy people I’ve known were riddled with insecurities. Sandy never felt pretty enough or whatever. Everybody wanted to be six stone and look like Twiggy and it’s not doable: I know; I tried. And these were very sexist times. She was in a man’s world so she drank and presented a front. In those days, if Sandy and I were in the studio and there was a tea break, there was no question it would be us making the tea. Some idiot playing a nose harp would just sit there: ‘Two sugars, love.’ We were tough, but we crumbled.”

Neither I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight nor its follow-ups sold – Thompson says she made more money singing jingles for commercials – and her husband’s increasing interest in Islam eventually led him to move his family into a Sufi community. “It was in Norfolk, a big house that looked like the Bates motel in Psycho. It was fucking torture. Not for the men. We were kept in the kitchen, it was just kind of keeping women down. We weren’t allowed to go shopping because you weren’t allowed to look a man in the eye. Richard wasn’t allowed to do music – for some reason our cheikh, our leader, said men weren’t supposed to sing – but I had to sing at all these dos, for Eid or whatever, for hours and hours.

“I would say to Cheikh: ‘My throat hurts’ and he’d say: ‘Nonsense, you don’t sing from the throat, you sing from the stomach, keep singing.’ I think at the time I just accepted this purgatory as something I must have deserved. Like a lot of white, over-educated people, we were looking for something, and you think: ‘This must be it’ – through pain, you might get there. And I’d just had a baby, so I wasn’t quite in my right mind. There was no postnatal depression in those days, nobody had heard of it. People just told you to pull yourself together.”

The Thompsons eventually left the commune, but you could tell their marriage was in trouble just from the track titles of 1982’s Shoot Out the Lights: Don’t Renege on Our Love, Walking on a Wire, Did She Jump or Was She Pushed? Ironically, the album that documented their demise turned out to be their biggest seller, particularly in the US. Despite the fact that they had separated before its release, they were invited to tour America together: a terrible idea in theory, which turned out to be even worse in practice. “Everyone told me not to go: you’ve just had another baby, you’re out of your mind, you’re drinking, you’re taking pills,” says Thompson. “So I thought: ‘I’m going to do it.’”

The irony, she says, is that her dysphonia never bothered her – “I liken it to someone dropping an anvil on your foot and you forget about your headache” – although the backing musicians quickly started calling it the tour from hell. Existing largely on a diet of vodka and antidepressants, Thompson wasn’t above physically attacking her ex-husband onstage. “And I stole an audience member’s car in Niagra Falls and ended up in jail, but they didn’t press charges. They thought: ‘This woman is clearly deranged.’ I trashed one dressing room and the guy who put on the show said: ‘We had the Sex Pistols play here and you’re worse!’ I thought: that’s fabulous – can you say that again? It was like a delayed adolescence, because I’d been in this restricted, awful misogynistic group of people and this was my rebellion.”

She ended the tour being rescued by Linda Ronstadt, who found her comatose on the pavement outside the Whisky a Go-Go in LA. “Yes, at my own gig!” she says. “That was Al Stewart’s fault, he brought three bottles of champagne backstage as a gift and I think I drank them all before I went onstage. Linda took me home and sort of nursed me back to health. I went back to Britain, stopped drinking, stopped taking drugs. My mother had been looking after my kids, so I stopped everything and got on with it.”

She remarried and made a solitary solo album, 1985’s glossy One Clear Moment, before dysphonia took over. “I just kept telling myself: look, it’s not cancer, it’s not something happening to my kids. I thought: it’s a loss to me, it’s not a great loss to the world.”

Hang on, I think it’s a great loss, I tell her: you had an incredible voice.

She snorts. “Don’t forget to cash that cheque I sent you.”

Of course, it isn’t just me that thinks that – the handful of albums she managed to make in the 21st century were all rapturously received. Even Thompson will allow that “the records of Richard’s that people seem to esteem the most are the ones I was on, so I must have had something going”. Proxy Music is a triumph, even if it’s one she doesn’t have any plans to follow up.

“Oh no. I’m not making any plans. Even when I was young, there was no career plan: you couldn’t make a career plan with folk music. There was no point, you wouldn’t get very far, would you? And as I creep towards 80, my plans mostly involve remaining continent. I mean, I don’t think much ahead of the next sausage roll” – she looks at the plates on the table – “which I notice you haven’t eaten. Please, take a slice. And would you like another cup of tea?”

The Russian republic of Chechnya has banned dance music it deems either too fast or too slow, in an attempt to quash a “polluting” western influence on the conservative majority-Muslim region.

Musa Dadayev, the culture minister, said “all musical, vocal and choreographic works should correspond to a tempo of 80-116 beats per minute” to make music “conform to the Chechen mentality and sense of rhythm”, according to the Russian news agency Tass.

“Borrowing musical culture from other peoples is inadmissible,” Dadayev said. “We must bring to the people and to the future of our children the cultural heritage of the Chechen people. This includes the entire spectrum of moral and ethical standards of life for Chechens.”

According to reports in Russian media, Dadayev set artists in the region a deadline of 1 June to rewrite any music that does not conform to the rule.

The law in effect criminalises most modern dance music genres that are typically played in clubs around the world, such as house, techno, dubstep or drum’n’bass. Some hip-hop and rap, which is typically played at speeds between 60 and 140 beats per minute, would in theory still qualify for the traditional Chechen “sense of rhythm” that the regime of the authoritarian leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, wants to preserve.

Traditional Chechen music includes khalkaran yish – instrumental songs used to accompany dances, processions and horse races – and heroic epic ballads known as illi yish. They can be accompanied by the dechig-pondar, a three-stringed instrument similar to the Russian balalaika.

Chechnya, in the North Caucasus region of eastern Europe, has in recent years been repeatedly criticised by human rights organisations for its violent persecution of sexual minorities. The Chechen government has denied such allegations, claiming there were no homosexual people in Chechnya, and those who did exist would be rooted out by their own families.

Thomas Adès began his two-year residency with the Hallé last autumn. He will feature as conductor, pianist and composer, but in his latest appearance with the orchestra at the Bridgewater Hall he confined himself to just two of those roles, conducting a programme that ended with one of his major scores, Tevot.

As the concert also included one of Tippett’s rarely heard late masterpieces and a brand new work from Oliver Leith, it was full of challenges for the players, but every one of them was met triumphantly. It had all begun quite modestly with Purcell, or rather with a suite of movements from Purcell’s operas and masques arranged by the Hallé’s revered former principal conductor, John Barbirolli which, after an opening salvo of Bruckner-like horns, turned out to be quite sober.

But there’s nothing sober about Tippett’s Triple Concerto for violin, viola and cello. First performed in 1980, it is one of the most luscious of his later works, coloured by an array of exotic percussion and overflowing with lyricism, its heart a rapt slow movement, one of Tippett’s most intense inventions. With Anthony Marwood, Lawrence Power and Paul Watkins as the soloists, the lineup was about as fine as one could want, though there were moments when, from a seat in the Bridgewater’s choir circle at least, the balance between them was not all it could have been. And after it Leith’s Cartoon Sun, a Hallé commission, provided exhilaration of a very different kind; it’s a wayward processional, set in motion by tolling bells and generates some cataclysmic climaxes along the way.

Adès prefaced Tevot with Elgar’s Sospiri, drawing almost symphonic intensity from what is at first sight just a salon piece, but then demonstrated that his own work has a power that really deserves the word symphonic. Played as magnificently as this, Tevot becomes an immense statement, whichfollows its own irrefutable musical logic while also seeming – for me at least – to conjure up echoes of late Mahler (of the 10th symphony especially); it’s undoubtedly one of Adès’s finest achievements.

British jazz is currently blessed with vocal talents. Bandleader Charlie Pyne is just one sample from a spectrum that embraces big band fan James Hudson, who includes a cool version of Disney’s Feed the Birds on his second album of standards, Moonray, and songwriting diva Sarah L King, whose new album Fire Horse comes steeped in soul influences such as Nina Simone.

Charlie Pyne is different again, a bass player with her own quartet and, on this second album, a set of originals drawn from her experience as a woman and mother. Pyne sings with a high, bright voice that can soar when she chooses, though she is also happy to punch out her lyrics in tandem with her bass parts. The quartet meld easily; drummer Katie Patterson urgent without being noisy, and pianist Liam Dunachie contributing melodic solos alongside Luke Pinkstone’s tenor (and occasional soprano) sax. On standout Am I Doing It Right? Pyne frets about motherhood, celebrating its triumphs on the title cut. Blackberries salutes autumn joyously while A Fistful of Keys provides a moodier moment, the keys in question being poised ready for a would-be assailant. An enjoyable, effervescent set.

A classical composer signed to experimental UK label Warp, US pianist Kelly Moran has more in her fingers than mere canonical elegance. She has accompanied Oneohtrix Point Never and FKA twigs on tour; her previous works were often for prepared piano.

Moran’s second full-length for Warp was conceived in lockdown. In early 2020, Yamaha loaned her a Disklavier – a modern version of the ghostly “player piano”, a programmable real instrument – to help her prepare a collaboration. Moran seized the opportunity to experiment. She created a version of herself with more fingers and a greater handspan. On Moves in the Field, she duets with this augmented version of herself. These 10 tracks feature what sometimes sounds like one pianist running rings around the other. Superhuman, where Disklavier Moran pirouettes around flesh-and-bone Moran, finds the Disklavier phrases fractalling out into digital-sounding stutters. Dancer Polynomials and Leitmotif suggest systems music being played alongside traditional composition.

Moves in the Field is named after foundational figure-skating forms, and there is a sense here of Moran honouring poise and classicism – some of her considered strokes evoke Erik Satie – while creating unachievable counterpoints. The greatest satisfaction is that she does not jump the shark: everything here is possible-sounding, humanistic and full of emotion; only slightly uncanny.

Independent nightlife venues across the UK are struggling to survive amid a cocktail of high costs, low footfall and oppressive regulation that is squeezing them out of city centres.

Last week, the bar Night & Day in Manchester won a partial victory in a legal battle over a noise abatement notice that began when a neighbouring flat complained about gigs and DJ sets going on late into the night.

In court, a compromise was found: the venue could continue with club nights until 3am but needed to turn the music down after 11pm.

The district judge Margaret McCormack said despite Night & Day being on Oldham Street for more than 30 years when the Northern Quarter was considerably more run down, Manchester was “evolving” and the flat residents had a right to be able to use their property.

While this represents a partial victory, other venues have not been so fortunate in their fight for survival. Michael Kill, the chief executive of the Night Time Industries Association, said: “We’re seeing about a 30% to 40% increase in operating costs and about a 15% to 20% downturn in terms of trade due to people having less disposable income.”

This was coupled with poor public transport and safety fears on city streets, he said. Fights with landlords and problems with developers are also an increasing threat.

Last year, a bitter row erupted in Sheffield over the future of the Leadmill, the music venue credited with launching the careers of Pulp, Arctic Monkeys and Self Esteem, when the building’s owner refused to renew the lease, instead planning to take over the running of the venue.

Sheffield residents chose sides in what became a heated fight, with the site’s landlord, Dominic Madden, being called a “vulture capitalist”, while the Leadmill’s ousted founder, Phil Mills, was criticised by a former business partner who said he hoped the battle “bankrupts him in the process. I hope he’s left with nothing.”

Even when venues are not bought out by developers, construction work and local issues surrounding a bar or club can be an impossible hurdle to overcome.

G-A-Y Late, an LGBTQ+ venue and one of the only places in Soho in London with a late licence, closed down at the end of last year, citing problems with construction on the building and people parking around the venue to access other parts of Soho ignoring restrictions and blocking fire exits.

Jeremy Joseph, who owned the nightclub as well as the G-A-Y bar and Heaven nightclub, said: “For a year and a half, two years, we were living on a building site and it was just unbearable. It was becoming so stressful to be there that it just wasn’t worth continuing and the point of managing to get out just was a sigh of relief.

“It was a money-making venue. I think people have to realise that venues can close now [for reasons that are] nothing to do with the financial circumstances of the venue but to do with external reasons as well.”

At G-A-Y Late, Joseph was forced to pay full rent during the Covid pandemic at a time when the club could not open. Meanwhile, he is in dispute with the landlord at Heaven’s Charing Cross premises over an increase in the rent.

He said: “We’re a part of history. This is where people like Freddie Mercury and Kenny Everett went. You may own the venue name but actually you’re part of a community. If I move out, what guarantee will it be that it’s an LGBT venue? So we lose another space, and we lose one of the largest spaces LGBT safe spaces in the UK because of greedy landlords.

“There’s a lot of stress in running a venue at the moment and sometimes you just go: ‘What’s the point?’”

One in six live music venues closed in the past year, according to figures from the Music Venue Trust. But amid the gloom, there are venues opening, too – albeit with a broader remit than focusing solely on club nights or gigs.

Tom Brown, one of the founders of Project House, which opened out of a converted tile warehouse in Leeds last year, said: “We wanted it to be versatile. We wanted it to be open to as many people as possible and be able to change a vibe quickly.”

The 1,000-capacity mixed venue hosts touring artists, DJs, pop-ups and daytime events such as vintage markets, food markets and record fairs. Part of the building is home to a restaurant called Galleria.

Brown’s co-founders have decades of experience running gigs, events and other venues, including Brudenell Social Club and the city centre venues Belgrave Music Hall and Canteen, and Headrow House. They are having early success at the new venue but it is still a very tense time.

Brown said: “We’re all risking something and I suppose for me it was a punt but it was like: this is really exciting.”