Some music tech entrepreneurs argue the speed at which AI tools are growing globally is also putting pressure on Stockholm’s well-oiled music tech ecosystem. – BBC
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The final concert of the Japanese virtuoso is captured in an aching meditation on mortality and legacy.
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The Nash Ensemble’s From my Homeland series, exploring and contextualising the Czech repertory, came to its conclusion with a daylong survey of composers associated with Terezín (Theresienstadt in German), the ghetto-camp set up by the Nazis near Prague, where many of the Czech-Jewish artistic community were held before transportation to Auschwitz, and where music, drama and literature flourished almost in defiance of the encompassing horror. The Nash gave us two concerts, late afternoon and evening, preceded by two films, Simon Broughton’s benchmark 1993 documentary The Music of Terezín, and his 2019 interview with the actor Zdenka Fantlová, who survived the Holocaust to bear witness to events in Terezín, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.
In the wider context of a Czech retrospective, the day served in part as a reminder of musical traditions both undermined and fiercely re-asserted. The main composers of Terezín – Hans Krása, Viktor Ullmann, Pavel Haas and Gideon Klein – were the musical heirs and successors of Smetana and Janáček, and Smetana’s pioneering 1855 Piano Trio in G Minor was placed during the evening concert alongside Ullmann’s Third String Quartet, written in Terezín in 1943, which casts aside modernism (Ullmann studied with Schoenberg) in a return to Czech folk music as inspiration. The main work of the afternoon concert, Pavel Haas’s Second String Quartet, written in 1925, gradually takes the language of his teacher Janáček into gritty, dissonant territory close to expressionism, throwing us off balance by the addition of percussion (and with it a fifth player) in the final movement. The piece is too long for its own good, though the performance, focused, detailed and exuberant, was terrific.
Elsewhere, an uncompromising, at times angry bearing of witness alternated with nostalgia, humour and yearning for escape. Krása’s Tanec (Dance) for String Trio whirls and rages like some bitter danse macabre while František Domažlický’s Song Without Words for string quartet hankers after an already lost world of salon elegance and sentimentality. A suite arranged by David Matthews from Krása’s children’s opera Brundibár, the most frequently performed work in Terezín, ended the day with a blaze of defiant humour and some wonderfully breezy playing, though the emotional climax came earlier on, with a group of songs written in the camp and sung with extraordinary directness by the outstanding baritone Konstantin Krimmel. Ullmann’s sad reflections in Yiddish, contrasted with Adolf Strauss’s Ich Weiss Bestimmt, Ich Werd’ Dich Wiedersehen, which could almost have come from a Broadway musical. Ilse Weber, meanwhile, was a great singer-songwriter: her Ade Kamerad!, in which friends say goodbye before transportation to Poland, just tears you in two. An unforgettable day, every second of it. The concerts, meanwhile, were live-streamed and are now available on the Wigmore Hall site. They really are essential viewing.
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Buika has forgotten about our interview. The Spanish singer-songwriter was in her studio, preoccupied. “Completely stoned with my music,” she says, once her manager has given her a prod and she connects with me via video call from the Dominican Republic. “I’m so sorry.”
What is she working on? “Well, actually, it’s very complicated,” she says, as a ceiling fan whirs over head. “During the pandemic, it was too much for me. I was secluded and I was afraid of everything. So my solution was to escape – oh, you’re going to think I’m crazy. OK, my solution was to escape to an exoplanet.” She is now recording 13- to 15-minute tracks of thoughts and music inspired by her imaginary planet.
Buika has been compared to Amy Winehouse, Billie Holiday and Édith Piaf. She has collaborated with everyone from Santana and Seal to Pat Metheny and Anoushka Shankar. She is also a judge on Amazon Prime’s singing talent show Operación Triunfo, which airs in 33 Latin American countries. A conversation with the 51-year-old is not unlike an interstellar experience: she is unrestrained and transcendental, as happy talking about her love life as her records. And every candid comment is punctuated with an explosion of laughter – a throaty roar from the soul. Yet the basics can be hard to pin down.
Does she, I ask, still live in Miami? “I’ve got a secret for you, my brother,” she says. “If you spread your love, you have a home everywhere in the world!” What I can establish is that she is in Punta Cana between stops on a world tour that will shortly reach London, a city that evokes memories of “a lot of cold and a lot of love”.
At the end of every tour Buika used to ink her skin, but there isn’t much space left. Instead, she says: “I tattoo on my heart and in my mind.” On one arm, she says she has two butterflies “because my flight is like the butterfly’s. I fly in all directions to be straight.”
She is no easier to pin down when it comes to genre. The self-taught “singer from everywhere” (New York Times) who only knows how to perform “with her heart ripped apart” (Pedro Almodóvar) has flitted between flamenco, Spanish copla, jazz, pop, rumba, R&B and soul since her debut solo album in 2005. But she hates “psychoanalysing myself. I’m not going to do that. I’m a free spirit and I’m a free note. Let yourself be! That’s why I feel I fit in to every music from the world. No matter if it’s from Russia, from England, from America, from Africa, I think that my voice is going to sound good.”
Buika is currently in her happy place, if you remove the intrusion of this journalist from the equation. The singer, who regards herself an introvert, is never more content than when sitting alone in her studio, naked, smoking and drinking mezcal. “I got to be honest, yes, I do sir. Every time I can.” She tells me she has never voted because she wants “to agree with everybody. I don’t really understand about right or left or red or blue. If a politician finds the time to talk about love and donkeys, I like them.”
Her longtime producer, Javier Limón, has described her, somewhat contradictorily, as “an extraterrestrial” and “the most liberated woman on earth”. Buika says: “I dream I am. I discovered my superpowers when I turned 50. They give me big and tremendous feelings of freedom.” What was she frightened of before? “Oof, everything. Because that’s how they taught us: that we have to be scared of not having money, scared of not being in love.”
Touring is a family affair. Buika’s production manager is her 24-year-old son, Joel, while her musical director is the boyfriend she recently re-connected with in Spain after first meeting when he was 16. “He used to come for the weekends to see our band playing and I used to see a little boy. He used to ask for orange juice and milk in a blues club. But after 20 years, I found him again in the street and I was like, ‘Hmm, hmm, you look good. How old are you now?’ And he was like, ‘Old enough to make you happy.’ He just shot my heart.” She adds: “My man is, like, 10 years younger than me. Because at my age, options are not better!”
Buika grew up in Palma de Mallorca, in the only black family for miles around, inhaling flamenco, Gypsy and African folk songs like air. Her father was a pro-democracy politician in exile from Equatorial Guinea, who walked out when she was nine. The teenage Buika, she says, was “a wild animal. Oh my God! I used to go on stage barefoot – well, same as I do now – with chewing gum in my mouth, with no bra. I was the enfant terrible,” she says, guffawing. “I used to invent a lot of stories because I didn’t want to face pain. But the first time in my life I heard applause from the audience, they saved me. They gave me the possibility of being someone. I owe them everything.”
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As the queen of flamenco fusion, Buika has a Latin Grammy to her name, plus two US Grammy nominations, as well as two books of poetry and a role as a wedding singer in Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In. She says she often channels her “naughty” hard-drinking, chain-smoking grandmother, with whom she shared a first name, Concha, although she has always gone by her surname professionally.
Did Concha sing too? “Yeah! All my family do. Because we are from a little tribe called the Bubis. And it’s not the same as in Europe where you write down your story: tribes in Africa, they sing it.”
It is all some distance from Las Vegas, where she started out as a “hungry” Tina Turner impersonator with a two-year-old child, before finding her own uniquely raw and raspy voice. I ask how she would react if she discovered a Buika impersonator in a casino today. She lets out that gravelly howl. “I think that she would go crazy,” she says. “It’s not easy to be me!” She pauses and shoots me a gap-toothed grin. “But it’s fun.”
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The lyric raised eyebrows given Grande's relationship with her "Wicked" co-star, Ethan Slater.
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Like the presidential primaries, this year’s Best Original Song category at the Oscars was a two-candidate race from the beginning. With all due respect to American hero Diane Warren, it’s Barbie’s award to lose. But which of the two nominated Barbie songs will win? Prognosticators overwhelmingly favor “What Was I Made For?,” Billie Eilish’s gentle piano ballad, which has cleaned up in precursor contests—not to mention winning Best Song at the Grammys. It sounds like exactly the kind of song that wins Oscars, which is to say it sounds a lot like Eilish’s previous Oscar-winning song, the piano-ballad Bond theme “No Time to Die.”
Eilish’s top-20 performance on the charts notwithstanding, “What Was I Made For?” is not the song from Barbie that everyone remembers. Only one song from Barbie was a cultural sensation, a TikTok masterpiece, a showstopping earworm—and it’s the other nominated song, the one that’s probably going to lose on Oscar night: “I’m Just Ken.”
Just as Best Picture tends to ignore comedies in favor of serious dramas, so does the Best Song category ignore funny, upbeat bops in favor of weepy ballads or square inspirational anthems. You might trace this trend to 1980, when Dolly Parton’s spiky comic masterpiece “9 to 5” lost the Oscar to the motivational pap of “Fame.” With few exceptions—The Little Mermaid’s “Under the Sea” among them—the Best Song category has ignored fun ever since. Top Gun’s “Take My Breath Away” defeated Little Shop of Horrors’ toe-tapping “Mean Green Mother From Outer Space.” The ’90s Disney renaissance saw power ballad after power ballad defeat the actually great comic songs from those movies: “Beauty and the Beast” defeated “Be Our Guest,” just as the next year “A Whole New World” defeated “Friend Like Me,” just as two years later “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?” defeated “Hakuna Matata.”
And so it goes. The injustices aren’t always as outrageous as all-time classics “Blame Canada” and “Everything Is Awesome” losing to, respectively, the terrible Phil Collins song from Tarzan and the dull Common–John Legend duet from Selma. Sometimes the schmaltzy ballad that defeats a comic number is actually really good, as when “The Weary Kind” from Crazy Heart defeated Randy Newman’s jazzy numbers from The Princess and the Frog, or when Once’s “Falling Slowly” defeated the musical-comedy soufflés of Enchanted. Nevertheless, year after year, the lively songs lose.
You may recall that the year that Eilish won her first Oscar, the movie-music song everyone was humming certainly wasn’t “No Time to Die.” (Imagine humming “No Time to Die”!) It was “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” the catchy, joke-filled number from Encanto that Disney didn’t even submit for the Oscars, because they didn’t realize it was going to be a No. 1 hit. They submitted—guess what!—a weepy ballad, “Dos Oruguitas.”
Every once in a while, a nominated song, despite being fun, is such a sensation—often one that represents a kind of showy progressive step for the staid academy—that it breaks through. That’s the best explanation for the victories of “Naatu Naatu” from RRR last year, or Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” in 2002, or—perhaps the greatest Best Song surprise in Academy Awards history—Three 6 Mafia’s “It’s Hard Out There for a Pimp” in 2005. But most years, the academy persists in its bias for uplift over verve and wit and parody and all of the other things pop music can do.
The likely loss of “I’m Just Ken” is a particularly tough pill to swallow, because the song is the inarguable highlight of one of the year’s great movies, the best sequence in a Best Picture nominee. A delirious, hilarious fantasia of preening, flexing, and squinting, “I’m Just Ken” is part old-fashioned showstopper and part dream ballet, with Ryan Gosling and the other Kens finding the perfect line between sincerity and silliness. When Gosling sings, “Anywhere else I’d be a 10,” he delivers a laugh line that also digs at the themes of this plastic, fantastic inquiry into female empowerment and male fragility. In a way, “I’m Just Ken” is a parody of the kinds of songs that win Oscars. Songwriters Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt are masters of not only sentimental ballads (they previously won for A Star Is Born’s “Shallow”) but pastiche, beginning the song as a spoof of (what else?) a goopy piano ballad before taking left turns into “Fame”-style ’80s inspirationalism and such gloriously stupid rhymes as “I’m just Ken, and I’m enough/ And I’m great at doing stuff.” And I’ll long remember the collective shriek in my local theater when Gosling and Simu Liu were revealed on their striped soundstage, facing each other in a dance-off for the ages.
“What Was I Made For?” is a perfectly nice song, and it scores a lovely part of the film— Barbie’s encounter with creator Ruth Handler and her vision of “real life,” made up of carefully chosen home-movie footage of real women living, loving, and laughing. But I hope Oscar voters this year embrace fun over sentiment, comedy over melodrama, a big cheesy grin over a wistful single tear. The academy has a chance, just this once, to face all of Hollywood’s tinkly ballads and uplifting choruses, and tell them: Kenough.
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“Prologue” is actually the final track on Kamasi Washington’s coming album, “Fearless Movement,” and it’s dense and bustling. Double time drumming, frenetic percussion and hyperactive keyboard counterpoint roil around a melody that rises resolutely over descending chords, while breakneck solos from Dontae Winslow on trumpet and Washington on saxophone exult in sheer agility and emotional peaks. JON PARELES
Shabazz Palaces — Ishmael Butler from Digable Planets — sets up a sci-fi scenario in “Take Me to Your Leader” from his album due March 29, “Exotic Birds of Prey.” He and a guest rapper, Lavarr the Starr, have to convince a powerful, mysterious queen that “our race deserves to survive.” Amid blipping electronics and slow-pulsing bass, with voices warped by echoes and effects, they set out a strategy of gifts, philosophizing, seduction and “a steady-bumping beat she can freak with.” PARELES
A decade-long friendship somehow turns into an ecstatic romance in “Off the Walls” by Salt Cathedral, the duo of Juliana Ronderos and Nicolas Losada. “Getting along wasn’t our strong suit/but I’m happy that we saw it through,” Ronderos sings in a track that melds hovering electronics, crisp programmed beats, Afropop-tinged guitar curlicues and Ronderos’s multitracked vocals into sheer bliss: “Feeling like I never did before.” PARELES
“Act II: Date @ 8” by 4batz is clearly indebted to music coming from Toronto in the early 2010s, when Drake and the Weeknd were collectively laying the bricks to remake the sound of pop. And so that slow, sensual, saccharinely off-kilter down-tempo R&B hit — which has run rampant through TikTok and elsewhere over the for the past couple of months — getting an old-fashioned Drake-remix bump is a full-circle moment. It’s also a student-teacher convention: 4batz’s rendering of an infatuation has an edge of titillation, while Drake’s is calm and collected. JON CARAMANICA
Somewhere between a hymn and a sea chantey, “All in Good Time” — from Iron & Wine’s album due April 26, “Light Verse” — has Sam Beam’s earnest tenor and Fiona Apple’s huskiest alto trading lines about togetherness, estrangement, shared memories and lessons learned: “You wore my ring until it didn’t fit,” Apple observes. Piano chords ring and strings swell as the song’s two ex-partners harmonize to find, if not reconciliation, a mature sense of resignation. PARELES
The Canadian folk singer Mustafa’s specialty is isolation and longing, rendering them with beauty and, somehow, without anxiety. On “Imaan,” the first single from a forthcoming album, the subject is about how two star-crossed people attempt to find ways to connect when faith (and maybe other things) demand that they don’t: “You say praying isn’t easy/And all the ways you need me are from God/And all the ways you reach him are flawed.” It’s about the tension between the carnal and the spiritual, but more simply, about two people who are talking right past each other, because the price of talking directly to each other may be far too high. CARAMANICA
Still a provocateur at 81, the wry Southern soul veteran Swamp Dogg plans to release “Blackgrass: From West Virginia to 125th St.,” an album that has him backed by bluegrass virtuosos like Sierra Hull on mandolin, Noam Pikelny on banjo and Billy Contreras on fiddle. “Mess Under That Dress” bounces along as Swamp Dogg sings about a woman who’s so sultry, she even has the undertaker worried. “You’re bad for business,” he frets. “You’re gonna raise the dead.” PARELES
In the early days of corridos tumbados, a generation gap grew between the young performers injecting regional Mexican music with new rhythms and attitude — and gaining widespread attention — and the older musicians who had been plugging away for years finding success within the scene but going largely unheard elsewhere. Those walls have, thankfully, been dissolving, as evinced by this vibrant collaboration between Fuerza Regida, one of the pioneer bands of the last decade, and Eden Muñoz, the former frontman of the long-running and extremely popular band Calibre 50. It’s a tag-team of chest-thumping bravado — not against each other, but together. CARAMANICA
“I’m a goddess onstage, human when we’re alone,” the ever-poised Icelandic pop-jazz crooner Laufey sings in “Goddess,” envisioning a post-show hookup. The tune is an old-fashioned, acoustic piano waltz with a sudden, grandiose buildup. Like many of Laufey’s songs, it pinpoints a decidedly contemporary tension, between perfect image and earthly reality. PARELES
Deep-voiced and absolutely unflinching, Moor Mother — the poet and vocalist Camae Ayewa — turns her attention to the British Empire, and all its colonial plunder, in “All the Money” from her album “The Great Bailout.” With production by the keyboardist Vijay Iyer that floats echoey piano notes over a cavernous bass pulse, swirling echoes and a wailing operatic voice, Moor Mother considers churches and museums and art objects. She lists dates and catalog holdings in the millions; she cites “thieves disguised as explorers” and whispers, “Where did they get all the money?” PARELES
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Welsh National Opera’s collaboration with NoFitState circus in Benjamin Britten’s final opera has created a stunning spectacle. Based on Thomas Mann’s novella, the work makes huge demands on the tenor singing the role of Gustav von Aschenbach – heroically sung here by Mark Le Brocq – yet this is an opera that stands or falls on the casting of the beauteous vision who is Tadzio. He is the Polish boy held in increasingly obsessive thrall by Aschenbach, searching for blessed release from the pain of writer’s block. Tadzio is a non-speaking role normally given to a dancer, but director Olivia Fuchs here introduces a whole new spatial dimension in the form of the Belgian aerialist Antony César. It is indeed his supreme grace and athleticism that holds the whole audience in his thrall.
Taking the idea a step further, Fuchs makes Tadzio’s whole Polish family acrobats – Diana Salles the tightrope and aerialist mother – and there are several interventions that animate what are sometimes seen as the longueurs of Britten’s score. The sequences of aerial and circus skills bring an distinct element of Marcel Carné’s film Les Enfants du Paradis. This, together with the allusions to angels of light, is a counterbalance to the seven roles sung by baritone Roderick Williams, different manifestations of a single figure whose underlying sinister nature - his old gondolier the harbinger of death – make him more Aschenbach’s nemesis than alter ego. Williams’ characterisations are brilliant and agile, some more robustly projected vocally than others.
Designer Nicola Turner’s setting is mainly monochromatic, a black box with video spreading slowly lapping water in evocative cyclorama footage on the rear wall. Guests at the Lido’s Grand Hotel des Bains are all Edwardian elegance in white; the populace wear dark grey, against which white wings and later Venetian masks stand out. The dark, crepuscular mood symbolising Aschenbach’s desperate need for the returning light of inspiration also suggests the insidious onset of cholera. Based again on Mann’s experience of the 1911 epidemic in Venice, its threat feels all too real in the wake of Covid.
Vivid colour comes with Alexander Chance’s golden Apollo, presiding over the Olympian games which prompt Aschenbach’s realisation that he loves Tadzio, and then competing with Williams’ scarlet-suited Dionysius – beauty versus passion – for the soul of the sleeping writer. There is less eroticism in this dream than in the Tadzio’s final combative pas de deux with Riccardo Saggese’s Jaschiu, who doubles as the Polish governess. Tadzio’s head is not forced into the sand as Britten directed but, in ceding to his opponent’s superior strength, raises his lips to him in a kiss. This is the moment of Aschenbach’s demise.
A strong presence throughout, Le Brocq conveys in both deeply sympathetic voice and in body language Aschenbach’s anguish. Leo Hussain conducts with a sure hand, the WNO chorus is terrific as are the many cameo roles, the WNO orchestra relishing the textures, with scintillating percussion playing, wind lines and periodic brass resonance. The brief final threnody spells heartbreak, but also ultimately serves to reinforce the suspicion that the circus element– thrilling as it is – has denied Britten’s wonderful music its primacy. It’s not an insignificant reservation in an otherwise captivating staging.
At Venue Cymru, Llandudno on 13 March and touring until 11 May.
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Was the first heavy metal record the Kinks’ You Really Got Me (1964), Steppenwolf’s Born to Be Wild (1968), Black Sabbath’s Black Sabbath (1970) or something else? VerulamiumParkRanger
Gotta be Black Sabbath. I love the Kinks and Steppenwolf but by definition they’re not really metal. In terms of riffage, I’ve always defined metal to the greatest extent by the bass, that big, meaty, Black Sabbath-style riff – a West Midlands sledgehammer! That’s what Tony [Iommi] was doing, so it’s definitely Black Sabbath for me.
How did you feel about punk at the time, and is it weird that as time has gone on, punk and metal have become pretty interchangeable as far as their fanbases go? johnny5eyes
It was exciting for Priest to be around when the punk movement exploded from London. I remember seeing the Sex Pistols at a club in Wolverhampton, and I thought they had some metal vibes to them – the attitude and some of the riffs. I welcome anything like this because it’s the true essence of what rock’n’roll should be all about. The unfortunate thing that happened in the industry was that suddenly all the labels and the media focused exclusively on the Sex Pistols, the Damned, the Clash. All great bands, but metal was kind of pushed out of the picture. For a while, there was this mantra that metal was dead. You can’t squash a whole movement because something else comes along, but we needed punk in the British music scene.
How is [guitarist] Glenn Tipton and will he be making an appearance on the tour? Metalizer
He’s doing extraordinarily well considering that he’s been living with Parkinson’s for 15 years. He’s such a strong man. It’s like any of these challenges, a lot of it is borne by how you fight back, and he fights back all the time. I love that people still understand his importance in Judas Priest – his input on this new album, Invincible Shield, is as it has been on all the records. Glenn and Ozzy [Osbourne, also living with Parkinson’s disease] keep in touch. They’re both cut from the same cloth with that British “get on with it” type of thing. I don’t mean to speak against other identities but there’s this thing about blokes and dignity, an extremely powerful word in what it represents – my dad was the same – and they are really strong in battling on.
Whose idea was it for Priest to work with Stock Aitken Waterman, and why have the results never been released? JacquelinePearce
That was my gayness coming to the front – I think there are certain things that come from my identity that wouldn’t be there if I was a straight bloke. And one of them was taking this adventure with Stock Aitken Waterman. I love pop – I’ve just been listening to the new Olly Alexander song for Eurovision, it’s brilliant.
That’s what I love about this band: we never say no, we’re always about having a go. We went to Paris for a couple of days, and it was extraordinary to see how SAW made music. We did the Stylistics’ You Are Everything and a couple of other bangers they made there and then. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves but when we came back, not the doubt, but the preservation came in. At that time, we felt there would have been pushback if we’d dropped those tracks, and we didn’t want that to happen. Pete Waterman’s still got them hidden away in his safe somewhere. It was heavy stuff, but it had those trademark Stock Aitken Waterman vibes.
It was a very different world back in 1998, when you took the unprecedented move (for a high-profile heavy metal singer) to come out as gay. At the time, did you feel particularly courageous, either in a personal capacity or in terms of it being a possibly terminal career move? And how have your feelings about that decision changed since? NonDairyCanary
The day I made that announcement on MTV New York, it was completely unmeditated and just a pure, subconscious stream of banter. It was only after I released myself from my fucking heavy metal prison that I realised what I’d done. I had no idea that it was gonna go around the world like crazy – I was away from Priest at the time. Any gay person that has the right time in their life to step forward and let their identity be what it is without any clutter or interference, it’s unbelievable, the elation. Firstly, you set yourself free. Secondly, all the ammunition and innuendoes, they evaporate. It’s the gay guy from Judas Priest – what can you throw at him now?
There was very little backlash and I was really thrilled by the acceptance. Pure speculation: if I hadn’t come out when I did, and then gone back into Priest, I think I might have stayed hidden, because I love this band so much and I protect it with every fibre of my being. The world is a much better place now, thank God, but we’ve still got homophobia, racism and these stupid parts of humanity that drive us nuts. You’ve really got to face it head on, so please come out, wherever you are! Proud and loud.
What was it like working with Dolly Parton on her rock album? bruyere
It was extraordinary. That woman is a legend in the truest sense of what the word means – when you think about the thousands of songs that she’s sung, and she’s burning so bright even now. For me to be singing with her side by side at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame was so surreal, I felt like I was dreaming. And then when she sent me a note a few days later, asking me if I’d consider joining her on a song on her Rockstar album, I couldn’t believe it. So many people embraced it, even people in the metal world – everybody knows who Dolly Parton is.
Is it true that you once worked in a cinema that specialised in erotic films? VerulamiumParkRanger
A mate of mine ran a little seedy shop up in Stafford Street in Walsall, which I could walk to now in 20 minutes. All those buildings are gone, but it had a boarded-up window and a door that was barely hanging on. One day he goes: “I’m going on holiday, would you mind running it for me?” I was unemployed and had nothing better to do, so I did. What was fun was the kind of people that came in, because that’s fascinating. Guessing what they did for a living, and all the mystery. At the time, [what was being sold] was very restricted and illegal to a certain extent. This was before Thatcher – don’t get me started on her.
Where is the most metal place in the Black Country? Geofffrombykergrove
My home town of Walsall is very heavy metal. When I go for a walk around town, it’s a tough place. It’s hard-working, loving people who are very self-determined and quite blunt with their matter-of-fact responses. I love Walsall for that, but there’s Bilston, Tipton, Wednesbury, West Bromwich, Wolverhampton, Willenhall. It’s a whole kaleidoscope – you can’t really pin it down.
Did you expect British Steel to effectively become an essential album in the pantheon of British rock? PartTimeReader49
You never expect these things because they’re out of your control. That’s what I love about music. When bands make music, initially it’s for the good times of making songs, making records, but without your fans you can’t get anywhere.
British Steel was pretty remarkable – it was such an uncluttered, simple record. A lot of the songs were written in a house that used to belong to John Lennon. It’s very direct, almost like the band is playing live in the living room – and that was down to Tom’s [Allom, producer] prowess. But the actual songs – Living After Midnight, Breaking the Law, The Rage, Rapid Fire, Metal Gods – collectively they’ve become a definitive part of heavy metal music, and you have no idea that that’s gonna happen.
Rockin’ Rob, of all the songs you’ve written, which one do you like the most? Why that one? Spittwerks
It’s Victim of Changes from the Sad Wings of Destiny album – it’s got all the elements. The way the dual guitars come in – because we were the first dual-guitar heavy-metal band – the bludgeoning riff, the singing going off, the unusual arrangement, the middle eight part where it goes very quiet, then it’s a blistering Glenn Tipton lead break, full of blues and metal, and then it ends with a bang and a scream. It’s a beautiful song and if there’s one song in metal that you could listen to to get into the feel and vibe of the genre, I always suggest Victim of Changes.
My dear wife tells me I should wear my heavy-metal T-shirts more often, but I like to save them for special occasions, to stop them wearing out too quickly. Who’s right in this case? FrogmellaMousetrap
I might be gay, but the wife is always right! I just tried on some new Priest merch when I was in rehearsals the other day and it’s brilliant, but back then they were like medieval spud sacks with Judas Priest shields painted on – they were absolutely horrific and as soon as you washed them, they shrunk about three sizes and the print would start peeling off.
If you were 21 now, what current metal band would you want to join? Lawlessand23
Right now, there’s a couple of British bands I like: Malevolence from Sheffield, and Svalbard. Code Orange, Behemoth, Ghost. Are Ghost metal? I’ll argue about that with my mate Tobias [Forge]. They’re relatively new to this septuagenarian metalhead but it’s the same attitude.
Is it frustrating that, given your legacy with Judas Priest, people tend to overlook your fantastic solo and side projects? Richey1977
No, because Priest completes me as a musician. This is all I ever wanted in life, to be in this band; I’ve been here for 50 years, and I get everything that I need and love out of Judas Priest. The solo adventures are important and valuable to me as they are to anyone – people go off and have a bang elsewhere. As I did, you’re able to figure out the most important part of who you are as a musician, and Priest is that for me.
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If you’re looking to bolster your cognitive abilities and keep your mind sharp throughout your lifetime, you may want to pick up a musical instrument. A recent study published in the International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry found that playing is good for your brain health as you age.
Researchers examined 1,107 people in the U.K. over the age of 40 with an average age of 67.82. Participants self-reported their musical experience via a questionnaire and took part in a cognitive assessment, which tested their working memory and executive function. Researchers then studied how four aspects of musicality — listening to music, playing an instrument, singing and self-reported ability — impacted cognitive behavior and compared that to people who did not have a musical background.
“This large-scale, longitudinal study supports previous research indicating that musical training supports cognitive health by improving memory and lowering risk for age-related cognitive decline,” Dr. Gary Small, a memory, brain and aging expert at Hackensack Meridian Health in New Jersey, told HuffPost via email. Small is not affiliated with the study.
It’s worth noting that 83% of participants were women, so it’s not totally indicative of the general population. Another caveat is that some data was self-reported, said Dr. Arman Fesharaki-Zadeh, a behavioral neurologist and neuropsychiatrist at Yale Medicine in Connecticut, who is not affiliated with the study. Self-reporting leaves room for error; people may misremember their musical background or misunderstand a question.
Playing music largely involves your executive function, so it’s natural for folks with a musical background to see an improvement in the brain, said Dr. Golnaz Yadollahikhales, a neurologist at Cedars-Sinai in California, who is not affiliated with the study.
Your executive function refers to your “ability to multitask and organize oneself, and being able to sequence and prioritize,” Fesharaki-Zadeh explained. Additionally, playing music keeps you cognitively active, meaning it challenges your brain.
“Being cognitively active throughout one’s life can have a protective role” in brain health, Fesharaki-Zadeh continued. This is known as your cognitive reservoir (or cognitive reserve) and activities like playing music can build this up.
Yadollahikhales noted that she’s seen the study’s findings in her day-to-day work, too. People with a good cognitive reserve perform well even when their brain imaging has signs of atrophy. Brain atrophy is linked to issues like dementia and aphasia, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
“The patients of mine who were musicians or who were still playing music at the time of diagnosis would show better cognitive function than what was expected to be seen based on their structural imaging findings,” Yadollahikhales said.
Luis Alvarez via Getty Images
You may want to consider dabbling in music. The research and the experts who spoke to HuffPost were all pretty clear that playing musical instruments and singing can be beneficial for your long-term cognition.
If you’re ready to start some lessons and are open to the process, consider trying specific instruments. The study found that playing keyboard-based instruments, like the piano or organ, had the biggest benefit on memory and executive function, study author Anne Corbett told Newsweek, followed by brass and woodwind instruments.
The social aspect of music may be beneficial for your brain, too. Corbett also told Newsweek that the singers in the study had better complex task completion as they aged. But the study noted that the benefits that come with singing may also have to do with the social connections that are formed when singing with a choir or in a group setting.
“Music doesn’t usually happen in isolation,” Fesharaki-Zadeh said. Think about it: Music is often played in a group, practiced with a teacher or performed for other people. That social interaction is one of those protective factors for brain health, he added.
Bottom line: You’re never too old to start learning and challenging your brain.
“Overall, it is recommended that people start building their cognitive reserve early in life,” Yadollahikhales said. “This can be achieved by playing music and games such as puzzles, reading books and being physically active ... also, as mentioned in this study as well, higher education can affect cognitive reserve positively.”
Even if it’s been years or even decades since you’ve challenged your brain to something new, hope is not lost. “We’re never too old to learn, I think that’s a known concept,” Fesharaki-Zadeh said. Benefits can be seen whether you’re 65 or 18.
Neurogenesis, the forming of new connections and new cells in the brain, is often not as robust for someone in their mid-70s when compared to someone, say, learning at a new job in their mid-20s. But by learning music (or by learning anything new) you activate this process again, Fesharaki-Zadeh added.
“So, let’s say somebody doesn’t have dementia [and] they’re wondering what are the ways that they can protect their brains against dementia — music could be potentially a viable strategy because it does incorporate a lot of the other factors such as learning, emotional well-being, social connections ― and they’re all great for the brain,” Fesharaki-Zadeh said.
It’s important to keep in mind that while you can control certain risk factors, you can’t control your genetics.
“Although this study demonstrates that musicality provides a significant cognitive benefit, other non-genetic ... and genetic risk factors contribute to the risk of cognitive decline,” Small said. “So, even highly successful people with healthy lifestyles will develop dementia if they have a strong genetic predisposition.”
But, as Yadollahikhales mentioned above, if you build your cognitive reserve throughout your life, you’ll be better off if you do develop cognitive impairment or dementia. Studies “have shown that being cognitively, socially and physically active after the development of cognitive impairment and dementia can slow down the progression of the disease,” Yadollahikhales said.
So go ahead and pick up that guitar ― or whatever instrument makes you happy.
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The Home Office has been forced into a U-turn and has now granted visas to the Afghan youth orchestra for their tour of England, after its earlier refusal threw their planned tour into chaos days before it was due to begin.
The band of 47 exiled musicians aged between 14 and 22 had been working for months on their repertoire for the shows, which are due to start at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London on Thursday.
The Home Office had initially refused their visa applications but overturned the decision on Monday after public criticism.
The musicians are also booked to play in Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool.
Diana Johnson MP, the chair of the home affairs select committee, wrote on X: “Excellent news and glad the @ukhomeoffice have done the right thing. Thank you to everyone who made this happen.”
The orchestra’s director, Dr Ahmad Sarmast, said the group have performed freely in Switzerland, France, Italy and Germany among other countries since they were chased out of their home country by the Taliban. Sarmast had described the Home Office’s initial decision as “heart-breaking”.
One of their most recent concerts was at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. Among those helping them get out of Kabul were the international classical music stars Daniel Barenboim and Yo-Yo Ma.
After fleeing to Qatar from their home country when the Taliban retook power in 2021, the orchestra is now based in Portugal, where the players were granted immigration rights and are in education at Portuguese music schools, according to Sarmast.
He said the Home Office had initially told them it was not convinced by the information the orchestra provided about the status of the students, saying it was vague.
Speaking to the Guardian before the Home Office’s U-turn, Sarmast said: “The group has been denied visas for entry to the UK to complete this wonderful tour called Breaking the Silence.
“We have played all over the world since we left [Afghanistan] but we never faced this.”
The orchestra said the refusal was a “significant blow” that “deprived these young musicians an opportunity to raise awareness through music about the gender apartheid against Afghan women and denial of cultural rights of the Afghan people by the Taliban”.
The orchestra is part of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music (ANIM), which was established in 2010. When the Taliban retook power its campus in Kabul was seized as a command centre, its bank accounts were frozen, its offices ransacked and its instruments left abandoned.
Last summer the Taliban shared a picture of officials presiding over a bonfire of musical instruments and equipment. Playing and listening to music is heavily restricted under the regime.
In 2014 the ANIM symphony orchestra was performing at the French cultural centre in Kabul when a bomb ripped through the venue. Sarmast was knocked unconscious, both eardrums were perforated leaving him deaf, and he received serious shrapnel injuries. After months of treatment in Australia, he recovered his hearing.
“The main purpose of the orchestra is not only to share Afghan music in exile while it is banned and suppressed [under the Taliban] but to achieve cultural diplomacy – people to people – across the world,” he said.
“This denies our people the opportunity to let people in the UK know about what is happening in Afghanistan and share the beauty of Afghan music.”
The orchestra had prepared a repertoire of Afghan, south Asian and western classical music to perform at the Southbank Centre in London, the Tung auditorium in Liverpool, Stoller Hall in Manchester and at Birmingham Town Hall.
A Home Office spokesperson said: “Musicians and performers are a valued and important part of UK culture.
“Applications have to be considered on their individual merits in accordance with the immigration rules with the responsibility on applicants to demonstrate they meet these rules.”
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The Vienna Philharmonic hasn’t had a chief conductor since 1933. But it has had favorite conductors.
Of the great musicians who have led this self-governing, proudly idiosyncratic orchestra, Leonard Bernstein and Pierre Boulez were made honorary members; Herbert von Karajan and Karl Böhm were given honorary conducting titles. The violinist Daniel Froschauer, the Philharmonic’s chairman, has said that today, the ensemble not so secretly has two maestros at the top of its roster: Riccardo Muti and Franz Welser-Möst.
At Carnegie Hall last weekend, it was the Austrian-born Welser-Möst, 63, who conducted three breathless, exhilarating and often moving performances by the Philharmonic, in meaty programs of Bruckner and Mahler symphonies, and works by Berg, Hindemith, Schoenberg, Strauss and Ravel.
It takes a lot to win over the affection of the Philharmonic, one of Europe’s finest ensembles, just as it takes a lot to join its ranks. These players — known for their lush sound, their brighter, higher tuning frequency and their distinctly Viennese articulation — can be haughty and stubborn; I have seen them outright defy a conductor in rehearsal.
Welser-Möst has not only penetrated the Philharmonic’s inner circle, but also has done so while leading the Cleveland Orchestra — another top-notch ensemble, though one whose sound differs enormously from that of the Viennese.
The main difference between the Cleveland Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic is that while the Clevelanders have been criticized for giving performances that are too good, no one could ever accuse the Viennese of the same.
In Cleveland, Welser-Möst has for the past two decades maintained and deepened the orchestra’s transparent, clean sound. (He will leave his post in 2027.) Its playing is the most precise of any American ensemble, impeccably balanced to the delight of perfectionists and the frustration of those who crave more daring in their concerts.
The Philharmonic is also impressively skilled, but with a touch of messiness that tends to enliven rather than diminish a score. These players are, above all, human: Expressivity pervades their wide tremolos, wailing glissandos and physical gestures that verge on theatrical.
If the Clevelanders like their music lean, the Viennese like it fatty, “mit Schlag.” Together, these orchestras embody two approaches to musical excellence. And able to walk either path with them is Welser-Möst.
At Carnegie, the Philharmonic’s style was at its most pronounced in Bruckner and Mahler’s ninth symphonies — which were fitting inclusions in Welser-Möst’s Perspectives series at the hall, but not in its festival “Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice.”
The Weimar Republic, during its short life from 1918 to 1933, was an extraordinary period for all types of art. Audience members at the Philharmonic concerts, though, could barely glean that from its three programs, which only glanced at the era and grasped at thematic relevance. The performances more richly represented the Germanic world inching into modernism on the cusp of World War I, and the disillusioned mood of the war’s aftermath: the decline of Romanticism and the rise of embittered irony.
That idea can overlap with, but is not the same as, the precarity and collapse of the Weimar Republic. And where they met was the Philharmonic’s Saturday program, which opened with Hindemith’s Konzertmusik für Blasorchester, written in 1926 for a military band with the kind of satirical spirit you could hear on the revue stages of Berlin at the time. It was there that Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra premiered in 1928, disastrously mishandled by the Berlin Philharmonic under Wilhelm Furtwängler. But at Carnegie both received easily legible readings; the Schoenberg, played with a comfort that let its underlying expressiveness come through, provided proof that “atonal” doesn’t inherently mean “unpleasant.”
From there, the Philharmonic’s programming trailed away from the Weimar Republic, with works like Ravel’s “La Valse,” first performed not in Germany but in the Paris of 1920; and Strauss’s Symphonic Fantasy from “Die Frau Ohne Schatten,” a 1947 reworking of an opera written before and during World War I.
Which is not to discount the performances of these pieces. The Ravel unfurled like a dreamy memory of the Philharmonic’s famous New Year’s concerts — one that gives way to a nightmare. And the Strauss, difficult to balance with its large scale and dense writing, was an alluringly perfumed stroll through the luxuriant sound world of “Frau.”
Furthest, perhaps, from the Weimar theme was the Bruckner, dedicated to God and left incomplete at the composer’s death in 1896. Welser-Möst likes to play with juxtaposition, and on Friday, he paired it, as something of a finale, with Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra, written in the 1910s — Berg’s music bringing Bruckner’s across the threshold of modernity.
Bruckner’s Ninth, discursive and inconclusive, at one point rivaling the mystery and mystical power of Wagner’s “Parsifal,” acquired dramatic shape and cohesion under Welser-Möst. Its introduction began quietly until it escalated to an explosive declaration, and the passages that followed rose and fell like a distress signal, flaring brightly and fading. From silences emerged wisps of melody and balletic delicacy, before more eruptions that left behind softly glowing halos of sound.
There was a similar sense of shape — a wrangling of immensity — in Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, which stood alone on Sunday. Welser-Möst took a brisk tempo, but with vitality rather than impatience, making for a running time of about 75 minutes where some conductors stretch the score to more than 90.
This is a work full of farewells: an allusion to Beethoven’s “Les Adieux” sonata, inscriptions by Mahler of “Leb’ wohl!” and an ending that quietly takes leave while, as Theodor Adorno wrote, looking questioningly into uncertainty.
Welser-Möst’s interpretation was one with much to say on the way out. The first movement developed with defiant freedom before giving way, in later movements, to a ländler, a folk dance particularly popular in Austria, that began with rustic earthiness but ended with a cosmic dance, and, by the finale, a passionate elegy.
That last movement is often performed as a kind of prolonged death. But the direction “ersterbend,” or “dying,” doesn’t appear in the score until the penultimate page, and the Philharmonic players didn’t take a linear journey to arrive there, with swerves of energy from passages of glacial tranquillity. The music wasn’t ready to say goodbye, and after three days, neither were they.
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‘An opera of dazzling surfaces, knowing theatrical tropes and deliberate distancing effects,” is how director Polly Graham describes The Rake’s Progress, in a programme note for her new staging for English Touring Opera. Completed in 1951, Stravinsky’s ironic Hogarthian parable ranges allusively through operatic history in its exploration of the relationship between indolent Tom Rakewell and demonic Nick Shadow, deploying the formalities of 18th-century opera – recitative, aria and ensemble – to distance us from the protagonists even as the music itself exposes their thoughts and feelings with extraordinary poignancy. But where Stravinsky strives for narrative clarity, Graham on occasion tips stylisation towards surrealism, with uneven results.
April Dalton’s designs elide Rococo frippery with the distortion of Dalí, as pictures of eyes and lips materialise on the walls of Mother Goose’s brothel, and bizarre bric-a-brac fills the house where Baba (Lauren Young) lives with Tom (Frederick Jones, unwell on opening night; his understudy, Brenton Spiteri, sang the last two acts from the side of the stage). Some of it is unduly busy. The opening scene between Tom and Anne (Nazan Fikret) now takes place at a May Day festival, during which Tom is already being eyed by Shadow (Jerome Knox), while masked pagan figures, half-human, half animal, dance round a maypole. There’s more maypole later on in the graveyard scene, which proves distracting.
Some of it is striking. Casting a younger baritone than usual as Shadow allows her to present the pair as alter egos rather than middle-aged mentor and hapless protege. We’re never quite sure whether or not London is a hell on earth populated by Shadows’s demonic minions, while Bedlam, ironically, seems the only calm place in a world where “good or bad, all men are mad,” as Baba puts it. Elsewhere, however, Graham’s ideas sometimes don’t quite work. Anne sets out to redeem Tom as a warrior heroine in trousers and chainmail, brandishing a sword like Bradamante in Handel’s Alcina, which comes close to undermining Stravinsky’s depiction of her courage as born of simple goodness.
That it does not is due to Fikret, who sings with a wonderfully silvery tone and great depth of feeling throughout. This is one of several superb performances in an evening which, musically, is consistently fine. Knox’s elegant Shadow is all the more dangerous for being so plausibly charming, even when he is at his most malevolent. A couple of moments of wayward intonation apart, Jones didn’t sound as if he was struggling in Act I: Spiteri’s voice is slightly darker, nicely combining weight with lyricism. Young, meanwhile, makes a really fine Baba, funny, self-assured, tellingly compassionate beneath the self-dramatisation. In the pit, Jack Sheen propels the score urgently forwards. It’s beautifully played with some wonderfully precise, elegant instrumental solos, and the choral singing is first rate.
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