Latest news with #NickCave
Times
23-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Little Simz at Royal Festival Hall review — a thrilling finale to Meltdown
'It's crowded in here, innit!' Britain's greatest rapper, Little Simz, exclaimed to a sold out Royal Festival Hall. Her performance was the jewel in the crown of this year's Meltdown festival, after gigs by the Streets, Lola Young and James Blake. The rapper headlined and curated the festival's line-up, following in the footsteps of greats such as David Bowie and Nick Cave. The 31-year-old's Glastonbury set last year was one of the standout moments of the weekend. But this concert, where she was accompanied by the Chineke! Orchestra and some excellent guests, was even better. The first beat — a marching snare drum and ominous brass — backed by flashing red lights, set the tone for an exhilarating night. Dressed in baggy leather shorts and a jacket she later removed to show the slogan 'Hardcore', Simz opened with Introvert — the first track on her Brit and Mercury-winning album Sometimes I Might Be Introvert. Thief and Flood followed: two vengeful numbers from her recent album Lotus, which comes in the wake of a lawsuit with her former producer Inflo after he allegedly failed to repay a loan of £1.7 million. Kudos to the lighting designer: thundery grey-and-white streaks lit the stage, ramping up the tension as the artist called out instances of betrayal. • Little Simz: 'Women are made to feel like rap is not their place' But the north Londoner didn't let darker themes dominate the show. Quickly she switched to playful banter, inviting — later ordering — the crowd to stand up and dance. 'Why are you sitting down? Nah.' It was the right call: most of her fans had clearly been waiting for permission to hop up and go for it, particularly a group of teenage girls on the balcony, who screamed every word and got an acknowledging wave from their hero. They weren't the only ones to receive a flash of love: for Heart on Fire she walked along the stalls, shaking hands with the crowd and throwing piece signs for one person's selfie video. The guest rapper Wretch 32 also walked through the aisles before taking to the stage with the singer Cashh to join Simz for the intimate conversational Blood, a song about checking in and relying on your loved ones. Simz's playfulness was at its peak, however, when she took Chris Cameron's place at the conductor's podium and flicked the baton as she went into Venom — a formidable tirade against sexism in the industry, which feels particularly relevant in the UK rap scene: Simz is the only woman in history to have been nominated for the best rap category at the Brits. Jaunty, satirical Young came next, topped off with a solo by the bass player Marla Kether — the star of Simz's band. • Read more music reviews, interviews and guides on what to listen to next Was that the highlight, or was it when the Nigerian singer Obongjayar came out for Lion and Point and Kill? Perhaps it was everyone swaying to Woman, or the immense orchestral intro to the finale, Gorilla? Whichever takes the crown, Simz has done it again. Next up: her debut at the O2. ★★★★★Little Simz plays Co-op Live, Manchester, on Oct 16, and the O2, London, on Oct 17, Follow @timesculture to read the latest reviews
ABC News
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Ambient Country
Let us take you on a sonic journey through the paddocks, sun-kissed fields, trickling brooks and dappled forests with this collection of lush AMBIENT COUNTRY songs. Featuring iconic purveyors of the genre including Ry Cooder, William Tyler, Nick Cave & Warren Ellis, Andrew Tuttle, Marisa Anderson and more artists known for their unique approaches to ambient and twang-fused cinematic music. Blending acoustic instrumentation with atmospheric textures to create immersive textural twang, atmospheric soundscapes of swirling pedal steel, sparse synthesisers, strewn strings and acoustic guitar picking. TRACKLIST Cooder - Paris, Texas Tuttle - Sun At 5 In 4161 Gutiérrez - Western Bronco Cave & Warren Ellis - Cowgirl Gunn - Way Out Weather White & Marisa Anderson - 18 to 1 La Tengo - Green Arrow Lee – The Badger and The Locust Tyler – Highway Anxiety Johnson - Riga Black Americans - Gallup Knopfler - Wild Theme Anderson - In Waves Golden Messenger - Dreamwood Brown - Turtle Spirit - Over Your Shoulder Silverstein - Door at the Top of Your Head Kaphan - High Desert Dead - Love Scene Star – Into Dust
The Guardian
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Nick Cave says he declined Morrissey's request to sing ‘silly anti-woke screed' on new song
Nick Cave has said that he turned down Morrissey's request to appear on a new song in 2024, claiming that the former Smiths frontman wanted him to sing 'an unnecessarily provocative and slightly silly anti-woke screed he had written'. In response to a fan question on his Red Hand Files site about his relationship with the singer, Cave said that 'although I suppose I agreed with the sentiment on some level, it just wasn't my thing. I try to keep politics, cultural or otherwise, out of the music I am involved with. I find that it has a diminishing effect and is antithetical to whatever it is I am trying to achieve.' The Guardian has contacted representatives for Morrissey for comment. In 2019, Cave said: 'Regardless of the virtuous intentions of many woke issues, it is its lack of humility and the paternalistic and doctrinal sureness of its claims that repel me.' A year later, he called cancel culture 'bad religion run amuck'. In 2024, he clarified in an interview with the Observer that he was 'totally down' with social justice but didn't 'agree with the methods that are used in order to reach this goal – shutting down people, cancelling people. 'There's a lack of mercy, a lack of forgiveness. These go against what I fundamentally believe on a spiritual level, as much as anything. So it's a tricky one. The problem with the right taking hold of this word is that it's made the discussion impossible to have without having to join a whole load of nutjobs who have their problem with it.' In addition to the lyrical content of Morrissey's proposed collaboration, he said, 'while the song he sent was quite lovely, it began with a lengthy and entirely irrelevant Greek bouzouki intro'. Cave said that the two of them had never met, 'which is probably why I like him. He is undeniably a complex and divisive figure, someone who takes more than a little pleasure in pissing people off. As enjoyable as some may find this, it holds little interest for me, but for the fact that Morrissey is probably the best lyricist of his generation – certainly the strangest, funniest, most sophisticated, and most subtle.' Answering a further question about the state of yearning, Cave said that 'certain music' can fill the void that he described as 'the essence of being human … a sense of incompleteness, of abandonment, a feeling of something lacking'. 'We feel complete when we listen to music we love, while being guided towards the goodness of things,' Cave wrote. 'I find that Morrissey's music, regardless of how jaundiced and disaffected the songs may sometimes seem, does precisely that – ushers us toward what is true.' Answering one final fan question about what he was currently listening to, Cave namechecked the New York punk-funk noise band YHWH Nailgun, whose debut album 45 Pounds has been hailed as one of the year's best, and who, Cave wrote, 'in their own purifying way, do all of the above, pointing us to the heavens by going all the way down. Completely awesome.' Cave has used his Red Hand Files site to communicate directly with fans since 2018. 'Over the years, the Red Hand Files has burst the boundaries of its original concept to become a strange exercise in communal vulnerability and transparency,' he wrote on the site. Cave is currently on a solo tour of Europe that concludes in Luxembourg in September. His most recent album with the Bad Seeds, Wild God, was released in March 2024. Morrissey has not released an album since 2020's I Am Not a Dog on a Chain. He has claimed that a follow-up album, Bonfire of Teenagers, was 'gagged' and prevented from release as a result of 'idiot culture' after he left his US label, Capitol, in 2022. He has called it 'the best album of my life'.
The Independent
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Nick Cave reveals why he turned down Morrissey collab
Nick Cave revealed he declined an invitation from Morrissey to sing on a song featuring "an unnecessarily provocative and slightly silly anti-woke screed." Cave praised Morrissey as "probably the best lyricist of his generation" despite turning down the collaboration. Morrissey 's unreleased album, 'Bonfire of Teenagers,' faces record label concerns over its title track about the 2017 Manchester terror attack. Cave explained that he avoids incorporating politics into his music, finding it diminishes his artistic goals. Morrissey claimed that every major label in London has refused to release his album, despite admitting that it is a masterpiece.
Forbes
01-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Sunday Conversation: The National's Matt Berninger On His New Solo Album
How to describe an interview with The National frontman Matt Berninger? Like talking to Moby or Liz Phair (who along with Robert Plant might be the smartest interview in music) it is a fascinating labyrinth of cerebral twists and turns where you just hold on and do your best to keep up. It is as compelling and enlightening as his music. Which is saying a lot because along with Nick Cave and the timeless Bruce Springsteen, Berninger, with The National and on his own, has been, to me, the most consistent rock act in the first quarter of this century. Once again, Berninger stuns with his second solo album, Get Sunk. A gorgeous slice of life that, like the writing of Raymond Carver, is deceptively complex and profound, Get Sunk is, as Berninger describes it, a romance with ghosts. As we discussed, it is a record of memories, of life, of hope. Steve Baltin: I'm a big believer in environment affecting writing. So, was it Connecticut that lit the spark for this album? Matt Berninger: The Connecticut part of it maybe colored the process. This record has a lot of Midwestern atmosphere with creeks and trees and animals and bike rides along rivers and stuff. I've always been writing about that stuff. But yeah, getting to Connecticut, back in an area that is like what it was like in my youth and particularly on my uncle's farm. The place I live now, I have a barn, and I have a little bit of land. But I have all this stuff and there are trails in the woods and creeks all around where I live now. And that's where I spent all my most memorable stuff of my childhood, it all happened at that farm in Indiana. So, Connecticut really inspired that part of it. But I think anytime you uproot and go to a new place, or take a vacation, you're riding a train through Italy, like suddenly, you're going to write differently and be inspired to write different kinds of stories. So, I do think, I think changing the soil you're in every 10 years is really smart. Baltin: So that's something that you've done regularly, move every decade or so? Berninger: Yeah, I've moved from Cincinnati, moving out of your house or your parents' house, and then going to college in an apartment, that feels like two different types of living. Then I moved to New York City in '96, and I was there for maybe 15 years, and that's where I met my wife, that's where my daughter was born. We'd been in Brooklyn for close to 15 years or something. Then we just felt we had squeezed New York for every drop of inspiration and so we moved to Venice, California. We lived out there for 10 years and then I wrote five or six, seven records, did so much stuff out there and met Mike Mills and became a collaborator with all these amazing filmmakers and stuff. So that was an amazing decade of creativity and then my daughter was about to go to high school, and we all wanted something new, and we had family in Connecticut and it's so close to New York. I didn't want to move back to Brooklyn, but I really want to be close to New York again. I go to New York every week and ride the train. So yeah, it's really new and inspiring and I think that is really good and it does jolt me, although some of this record I started five years ago in Venice. Even some of the songs that are talking about Indiana, and the Midwestern pastoral scenes were written when I still lived in Venice during the lockdown. So maybe I was just dreaming of wandering the woods or going back to a time. But I always write about that stuff. But moving and changing your environment does change your brain. Baltin: Would this album have been made anywhere now at this time? Berninger: Yeah, I feel like this would have been made anywhere at this point in time. I do, and I have been saying this recently because I've been trying to answer that question. Because yeah, a lot of this record does go back and it's a really conscious effort to try to reshape, not in the details and truth, but in the emotional memories of things and write a great story, and of a great 45-minute immersive connected experience. And it was really important for me on this record more than anything I've ever done, I think. But you're right, what is our past? What is it? And often, I've been saying this, that our past is a story we tell ourselves. and we remember it differently. Our memories of it change and our memories are memories of memories. So, it's our own version of (the game) telephone constantly going as we go and try to retell the stories of what happened and why am I like this and what was my childhood like and what were my relationships with my parents like and what was it? It's all fantasy and it's just the same way your future is a story you're telling yourself. What you want, why you're doing what you're doing and where you're trying to go and how long you want to live and what you want in your life and what experiences you want to have going forward is also just a story. And what experiences you had in the past so you're just telling your story of those experiences. All those things, traumas, good things, can totally shape you, yes, but sometimes we can be confined by our own definitions of ourselves and that we create a little bit of a prison or a trap around ourselves and we say, 'I'm this way because of this and that's why and I'm going to stay this way.' And right now you're seeing in the world, everybody, it's an identity crisis. People don't know. I'm a Catholic, but there are so many Catholics identifying with something else that is so un -Catholic. And that kind of thing, but there's so much, 'But this is me now, I'm this and I identify with this.' I think we really trap ourselves into our ideas of who exactly we are and I think it's a dangerous thing. I was trapped in an idea of what I was. Like I was this type of guy. I'd written all these stories. I had manifested becoming this melodramatic, unhinged character. And then I was leaking into that facade or that story I had told had started to become a little real. And it wasn't real. And so, yeah, I think that this record is trying to maybe go back and kind of recontextualize some of the beauty and I think the good things mostly. There's a lot of darkness in this record, but I'm a happy person. I've had very unhappy times. I've had very dark, long depressions. Everyone has, but my core is optimistic, hopeful, kind, brave, and happy mostly, and I remember that. And I learned that from my parents. I learned that from my cousins. I learned that from my uncle. I learned that from nature. I learned that from the farm. I learned that early, and that hasn't changed. I identify as those things, but sometimes you get lost in these other prisons of other things that you think you are, but you're not. Baltin: That's so interesting on so many levels. As The National started getting bigger, do you feel like personally you became a character people wanted you to be? Berninger: I was actually in my early 30s before we got successful. But when you get your first taste of success and people are really reacting to your work that is some of the most extreme, darkest parts of your personality, or the saddest parts, and those become the best songs because I'm being honest about something. But when you're writing those songs in your 30s, and then you get successful, I'm sure subconsciously I've elevated that idea of that guy in my head. There's more currency to that character, I realize. And so maybe you start to manifest it, and you keep building this weird sculpture of these little Legos of melodrama and anger or rock and roll songs and all these things. Then they become this really weird cool sculpture that everybody buys tickets to see. And then the next thing you know, you're stuck as this thing that wasn't what you intended. Baltin: You and I have talked over the years too about literature being inspiring and I feel like there were very literary and cinematic points of this album. Right when we got on the Zoom, I was listening to the record again. I love 'Silver Jeep.' That one has almost like a Raymond Carver feeling to me. Berninger: Yeah, there's a few of them. Some of them are more kind of blurry, abstract, impressionistic, emotional descriptions of emotional things or descriptions of process, like 'Nowhere Special' is a totally different song from a lot of the other songs and so is "End of the Notion.' I don't think about it when I go in but I see that I'm often trying to write a type of song I've never written but I've written hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of songs. But "Silver Jeep" and "Bonnet of Pins" and "Frozen Oranges," those are three examples of songs that are like scenes. Or "Bonnet of Pins" is maybe just an hour or a couple of hours of reconnection between two people. Then "Frozen Oranges" is a whole day, a long bike ride filled with medicines and joys and fruit and sunshine and bugs and juice and it's a really healthy song. Then 'Silver Jeep' is a is an echo of the same character from 'Bonnet of Pins.' That character is not really present much in 'Frozen Oranges.' But then at the end of the record, I think 'Silver Jeep' and 'Bonnet of Pins' are a little bit of a return to that relationship or that dynamic. What is it? Well, they're always chasing each other. They're always seeking each other, but they're always there. The line in 'Silver Jeep' that I like is, 'I see you out there somewhere in a silver jeep.' Maybe only in my mind but you'll always be there whether I ever see you in person again, you're never leaving. This person might already be dead. The whole record is about a ghost but it's not a singular ghost, it's not one person, it's a ghost of something. It's a really romantic record. It's a romance with a ghost, I guess.
