NEIL YOUNG AND CRAZY HORSE, O2 Arena – Evening Standard, 18 June 2013

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There’s something about his face that lets you know Neil Young isn’t going to divide the room into two halves to see which side can shout the loudest – a permanent glower, downturned since the Sixties.

Yet this rare sighting of him with his scuzzy intermittent backing band, Crazy Horse, offered an even rarer glimpse of Young the showman, providing arena entertainment in his own obtuse way.

So there were men in white coats building a set of giant amps and a towering microphone, before the four bandmates arrived to an unlikely rendition of God Save the Queen. A tattooed girl with a guitar case wandered around theatrically during a new piano number, Singer Without a Song.

Young, 67, may not have said hello but he did encourage some audience participation on the repeated profanities of Fuckin’ Up.

Only the most casual fan would have come expecting a whizz through the hits, especially when their most recent album, Psychedelic Pill, is an indulgent double with songs anything up to 27 minutes long. Young frequently turned inwards to guitarist Frank “Poncho” Sampedro, bassist Billy Talbot and drummer Ralph Molina, and sailed off on crashing waves of savage guitar.

With their huddle sometimes so close that all four could be seen in close-up in one screen shot, they squalled and burned through 1990’s Love and Only Love and a fierce take on Buffalo Springfield’s Mr Soul. New song Walk Like a Giant involved a guitar effect that generated notes lower than whale song.

There were longeurs, especially on an unnecessarily epic new one, Ramada Inn. An acoustic section including Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind and a blissful Comes a Time was lovely and much needed. One more guitar frenzy, Like a Hurricane, provided a neat summary. But there’s no one quite like Neil Young.

Also Aug 19, O2 Arena, SE10 (0871 984 0002, theO2.co.uk)

EMPIRE OF THE SUN interview – Evening Standard, 14 June 2013

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With Daft Punk riding high in the charts it’s a good time to be a mysterious dance duo that looks as if it’s from another planet. Empire of the Sun’s first album in five years is all the more exciting because for a while it looked as if they weren’t going to come back to Earth at all.

Luke Steele and Nick Littlemore are Australian, from Perth and Sydney respectively, though you wouldn’t guess it to look at the elaborately airbrushed pictures of the pair in cloaks, facepaint and huge feathered headdresses. More inspired by the original Star Wars posters than JG Ballard’s book or Steven Spielberg’s film, Empire of the Sun began life as a side project for men who were both already in popular bands (Steele leading indie rock group The Sleepy Jackson, Littlemore in another electronic duo, Pnau) but has become far and away their biggest success. Their fabulous 2008 debut album, Walking on a Dream, went gold over here and double platinum in their homeland, picking up Australia’s BRIT-equivalent ARIA awards for Album of the Year and Best Pop Release.

But it looked as though that was that. Steele took the Empire music on a world tour on his own, surrounded by dancers dressed as everything from rubber-suited aliens to sexy swordfish. Littlemore went off to be musical director for the Cirque du Soleil show Zarkana, now resident at the Aria Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, and most recently released a Pnau album with Elton John singing, Good Morning to the Night, which went to number one last summer.

“There seemed to be some trepidation that we weren’t coming back but we always knew we were,” says Littlemore, 35, sharing a sofa with Steele, 33, in a boutique hotel in Marble Arch. Though he does most of the talking, it’s not because the pair are at loggerheads but because Steele really does seem to be a bit of a spaceman — sentences trailing off, staring wide-eyed into the middle distance and yawning with vigour. When he does speak he says “Hey?” at the end of everything with that characteristic Australian upwards inflection.

Steele’s attention span is not  helped by the fact that he’s only just off the plane from Australia (Littlemore has arrived from his home in relatively handier LA) but at least he looks like a proper pop star with his shiny leather frock coat, thick guyliner and Emeli Sandé’s hair. Littlemore, in a jumper and jeans, curly hair greying at the edges, looks like the one who makes sure they get their tax return in on time.

“The press are funny. I wasn’t touring so they ran with this whole story for ages,” he says. In late 2009, he was quoted giving the following explanation as to why he hadn’t spoken to Steele in five months: “I was recording in Atlanta and went swimming with my phone in my pocket. I’ve never managed to replace it.” If that sounds a bit dog-ate-my-homework at least they’re here today, with a new album that sounds bigger and even more brightly melodic, although the division of labour still sounds strange.

Today Littlemore claims that he only saw his own band in concert for the first time less than a month ago, at New York’s Electric Daisy Carnival. “I welled up, it was beautiful.” Surely he’d have liked to be up there too, even if just to prod a keyboard in the shadows? Especially when Empire of the Sun made their Australian comeback at the Sydney Opera House on May 31.

A London show is still to be announced for later in the year. “I might do a couple of cameos live in the future. I don’t get jealous, I love it, I celebrate it. In the future who knows what will happen — but he’s doing such a remarkable job.”

They’re on the same page when it comes to the music, however. The new album, Ice on the Dune, is packed with fantastic, futuristic electropop, piling all the synthesisers in the world onto the chorus of DNA and achieving an irresistably summery bounce on Concert Pitch. Though it’s not light years away from the frothy hands-aloft dance pop that currently riddles the charts, there’s something about Steele’s weary, distinctive singing voice that adds a surprising sadness to the sound, even when he’s simply repeating “We celebrate, we celebrate our love” on the euphoric Celebrate.

“After such a hiatus we couldn’t come back and make something at the same level,” says Littlemore. “We didn’t want to repeat ourselves.

We wanted to be bigger, more expressive.”

Even though Littlemore doesn’t tour, he was aware of the need for the new songs to sound spectacular now that the band are such a major live draw. When Steele arrives on stage at a festival after a procession of guitar/bass/drums bands, looking like a Flash Gordon villain, he understandably makes an impact. “The fans design their own headpieces and spend all day doing their make-up,” says the singer. “They call themselves Empirians, they have competitions.”

“We needed to impress them,” adds Littlemore. “People walk down the aisle to Walking on a Dream. We wanted to respond to the touring aspect too. So we made it harder edged at some points because you want those high energy levels when you have people there in front of you.”

Like Daft Punk, they’re aware of the power of creating what seems to be an alternate universe when presenting their music. “They’ve done a great marketing job on it,” says Littlemore of the French duo’s hit new album. “When we came up with Empire it was about creating something kids could believe in. We didn’t want to be too cool for school, staring at our shoes. You want superstars and flamboyance as a kid.”

That comes across best in their videos, where the headdresses are taller than ever and there’s an ongoing plotline about the jewel from the Emperor’s crown being stolen by the King of Shadows.

“The world descends into turmoil and all kinds of crazy stuff starts happening.” The new album was announced with a blockbuster-style trailer that looked like Indiana Jones and featured almost no music, produced by the people at Bad Robot, the Star Trek director JJ Abrams’s company.

“We met JJ and spent a couple of days in his studio,” says Littlemore. “He’s really into electronics. He’s got the most amazing synthesiser collection and everything works, which is rare.”

There are tentative plans to make a full-length film but for now the pop clips are spectacular enough. There’s no shortage of ambition from the pair, which comes over in the way they look and sound. “We wanted it to be limitless in the way that dreams are. We don’t stop ourselves and say, ‘We can’t do that,’” says Littlemore.

And this time there seems to be no stopping their unusual working relationship either. “We’re already working on another album, so I’ll be coming on and off the tour to collect ideas from Luke, work on them and bring them back,” he continues.

“It’s a dysfunctional thing but we’re just trying to be smarter about it and make it functional within its odd shape. It feels like this can just keep growing. As long as we have Luke’s voice it can go on forever.”

Ice on the Dune is released on Virgin on June 24.

KINGS OF LEON, O2 Arena – Evening Standard, 13 June 2013

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It’s unusual for a band to mark their comeback with an arena tour well before the arrival of a new album. Kings of Leon, whose sixth long player, Mechanical Bull, will be released in late September, may be indicators of a broader trend for live music to take priority over recorded. With several monstrous hits already behind the Followill family from Tennessee, who cares about new songs?

They sneaked a couple in even so, with no mention of their album. They were a disparate pair that didn’t suggest an obvious new direction for the quartet — once hyped as the Southern Strokes, more recently dismissed as the Southern U2, cynical arena rockers with the edge mislaid.

Supersoaker was a light, summery tune with a nice pause for breath before its harmonious chorus. It Don’t Matter was much more raw, a heavy punky thrash without much in the way of hummability.

Frontman Caleb Followill relied on his mighty rasp to add personality where it was otherwise lacking. He said little between songs and the rest of the band came from the Oasis school of standing still and blasting the favourites. Matthew Followill’s lone moment of showmanship was a guitar effect played with his teeth on Closer. Rock authenticity was ensured by giant screens that only showed the musicians live in washed-out browns.

There’s variety in their long back catalogue. The industrial groove of Crawl was a strong contrast from the early single Molly’s Chambers, whose taut riff was far heavier than it is on record. Then there was weird, deathly slow Milk, a moment of real darkness.

Sex on Fire, of course, got the biggest cheer. That huge roar into such a ridiculous chorus will be their legacy, fine fun and not a little silly. Its success means that what they do next doesn’t really matter.

Tonight, O2 Arena, SE10 (0871 984 0002, the02.co.uk)

NILE RODGERS interview – Evening Standard, 7 June 2013

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Nile Rodgers is in a celebratory mood, and it’s not because of his imminent London shows or the new 46-track box set of the guitarist’s work with Chic and beyond, or even the world-conquering triumph that is his number one single with Daft Punk, Get Lucky. It’s a gala day for the 60-year-old because he actually slept in his own bed last night.

He’s there on the waterfront in Westport, an hour north of New York, for just one day, working on a new song for another French dance star, David Guetta. Then it’s back on the road for a man enjoying his busiest period since the days when he was writing hits for Diana Ross, Sister Sledge and his own Chic Organisation, joking that his office was in “the women’s bathroom at Studio 54”.

“I’m home but this is nothing like a day off,” he tells me. “It’s been like that for a while now. It’s been pretty insane.”

He can thank Daft Punk for the increase in ears turning his way at this moment — Get Lucky is a perfect pop song, the summer in your hand, its indelible tune propelled skywards by Rodgers’ long-familiar clipped, funky guitar work. Another track he wrote with the robotic producers and singer Pharrell Williams, Lose Yourself to Dance, is almost as good.

“It sounded like a hit to me but we didn’t think it would be this big. You do the best you can,” he says, stressing that Get Lucky was made more than a year ago, at a time when Daft Punk didn’t even have a record deal and had no way of predicting that they would capture the public imagination in such a way. “People kept telling me that if you have guitar on your songs today, they won’t play it on the radio. So I thought that me being on their record would make it irrelevant.

“For Daft Punk to be this brave and just do music because they love it … I think that’s what’s been lost in music. People are so afraid of failure.”

I get the impression Daft Punk hired him as much for his anecdotes as his songwriting. Thomas Bangalter’s father is the songwriter Daniel Vangarde, who wrote D.I.S.C.O. for Ottawan, so the duo already had strong connections to the era in which Rodgers ruled. He’s charming company, unfailingly upbeat, and the names of his starry connections decorate his talk like glitter. At one point he reels off a list of artists he has written for and produced, including David Bowie, Madonna, INXS and Duran Duran, that seems like it will never end. Then he mentions a Dublin gig last week at which “the boys from U2” were in attendance.

Get Lucky was recorded at Electric Lady Studios in New York, with which Rodgers was already linked. Chic’s debut single, Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah) was made there in 1977 but even before then he was hanging out at the same address when it was a nightclub called Generation. In fact, you can name any location or cultural moment of the past 40 years and you’re likely to find, as detailed in his extraordinary 2011 autobiography, Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco and Destiny (Sphere), that Rodgers was there.

“I was the oldest eight-year-old on Earth,” he writes of a New York childhood raised by a mother who had him at 14 and a stepfather who was a junkie beatnik. Jazz legend Thelonious Monk used to drop by. By the time Rodgers was 18 he’d already taken acid with Timothy Leary, jammed with Jimi Hendrix and joined the Black Panthers.

Now he’s amused by the number of young people who have been converted to his music by their parents. “I grew up rebelling against my parents which is strange because they were really cool and they loved the hippest music in the world. But I felt it was my job to rebel. So many people walk up to me and say, ‘I love this song, my mother used to play it all the time.’ It’s such an odd thing.”

He’s having these conversations more and more, as over the past two years Chic have been fixtures on the live circuit. They’re currently officially known as Chic feat. Nile Rodgers, as the deaths of co-writer and bassist Bernard Edwards in 1996 and drummer Tony Thompson in 2003 prevent a full reunion. But there are no restrictions on the hits, which range from Bowie’s Let’s Dance and Madonna’s Like a Virgin to Sister Sledge’s We Are Family and their own Everybody Dance, Le Freak and Good Times. “We usually do a two-hour show and we don’t even scratch the surface of all the songs that we have,” says Rodgers.

The main reason he’s now playing so often, and another reason for his music being back in favour once more, is a diagnosis of aggressive prostate cancer in October 2010 that made it look like we were going to lose him. He had surgery, and maintained a painfully honest blog called Walking on Planet C. Today he is cancer-free and working harder than ever. When I ask what he’s doing next, he says we would need to schedule another interview to cover it all. Chase and Status, Avicii, Tensnake and Adam Lambert are some of his latest collaborators.

“Getting a severe diagnosis like that is so powerful and all-encompassing. I did what I believe most musicians would do, which is to do the thing that makes me feel the best: make more music. Of course I wanted to play more disco. I wasn’t going to play the blues.”

I saw Chic at the Forum in 2011 and gave them five stars for the most joyous, hit-packed show I’d seen in a long time but was surprised that this mid-sized venue was not sold out. “Booking Chic shows is the hardest thing in the world,” Rodgers claims, somewhat improbaby. “I’m not famous. My life has been spent in the studio, and we really only performed live in the old days to support the records.”

Ticket sales will surely have improved when they return next month to IndigO2, and before that, to the Forum next Friday for the disco-themed late-night event that also features DJs Derrick Carter, Seth Troxler and Studio 54 veteran Nicky Siano. “You were there last time. You could see how much we love to play and how good we sound.”

He’s right — and although he stops short of declaring this to be the next summer of disco, he’s glad that dance music generally is back on top. “I say thank God, oh happy day, that dance music is popular again, although I’ve never not played dance music. It’s a culture that’s been open and loving and allowed a freaky guy like me to come in. It makes me feel good.” See his band this summer, you’ll feel the same way.

Nile Rodgers presents The Chic Organization Boxset Vol. 1/Savoir Faire is released by Rhino on Monday.

A Lovebox & Red Bull Music Academy Special, June 14, Forum, NW5 (0844 847 2405, theforumlondon.com); July 27, IndigO2, SE10 (0844 844 0002,theindigO2.com)

TEGAN AND SARA interview – Evening Standard, 31 May 2013

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If this is what a midlife crisis sounds like, we should all have one. At 32, with six albums of tuneful, understated indie rock behind them, Canadian twins Tegan and Sara Quin have made a seventh that is the musical equivalent of buying a huge motorbike and roaring off to the beach. When they play Heartthrob live in London in a few days, guitars are out, fizzy synths are in, and all that will be missing are a confetti cannon, eight costume changes and a dance troupe to fully represent this belated pop explosion.

“We’d started to get freaked out that we were going to become boring. I was afraid we’d become very comfortable,” says Sara of a long career at the weightier end of cult status that has included support slots with Neil Young and The Killers, Juno and Polaris nominations (Canada’s versions of the Brits and the Mercury) and a White Stripes-recorded cover of their song Walking with a Ghost — but never a true crossover hit until Closer. Their recent single might be the greatest song Kylie never recorded.

“What’s exciting is that everyone’s talking about the music this time. There’s no need to tread too heavily on what’s been talked about in the past,” says Tegan, although she insists that she now feels less awkward about discussing the most unusual aspect of their group’s biography — the fact that these identical twins are both gay. Both are in settled relationships, Tegan splitting her life between homes in LA and Vancouver, Sara in New York and Montreal.

“For a long time we said, ‘It’s not about us being twins and being gay.’ But that has been our course. We’re not some regular boring old band. We have an interesting story. I’m proud of it now in a way I couldn’t be when I was 19.”

This confidence has finally come through in the music. Heartthrob is the most glorious pop album I’ve heard all year, bursting with sparkling keyboard motifs and exuberant harmonies from the siblings. Ordinarily they both sing and play guitar but this time they’re both on synthesisers. It feels modern but nostalgic, with lyrics that embody that teenage thrill of first love and the world coming alive. “I was thinking about first relationships, trying to capture that spark when you meet someone,” says Tegan. The songs deserve to blast from open windows all summer.

To achieve such a U-turn, they had to go back to first principles. “We wanted to start from scratch and not worry about what people imagined our band to be. That allowed us a tremendous amount of freedom,” says Sara. “I could write whatever I wanted and not worry that it’s not going to sound like us.”

It helped to involve producers they’d never tried, mainly Greg Kurstin, best known for his work with Lily Allen and Kelly Clarkson. It sounds like he let them cut loose. “We’re so controlling. We need to be in control of all the little details,” says Sara. “Greg had such cool ideas. It was like having a fun wizard in the room.” He also has a credit as a co-writer on Closer, “because initially we didn’t feel like the chorus [we had] was enough of a home run.” Together, they bashed it out of the stadium.

And although stadiums might not be where these songs will end up, there’s a new hunger for the sisters to reach a big audience. “We would tour with other bands and wonder, what would it be like to be The Killers or Paramore? Selling out arenas,” says Sara. “If our early stuff was only interesting to a small group of people, I want these songs to connect with a mom, and a two-year-old, and a queer teenager from Kansas City, and a hipster who ironically rolls their eyes but actually loves it.”

Most bands are treading water or fading if they get to make seven albums. Tegan and Sara have been making music together since they were 15. But they admit that they may not have been ambitious enough. Is there something inherently underachieving about indie rock? “I think there’s a hangover from the Nineties that it’s not cool if you’re popular but that’s going away. There are a lot of bands adapting their sounds and that includes us,” Tegan tells me.

Sara is defensive about any idea that a poppier sound could be less artistically valuable. “It’s unfortunate and snobby that people think unless you’re in a basement working with someone nobody has ever heard of, that’s not creative. People don’t understand how much creativity and brain power goes into making this kind of music.”

They’re obviously both fiercely proud of their new sound, undermining the popularly-held idea that bands only reach the mainstream by selling their ideas short. And whatever direction they’re going in, they’re going together. Although they live far apart, their working relationship is as close as you’d imagine with twins. They are known for their between-song ramblings on stage. “We’re definitely oversharers,” says Tegan, revealing that having a therapist for a mother has left them both willing to chatter openly about anything. “We love getting up on stage and talking about ourselves.”

Sara promises that the somewhat ramshackle elements of their live shows will remain in part but says the new material demands a new level of professionalism. “We had to relearn what it means to be a modern band. I’m used to playing guitar and everything goes a little out of tune by the end of the song, which can be fun. Now I feel like a robot who has to sing over the top of this really perfect music. It’s like going from hitting a tennis ball against the back of your garage to playing at Wimbledon.”

It’s a huge shift, and the die-hard fans are understandably wary. “This one had a more vocal response from them,” says Tegan, euphemistically. “But I still see them out there when we play. We have fans who swear our best work was our first album that came out in 1999. I don’t think that’s possible.”

She’s right, because Tegan and Sara’s best work is happening right now. I don’t think they’ll be heading backwards after this triumphant transformation. Catch them as they peak.

Tegan and Sara play the Troxy, E1 (020 7790 9000, troxy.co.uk) on June 11. Their new single, I Was a Fool, is released on June 10 by Vapor/Warner Bros.

THE HANDSOME FAMILY, Islington Assembly Hall – Evening Standard, 30 May 2013

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“Awkward, isn’t it? We’ve been shambling on stage for going on 20 years,” said Brett Sparks while fiddling with his guitar, a few stilted moments before striking the first notes of his latest London show with his wife Rennie. Nine albums and two decades since the Albuquerque pair began turning Americana to the dark side, becoming the first couple of alt-country, they remain as bleakly funny as ever.

“We had a cat named Foot-Foot. He’s dead,” was a typical anecdote. They have plenty of animals to replace him, however. On their new album, Wilderness, every song is named after a beast, fish or bird. The tracklisting reads like David Attenborough’s to-do list.

As ever, Rennie’s vivid lyrics offered far more than the one-word song titles. Flies was actually about the fall of General Custer. Glow Worm’s epic drama pictured journey down a hole inside the earth.

With the pace funereal at best, it was a slog at times. Rennie tickled a banjo or ukulele while Brett glowered over his guitar and pushed his glasses up his nose. The addition of David Coulter on musical saw provided a spooky focal point for this odd couple and their swelling menagerie.

MUSE interview – Evening Standard, 24 May 2013

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London’s stadium summer is about to begin and Muse intend to kick off proceedings with a deafening bang. I wouldn’t want to be Rihanna, Green Day, The Killers or Robbie Williams and have to follow the grand-scale spectacle that the Devon trio are promising at the Emirates Stadium this weekend.

For Muse are the biggest band in the world right now — perhaps not quite the most commercially popular, but certainly the largest in terms of the size of their concert productions, the galaxy-crushing rock of their six albums and their ambition to make audiences feel like the world is coming to an end every time they play.

After a lengthy arena tour last autumn and a slot at the Olympics closing ceremony concert last summer (playing their menacing, utterly bonkers official anthem, Survival) these beasts that walk the earth are back in their natural habitat. If you believe their 34-year-old singer and guitarist, Matt Bellamy, it could be the last time.

“As a band I think we’re at the moment of collapse,” he tells me. “We’re at the point of being forced to go back to the basics.”

This isn’t the first time he has threatened to break out the acoustic guitars and start making campfire music, of course. But there’s something about the way he speaks of this stadium tour that suggests Muse are about to reach their peak.

“This is going to be our Zoo TV,” he says, referring to U2’s extravagant early Nineties tour featuring suspended Trabant cars, endless flashing TV sets, Bono’s turn as The Fly and live satellite link-ups with Sarajevo. “This will be the tour when everyone goes, ‘You’ve gone too far, you shouldn’t have done that’. I’m pretty confident about that, and I’m glad. It’s a totally different show from the arena tour. I feel like we’ve scaled up and scaled up every time and I’m very confident that this is as far as you can go.”

I’m not sure whether to believe him when I ask what we can expect from the show. If he’s telling the truth, it will certainly live long in the memory. “We’ve got a 20ft robot called Charles who’s going to go around the stadium barking at everyone, then he’s going to go outside and cause traffic jams. We’ve got an actor playing a banker who’s going to have a banking crisis on stage as we do our own version of quantitative easing, and spray the audience with millions of euros. We might have a businesswoman drinking petrol. The stage is basically a giant futuristic industrial power station polluting the world.”

The set-up is inspired by the main theme of their most recent album, The 2nd Law. It’s named after the second law of thermodynamics, which is not easy to grasp but which is partly explained by a sampled female voice on the song Unsustainable: “The fundamental laws of thermodynamics will place fixed limits on technological innovation and human advancement. In an isolated system the entropy can only increase. A species set on endless growth is unsustainable.”

So it’s the story of the planet, and the financial system, although Bellamy insists that unlike U2, his band aren’t out to preach. “There have always been elements of message in our music, but we don’t make music for the message,” he says. “I don’t think we’re trying to take a stance on anything. I think we’re trying to honestly express some of the confusion of what it is to live in these times. I’m yet to get up on a pedestal and say, ‘This is what needs to happen’.”

He’s aware, too, that the theme also reflects his band’s exponential growth from easily dismissed Radiohead and Jeff Buckley copyists around the time of their 1999 debut, Showbiz, to uniquely overblown space rockers adored for putting on a show like no one else.

He sounds like a reluctant environmentalist. “We all want to escape off the planet in spaceships and live like Star Trek but that appears not to be happening. Instead we’re being told we’ve got to go backwards. That’s a depressing thought. So as much as I love the idea of a sustainable future and all the environmental stuff, there is still a part of me that just wants to go [blows giant raspberry] f*** it all, and push for progress.”

Even so, he still promises a quieter future. I mention that the last time I saw Muse live was at a War Child charity show in the relatively minuscule space of the Shepherd’s Bush Empire in February.

“That was a totally different feeling, although we were still doing the big rock songs. I loved it so much that I think on the next tour, every city we go to, I wouldn’t mind pulling a Prince. Do the arena gig and then show up in some little club late at night.”

It might be the one area where a band that could be said to have done it all still have things to do. “We have work to do with intimacy, connection, stripped-down organic stuff and all those warm fuzzy words. There’s definitely something in that department that we want to explore.”

It’s understandable that the trio might want to calm down a bit as they approach elder statesmanship. Bellamy and bassist Chris Wolstenholme have young families. Bellamy’s son Bing with his wife, Hollywood actress Kate Hudson, is almost two and fascinated by the work of Muse drummer Dom Howard. “Bing is obsessed with drumming. He loves hitting things.”

Wolstenholme has also reached a more serene space after going through rehab in 2009, having spent most of the band’s existence as an alcoholic. He wrote and sang two songs on The 2nd Law, Save Me and Liquid State, the latter containing the lyrics: “The iniquity has died inside and left a scar/I’m all red and done/Bring me peace and wash away my dirt.”

“On this last tour it’s like he’s a different person,” says Bellamy. “He’s totally sunny now and it reminds us of when we first got together. He’s got that youthful energy back. It makes it a lot more fun being on the road. There’s no one who’s down and wants to go home.”

He says the band would have split altogether before they’d have kicked Wolstenholme out. It’s easy to forget, as they stand astride laser cannons and conduct the most apocalyptic rock show in existence, that Muse are just three school friends from Teignmouth. If they do make the long-threatened return to their roots after one last stadium blowout, they’ll have earned a bit of peace and quiet.

Muse play Emirates Stadium, N5, 08444 999 990, muse.mu, Sat May 25 and Sun May 26.

ERIC CLAPTON, Royal Albert Hall – Evening Standard, 20 May 2013

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As he celebrates 50 years as a performer, Eric Clapton could be excused for becoming rather set in his ways. Every two years, at the exact same time in May, he’s back in the Albert Hall. The number of shows varies, at least.

This time it’s seven. He’s ostensibly promoting a new album, though he barely grazed it this evening, perhaps understandably. There’s an unbothered air to Old Sock, from the title and mobile phone-shot cover to the mostly cover versions within. So here he stuck to the older formula of big hits mixed with ancient blues, plenty of acoustic relaxation time and solo after solo.

It can sometimes be harder to be impressed by his fretwork, because he looks as if he’s barely doing anything while the notes gush from his fingers as when a door opens on a flooded house.

He saunters, not sweats, though a big smile as the riff of Crossroads began, and plenty of shouted thank yous, showed what fun he was having.

His new song Gotta Get Over was a raucous gospel number, while Got To Get Better In A Little While sounded more modern and funky, with vigorous drumming from an impressive Steve Jordan. Keyboard player Paul Carrack added smooth soul to Clapton’s more raw vocals, and everybody got their turn at a solo eventually.

A quiet audience was matched by the band during a long seated section that included the inevitable languorous Layla and the first dance favourite, Wonderful Tonight. A portly stage invader, wrestled off at length by a security guard, provided some unwelcome energy during Sunshine of Your Love. Clapton never missed a note, as always.

Until May 26, Royal Albert Hall, SW7 (020 7589 8212, royalalberthall.com)

NAUGHTY BOY – Evening Standard, 17 May 2013

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I’m sitting in British urban pop’s ground zero, which turns out to be a small black room in the historic Ealing Studios complex. Just across the car park the stars of Downton Abbey are donning their tailcoats and tiaras to film their fourth series. Where I am there are disco lights, many fish and an extremely large computer on which the future of music is under construction. It’s the operations room for Shahid Khan, who calls himself Naughty Boy. Most of London’s rappers and R&B singers want to be in his gang.

He owes this status to three unlikely people — Emeli Sandé, Prince Charles and Noel Edmonds. It was Sandé’s huge-selling album, a grant from the Prince of Wales’s young people’s charity The Prince’s Trust, and a £44,000 victory on Deal or No Deal that brought him here.

The 27-year-old from Watford releases his debut album, Hotel Cabana, in September. An effortlessly catchy single, La La La, arrives next week and is already all over Radio 1. He’s a producer who doesn’t sing or rap, so the album features guest appearances drawn from a glittering contacts book that includes Ed Sheeran, Tinie Tempah, Professor Green and Wretch 32 as well as next big things Ella Eyre, Mic Righteous and Chasing Grace. He plays up to the svengali image on a concept collection that depicts him as the mysterious proprietor of a hotel for the rich and famous.

Emeli Sandé is on there too, naturally. Khan co-wrote and produced the majority of the multiple Brit-winner’s album Our Version of Events. It is the UK’s biggest seller of 2012, a five-times platinum smash that is currently on its 65th consecutive week in the top 10.

So it’s an honour to be sitting on the grey sofa where its soulful pop songs were largely composed by the pair, directly beneath a large framed disc commemorating its first million sales. Lily Allen was in my spot last week, working on a song for her comeback album. James Arthur, the latest X Factor victor, was here the week before that. On the security camera above Khan’s computer and keyboard setup, we spot Maverick Sabre heading to the studio upstairs to carry on writing his second album.

“I believe the vibe is what makes the song, not how expensive the equipment is,” Khan tells me, offering me the most exotic Werther’s Original I’ve ever had, picked up in Marrakech that morning.

His studio is set up to reflect that vibe with black walls, coloured lights and lasers in the ceiling. A green Post-it note on the door says “Well done Naughts!”

A large fish tank used to contain piranhas but, disappointingly, it is now filled with goldfish. “The piranhas weren’t a good vibe. I still want baby sharks, though,” he says, re-establishing his Bond villain credentials. “When I put the blinds down, this is my own little spaceship.”

Naughty Boy’s cat, Naughty Bob, sleeps on the warm pile of cables behind an amplifier. A second sofa, invisible beneath piles of crumpled clothes, suggests that this is one producer who really does live in the studio. “I like night sessions. A lot of mine and Emeli’s songs were done in here really late at night.”

He’s revelling in maverick status, self-taught at the piano as well as the various computer programmes he uses to craft his tunes. “I just sat there in the shed at the bottom of my parents’ garden, where I started making music, and worked it out myself like a madman. I never read the instructions,” he says. “I don’t want to feel like I’m ‘trained’ in anything — a piano isn’t a machine.”

Strait-laced Sandé, a trainee doctor in Scotland when she met Khan after performing a showcase gig in London in 2008, benefited from his loose-cannon approach to songwriting. “I was never cool,” she told me when I met her in 2011. “He definitely gave me a sound and a musical identity.”

“We were from very different backgrounds,” he says today. “She was going to be a doctor and I was a marketing and music dropout at London Guildhall, delivering pizzas for Domino’s. She made me take myself a lot more seriously. The way I approached making music changed dramatically when I started working with her.”

Before he met her, he was producing mixtapes for London rappers who are big now but were underground then, such as Tinie Tempah, Chipmunk and N-Dubz.

A 2007 song he made with Bashy, Black Boys, was an uplifting roll-call of positive black British role models that was used in the promotion of Black History Month. When he saw Sandé singing one of her self-penned songs, Baby’s Eyes, at the Iluvlive club night, he knew he had spotted a star.

“She captivated me. I felt like she was just singing to me,” he says. He was one of only a handful of people who approached her after her set, and they began emailing work to each other.

The first song they wrote together, in his shed, was Daddy, which became the second single from her debut album in 2011. More recently, they made Wonder, a glorious tune that was his first hit solely under the Naughty Boy name.

She would travel down from Scotland and stay in a B&B near him, paid for by Khan from his Deal or No Deal money. After dropping out of university in 2006, he applied to both The Prince’s Trust and the game show simultaneously, and received thousands from both. “I hadn’t seen the show before I went on it. Everyone was getting stressed out about it, but really you don’t have to know a thing. It’s just opening boxes.”

The money enabled him to buy his music equipment, a second-hand Audi A3, and to support him while he served an unpaid apprenticeship at the now-defunct Townhouse Studios in Shepherd’s Bush. “It was great. Elton John was there, Damon Albarn, Ian Brown. I was just making the tea and trying to learn how to use the equipment whenever it was free.”

Just as he was running out of cash in 2009, he and Sandé landed their first top 10 hit, producing and singing Chipmunk’s bouncy, ska-influenced single Diamond Rings. This resulted in publishing deals for them both and then it was full steam ahead to stardom.

Khan seems less keen on the personal attention that releasing his own album will bring upon this former backroom boy. He looks worried when I say there must be huge commercial expectations for Hotel Cabana. A trailer already on YouTube makes it look like a blockbuster movie. “I like being the underdog. I don’t want people to expect a hit.”

He’s somewhat jittery in his first significant interview, fiddling with an unlit cigarette throughout and asking, “Did I answer the questions right?” But he’s also a great host, full of enthusiasm and sweets, and it’s easy to see why so many major musicians are currently heading to his studio.

“The British music scene is as exciting as it’s ever been,” he says. “I’m not hurrying over to America. Me and Emeli did a song for Rihanna [Half of Me, on Unapologetic] but we made it here. I was asked to work with Mariah Carey recently but I was too busy. I want to make British music the pinnacle.”

He swivels back round in his producer’s chair and plays me the opening song from his album, a dramatic orchestral piece featuring Sandé and Tinie Tempah that sets expectations for the rest of it toweringly high. “I’ve deliberately not shown my face throughout this whole process so far. I just want people to connect to the music,” he says. They’ll have no trouble doing that.

KINGS OF CONVENIENCE, Roundhouse – Evening Standard, 16 May 2013

 

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Almost four years since their last album, with no word of a new one, Norwegian acoustic duo Kings of Convenience arrived in London for what Eirik Glambek Bøe called “the start of a very unlikely tour”. In the next few days he and Erlend Oye will also visit Seoul, Moscow and Istanbul, demonstrating the still powerful global reach of music that is as meek as it comes.

Having emerged as part of the non-stop thrill ride known as the New Acoustic Movement at the start of the last decade, the pair have continued to make hushed autumnal music, ideal for a warm place on a wet day.

They appeared to acknowledge their debt to Simon and Garfunkel as they harmonised on Homesick: “I can’t stop listening to the sound/Of two soft voices blended in perfection/From the reels of this record that I found.”

Yet they were bright, engaging company in their own right, raising a disproportionately passionate audience response to such passive sounds.

Gangly Oye danced and weaved, and a three-piece band, produced in the second half, even mustered an electric guitar solo on Boat Behind.

“Life is full of terrible moments, and this is not one of them,” said Oye. Quite.