It’s a little hard to believe that Alex Crossan, who is known for his zeitgeisty electronic music as Mura Masa, is feeling nostalgic. This is hardly a mid-life crisis – he’s only 23. But on his newly released second album, R.Y.C., which stands for Raw Youth Collage, he’s mostly stopped making songs that sound like…
Bea Kristi Laus settles in the corner booth of a Wandsworth cafe at 2pm and orders the mozzarella sticks, which are breakfast. The 19-year-old is winging it again, and why not? From her cutesy, hastily chosen stage name, Beabadoobee – a scatting play on her first name Beatrice – to her lower-than-lo-fi debut recording, Coffee,…
You can’t trust a band to stay split. It took Mötley Crüe just five years to rip up the “cessation of touring agreement” that they signed so dramatically in 2014. Even The Beach Boys briefly forgot about the years they spent suing each other to get back together for a 50th anniversary tour. For north…
I break off my interview with Toni Watson halfway through to ask if she’s okay, or if she’d prefer to stop and do something else. Sitting backstage in a pub venue on a sofa raised on beer kegs, so that her legs dangle innocently like a child on a wall, she sounds as if she’s…
Aitch is an hour and a half late to meet me because he says he’s having an emergency at the barber’s. This seems unlikely given that the teenage rapper’s hair is generally putting green short, but when he finally shows up at his management’s office – a chilly shipping container on a Manchester industrial estate…
Elly Jackson has a lot to say. The musician, who trades as La Roux, talks for half an hour longer than our intended interview slot, then carries on for another 20 minutes after I’ve turned off the dictaphone. When we finally wrap up, she looks out of the window of her publicist’s Brixton office to…
Among my range of hard-hitting interview questions, I don’t think I’ve previously been cheeky enough to ask someone if they’ve ever had sex while listening to their own music, but Greg Gonzalez does rather invite the enquiry. The Texan musician called his band Cigarettes After Sex, then set about making two albums of foggy, post-coital…
Björk at the O2 Arena is a concept that might have made more sense in the Nineties, if only the venue had existed. That was when the Icelandic musician was making platinum-selling albums, her startling, vaulting voice front and centre in pop culture. Today the mainstream is a distant memory as the 53-year-old, together with…
Celeste meets me in the cafe at the front of The Premises, a Hoxton rehearsal studio which celebrates its prestigious clientele with signed photographs all over the walls. The 25-year-old, full name Celeste Waite, isn’t famous enough to be up there herself yet, with just one EP and a handful of singles out there so…
Headie One apparently got his nickname because his head looks like a 50 pence piece, but it’s hard to tell as the Tottenham rapper descends the backstage stairs in Brighton’s Concorde 2 venue. At the latest stop on a headline tour that will culminate at Brixton Academy next week, his biggest show yet, he’s got…