A couple of days before the start of Freshers Week saw the hotly-anticipated release of the Bad Seeds’ 16th album – Skeleton Tree. It comes after a great personal tragedy for frontman Nick Cave, whose son – Arthur, 15 – died late last year, falling to his death under the influence of LSD. It has, […]
One Man in Amman – The Cinema
Cinema is one of those things you can always enjoy. There’s the stale-in-the-mouth popcorn that you wish you’d never bought, the seat with three or four pieces of chewing gum glued to the underside – reluctantly discovered by an overcurious hand, the floors imbibed with sodas spilled through the decades that you can peel your […]
A Music Man in Amman: Rahbani Disco
Time for some Lebanese disco. Picture a pre-civil war Lebanon: regarded as a Middle-Eastern Paris, a society making real steps towards liberation for women, fashion is picking up, Beirut has become a booming port-town. It is the rich man’s Tangiers, the architecture is a fashionable if not an uncomfortable reminder of the French Mandate – […]
Album Review: Savages – Adore Life
Savages are a great band live. They play with a remarkable intensity- something I can testify to having experienced it myself. The music of their first album Silence Yourself, a punchy, frenetic array of tracks that refuse to let up, translate extremely well. In their gigs leading up to the release of their second album […]
One Man in Amman – Ghost Snows
I would have liked to write about snow for this article. That’s what I had been promised when I came to Jordan. It’s what I had planned for this article – the oddity of snow in the desert. The past few years have seen heavy snowfall in Amman, it has become the norm. Yet there […]
A music man in Amman: SoapKills
Let’s be honest. It was not going to be long before I, a self-confessed fan of trip-hop, had sniffed out any Arab bands that even slightly dabbled with the tell-tale, echoing, miserable beats that so define it. So we segue into SoapKills (described by French media as “trip-hop à l’orientale”), a Lebanese-based duo who, though not currently […]
A music man in Amman: Souad Massi
Algerian chanteuse Souad Massi is not your average singer-songwriter from the Arab world. For one, her music seems uncommonly palatable to a western ear. This is by no means a result of her conscientiously distancing herself from the Arab music world. Her 2015 album, Al-Mutakallimun (“Masters of the World”), is an intriguing and refreshing examination […]
Sandstorms and the balcony bunch
Here, in Jordan, I’ve discovered a new hobby in the balcony. There is this indescribable feeling, found only when sitting on the grimy plastic of a weak-legged chair and surrounded by your housemates’ damp underwear left to dry under the Jordanian desert-sun. I like staring at the same bit of road below for hours on end. I […]
A music man in Amman: Mashrou’ Leila
Now stop me if I’m wrong, but the quaint cobbled streets of Exeter aren’t often graced with the strange blend of music that is Arab Pop. From the Old Firehouse to Cavern (and everything in between), you get to hear a lot of music if you keep your ear to the ground, but rarely will […]
Working at festivals
Following his neo-Orwellian Latitude trip-hop adventure of last weekend, Sam Jennings assesses the worth of volunteering at a music festival. Posing the question: did he succeed on his quest to see Portishead? [dropcap size=small]E[/dropcap]ver since I was a wee bairn, I listened to trip-hop. Not that I had much choice. Any chance he could, during long […]