The line-up for Antony Hegarty's Meltdown festival at London's Southbank Centre has been revealed.
The Antony And The Johnsons singer is curating the annual festival, following in the footsteps of Jarvis Cocker, David Bowie and, most recently, The Kinks' Ray Davies, by curating the 12-day festival which runs August 1-12.
In 1570, a few years before he became preoccupied with alchemical quests, heretical visions and attempts to divine the language of angels, Dr John Dee was commissioned to write a government report on the state of England.
The Beatles' iconic 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' album cover has been redesigned by original sleeve designer Peter Blake on his 80th birthday.
Blur frontman Damon Albarn has revealed that he almost recorded an album with David Bowie and The Kinks' mainman Ray Davies.
The singer, who is currently preparing for the release of the studio album version of his opera Doctor Dee, revealed that for precisely 24 hours he was set to make a record with the Thin White Duke and The Kinks man.
The new April issue of Uncut, out now, features David Bowie peering from the cover in his guise as sleazy space-star Ziggy Stardust. To celebrate this look at Bowie’s greatest creation 40 years on, here’s a fantastic piece from Uncut’s 18th issue, in November 1998, in which Chris Roberts looks back at the glammed-up, transgressive superstars who changed his adolescent world.
Whatever it was meant to be, it wasn’t fun. In the closing years of the 1960s, the Kinks’ managers Robert Wace and Grenville Collins cajoled Dave Davies into recording material for a putative solo album - long known to fans as A Hole In The Sock Of Dave Davies. Hard-pressed and still heartbroken from being parted from his school sweetheart, what the Kinks guitarist delivered was too gloomy for anyone to handle.
It is a sad fact of life that a man from any walk of life – even the often preposterous world of music – will struggle to be taken seriously if he wanders about wearing a beard the size of Gibraltar, decorating his face with white stars and red war paint, growing his hair down to his waist, then dying it yellow on one side of the parting and blue on the other. So it is with Roy Wood, still best remembered for his terrifying dayglo clan chief appearance than the succession of superb pop songs he wrote for The Move, ELO, Wizzard and – perhaps most impressively - as a solo performer.
