Blancmange: Joining All The Dots

Blancmange have released some terrific albums in recent years – and ‘Private View’ is up there with their very best. In a hugely entertaining and highly revealing interview, frontman Neil Arthur gives the inside story on the band’s latest record and also talks art, swimming, dead men’s suits, recycling, smudged bindis, inflatable whales, luck, love, loss… and how everything is connected

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Bob Fischer

The Joe Meek Story

byJohn McCready

The tragic tale of the original pop Svengali would be fantastic enough even without the black magic, gangland threats and a pill-popping climax of paranoia, rapidly declining fortunes and murder… through a series of interviews, conducted in the late 1990s and early 2000s, many with collaborators, artists and assistants who have since died, we tell the incredible tale of Joe Meek

LLong Reads

23 minute read

Simple Minds: Natural High

byPush

Simple Minds have just put out a new album… and it’s their best since the band’s heyday in the 1980s. From the striking cover to the upbeat tunes and sometimes dark lyrics, Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill explain how ‘Direction Of The Heart’ came together, as well as reflecting on their enduring friendship and the 40th anniversary of their 1982 classic, ‘New Gold Dream’

LLong Reads

8 minute read

Nabihah Iqbal: The Stuff Of Dreams

byStevie Chick

After overcoming immense challenges during its gestation, the second album from London producer Nabihah Iqbal – the left-field, intimate and gloriously melancholic ‘Dreamer’ – is an unequivocal triumph over adversity

LLong Reads

10 minute read

Fever Ray: Free Radical

bySian Pattenden

Always striving to challenge the status quo, Swedish enigma and visionary Karin Dreijer does things very much on their own terms, artistically and musically. Here, they open up on electropop experimentation, identity politics and the “visceral confection” that is Fever Ray

LLong Reads

8 minute read

Oneohtrix Point Never : Straw Dog

byBen Willmott

Films played quite a role in the making of the new Oneohtrix Point Never album, ‘Age Of’. Recording alone in a rented a house on the hill that freaked the bejesus out him at night, Daniel Lapotin talks Kubrick, harpsichords, alien regression and, erm, ‘The Great Whatsit’…

LLong Reads

8 minute read

Beverly Glenn-Copeland: All You Need Is Love

byJim Butler

On his first studio album since 2004, revered American singer/composer Beverly Glenn-Copeland exudes warmth and optimism. He talks about the inspiration behind the record, his late-career resurgence and the inordinate power of love