The Alternate Collection Box) (BF22 EX)

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Disc Two’s BBC In Concert from June 1971 heralds, as MC John Peel drily observes, the arrival of a new ensemble, fronted by Ronson – soon be renamed The Spiders from Mars for the following year’s Ziggy Stardust album, which, incredibly, was being written concurrently – along with a circus of bohemian hangers-on, one of whom, Dana Gillespie, sings the newly minted Andy Warhol. When in line with the preferences you have shared with us, provide you with information or advertising relating to our products or services. After a brief period of credibility in the early 2000’s around The White Stripes’ ascent, precious few blues desperados wander the pop landscape these days. On our shores, south London’s Duke Garwood has carved out a singular voice in isolation, his smoky, nocturnal sound and quietly intense purr mesmerizing a cult listenership across six long-players, the last two for hipster label, Heavenly Recordings.

Finally, we may also share your Personal Information to comply with applicable laws and regulations, to respond to a subpoena, search warrant or other lawful request for information we receive, or to otherwise protect our rights. But this whirlwind of ideas and genres can also sometimes make you feel a little dizzy, with Wake Up (which features Chicago conscious rapper Vic Mensa) all over the place in terms of its execution and ultimately what it is trying to say. If that sounds a tad bleak for the run-up to Christmas, it cannot be overstated how much warmth, vitality and, frankly, sexiness there is to Garwood’s uniquely simmering take on the blues idiom. He talks of the process of making Rogues Gospel, mid-pandemic alongside his drummer Paul May, “in a heat-soaked fever dream […] to save ourselves from insanity, to invite the angels in.” The limelight-dodging, careerism-averse 53-year-old cut a further pair in the mid-’10s with a Transatlantic kindred spirit, Mark Lanegan, the sometime grunge hero who shared his penchant for rootsy, if ever exploratory mood music.

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Aside from introducing song titles and band members and thanking the audience for applause, Willie Nelsondidn’t talk much during his February 1984 concert at Japan’s Nippon Budokan arena. Some of his listeners probably wouldn’t have understood him if he had because they didn’t speak English. Still, as Nelson says in liner notes for Live at Budokan, a new two-CD and DVD release of the show, “Music is a great communicator…[people] will hear it in whatever language they are listening.”

This is a quandary that the group isomonstrosity (a collaborative project between artists and musicians Ellen Reid, Johan Lenox, and Yuga Cohler) mostly overcome on their ambitious debut album, which seems determined to cement the links between these two very different musical worlds. However, isomonstrosity should ultimately be applauded for their ambition here, which hits more than its misses, and results in a project that makes a convincing argument that rap and classical in fact carry the same rule-breaking approaches to things like song-structure and harmony. Thomas HobbsAs if it wasn’t difficult enough keeping up with the break-ups, make-ups and ever-changing members of Fleetwood Mac, the legendary band are now releasing alternate versions of some of their best-loved albums to add a further layer of confusion. Oh, and all of them have already been released individually in recent years. Following Lanegan’s passing in February, Garwood delivers a fittingly smouldering tribute to his friend and co-conspirator at the conclusion of this seventh solo outing, called Lion on Ice, eulogising him as “like a satellite that fell too soon”, and forlornly concluding that “we’re all lost in the game”. Whether it’s Mike Jones sampling Rossini for a seminal trap song about sex or Nas reinterpreting German composer Carl Orff’s menacing yet triumphant Carmina Burana for a street smash about irritating one’s haters, there’s plenty of examples of hip hop and classical music coming together as one.