Wolf Alice Unveil New Single 'The Sofa'
'The Sofa' is the album's psychological portrait which is a microcosm of the wider themes it reckons with: falling in love with your life for exactly what it is and finally letting go of unrealised dreams without shame, guilt or disappointment as you grow older. Unspooling like a daydream on an idle afternoon, 'The Sofa' is a piano ballad fortified by the best songwriting of Ellie Rowsell's career - radical in its unflinching honesty. 'Didn't make it out to California / Where I thought I might clean the slate / Feels a little like I'm stuck in Seven Sisters / North London, oh England / And maybe that's ok,' Rowsell sings. In abandoning the self-consciousness which weighs down your twenties, Wolf Alice reach a point of hard-won serenity.
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'It's about not trying so hard to figure everything out, reflecting on getting older and trying not to agonise over things that have or haven't happened in your life. It's also about trying to get to grips with the polarising aspects of one's life when you're in a band. You've just played a huge tour - and you come home, and you have your dinner on the sofa. For me, it's summed up in how I treat TV. I used to never watch the same thing twice because I thought I've got so much to discover! And now I'm like, It's okay if I just want to rewatch Peep Show for the thirteenth time.' – Ellie Rowsell
Shot on the streets of the band's native North London in homage to the lyrics, the video for 'The Sofa' captures the day-dreamy spirit of the song in boldly-coloured slow motion. Ellie is transported on a surreal fantasy through the euphoric messiness of British summertime street life while never leaving the comfort of her sofa. Inspired by classic street photography, these vignettes capture the blissed-out interactions of people from all walks of life, celebrating the shared joy we feel with strangers on a sunny day. The video was directed by Fiona Jane Burgess (Christina Aguilera, girlinred, Gucci) and features numerous easter eggs for the band's upcoming album.
The single release follows Wolf Alice's victorious return to Glastonbury Festival this past month, performing a razor-sharp set of hits to a sunset crowd on the Other Stage on Sunday afternoon. Combining fan favourites such as 'Bros' and 'Don't Delete The Kisses' with jubilant new singles 'Bloom Baby Bloom' and 'The Sofa' - the slot felt like a victory lap for a band truly at the peak of their powers.
Written in Seven Sisters and recorded in LA with Grammy-winning, master producer Greg Kurstin last year, The Clearing reveals where Wolf Alice stand sonically in 2025, delivering a supremely confident collection of songs bursting with ambition, ideas and emotion; The Clearing is a truly timeless record.
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Singer Cleo Laine, Britain's greatest jazz voice, dies at 97
Cleo Laine, whose husky contralto was one of the most distinctive voices in jazz and who was regarded by many as Britain's greatest contribution to the quintessentially American music, has died. She was 97. The Stables, a charity and venue Laine founded with her late jazz musician husband John Dankworth, said it was "greatly saddened" by the news that "one of its founders and Life President, Dame Cleo Laine has passed away". Monica Ferguson, artistic director of The Stables, said Laine "will be greatly missed, but her unique talent will always be remembered". Laine's career spanned the Atlantic and crossed genres. She sang the songs of Kurt Weill, Arnold Schoenberg and Robert Schumann; she acted on stage and on film and even played God in a production of Benjamin Britten's Noye's Fludde. Laine's life and art were intimately bound up with band leader Dankworth, who gave her a job and her stage name in 1951, and married her seven years later. Both were still performing after their 80th birthdays. Dankworth died in 2010 at 82. ADVERTISEMENT In 1997, Laine became the first British jazz artist to be made a dame, the female equivalent of a knight. "It is British jazz that should have received the accolade for its service to me," she said when the honour was announced. "It has given me a wonderful life, a successful career and an opportunity to travel the globe doing what I love to do." Laine was born Clementina Dinah Campbell in 1927. Her father, Alexander Campbell, was a Jamaican who loved opera and earned money during the Depression as a street singer. Despite hard times, her British mother, Minnie, made sure that her daughter had piano, voice and dance lessons. She began performing at local events at age 3, and at age 12, she got a role as a movie extra in The Thief of Bagdad. Leaving school at 14, Laine went to work as a hairdresser and faced repeated rejection in her efforts to get a job as a singer. A decade later, in 1951, she tried out for the Johnny Dankworth Seven, and succeeded. "Clementina Campbell" was judged too long for a marquee, so she became Cleo Laine. "John said that when he heard me, I didn't sound like anyone else who was singing at the time," Laine once said. "I guess the reason I didn't get the other jobs is that they were looking for a singer who did sound like somebody else." Laine had a remarkable range, from tenor to contralto, and a sound often described as "smoky". ADVERTISEMENT Dankworth, in an interview with the Irish Independent, recalled Laine's audition. "They were all sitting there with stony faces, so I asked the Scottish trumpet player Jimmy Deuchar, who was looking very glum and was the hardest nut of all, whether he thought she had something. 'Something?' he said, 'She's got everything!'" Offered 6 pounds a week, Laine demanded — and got — 7 pounds. "They used to call me 'Scruff', although I don't think I was scruffy. It was just that having come from the sticks, I didn't know how to put things together as well as the other singers of the day," she told the Irish Independent. "And anyway, I didn't have the money, because they weren't paying me enough." Recognition came swiftly. Laine was runner-up in Melody Maker's "girl singer" category in 1952, and topped the list in 1956 and 1957. She married Dankworth — and quit his band — in 1958, a year after her divorce from her first husband, George Langridge. As Dankworth's band prospered, Laine began to feel underused. "I thought, no, I'm not going to just sit on the band and be a singer of songs every now and again when he fancied it. So it was then that I decided I wasn't going to stay with the band and I was going to go off and try to do something solo-wise," she said in a BBC documentary. ADVERTISEMENT "When I said I was leaving, he said, 'Will you marry me?' That was a good ploy, wasn't it, huh?" They were married on March 18, 1958. 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It wasn't well-attended, but The New York Times gave her a glowing review. The following year, she and Dankworth drew a sold-out audience at Carnegie Hall, launching a series of popular appearances. Cleo at Carnegie won a Grammy award in 1986, the same year she was a Tony nominee for The Mystery of Edwin Drood. A reviewer for Variety in 2002 found her voice going strong: "a dark, creamy voice, remarkable range and control from bottomless contralto to a sweet clear soprano. Her perfect pitch and phrasing is always framed with musical imagination and good taste." Perhaps Laine's most difficult performance of all was on February 6, 2010, at a concert celebrating the 40th anniversary of the concert venue she and Dankworth had founded at their home, during which Laine and both of her children performed. "I'm terribly sorry that Sir John can't be here today," Laine told the crowd at the end of the show. 'But earlier on my husband died in hospital.' 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Banksy work removed from Venice palazzo for restoration
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NZ Herald
a day ago
- NZ Herald
Cleo Laine, Grammy-winning jazz singer and actor, dies at 97
Laine, who rarely appeared without Dankworth at her side as her musical director, made dozens of recordings, including albums with classical guitarist John Williams and flutist James Galway. She recorded songs from Porgy and Bess with Ray Charles. Ray Charles and Cleo Laine recording Porgy and Bess, the Gershwin folk opera in a studio at RCA records in Los Angeles, California, in July 1976. Photo / Afro American Newspapers, Gado, Getty Images Her parallel career as a theatre actor informed the dramatic flair she brought to her singing. 'I'm a cabaret singer wherever I am,' she once told The Washington Post. 'I think it's a part of me that the words are very important, much more so than improvisation. I think that the drama of a song is a lot more important than oobly-shoobling all over the place.' In 1961, she had a song in the Top 5 on the British pop chart (You'll Answer to Me), appeared as a nightclub singer in the film The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone and received glowing reviews for her performance at an Edinburgh arts festival when she filled in at the last minute for Lotte Lenya in The Seven Deadly Sins, a theatrical piece with music and dance by Lenya's husband, Kurt Weill. The following year, Laine – who identified herself as Black and biracial – appeared in two plays on the London stage, including in Caryl Brahms and Ned Sherrin's Cindy-Ella, or I Gotta Shoe, an all-Black musical based on the Cinderella story. She had dramatic roles in other British productions, including a modern adaptation of Euripides' The Trojan Women, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and the title role in a 1970 staging of Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler. Laine had a showstopping role in a long-running 1971-1972 London revival of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II's Show Boat, playing Julie, a mixed-race singer whose story ends in tragedy. Her songs, including Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man and Bill, invariably brought the audience to its feet. The cast of the musical production Cindy-Ella (Or 'I Got A Shoe') during a performance, from left: actor and singer Elisabeth Welch, jazz singer Cleo Laine, and actors Cy Grant and George Brown, at the Garrick Theatre, London, in December 1962. Photo / Bryan Wharton, Daily Express, Hulton Archive, Getty Images In 1972, after Laine made her New York debut at Alice Tully Hall, New York Times jazz critic John S. Wilson called her one of Britain's 'national treasures… with a remarkable voice that ranges from an exotically dark, breathy quality to high-note-topping exclamation'. Despite her undeniable vocal dexterity, other reviewers were unmoved by the commanding theatricality she brought to the concert stage. 'She has a frighteningly accurate ear and a teasingly infallible sense of rhythm,' Times music critic John Rockwell wrote in 1974 of Laine's performance at New York's Carnegie Hall. 'But for this listener, admiration stops a good deal short of real affection. Miss Laine strikes me as a calculating singer, one whose highly perfected artifice continually blocks communicative feeling. To me, she has all the personality of a carp. But then, obviously, I'm just a cold fish.' Nonetheless, Laine maintained a large and loyal following for both her singing and her theatrical work. Dankworth wrote a musical play for her, based on the life of the French writer Colette, that premiered in 1979 and later moved to London's West End. In 1985, Laine developed the role of Princess Puffer in the original Broadway production of The Mystery of Edwin Drood (later called Drood), based on an unfinished novel by Charles Dickens, and earned a Tony Award nomination for best actress in a musical. In 2000, she played a singer in The Last of the Blonde Bombshells, a joint US-British TV movie about a latter-day reunion of an all-female band from World War II, also starring Judi Dench, Olympia Dukakis and Ian Holm. Cleo Laine and her second husband John Dankworth. Photo / Mick Hutson, Redferns via Getty Images 'Whatever I'm doing at the time is my favourite thing,' Laine told The Post. 'A lot of people would say I'm too eclectic, diversifying far too much, but I think that because of that I've worked longer and had a much more interesting life.' Clementina Dinah Campbell was born October 28, 1927, in the Southall district of London. She had a Black Jamaican father and a White English mother who were not married to each other when their daughter was born. In a 1994 autobiography, Laine called her mother 'a bigamist' who had not obtained a divorce before marrying Laine's father. The family moved frequently, and her parents held a variety of jobs, including running a cafe and boardinghouse. Her father also worked in construction and 'would sing at the drop of a hat', Laine told The Post. 'He was a busker, singing on street corners in the Depression,' she said. 'It was a matter of need, dire need, in those days. Being Black, it was difficult for him to get work, so he busked. I wasn't really aware of this until much later, when I realised that he used to bring a lot of pennies home and count them.' Young Clementina was strongly influenced by her father's interest in jazz and was encouraged by her mother to study music and acting. She left school at 14 and became an apprentice hairdresser, always hoping to break into show business. 'I would sit in the cinema,' she later told Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper, 'watching Lena Horne and Judy Garland and think: 'I want that for me.'' At 19, she married George Langridge, a roofer, and had a son. Five years later, in 1951, Laine had a tryout with Dankworth, then emerging as one of England's leading jazz musicians. 'I think she's got something, don't you?' he told his bandmates after the audition. Dame Cleo Laine attends the Jazz FM Awards 2018 at Shoreditch Town Hall in London, England. Photo / David M. Benett, Getty Images 'Something?,' a trumpeter answered. 'I think she's got everything.' Her name at the time was Clementina – or Clem – Campbell Langridge. After some brainstorming, the band members decided to call her Cleo Laine. 'They decided my real name was too long and sounded like a cowboy,' she told the Chicago Sun-Times. Her sister raised her son while Laine devoted herself to her career. She impressed Dankworth and his band not just with her voice but with her ability to match them, glass for glass, in drinking ale during their tours of British nightclubs. By the mid-1950s, Laine was anointed Britain's top jazz singer by critics and music magazines. She divorced her first husband, from whom she had grown apart, and she married Dankworth in 1958. They had two children, who were raised by nannies and attended boarding schools while their parents were on tour. They lived about 80km from London in the village of Wavendon, where they established a theatre and an educational foundation. In the 'show must go on' tradition, Laine gave a performance at Wavendon on February 6, 2010. Only at the end did she announce that Dankworth had died earlier that day. Dankworth was presented with a fellowship of the Royal Academy in 1973 and the following year appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. He was knighted in 2006, the first British jazz musician to receive this honour. Survivors include a son from her first marriage, Stuart Langridge; two children from her second marriage, singer Jacqui Dankworth and jazz bassist and composer Alec Dankworth; and several grandchildren. Laine wrote two volumes of memoirs and received the title of Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1997. Her voice remained supple and precise well into her 80s. In 1983, she told The Post how she sought to connect with her listeners: 'I like to imagine when I'm singing that it's not thousands of people but one person, and a love affair can be created that way. I ignore my husband in the background: This is a love affair going on.' Matt Schudel has been an obituary writer at The Washington Post since 2004.
