Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts review — celebrating soft rock legends
Probably not, given that Morrison picked the short straw and went on at a moon-free 4.45pm. Perhaps in rebellion he did a set of super smooth jazz and blues; pleasant enough, but lacking the bite to pull the crowd out of its sun-drenched torpor. Still, Morrison was in fine voice, two female backing singers offered cheerful counterparts, and after a bit of tetchiness when the band missed their cue he went off on an extended bout of scat vocalising. Best was a bluesy rendition of Gloria, the garage rock standard he wrote while still in his teens for his Belfast band Them, brought to the heights of ecstasy by one of the backing singers going operatic. And no Moondance.
• Van Morrison: 'I was at the bottom. Game over'
Yusuf/Cat Stevens came on and played The Wind, that beautiful acoustic ballad from his 1971 album Teaser and the Firecat, and it sounded just as it did on the record. It has been over a decade since Stevens thawed from an approach to Islam that curtailed performing his old material, and now it was like nothing had changed since his spiritually searching 1970s heyday. No more so than with Miles From Nowhere, a rock epic on trying to find the meaning of life to match the Who's The Seeker.
'It's a full moon,' announced Stevens, which was almost correct, to introduce Moonshadow, his lullaby-like acceptance of the ascetic life. 'We've got to be careful because children may be losing their lives,' said Stevens before Where Do The Children Play, and the gentle ecological message stood up after all these years. 'You can't live on this planet and not have a conscience about what's going on in Palestine,' he announced before The Little Ones, a song he wrote during the Bosnian War. Finally came Peace Train, the perfect ending for a joyous set that overran due to Stevens' excitement. 'Neil Young can wait a little bit longer,' he said, asserting his own position like a grandfather with a touch of stardust. 'I like him, but you know.'
If that bothered Young, he didn't show it as he wandered on stage to sing Ambulance Blues, an acoustic expression of disenchantment with the hippie era from his downbeat 1974 classic, On the Beach. From then on Young was on fire: a blistering Cowgirl in the Sand, an ultra-heavy Cinnamon Girl, a slow and tender Old Man.
• Read more music reviews, interviews and guides on what to listen to next
And full credit to Young for changing his set list since Glastonbury: this was raw and in the moment, with a kind of living purity that made it shine. Young certainly wasn't one for a big production: the stagecraft stretched to a toy octopus on a speaker and a wooden goddess who came down from the rafters. And yes, he did do Harvest Moon, that eternally romantic ode to lasting love. It meant the night belonged to Neil.★★★★☆
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The Guardian
16 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘I have different weathers in my brain': how Celeste rekindled her love of music after heartbreak and loss
On Glastonbury's Pyramid stage in June, Celeste appeared wearing smeared black eye makeup and a leather jacket moulded with the impression of feathers, latched at the throat. She evoked glamour and tragedy, a bird with its wings clipped. 'My first album came out nearly five years ago and I didn't expect it to take so long,' she said of its follow-up. 'But I'm here now.' Celeste broke through in 2020, her voice reminiscent of Billie Holiday's racked beauty, but sparkling with a distinctly British lilt: a controlled, powerful vibrato that stirs the soul. Despite her jazz-leaning balladry not being obvious chart fodder, she became the first British female act in five years to reach No 1 with her debut album, Not Your Muse, which was nominated for the Mercury prize. She also won the BBC's Sound of 2020 poll and the Brit award for rising star and was nominated for an Oscar for best original song (for Hear My Voice from The Trial of the Chicago 7) the year after – but her chance to capitalise on those accolades was stalled by the pandemic. She had to halt her touring ambitions. Of the years since, she says: 'Sometimes you worry: are you on your path?' Celeste was haunting and spectacular when I saw her at Glastonbury, but now, as we stroll through Hyde Park in central London, she is relaxed and laughs easily. She becomes distracted by a carousel ride – 'They're my favourite! I love the music' – then she is back to talking about the five-year struggle to make her excellent second album, Woman of Faces, which will be released in November. 'The title was kind of a diagnosis of how I feel sometimes; a device to help me begin to understand my own complexity,' she says. She was born Celeste Waite in California to a mother from Dagenham, east London, and a Jamaican father. Her mother had found her way to Hollywood as a makeup artist and Celeste was born 'quite quickly' after her parents met there. They separated when Celeste turned one and she and her mother moved to England to live in Celeste's grandparents' home. 'It was almost like my mother was my sister, because we were both being looked after by my nan and grandad.' These are happy memories, but she has 'these different weathers in my brain … I've always had this little tinge of melancholy.' Maybe, she says, it stems in part from a lack of rootedness: 'You move from America to England and you don't really remember it, but you know that there's people that you've known there and built connections with. And then you don't have that.' She wondered if she would end up with a mental health diagnosis, 'something more clinical later on down the line. But I didn't feel I really needed that.' Instead, she found solace in other artists' music, 'people's lyrics and emotions and melodies, even how they dress themselves – that's always been quite a big remedy without needing to have a professional'. While she is frequently compared to Adele and Amy Winehouse, unlike them Celeste did not attend the Brit school of performing arts, instead studying music technology at sixth-form college in Brighton and working in a pub as she got her career off the ground. 'I'm really glad I taught myself to sing,' she says, arguing that it gives her 'rawness and authenticity'. Her venture into music was galvanised by the death of her father from lung cancer when she was 16: 'When you lose someone, every day you wake up and you're stunned by the fact that they're gone. And there's a certain point where you say to yourself: I can't do this any more, and that's when you start to either go to the gym or get into a practice. For me, that was where I picked up music and became really focused.' In the mid-2010s, she started uploading music to YouTube and SoundCloud and got a manager. She was picked up as a guest vocalist for producers such as Avicii, while Lily Allen's label released her debut single. 'I worked double shifts in a pub on weekends to afford to go to the studio,' she says. 'It took my energy away and I wasn't able to sing as well any more.' But she carried on doggedly, got signed to the major label Polydor, bagged the 2020 John Lewis Christmas ad soundtrack and beguiled listeners on songs such as Strange, in which her vocal tone expresses every contradictory emotion in a breakup – resignation, hurt, bafflement, poignancy, even a kind of helpless amusement at how awful it all is – in just four minutes. She is clear that she has received plenty of support and encouragement within Polydor: 'The people that signed me came into music with the intention to make meaningful, poignant, credible music.' But at the commercial end of the industry, there is still 'a huge pressure to make money. If you're not in the top 2% of acts who have such a huge fanbase, you maybe don't get the freedom' to do adventurous work. She says that developing her initial sound caused friction. 'I was hanging around all these jazz musicians like Steam Down and Nubya Garcia, real innovators, and it wasn't easy for me to go into the label and be like: this is what I want to do.' She has managed to preserve a sense of strangeness and singularity. Unlike her earlier peppy soul-pop hit Stop This Flame, familiar to millions as backing music on Sky Sports, most of the songs on Woman of Faces don't even feature percussion – almost unthinkable in 21st-century pop – and there aren't many British singers on major labels doing symphonic jazz. She wanted 'a cinematic feel' and referenced Bernard Herrmann – a composer for films by Hitchcock, Welles and Scorsese – in the studio as she worked with the conductor Robert Ames and the London Contemporary Orchestra. 'Herrmann was a real innovator and it's reflected in people like Busta Rhymes sampling him [on Gimme Some More] all those years later. So we wanted to make sure that if we went into that territory of a cinematic string orchestra, it didn't feel like an impression of the 1950s – it sounded like something new.' With this ambitious scope and Celeste shuttling between sessions in Los Angeles and London, it took a lot longer than expected to complete Woman of Faces. It was originally due to be finished by the end of 2022 and released a year later. 'I didn't expect it to take so long,' she says. 'And if I'm really honest with you, at the end of 2021, into 2022, I experienced some heartache and I fell into such a depression about it all.' A relationship had ended. 'When you lose the person from your life that you really love, there's a grief that comes over you,' she says. The album's first single, On With the Show, was written at her lowest point. 'I didn't really want to go to the studio; I didn't really feel like I actually wanted to live at that point. I didn't find meaning and purpose in the music.' She just had the song title, which she shared with her collaborator Matt Maltese. 'I didn't even have to explain to him what it would be about, because he just knew. We spoke about the song and what it needed to be.' She had also recently seen Marius Petipa's 1898 classical ballet Raymonda. 'It's about a woman in the Crimean war and she has two lovers: one is in Russia and one is in Crimea,' she says. 'I could relate, because she was torn between these two entities: at that point, my dedication to music and my dedication to a person. And one was taking the energy from the other. So On With the Show was about me having to find the courage to let go of something, to meet back in with the path of my life as a singer.' Worse, she says, 'social media had come in to erode my relationship'. As a public figure on social media, 'people can view your relationship and have so much awareness of the fact that you're even in one. There's this really strange, invisible, intangible impression that interactions in that space can leave upon your living reality. I was upset at how much that had come to affect my personal, real life.' On Could Be Machine, a curveball industrial pop song inspired by Lady Gaga, Celeste explores the idea that 'the more time we spend with this technology, the more we become it'. 'My phone had become this antagonist in my life, via communication that I didn't want to receive and the fact it could just be in your hand. It was quite alien, in a way. I hadn't grown up with a phone stuck to my hand and it was something that I had to become more and more 'one' with in my music career.' She says that, during the relationship, love had reverted her to a kind of 'child-like state … a really pure version of yourself, before the world has seeped in and shaped you'. Losing the person who brought her into that state meant that she had to 'learn how to steer and guide' herself to rediscover it. She is leaning on other musicians to help her understand these difficult years. She cites Nina Simone's song Stars, a ballad about the cruelty and melancholy of being a professional musician. 'It says so much about the tragedy of where her life is at that moment in time, but then there's so much triumph in the fact she even gets to express herself in that way.' Another inspiration for Woman of Faces was the 1951 musical romantic comedy An American in Paris and one of its stars, Oscar Levant, who spent time in mental health institutions. 'I was really moved by what he seemed to carry in his being. And, I suppose, I relate a lot to artists who carry this pain, but their work eases it.' Whereas Celeste was previously in thrall to American blues and R&B ('the older sense of what R&B was in the 1940s'), down to the way she might 'time things and phrase things and even pronounce things', she has 'learned what my true voice is and who I really am as a person. I still have some of that phrasing and pronunciation there, but I exist a lot more as myself, therefore I sing a lot more as myself.' Buoyed up by her and others' art, does she feel happy? 'Yes!' She grins and throws her hands in the air. 'The main thing is finding happiness within the relationships I maintain around me and making sure those are kept really positive and nourishing.' She is glad to be in her 30s: 'Age becomes kind of taboo for a woman in the music industry – but then you hear people like Solange speak about women really coming into their true sense of who they are within their work. There's been a shift.' And if the happiness in her career ever dissipates, she has decided she will simply move on. 'I don't really see the need to live in a feeling of oppression, when I know there's so much freedom outside this world. And anyway, I'm sure I would find my way back to it again. But on my own terms.' Women of Faces is released on 14 November on Polydor In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@ or jo@ In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at
Sky News
16 minutes ago
- Sky News
Brian Cox: Trump talking 'b*******s' on Scottish independence
Why you can trust Sky News Hollywood actor Brian Cox has told Sky News that Donald Trump is talking "bollocks" after suggesting there should be 50 or 75 years between Scottish independence referendums. The US president said a country "can't go through that too much" when questioned by reporters during his visit to Scotland this week. The Emmy-winning star, who is an independence supporter, has hit back, branding him "that idiot in America". The 79-year-old told Sky News: "He's talking bollocks. I'm sorry, but he does. It's rubbish. Let's get on with it and let's get it [independence] done. We can do it. "It's been tough as there's a great deal of undermining that has gone on." 2:13 SNP fraud probe causing 'harm' Mr Cox said the police fraud investigation examining the SNP's finances has done "enormous harm" to the party and wider independence movement. Nicola Sturgeon was arrested as part of the long-running police probe but cleared of any wrongdoing earlier this year. The former first minister's estranged husband Peter Murrell, who was SNP chief executive for two decades, appeared in court in April to face a charge of alleged embezzlement. He has entered no plea. Brian Cox is preparing to return to the Scottish stage for the first time in a decade in a play about the Royal Bank of Scotland's role in the 2008 financial crash. Ahead of the Edinburgh festival performances, the veteran actor told Sky News: "I think it's a masterpiece. It's certainly one of the best pieces of work I've been involved in. 'My friend Spacey should be forgiven' The Succession star was also asked about his "old friend" Kevin Spacey. The former House of Cards actor, 65, was exiled from the showbiz world in 2017 after allegations of sexual misconduct. Spacey has admitted to "being too handsy" in the past and "touching someone sexually" when he didn't know they "didn't want him to". Spacey stood trial in the UK for multiple sexual offences against four men in July 2023 but was acquitted on all counts. Mr Cox told Sky News: "I am so against cancel culture. Kevin has made a lot of mistakes, but there is a sort of viciousness about it which is unwarranted. "Everybody is stupid as everybody else. Everybody is capable of the same mistakes and the same sins as everybody else." Asked if he could see a return to showbiz for Spacey, Cox replied: "I would think so eventually, but it's very tough for him. "He was tricky, but he has learnt a big lesson. He should be allowed to go on because he is a very fine actor. I just think we should be forgiving."
Times
16 minutes ago
- Times
Carol Decker: ‘A glass of wine in my local is £21 — ridiculous!'
Carol Decker is the lead singer of the band T'Pau, which she formed in 1986 with her boyfriend at the time, Ronnie Rogers. The pair enjoyed their biggest success with the single China in Your Hand, which spent five weeks at No 1 in 1987. She has also acted on the West End stage and appeared in the TV series Doctors and Benidorm, and films including Nine Dead Gay Guys and Running Time. Decker has also taken part in the singing competitions Just the Two of Us on BBC1 and, this year, ITV's The Masked Singer, when she was the fourth contestant to be eliminated. In 2016 she released her autobiography, Heart and Soul. The 67-year-old lives with her husband, Richard Coates, in Henley-on-Thames. They have two grown-up children, Scarlett and Dylan. I have a beautiful Coach wallet that my husband bought me but there's no cash in it. Ever since lockdown — when if you touched any money you'd explode — I've just never ended up putting money back in my purse. A Mastercard, which is linked to my iPhone, and doesn't have a limit on it, so I could just go out and tap my phone and buy a car. I prefer using a credit card as I have a larger spending limit on it than a debit card. • Read more money advice and tips on investing from our experts A little bit of both. I love a bargain. When the kids were little they thought I shopped in a supermarket called Reduced because there was a yellow 'reduced' sticker on so much of our shopping. Do I still do that now? Oh, yeah. Today I brought home some awful sausages with hardly any meat in them because they had a yellow sticker. My husband is a wonderful chef. He's all about the ingredients, but I'm all about the budget. I can't help it. I didn't really catch a break in my career until I was about 26. I was broke for a long time, and I come from quite an ordinary background. I'm not tight but I'm used to just watching my pennies. Yes, we bought this house in Henley-on-Thames for £625,000 in 2005. It's a huge, slightly ugly dormer bungalow, with five bedrooms, four bathrooms, a swimming pool, a gym in the garage and half an acre of land. We all have our own space, which was particularly useful when we went through the horrors of lockdown. Yes, probably. I don't know what my dad's salary was, but we had a very pleasant life. Eventually. We didn't ever have a bad life, but we were evicted on to the street in the early 1960s when I was little because they fell behind on the rent. But then Dad did reasonably well, and we ended up with a four-bedroom detached house with a big garden. He had a steady salary. When T'Pau took off, after years of being completely skint it was a bit like winning the lottery. Suddenly a ton of money came in. I managed to keep some money, and I'm still paid very nicely for what I do. I think I probably do earn more than they did. • Chesney Hawkes: How did I blow through £8m? Because I was an idiot I'm not going to tell you, but it had a nice number of zeros on the end. My first ever job was when I was 16 and I was working behind the till on a Saturday at a shop called John Menzies, which was like WH Smith. It was utterly terrifying because they didn't add up for you then, and for me maths felt like Russian. It was about 50 years ago but I can still remember the queue of people huffing and puffing while I worked out their shopping. I guess when Ronnie and I bought a three-storey Victorian house in London for £205,000 in 1988. Some money had started to come in, and we upgraded the car and then we thought, let's go for it. The record company said, 'Well, there's a lot of money coming in through the pipeline. Do you want an advance on what's coming?' They gave us £200,000 to help us buy the house. • Clare Grogan: 'Being in Altered Images earned me £75 a week' God, yeah. I was skint even when we were recording [their debut album] Bridge of Spies. I was absolutely brassic. I remember there was ice on the inside of the windows of our flat because we couldn't afford to put the heating on. We had to sit in sleeping bags. The pipes froze really badly on quite a few occasions. And I remember going out and collecting snow and boiling it to wash my hair. That's why I can be very resourceful, because I had to be back then. I was shopping in charity shops and wearing some old bloke's blazer long before it was trendy. Our first album, Bridge of Spies, because obviously the big hits came off that. China in Your Hand still keeps me very busy. I'm not going to give royalty numbers — it's not as much as you think because of streaming. Because it's such a popular song and people seem to still love the 1980s, it gives me a platform to keep working — most of my money is from live work. I appeared on The Masked Singer and it was a lot of money. The other week I performed at a club in Bedford and, after paying the band, I came away with about £3,500. Two years ago I performed in the Night of the Proms tour across Germany and Luxembourg with a 60-piece orchestra, and that was really nice and really good money as well. Nice gigs just crop up, which is lovely. And it gives me some financial stability as well. With the way these governmental pickpockets behave and change their mind and break their promises, I'd say probably property. I just have this home. I haven't gone down the buy-to-let route. I don't want the responsibility of making sure other people are happy. I really don't. And then if you give it to an agency, there's a huge percentage to pay. I did start a private pension years ago, and I completely forgot to top it up. There's not that much in it, not really. I do have other things like Isas, and a few stocks and shares. Probably my house. I can be a bit flutterish about other things, but I gave it quite a lot of thought — about the location, what the house was going to give to us, how we could move our lives forward. And I always think at the end of the day, if the work dries up, if the money runs out, I have the house. We've nearly paid the mortgage off. I could pay it off if I wanted to. There's about £3,000 left. I treasure my home. I don't think I've made one, because I'm not courageous or curious. • Dave Robinson: You need money in the music biz, but it's the root of all evil Wine. I regularly order a box from Majestic, or one of those really nice wine companies. I have an amazing capacity to sit and watch Netflix and drink. I probably spend about £70 a week on wine at home, and then if we go out and eat, that's way more expensive. It could be about £150 a week on wine, easily. The place where I like to go has put a large glass up to £21. £21! F***ing ridiculous. They have a captive audience here. It's very, very expensive here and in Marlow. When I'm out, people say, well, why don't you just buy a bottle? I go, because that would be unseemly, but I usually end up drinking a bottle. But I think if I drink it by the glass it looks better. In about 1991 I spent two grand on an Azzedine Alaïa dress. It's what they call bodycon. Really tight. It's like wearing a corset. You can't breathe in it. I just didn't like it in the end. I gave it away to a mate. My kids. I just want to make sure my kids will be OK. I think it's quite tough out there for them at the moment. I'd buy my kids a house each so they've got something. And I'd probably fund an advertising campaign for a record, because that's what I miss. Ronnie has a studio, I can negotiate terms of musicians — I can cover all that. I did it a few years ago, but where the money is needed is the advertising. On the promotional campaign, making videos, ads, all that kind of thing. I miss that. I know you can use social media, but it's really hard to break through. I find it frustrating that if I put a new song out, nobody really knows. You're preaching to the converted. And so I think I'd spoil myself with an advertising campaign. I've started to focus my support on local organisations. I used to donate to the big charities but now I don't trust them any more. I think it's a business. I tend to focus on a local hospice and special needs centre for kids. I'd rather see exactly where my money goes. That it's freedom. I don't know how I'd cope if it all disappeared tomorrow. I'm used to being able to do pretty much what I want, within reason. For tour dates and new music visit
