Latest news with #MeltdownFestival
Times
23-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Little Simz at Royal Festival Hall review — a thrilling finale to Meltdown
'It's crowded in here, innit!' Britain's greatest rapper, Little Simz, exclaimed to a sold out Royal Festival Hall. Her performance was the jewel in the crown of this year's Meltdown festival, after gigs by the Streets, Lola Young and James Blake. The rapper headlined and curated the festival's line-up, following in the footsteps of greats such as David Bowie and Nick Cave. The 31-year-old's Glastonbury set last year was one of the standout moments of the weekend. But this concert, where she was accompanied by the Chineke! Orchestra and some excellent guests, was even better. The first beat — a marching snare drum and ominous brass — backed by flashing red lights, set the tone for an exhilarating night. Dressed in baggy leather shorts and a jacket she later removed to show the slogan 'Hardcore', Simz opened with Introvert — the first track on her Brit and Mercury-winning album Sometimes I Might Be Introvert. Thief and Flood followed: two vengeful numbers from her recent album Lotus, which comes in the wake of a lawsuit with her former producer Inflo after he allegedly failed to repay a loan of £1.7 million. Kudos to the lighting designer: thundery grey-and-white streaks lit the stage, ramping up the tension as the artist called out instances of betrayal. • Little Simz: 'Women are made to feel like rap is not their place' But the north Londoner didn't let darker themes dominate the show. Quickly she switched to playful banter, inviting — later ordering — the crowd to stand up and dance. 'Why are you sitting down? Nah.' It was the right call: most of her fans had clearly been waiting for permission to hop up and go for it, particularly a group of teenage girls on the balcony, who screamed every word and got an acknowledging wave from their hero. They weren't the only ones to receive a flash of love: for Heart on Fire she walked along the stalls, shaking hands with the crowd and throwing piece signs for one person's selfie video. The guest rapper Wretch 32 also walked through the aisles before taking to the stage with the singer Cashh to join Simz for the intimate conversational Blood, a song about checking in and relying on your loved ones. Simz's playfulness was at its peak, however, when she took Chris Cameron's place at the conductor's podium and flicked the baton as she went into Venom — a formidable tirade against sexism in the industry, which feels particularly relevant in the UK rap scene: Simz is the only woman in history to have been nominated for the best rap category at the Brits. Jaunty, satirical Young came next, topped off with a solo by the bass player Marla Kether — the star of Simz's band. • Read more music reviews, interviews and guides on what to listen to next Was that the highlight, or was it when the Nigerian singer Obongjayar came out for Lion and Point and Kill? Perhaps it was everyone swaying to Woman, or the immense orchestral intro to the finale, Gorilla? Whichever takes the crown, Simz has done it again. Next up: her debut at the O2. ★★★★★Little Simz plays Co-op Live, Manchester, on Oct 16, and the O2, London, on Oct 17, Follow @timesculture to read the latest reviews
The Guardian
23-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Little Simz & Chineke! Orchestra review – rap-classical crossover is spectacularly realised
Not many can say that they've reloaded a symphony orchestra. But as the Southbank Centre erupts after the opening horns of Gorilla, Little Simz has to run it back, starting the track again in the manner of a rowdy club set. Backed by the majority Black and ethnically diverse Chineke! Orchestra and her own live band, Simz – closing out the 11-day Meltdown festival which she curated this year – performs a set that is equal parts genuine and genius. The energy in the room is overwhelming, overcoming any misgivings about performing to a seated crowd. Songs of contrasting styles are played one after the other, to highlight the malleability not only of Simz as a performer but of the combination of the live band and orchestra. Young, with post-punk production and Mike Skinner-esque rapping, topples into Free, which is soulfully stripped back. The string players create a frantic, horror-film atmosphere for Thief and Flood, but immediately after, serve to make the 'I love you' on Two Worlds Apart far more tender. This extends to word painting: on Introvert, the flutes invoke a choir ('I see sinners in a church'); vibrato strings mimic a voice trembling and breaking on Lonely, the raw, vulnerable track about her internal struggle with producing new album Lotus. Joining her are Miraa May for Peace, longtime collaborator Obongjayar for Lion and Point and Kill, and Wretch 32 and Cashh for Blood. For the latter, Wretch emerges from the crowd and walks down through the stalls, clever staging since the song is structured as a phone conversation, forcing the audience to look between the two rappers like watching a tennis match. At points, Simz feels larger than life, spectacular, replacing conductor Chris Cameron at the helm of the Chineke! Orchestra during Venom, rapping while facing the ensemble until the chorus, to frantic lights. Yet she's chatty between songs, strolls the aisles during Heart's on Fire, and stands beaming like a schoolgirl soaking in minutes-long applause. The whole experience is perfectly orchestrated – in every sense of the word.
The Guardian
04-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
TV tonight: Little Simz at her soul-bearing, electrifying best
11.40pm, BBC OneBefore she sets off on a European tour and curates this year's Meltdown festival at the Southbank Centre in London, multi-award-winning Little Simz gives us a taster with this electrifying session at Maida Vale Studios. She will perform six hits – some from her new album, Lotus, along with a few picks from her back catalogue – and chat with Clara Amfo about her struggles to make the album, collaborations and what's ahead. Hollie Richardson 8pm, BBC OneDaisy is a huge fibreglass cow lantern who's missing an ear and a couple of hooves, so the experts travel to Devon to see if they can fix her up. Over in Oldham, there's a warming story behind a vintage fruit machine that is jammed. And in Swindon, a precious Hindu holy scripture needs some delicate attention. HR 8pm, Channel 4To the outskirts of Glasgow, where Kirstie helps nurse Gwyneth and husband James find a family home for £320,000. Elsewhere, Phil's with Lorraine and her daughter Emma, seeking a three-bed property to help house Emma's returning gap-year sister Meg too. But he has his work cut out finding somewhere that suits all three women. Ali Catterall 9pm, BBC One Who will go into the final leg of this race in pole position? As the penultimate episode of this delightful travelogue begins, it's very close – but it's at least as much about the journey as the arrival. As they head for Goa, the teams enjoy a safari in Gir national park. Phil Harrison 9pm, ITV1It takes real genius to decipher the rules of this David Tennant-fronted gameshow, but somehow that doesn't detract from the fun. To secure a place in next week's final, the remaining players must make astute 'media mogul'-style investments. But, as ever, there are multiple levels of play, and only the most strategic will survive. Ellen E Jones 9pm, Channel 4Another stomach-churning insight into the UK's top-end property market. An £18m townhouse near Harrods in London is being rented for £27,000 a week while it's being sold. And in Stratford-on-Avon, a three-storey home with a private jetty on the river hasn't been snapped up yet. HR National Anthem (Luke Gilford, 2023), 11.20pm, Film4 New Mexico casual labourer Dylan (Charlie Plummer) is getting by day to day with his alcoholic mother and younger brother, until he gets a casual job at the House of Splendor ranch. It is home to – and refuge for – a community of LGBTQ+ folk, in particular rodeo rider Sky (Eve Lindley). Her and Dylan's mutual attraction is instant, though she is already in a relationship that maybe isn't as open as she says and he hopes. Gilford's queer coming-of-age drama is a warm-hearted tale of finding your people, set in a bigotry-free environment that keeps the political personal. Simon Wardell Women's One-Day Cricket: England v West Indies, 12.30pm, Sky Sports CricketThe second ODI from Leicester.
Arab Times
02-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Arab Times
David Johansen, singer of the New York Dolls band, dies at 75
NEW YORK, March 2, (AP): David Johansen, the wiry, gravelly-voiced singer and last surviving member of the glam and protopunk band the New York Dolls who later performed as his campy, pompadoured alter ego, Buster Poindexter, has died. He was 75. Johansen died Friday at his home in New York City, Jeff Kilgour, a family spokesperson told The Associated Press. It was revealed in early 2025 that he had stage 4 cancer and a brain tumor. The New York Dolls were forerunners of punk and the band's style - teased hair, women's clothes and lots of makeup - inspired the glam movement that took up residence in heavy metal a decade later in bands like Faster Pussycat and Mötley Crüe. "When you're an artist, the main thing you want to do is inspire people, so if you succeed in doing that, it's pretty gratifying,' Johansen told The Knoxville News-Sentinel in 2011. Guitarist Steve Stevens, a kid from Queens who went on to work with Billy Idol and Robert Palmer, said the Dolls were never about technique: "It was always about the sound of the subway, the stinking, overflowing garbage cans, the misfits of Times Square. The Dolls did it to perfection. Safe travels David Johansen,' he wrote on X. Rolling Stone once called the Dolls "the mutant children of the hydrogen age' and Vogue called them the "darlings of downtown style, tarted-up toughs in boas and heels.' "The New York Dolls were more than musicians; they were a phenomenon. They drew on old rock 'n' roll, big-city blues, show tunes, the Rolling Stones and girl groups, and that was just for starters,' Bill Bentley wrote in "Smithsonian Rock and Roll: Live and Unseen.' The band never found commercial success and was torn by internal strife and drug addictions, breaking up after two albums by the middle of the decade. In 2004, former Smiths frontman and Dolls admirer Morrissey convinced Johansen and other surviving members to regroup for the Meltdown Festival in England, leading to three more studio albums. In the '80s, Johansen assumed the persona of Buster Poindexter, a pompadour-styled lounge lizard who had a hit with the kitschy party single "Hot, Hot, Hot' in 1987. He also appeared in such movies as "Candy Mountain,' "Let It Ride,' "Married to the Mob' and had a memorable turn as the Ghost of Christmas Past in Bill Murray-led hit "Scrooged.' Johansen was in 2023 the subject of Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi's documentary "Personality Crisis: One Night Only,' which mixed footage of his two-night stand at the Café Carlyle in January 2020 with flashbacks through his wildly varied career and intimate interviews. "I used to think about my voice like: 'What's it gonna sound like? What's it going to be when I do this song?' And I'd get myself into a knot about it,' Johansen told The Associated Press in 2023. "At some point in my life, I decided: 'Just sing the (expletive) song. With whatever you got.' To me, I go on stage and whatever mood I'm in, I just claw my way out of it, essentially.' David Roger Johansen was born to a large, working class Catholic family on Staten Island, his father an insurance salesman. He filled notebooks with poems and lyrics as a young man and liked a lot of different music - R&B, Cuban, Janis Joplin and Otis Redding. The Dolls - the final original lineup included guitarists Sylvain Sylvain and Johnny Thunders, bassist Arthur Kane and drummer Jerry Nolan - rubbed shoulders with Lou Reed and Andy Warhol in the Lower East Side of Manhattan the early 1970s. They took their name from a toy hospital in Manhattan and were expected to take over the throne vacated by the Velvet Underground in the early 1970s. But neither of their first two albums - 1973's "New York Dolls,' produced by Todd Rundgren, nor "Too Much Too Soon' a year later produced by Shadow Morton - charted. "They're definitely a band to keep both eyes and ears on,' read the review of their debut album in Rolling Stone, complementary of their "strange combination of high pop-star drag and ruthless street arrogance.' Their songs included "Personality Crisis' ("You got it while it was hot/But now frustration and heartache is what you got'), "Looking for a Kiss' (I need a fix and a kiss') and a "Frankenstein' (Is it a crime/For you to fall in love with Frankenstein?') Their glammed look was meant to embrace fans with a nonjudgmental, noncategorical space. "I just wanted to be very welcoming,' Johansen said in the documentary, "'cause the way this society is, it was set up very strict - straight, gay, vegetarian, whatever... I just kind of wanted to kind of like bring those walls down, have a party kind of thing.' Rolling Stone, reviewing their second album, called them "the best hard-rock band in America right now' and called Johansen a "talented showman, with an amazing ability to bring characters to life as a lyricist.' Decades later, the Dolls' influence would be cherished. Rolling Stone would list their self-titled debut album at No. 301 of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, writing "it's hard to imagine the Ramones or the Replacements or a thousand other trash-junky bands without them.' Blondie's Chris Stein in the Nolan biography "Stranded in the Jungle' wrote that the Dolls were "opening a door for the rest of us to walk through.' Tommy Lee of Motley Crue called them early inspirations. "Johansen is one of those singers, to be a little paradoxical, who is technically better and more versatile than he sounds,' said the Los Angeles Times in 2023. "His voice has always been a bit of a foghorn - higher or lower according to age, habits and the song at hand - but it has a rare emotional urgency. The Dolls, representing rock at it's most debauched, were divisive. In 1973, they won the Creem magazine poll categories as the year's best and worst new group. They were nominated several times for The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame but never got in. "Dirty angels with painted faces, the Dolls opened the box usually reserved for Pandora and unleashed the infant furies that would grow to become Punk,' wrote Nina Antonia in the book "Too Much, Too Soon.' "As if this legacy wasn't enough for one band, they also trashed sexual boundaries, savaged glitter and set new standards for rock 'n' roll excess.' By the end of their first run, the Dolls were being managed by legendary promoter Malcolm McLaren, who would later introduce the Sex Pistols to the Dolls' music. Culture critic Greil Marcus in "Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century' writes the Dolls played him some of their music and he couldn't believe how bad they were. "The fact that they were so bad suddenly hit me with such force that I began to realize, ''I'm laughing, I'm talking to these guys, I'm looking at them, and I'm laughing with them; and I was suddenly impressed by the fact that I was no longer concerned with whether you could play well,' McLaren said. "The Dolls really impressed upon me that there was something else. There was something wonderful. I thought how brilliant they were to be this bad.' After the first demise of the Dolls, Johansen started his own group, the David Johansen band, before reinventing himself yet again in the 1980s as Buster Poindexter. Inspired by his passion for the blues and arcane American folk music Johansen also formed the group The Harry Smiths, and toured the world performing the songs of Howlin' Wolf with Hubert Sumlin and Levon Helm. He also hosted the weekly radio show "The Mansion of Fun' on Sirius XM and painted.
Yahoo
01-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
David Johansen, New York Dolls frontman, dies at 75
The Brief David Johansen, the frontman for the New York Dolls, has died. David Johansen, the last surviving member of the glam and protopunk band the New York Dolls who later performed as his alter ego, Buster Poindexter, has died. He was 75. Johansen died Friday at his home in New York City after it was revealed earlier this year that he had stage 4 cancer and a brain tumor. The backstory David Roger Johansen was born on Staten Island. The Dolls — the final original lineup included guitarists Sylvain Sylvain and Johnny Thunders, bassist Arthur Kane and drummer Jerry Nolan — rubbed shoulders with Lou Reed and Andy Warhol in the Lower East Side of Manhattan the early 1970s. RELATED: Celebrity deaths of 2025: Who we've lost this year They took their name from a toy hospital in Manhattan and were expected to take over the throne vacated by the Velvet Underground in the early 1970s. But neither of their first two albums — 1973's "New York Dolls," produced by Todd Rundgren, nor "Too Much Too Soon" a year later produced by Shadow Morton — charted. Their songs included "Personality Crisis" ("You got it while it was hot/But now frustration and heartache is what you got"), "Looking for a Kiss" (I need a fix and a kiss") and a "Frankenstein" (Is it a crime/For you to fall in love with Frankenstein?") The New York Dolls were forerunners of punk and the band's style — teased hair, women's clothes and lots of makeup — inspired the glam movement that took up residence in heavy metal a decade later in bands like Faster Pussycat and Mötley Crüe. "When you're an artist, the main thing you want to do is inspire people, so if you succeed in doing that, it's pretty gratifying," Johansen told The Knoxville News-Sentinel in 2011. Dig deeper The Dolls, representing rock at it's most debauched, were divisive. In 1973, they won the Creem magazine poll categories as the year's best and worst new group. They were nominated several times for The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame but never got in. RELATED: Bruce Willis' daughter gives glimpse into actor's birthday plans as he battles dementia The band never found commercial success and was torn by internal strife and drug addictions, breaking up after two albums by the middle of the decade. In 2004, former Smiths frontman and Dolls admirer Morrissey convinced Johansen and other surviving members to regroup for the Meltdown Festival in England, leading to three more studio albums. In the '80s, Johansen assumed the persona of Buster Poindexter, a pompadour-styled lounge lizard who had a hit with the kitschy party single "Hot, Hot, Hot" in 1987. He also appeared in such movies as "Candy Mountain," "Let It Ride," "Married to the Mob" and had a memorable turn as the Ghost of Christmas Past in Bill Murray-led hit "Scrooged." RELATED: Actress Michelle Trachtenberg found dead in Manhattan apartment Johansen was in 2023 the subject of Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi's documentary "Personality Crisis: One Night Only," which mixed footage of his two-night stand at the Café Carlyle in January 2020 with flashbacks through his wildly varied career and intimate interviews. He is survived by his wife, Mara Hennessey, and a stepdaughter, Leah Hennessey. The Source This report includes information from The Associated Press.
