The Byrds without the drugs: Teenage Fanclub s Endless Arcade reviewed spectator.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from spectator.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
One of the most highly anticipated releases of 2021 lands, and thankfully delivers.
Teenage Fanclub prove beyond doubt, they still have a lot to teach us, and a lot to say.
Endless Arcade, their eleventh, is just as alluring as the band’s previous outings. A collection of tracks which perfectly sums up our present existence, and equally provides the hope in our failing dreams. The Scottish outfit have blistered a trail which is both unique, and thoroughly captivating music for thirty-one years, rising above the ‘Brit-Pop’ named alternative acts of the nineties. In truth, Teenage Fanclub were always something special, and their longevity is a testament to that.
Little Simz, the Islington rapper Simbi Ajikawo, released the critically-praised, lockdown-generated
Drop 6 EP, which itself was a brisk, deeply personal follow-up to her Ivor Novello-winning, Mercury Prize-nominated third album, 2019 s
GREY Area. (Little Simz also did an FUV Live session two years ago too.)
On September 3, Little Simz releases her fourth album,
Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, and on UKNY at 11 tonight, the epic first single from that album, a collaboration between Simz, her longtime producer Inflo and pal Cleo Sol (the pair are also at the heart of the somewhat anonymous collective, Sault), and even actress Emma Corrin, who played Diana, Princess of Wales, in The Crown.
SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY (BMG)
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Credit:Rosie Matheson.
There have been previous examples of popular musicians reciting famous poems but this, as far as can be determined, is the first time an iconic singer (Marianne Faithfull) has collaborated with an avant-garde composer (Warren Ellis, from Dirty Three and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds) and delivered an entire recording of 11 poems from Englandâs most famous Romantic poets â two from Lord Byron, one from Lord Tennyson, two from Percy Bysshe Shelley, one from Thomas Hood, three from John Keats and one from William Wordsworth.
And these are not esoteric poetic byways. They are the major poems of the period:
With Endless Arcade, the beloved Scottish band enters a brand new era Patrick King | April 30, 2021 - 12:00 pm
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When
SPIN caught up with Teenage Fanclub songwriter Norman Blake in February to discuss the band’s new album Endless Arcade, the world was in a much more uncertain place than it is today. Prospects on when and how live music would be coming back were still marked with doubt. But Blake, as always, radiates with positivity for the days ahead. Even as the long-running Scottish band faced its biggest shake-up.
With it being their eleventh album and first since 2016’s