Kester Brewin

Last night I went to see Iron and Wine at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, where we were up in the gods rather; the night before I’d been looking for some theatre tickets for a Christmas show, and was shocked at how much it was going to cost to be anywhere near where we might see. [...]

I love the look of fierce concentration on the faces of musicians, playing live, struggling to hear the foldback, straining to keep within the bounds of the beat… The rush of performance and I think of my own struggles to live life, playing live, no click track. This is not a recording. The energy and [...]

Mika Brzezinski recently refused to lead with a story about P@&i$ Hi%ton over the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In a similar vein, Wired reported in ‘A Tale of Two Cities‘ that a trawl of the web revealed more interest in the iPhone than the recent triple-attempted bombing on London and Glasgow. Celebrity::Security::Gossip::War :: These [...]

Excellent interview with Brian Eno on Front Row today. Well worth a podcast or download. For one week only. In reply to a question about his music being ‘spiritual’ he admits to be being an ‘evangelical atheist’ but that he is ‘jealous of the spiritual experiences the religious have access to.’ His recent work seeks [...]

I had a snoop around the sale items in a department store the other day. A guy in an ill-fitting suit bee-lined me and was desperate to show me the new hard-drive recorders they had in. Tempting, but the prices are crashing and the capacities are inflating, so we’ll hold for a while yet. One [...]

Had a great time chatting to Barry Taylor yesterday – who’s over in the UK ‘writing a film score’ (yeah right Barry – we believe you We got on to talking music. I’d recently heard John Bell talk about protest music, and, harking back to the good old days of Dylan and Joan Baez, he [...]

This year’s Reith Lectures, to be broadcast shortly on the BBC, are to be given by Daniel Barenboim under the title ‘In the Beginning was Sound’. I’m hoping they live up to the excellent title, which reminded my of Claude Levi-Strauss’ Overture introduction to his seminal work on myths The Raw and The Cooked, which [...]