Lost in music

Every month we get inside the mind of one of the biggest names in music. This issue: Roy Harper . Since the mid-60s, the progressive folk singer-songwriter has enjoyed a successful solo career that’s also found him collaborating with everyone from Pink Floyd and Peter Gabriel to Kate Bush and Ian Anderson. But he’s never quite reached the commercial heights of his peers. As his Final Tour: Part Two fast approaches, he looks back over highlights from his career so far and teases a brand-new album.

When I first heard the classical music of North India, my musical world shifted on its axis. I was in the cinema, watching Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, which had just opened in the UK and was takin

Zaytoun Songs by JS Bach, Monteverdi, Purcell and Sayed Darwish et al Haitham Haidar (tenor), Sylvain Bergeron (archlute), Abdul-Wahab Kayyali (oud) et al Athene ATH 23027 51:44 mins In medieval Spain

The grand parade of lifeless packaging? Far from it, as this much-delayed blockbuster reissue of one of prog’s most fascinating and frustrating albums finally proves.

When Luciano Pavarotti died in in 2007, he was one of the most famous men in the world, his celebrity extending far beyond the opera stage. This year, as we prepare to celebrate what would have been t

In 2000, Banu Mushtaq was subject to a fatwa for saying that it was not Islam itself that prohibited women from entering certain mosques, but the patriarchs of those mosques. Today the writer, lawyer