Aside from a performance at Love Supreme Festival last year, we haven’t seen Sananda Maitreya play live in the UK for quite some time. Here for nine shows, it’s been 23 years since he last officially

London Shepherd’s Bush Empire

For a band who’ve spent the last months playing to thousands in North American venues, it could have felt uneasily sobering to pull up outside Berlin’s Columbia Theater. Just a couple of years short o

The bringing together of The Blow Monkeys and The Christians – both headliners in their own right – unites two acts indebted to late-60s and early-70s soul. For The Christians, the influence of the Mo

In 1976, the revolutionary singer-songwriter LAURA NYRO returned from self-imposed exile. But her comeback confounded expectations, shifting away from the impassioned intimacies of her early albums to embrace more radical perspectives. Fifty years on, Nyro’s collaborators revisit her striking second act. “She was a hip American from the Bronx,” one friend and producer tells Rob Hughes. “But her soul was old.”

74-75: Night Life / Fighting UMR