Marc Almond, On tour
It’s a strange place occupied by Marc Almond. On the one hand, he’s the chansonnier of a body-modifying demi-monde, one of the few artists of the synthpop 1980s to have achieved elder statesman status with dignity intact. He’s the survivor of a serious motorcycle accident whose new work, with its melancholic midlife reflections, is eagerly awaited by a fanatical audience. On the other, he’s still the Tainted Love guy, so he pops up on BBC Breakfast in a way that’s kind of at odds with his core business. Still, just because he makes sad music doesn’t mean that he can’t be successful. His latest album, The Velvet Trail, has been co-written with Lana Del Rey producer Chris Braide, someone who knows a bit about sad and popular music. Hopefully it will see both sides of Almond’s career reconciled.
JR
Sinkane, Leicester & London
A good clue to where Sinkane fit in the scheme of things is offered by the fact that frontman Ahmed Gallab was the musical director for a show last year called Atomic Bomb! The Music Of William Onyeabor. After a timely compilation, Onyeabor (a Nigerian synth composer) became a hip icon, and Sinkane were well placed to enjoy the fruits of that development. It’s the kind of kudos that attends, say, St Vincent: impressive to the great and good, still cool but with the potential to cross over. On their Mars album, they played a tuneful version of the longform compositions that spiritually link krautrock and Afrobeat, while 2014’s Mean Love does a creditable job of mixing minimal funk with deep reggae – all abetted by Gallab’s incredible searching voice.
The Musician, Leicester, Mon; XOYO, EC2, Tue
JR
Godspeed You! Black Emperor, On tour
No band is less showbiz - and yet, in their refusal to engage with the business side of being in a band (promotional interviews, creating personalities, providing photographs and so on), this Canadian group have unwittingly conformed to the oldest showbusiness trick in the book: always leave them wanting more. All of this intrigue has been undoubtedly healthy for the band’s legend. Enthusiasts regularly upload fake versions of their rumoured mid-90s debut album All Lights Fucked On The Hairy Amp Drooling (apparently limited to 33 tape copies), while the band’s shifting membership and occasional communiques imply a strong ethos to their stately instrumental rock. Post-rock was once a fairly thoughtful and methodical place, its drama in its quietude as much in its noise. GY!BE, meanwhile, don’t just talk an apocalyptic talk, they walk an apocalyptic walk – offering a glowering musical threat that ultimately finds enormously heavy release.
JR
The Necks, On tour
Australian trio the Necks have been making their distinctive strain of ambient, minimalist jazz since the late 80s. Not a household name, but still able to pack out large venues, they operate in a strange liminal zone of fandom, reflected in the music they make. Durational and difficult to categorise, single tracks often stretch out over a mesmerising hour or more. Concerned with stamina and detail, they stalk a tune as if it were a newly discovered fire, prodding and poking, coming near to feel its warmth, plucking burning torches from it in the shape of a brief blaze of toms, but never jumping in to be consumed by the flames.
JA
The Cookers, Gateshead & London
Jazz trips down memory lane can make the music’s vitality and power to surprise disappear into the rosy glow, but the seasoned American jazz stars who make up the Cookers play the classic hard bop style (the name salutes a famous 1965 Blue Note live album, The Night Of The Cookers) as if it had never gone away. As the Boston Globe’s Andrew Gilbert put it, they “embody the serious-as-death commitment that it took to thrive on the New York scene some four decades ago”, and after seven years and four albums together (and a combined 250 years and 1,000 recordings’ worth of experience separately) they still retain that urgency and edge.
The Sage Gateshead, Sun; Ronnie Scott’s, W1, Mon
JR
Between Worlds, London
Over the last 10 years, Tansy Davies has made her mark among the younger generations of British composers with music that quirkily blends elements of pop and rock with the techniques of the post-1945 art-music avant garde. In Davies’s pieces, funky basslines underpin atonal harmonies with structures that behave in entirely unpredictable ways. Davies has already explored a wide range of genres, but her latest work is easily her most ambitious: a full-scale stage work commissioned by English National Opera. The poet Nick Drake has written the libretto, which was inspired by the events of 9/11, and Deborah Warner directs. In Davies and Drake’s tale, a collection of characters are marooned high in one of the twin towers on that day in 2001. It could be a treacherously difficult subject but, says Davies, it is an attempt to turn what is “complex and difficult into something that is healing and beautiful”.
Barbican Theatre, EC2, Sat to 25 Apr
AC
