Music reviews

Big Skies and Global Beats: WOMAD’s 30th Anniversary Festival (2/2), a set on Flickr. Yesterday I published my first set of photos from this year’s WOMAD world music festival in Charlton Park, Wiltshire, celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. The product of a great flowering of interest in festivals, WOMAD, which began in 1982, as [...]

WOMAD’s 30th Anniversary Festival, Wiltshire, July 2012 (1/2), a set on Flickr. In the history of British music festivals — and especially those with an appeal that spreads beyond these shores — the behemoth that is Michael Eavis’s Glastonbury, with its roots in the free festival movement, may well be the best known, but also [...]

Regular readers may know that a friend of mine, the singer/songwriter Sarah Gillespie, has long taken an interest in tackling injustice, and regularly regales her audiences with the story of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay. This is a bold and commendable move in a world [...]

So I count myself fortunate to live in the same neighbourhood as Sarah Gillespie, a wonderful singer/songwriter whose latest album, “In the Current Climate,” features a song about Shaker Aamer, the last British resident held in the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Sarah and I met a few years ago, when she let me [...]

Those of you who know me as the world’s most incessant commentator on Guantánamo and related issues in the “War on Terror” — or, of late, as a fierce opponent of the coalition government’s plans to butcher the British state — may be surprised to find me writing a music review, but back in 2005, [...]