"I was brought up by two ambitious artistic people," says Baxter Dury. (Photo by Tom Beard) A quarter century since the passing of his father — beloved Cockney poet, punk, and actor Ian Dury — there is much that unites the sound of vocalist-composer Baxter Dury to his dad. And more that does not. Especially…
A$AP Rocky has dropped another new single, “Punk Rocky,” ahead of the Jan. 16 release of Don’t Be Dumb, his first album in eight years. The accompanying video stars Winona Ryder, Danny Elfman, Thundercat and A$AP Nast and introduces five of Rocky’s six Don’t Be Dumb-specific alter egos, who are apparently named GR1M, RUGAHAND, BABUSHKA…
Billy Joel has been off the road since last February while recovering from the brain disorder normal pressure hydrocephalus, but the 76-year-old ailing music legend stunned fans on Jan. 2 in Wellington, Fla., when, with the help of a cane, he walked onstage to join the longtime Joel tribute band Turnstiles and perform his songs…
Mark Feld was born in London in 1947, and adopted the stage name Marc Bolan as a teenager. Like many British rock stars of his generation, Bolan flirted with different sounds as he adapted to the rapidly changing times, starting a skiffle band as a child before becoming a mod and then a psychedelic folkie….
Epiphanies come, as epiphanies do, in unexpected and often far-flung settings. For trumpeter Amir ElSaffar, three such horizon-openers converge in his latest album, New Quartet Live at Pierre Boulez Saal. Recorded at the famed Frank Gehry-designed concert hall, it’s a scintillating performance in which he is joined by Ole Mathisen on saxophone, Tomas Fujiwara on…
Some nights, a bouzouki cuts through the kick drum, clear and played live. That detail anchors the live set from Zehavi (Sagi Zehavi), an electronic artist who grew up sharing one crowded room in an impoverished neighborhood and found his early momentum busking on that same instrument. His music blends club energy with Mediterranean and…
I remember the confusion and excitement I felt seeing “Captain” Lou Albano of the WWE (formerly called the WWF) appear in Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” music video when it premiered in December 1983. Why was a wrestling star in a Cyndi Lauper video on MTV? It turns out that Albano and…
Richard Philip Henry John Benson was not a normal person. In the mid-90s, he was a hunk Italian prog guitarist in nuts-tight denim, bare-chested beneath a black silk blazer, famous across Rome for his fretboard stunt show VHS tapes. The guitar tricks on his mail-order “instructional” videos were nearly irreplicable — dizzying two-hand tap triplets…
With his 1982 song “I Have the Touch” enjoying new visibility thanks to its inclusion in the Timothée Chalamet-starring film Marty Supreme, Peter Gabriel is turning his attention to his next studio album, o\i. The project’s lead track, “Been Undone,” can be sampled below in its Tchad Blake-helmed Dark-Side Mix. “I’m delighted to say that tonight,…
Each week, SPIN digs into the catalogs of great artists and highlights songs you might not know for our Deep Cut Friday series. In ancient Greek literature, the lost city of Atlantis was a fictional island that sank into the Atlantic Ocean. In late ’70s Washington, D.C., Atlantis was briefly the namesake of a key…
