MUSIC LIST
V SINGLES
I Danny Wilson: I Can’t Walt(Virgin) Joy. joy. joy. Danny Wilson let it all hang out as Kit Clark gie‘s it laldy. [Can't Wait is unbounded exuberance. cheery and chirpy and just the thing for adreary winter‘s day. A wee gem. As for the b-side, ABBA never sounded so good. (CM)
I Happy Mondays: Madchester Rave On EP (Factory) Warning: never repeat dosage more than once in four hours. The Mondays experience again. an ugly. soupy sound that is profoundly uncomfortable but bloody marvellous at that. This is the greasy. festering underbelly of dance music captured on one slightly seedy EP. This trip will run and run. (CM)
I House of Love: I Don't Know Why I Love You (Fontana) Jaggy. spicy guitars. echoey voice. and an overriding commitment to the indie ethic (whatever that means). This is House Of Love and this is yet another angry rocker. Rawer than the fashionably-slagng last single. but so raw as to be undercooked. . .'.’ Never. (CM)
The World Is Walling For/Fools' Gold 9.53 (Sllvertone) A backwards loop. a wah wah feast. subliminal lyrics. frenzied tom-toms. but no rampant chorus. This is the Stone Roses. unwittingly (probably) reaffirming their stake as the cutting edge of. . .just about everything. With case. we have lift-off. a music that is never passive in intent or effect. The Stone Roses lift us up, and there ain‘t gonna be no coming down. Stop the world. we‘re off. (CM)
ROCK 39 JAZZ 35 FDLK 36 CLASSICAL 39 MUSIW
LISTINGS
I Laibach: Acrossthe Universe (Mute) Strange Yugoslavians enter the race for the Christmas Number One. while continuing their Beatles obsession. This rather offbeat version of the song was taken from their cover ofthe entire Let it Be album (and includes versions of ‘Maggie Mae' and ‘Get Back'. and when Mute put £500 on it reaching the coveted Christmas slot the odds were 50/1. The race ison! (AM)
um:- ; Pop Princess
If there was one moment when Natalie Cole could be said to have escaped the shadow of her illustrious lather Nat King Cole, it must have been in 1980, when she had the honour of her own star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame bestowed upon her, but her standing as one of today's premier soul and B8B singers has never been in doubt. In a careerthat has lasted 17 years, the
singer who trained as a child psychologist has rarely been off the Grammy nominations list, winning the Best New Artist category in 1975, when her debut album was released and Best 888 Female Vocal Performance twice. She can also number fans in the juries of the 1979 Tokyo Music Festival and the 1988 ‘Soul Train’ Awards. However, despite the reverence her father’s name commanded, and the American, Canadian and European tours she had undertaken, it was a change of agent and her subsequent introduction to producer and future husband the late Marvin Yancy that got her her first recording contract. Despite a small dip with the albums ‘l’m Ready’ and ’Dangerous’, both released after she left Capitol Records and before she took up with EMI USA, Natalie Cole has been a consistently successful presence on the international soul scene. Most recently, she was seen by millions at the Nelson Mandela 60th Birthday Concert, doing a set of her own and joining in a soul ‘supergroup’ with the well-qualified Al Green and Joe Cocker, whose credentials really should have been checked at the door. The absurdly inlectious Top Three hit ‘Miss You Like Crazy’ has been followed this month by another track from her ‘Good to be Back’ LP, ‘Starting Over Again’. A good excuse as any for shipping out to Livingston lorthe evening. (Alastair Mabbott) Natalie Cole plays her only Scottish date at The Forum, Livingston on Monday4 Dec.
V CLASSICAL
Brought to the attention oi Scottish audiences in 1987 through the Festival in Glasgow bearing his name, Iannis Xenakis comes to the lore once again in Scotland with a special concert on Saturday 25 November marking the occasion of his receiving an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Edinburgh. In an imaginative collaboration between the New Music Group of Scotland, Edinburgh Contemporary Arts Trust and the University, subsidised by the Scottish Arts Council, the concert will be held in a new Edinburgh periormance venue, the Sculpture Hall of Edinburgh College of Art. A Bumanian born Greek, Xenakis has lived in France for much of his life where apart from studying composition, he worked as an architect with Le Corbusier, the most famous result probably being the Philips Pavilion lor the 1958 Brussels Exhibition. Lecturer in music and Director of Edinburgh University's Computer Music Studio, Peter Nelson, who has been behind much of the planning in bringing Xenakis over from Paris, describes him as ‘one of the most important, if not the most important, and influential European composers working today’, explaining that the University has decided to honour him ‘because he has made a considerable contribution to the theoretical as well as the practical aspects of music. He is also the
inventor of the UPIC, a computer
The science of music
instrument for drawing music by hand, and has a particular position in music as a restorer of the old relationship between music and the physical sciences.’ The programme features four compositions for solo and ensemble by this extraordinary musician, summed up by Nelson as ‘a scientist, engineer and thinker, as well as a composer.’ (Carol Main)
A large exhibition of Xenakis’ architectural drawings and music manuscripts is on show at Edinburgh College of Art from Friday 24 for two weeks.
Xenakis Celebration, Saturday 25 November at 8pm, Sculpture Hall, Edinburgh College of Art, Lauriston Place.
Spirit music
Joe Alexander trades licks with guitar geniusJohn McLaughlin.
Once upon a time. John McLaughlin had a fearsome reputation as something ofa wild man, back before he discovered the inner contentment of Indian philosophy in the early Seventies. It is hard to associate that hell-raising figure with his present calm. charming self. but these two sides of McLaughlin suggest a curious echo of his multi-faceted musical career. McLaughlin is the greatest jazz guitarist of the contemporary period. one in which the instrument has established itselfas a major improvisational voice in the music. He had already made his mark on the
30 The List 24 November - 7 December 1989