BONNIE PRINCE BILLY is the new moniker of cult hero WILL OLDHAM. NICK KELLY spoke to him about his album I See A Darkness. And received a lot of curt replies.
If that figure easing down the road looks strangely familiar then that s because it s WILL OLDHAM under yet another nom de plume. EAMON SWEENEY reports
Will Oldham is not a man who believes in making life easy. Since he changes his name the way others change clothes, following his career can be a devilish task.
Aongside gentlemen of similar vintage and taste such as Shane MacGowan and Nick Cave, Will Oldham (by Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Palace Brother, or any other name) is a master of adapting traditional musical and linguistic idioms to post-punk sense and sensibilities.
YUP, IT'S Wild Will again, the adopted son of Bob at his most hellfire-spittin', sickly nephew of Neil at his most 'Safeway Cart' Beckett-esque, brother figure to Bill Smog, the Handsome Family and any Gram-my loser who ever chased a ghost in anger.
YUP, IT'S Wild Will again, the adopted son of Bob at his most hellfire-spittin', sickly nephew of Neil at his most 'Safeway Cart' Beckett-esque, brother figure to Bill Smog, the Handsome Family and any Gram-my loser who ever chased a ghost in anger.
BEFORE EMBARKING upon one of the more, eh, idiosyncratic musical careers of our time, Will Oldham had a brief career as a TV-movie actor. In one of his roles, he was called upon to play the father of a little girl who'd fallen down a well.
BEFORE EMBARKING upon one of the more, eh, idiosyncratic musical careers of our time, Will Oldham had a brief career as a TV-movie actor. In one of his roles, he was called upon to play the father of a little girl who'd fallen down a well.
You could set your clock by him. Like some kind of agrarian song tiller, Will Oldham is a seasonal operator whose harvest falls every winter, January being market time. This year he’s gotten a little help on the farm from guitarist Matt Sweeney, and together they’ve come up with a batch of tunes that are by turns courtly, kinky and perverse.
Watch a video interview with Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, aka Will Oldham - including a (truly lovely) exclusive acoustic performance - and enter to win copies of 'Master And Everyone'
There is a tendency to regard Bill Callahan, the morose Kentucky songwriter who trades as Smog, as a sort of bargain-basement Will Oldham, a rural malingerer perched perpetually on the brink of an emotional fault-line.
For all its starkness though, Callahan’s oeuvre is tinged with a cautious beauty. Beneath the artist’s pained snarl – he’s one of those live performers who seems in constant distress – one begins to detect the hint of a rueful grin.
For his 12th record, Callahan retreats from the mannered melancholia of his recent albums. Here, the ominous tranquility of nature is Callahan’s obsession. Where most see a tranquil lake, Callahan senses the sinister undertow.
Going back to the deep-seated roots of music is the route taken by THE PALACE BROTHERS on their stunning debut album. GERRY McGOVERN goes to meet them at the crossroads where cultures collide . . . well, The Baggot Inn actually.
DOMINO RECORDS has released some of the most essential music of the 90 s by the likes of Sebadoh, Palace Brothers, and Elliott Smith. NICK KELLY talks to lynchpin Laurence Bell and one member of the label s current roster, Stephen Pastel of The Pastels.
'Girl From The Hills' opens Dot Creek's debut with a quietly twanging guitar, before a plaintive male voice urges someone to fetch water from the spring, and you think, 'OK, I'm in the middle of Nowheresville, Alabama.
Ireland beating the mighty Dutch on an enchanted evening at Lansdowne Road. The Frames at Vicar St. Liverpool lifting three trophies in one season. BellX1 at the Music Centre
Radio has studiously ignored it but that doesn’t mean that Republic Of Loose’s ‘Girl i’m gonna fuck you up’ isn’t the best Irish single of the year. Tanya Sweeney meets the Dublin boys who just want to have fun.
Radio has studiously ignored it but that doesn’t mean that Republic Of Loose’s ‘girl i’m gonna fuck you up’ isn’t the best Irish single of the year. Tanya Sweeney meets the Dublin boys who just want to have fun.
Radio has studiously ignored it but that doesn’t mean that Republic Of Loose’s ‘Girl i’m gonna fuck you up’ isn’t the best Irish single of the year. Tanya Sweeney meets the Dublin boys who just want to have fun.
Domino Records – home of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Max Tundra, Franz Ferdinand and Four Tet – turns ten. Kim Porcelli talks pop culture with label boss Laurence Bell.
The old actor in Mr Oldham has never forgotten the importance of making a strong visual impression – and with his mixture of Chaplin tramp, chimney corner minstrel and death row pen-pal, you’ll certainly never confuse him with anyone else.
With 2009 entering its final months, it’s time to take stock of the quality of northern releases thus far. If this year’s batch of stand-out records have anything in common, it is their determination to break boundaries and confound expectations
As cult continental rockers Deus release their fifth album, frontman Tom Barman talks about interviewing David Lynch, collaborating with Glen Hansard and hanging out with Elbow's Guy Garvey.
Former Belle And Sebastian mainstay Isobel Campbell has recorded a country-rock masterpiece worthy of Johnny Cash. But what’s a gravel-throated Mark Lanegan doing on it?
Kim Porcelli leafs through a new version of the book that kickstarted the sexual revolution, and brought toes into contact with some very strange places
dEUS are winning over more and more fans with their idiosyncratic, guitar-based songs. NICK KELLY met lynchpin TOM BARMAN to talk about love, loss and famous Belgians. Pics: CATHAL DAWSON.
Back from exile in Brighton, Fionn Regan is making major waves with his filmic observations on life in a seaside town. Peter Murphy joins him for a promenade down memory lane, and suggests that he might just be the Wicklow Dylan.
As he prepares for the release of his band s third album, Cold And Bouncy, high llamas mainman
sean o hagan tells an awestruck
nick kelly exactly why there s always been a Beach Boys element to his music.
No mere actor boy moonlighting as a rock star, Billy Bob Thornton is steeped in music and also in the kind of brooding Southern gothic aesthetic which informs his compelling album of song and story, Private Radio. Peter Murphy meets a singular man of stage and screen
It’s Christmas time and, as far as the hotpress journalistic elite are concerned, there’s not a turkey in sight. JOHN WALSHE, COLIN CARBERRY, CHRIS DONOVAN, EAMON SWEENEY and BARRY O'DONOGHUE report on the Irish acts who are going to be huuuuuuuuge!
over the next 12 months.
It's been a long strange trip and no mistake, one that describes a discernible line from
Harry Smith's Anthology Of American Folk Music through to the Handsome Family.
But there's even more going on beneath the surface. GREIL MARCUS, the music critic's music critic,
is PETER MURPHY's guide on a mystery train whose other passengers include Elvis Presley, Robert Johnson, Mark Twain, Nick Cave, The Blair Witch, Bill Clinton, The Band, Siniad O'Connor, Beck, William Burroughs, William Faulkner and Bob Dylan. And that's just the first class carriage. All aboard
Sex and sanctity, grit and glitter, penthouse and pavement, God and the Devil, and all conical points in between!
PETER MURPHY dials M for ADONNA, the pre-eminent pop icon of this and every other year
UK reviews for Soon It Will Come Time To Face The World Outside - the debut album from Cork's Boa Morte - range from excellent to, er, even more excellent. See what the quiet riot's all about at an upcoming live date near you
The tracklisting of the upcoming Frames live album, Set List, revealed in full - in a hotpress.com exclusive. Also: tidings of a Frames radio documentary on Today FM, a No Disco special - and did somebody say Glastonbury?
"Musically, these are piano ballads either splashed with a whimsical dose of vaudeville, tumbler-slamming jaunts, or torch songs supplemented by a tender string section."
Melbourne’s favourite experimental, instrumental, indie-folkists The Dirty Three make a welcome return to Dublin for an intimate show in Whelans on Wednesday December 9.
Quite a few people could be surprised by Rónán Ó Snodaigh’s debut solo album. While there are large elements of folk present, the arrangements often have more in common with classical rather than traditional music.
His compositions have this remarkable unfinished air, as if he is in possession of painterly instincts telling him exactly when to stop, an interior alarm mechanism warning him that one more stroke might reduce a great piece of work to a failure
After defining the currency and potency of much contemporary instrumental guitar music, Pajo acquaints himself with the role of a skewered folk and blues artist astonishingly well
The shoes fit. Their suits are made to measure and the skin's all their own. Finally, after more schizophrenic shifts than a busload of Hannibal Lectors, The Frames have found their own identity and they're not afraid to bask in its glories.
The Frames were the envy of the class of 1990, jammy dodgers who had a deal before they were a band, forced to evolve in public at an unmerciful rate. By the time most acts get ready to demo their first batch of songs, Glen Hansard and co. were on their second album and record deal.
For years now, so his cheerleaders (eg Chris Martin) would have us believe, Ron Sexsmith has been teetering on the precipice of gigantic, head-spinning, success.
Yup, the brothers gonna folk you up. Anti-folk that is: Jeffrey and Jack’s garage troubador aesthetic topped off with smarter-than-your-average-bear lyrics and delivery courtesy of our old friends Arch and Knowing. If irony is dead, nobody invited these Lower East Siders to the wake.
The Frames were the envy of the class of 1990, jammy dodgers who had a deal before they were a band, forced to evolve in public at an unmerciful rate. By the time most acts get ready to demo their first batch of songs, Glen Hansard and co. were on their second album and record deal.
Love’s tough when it doesn’t work out. Most of us have been there. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy chases girl… and fails to win her heart back. Where does boy (or girl, for that matter) go from there?
One fine day about a decade ago, your reporter was idly hitching a lift to Wexford town when he chanced to glance up and realise that, to his horror, he was thumbing a hearse, the incriminating digit standing obscenely erect in full sight of the driver, the mourners and their grim cavalcade.
There hasn’t been a debut this ominous and arresting from sleepy Lincolnshire since a radiant young Margaret Thatcher first addressed the Tory conference, and we all know how that one ended up.
While Mr Rice is a notoriously camera-shy chap, we shouldn’t mistake this reticence for a meekness of character. Far from it – because from beginning to end, 9 is a serious statement of authorial intent.
While Electric Picnic did not lack for non-musical highlights, the hottest action was to be found on stage, where the likes of the Sex Pistols and My Bloody Valentine whipped up a storm.
