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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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, […]
Name Crispian Mills of Kula Shaker Best known for Britpop on to Lord Krishna (people are still high from that mantra shizz). Current city London, rehearsing for a tour. Really want to be in Home in Penzance, Cornwall. If I was there I would be staring out of the window at the beautiful island of St Michael’s Mount, reminding myself that the […]
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 […]
Horror Show is a new series uncovering the stories of artists’ experiences with the supernatural, paranormal, and unexplained—and how surviving it provided new appreciation for creating in the here and now. For many generations, the family of filmmakers Ximena and Eduardo García Lecuona has experienced a long-running phenomenon: When it’s your time to leave this […]
In December of 1991, I was asked to do a photoshoot with Henry Rollins for SPIN. The majority, if not all, the photos I had seen of Henry had presented that intensity and punk-like rage he was known for. I planned to capture images that went beyond that facade while remaining true to the Rollins […]