Author: Beth Kirkbride

Indie pop band The Crookes take to the stage to warm the crowd up for Van McCann and his merry men. As a fellow Sheffielder, familiar with their discography and with a penchant for their soothing indie pop concoctions, I enjoy their brief set. However, as their material is seemingly fairly unknown and unappreciated down […]

Like many others, I was first introduced to the work of the Monkees through the timeless single “Daydream Believer”. My father, a fervent 60s fan, used to, and still occasionally does, put it on a lot back home and I have very fond memories of the song. So when I was waiting for my digital […]

Unpopular opinion: I’ve never really understood the Taylor Swift craze. People love her because her songs are catchy, she’s attractive, she has a nice voice, and (surprisingly in my opinion) because they relate to her lyrics. I get it, we never go out of style/are never getting back together ya-da ya-da but for me she’s […]

LCD Soundsystem – 45:33 The unlikely offspring of an indie retro dance outfit and a Nike commission, this extended mix is ideal for slow-burn exercise. It was written to accompany workout sessions, and the intention shows; skittery electronic beats settle into driving repetition, gradually changing to reflect and use the natural ebbs and flows of […]

Louis Kevin Celestin, known better as Kaytranada, is one of those rare artists that transcends time, genre and place. His music is a colourful, sonically rich mixture of hip-hop, house and r’n’b, that pays tribute to the musical heroes of his past but fuses their elements into a totally original whole. It is a musical […]

“I don’t care if it hurts, I want to have control”. No, it’s not Christian Grey, it’s Thom Yorke, lead singer of Radiohead in their (worryingly sadistic) smash hit Creep. If I say Radiohead, that will probably be the first song which comes into your mind, with 105,682,500 Spotify streams and counting (to put this […]

  I still remember the first time I ever listened to a Radiohead song. I was 13 at the time, having just got back home from a football match called off midway as it was woefully raining cats and dogs.  I was absolutely knackered, and somehow through a few random clicks on YouTube, I came […]

Last Saturday 25 European countries (and Australia) came together to compete in the final of the Eurovision Song Contest 2016.  This year the UK’s contribution was “Joe and Jake”, two ex-contestants of reality singing competition The Voice who couldn’t even make it to Week 3. Disappointingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, the pair placed 24th, another […]

Grime Whether it’s cravatted MCS preppies, sitting on Magdalen bridge with Skepta’s dulcet tones rending the nearby ether from an overzealous phone speaker, or fully-fledged Streetonians in convoy with other private school road-boys, Oxford has certainly taken to the sound of the Tottenham streets, even if admission figures for ethnic minorities and those on lower […]

James Blake has built his reputation on a combination of high-calibre electronic production and soulful crooning. His two previous albums, 2011’s James Blake and 2013’s Overgrown, showed an artist moving towards singer-songwriter territory, exemplified by his cover of Joni Mitchell’s ‘A Case Of You’, and emotive vocal-centric tracks such as ‘Retrograde’ on his second effort. […]

The London mayoral election ended up with the result most people expected. Zac Goldsmith always seemed an unlikely candidate for the role, being neither left-wing nor Boris Johnson, and an uninspiring campaign didn’t help his cause. With hindsight, though, we should turn to what is surely the most important aspect of the race – its […]

After what feels like years of watching him navigate high-profile celebrity feuds, sit courtside for every basketball game ever played, and star in countless questionable memes, Drake finally reminded us he makes music too, dropping his fourth studio album Views on April 29th. The album was immediately a commercial success, selling 1.2 million copies within […]

Something strange is going on at Oxford. Having spent years in a school culture with a clean divide between cool music and bad music, it took me a while to notice it. But look at the middle floor of Park End, or whatever they call it these days; go to a college bop; spend a […]

Beyoncé’s sixth album is a sprawling, visceral examination of scorned womanhood. It is a potent, rousing celebration of blackness in a world where black people are violently subordinated by structural racism. Foremost, the album is, in its forensic precision, a kind of post-mortem of a marriage still alive, but on its knees. Lemonade is an […]

I’d like to start off this article by saying that I spend a lot of time studying, and that it’s important to make the things you spend a lot of time doing as comfortable and pleasing to do as possible (hence the advice to buy a good bed, because you spend more of your time […]

When you look at the album cover of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros’ newest release, the one thing that immediately grabs your eye is that the very name “Edward Sharpe”, also the alter ego of lead singer Alex Ebert, has been crossed sharply out by a red marker. It’s gone now. According to Ebert […]

Of the members of archetypal hippie supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash and (occasionally) Young, Graham Nash was always the least interesting. David Crosby’s social consciousness led to great lyrics such as ‘Long Time Gone’ and ‘Almost Cut My Hair’, as well as the intricately beautiful ‘Déjà Vu’; Stephen Stills played nearly all of the instrumental parts […]

On April 21st, musical icon Prince Rogers Nelson joined the list of talented stars who have lost their lives too soon this year. Unsurprisingly, ‘Prince’ was immediately the top trending word on Twitter, his music was #1 on iTunes within 45 minutes of the announcement and in the first five hours alone Facebook reported an […]

Oxford’s annual celebration of the beginning of summer is almost upon us. The traditions surrounding May Day go well beyond the confines of this city, of course, although surely nowhere else have ancient English customs been so enthusiastically melded with all-night clubbing and a pervasive miasma of marijuana. Music, whether electronic or homophonic, plays a […]