Cabaret sensation Meow Meow returns to London this Christmas!

After her starring role Kneehigh Theatre’s West End hit The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, international cabaret sensation Meow Meow comes to Southbank Centre this Christmas with a sizzling show that will defrost even the coldest of hearts.

Catch Meow Meow’s Little Match Girl at Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of The Winter Festival from 13 – 30 December 2012. Get tickets here. 

Listen to our Undiscovered India Spotify playlist

From 3 November, Southbank Centre is welcoming a whole host of musicians  as we explore the best in Indian classical music. Have a listen to our Undiscovered India Spotify Playlist.

Take a look at our series of Undiscovered India events featuring performances from Tarang, Alif Laila, Patri Satish Kumar and Tarun Bhattacharya at Southbank Centre from 3 November – 1 December. Get tickets here. 

Free download – Kathryn Tickell ‘The Fiddle’

To coincide with the release of her latest record ‘Northumbrian Voices’ , Kathryn Tickell is on tour and reaches London’s Southbank Centre on Friday.

‘I had been worried about how it would be, touring with a band whose ages spanned three generations, but it’s lovely. We are the only band I know who tour with an armchair; it’s for my dad to sit in on stage…he’s in his seventies and we want him to be comfy!’ Read the full interview here.

Have a listen to this free download

Catch Kathryn Tickell with Northumbrian Voices at Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room at Queen Elizabeth Hall on Friday 21 September. Get tickets here. 

KATHRYN TICKELL WITH NORTHUMBRIAN VOICES

Kathryn Tickell is the foremost exponent of the Northumbrian pipes, a composer, performer and successful recording artist whose work is deeply rooted in the landscape and people of Northumbria.

Kathryn also works collaboratively across many genres, making her work contemporary and exciting. She first took up the Northumbrian smallpipes at the age of nine, learning in the traditional way from shepherd musicians in outlying hill farms near her home. All the elements of landscape, weather and stories of the people that lived and worked there were part of her childhood. Kathryn’s personal evocation of this is heard through the traditional tunes and songs that she brings to audiences all over the world. She has released 14 of her own albums to date and has also recorded and performed with Sting, The Chieftains, The Penguin Café Orchestra, Evelyn Glennie, Andy Sheppard and many others.

Catch Kathryn Tickell with Northumbrian Voices at Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room at Queen Elizabeth Hall on Friday 21 September. Get tickets here. 

Fascinating Aida – ‘feckin’ hilarious’ **** (The Daily Telegraph)

Continuing their smash-hit, sell-out 2011 tour, three times Olivier-Award nominated and now a global internet sensation, Fascinating Aïda are still Britain’s best comedy cabaret trio.

This show includes several numbers hot off the press, plus a few old favourites including their infamous anthem to budget travel, Cheap Flights (8 million plus hits on YouTube) as well as The Dogging Song, a fond homage to the joys of al fresco sex.

Here’s a sneak peak from the girls!

 

Catch Fascinating Aida’s show ‘The Cheap Flights Tour’ at Priceless London Wonderground until Saturday 29 September. Get tickets here. 

Caught by the river – Blog Series – #2 Robert Mcfarlane

On Friday 25 May, some of the UK’s best loved writers and musicians form a cracking line-up for the Caught By The River Variety Show.

The show features live music from Diagrams, Tim Burgess discussing his new book, Richard King reading from his account of the history of independent music – ‘How Soon Is Now?’, Culture Show presenter – Michael Smith, and more.

In the second part of our blog series, we have an extract from Robert Mcfarlane’s new book The Old Ways. Macfarlane’s work documents his explorations into British landscapes, mountains, moors, islands, salt marshes, and sea-caves, writing about modern society’s relationship with the wild.

Two Augusts ago, I joined a crew of five sailing an old open boat from the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides, to the remote skerry-island of Sula Sgeir, which lies forty miles due north of the northernmost-point of Lewis – far out into the Atlantic.

Sula Sgeir’s form is geological-brutalist. It is a jaggy black peak of gneiss, the topmost summit of a submarine mountain, and it is home to ten thousand gannets and (until recently) the only albatross in the North Atlantic. The sea has bored clean through the southern part of the island to form a series of caves and tunnels. In big Atlantic storms, the waves break over its summit.

The boat we sailed to Sula Sgeir was called Jubilee, she was seventy-five years old, and she was a sgoth Niseach: a class of Lewisian working boat, lug-rigged, clinker-built, double-ended and open, designed for sturdy seaworthiness up there off the Butt of Lewis where the Atlantic currents meet the currents of The Minch. She was skippered on our voyage by Ian Stephen – sailor, poet, story-teller and life-long follower of the sea-roads – and under Ian’s safe steerage we sailed her overnight to Sula Sgeir, up through an ocean of phosphorescence and stars, at last reaching the skerry at dawn.

The story of that unforgettable journey is told in full in a book called The Old Ways. A year or so ago, though, I was fortunate enough to be put in touch by Jeff Barrett with Chris Watson – the sound-artist, natural-history sound recordist, and Caught by the River favourite. Jeff had it in mind that a collaboration might develop, and so it has. At the Caught by the River Variety Show at the Southbank on May 25th, Chris and I will be performing a sound-story of that voyage – the text spoken by me over a bedding track, with Chris drawing on his extraordinary sound archive to respond to and improvise out of the words themselves. Our aim is nothing more or less ambitious than to evoke the profound and abiding strangeness of sailing that old boat up that ancient sea-way into that vast ocean to that lonely island – and to carry our listeners with us.

What you will hear, therefore, might best be imagined as a dream-voyage or wonder-journey – what in Gaelic is called an immrama – and in this sense precedents for it might be found in very early Celtic sea-stories: the lyric accounts of Mael Duin or St Brendan, say, sailing their hide-hulled boats westwards and northwards, out of the verifiable and into the miraculous.

To buy tickets for this events and check out the full line-up, click here.

Low at Royal Festival Hall – exclusive track, video and Guardian webcast

American indie legends, Low perform at Royal Festival Hall next week Tuesday 3 April. The Minnesota three-piece comprise of band founders – the husband and wife songwirting team of  singer/guitarist Alan Sparhawk and drummer Mimi Parker – and bass player Steve Garrington, who joined in 2008.

Low’s most recent record C’mon was released in April last year, and garnered positive reviews across the board with Drowned In Sound praising it’s ‘impossible beauty and spellbinding drama’, while The Observer‘s 5 star review describes the band as ‘exquisite’.

Their last outing in London was a sell out show at Barbican Hall in April 2011, and was deemed a triumph by critics and fans alike, see Music OMH‘s 4.5 star review for proof.

You can hear a beautiful acoustic rendition of C’mon opener ‘Try to Sleep’ on the Soundcloud link below, exclusive to Southbank Centre.

Low also performed ‘Witches’ for The Guardian‘s ‘How I Wrote’ series, with Alan Sparhawk discussing the inspiration behind the lyrics and the instrumentation used in the song. Click here to watch now.

And if that’s not enough for your ears and eyes, here is a video of Alan and Mimi performing ‘Point of Disgust’ at Sacred Heart Music Center in Duluth, Minnesota.

 

Low perform at Royal Festival Hall on Tuesday 3 April, with support from Lanterns On The Lake. Click through to the website to buy tickets.

 

 

BRIT Award Nominee Carleen Anderson performs as part of Sing Inspiration! 2012

Carleen Anderson comes to Royal Festival Hall next Tuesday 13 March to perform solo material alongside young and adult choirs from across the UK.

Anderson was nominated for a Best International Newcomer BRIT Award in 1995, she went on to tour alongside the hugely popular pop-funk-jazz group, The Brand New Heavies in 2000, and has worked with the likes of Paul Weller and 2008 Meltdown Festival directors, Massive Attack.

Sing Inspiration is put together by iGospel and has fast become the UK’s most dynamic soul & funk choral festival. Sing Inspiration Festival 2012 features 4 amazing concerts at Royal Festival Hall with over 3,000 young people and adults.

The two videos below should give you a little taster of what to expect.

You can buy tickets for the event by visiting our website.

 

Vieux Farka Touré comes to Southbank Centre

On Sunday 12th February we welcome Vieux Farka Touré to Southbank Centre. This will be the only London date of Vieux’s UK tour, and is set to be a really exciting show. Following in the footsteps of his father, the legendary Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré, Vieux’s music combines funk, reggae and jam music with the desert-blues genre.

Living up to his father’s lofty reputation is no mean feat, but Vieux’s latest album The Secret has established him as an important artist in his own right. Often referred to as ‘the Hendrix of the Sahara’, Vieux heads up a new generation of contemporary West African music.

You can buy tickets for Vieux Farka Touré at Queen Elizabeth Hall by visiting our website.

Introducing…The Vocal Orchestra, created by beatboxer Shlomo

We’re excited to announce one of two headline shows coming to E4 Udderbelly Festival at Southbank Centre in 2012.

The Vocal Orchestra, created by Shlomo, is a spine-tingling hour of incredible musical entertainment. A celebration of everyone’s favourite tunes using seven mouths, seven mics and no instruments!

Combining jaw dropping human beatboxing, glorious vocal harmonies and floor wobbling basslines, The Vocal Orchestra is a breathtakingly original show, written and created by internationally acclaimed beatboxer Shlomo, and performed by a company of the world’s most exciting beatboxing superstars.

This uplifting mash-up of intricate group beatbox routines and roof-raising interpretations of all-time classics will leave you whooping, clapping and dancing all the way home.

Check out this taster of what to expect…

Catch The Vocal Orchestra, created by Shlomo, at E4 Udderbelly Festival at Southbank Centre from Monday 9 April 2012. Get tickets here.