UR TV CAST

ALISON MOYET

With her profile heightened by a run in the musical Chicago, Alison Moyet has chosen the right time to undertake the substantial career refurbishment signified by Hometime. It’s undoubtedly her most compelling set of performances since her 1984 solo debut Alf, and may be her best album, period. Sometimes, she strays into strange territory indeed: the single “Should I Feel That It’s Over”, for instance, sounds uncannily like a Coldplay out-take, with Moyet’s vocal elision lent grandeur by a dramatic string arrangement, while the enigmatic “Mary Don’t Keep Me Waiting”, with its backward guitars and childlike backing vocals, comes across like a Sixties psychedelic fairy tale. Simpler but more effective by far is “Ski” – surely a single in waiting – whose sparse, D’Angelo-style nu-soul groove plays directly to Moyet’s strengths.. BRIGHT EYES

Conor Oberst, creative mainspring of the Nebraskan alt.country outfit Bright Eyes, is almost as prolific as Ryan Adams, with no fewer than five Bright Eyes albums and one by his noisier punk-rock band Desaparecidos released so far in his eight-year career.
He’s still only 22, which means that earlier LPs may not have featured the most mature of reflections – something that the concept album Lifted redresses with a vengeance in Oberst’s feverish ruminations on love, ambition, creativity and redemption. Like Adams and Will Oldham – and Dylan, Waits and Cohen before them – he seems a young man old before his time, stung to world-weary cynicism about both romance (“Love is an excuse to get hurt and to hurt”) and the uneasy compromise between commerce and culture, but capable of Zen insights of some depth, too. “There is nothing I know except that this lifetime is one moment and wishing will just leave me empty,” runs a line from the opening track, “The Big Picture”, which just about sums things up.The album starts with a car journey, into which intrude desultory organ and guitar, before passengers are “sucked in” – to use Oberst’s term – to the tape deck for the duration of the ride/album, in a manner analogous to the book in the film The Never-Ending Story.

Rather than fantastic stories, however, Lifted offers a tour of Oberst’s emotional state, couched in arrangements that colour his lo-fi guitar and racked vocals with keyboards, vibes, banjo, hammer dulcimer, pedal steel guitar, mandolin, strings and horns, with fake vinyl crackle applied to differentiate between the truth of art and the artifice of “real” life, one of the album’s abiding themes. “If I could just speak up, I think I would say that there is no truth/ There is only you and what you make the truth,” he outlines in typically hesitant fashion in “Don’t Know When but a Day Is Gonna Come”; while later on, in “Waste of Paint”, he assesses the impact of voracious reading on his character by claiming, “I am never real; it is just a sketch of me.”Against such self-abnegation, Oberst celebrates the purity of spirit in one’s first love, the power of creativity, and the infinite patience required for transcendence, culminating in the redemption of “Let’s Not Shit Ourselves”, a jolly country-rock number flushed with the relief of failed suicide, and protective of personal pain “Ambition, I’ve found, can lead only to failure,” he sings “I do not read the reviews. No, I am not singing for you.” The implication being: to come to terms with the self, ultimately we all must sing for ourselves.. …dinburgh

Sometimes even stars need souvenirs. Before singing a note Nancy Sinatra whips out a camera and, like a teenager on her first ever holiday, starts randomly snapping the crowd.

Judging by the whoops that erupt across the room, the audience is instantly seduced.
This is Nancy’s first solo show in the UK and boy, has she dressed up for it. Kitted out in a gold lurex mini-skirt, gold lam?acket and matching thigh-high boots, it’s the kind of outfit that would make Barbarella blush. Under the full glare of a spot, the light is so dazzling that you fear she might go up in smoke.Also crammed on to the tiny stage are the singer’s all-male band, who include Don Randi, the composer and pianist and one of Phil Spector’s renowned Wrecking Crew session musicians, and the sometime Guns n’ Roses guitarist Gilby Clarke. It’s a starry set of names, although it isn’t exactly justified by the music.It’s when Nancy and her band try to rock out that things go horribly wrong. A song from her new album California Girl (so far only available in America) is high on guitars and low on appeal, while another nameless stomper could give AC/DC a run for their money if it didn’t render Sinatra’s voice completely inaudible. Elvis Presley’s “A Little Less Conversation” offers some light relief, however, while a cover of the Georgia Satellites’ “Keep Your Hands To Yourself” is terrific.