Dust - Live at The Exchange, Bristol, 24th January
On a cold, wet January night Australian band Dust take to the stage in the basement of The Exchange without much ceremony, but from the opening moments they are focused and direct.
The angular guitars of opener ‘Drawbacks’ cut sharply while the band locks into a tight, forward-driving rhythm.
The song moves quickly and purposefully, establishing the controlled, restless core of their live sound, built on momentum rather than theatrics.
That sense of propulsion continues on ‘New High’ which pumps steadily, allowing space for the rhythm section to drift and recalibrate. The bass is prominent, holding the track together with an insistent groove.
Dust’s arrangements feel well-rehearsed but not rigid, giving each section room to breathe rather than on their recent debut album, Sky Is Falling, where the sound is denser.
‘Swamped’ is more confrontational, with a skank-inflected delivery, adding a broader palette to what has thus far been contemporary post-punk.
https://www.live4ever.uk.com/dust-exchange-bristol-gig-review/
Arctic Monkeys - Opening Night
Arctic Monkeys return with ‘Opening Night’, their first new single in over three years.
A fuzzy beat ushers in dexterous, dusk-hued guitar lines, putting the guitars firmly back front and centre for the first time in a decade.
As ever, Alex Turner’s characteristically oblique lyrics invite decoding (‘Try not to wake up sleeping dogs just because you’re your own little hall of famer,’) before opening into a chorus drenched in band harmonies that evoke the warmth of peak Fleetwood Mac.
Disarmingly catchy and refreshingly direct, ‘Opening Night’ should hopefully silence some of the critics they’ve amassed since AM. If not quite the sleazy rock of those halcyon years, it’s good to hear that Turner and company haven’t quite forgotten their roots.
As the opening track on War Child’s Help (2) compilation, recorded over one week in November, it bodes well for the album’s stellar lineup, featuring Fontaines D.C., The Last Dinner Party, Cameron Winter, Pulp, Depeche Mode and many, many more.
They’re back. Thank the Lord.
Sleaford Mods - The Demise Of Planet X
And they thought things were bad when they started out.
Who better to soundtrack the seemingly inevitable erosion of the UK’s spirit than Sleaford Mods?
The Demise Of Planet X sees Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearn confronting grim times by sharpening, rather than dulling, their creative edge.
Their ninth album together features more guests, textures and exposed vulnerability than any previous record, slightly nudging them into unfamiliar but fertile terrain.
‘The Good Life’ immediately stakes out that restlessness, with Gwendoline Christie’s terrifying laugh announcing the unease of life and ushering in a three-character psychodrama played out within a single psyche: Williamson’s own.
Big Special’s warm chorus offers a vision of happiness and calm while the lyricist’s trademark fast-paced fury circles it like a saboteur.
https://www.live4ever.uk.com/sleaford-mods-planet-x-album-review/
The Molotovs - Live at Thekla, 9th January 2026
So hot they’re steaming, Southend duo The Molotovs had a remarkable 2025 – recording their debut album, supporting the likes of Blondie and The Damned – and look set to continue their hot streak well into 2026, straight out of the traps with an early-year tour.
The graft started early for the pair, and the effort is impossible to deny: siblings Matt and Issey Cartlidge were apparently immersed in music from their early teens, raised on their parents’ record collection of quintessentially British acts such as the Buzzcocks, The Undertones, The Jam, The Specials, Madness, etc.
By 2020 they were performing live, but when lockdown closed venues they busked wherever they could. A backstory rooted in persistence rather than privilege, it shows in how comfortable they are onstage.
That said, their youth (Matt is 17, Issey 19) doesn’t quite align with the mythology already surrounding them.
The Molotovs are regularly framed as prodigious outsiders, but they are also a band that has benefited from rapid exposure.
https://www.live4ever.uk.com/the-molotovs-bristol-thekla-review/
Interview - Jason Williamson
There’s no doubt about it, 2025 has been yet another tough year, socially and politically.
Despite the Labour Party having been in power for less than 18 months (surely a fraction of the time required to undo 14 years of neglect and rampant opportunism), there is a feeling that things in the UK are getting worse still, not helped by events over the Atlantic, in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
There’s undoubtedly a despondency in the air as the seeds of the 2010s bloom into global insecurity.
While never the most optimistic of outfits, Sleaford Mods have noticed, and it informs much of their new album The Demise Of Planet X, which is themed around a post-apocalyptic landscape.
Unfortunately, Jason Williamson doesn’t feel the album is particularly metaphorical.
“We’re in it, aren’t we? This is it,” he ponders while speaking to Live4ever. “I often wonder what it was like in the 1920s, where people started to feel this dread.”
https://www.live4ever.uk.com/sleaford-mods-live4ever-interview/
Babyshambles - Live at the o2 Academy, 9th December 2025
Peter Doherty has always been consistent and prolific; either through playing gigs or rattling out material at a steady pace for over two decades.
Yet 2025 has been remarkable even by his standards. A solo album and tour in the spring preceded yet another summer of touring with The Libertines, while the last few months of the year have been taken up with a reunited Babyshambles playing their first shows for over a decade.
At this penultimate show of the tour in Bristol (December 9th), he was ubiquitous all evening, acting as a ringmaster rather than just frontman.
The night began in a haze of synths courtesy of Keeley, her slinky electro-pop drifting across the room while Doherty watched from stage right, half-hidden in his own little dressing room.
https://www.live4ever.uk.com/babyshambles-bristol-academy-review/
2025’s Best Film Soundtracks
A trip to the cinema represents one of the few ways we can truly switch off in 2025 – phones are placed on silent, the outside world can wait, and for two hours (or more) we can surrender to the narrative on-screen. The growth and evolution of film soundtracks has only accentuated this – artists such as Nick Cave and Warren Ellis have built shadow catalogues out of it, with the film world reaching out to some of the best musicians of the present era.
Looking back on another trip round the sun, CLASH writer Richard Bowes picks out 2025’s best film soundtracks.
https://www.clashmusic.com/features/2025s-best-film-soundtracks/
The Beatles Anthology at 30
After John Lennon’s assassination, The Beatles’ cultural stock remained high, but their reputation began to falter through the 1980s and early 1990s. With the ‘cool one’ gone, the public was left to judge the band by Paul McCartney’s creative misfires (Give My Regards To Broad Street, ‘The Frog Chorus’), Ringo Starr’s struggles with alcoholism, and George Harrison’s embrace of middle-of-the-road rock with The Traveling Wilburys.
Still, the uneven output of the surviving members couldn’t tarnish The Beatles’ unquestionable legacy, even as they began to be taken for granted. In 1992, Apple Corps revived an abandoned 1971 documentary project, The Long And Winding Road. Originally a 90-minute film compiled by Apple manager and longtime friend Neil Aspinall, it featured interviews, concert clips, and television footage, albeit without direct participation from any of the Beatles.
https://www.clashmusic.com/features/anthology-is-the-moment-the-beatles-ascended-their-modern-peak/
Interview - Dan Jennings
Thankfully it’s been half a decade since the UK was in the midst of the second of three lockdowns because of the COVID pandemic.
And while you undoubtedly and understandably try and block out those long, dark months, there were some reasons to be cheerful.
The podcast boom for one. With time to spare and little else to do, countless enthusiasts took to the airwaves to share their wisdom on a variety of different subjects, and music was no different.
Yet while many ventures fell by the wayside, one former broadcaster lasted the course.
“My background was always audio, I worked in the broadcasting space for a long time,” explains Dan Jennings, creator of the Desperately Seeking Paul (Weller) podcast.
https://www.live4ever.uk.com/author-dan-jennings-live4ever-interview/
Simple Thing Festival - 8th November 2025
The only real issue with Bristol’s Simple Things Festival is abundance.
There’s simply too much good music, too many must-see acts and too many painful clashes, such as this year’s scheduling duel between Dry Cleaning and Adult DVD.
Yet that’s part of any festival’s charm, and this year’s is a mad scramble through Bristol’s best venues, breathlessly trying to catch a band, racking up the step count while often hearing of a barnstorming set that, typically, you missed.
The first band your correspondent is able to catch is My First Time, a local outfit whose sound is akin to Rage Against The Machine gate-crashing a Franz Ferdinand rehearsal.
https://www.live4ever.uk.com/adult-dvd-vlure-simple-things-review/
Daniel Avery - Live at the Beacon, Bristol, 7th November 2025
With the Simple Things festival officially underway, a dark, pulsing energy filled the Bristol Beacon on Friday night as Scaler and Daniel Avery brought two distinct visions of electronic intensity to the venue’s main hall.
Both acts pull at the boundaries of live dance music, merging the mechanical with the emotional, but both finding beauty in the noise.
Locals Scaler, who have evolved from their earlier industrial dance-rock beginnings and have expanded their live act (now featuring five musicians lined up across the stage), now channel something more refined yet no less ferocious.
Apparently determined to be more than just a support act their set, largely based around new album Endlessly, was less a gig more like an exorcism.
https://www.live4ever.uk.com/daniel-avery-bristol-beacon-review/
Interview - Tim Burgess
Although it’s been eight years since The Charlatans’ last album, frontman Tim Burgess has released three solo records, written several books, and spearheaded the lockdown-era phenomenon Tim’s Twitter Listening Parties, which later evolved into a spin-off show on Absolute Radio – all alongside a host of other creative ventures.
Meanwhile, Northwich’s finest haven’t exactly been idle themselves since Different Days arrived in 2017. A Best Of collection (A Head Full Of Ideas) and a post-lockdown tour kept things ticking over, though this remains the longest gap between albums in their nearly four-decade career. For the band themselves, however, the wait hasn’t felt quite so long.
“I guess we started writing it before 2023, but I keep thinking it was two and a half years ago that we started,” Burgess tells CLASH. “We had a download from above telling us we had to make a record, and so that’s what we did. We felt like we had something to say and something musically to add.”
The Clause - Victim Of A Casual Thing
The Clause have come a long way from their early days putting on DIY gigs in Digbeth, Birmingham.
What began as a group of college friends playing for their mates has evolved into a confident debut album that captures both their ambition and their limits.
Victim Of A Casual Thing is a collection of polished, guitar-led anthems that nod to mid-2000’s indie rock while occasionally revealing flashes of something more introspective beneath the surface.
The album opens with ‘Prologue’, a short cinematic scene that fades seemingly from last orders in a pub into a swirl of synths.
https://www.live4ever.uk.com/the-clause-victim-casual-thing-review/
Richard Hawley - Live at the Grand Pier, Weston, 11th October 2025
When Coles Corner first appeared in 2005, Richard Hawley’s lush orchestral pop was often labelled ‘retro’. Two decades on, it simply sounds timeless.
At the end of Weston-super-Mare’s Grand Pier, Sheffield’s favourite son (with all apologies to Messrs Cocker and Turner) revisits his breakthrough album with warmth, humour and characteristic understatement as the latest stop on the commemorative tour.
The set opens in hushed reverence with the familiar strings of the title-track sweeping through the old building.
Clad in a pale blue jacket, Hawley checks in on the crowd midway through the song with a gentle, ‘Everyone OK?’, before easing into ‘Just Like The Rain’, whose vulnerable skiffle rhythm flickers with bluegrass energy.
https://www.live4ever.uk.com/richard-hawley-live-grand-pier-review/
Richard Ashcroft - Lovin’ You
Galvanized by his special guest slot across the summer’s Oasis uber-gigs, Richard Ashcroft returns with his first album of new material in seven years. Yet little has changed: on Lovin’ You, he’s only thinking, writing, and singing about the big themes.
Best exemplified by the title of recent single ‘Lover’, the former Verve frontman once more draws inspiration from his undeniably deep love for his wife. But while the subject matter is familiar, musically there are new soundscapes, having returned to one of his favourite tricks: built around a looped riff sampled from Joan Armatrading’s ‘Love and Affection’, the track is all finger-snaps, strings, and a skull-thudding bassline, yet with soul and warmth. Shamelessly uplifting and disarmingly simple, exposure has been kind to it.
https://www.clashmusic.com/reviews/richard-ashcroft-lovin-you/
Scaler - Endlessly
Bristol’s Scaler (formerly Scalping) made their name by fusing metal instrumentation with the dark mechanics of club culture.
When they first emerged as a live act pre-lockdown, the gigs were pulverising in their intensity and the pandemic came at perhaps the wrong time for them.
Their 2022 debut Void was born in isolation, stitched together remotely, and while it showed off their ferocious energy, it sometimes leaned too heavily on blunt force, almost as if the sheer frustration of the endless days of nothingness were put to music while suffocating any nuance of life.
But on Endlessly (the band’s first release under their new name), they take a more organic and collaborative approach, recording side-by-side in the basement of Bristol’s iconic Louisiana.
The result is a more cohesive and atmospheric album, though not one without limitations.
The Beta Band - Live at the o2 Academy, Bristol - 30th September 2025
In a year of blockbuster reunions (Oasis, The Maccabees etc), The Beta Band’s return has flown curiously under the radar.
Yet one suspects that suits them just fine; Steve Mason and his cohorts have always thrived on being the outsiders, yet in the late 1990s they were perhaps indie’s most influential outfit.
21 years after calling it quits, they’ve re-emerged not with bombast or sentimentality but with the same eclecticism that made them cult heroes.
The night begins with a 10-minute intro film made up of spliced camcorder footage, including a parody of THAT scene from High Fidelity and even an appearance from Mani.
Then the four musicians wander on stage to Bowie’s ‘Memory Of A Free Festival’, dressed in boilersuits, surrounded by foliage and with enough percussion instruments to stock a music shop.
https://www.live4ever.uk.com/the-beta-band-bristol-gig-review/
GANS - Good For The Soul
“We felt connected when we met and we had ambitions that lay beyond that world,” explains GANS (‘Goose’ in German, fact fans) guitarist and vocalist Thomas Rhodes of his band’s gestation.
“We are fiercely proud of where we are from and we strongly believe in how we were raised. It’s just we have ambitions that are more Copacabana than Costa Del Dudley.”
The Black Country duo launch their mission statement on this restless and carefully constructed debut album.
Released on Peter Doherty’s Strap Originals and produced by Ross Orton (Arctic Monkeys, Working Men’s Club, Amyl & The Sniffers), Good For The Soul ambitiously blends electronics, rock and post-punk grit into an eclectic hotch-potch which remarkably never compromises on their identity or its sense of direction.
Led Zeppelin - Physical Graffiti 50th Anniversary Reissue
One of the defining rock records, when Physical Graffiti was released in 1975 it was Led Zeppelin’s first release on their Swan Song label and a double album that pulled together years of work into one sprawling, career-defining package.
Such is its importance, it has been analysed endlessly ever since but, half a century later, it still feels like the moment Led Zeppelin captured the full scope of what they could be.
The album had a troubled gestation: the initial sessions at Headley Grange in November 1973 were abandoned, while John Paul Jones had become disillusioned and was considering quitting.
Yet when they reconvened at the same location in early 1974, with John Bonham the driving force, their restless creativity yielded wonderful results.
https://www.live4ever.uk.com/led-zeppelin-phys-graffiti-50th-review/
Baxter Dury - Allbarone
Baxter Dury has built a career out of sardonic half-singing, half-snarling portraits of England’s absurdities.
On Allbarone, his ninth album and first collaboration with heavyweight producer Paul Epworth, he takes that persona to a neon-lit future.
The resulting album is Baxter Dury at perhaps his most direct; nine tracks of sharp wit, harsh beats and warped intimacy.
The opening title-track is all metallic, tick-tocking, swooping synths and a raver’s pulse, with long-term collaborator JGrrey’s vocals mirroring Dury’s own. Europop dressed in drama, it’s both accessible and unsettling.
The sheen feels almost luxurious, but beneath the incessantly repeated title lies the darker heart and theme of the record: a tension between longing and bitterness which is never resolved for the characters.
https://www.live4ever.uk.com/baxter-dury-allbarone-album-review/