AUGUST 2025 ISSUE
A sneaky peek of just some of what is in the August 2025 issue – OUT NOW!
CURTIS HARDING
Welcome to Soul Tales Of The Unexpected: Part Four.
This time around, our hero, Curtis Harding, a guy who grew up on gospel and remains, at heart, a soulman – albeit one with side interests in indie-rock, psychedelia, blues and numerous other musical tangents that may occasionally put flight to his fancy – has launched himself into space. Departures & Arrivals: Adventures Of Captain Curt, the man’s fourth solo album and the first one he’s self-produced since his 2014 debut, Soul Power, finds Harding merging his soul roots into what can only be described as an intergalactic opera…
ADRIAN SHERWOOD
Adrian Sherwood’s latest album is called The Collapse Of Everything and if ever a title captured our collective mood, this is it. Yet the music on it isn’t austere or foreboding, but quite beautiful in a proud, strong kind of way.
“Recently I lost two great friends – Mark Stewart & Keith LeBlanc – and started working with the idea of doing another solo record, because it’s been a long time since Survival & Resistance,” he explains. “Mark had written a song and part of a lyric was about the collapse of everything. It seemed a very appropriate title, both summing up my feelings about losing Mark and Keith and, on another level, what’s going on in the world now both politically and environmentally.”
CONNER REEVES
All music fans are cognisant of at least the notion of ‘the difficult second album’, that’s a given. What, then, of the follow-up project that arrives 27 years later?
Step forward Conner Reeves, the songwriter whose ambitions to be an artist led, back in 1997, to a debut solo album, Earthbound, that was successful enough to land him a Brit Award nomination and a support slot for the touring Whitney Houston, yet whose second set, Ten Thousand Days & The Church Of The Restoration, is only due for release at the end of this month. [Hence the first part of its title.]
The explanation for the gap, as you’ll hear, is partly contained in the lyrics to some of the songs on the new album…
TERRI LYNE CARRINGTON/CHRISTIE DASHIELL
“A revolution is unfurling, America’s unfinished revolution. It is unfurling at lunch counters, buses, libraries and schools, wherever the dignity and potential of men are denied. Youth and idealism are unfurling. Masses of Negroes are marching on to the stage of history and demanding their freedom now.”
This speech by A. Philip Randolph, a key figure of the African-American Labour Union movement, forms the opening paragraph to one of the great entries in the canon of modern protest music: Max Roach’s 1960 album We Insist! Freedom Now Suite…
