Spiller

Akin to the Darkness in their unabashedly over the top, retro-fetishist, classic rock style, English rockers the Struts burst onto an unsuspecting public with big dreams and loud mouths to match. The band was the brainchild of singer Luke Spiller, the child of strict Christian parents, who had dreamed of being a showman ever since becoming obsessed with Michael Jackson at the age of seven. With his sexualized swagger, powerful voice, and outrageous pronouncements like "I was born to do this, and I'll die doing it," Spiller came off like a cross between Freddie Mercury, David Bowie, Mick Jagger, and Robert Plant. The band's music was a similar blend of '60s and '70s tropes, with big, singalong choruses that earned their videos hundreds of thousands of YouTube hits and won them a deal with Mercury Records.

Six years after the classical Music of the Spheres, Mike Oldfield returns to his version of rock. Man on the Rocks is a slick production that recalls the AOR sounds of the late '70s and early '80s. He plays many instruments here but concentrates mainly on guitar…

London glam rockers The Struts return with their third album. Lead cut is Strange Days which features the incomparable pop legend Robbie Williams. A magnificent, sprawling and string-laced duet, it’s a tender-hearted epic that offers incredible solace in the most chaotic of times. The song came about – along with the rest of the ten-track album – as a result of the band’s enforced lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic but started out as an idea lead singer Luke Spiller originally had on a tour bus last summer. It then took on a life of its own as a result of a chance encounter online.

Ase Kleveland releases her first album in almost 45 years. Ase Kleveland and The Salmon Smokers played for the first time at the big tribute concert for Leonard Choen in 2017, where they together rocked a packed Oslo Spektrum with a spectacular version of Choen's "First We Take Manhattan". The concert and the television recording left viewers with thoughts about what an artist we lost when Ase chose a career in cultural bureaucracy and politics.

Carl Nielsen’s incidental music The Mother was written for a gala celebrating the reunification of Southern Jutland with Denmark. The score first appeared in print in 2007 and has never been recorded in its entirety. This recording places the music in the right context for the first time, therefore providing us with a new picture of Carl Nielsen as a composer for the theatre. Carl Nielsen uses familiar songs in the play, including the Danish national anthem as well as a curious use of the national anthems from the allied countries that, with their attacks on Germany, determined the fate of Southern Jutland.