Wakeford shot to fame after appearing multiple times on the Channel 4 TV show The Undateables, in which people who live with challenging conditions attempt to find love and the show follows their progress. Wakeford is autistic, and after his music appeared on the show fans responded in a hugely positive way. In his fourth appearance on the show, he was filmed on tour performing his songs, and the tracks resonated with audiences.

Wakeford began making music in 2009 when musician and producer Tom Cook introduced him to Carousel, an organisation that runs music projects for disabled people, who were able to support Daniel to write his own music. Over the past decade, Wakeford has written over 60 songs with the help of Tom Cook and Carousel. He was a finalist in the European Song Competition in 2014 with his song ‘The Black of Lonely’ which he performed with a 21 piece orchestra.

His last tour, which took place in 2018, consisted of 19 UK dates all of which sold out, and he also made appearances on Good Morning Britain to promote his second album ‘That’s How I See It’.

As well as making great music, Wakeford is a fantastic positive role model for any people with learning disabilities looking to make it in music.

If you would like to buy tickets for The Daniel Wakefield Experience’s upcoming show, you can visit Resident music or the ticket web, and you can find out more about Wakeford and his upcoming music and shows by visiting danielwakeford.com.

The small venue has been named Small Community Co-op of the Year by Co-operatives UK, and it has also won a Lockdown Innovation Award at the Parliamentary Jazz awards to recognise its amazing work in the face of the pandemic.

The co-chair of the Pink Lane Jazz Co-op, Dave Parker, said in Business Live that “We’re delighted with this award because it recognises the vision, determination and hard work of members, volunteers and everyone else who helped keep us going during the pandemic, providing income for musicians, employment for staff, and joy for lovers of live music…Eight years ago, The Globe was a failing pub. Today it is an award-winning music venue and learning centre owned and run by a co-operative….It’s often been a struggle but we’ve succeeded by keeping people engaged.”

Although it was difficult keeping the venue going throughout the lockdowns and wider coronavirus crisis, Parker explained that streaming played a part in the co-op’s success, saying: “We worked with musicians to develop livestreaming, and soon decided this was the way forward. The Globe was refurbished, and new equipment was installed by volunteers. We were fortunate in accessing funding from Power to Change and the Culture Recovery Fund.” This enabled the co-op to hold live events virtually when attendance by music lovers wasn’t possible.

The Co-op is committed to more than just live music, and also rents out rehearsal spaces across the UK as well as offering a programme of music courses and jam sessions so that people are able to access music. 

The vault will protect from both nuclear and natural disasters, similarly to the gene banks, and will be placed on an island near the north pole. Speaking about the vault, Elire Management Group has said that it will be “built to withstand the kind of extreme electromagnetic pulses that could result from a nuclear explosion, which could permanently damage electronic equipment and play havoc with digital files”. This is similar in nature to the gene banks, which exist to protect sources of food that could help the human race feed itself in the future. 

While the gene banks are about protecting the future of humanity, this new doomsday vault is about protecting our past and our heritage for future generations to enjoy; the president of the IMC says: “This is about safeguarding the future of music in having these archives of the past.”

The music is due to enter the vault in spring 2022.

Phil Griffin is a photographer and music video director who worked with Winehouse on the videos for her second album Back to Black which featured hits including Rehab and Tears Dry On Their Own. Griffin set up the exhibition, which features photographs taken during the era of Back to Black, to encourage people to focus on the blues artist’s achievements rather than her notorious and tragic life story and death.

Griffin explained to the Guardian: “I want there to be a positive flow of conversation about her. She’s not just a tragic figure but a human being who was incredibly talented. She was a girl with a story to tell and she wasn’t afraid to tell it.”

In sharing some of the beautiful pictures taken during the shoots for the Back to Black music videos, Griffin hopes to show her as the artist she was not the tabloid headline she became, and he discusses how he thinks her life may have gone differently in an earlier age: “If she’d been born in a different age and was allowed to grow in the way that Diana Ross grew or the way that Ella Fitzgerald grew, she might still have remained a troubled figure, but I think we might still have her.”

Griffin is not the only person close to Amy who wants her story to be recast in a different light. Her family has also released a new documentary called Reclaiming Amy, which tells her story as a person, in contrast to the 2015 documentary Amy, which was critical of her family, and called ‘a disgrace’ by her father.

Griffin’s exhibition is titled ‘Amy in the Light’ and opens at the Brownsword Hepworth Gallery in Knightsbridge, London on 26th July. The exhibition is free to attend.

The band have also released an album trailer featuring an animated cosmic journey with clips from each track.

The band announced the album and trailer with a handwritten, multicoloured note on Instagram which read:

“Hello everyone <3 we hope you’re doing really well. We have a new album called Music of the Spheres coming out on Friday 15th October 2021. It is produced by Max Martin. There is a trailer for the album called ‘Overtura’ which you can watch or listen to now if you like. Then on Friday an album track called ‘coloratura’. Our next single will come out in September. Thank you for listening, or coming to shows, or anyway we have met through music. With love, Chris, Jonny, Guy and Will (and Phil), a.k.a Coldplay.”

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The first single from the upcoming record, ‘Higher Power’, was released in May and another track ‘Colotura’ will be released this coming Friday (23rd July).

The band also performed ‘Higher Power’ for Macy’s Fourth of July celebrations, as well as headlining Glastonbury’s Livestream concert that was held instead of the usual live event as a result of the ongoing coronavirus crisis. They will also perform later in the year at the Brit awards.

The band’s most recent album was released in 2020 and named “Reimagined“, as it featured a pared-back reimagining of five tracks from their 2019 album Everyday Life. This is the band’s first full-length studio album since the release of Everyday Life in November 2019.

Other festivals of a similar size, such as UK Boomtown spin off Boom Village, have decided not to go ahead, stating that “The core decision is due to the escalating cases of Covid-19 across the country, and the risks that widespread illness and self-isolation could have on our crew and contractors, which would result in us not having enough people to build and deliver the show to the high public safety standards we uphold.”

The Green Man festival, founded by Jo and Danny Hagan in 2003, takes place annually in the Brecon Beacons in Wales from the 19th-22nd August. The festival will host a wide range of artists including Mogwai, Caribou, Fontaines DC, and Thundercat, as well as other artists spanning the genres of indie, folk, jazz, pop, post-punk and electronic music. Stuart Braithwaite of Mogwai was delighted at the announcement, stating that “We’ve been looking forward to making a racket in the countryside for a long time.”

Wales has been doing better than England in terms of cases and contaminants, hence more optimistic projections for large and live events to be able to go ahead. 

All attendees will have to provide proof that they have been double vaccinated at least two weeks before the event takes place, but the festival will not require masks to be worn.  The festival is not one of the events making up the government’s testing programme, meaning data will not be collected from the event to analyse how it affects the spread of coronavirus.

In an interview published in Music Ally explaining the initiative, Gray said that “This is Covid-19. Live [income] has gone, PRO money is going to dry up shortly. Whatever anger you think there is in the industry now towards streaming, imagine it in six months’ time when the last of the money that’s in touring musicians’ bank accounts has gone, and when their PRS and PPL cheques go through the floor.” His movement prompted the government to start an inquiry into the issue.

In recent days, after a six-month enquiry into the effects of streaming into the music industry, some MPs have agreed that a reset of fees is necessary in order to ensure fairness for musicians. Several studies have shown that The MP Julian Knight has said that “While streaming has brought significant profits to the recorded music industry, the talent behind it – performers, songwriters and composers – are losing out.”

As reported by the BBC, other recommendations made by the study include:

• Musicians and songwriters should be allowed to reclaim the rights to their work from labels after a set period of time.
• Artists should be given the right to adjust their contract if their work is successful beyond the remuneration they received.
• The government should explore ways to ensure songwriters, who receive minimal streaming royalties, can have sustainable careers.
• Curators who make playlists on services like Spotify and Apple Music should adhere to a “code of conduct” to avoid bribes and favouritism.
• The government should require publishers and royalty societies to inform artists about how much money is flowing through the system.

Gray said he was “overjoyed” by the results of the inquiry, and said that “It feels like a massive vindication…they’ve really come to the same conclusions that we’ve been saying for a very long time.”

The singer sadly passed away from alcohol poisoning on the 23rd July 2011 after a lengthy battle with addiction and tumultuous personal relationships, as well as struggling with public scrutiny. The new documentary was suggested as a project by her mother Janis Winehouse Collins, who wanted to create a true reflection of the Amy she knew for fans before she is overtaken by Multiple Sclerosis, a progressive disease that affects physical ability as well as memory and mental function. A press release about the documentary’s release said that “Janis lives with Multiple Sclerosis, a condition which threatens to strip her of her memories of Amy, and is a large part of her motivation to make this timely and personal documentary.”

She feels that the world was unable to get to know the real Amy, and wants to set the record straight.  The documentary will also feature an appearance from Mitch Winehouse, Amy’s father and the subject of the now-iconic song ‘Rehab’ from Winehouse’s album Back to Black.

Speaking about the documentary, Winehouse’s mother said “I don’t feel the world knew the true Amy, the one that I brought up, and I’m looking forward to the opportunity to offer an understanding of her roots and a deeper insight into the real Amy.”

You can watch the trailer for the new documentary below, and watch the full film at 9 pm on the 23rd July on BBC 2. Fans countrywide will tune in to better understand a wonderful artist lost too soon. 

Taking inspiration from such artists as Elbow, Elton John and Tears for Fears, the new album is a journey through the experience of the pandemic for listeners.

In a statement in Brave Words, singer and lyricist David Longdon said that “After the death of a collaborator Judy Dyble in July 2020, I time spent shielding with an ill relative. With everything that was happening around me and for the world with the relentless doomwatch tone of the news broadcasts, I spoke with Greg. I said I couldn’t just be writing songs about historical figures and scenarios. I felt that I needed to write about the here and now. In ‘The Strangest Times’, I’m writing very directly about what has been happening globally and how I feel about it. The screaming media broadcasts made me want to avoid watching or listening to the news, but I made myself read the latest news once a day. I felt better when I was out of the house and walking by the brook and then visiting Watnall Wood in Nottinghamshire. I have always admired the directness of Pete Townshend’s lyrics, and that very much fitted the tone of the song. The music has a driving piano feel to it. I wanted it to sound like an Elton John rocker with that pushing rhythm piano playing that he does. When Rikard and I spoke about this song and I mentioned Elton John, he referred to ‘Grey Seal’ from ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ as external stimuli. That track directly inspired Rikard’s swift piano arpeggios. Dave Foster played electric guitar on this song, and when we met at Real World in November 2020, I said that I wanted the electric part to be Pete Townshend-esque, and Dave knew exactly what I was pushing for.”

The band will give an extensive UK tour for the album in 2022, starting in York and ending in the London Palladium. They will announce a North American tour in the coming weeks.

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You can listen to the new single here:

UK TOUR DATES

15.03.22: Barbican -York
16.03: Corn Exchange -Cambridge
18.03: Symphony Hall -Birmingham
19.03: Forum -Bath
21.03: Royal Concert Hall -Glasgow
22.03: Bridgewater Hall -Manchester
23.03: PALLADIUM – London

In an instagram post, Bon Iver announced that “After careful consideration of the fluid situation of the pandemic, we have decided to reschedule our fall 2021 European tour dates for October and November 2022. The ongoing uncertainty around international travel and restrictions make any kind of international touring impossible.

Unfortunately, we are unable to include a rescheduled Cologne date at this time and our dear friend @aarondessner’s Big 37d03d Machine is not able to join us for the rescheduled dates. For London purchasers, tickets for 11/1/21 are now valid for 10/25/22; tickets for 11/2/21 are now valid for 10/26/22.

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We want ALL of our fans across the world to be healthy and safe when we play for them; together, we can keep moving in the right direction and be together again soon! All previously purchased tickets are valid for the new date. Please contact your point of purchase for any additional ticketing questions.”

All tickets already purchased will be valid at the rescheduled concerts and refunds can be obtained through individual ticket vendors for fans who can no longer attend. The new tour will still take place throughout the UK and Europe on its new dates.