Michael Hubbard

3 days ago | musicomh.com | Michael Hubbard

The Mael Brothers celebrate their highest-charting album MAD! with deep dives, hits and reciprocated love The brothers Mael arrive for two shows at London’s Hammersmith Apollo fresh from touring Japan and scoring their highest album chart position of their long career as Sparks with 28th album MAD! Another entry in the band’s prolific and excellent latter-day imperial phase that began with 2017’s Hippopotomus, it reached Number 2 – five places higher than the three studio albums that preceded...

1 week ago | musicomh.com | Michael Hubbard

Lean, mean music machine Trent Reznor and his cohorts fire on all cylinders in the Peel It Back tourTrent Reznor turned 60 last month, an age at which reviews are duty-bound to start mentioning that he is now a sexagenarian. On the evidence of the London date of Nine Inch Nails’ sensory-whelming Peel It Back tour, there are scant signs of the industrial titan and latter-day movie soundtrack master slowing down. On the contrary, the band’s 2025 iteration is at last an arena headliner.

2 weeks ago | musicomh.com | Michael Hubbard

At the start of her European tour, the consummate musician/feminist icon brings together musical numbers with songs old and new Feminist icon, independent trailblazer, “little folk singer”, Grammy winner, label owner, activist, sometime Prince collaborator and author Ani DiFranco is in town for her first music-playing UK date in eight years, kicking off a tour of Europe in support of her recent – and 27th – album Unprecedented Sh!t that also takes in a stop at Glastonbury.

3 weeks ago | musicomh.com | Michael Hubbard

Unique, pitch-perfect and vital, the 2025 edition had nostalgia, politics, contemporary edge – and community to the foreIt’s a music festival in Brockwell Park, but that’s not even statistically the half of it. It’s the Gay Glastonbury: there’s no need to overnight in a tent, but there is camping. It’s the Gay Halloween: outfits aside, have you seen that there’s a witch singing songs from Wicked! on the second stage?

4 weeks ago | musicomh.com | Michael Hubbard

The opening of London’s 2025 music festival season has been fraught, with obstacles in nature both local and global thrown in its path The festival that is now called Field Day is a very different offering from the independently minded, superbly curated yet logistically problematic event which debuted in Hackney’s Victoria Park way back in 2007.