State Champ Radio BBC
The Last Dinner Party comes first in the BBC Radio 1’s Sound of 2024, an annual poll that tips-off the next big thing in music.
Based in London, the indie rock-pop quintet — Abigail Morris (vocals), Georgia Davies (bass), Lizzie Mayland (guitar), Aurora Nishevci (keys) and Emily Roberts (lead guitar) — captured the buzz on both sides of the Atlantic last year, thanks in part to “Nothing Matters,” their breakthrough debut single.
“Nothing Matters” was a legitimate alternative radio hit in the United States, cracking the top 10 (peaking at No. 8) on Billboard’s Adult Alternative Airplay chart dated Sept. 23.
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Along the way, the band performed at Glastonbury Festival 2023, opened for the Rolling Stones in London’s Hyde Park, embarked on their first North American tour, and headlined a show at London’s Roundhouse.
“We are overjoyed to have won BBC Radio 1’s Sound Of Award for 2024,” the bandmates enthuse in a statement. “We predict amazing things happening in music this year and it is truly an honor to even be a part of it. BBC Radio has championed us and so many other young artists from the start of their careers, we still can’t believe it every time we hear one of our songs being played.”
If 2023 was the warmup, 2024 should be the payoff.
New track “Caesar on a TV Screen” turns up on Billboard’s latest Friday Music Guide, ahead of the release next month of the band’s full-length debut Prelude to Ecstasy.
The Last Dinner Party was selected by a panel of over 140 industry experts and artists, including Olivia Rodrigo, Declan McKenna, Chase & Status, Mahalia and others.
It’s a rare double for the newcomers; they’ve already collected this year’s BRITs Rising Star Award, a result that raises expectations for the five-piece to fever pitch.
With the Corporation’s coveted award, the Last Dinner Party joins the likes of previous winners Adele, Sam Smith, Haim, Ellie Goulding, Sigrid and last year’s champion, Flo.
“Every artist who has been nominated or won over the years is such a powerhouse, it humbles us to join their ranks,” the band continues in a statement. “Thank you to guitar music for never dying. Bands are back, baby.”
Honorable mention this year goes to Olivia Dean, Peggy Gou, Tyla and Elmiene, who respectively complete the BBC’s top 5 list of acts to watch.
The top five acts for Sound of 2024:
The Last Dinner Party
Olivia Dean
Peggy Gou
Tyla
Elmiene
It’s been six years since the #MeToo movement exploded into the mainstream consciousness, and Ellie Goulding believes that the reckoning has changed the music industry for the better. In a new interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today show, the “Love Me Like You Do” singer recounted the evolution of her experiences in the music industry post-#MeToo.
“I definitely think the landscape has changed a bit, especially since the [#MeToo] movement,” Goulding said. “I think that was really, really important for people to keep speaking out about their individual stories, because I know a lot was happening and just wasn’t being talked about.”
Activist Tarana Burke first coined the phrase “Me Too” in the context of raising awareness against sexual violence and rape culture in 2006. The phrase grew into a culture-shifting social movement by 2017 when several sexual abuse allegations were levied against disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein.
Those Weinstein allegations became a catalyst for more people to feel comfortable coming forward and sharing their stories. In the interview, Goulding recounted an experience that she had “sort of normalized.”
“You know, when you go into a studio and afterwards the producer asks if you want to go for a drink. And I’m quite a polite person, I don’t like letting people down. I don’t like disappointing people. So I was like, ‘Yeah, sure, absolutely, go for a drink,’” she explained. “And then it sort of somehow becomes like a romantic thing when it shouldn’t. You don’t want it to be a romantic thing, but it’s like there was always a slight feeling of discomfort when you walked into a studio and it was just one or two men writing or producing.”
For Goulding, “hearing so many other, similar stories from other female musicians and singers” helped her realize that those experiences — which she described as a “kind of currency” — were not to be normalized. “I [realized] that I wasn’t alone in it at all. It wasn’t just me, being particularly friendly.”
“It was like a sort of unspoken thing where if you’re working with male producers, that was almost like an expectation, which sounds mad for me to say out loud, and it definitely wouldn’t happen now. I mean, very rarely, because things have just really changed,” she said. “Younger artists at Polydor, my record label, will now have chaperones when they go to the studio. And they also have a chance to speak to a [counselor] or speak to someone about their experience as an up-and-coming musician.”
The “Lights” singer’s recent sentiments echo a 2020 Independent interview where she said, “I feel really stupid for saying I wasn’t affected by the #MeToo movement… I [normalized] too much and I am sad about that.”
Goulding is entering the new year with her second career Grammy nomination — best pop dance recording for “Miracle” (with Calvin Harris). In 2023, she earned her sixth career entry on the Billboard 200 with Higher Than Heaven (No. 125), which also hit No. 1 on the U.K. Albums chart.
The BBC’s historic Maida Vale Studios has been sold to a business partnership headed by Oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmer and film producers Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner, the British broadcaster announced Monday (Aug. 14).
The famous London facility has been used for music recording since the 1930s and has played host to everyone from Adele to David Bowie to The Beatles throughout its storied history. The BBC first announced its plans to close the building and relocate to a new purpose-built music base in 2018, although Maida Vale Studios was only officially put up for sale by the broadcaster in November.
The new owners, which also includes Zimmer’s business partner, Steven Kofsky, have said that the Grade II listed building — originally a roller-skating palace — will continue to operate as a music hub and will undergo a multi-million-pound refurbishment to create a “world-class studio space for the next generation of composers, producers, editors and engineers.”
Terms were not disclosed for the deal, but last year it was reported that the studios were being advertised on the property market for offers above £10.5 million ($13.3 million). According to Sky News, a rival business consortium that included Warner Music Group controlling shareholder Len Blavatnik and film producer Matthew Vaughn also made an offer to buy the studios but was rejected.
Zimmer, Bevan, Fellner and Kofsky said they will also establish a not-for-profit education facility at Maida Vale Studios that will provide jobs and opportunities for the local community.
In announcing the sale, the BBC’s director of music, Lorna Clarke, paid tribute to the important role the venue has played in British popular culture. “We are so pleased to secure a sale which looks to continue the bright, vibrant future of music-making in this iconic building,” she said in a statement.
Zimmer recalled the first time he worked for the BBC at the complex 45 years ago. “I still remember the strong pull, the desire to touch the walls, as if that would somehow allow me to connect to the artists whose extraordinary music had resonated against these walls on a daily basis,” said the composer.
Zimmer went on to say that he now wants to “close the circle” and make the facility an inspirational place “that gives the next generation the same opportunities I was given: to create and to never give up.”
Bevan and Fellner, co-chairmen of London-based film production company Working Title, called the acquisition a “once-in-a-lifetime project” that will continue the BBC’s legacy by attracting global talent to the United Kingdom.
In addition to playing host to a wealth of rock and pop stars over the years — a long list that also includes Led Zeppelin, Dusty Springfield, Beyoncé and Bing Crosby, who made this final recording there in 1977 just days before he died — Maida Vale studios was previously home to the BBC’s pioneering Radiophonic Workshop.
At present, the facility is home to the BBC Symphony Orchestra and is regularly used to record a large number of music and drama sessions broadcast across the BBC’s radio and online network. The BBC says it has agreed to lease back the building from the new owners and will continue to use the studios until it moves to a new studio complex, which is currently under construction in East London and due to open in late 2025.
A 60-year-old recording of the Beatles, said to be the earliest full taping of the Fab Four on home soil, has come to light.
The gig took place on April 4, 1963 when the-then rising band performed at the school’s theater.
Teenager John Bloomfield, a boarder at Stowe in Buckinghamshire, tested out his new reel-to-reel tape recorder at the show. The result, revealed on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, opens with “I Saw Her Standing There,” then segues into Chuck Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business.”
The recording “captures the appeal of The Beatles’ tightly-honed live act,” according to the Corporation, “with a mixture of their club repertoire of R&B covers and the start of the Lennon/McCartney songwriting partnership, with tracks off their debut album Please Please Me, which had been released barely two weeks earlier, on 22 March.”
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Speaking about the find, Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn comments, “The opportunity that this tape presents, which is completely out of the blue, is fantastic because we hear them just on the cusp of the breakthrough into complete world fame. And at that point, all audience recordings become blanketed in screams.”
He adds, “So here is an opportunity to hear them in the U.K., in an environment where they could be heard and where the tape actually does capture them properly, at a time when they can have banter with the audience as well.”
The mic picks up the mostly-male audience shouting out requests and, crucially, the BBC adds, the recording isn’t drowned out by screaming, a hallmark of “Beatlemania.”
Bloomfield, who kept the recording safe through the years, but hadn’t revealed its existence until now, is now 70.
“I think it’s an incredibly important recording,” adds Lewisohn, “and I hope something good and constructive and creative eventually happens to it.”
Though the Beatles officially split in 1970, the year of the release of Let It Be, their twelfth and final studio album, the legend, and the myth continues to grow.
A Danny Boyle-helmed film based on the band’s music, Yesterday, was released in June 2019; recent reissues of the Beatles’ catalog have topped sales charts around the globe; and Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson invited fans inside for previously-unseen final recording sessions, and the band’s legendary performance atop the Apple Corps headquarters in London, for an exhaustive three-part documentary series, Get Back, which dropped in late 2021 on Disney+.
Read more on “The Beatles at Stowe School” here.
The BBC isn’t putting up with Sabrina Carpenter‘s “Nonsense,” if you will. The 23-year-old singer appeared on BBC Radio 1’s Live Lounge music series to sing her hit Emails I Can’t Send track “Nonsense” as well as a cover of Harry Styles’ hit “Late Night Talking” on Feb. 23, and added an ad-libbed line joking the acronym “BBC” standing for, well, something very different from “British Broadcasting Corporation” that was scrapped from the official video of the performance.
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Shortly after a video of Carpenter’s Live Lounge visit was uploaded to BBC Radio 1’s YouTube channel, it was removed and an edited version was re-uploaded. As it stands, the video cuts off the Work It actress right before she finishes her No. 56 Billboard Hot 100 hit with an ad lib captured by fans: “I’m American I am not British/ So BBC it stands for something different/ This live lounge just so lit because I’m in it.”
“An unedited version of the video was briefly posted in error, and the correct version is now available for viewers to enjoy,” a BBC Radio 1 spokesperson tells Billboard, though they did not specify why and how the video was edited.
The natural conclusion, though, is that the double entendre (consult Urban Dictionary if you’re lost) may have been a little too raunchy by the BBC Radio 1. But for fans who are familiar with Carpenter’s tradition of improvising occasionally NSFW lyrics every time she performs “Nonsense” — past ones include references to her rumored Joshua Bassett romance and having “no t–s” — the situation is pretty hilarious.
Even English pop star Charli XCX chimed in on the matter, tweeting, “sabrina carpenter explaining bbc on the bbc is so funny i can’t.”
Billboard has reached out to Carpenter’s team for comment. Watch her edited performance of “Nonsense” and “Late Night Talking” on BBC Radio 1’s Live Lounge below:
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Source: Stephane Cardinale – Corbis / Getty
The artist known as Ye is expected to be the subject of an upcoming documentary and a podcast from the BBC.
Word has it that Mobeen Azhar will be the host of the We Need to Talk About Kanye documentary planned by the British network. (The title is tentative, per the network.) The BAFTA-winning investigative journalist will follow the “Flashing Lights” rapper as he sets out on his campaign to become president in 2024. Azhar has been lauded for his work as the lead journalist in the documentary The Battle for Britney, which covered the battle over pop star Britney Spears’ conservatorship in detail.
The one-off documentary will be accompanied by an eight-part podcast series entitled The Kanye Story. The series is expected to feature various figures from Ye’s life from his early days until now. Both projects were ordered by the newly-minted Head of Popular Music Jonathan Rothery. UK-based company Forest Sounds will be in charge of the production, with Abacus Media Rights handling the distribution. No date has been set for the documentary, which will air on BBC Two.
The news comes as Ye is dealing with the aftermath of his antisemitic remarks & behavior, which began on Twitter last October. Since then, he has suffered multiple setbacks on the business front, including the severing of ties with Adidas. It has not stopped him from associating with far-right figures like Nick Fuentes and meeting with former President Donald Trump last Thanksgiving.
Another project featuring the multi-hyphenate entertainer done in collaboration with MRC was shelved in October. MRC studio executives Modi Wiczyk, Asif Satchu and Scott Tenley released a statement at that time, saying:“Last week he sampled and remixed a classic tune that has charted for over 3,000 years — the lie that Jews are evil and conspire to control the world for their own gain.”
Flo are crowned winners of the BBC’s Sound of 2023, an annual poll that identifies the next big thing in music.
The British R&B trio — Renée Downer, Stella Quaresma and Jorja Douglas — was formed in 2019 and signed the following year to Island Records, a division of Universal Music Group.
Their debut single, “Cardboard Box,” dropped last March and was followed in July by EP The Lead.
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Subsequent appearances on Jimmy Kimmel Live and the BBC’s Later… With Jools Holland confirmed their talent with audiences on both sides of the Atlantic.
Flo’s message is “to be strong in yourself, to be confident,” the group tells the BBC.
“There is female empowerment – but everyone who listens should feel supported, inspired, independent,” says Quaresma. “We want them to feel the way music used to make us feel.”
The Sound Of 2023 was voted on by a 130-strong music industry panel, which included former nominees Dua Lipa, Stormzy, Sam Smith and Foals.
With the Corporation’s seal of approval, Flo joins an elite circle of winners which includes Adele, Sam Smith, Haim, Ellie Goulding, Sigrid and last year’s winner, PinkPantheress.
Producer Fred Again (real name Fred Gibson) is runner-up in the 2023 list, which was open to new artists yet to achieve a top five album or more than two top 10 singles by Oct. 31 2022. Those artists who had appeared on reality TV shows within the past three years were ineligible for the competition.
The competition was open to new artists who had yet to achieve a top five album or more than two top 10 singles by Oct. 31, 2022. Artists who had appeared on TV talent shows within the last three years were ineligible.
The BBC Music Sound of 2023 top five:
Flo
Fred Again
Nia Archives
Cat Burns
Gabriels
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