News Round-Up: Michael Kiwanuka, Royal Blood and more

Michael Kiwanuka performing at Citadel 2017 (Alberto Pezzali / Live4ever)

Michael Kiwanuka performing at Citadel (Alberto Pezzali / Live4ever)

You’re in the right place if you’ve missed any of the week’s top news stories – here Live4ever’s News Round-Up presents a recap of the biggest and best headlines we featured during the last seven days…

Michael Kiwanuka has picked up the 2020 Mercury Prize thanks to KIWANUKA.

If this year’s winner being announced on The One Show took a bit of shine off the prestigious award, the recipient should prove to be a popular one at least, Kiwanuka beating big name competition from the likes of Stormzy and Dua Lipa, as well as equally lauded work from the likes of Laura Marling and Sports Team, to pick the £25,000 winner’s cheque.

Add The Shins to the list of bands whose return with new music is making 2020 slightly more tolerable.

“It’s an epic about longing and love in a broken world,” James Mercer says of The Great Divide. “I guess we wanted to try to provide a bit of warmth and sentiment in hard times. We used everything from vintage synthesizers to iPhones, from a sixties Ludwig kit to an 808.”

Boots on the streets in Austin during March 2021 hasn’t quite been ruled out yet, but with the fate of pretty much everything next year still up in the air, South By Southwest organisers have begun planning a virtual event for the week which is usually one of the busiest in the music calendar.

Encompassing all the multimedia facets of SXSW, the music part of the online event will be curated by programming staff, albeit with a keen eye on those artists who would have been performing in Texas earlier this year had it not been for the eleventh hour cancellation.

Royal Blood playing Leeds Festival 2019 (Gary Mather for Live4ever)

Royal Blood stuck to their word and returned last week with new single Trouble’s Coming.

The single comes with another promise; for the release of the duo’s third studio album in the spring of 2021, Mike Kerr explaining that it was this track which helped to get the new record into gear – when they ‘started playing over those much more rigid dance beats’.

Stick your head above the parapet, whether you mean to or not, and someone will take a pot shot.

Idles have both set and demanded some high standards for themselves during the past few years, so the recent criticism surrounding their support of female artists as a band which quite literally exclaims ‘feminism’ is perhaps, in turn, both justified and unjustified. Whatever the debate, they’ve moved quickly to address it by announcing an all-female backing cast for their UK and Ireland tour which is booked for May/June 2021.

Fleet Foxes put out a new album last week, with the autumnal equinox very much in mind.

The quick release of Shore was set to be accompanied by a 55-minute, super 16mm companion film directed by Kersti Jan Werdal, as the band follow-up 2017’s comeback Crack-Up – one of Live4ever’s top picks of that year.