'music' - tagged features

The Little Match Girl is one of Hans Christian Andersen's most popular fairy tales. The little girl selling matches on New Year's Eve lights one after the other in order to capture the illusion of warmth. Like many of Andersen's tales it has a dark and bitter side. The little girl freezes to death in the snow. British songwriter and composer Martyn Jacques captures this fairytale in 12 songs he wrote for a special theatre production. He's performing the Little Match Girl with his trio The Tiger Lillies and touring Europe. 

Travis, Orange Juice, Texas, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Primal Scream, Teenage Fanclub and Franz Ferdinand. These rock bands all have one thing in common - they hail from Scotland's biggest city, Glasgow. Over the past couple of decades, the working class port city has produced an incredible number of critically acclaimed - and commercially successful – rock acts. 

With English taking over as the international language of music, throughout Europe it can be difficult to avoid Scottish, English and American bands blaring out of the radio. The situation is slightly different in France where bands singing in English face tough competition from French bands who opt for lyrics in their mother tongue. Find out why at the “Route du Rock” festival in Saint Malo. 

Romania's capital Bucharest is home to a small but vibrant underground music scene. Many of the musicians involved in the alternative scene grew up in the suburbs and their lyrics tend to reflect their experiences of social inequality. The bands might not be commercially successful, but their existence is a sign of the vibrancy of Romanian music. 

The Basowiszcza music festival in Poland has become a mecca for Belarusian rock fans who can't see their favourite bands at home. Basowiszcza, which has been running since 1990, showcases Belarusian rock acts banned from playing in their homeland by authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko. 

When night falls in the Serbian capital Belgrade, the whole city gets ready to go out and party. In the summertime, the nightlife takes place outdoors. Many clubs close down their bars and cellars in the town center and move to floating rafts on the banks of the Danube and Sava rivers. Hundreds of rafts line the imposing confluence of the two rivers and offer everything from Gypsy music to electronic beats, grunge and turbo folk - a sort of Serbian ethno-pop.