thu 28/03/2024

Michael Jackson

Hitsville: the Making of Motown - a thrilling celebration of the record label's heyday

Berry Gordy, who founded the Motown label in Detroit in 1959, borrowed his star-maker machinery from the car assembly line. When he worked at the Lincoln-Mercury plant he was inspired by how a bare metal frame would emerge as brand new car. “What a...

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Sunday Book: Zadie Smith - Swing Time

In his lovely memoir My Father’s Fortune, Michael Frayn dubs the Holloway and Caledonian Roads the “Tigris and Euphrates” of his family history. In that case, just a few pages west in the London A-Z (the mystic scripture that baffles an American...

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The Joy of the Guitar Riff, BBC Four

We all love a good guitar riff and so a whole hour devoted to this one simple pleasure sounds like a surefire hit. BBC Four is the go-to channel for the rock‘n’roll documentary and this latest offering boasted a dazzling line-up including Brian May...

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Michael Jackson: Bad 25, BBC Two

The latter years of Michael Jackson were a sorry saga of debt, lawsuits and sordid allegations about his private life, with the artist seeming an increasingly desperate and isolated figure. Director Spike Lee aims to salvage Jackson's artistic...

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Janet Jackson – Taking Control, BBC Four

How do you forge a pop career in the shadow of the biggest pop star on the planet? What is perhaps forgotten about Janet Jackson is that not only did she pull this off, but for a while she actually overshadowed her older brother. But this...

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Gareth Goes to Glyndebourne, BBC Two

We love Gareth Malone, don’t we? We are big fans of the Pied Piper of primetime. And so we should be. The youth of today seem impressively eager to down tools, put away childish things like knives and drugs and safe-cracking equipment, and follow...

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Marc Quinn, White Cube

Marc Quinn is used to making a spectacle of himself. In Self (1991 and ongoing), a life-sized cast of his head was filled with his own blood. It was a stark and sobering reflection on what we all share, the universality of the most basic of human...

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Noughty Girls: Britney, Amy, Beyoncé, Kylie... and Kaija

Last night I was thinking, as I often do, of Britney, Kylie, Beyoncé, and less of Shakira, mainly because her name doesn’t end in y or e. The reason that my thoughts turned to Britney et al (incidentally we are delighted to have britneyspearsfans @...

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