Features
theartsdesk
In the next instalment of our Year Out/Year In series, theartsdesk's New Music writers cast a critical eye over 2010, and offer some recommendations for 2011, incorporating some very funky videos. Our selection of recommended albums from the past year ranges wildly over electronica, world, jazz, indie, rock and folk. We also note some disasters and sad losses. Written by Howard Male, Peter Culshaw, Russ Coffey, Peter Quinn, Bruce Dessau, Kieron Tyler and Thomas H Green.PETER CULSHAWGood things about 2010 Brad Mehldau's surpisingly successful mix of classical, film and jazz music for the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Captain Beefheart, who with his Magic Band made John Peel’s favourite album, 1969’s extraordinary Trout Mask Replica, died of complications from multiple sclerosis last week, aged 69. In tribute, below is a feature from 2003, much of it unpublished till now, in which members of several incarnations of The Magic Band reminisce about their tyrannical, brilliant leader, and the jaw-dropping story of Trout Mask Replica’s creation. At the time I spoke to them, the Captain was living in the desert, a reclusive but successful painter known as Don Van Vliet who had been a minor star in the Read more ...
anne.billson
2010 will go down as the year I fell out of love with Johnny Depp. And not just because of his cringe-making Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland, an over-produced farrago which reduced Lewis Carroll's dark Victorian whimsy to a dull computer gamelike chase-rescue-showdown scenario. The Deppster sealed the Double Whammy of Dreadfulness with his uncanny impression of naff comedian Rob Schneider in The Tourist, a would-be rom-com thriller that somehow sacrificed the romantic, comedic and thriller elements of its remit to fawning close-ups of the increasingly prognathic Angelina Jolie. If only it Read more ...
howard.male
Once upon a time in the central West Bank, a child called Jesus was allegedly born to a virgin. Once upon an even earlier time, the Greek demigod Perseus was also allegedly born to a virgin, likewise the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli. You can probably see where I’m going with this. There have been countless holy figures from Mexico to China, from Mongolia to Korea, and on and on down the millennia, who have supposedly been born in this biology-denying manner. Within the macrocosm of the mythic it all makes perfect sense: obviously a supernatural being would come into being in a Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Now that The X Factor's finally over, can we please get back to heaping opprobrium on the only Wagner that really deserves it? In the coming year opera houses around the world will be deciding whether to temporarily bankrupt themselves in 2013 to celebrate the composer's centenary. Opera Australia have announced a £10 million Ring Cycle. LA Opera and the Met are in the middle of new bank-busting cycles (£20 million and £15 million respectively). No doubt ours will want in some way to follow suit. Yet they would do well to steer clear. We cannot afford it. And we should not be encouraging this Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Over the last 25 years I've done a lot of DJing, or at least playing records in public that, occasionally, people have been refreshed enough to dance to. I've done sets in all manner of scenarios, from nightclubs to house parties, to gallery events, to a Finnish festival in front of thousands, to a Balham comedy club. The last used to pay me £300 a night to play the same cheese and predictability week after week, but one evening when I put on "Fools Gold" by The Stone Roses and my heart sank with boredom, I knew it was time to get out, £300 or no £300.So what is an "unexpected party Read more ...
Graham Fuller
A nostalgified panacea of pine, tinsel, and tintinnabulation? Or a black hole of loneliness, bitterness and melancholy? Films about Christmas, wholly or partially, have straddled both polarities over the years, producing a surprising number of classics. In compiling this list, I hummed and hahed over Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa (2003), starring Billy Bob Thornton as a hard-drinking (if redeemable) misanthrope who poses in the red suit and white beard to get at a department store’s Christmas takings. It's wicked fun, but to have included it would have been disingenuous: at the time of writing [ Read more ...
sue.steward
"The way I keep in touch with the world… is very gingerly… because the world touches too hard." That honest and hugely poignant statement by the musician, composer, songwriter, painter and full-on eccentric Captain Beefheart comes from a documentary film by Anton Corbijn titled Don van Vliet: Some Yo Yo Stuff (1994). His staccato delivery is a clue to the terrible toll of sharing his life for decades with multiple sclerosis, but it also feels like a comment on those who just didn’t "get" his music, his performances and his shimmeringly surreal conversations. It carries extra meaning now that Read more ...
carole.woddis
Seems we’re living through a silly season. There are rumours afoot that our PM’s Big Society is nothing other than a fig leaf for a chaos theory of how to run society, ie let the devil take the hindmost. And in the arts we’ve got theatre’s esteemed trade paper declaring, in a much-publicised puff - organised through a star-studded panel of the Great and the Good and “hundreds of readers voting from a list of 10 actors” - that Dame Judi Dench is The Greatest Stage Actor of all time.Well, good on The Stage. Nothing like stirring up debate to draw attention to yourself, and heaven knows Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Breton capital Rennes is an attractive city. Move north from the train station, pass through a covered market with tripe and saucisse sellers, cross a canal and there's a series of Italianate squares and arcades. Further along is the quaint Place St Anne and a warren of medieval streets lined with half-timbered buildings. It’s an inspiring cityscape. But for three days every December, the city is crammed with revellers and dogs on string who couldn't give a fig about the medieval cathedral. They're here for the Trans Musicales de Rennes, the annual musical jamboree. Just short of 100 acts Read more ...
theartsdesk
With the lightning speed of online delivery, there is still masses of time to select the best and most enjoyable presents for Christmas, thanks to the taste and wisdom of theartsdesk's pack of writers. With battered guitars, Belgian cartoons, Pacino's Shylock on Broadway, Australian festivals, Ballets Russes scarves, boomboxes, special edition CDs, advance booking on next year's hot shows, a subscription to The New Yorker and commissioning a portrait by a top artist among the cornucopia of suggested desirables, there really is something for everyone and for every purse. Kieron Tyler Read more ...
theartsdesk
And so we reached the climax of Series 7, long awaited by cognoscenti but greeted with mounting apathy by non-believers. Though some had held out hopes for boy - infant? - band One Direction, it was live poll favourite Matt Cardle who ultimately romped home to victory.It was hard to tell why - Cardle has the charisma of an apprentice photocopier salesman, and his performance on the night barely breached the frontiers of insipid. Hysterical supporters of Rebecca Ferguson, urged onwards by Coleen Rooney, thronged the streets of Liverpool to urge their girl on, but Rebecca's identikit soul-diva Read more ...