Features
Tom Birchenough
When Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan opens in Russia early next year it won’t be in the director’s cut. Given new legislation effective from this past July, it will be against the law to include the very distinctive Russian expletives, known locally as mat, that are plentiful in the director’s film, and add a very distinctive quality to his depiction of contemporary Russia.It’s a difference that may be lost on non-Russian speaking viewers who won’t be surprised by the usual procession of f-words and the like. But for Zvyagintsev himself, it’s a matter of considerable concern. “Film-makers, and Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Earlier this year, bobdylan.com posted “Full Moon & Empty Arms”, a song associated with Sinatra and the popular music of America before rock'n'roll. Dylan’s new version seemed to presage an album of tunes of similar vintage titled Shadows in the Night, featuring the likes of “Melancholy Baby”, “On a Little Street in Singapore” and “Stormy Weather”. Those new recordings, however, have been pushed back to make room for another release, one so big and wide you’d need to tear out the door to bring it in.Six discs, 138 songs, 17 reels, five young men, one dog, and roughly nine months of Read more ...
Tom Littler
About a year ago, Alan Brodie, who is the agent for the estate of Terence Rattigan, sent me a handful of his more obscure plays. I had worked with Alan before on a revival of Graham Greene’s first play, The Living Room, so he knew I had a penchant for what are now termed "rediscoveries". The play that jumped out at me was Rattigan’s theatrical debut: a comedy called First Episode. Written while he was still an undergraduate at Oxford in 1933 (co-authored with his friend Philip Heimann), it seemed to me a fresh, funny, and painfully honest account of his experiences there. A little research Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Annie Lennox is a far more fascinating artist than she’s often given credit for. Perhaps because she has been around for decades (she’s now 59) and hasn’t self-destructed like her friend Amy Winehouse or gone into exile for ages like Kate Bush, or Patti Smith, she has less of a fierce mystique and feels more a familiar part of the landscape.Her first band The Tourists, with Dave Stewart, was not especially distinguished. Their big hit “I Only Want to Be with You”, a Dusty Springfield cover, was distinctly unadventurous in the world of 1979 post-punk. "You wouldn’t have put money on Annie Read more ...
David Nice
Should you not have caught one of the 20th century’s handful of greatest Wagnerian singers live - I did, just once, in a Prom of uneven excerpts - chances are that you first heard Birgit Nilsson in Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene from Götterdämmerung on Sir Georg Solti’s Vienna Philharmonic Ring recording. The distinguished President of the Birgit Nilsson Prize who lives in the orchestra's wonderful city, physicist, economist and Nilsson’s biggest if always most respectful fan Professor Doktor Rutbert Reisch, insists that the connection was never a criterion behind the bi- or triennial prize of Read more ...
marcus.odair
As the presenter of a regular music podcast for a national newspaper, I used to be in the happy position of interviewing one or two artists of my choice per month, provided they were signed to an independent label. So when Domino released a Robert Wyatt box set in 2008, I spent a glorious afternoon with Robert and his wife and creative partner Alfie, in their Lincolnshire garden. I enjoyed myself so much, in fact, that I set out to find an excuse to do it again.Different Every Time, my authorised biography of Robert Wyatt, didn’t take me all those six years to write, although it has certainly Read more ...
joe.muggs
It has been announced by the Hyperdub label that Stephen Samuel Gordon, better known as The Spaceape, vocalist, poet and live performer, passed away peacefully after a 5 year struggle with a rare form of cancer. Gordon was the constant recording and performing partner of Hyperdub founder Kode 9, and collaborator with key Hyperdub affiliates including Burial and Kevin Martin, and his rich voice and lyrics which blurred academia, mysticism and science fiction with the power and finesse of soundsystem culture were a constant for lovers of "bass music" through the 2000s. He was a mysterious Read more ...
David Nice
As a town of 70,000 or so people, Bamberg boxes dazzlingly above its weight in at least two spheres. The Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, risen to giddy heights under its chief conductor of the last 14 years Jonathan Nott, is decisively among Germany’s top five, and acknowledged as such in its substantial state funding (to the enviable tune of 80 percent, a figure known elsewhere, I believe, only in Norway). And a galaxy of great buildings has won the place UNESCO World Heritage status. Strange, then, that the British don’t seem to realise, as do the Americans, Chinese, Japanese and Italians – Read more ...
theartsdesk
He was not only a bracing conductor/harpsichordist pioneer in period-instrument authenticity, writes David Nice, but also a gentleman and a scholar. My only direct acquaintance with Christopher Hogwood, who died earlier this week at the age of 73, was in two projects dear to his heart: the recording of Handel’s Orlando, mentioned by its countertenor star James Bowman below as a highlight of his career, and his phenomenally well researched Haydn symphonies series, both for that handsomely logo-ed early music branch of Decca known as L’Oiseau-Lyre.Hogwood was very much a part of my own Read more ...
joe.muggs
The story of Vashti Bunyan is a compelling one. The urbane Sixties would-be popstrel who gave it all up to ride up to a hippie community in a horse-drawn caravan, writing an exquisite album on the way, Just Another Diamond Day, which then became a lost classic, vanishing into the ether as she too vanished until she was rediscovered by obsessive record collectors and psychedelic freaks and persuaded to return to music after 30 years: who couldn't be enchanted or at least intrigued by it? And when her comeback showed her still with a crystal clear voice and intimate songwriting style it just Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
In 1959, the walk to Salvador Dalí’s house in Portlligat seemed very long. I was on holiday with my parents in Cadaqués, staying in our friends’ house high on a hillside with a view of the blue bay and the white houses surrounding it. Not that I cared about views. What I wanted to do was swim, poke sea urchins, watch the fishermen unload their nets, and have a Coke at the Meliton bar.We set out for Dalí’s house with a guide, a little boy not much older than me who led us across rocks and beaches. I whined as we rambled along, annoyed because I couldn’t keep up with the boy. In those days Read more ...
Paul Simmonds
Not that long ago, certainly when I was old enough to know better, I managed to get myself mugged by a gang of teenage street girls down by Lisbon docks. I had been following a long chain of beer and whisky glasses from the end of one bar to the front of the next and was quite drunk in that careless, carefree, foolhardy way.As muggings go it was hardly the worst: a little swarm of hands, a tickling feeling, a few oaths and the sound of trainers running off into the distance. As my dignity had already departed, I was entirely unharmed. Obviously, they had made off with everything I had. Read more ...