1980s
Sarah Kent
Last month a portrait of Alan Turing by AI robot AI-Da sold at Sotheby’s for $1.08 million – proof that, in some people’s eyes, artificial intelligence can produce paintings worth as much as those made by human hands.Depending on your view of AI, this can either be a very exciting or deeply depressing idea; whichever way you lean, it makes Tate Modern’s exhibition of work by the pioneers of machine art extremely timely.This exhaustive (and exhausting) show starts in the 1950s with Japanese artist Atsuko Tanaka. In response to the neon signs brightening up Osaka’s streets in the aftermath of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Let's walk down memory lane the Magazine way. Let's regurgitate fifth-rate Low [the David Bowie album] period pieces. Let's plonk plonk plonk with ponderous sub-Pink Floydery. Let's do the wallpaper waltz. This is not pushing back the barriers. It's frighteningly bland conservatism.”So said Garry Bushell in his March 1979 Sounds review of Magazine’s second album Secondhand Daylight. He went on. “'Silly Thing' [the single by the rump Sex Pistols] is one hundred times more exciting. 'Unconventional People' [the then-recent Royal Rasses single] is one hundred times more relaxing. [Sham 69’s] ' Read more ...
How To Survive Your Mother, King's Head Theatre review - mummy issues drive autobiographical dramedy
Gary Naylor
It is unsurprising to learn in the post-show Q&A that each audience receives Jonathan Maitland’s new play based on his 2006 memoir differently. My house laughed a lot (me especially) but some see the tragic overwhelming the comic, and the laughs dry up. When it comes to humour, as is the case with mothers, it’s each to their own.It’s an unusual production right from the off when the playwright, who is also a main character, is also acting himself too – but not entirely, as there’s a pre-teen and post-teen version of him too, played by different actors. Got all that? When you add his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Delirium has greeted Disney’s eight-part adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s 1988 novel Rivals (part of her Rutshire Chronicles series).Perhaps it’s nostalgia for the previously-unloved Eighties, or maybe it’s because its non-stop conveyor belt of adultery, skulduggery and political incorrectness feels like some kind of liberation from the joyless paranoia of the 2020s. It also has lots of Eighties pop hits to keep it rattling along, from Tears for Fears and Blondie to ZZ Top and Depeche Mode.The rivals of the title are Rupert Campbell-Black, a former Olympic showjumper and now Minister for Sport in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 2022, Spritualized’s Jason Pierce described his musical goal as "trying to find somewhere between Arvo Pärt and The Stooges.” Amongst the most arresting and explicitly Pärt-styled results of this quest to link the minimalist composer with Iggy Pop‘s pre-punk confrontationists was the affecting "Broken Heart," from his band’s 1997 third album Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space.Pierce hasn’t been alone in declaring a fidelity to Pärt. In 2009, former Public Image Ltd bassist Jah Wobble cited Pärt as his choice of Sunday morning music. He was moved to tears while listening. In 2005 Read more ...
David Nice
Most of us have been there: an impasse in a marriage, a bereavement in a dysfunctional family. Leonard Bernstein certainly had when he composed Trouble in Tahiti in 1952, basing the unhappy couple on his own parents and even the incipient problems in his own relationship with Felicia Montealegre (see the superb film Maestro), and 30 years later the sequel, A Quiet Place, when Felicia’s early death from cancer had left him unhappy and guilty.Odd, then, that both works keep us emotionally at arm's length, either by stylisation (the one-acter, with the libretto by Bernstein in verse) or by going Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Like an angry teenager rejecting everything his parents stand for, American artist Mike Kelley embraced everything most despised by the art world – from popular culture to crafts, and occultism to catholicism – to create what he ironically called “blue collar minimalism”. “An adolescent,” he declared, “is a dysfunctional adult and art is a dysfunctional reality”.Noisy, anarchic, silly and disturbing, Kelley’s unruly output makes for uneasy viewing. Despite Tate Modern’s attempts to civilise and rationalise his work, the galleries are filled with the raucous din of loud music and singing plus Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Michael Craig-Martin was the most playful and provocative of the conceptual artists. His early sculptures are like visual puns, a play on the laws of nature. On the Table, 1970 (pictured below right), for instance, appears to defy gravity. Four buckets filled with water stand on a table; so far so ordinary. But the table has no legs and is suspended from the ceiling by ropes and pulleys.Normal relationships are reversed; by acting as a counter balance, the buckets hold up the table rather than the other way round. On the Shelf, 1970, consists of 15 milk bottles lined up on a shelf tilted at a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As the name of a music genre, new jack swing was coined in an issue of the Village Voice dated 18 October 1987. Writer Barry Michael Cooper was profiling producer, songwriter and member of the R&B trio Guy, Teddy Riley when he created a tag exemplifying the mix of R&B and hip-hop which had hit super-big in 1986 with Janet Jackson’s Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis-produced Control. Riley was on the same wavelength, and Cooper recognised a groundswell.Swingbeat was interchangeable with new jack swing, but it was the latter which caught on. So When TLC and SWV emerged in 1992 they were swiftly Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
When the first solo album by Tangerines Dream’s Peter Baumann was released in the US in 1977, its promotion was striking. Press advertising (pictured below left) said “he possesses the infinite vision that has made his group one of the most important contributors to mystagogic lore.”Baumann had joined Tangerine Dream — "his group" — in 1971, and left in late 1977. The album in question, Romance ’76, was recorded in Berlin and Munich in July and August 1976 and first issued in the UK by Virgin Records in February 1977.Discussing the album with NME’s Miles before its release, there Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Some pointers suggest how Finland’s Shadowplay might sound. They took their name from a Joy Division song. Their key founder member was Brandi Ifgray – born Visa Ruokonen. He had been in the final line-up of first-generation Finnish punk band Ratsia. Add in Shadowplay’s 1988 first album Touch and Glow’s cover version of Gang Of Four’s “Damaged Goods” and that would seem to nail it. Dark then, with the edge of punk.However, the back of Touch and Glow’s sleeve has a picture of the band which includes a trumpet player, someone at an upright piano and a double bassist. The only electric Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHMike Lindsay Supershapes: Volume 1 (Moshi Moshi)Solo debut from Mike Lindsay, a founder member of tunng and also half of psychedelic duo LUMP. It’s a good thing when music is hard to describe. Opener “Lie Down” sets up the stall, a catchy but weird slice of poet-pop, wherein wonky dance rhythms, abstract jazz, lyrics about mundanity and shouts of the title phrase, including contributions from singer-songwriter Anna B Savage, add up to a wild frolic. With plenty of woodwind, lyrics about toast and Sunday roast, an inability to musically settle down anywhere “normal”, the Read more ...