1980s
mark.hudson
That Anselm Kiefer is one of the great elder statesmen of contemporary art goes without saying. His work’s precise relevance to now is less clear. In the early 1980s, when he sprang to fame as part of the New Image Painting phenomenon (with Schnabel, Baselitz et al), the Berlin Wall was still up and the post-Holocaust Teutonic angst that Kiefer has relentlessly mined felt far more immediate and problematic than it does today. The great Monetarist showbiz-art wave hadn’t yet broken. It left Kiefer and his fellow New Imagers overshadowed and, in a paradox that is absolutely typical of the art Read more ...
joe.muggs
Clever people often make terrible music. Not always: the best pop is smart as well as direct - but an inability to stop analysing, comparing and explaining is the anathema of the pleasure principle, and encyclopedic knowledge often leads to bone-dry discourse. These are problems that all of the performers at last night's show have run up against, and dealt with in different ways; in particular, the headliner Green Gartside has spent his entire three-decade-plus career with various versions of Scritti Politti more or less successfully finding ways of reconciling the immediacy and concentrated Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“Whose idea was it to do the gig in this shithole?” asks Captain Sensible towards the end of the night. He’s right. The East Wing is truly an atmosphere-free venue, a carpeted, low-ceilinged conference room that’s part of the much larger Brighton Centre complex. It’s easy to imagine it filled with municipal administrators milling about, the stink of coffee and the rustle of paperwork. Instead, it’s packed to the gills with men and women, mostly in their late forties and early fifties, mostly clad in black, lots of leather and badges.The Damned have undoubtedly played worse. They’ve had a Read more ...
graeme.thomson
There are two fundamentally opposing schools of thought on Florence Welch and her mysterious machine. For the believers, her music belongs to the tradition of questing, modernist pop with a pagan trim of the kind Kate Bush made before she started writing 14-minute songs about having sex with snowmen. To the naysayers, on the other hand, she’s both shallow and contrived, a paint-stripping belter desperate to lend her sub-Siouxsie Sioux shtick gravitas by grafting on a skin of borrowed poses and studied weirdness.Neither view quite nails it. In reality, Welch makes occasionally stirring but Read more ...
graeme.thomson
A companion piece to last year’s Scratch My Back, on which Gabriel restrung classic material by the likes of Radiohead, Lou Reed and Elbow, New Blood finds the arch tinkerer dismantling some of his own greatest songs, stripping them of their rockist infrastructure (bass, guitar, drums) and rearranging them for a 46-piece orchestra.The two fundamental problems rest with the wide-ranging choice of material and the mode of reinvention: the fact that Gabriel has struggled to write anything of real magnificence for a couple of decades (hence why he’s doing this, Read more ...
ash.smyth
As Gary Numan strode out onto the stage last night, for the Shepherd's Bush leg of his Dead Son Rising tour, his black boots a-shining, his arms a-waving, his proto-emo knees a-bending, well, you couldn't say the crowd went insane, exactly - but they were very pleased to see him.For a man whose career was said to be all but over a quarter-century ago, Numan has done a hell of a job ignoring the bad news. His albums of recent years (four since the millennium) have created a new surge of critical esteem, and he is now openly lauded and acclaimed (and covered) by a generation of new musicians.If Read more ...