England
Nick Hasted
Damon Albarn’s second solo album in a career otherwise defined by open-hearted collaboration confirms he sees operating under his own name as a chance for melancholic introspection. The deliberate austerity of its predecessor, Everyday Robots (2014), was shown when accompanying, full-band gigs revealed the bright pop song finery beneath the album’s bleak camouflage. Where others go solo to satisfy band-cramped egos, solo Damon is a place of anticlimax and indirection, where his gift for melody is befogged and hazy.The Nearer The Fountain, More Pure The Stream Flows began as an orchestral Read more ...
Nick Hasted
It’s hard to navigate the gap between Ed Sheeran’s ordinary songs and the rarefied air of his career’s stellar orbit, which he now breathes with Adele and Chris Martin - the rump aristos of a once ruling rock culture. The image of him as a modern troubadour alone with his guitar at Wembley Stadium in 2015 symbolises both his admirable personal achievement, and something vacant at singer-songwriting’s pop summit. This fourth solo album arrives in the wake of wedding his childhood friend Cherry Seaborn in 2019, and her having their child the next year, events which understandably dominate =. Read more ...
David Nice
Yes, it was bound to be HMS Laugh-a-minute, given Cal “One Man, Two Guvnors” McCrystal’s ENO comedy riffs on an already funny early G&S classic, but what does this tight little craft have to say to Little England today?That a British sailor’s “energetic fist should be ready to resist/A dictatorial word” (violence for equality). That love should level all ranks but doesn’t (so much for levelling up). And that “if you want to rise to the top of the tree…Stick close to your desks and never go to sea/And you all may be rulers of the Queen’s na-vee” (words which my 10-year-old performing self Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Trigger warnings have become commonplace in theatres these days, but few chill the blood like the description "a new musical" on a playbill. There are so many things to go wrong, so few ways to get things right and, never far away, the dissenters who caught ten minutes of the Sound of Music during its annual Christmas TV airing and won’t stop telling you exactly how they feel about musicals.So, while the National Theatre gears up for its new musical, Hex, the RSC is commendably returning to its lockdown-postponed The Magician’s Elephant, both productions given the stages and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Like a more genuinely earthed Springsteen, Billy Bragg’s middle-aged, Dorset years have offered somewhat self-conscious wisdom and awareness of his singer-songwriter status. He’s grown up and into himself, diligently expanding both his craft and ideals. Like his near contemporary Elvis Costello, he has also found musical comfort in Americana and country-soul, with accompanying, initially disorientating American accent.The Million Things That Never Happened was additionally inspired by the recent sharp fear, as successive tours were cancelled, that Covid might permanently decimate his working Read more ...
Mert Dilek
"You need to get better at communicating", says one character to another in Isley Lynn’s albatross. Indeed, the same advice would fare well with many of those in the Anglo-American Lynn’s new play, where miscommunication plagues a range of relationships and chance encountersStructured as a loosely connected sequence of mostly two-handers, albatross. offers a panoramic look at the power dynamics coursing through everyday conversations among strangers and intimates alike.This production is brought to the Playground Theatre by represent., a repertory company dedicated to working with Read more ...
mark.kidel
Two men trade licks: one of them delves into the heart of the blues, a potent dose of the boogie, the medicinal music of the Mississipi Delta. The other with a mournful voice and violin draws on the equally stripped-down and drone-inflected roots of Southern Italian tradition. The Italian also plays a range of frame drums with phenomenal energy and technical prowess. Mixing the rocking and rolling lilt of John Lee Lee Hooker with the frenetic pulse of pizzica music from Italy might seem an unlikely combination, but the result of collaboration based on a shared passion for the music of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Conceived on a global scale to depict the enormity of an alien menace from outer space, Apple's new series Invasion has grand ambitions, but crash-lands like a pile of space junk. After a few hours of this, waiting for something to happen, you’ll be yearning for a trawl through Netflix or Walter Presents.Created by Simon Kinberg and Davis Weil, with a reported budget of $200m, Invasion seeks to depict the consequences of its unearthly incursion by showing the varying fates of a contrasting group of characters. In Afghanistan, we hook up with a squad of US soldiers led by bullish, rifle-waving Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Outside Wales – even, perhaps, within it – few students will have run across the verse of Gwerful Mechain. The free-spirited poet of the late 15th century may come as a thrilling surprise (one of several) to readers of Mary Wellesley’s Hidden Hands. Gwerful was trained, probably by a family member, in the fiendish virtuosity of Welsh strict-metre verse-forms but barred from the all-male ranks of professional bards. Yet she sparred fearlessly in deftly-marshalled words with the conventions of her time. One notorious ode, preserved in 13 manuscript copies, spurns the drippy praise of girls’ Read more ...
India Lewis
Sarah Hall’s Burntcoat is one of those new books with the unsettling quality of describing or approximating a great moment in history and its aftermath, as the reader is still living through it. This could be trite, but Hall manages to make it compelling, tragic, and still sensitive in its handling of a love story during a time of terrible social upheaval.The pandemic of Burntcoat is not our Corona or Covid, but Nova, a disease that more closely resembles the bubonic plague, with its pustules and arguably more horrific end. We join Burntcoat’s narrator, the artist, Edith, when the disease, in Read more ...
Heather Neill
Lucy Bailey's production of Christie's Witness for the Prosecution, first staged at County Hall in 2017, has a few years to make up on The Mousetrap's near 70, but it has already proved its staying power, despite the hiatus of the lockdown months.The venue is inevitably a significant part of its attraction. The courtroom at County Hall - once the chamber which saw the political debates of the Greater London Council - is a magnificent, atmospheric space, standing in for the Old Bailey. A statue of Justice, scales in hand, presides over the action and 12 members of the audience are co-opted as Read more ...
David Nice
British opera’s attempted answer to The Magic Flute, and its presentation as the opening gambit of Edward Gardner’s eminent position as principal conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, leave me queasily ambivalent.After all the smoke and lighting of the LPO’s online series, there’s barely a hint of theatricality in this plain concert performance, with the only concession to lighting the constant red on the Royal Festival Hall organ: is it not an opera but a choral symphony with eight soloists? Then you remember what wonders good directors and designers have achieved with The Read more ...