Manchester
Thomas H. Green
So Fresh Meat approaches the conclusion of season one and, against my expectations, I’ve become a devoted fan. When it was announced that Peep Show creators Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain were launching a new sitcom, based around a Manchester student household, it sounded promising; perhaps a postmodern update on The Young Ones was in the offing. Peep Show fans were expecting a riot of sordid humour and cruel jokes of embarrassment. We had those in spades. What we weren’t expecting were such wonderfully written and acted character studies.You grew to really care about perky try-too-hard Welsh Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Nearly 20 years have whizzed by since Jonathan Harvey, then a 24-year-old comprehensive school teacher, wrote a play in the school holidays – and caused a stir. That play was Beautiful Thing, dealing with the then (and now?) contentious issue of two 16-year-old schoolboys, next-flat neighbours in the high-rise south-east London council estate of Thamesmead, who fall in love – and overcome prejudices and obstacles, not least their own self-realisation.It was a daring work. “I wrote it out of anger and outrage,” Harvey says in the programme notes. “The age of consent for gay men was 21, whereas Read more ...
bruce.dessau
“My friends don't add up to one hand,” intoned Mark E Smith on his 1988 album Frenz Experiment. Maybe not, given his legendary propensity for dramatically falling out with band members, but his albums now add up to considerably more than a single appendage. Ersatz GB is Smith's 29th studio album, and while not necessarily his best, it certainly demonstrates that his appetite for creating angry, angular, wonderfully warped state-of-the-nation addresses is hardly diminished.Ersatz GB reflects Smith's increasing despair at this sceptic isle's rotten-to-the-core decline. The lyrics are Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Noel Gallagher is hardly renowned for his willingness to stand on the precipice and leap into the unknown. A songwriter happy to work well within his own limitations, he has embarked upon his solo career (don’t be fooled by the “High Flying Birds” shtick; this is a star-plus-hired-hands job) with due caution. Indeed, his new album conforms so precisely to the preconceived notion of what a solo Noel Gallagher album would sound like you half suspect the whole project may one day be outed as some conceptual prank.Likewise, last night’s Edinburgh concert was entirely risk-free, with no hint of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
New Order’s “Blue Monday” might be the bestselling 12” single ever. It might not be. Either way, Factory Records released it on the 12” format only and it was given dry runs by club DJs. Although Factory had an overriding visual aesthetic, it was a wilful label with little musical coherence and no set way of doing things. Dance music, though, was central to Factory, and the new compilation Fac.Dance celebrates that in a way that was impossible in the scattershot Eighties.Fac.Dance collects 24 tracks issued between 1980 and 1987. Most were originally heard on 12” singles and were either Read more ...
matilda.battersby
If Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds tells us anything it is that Noel got all the songwriting genes in the Gallagher family. Compare its melodies to those by Liam and his Beady Eye chums, and you will sigh in relief at a reminder of why you were an Oasis fan in the first place. But I’m afraid that’s pretty much all it does. It reminds us that Liam’s talent for lilting harmonies is prodigious, but seems to deviate little further from the path trodden (so brilliantly) 15 years ago by Oasis’s best albums (What’s the Story) Morning Glory and Be Here Now.Going it alone has given Noel greater Read more ...
philip radcliffe
The objective: Beethoven’s symphonies. All of them. In numerical order, one after the other. Not only that, but a “powerful” work written in the last century to go with each one. That is Sir Mark Elder’s self-imposed mission for his 12th season with the Hallé. He has described it as the orchestra’s “first Beethoven cycle of the 21st century”. Is that a veiled promise of others to come? Perhaps in another 50 years, which is when the Hallé last tackled the cycle.Not that Elder will conduct all the symphonies. He is directing five, but vacating the rostrum for Markus Stenz, now in his third Read more ...
philip radcliffe
The only time I saw Ginger Rogers in the flesh was by chance in a book store on New York’s Fifth Avenue. She was doing a book signing (Ginger: My Story – a good read) and was well past her dancing years, but she still had a certain allure. And somehow, looking at this legend, the years rolled back and I could visualise her again dancing with Fred Astaire in the best of their 10 musicals together, Top Hat, the hit 1935 RKO movie. It took just over two months to make and grossed more than $3 million. “They’re dancing cheek to cheek again!” blazed the publicity poster at the time.Summer Read more ...
philip radcliffe
After producing an overwhelming performance of Mahler’s colossal Second Symphony, rewarded by a 10-minute standing ovation from a packed house, the new chief conductor of the BBC Philharmonic could not be accused of easing himself into the job. One might have thought that Juanjo Mena (pronounced Huanho Mayna, being Basque) might have started off with a splash of Spanish colour, with Rodrigo and De Falla, which must be in his blood. But no, although that will come in his next concert.Clearly, he has chosen to put down a strong marker straightaway – the Resurrection. Mind you, he isn’t new to Read more ...
Veronica Lee
How could you not immediately warm to a new comedy series that has almost as its first line, “Maybe you should tuck your cock away while I make us a nice cup of tea”? And so begins Fresh Meat, set in a shared freshers' student house in Manchester (the line's speaker had just come across a chap wearing a jumper but no trousers), a sort of The Inbetweeners and Skins grown up a couple of years with a Peep Show aesthetic.That aesthetic is due to Fresh Meat being the latest from Peep Show creators Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, who readily admit they are long past their own experiences of Read more ...
philip radcliffe
This is not exactly Edward II the musical. There’s no singing, but music plays a leading role. It is the food of love of the sort that dared not speak its name – and there is excess of it for my taste. The idiom is jazz of the edgy sort fashionable in Paris in the 1950s, reflecting pretty boy Piers Gaveston’s exile there, where he has been banished by Edward I for getting too close to his wayward son.Director Toby Frow chooses to move Marlowe’s play nearly 650 years on to the 1950s, notable amongst other things for the newsworthiness of homosexual causes célèbres, as the timeline diagram in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Between 1996 and the earliest years of the 21st century, the Manchester-based duo Lamb defined a moody, ambient, dance-influenced pop – the trip-hop/chill-out nexus. "Górecki", their 1997 chart single, will always be their most well-known moment. Lamb played what was announced back then as their final live show in 2004. But Andy Barlow and Lou Rhodes reunited for a slew of festival dates in 2009. Both had been working solo, and 5 is the first recorded evidence of their second life.Rhodes’s voice is smokier than before, fuller, more rounded and less likely to dance around the melody line. A Read more ...