Roundhouse
Liz Thomson
Was it imagination or did The Waterboys’ audience at London’s Roundhouse, invited to sing along to “The Nearest Thing to Hip”, really sing extra-loud and lustily on the line “in this shithole”? On a momentous day that seemed to push Britain further toward the perilous unknown, Mike Scott’s energetic performance of the song from the band’s 2015 album Modern Blues certainly struck a chord, and his recollections of youthful visits to London and lament of now long-gone delights surely resonated with many.There was the record store in Westbourne Grove where the teenaged Scott was invariably told Read more ...
Katherine Waters
It was in the early 2000s in a tiny, gritty bar that I first saw Rodrigo y Gabriela live. Camden was less pretty then – a look was close to a glare and there were more spikes and kohl – the nineties were that much closer. I was right at the front, pressed up against a rib-height stage, alarmingly close to the percussive thrum taking place inches above my head. The atmosphere was heady, their acoustic performance electric. Their hands moved like fire, catching the area’s thrash sensibility – I’d not heard anything like it.Over a decade on and the two are playing the Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
There is increasing urgency, commitment and assuredness about the way Laura Mvula performs her music. The context for her performance here was Love Supreme's day at the Roundhouse. As the event's main headliner and the stand-out performer, she really delivered the goods on Saturday night.Mvula explained that she has not been gigging much since she stopped touring her second album The Dreaming Room a couple of years ago, but rather wanted to work on new material. However, the real interest in this performance stemmed from what has happened to her performing manner. If there was once a certain Read more ...
Ellie Porter
“Don’t love me yet,” replies Patti Smith to the first of tonight’s many excitable shout-outs. “Who knows, after 20 minutes you might be gone!” An unlikely scenario, given that this show – part of the Roundhouse’s annual “In the Round” series, which also features Ronnie Spector and Shirley Collins – sold out in nanoseconds and is packed with rapt fans. It’s billed as “An Evening of Words and Music”, but if you’ve ever seen Patti Smith before you’ll know that this combination is pretty much a given (I don’t think I’ll ever forget Smith's furious performance of Allen Ginsberg's “Footnote to Howl Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s about to begin. The final performance on the final night – and only UK date – of the European Apocalypse package tour featuring four extreme metal bands. The 1,700 capacity Roundhouse is sold out. Touts outside are scrabbling for tickets. A curtain covers the stagefront. A procession of images flicker across it; ancient art, demons, gods and hellish conflict. Then the screen goes black. In large white gothic letters, words in sequence: LONDON. PREPARE. TO. GET. DESTROYED. The curtain drops. The white-light silhouetted forms of German thrash juggernaut Kreator pounce in at a velocity Read more ...
Matthew Wright
There are good musical reasons why it might never have occurred to you to wonder how Lady Gaga would sound if adapted by Duke Ellington; Radiohead by Sidney Bechet; or Bruce Springsteen by Frank Sinatra. Even if you still think those reasons are aesthetically valid, you need wonder no more, because chances are that the extraordinary YouTube phenomenon that is Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox, touring UK now, will have made that adaptation, and several million people will have liked it.Sometimes the transformations are uncanny. Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” has a completely different vibe even Read more ...
David Nice
The power of music solves every problem, at least when as bewitchingly performed as it was here. With the great mezzo Christine Rice voiceless for at least a night, and rising star Caitlin Hulcup singing for her from the midst of the instruments in the pit right at the centre of the Roundhouse, how could faithful Penelope's final acceptance of her long-lost husband Ulysses (Roderick Williams) achieve transcendence? Yet it was moving to tears, thanks to the exquisite sensitivities of three very special performers and Christian Curnyn's Early Opera Company. Not even a scattergun production's Read more ...
Katie Colombus
The creative partnership between Ed Harcourt and Martha Wainwright is an intriguing one. He is an out and out showman, full of stage presence, bravado and tinged with thespiness. She is an introverted, quirky creative, flanked by the comfort of a full band. But there's no doubting that together they make beautiful music.Their songs, whether independent or duet, trip through the lyrical poetry of tender ballads, rousing guitar riffs, cloudy folk and abstract punk tunes with a touch of vintage jazz. Bathed in the soft, warm lights and before an intimate audience at the Roundhouse, the Read more ...
Marcus Davey
We've got a lot to celebrate in 2016: 50 years since the Roundhouse became an arts centre and 10 years of transforming young lives through creativity. In celebration of this momentous year we embarked on a journey of discovery to uncover the stories from train-enthusiast accounts of our humble beginnings to real-life high-wire love stories, from week-long raves in the 1990s to politically-charged spoken word in the 2000s. So many incredible stories have emerged from the walls of this beautiful building.In the 1960s freedom of expression and liberation had arrived in London. Skirts were Read more ...
Helen Wallace
Some enchanted afternoon in Camden Town… the Proms returned to the Roundhouse after four decades with a dreamlike fusion of sound, space and light. Ron Arad’s Curtain Call – a 360° installation of 5,600 sillicon rods – encircled the London Sinfonietta and audience in its luminescent embrace, a haze of microtonal music slinking through a sequence of glimmering projections.The programme built towards György Ligeti’s Ramifications, an indelible masterpiece of the gauziest microtonal weave, and part-inspiration for Georg Friedrich Haas’s Open Spaces II (2007). In this ravishing work Haas also Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
What I want to know is: has there been a major upsurge in boys taking contemporary dance classes this year? And if not, why not? With the amount of male dancing in the media these days, the excuse that boys lack dancing role models just won't wash any more.Last year we had Matthew Bourne and his mammoth Lord of the Flies project, which delivered dance workshops to 6,000-odd men and boys and performed with a different cast of locally-based amateurs in each of its 13 locations. Earlier this year, BBC Young Dancer of the Year was won by 16-year-old Connor Scott, a wild card from the contemporary Read more ...
David Nice
It’s quite a distance from the first performance of Monteverdi’s operatic cornucopia under the Mantuan Gonzagas’ imperious eye to this democratic celebration at the Roundhouse – 408 years, to be precise. Michael Boyd’s production takes us back even further, to those ancient Greek festivals of poetry and music which inspired the intellectual Florentines to fashion the art of opera in the late 16th century.One third of the Roundhouse seating is blocked by a grand edifice with a contemporary court seated half way up, the orchestra at its base, leaving us in a near-perfect amphitheatre with the Read more ...