Roundhouse
bruce.dessau
I had a terrible fright last week. While listening to BBC London DJ Robert Elms introduce a track from the new Paul Weller album, Sonik Kicks. What I heard sounded remarkably like Oasis. It seemed that the man who once influenced Noel Gallagher was now so bereft of ideas he was reduced to ripping off Noel Gallagher. To my relief Robert Elms followed the track with an apology. He had pressed the wrong button and had played a Noel Gallagher track by mistake.If you've got enough hair to make it stand up at 53, why not flaunt it?By contrast Sonik Kicks actually sounds fresher than anything by Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
It's often more fun on the margins. The pickings are richer. The view is clearer. You can take aim easier. The AV Festival has spent more than eight years here, on the counter-cultural edges, delving into the divisional cracks between art, music and film. This year, with the Cultural Olympiad swallowing up everything for its year-long national pat on the back, independent artistic thinking is at a premium. AV, however, have not only escaped the Olympiad's clutches but have upended the boastful spirit of 2012 with a theme that is about as co-optable for national self-aggrandisement as a Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Freud would have loved the final night of Reverb 2012's opening weekend. First came a screening of a mad early Surrealist film from Germaine Dulac and Antonin Artaud, in which a priest chases a woman's breasts that have turned into two seashells. Then came the even madder sight of the Estonian Television Girls Choir dressed up in stripey national dress, coyly jellyfishing around the Roundhouse stage during their a cappella piece, while their long-haired conductor, Aarne Saluveer, beat time on an old metal plate. A dream logic was in fact at play throughout the evening. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Roundhouse is a melee of moneyed cosmopolitan twentysomething trendies. The beautiful people are out in force. My God, there are some delicious women and men here, expensively dressed, uptown couture to the hilt, a hefty smattering of languages from around the globe. Unexpectedly, for me at least, 22-year-old Chilean-American electronica prodigy Nicolas Jaar has the most chi-chi gig in London tonight. This is not a plus – the queues at the bar are half-an-hour long, dilettante party people buying rounds of exotic shots and bottles of bubbly, waving wodges of tenners about. And while Jaar’ Read more ...
david.cheal
This show was memorable almost as much for the audience as it was for the music. The Roundhouse was perhaps two-thirds full for a show that The Low Anthem’s singer Ben Knox Miller said was “the biggest gig of their career” (adding: “And I’ve never called it a ‘career’ before”), but those who were there had clearly come to see the band rather than catch up on gossip, because the audience’s attention was absolute, their silence total; I can scarcely recall a gig where the crowd’s concentration was so complete.The objects of their attention were a band from Providence, Rhode Island who have been Read more ...
alice.vincent
The round and the curtain are two of theatre’s oldest pieces of stagecraft. Yet architect and design legend Ron Arad has reinvented both in celebration of the Camden Roundhouse’s fifth birthday. The north London venue, which was transformed from a redundant 19th-century railway turntable shed into a famed music venue in the Sixties, was revamped in 2006 and has since become a hub of creative support for young and disadvantaged people in the area. Echoing these sentiments, Arad’s Curtain Call has been created with accessibility and opportunity at its core to try and bring art to the Read more ...
Russ Coffey
“Tonight there’s no one else in the world – just us together,” announced Josh Homme halfway through the night. And it felt so. But it didn't seem like we were in the Roundhouse. More like we were sitting amid the heat haze of California’s Palm Desert, on a two-hour psychedelic trip, and the Queens of the Stone Age front man was our personal shaman. Sometimes it was euphoric, and other times it was dizzying. And when the volume was cranked really high it was like the top of the Roundhouse might blow off.This world tour is supporting the reissue of the band’s eponymous debut recording. As such Read more ...
david.cheal
They’re a fun band with some cracking tunes and they provided a vibrant night’s music last night at the Roundhouse, but where on earth did the idea come from that Noah and the Whale are a folk band? On this evidence, they’re about as folkie as Motörhead. Granted, they have a violinist in their line-up, but this is really no signifier of folkiness. In fact, the musician who sprang to mind most frequently during this pacy, compact show was Bruce Springsteen, especially on the material from the band’s recent Last Night on Earth album, with its heroic chord changes, its loose scansion and Read more ...
david.cheal
Bouncy: if there is one word that sums up this hot young Northern Irish band, that would be the one; there is a Tiggerish enthusiasm to their music that encourages bouncing, clapping, arm-waving and generally having a good time, which is exactly what happened at last night's gig: a festive atmosphere prevailed, Two Door Cinema Club played a short, sharp set that lasted for little more than an hour, and they sent the crowd out into the early spring night buzzing.A year ago Two Door Cinema Club were, as their choochy-faced singer Alex Trimble noted during this show, playing the Hoxton Bar and Read more ...
david.cheal
Beards, beards, beards: at the Roundhouse, they seemed to be everywhere, sprouting from the chins of hundreds of chaps in the audience. Perhaps, though, I was just looking out for them, what with the luxuriant growth on the face of the man they had all come to see: Iron & Wine, the artist otherwise known as Sam Beam, singer, songwriter and former film studies professor from the American south-east.Indeed, I think I had beards on the brain; skimming through his Wikipedia biography before the show, I thought I’d read that he “sometimes tours with a full beard”, when of course it says “ Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Five people stand in the dark. A bleak gantry descends with a rumble onto their heads. They scuttle under it and flatten themselves to escape a crushing, but then they get up and start building. The platform is stripped of planks, rebuilt at crazy angles, refashioned while decorating the tasks with acrobatic surprises. At a steep tilt a plank is both a slide and human catapult, or makes a terrific wobbling noise if slapped right; as an upright it’s perfect for a girl to shin up and then array herself in a bouffant Boucher Pompadour dress of crumpled paper, later to be elegantly torn off in Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Now go we in content. To liberty and not to banishment.” A touchstone to productions of As You Like It, Celia’s wishful recasting of the Forest of Arden can rarely pass unchallenged by directors. In 2009 we saw Michael Boyd’s RSC production go head to head with Thea Sharrock’s unexpected and beguilingly sunny interpretation at the Globe – a contest in which Sharrock proved a comfortable victor. Returning once again with his conventionally darker-hued take on Shakespeare’s comedy, the question was always going to be whether Boyd could grasp the authority that so slimly eluded him last time. Read more ...