Reviews
Kieron Tyler
NME’s Paul Morley reviewed Angelic Upstarts’ debut album, the newly reissued Teenage Warning, in August 1979. He pointed out that they were “seen as the successors to Sham 69.”The assessment made sense. Their encore song was a version of Sham's “Borstal Breakout.” Both bands played a reductive punk which was long on musical attack and lyrical howls, and low on finesse. Around the time of Teenage Warning's 1979 release Sham's front-man Jimmy Pursey was busy with J. P. Productions, a concern where he picked up bands, became their producer and placed them with major labels. He took on Read more ...
John Carvill
It’s often said that nobody mythologised Billie Holiday like Billie Holiday. I’m not so sure.In this fine, clear-eyed biography, Paul Alexander documents Holiday’s propensity for feeding the media inaccuracies and tall tales, her enthusiastic embrace of “the adage that said the truth should never stand in the way of a good story.” But the media gave as good as they got, downplaying her artistic achievements and fixating on her problems with substance abuse and exploitative, violently toxic male partners.Many of the myths imposed upon her during her lifetime persist, particularly those that Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As Dust we Rise ends with “Quilt,” a percussion-driven lamentation bringing to mind the New Orleans stylings of Dr. John. The album begins with “Hem,” where stabbing piano and strings interweave with a pulsing, wordless chorale. After a while, a muted trumpet and pattering wood blocks fill it out.In between, odd suggestions of The Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy For the Devil" (“Here Comes the Flood”), a spectral, twinkling ballad (“The Sea”), a sharp, skip-along, clockwork-toy of a track (“Ammonite,” one of the album's most electronica-inclined cuts) which could fit snugly into the soundtrack of Read more ...
Sarah Kent
On one level, Heart of an Oak is the most spectacular nature film you are ever likely to see. The camera glides over a forest before honing in on a magnificent, 210 year old oak tree. It travels up the gnarled surface of the ancient trunk, which resembles elephant hide, into the canopy. Time to introduce the cast of what directors Laurent Charbonnier and Michel Sedoux describe as an “adventure movie”: weevils, a red squirrel, woodpecker, robin and pair of jays, field mice and some wild boar. All of them live in or around the tree and this is their story.It’s high summer, but a storm is Read more ...
Gary Naylor
We open on one of those suburban American families we know so well from Eighties and Nineties sitcoms - they’re not quite Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie, but they’re not far off. As usual, we wonder how Americans have so much space, such big fridges and why they’re always shouting up the stairs.But this squabbly, stereotypical family is not what it seems. Soon the mother is behaving oddly, there’s a “Here we go again” look in her husband’s eyes and the daughter withdraws, somewhat traumatised. Only the son, who has taken on a Puck-like status as an unreliable observer, appears at ease – Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The Nature of Love joins a recent spate of films where older women enjoy what a mealy-mouthed columnist would describe as an inappropriate relationship. Whether it’s Olivia Colman bedding a much younger black colleague in Empire of Light, Emma Thompson hiring a sex worker in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, or Anne Hathaway shagging a boy-band singer in The Idea of You, the scenario allows for smooching and soul searching in equal measures. This time the risk-taker is a French-Canadian philosophy lecturer in a pleasant but passionless marriage. Sophia (Magalie Lépine- Read more ...
caspar.gomez
SUNDAY 30th June 2024It’s late. But not really. Not by the standards of this place. Photographer Finetime and I are in Block9 in the South-East Corner. The so-called “naughty corner”. We take turns juggernauting quomble off a pinecone. Finetime’s right eyelid is twitching. This tic developed today. Nearby is a gigantic head. About the size of a large Victorian house. It’s at an acute angle to the ground. Instead of eyes it has a kind of welders’ mask blitzing white-noise light. Like the haunted, detuned television in the 1982 film Poltergeist.We all know what happened to the little blonde Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
NMC Recordings has spent 35 years promoting contemporary music by British composers, and this commitment to both emerging and established voices was represented at this birthday concert in London last night, part of the Spitalfields Festival. From their emergence in 1989 in a different musical and technological world (“NMC” standing for “New Music Cassettes”) my early days of CD buying were guided by NMC’s developing catalogue and they are still a go-to for finding interesting new things. The audience at the Dutch Church in the City of London was garlanded with composer royalty of all Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
I’m sitting in the Olivier waiting for the show to start, comfortable in the knowledge that I’ve seen the original production of Mnemonic, one of Complicité’s most lauded plays, in 1999; but I struggle to remember anything about it, the detail is fuzzy. A play about memory is challenging my own faltering apparatus.Who did I see it with? Where? What was that audience participation? I sift through the gears, opening mental doors in an attempt to find a clue as to whether I did actually see it, after all. Meanwhile, the magnificent Kathryn Hunter, stalwart of the Complicité troupe, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Ukraine’s history is complex and often bitter. The territory has been endlessly fought over, divided, annexed and occupied. From 1917-20 it enjoyed a brief period of independence before being swallowed up once more by the Soviet Union after a vicious three year war – an example that Vladimir Putin is copying with his monstrous invasion.Now Ukrainians are being forced to fight, once more, for independence is an appropriate time to reveal that many artists of the so-called Russian avant-garde were actually from Ukraine. Famous pioneers of abstract art such as Kasimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
The Academy of Ancient Music, which celebrates its “golden anniversary” this season, got going just as Handel’s operas began to leave the library at last and reclaim the stage. There they continue to flourish, dazzle and move – which makes any concert performance of them a slightly bittersweet pleasure.At the Barbican, the AAM’s Orlando boasted sumptuous luxury casting, headed by countertenor Iestyn Davies as the love-maddened warrior, and adorned by four other hugely gifted singers along with the savoury period sounds produced by director-harpsichordist Laurence Cummings and his crew. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The reinvigoration of Andrew Lloyd Webber continues apace. New York is now hosting a ballroom culture, drag-inflected Cats, and the Olivier-laureled Sunset Boulevard, a breakaway hit last year on the West End, hits Broadway in the autumn.And here is Lloyd Webber's 1984 large-scale caprice, Starlight Express, reinvented for the era of Power Rangers and Transformers, with women inheriting men's roles and the entire thing feeling as if the audience has landed inside a video game itself on overdrive.I was at the 1984 West End press night of the original Starlight, as it happens, and vividly Read more ...