Reviews
Kieron Tyler
The Lemon Twigs aren’t shy about telegraphing their inspirations. A Dream is all we Know, their swift follow-up to last May’s Everything Harmony, is stuffed with references. “Sweet Vibration” is rooted in The Left Banke’s “She May Call You up Tonight.” “In the Eyes of the Girl” draws from The Beach Boys’s “Girls on the Beach.” Album opener “My Golden Years” nods to second album Big Star. Todd Rundgren looms large over the album’s title track.Brian and Michael D’Addario’s bold fifth album needs, though, to have more going for it than good taste and evidence for a cool record collection to make Read more ...
David Nice
Four years embracing pandemic, genocide and rapid environmental degradation predicted by Wagner’s grand myth have passed before the Southbank Brünnhilde could become a new woman – literally, in this Ring. Since Das Rheingold, the “preliminary evening”, in 2018, the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Vladimir Jurowski has grown ever more idiomatic and resplendent. Casting of the main roles, however, had more than its usual peaks and troughs this time round.You suspect that there's a second league of singers when it comes to Wagner interpretation in the round who always give the same kind of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Edinburgh’s Rezillos were booked to play Middlesbrough’s Rock Garden on Wednesday 14 September 1977. “I Can’t Stand my Baby,” their debut single, had been issued in July and they were on the road subsequent to its release, positive music press reviews and regular spins from John Peel. Their humour-laced, Day-Glo art-punk was making waves.In Middlesbrough, the bill was filled out by local band Lice? – their name taken from a cautionary poster about pubic lice – and Macclesfield/Salford outfit Warsaw, who’d had a line-up change the previous month when their drummer Steve Brotherdale left. His Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Cricket has always been a lens through which to examine the legacy of the British Empire. In the 1930s, the infamous Bodyline series saw the new nation, Australia, stand up to its big brother’s bullying tactics. In the 1970s, the all-conquering West Indies team gave pride to the Windrush generation when they vanquished an England whose captain had promised to make them grovel. In the 2010s, the brash and bold Indian Premier League saw the world’s largest democracy flex its financial muscle as global power shifted eastwards. Kate Attwell’s 2019 play, Testmatch (receiving its UK Read more ...
Justine Elias
Earthrise, the 1968 Apollo 8 photograph of our small island of a planet, taken from the Moon’s surface, transformed our vision of our fragile home world. “To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats,” wrote Archibald MacLeish, “is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold.”In I.S.S., a swift, smart science-fiction thriller set aboard the real-life international space station, a new crew member, Dr. Kira Foster (Ariana DeBose), is similarly awestruck, and humbled, by that Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
With a troubled gaze and a lived-in face, the portrait of artist Alberto Giacometti on a withdrawn Swiss banknote is strange currency indeed. One need only think of the confidence and pomp with which national heroes gaze at us from Great British cash. Yet Giacometti is in the zone here, retaining the expression of weary humanity with which one imagines he probes the appearance of his sitters. Between 1998 and 2016, at least, the Swiss national bank was self-assured enough to accommodate real character and a bit of personality on its 100 Franc note.This image, itself an arguable masterpiece, Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The French cellist Christian-Pierre La Marca confesses that – like so many classical musicians – he was at a loss during lockdown as to how to develop his musical career. Then, at a recording for a TV show, he met the street dancer Yaman Okur, who made his name with the hip hop collective Wanted Posse and has collaborated with performers including Madonna.It was immediately clear to both of them that a collaboration could yield dividends, precisely because it was so counterintuitive. Four years later, we sat in the crypt of St Martin-In-The-Fields to see what they had devised for a programme Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
In director Pat Collins’s lyrical adaptation of John McGahern’s last novel, with cinematography by Richard Kendrick, the landscape is perhaps the most important character – though there’s a fine cast of well known mainly Irish actors.If you’re feeling hemmed in by concrete and city life, it’s a balm to take a deep breath and listen to the birdsong while watching the lake, the trees and the hills change colour through the seasons.Joe and Kate Ruttledge (Barry Ward and Anna Bederke) moved from London two years ago to live in this rural lakeside Irish community (it was filmed in Connemara). It’s Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Stephen is the first feature film by multi-media artist Melanie Manchot and it’s the best debut film I’ve seen since Steve McQueen’s Hunger. It’s gripping from the first frame to the last; the tension rarely lets up as we watch the main character lying and cheating his way through life as he struggles with addiction and is fleeced by card and loan sharks. In a heart-wrenching scene, his brother Paul (expertly played by Cam Riley) begs him to seek help.The film opens with Stephen (Stephen Giddings) watching The Arrest of Thomas Goudie, a film shot in 1901 about a real life bank clerk who Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The first season of Blue Nights was so close to police procedural perfection, it would be hard for season two to reach the same heights. Overall, it doesn’t, though there are still special moments.After an exhilarating start, its multiple narrative strands thrash around like eels in a tank. We are back at the response unit in the old Belfast nick, though with a new recruit and a couple of old faces unexpectedly returning. [Spoiler alert for those who didn’t watch season one and ought to.] But the tightness of the writers’ grip has slackened.It’s a year on, and the rookie cops have bedded in. Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Sabine Devieilhe, as with many other great sopranos, elicits much fan worship, with no less than three encores at her recent Wigmore Hall recital. In her native France, and in the rest of Europe, she has gathered ecstatic reviews for her performance and recording of a range of repertoire that stretches from the Baroque and Mozart to Richard Strauss, Debussy and Poulenc.Accompanied by Mathieu Pordoy, she offered the rapt audience at the Wigmore an artfully designed programme of Mozart and Strauss, weaving her way through surprising segues and contrasts with seamless ease. On the face of it, Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
In A History of the World in 47 Borders, Jonn Elledge takes an ostensibly dry subject – how maps and boundaries have shaped our world – and makes from it a diverting and informative read. It is light and conversational in tone, covering topics that range from the clearly important to the niche, showing Elledge’s eye for an entertaining story and an ability to pick up political hot potatoes without burning his fingers.The 47 chapters are each about five pages long (none outstay their welcome) divided into three tranches: “Histories” (how the map of the world changed over time from the earliest Read more ...