Reviews
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTH 1Simo Cell & Abdullah Diawy Dying is the Internet EP (Dekmantel) + Simo Cell FL Louis (TEMƎT)
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Where house music has drifted to conservatism, becoming predictable and dull, some electronic producers are still creating dancefloor-adjacent music that rips. One of the very best is French machine-freak Simo Cell. His wonked-out bangers defy definition. He’s been Vinyl of the Month before, with his Yes. DJ EP, back in 2021. These two new releases are also essential. The first, via Amsterdam’s Dekmantel organization, is Read more ...
johncarvill
Books about The Beatles are apt to prompt questions on whether there is anything left to say about them. Depends who’s doing the saying. We will each of us have had The Beatles seep into the fabric of our lives in a way that feels unique to us; but only a minority will be able to turn that into a story that’s compelling to others. Samira Ahmed achieves this rare feat by dint of being something of an outsider, but also in many ways an insider.As the child of immigrants, Ahmed’s assimilation of The Beatles was inflected by a certain “outsider status”. For her, The Beatles “existed as a kind of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Billie Eilish’s second concert film joins a newly lucrative genre, following Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour’s $267 million box-office. Both are marketed as participatory filmgoing, turning cinemas into cut-price venues where fans can relive or imagine communing with their heroes. James Cameron’s co-direction with Eilish in his favoured 3D format adds supposed stature, but this remains incurious star-sanctioned product. Eilish is the visual opposite of Swift’s traditionally glamorous feminine persona. The latter’s arch, “Oh, hi!” as she opened her Eras act in silver and red showgirl finery Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Quicksilver Messenger Service were central to what emerged from San Francisco as 1966 unfolded – the psychedelic-dance-ballroom scene. They first played the city’s Avalon Ballroom on 13 May 1966, and were there a further 74 times. Before this, the band had been on stage at the also-Family Dog-promoted Fillmore on 26 February, and over 25 to 27 March. Their initial booking for the city’s other main promoter Bill Graham was also at the Fillmore, on 19 March.These early shows – of a band which debuted live in December 1965 – ensured that QMS was moving fast, seemingly as much so as their the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Carla Simón’s latest autofiction disinters the post-Franco plague of heroin and AIDS which killed her parents and that of Marina (Llúcia Garcia), her indefatigable 18-year-old surrogate in this lyrical story of shame, memory and love.Simón was orphaned by AIDS contracted from sharing needles by the time she was six, and Marina shares this biography, being raised in Barcelona by her mum’s family. Discovering a document she requires for a scholarship to study cinema states her dad had no child, she contacts his Galician family for the first time since his death. The quest to correct the legal Read more ...
Simon Thompson
Concertos where the soloist is a member of the orchestra are something of a Scottish Chamber Orchestra speciality. They’re always among their best-sold concerts each season, and there are obvious gains of warmth and communication when the band are playing to support one of their own. This week, the honour fell to Philip Higham, the SCO’s principal cello, and he played Robert Schumann’s Cello Concerto with so much involvement and quasi-operatic intensity that it was easy to forget how low down the priority list Schumann’s concertos were until very recently.Higham clearly believes in the work Read more ...
Gary Naylor
In the 1920s, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was as famous as it gets really, author of the beloved Sherlock Holmes stories, a polymath and a rare British example of that most continental of figures, the public intellectual. Across The Atlantic, Harry Houdini was a phenomenon, the escapologist showman, personifying The Great American Dream, even making movies.A century on, Holmes and Houdini (both of whom are invented characters, lest we forget) persist as metaphors and memes that require no explanation.Ah, lest we forget. Neither man could, to the extent that memories became pathologised. The writer Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Contrast and variety are as vital in a three-ballet programme as in a well-built sandwich. Typically that might include textural interest, a spicy element and something substantial in the middle. Alchemies, the Royal Ballet’s latest triple bill, ignored that time-tested formula with the result that not one of the three works by Wayne McGregor registered as strongly as it should. Granted, the final item was a world premiere, so management couldn't have known exactly how it would turn out. On paper, Quantum Souls (terrible title), with its wall of onstage percussion instruments surrounded by Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Hallé Orchestra is still in many ways the well honed, burnished instrument created by Sir Mark Elder over his near quarter-century as its music director, and his calm authority over it was apparent in almost every note of this, his second Bridgewater Hall appearance in the present season.Radio 3 listeners – the concert was broadcast live – will have been aware as much as those in the auditorium of the qualities of its playing under its now Conductor Emeritus: incisive articulation, intelligently balanced and unified ensemble, sweet and passionate string playing, rapier-thrust brass Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Those nostalgic for a time when the Haymarket offered big names in well-upholstered plays will have a field day at Grace Pervades, in which David Hare furthers his relationship with Ralph Fiennes. Their partnership includes Straight Line Crazy here and in New York and the solo play Beat the Devil, in which Fiennes actually played the dramatist (15 years his senior) in the tale of Hare's battle with COVID. This play inhabits notionally less troubled times in its story of two titans of the Victorian era, Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, the latter of whom was the great-aunt of the legendary Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
I’m a latecomer to John Robins and Elis James’s hugely popular podcast, having only started to listen during a period of illness last year, when I quickly became hooked. The two (plus producer Dave) have an appealing chemistry that makes them a pleasure to spend time with. Prior to that I was aware of Robins as champion of series 17 of Taskmaster – a perennial favourite in my household – but had not seen his stand-up. Although his stage and podcast persona is of an obsessive neurotic driven mad by the petty obstacles in the path of everyday life, this new memoir narrates the more significant Read more ...
Gary Naylor
For a master dramatist - even for a tyro really - The Price is a strangely uneven play, brilliant psychological insights diluted by clunking structural issues. You wonder what it would be like in the hands of a less talented cast, a less experienced director, performed on a less convincing set - it could unravel very quickly. It was something of a surprise to find that amongst the credits in the programme, its weakest link proved to be its writer, Arthur Miller.We open on a middle-aged NYPD cop rooting through a treasure trove of stuff that you might find presented at an Antiques Roadshow Read more ...