1970s
The Apprentice review - from chump to TrumpFriday, 18 October 2024
It’s common to say that Shakespeare would have liked such-and-such a modern story, but I think he actually might have gone for this one. The Bard’s eye was drawn to cruelty at every turn, and bad-to-the-bone cruelty seeps from each scene of The... Read more... |
Salem’s Lot review - listless King remakeSunday, 13 October 2024
A boy’s dead friend scratching at his first-floor window, Nosferatu-like vampire Barlow rearing up with heart attack shock…The Texas Chain Saw Massacre director Tobe Hooper’s 1979 TV take on Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot scared a teen generation out of... Read more... |
Lygia Clark: The I and the You, Sonia Boyce: An Awkward Relation, Whitechapel Gallery review - breaking boundariesThursday, 10 October 2024
Brazilian artist Lygia Clark is best known for taking her abstract sculptures off the pedestal and inviting people to interact with them. Dozens of constructions named Bichos (Beasts or Critters) (pictured below right) are hinged... Read more... |
French Toast, Riverside Studios review - Racine-inspired satire finds its laughs once up-and-runningWednesday, 09 October 2024
It’s always fun jabbing at the permanently open wound that is Anglo-French relations, now with added snap post-Brexit, its fading, but still frothing, humourless defenders clogging up Twitter and radio phone-ins even today. So it’s probably timely... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: The Devil Rides In - Spellbinding Satanic Magick & The RockultSunday, 06 October 2024
Just over two weeks before Christmas 1967, The Rolling Stones issued Their Satanic Majesties Request. The album’s title appeared to serve time on the peace-and-love, flowers-for-everyone good vibes of the psychedelic era. A year later, the Stones’... Read more... |
Michael Craig-Martin, Royal Academy review - from clever conceptual art to digital decorWednesday, 25 September 2024
Michael Craig-Martin was the most playful and provocative of the conceptual artists. His early sculptures are like visual puns, a play on the laws of nature. On the Table, 1970 (pictured below right), for instance, appears to defy gravity. Four... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Peter Baumann - Phase by Phase: The Virgin AlbumsSunday, 01 September 2024
When the first solo album by Tangerines Dream’s Peter Baumann was released in the US in 1977, its promotion was striking. Press advertising (pictured below left) said “he possesses the infinite vision that has made his group one of the most... Read more... |
A Chorus Line, Sadler's Wells review - high-kicking fun that's low on pathosTuesday, 06 August 2024
A Chorus Line reigned supreme on Broadway from 1975 to 1990, a bold, bare-bones piece that for once put musical theatre’s hoofers in the spotlight. “As welcome as a rainbow after a thunderstorm” was Clive Barnes’s summation in the New York Times.It... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Sex Pistols - Looking For a Kiss in KristinehamnSunday, 04 August 2024
After Sex Pistols have played “New York,” the fourth song in their set, someone from the audience shouts “Anarchy in the U.K.” "We've already played it, you fucking idiot" responds Sid Vicious. They have. It was the first song they did at... Read more... |
Album: X - Smoke & FictionThursday, 01 August 2024
X, although beloved of music journalists, are one of American punk’s most under-acknowledged. They took a tilt at fame in the mid-Eighties with the radio-friendly Ain’t Love Grand album and its lead single “Burning House of Love”, but it wasn’t to... Read more... |
Album: Blues Pills - BirthdayWednesday, 31 July 2024
Swedish-American four-piece Blues Pills are new to this writer but have been around since 2011. Their fourth album makes me wonder why.Of its 11 songs, judged purely on sheer pop-rock chops, nine have real legs. If a friend had put Birthday on and... Read more... |
Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent, Whitechapel Gallery review - photomontages sizzling with rageTuesday, 30 July 2024
Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent at the Whitechapel Gallery includes many of the artists’s most iconic political photomontages. Beginning in the 1970s, Kennard created images that by speaking truth to power, gave protest movements like CND (... Read more... |
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