As in so many other cultural arenas, the UK punches way above its weight in pop music. And, drilling down a level, Manchester is the country’s greatest music city. Please: don’t @ me; just accept it.With his bowl haircut, loping gait, and Doors-inflected organ sounds, Clint Boon was one of the driving forces behind whimsical Madchester collective the Inspiral Carpets. As such, his story runs through the late 20th century Manchester music scene like the crease down a king-size Rizla paper. He knows everyone who’s anyone in the city, and has hilarious anecdotes to share about all of them Read more ...

It’s a tricky elevator pitch for a night out. On the one hand, Kimberly Levaco, the protagonist, is aging in dog years and has just hit a not so sweet 16, her condition’s median life expectancy. On the other, Kimberly Akimbo, the show, bagged five Tonys in 2023 including Best Musical.Short response – see it!We open in a very American, very working class, very left-behind town in Noo Joisey. I could almost hear Bruce Springsteen’s "The River" playing in my head long before the actual show's songs took its place, New Jersey’s most famous resident casting a long shadow.Maybe the continual drip Read more ...

The name was an explicit signpost. Maryland’s Velocity Girl named themselves after the B-side of Primal Scream’s May 1986 second single “Crystal Crescent.” At this point, Bobby Gillespie and Co were still a Byrds-leaning, Sixties-inclined, polkadotted jangly pop outfit. There were no hints of what came later.Velocity Girl formed in College Park, Maryland in 1989 but were embedded in the Washington, DC music scene – one which, for much of the outside world, was defined by hardcore punk and the various flavours springing from it represented by bands like Fugazi and Nation of Ulysses. Looking to Read more ...

It would be wrong to describe this insanely enjoyable operatic, theatrical show as being strictly Pumpkins. Despite its visionary leader Billy Corgan making one-off appearances during the two Southbank shows this week, this is not The Smashing Pumpkins augmented by an orchestra. Instead, Corgan, all Nosferatu and nineties snarl, appears only sporadically to perform songs like “Tonight, Tonight” and, of course, “1979'”. But it would be right to call this performance big, and indeed clever, partly because the original album it draws from - 1995's Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness Read more ...

If a week is a long time in politics, 30 years is an aeon in popular culture. It was in 1996 that Danny Boyle’s film of Irvine Welsh’s novel, Trainspotting, exploded over Britpop Britain, with its frequently horrifying but perversely life-affirming saga of a bunch of Edinburgh junkies. Its opening sequence of Renton and Spud being chased through the Edinburgh streets by a pair of store detectives, with Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” pounding like a steamhammer over Ewan McGregor’s “choose life” monologue, has crystallised in time as one of the all-time classic moments of British cinema.Welsh’s Read more ...

I didn’t want to review Shania Twain. My sense of her is of ancient mega-selling hits I can’t stand. I didn’t even go to her Sunday afternoon set at Glastonbury 2024. But it’s difficult to get most music writers to cover the biggest pop stars of our era. So here we are. And, you know what? It's a much better album than I was anticipating.I wasn’t looking forward to slating a smorgasbord of nursery rhyme, line-dance cheese. Given her remit, it felt unfair and pointless. But I’m off the hook. Even the songs that head that way, such as the breakbeat-rolling “That’s the Money”, boast acceptable Read more ...

Confessions II arrives amid a welter of promotional spectacle and global corporate partnerships. At heart, though, it’s Madonna retreating from projects stuck in development hell, and working through bereavement, via the salve of making music in a low-key London situation with Stuart Price. He produced 2005’s Confessions on a Dance Floor, to which this is a sequel. The preceding singles did not bode well but Confessions II contains surprises and shows a superstar holding her own.Returning to the arena of clubland bangers, and presented as a continuous mix, it’s hampered by the fact that house Read more ...

Sweating in my lair, there’s no trip to the mecca this year. If the festival was on, I'd be there right now, but it’s a fallow year and Glastonbury Festival is keeping its head down. The Glastophilic chat rooms bubble with antsy longing. My house is prowled by ghosts of yesteryear. Finetime’s camera is dormant. The cows on the farm chew their cud in peace.Instead of taking it to the wire in the fields of dreams, scribbled later with the urgency of one possessed, sleepless and obsessed, I can only offer ruminations. Snapshots and snippets. Aided by a large box of mementos from the attic, I Read more ...

For many years Paul Weller had a conflicted relationship with the oldest parts of his back catalogue. It was rare to hear more than one of his pre-1990 songs in concert. Then he started slipping them in, but only a couple. Tonight, he’s clearly at peace with the whole of his long and varied career, playing seven songs by The Jam and four by the Style Council in a set well over two hours long. It’s a joy to hear these gems scattered with vital precision among the eclectic smorgasbord of what came after.Weller has always been a lean, urgent presence and he remains so. Chewing gum, iron-grey of Read more ...

Yo, I'll tell you what I want, what I really, really want. Er… another nostalgic play about growing up in a Yorkshire post-industrial city?Hard on the heels of John Godber’s Leeds-set Do I Love You? running last week at Wilton’s and Kat Rose Martin’s marvellous Bradford-set £1 Thursdays at the Finborough (my best new play of 2023), we take a 30-mile trip south to Doncaster (Donny to friends) for Children of the Night. Is it something in the air? Besides the coal dust of course. Image If those earlier productions traded primarily on the Read more ...

American photographer Catherine Opie took her first self-portrait at the age of nine with a Kodak instamatic she’d been given for her birthday. There she stands in the garden, a little toughie flexing her biceps like a muscle man.And there she is again, twenty four years later. This time she presents herself as Bo (pictured below right), a persona developed among her queer friends in California. Her stance – chest square on, feet apart and thumbs in pockets – makes her look like an off-duty cop, an idea enhanced by what could be a baton dangling from her belt. She looks to camera with a Read more ...

Some exhibitions make you feel inspired, others perplexed. Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting at the National Portrait Gallery left me feeling battered and bruised – as if I’d been hit by a wrecking ball.The show doesn’t start out that way. In the early 1940s, Freud spent several years perfecting his drawing technique. At first, he used a mapping pen, which produces clear, sharp lines perfect for detailed observation.In a luminous self-portrait from 1947 intended as a book illustration, he uses a variety of marks to create the impression of a three-dimensional head. A shock of wiry hair Read more ...