2000s
Joe Muggs
At 24, Bradfordian Nia Archives has already clearly marked out her musical territory.While many of her Gen Z contemporaries have embraced the rave, jungle and drum’n’bass sounds of the early-mid 1990s, she’s done it more wholeheartedly than most: particularly rebuilding the rolling breakbeats and deep bass of jungle as a kind of British urban folk music, collaborating with older generations (original junglists DJ Die and Randall of Watch The Ride), and demonstrating how her natural Caribbean-influenced Yorkshire vocal articulation fits perfectly into that. Crucially, though, having shown Read more ...
Robert Beale
Brazil-born conductor Simone Menezes, known for imaginative and pioneering concert presentation, presided over a striking and illuminating programme shared by Manchester’s Kantos Chamber Choir and Manchester Camerata, with the star quality of Karen Cargill the icing on the cake.The association between the youthful choir (founded and directed by Ellie Slorach) and orchestra is still relatively new but looks set to lead to great things. In this case there was an intriguing link between several of the pieces on offer and an understated but carefully realised staging: an assembly of unlit candles Read more ...
Sarah Kent
At last Yoko Ono is being acknowledged in Britain as a major avant garde artist in her own right. It has been a long wait; last year was her 90th birthday! The problem, of course, was her relationship with John Lennon and perceptions of her as the Japanese weirdo who broke up the Beatles and led Lennon astray – down a crooked path to oddball, hippy happenings.Most notorious were the Bed-ins which the couple staged in the late 1960s as a protest against the Vietnam war. At the heart of Tate Modern’s exhibition is the 1969 film BED PEACE in which we see the couple advocating peace from hotel Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A decade ago Canadian duo Chromeo had their biggest success with the single “Jealous (I Ain’t With It)” and its parent album, White Women. However, it didn’t presage a move into the mainstream.For over 20 years, Chromeo’s wry-sexy, wordy electro-funk has been more hipster than populist. Their magnificent 2009 appearance, endorsing handwashing, on eye-boggling kids TV programme Yo Gabba Gabba sums up their playful ethos (check YouTube!). Then again, the same could said of their more recent COVID-era Quarantine Casanova EP. They were into all that Random Access Memories schtick before Daft Punk Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
When they read the roll-call of British Formula One champions, the likes of Jackie Stewart, Graham and Damon Hill and Nigel Mansell tend to grab the spotlight, but Jenson Button’s dramatic and totally unexpected win in 2009 is every bit as worthy of celebration. It get its due here, in Disney’s hugely entertaining account of how Button, team boss Ross Brawn and his unfancied and underfunded squad defied the odds and provoked apoplexy among the F1 aristocracy.It’s a great story, though it undoubtedly helps if you have some interest in F1 to begin with, and it gains an extra jolt of horsepower Read more ...
The SpongeBob Musical, QEH review - musical based on popular kids' animation sinks for lack of focus
Gary Naylor
There are many things that you are not told about being a parent, a vast landscape of details that batter you with unwelcome difference from that comfortable life of Friday night prosecco and pizza. One is a whole new palette of garish colours barging into your eyeline – fluorescent yellow, eye-bleeding orange, vomity green. As quickly as you learn about this hitherto unknown spectrum that even van Gogh might think a little too much, you forget, the brain too addled by fatigue to retain any information from those shocking sleepless years. Until you go to see The SpongeBob Musical – then they’ Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The shadow of Grenfell Tower has already produced Nick Kent and Richard Norton-Taylor’s dispassionately forensic but devastating documentary plays based on transcripts from the Grenfell Inquiry. Now comes a companion piece, the National’s Grenfell, a verbatim play using excerpts from the same source, but larded by Gillian Slovo into a wider account of the fire by those who were in it, to equally wrenching effect.The cast of 12 arrive in the National’s small Dorfman space and one by one introduce themselves: first by their own names, then as the main character they will play (all take on a Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Ever since she broke through in her teens, Leicestershire singer Mahalia Burkmar’s music has often been referred to as retro or revivalist R&B. But that framing is a fundamental misunderstanding of the way the genre operates for young 21st century music lovers. For fans and artists of Mahalia’s generation – she’s 25 – the Nineties and early Noughties classics of Mariah, TLC, Destinys Child and co aren’t really retro in the way that Seventies and Eighties music were back then.Firstly, those records have weathered the cycles of fashion particularly well – they’ve never been “out” so there’s Read more ...
Justine Elias
Searching for a coherent narrative thread in David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006) is probably futile, so it’s best to begin with the movie’s nervy central performance by Laura Dern in multiple, overlapping roles as “a woman in trouble” – the movie’s subtitle. Or maybe many different women in all manner of trouble. In one timeline, Dern plays a battered but defiant drifter, fighting back against years of abuse. In another, she’s an American actress at work on a Southern-fried melodrama called On High in Blue Tomorrows. That movie-within-a-movie’s smarmy Read more ...
Cheri Amour
When McFly returned to our loudspeakers in the summer of 2020 with Young Dumb Thrills, the record marked their first in a decade. The foursome, comprised of guitarist/vocalist Tom Fletcher, bassist/vocalist Dougie Poynter, guitarist/vocalist Danny Jones and drummer Harry Judd, had no qualmed about admitting the struggles that'd faced coming back together as a band (their lackluster 2010 release, Above The Noise, was very much the sound of a group hitting peak commercial heights with the overprocessed artwork and digital sounds to match).But, whatever your preconceptions of a band like McFly, Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
It’s been more than 20 years since the premiere of The Shape of Things, Neil LaBute’s prickly drama about couples and friends and the ways we change each other. And boy, does it show. Director Nicky Allpress and a talented young cast try their best with a script that, though updated for this version at the Park Theatre, still feels behind the times.Evelyn (Amber Anderson) meets Adam (Luke Newton, of Bridgerton fame) at work. His work, that is – he’s a security guard at an art gallery, she’s an art student with a can of spray paint she eventually uses to draw a penis on a sculpture. She gives Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In July 2007, an article in The Guardian expressed surprise that shoegazing was influencing a series of current musicians, Blonde Redhead, Deerhunter, Maps and Ulrich Schnauss amongst them.“You could hear the heady, woozy influence of a style of music that had been a byword for naffness and overindulgence for the past 15 years,” said the article’s opening paragraph. “A type of music that Richey Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers had said he ‘hated more than Hitler’".Five years on, in the same newspaper, a May 2012 live review of America’s Beach House said much the same thing: “The early Read more ...