2017
Guy Oddy
It’s some 40 years since Swans first made a name for themselves through the sheer volume of their live performances and provocative song titles like “Time is Money (Bastard)” and “Raping a Slave”. Irritated by this reputation though, it wasn’t long before band leader Michael Gira had turned down the volume somewhat (though not too much) and was bringing new sounds into their repertoire.This keenness not to stand still artistically has remained a constant throughout Swans’ history, and so it is no surprise that there is plenty that is new and interesting on The Beggar. Opening track, “The Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The actress Sydney Sweeney’s face in the harrowing docudrama Reality is an ever-evolving map, its contours and pallor altering as it gradually dawns on her character, the real-life American whistleblower Reality Winner, that her conscience has put paid to her freedom for the forseeable future.Sweeney’s eyes are big to begin with but they seem to expand as Winner agonizingly bleeds out the truth of the unauthorised action she took to protect democracy during Donald Trump’s presidency; the eyes of Wallace Taylor (Marchánt Davis), one of the two FBI agents grilling Winner, never blink, his stare Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
It’s been five years since 72 people died in the Grenfell Tower fire in West London. Five years and no arrests, as countless placards and posters around the neighbourhood point out.The Grenfell Tower Inquiry into how the tragedy occurred – why it was allowed to occur by hundreds of people – concluded in November 2022, with enough material that Richard Norton-Taylor and Nicolas Kent have been able to construct another devastating verbatim play. Where Grenfell: Value Engineering (2021) left us speechless, System Failure makes us rage.The Playground Theatre is about 10 minutes’ walk from Read more ...
Robert Beale
Saturday’s concert by the BBC Philharmonic was in large measure about the Mahlers – Gustav and Alma. The former’s First Symphony formed the substantial second part of the programme: Frau Mahler was the inspiration of the piece that opened the evening. New Zealand-born Gemma New returned to Manchester to conduct: we saw her last October on the Hallé rostrum, and the energy and fierce attention she brought then were even more evident this time.That first piece was Die Windsbraut, by Alissa Firsova (daughter of Elena and of Dmitri Smirnov), a short essay in putting pictorial ideas into music, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Stories of Japanese soldiers who spent years in the tropical jungles long after the end of World War Two have always felt more like metaphorical illustrations of the lunacy of war than actual historical fact. Yet some of them were true, most notably that of Hiroo Onoda.Paris-born director Arthur Harari’s film traces Onoda’s story from his attempts in 1944 to qualify as a pilot – his trainers failed him because of his fear of heights, though they did offer him the consolation prize of becoming a kamikaze pilot – to his recruitment to a secretive unit specialising in undercover operations. As Read more ...
peter.quinn
From newcomer Jazzmeia Horn to the Grammy-winning elder statesman Alan Broadbent, this round-up of favourite jazz releases represents just the tip of a huge iceberg of activity in 2017.A strong year for UK label Edition Records included Denys Baptiste’s The Late Trane, a beautiful deep dive into late period Coltrane by the outstanding British tenor player, plus the whiplash-inducing gear changes of Phronesis’s The Behemoth, which saw the Scandinavian/British trio’s back catalogue cast in dazzling big band arrangements. For ECM, US pianist Craig Taborn followed his solo debut Read more ...
Barney Harsent
There are albums that reveal themselves to you, their hidden depths become apparent over time as familiarity helps one to acclimatize to the terrain. David Crosby’s Sky Trails was one such release and has stayed with me since its release.There are albums that burn with incandescent light from the get-go, albums that leave you smiling with glee as they bring warmth to your world and add light to your day. Indeed, in this category were two that, in any other year, would have been shoe-ins for my album of the year slot. The sparse, electronic experiments of Autarkic’s I Love You, Go Away Read more ...
theartsdesk
Young people will laugh incredulously when you tell them that once upon a time, there was only one television channel in Britain. Now we've lost count, and as even the Queen pointed out in her Christmas broadcast, many of her subjects would now be watching her (no doubt hoping for a walk-on by Meghan Markle) on phones or iPads. And comparing Her Maj with Claire Foy in The Crown, the second series of which is every bit as good as the first.In our omni-channel, multiplatform present, it has become almost impossible to keep track of everything that's happening. Consuming the output of Netflix Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
With a clownish bully currently installed in the White House, the 2017 Man Booker Prize aptly went to a novel that showed a President who commanded true courage and nobility – Abraham Lincoln – as he grappled with the mysteries of life and death, love and loss, in the wake of his son’s passing. Markie Robson-Scott saluted the “magnificently inventive” Lincoln in the Bardo, one of clutch of stand-out novels that explored power and its abuse in another year of deranged global politics.Unjustly ignored by prize juries, Colm Tóibín returned to mythical Greece to re-tell the tragedy of the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1972, just 2000 copies of Bright Phoebus were pressed. Half were off-centre and unplayable. This year, the first conscientious reissue of the album hit 31 in the British album chart. Although it has been a cult favourite for the last couple of decades, the success was nonetheless surprising. Sales and an imponderable future were unlikely to have been on the minds of anyone involved in the recording of this folk-rooted singer-songwriter masterpiece.Bright Phoebus was credited as an album showcasing the songs of siblings Lal & Mike Waterson – it was not strictly by Lal & Mike Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Following in the footsteps of its predecessor lullaby and… The Ceaseless Roar (2014), where Robert Plant was also accompanied by his current band the Sensational Space Shifters, Carry Fire has been assembled from ingredients culled from virtually every continent. There are Indian and Arabic drones, spiralling 12-string guitar arabesques which bridge the gap from San Francisco to Katmandu, and drum and percussion patterns from various African locations, alongside shots of blues and folk and a haze of electronica. “Bones of Saints” could almost be called a pop song.Plant no longer positions Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Year-end wrap-ups function as both remembrances of things past and time capsules, attempts to preserve an experience to which audiences, for the most part, have said farewell. (It's different, of course, for films, which remain available to us forever.) How fitting, then, that pride of place for the year just gone should be saved for the National Theatre's shimmering revival of Follies, the 1971 Stephen Sondheim/James Goldman musical about the very act of letting go, served up in a production from the astonishing Dominic Cooke, whose 2016 NT revival of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom led my line-up Read more ...