Africa
Mark Kidel
Athens, 1987: Youssou N'Dour opens for Peter Gabriel on a world tour. It's a wonder – and to his credit – that the British rock star should dare follow such a powerful performance. Few bands at the time could produce such a seductively joyful sound.Dakar's super-talent hadn't yet succombed to the lure of international audiences. Although he'd begun to move away from the explosive party music of the lengthy grand bals with which he would entertain Senegalese audiences for three to four hours, he was still wholeheartedly true to his roots: the unique combination of African and Afro-Cuban Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Metta Theatre’s didactic "short plays" evening takes a rigorously Poppins approach: a spoonful of drama to help the medicine go down. The sobering facts – “We need to produce more food globally by 2050 than we have done in the whole of human history” – come thick and fast, emblazoned on a screen and spouted by four versatile performers. Some pieces, written in collaboration with scientists, are fuelled by those stats, others crumble under their weight.The opening pair are somewhat self-defeating in making their mouthpieces so unappealing: a pious, wilfully naïve organic farmer and Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Africa Utopia at the Southbank Centre is back for its third year with a raft of concerts and events, and for Friday night Senegal's Orchestra Baobab returned to the UK for the first time in three years, one of the great names of the post-independence African renaissance. They were joined by a young French-Cameroonian artist, Blick Bassy (pictured below), who was coming to London for the first time with his debut album Ako.He was here with his trio of cellist Clement Petit and trombonist Fidel Fourneyron, both superb, malleable players, and Bassy on banjo, singing songs inspired by Skip James Read more ...
Simon Munk
A unicorn, on fire; the wet slap of flesh on hospital linoleum; homoerotic manhugs from wounded soldiers. The latest and greatest in the legendary Metal Gear Solid series starts odd. But brilliantly odd.Waking in a hospital bed, covered in bandages is Big Boss. Or Ahab, as what appears to be a face-covered Kiefer Sutherland in a hospital gown insists on calling you. Before you know it Kiefer's helping you make a madcap escape from some distinctly superhuman entities that feel torn straight from the pages of a Manga comic, in a hospital covered in blood, on fire.Then Kiefer's gone and a bloke Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Dramatic music by William Goodchild underlined this narrative of wild life – nature vividly, even horrifyingly red in tooth and claw – of a surviving pride of lions in Botswana’s Savuti marsh, a wetland plain next to the Kalahari desert that attracts a huge range of animals.The Savuti offers water in abundance and, in season, grazing for huge herds of buffalo as far as the eye can see: ambulatory food for predators. The scenery is magnificent, the sunsets gorgeous, the aerial views of the great sweeps of grassland captivating, the night time scenes eerily mesmerising. Life is harsh and Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Now was the summer of our disco tent. The disco tent in question backstage was not jumping as much as in previous years – somehow strutting your Travolta moves in wellies doesn’t quite cut it. A glam tribute band at Molly’s Bar on Thursday night, knocking out Bolan and Bowie numbers dressed in cheap sci-fi tat were hugely entertaining though.Friday was a washout, with nonstop rain, but there were gems – like Tinariwen (pictured, below) whose music is more roll than rock, something to do with how the camels move in the Sahara. Though their main man Ibrahim seems to have been replaced by Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Trudging through the mud at last weekend’s WOMAD provided fleeting moments of random entertainment, as if surfing old-style across the bandwidths of a short-wave radio, you’d stumble unexpectedly on snatches of exotic sounds from around the globe: an eerie double-bass Mongolian throat-song one minute, and a horror-dark wisp of electronically enhanced tango the next. The food was taste-bogglingly varied too, from Algerian-flavoured steak wraps to a mysterious array of Tibetan treats. WOMAD’s programmers know their stuff. There was a profusion of excellent music drawn from all corners of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
If Britain has created a national myth about slavery, it’s surely been centred on the pioneering abolitionists whose actions in the early 19th century led first to the ending of the slave trade across the British Empire in 1807, later to the abolition of the institution in 1834. It’s a record of which, compared to the approach of other nations to the same issue (and the speed of their actions), we may even feel a hint of pride.It’s a myth that BBC Two’s Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners put deservedly to rest, confronting us with harsh facts of history that have been conveniently forgotten. Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
More than anywhere else, the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music has been the place where I have gone annually for most of the last 20 years to retune my ears, to find inspiration and connections, and to discover new international music. For fans, it was always more than a mere music festival; there was a visionary, idealistic element. The founder, Faouzi Skali, is a Sufi who started the festival as a response to the first Gulf war and invited musicians, thinkers and practitioners from all religious persuasions as a counterpoint to extremism and intolerance elsewhere. That mission’s importance Read more ...
Jasper Rees
One night in Cape Town, I was caught in a power cut. Like an untenanted theatre, the city went utterly dark, darker than perhaps it had been since settlers first arrived three centuries earlier. Street lamps, restaurants, car showrooms, offices were all plunged into Stygian gloom. Without traffic lights to impose order, we drove tentatively over the shoulder of Table Mountain and suddenly, sprawled out on the Cape Flats and shining as brightly as the stars overhead, were Guguletu and Khayelitsha. The lights were on in the townships.In purely theatrical terms, the symbolism of this image is Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Cheikh Lô , the much loved Senegalese singer, is back with new recordings for the first time in five years with a three track EP trailing a new album in June, and theartsdesk has an early look at his new video for the lead track “Degg Gui” (see below).The EP is a typically adventurous mix of styles – “Degg Gui” includes a vocal contribution from much touted Brazilian singer Flavia Coelho (her own reggae-soaked debut Mundo Meu is out in May, when she is performing in London) and also features the Parisian based accordionist Fixi, who has been known to record squeezebox hip-hop tracks.The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Naturally Sean Penn, earnest Hollywood liberal and hard-working humanitarian, didn't lightly undertake his role as professional hitman Jim Terrier in The Gunman. "The idea of making violence cute – I've never been interested as an actor in those things," Penn has commented. "But when I read this I thought there were a lot of real-world parallels to it."But let's face it, the fact that The Gunman is directed by Pierre Morel, who also helmed the irony-deficient revenge yarn Taken, doesn't augur well for anyone expecting nuanced dissection of moral conundrums, and the amount of promotional Read more ...