Birmingham
Guy Oddy
It has been three years since The Lemonheads, Evan Dando’s slacker kings, last toured the UK and six years since they released Varshons, a covers album. So it was a pleasant surprise when they recently announced a return to these shores to play some shows with no particular product to push, especially given that anyone might imagine that they had since long disappeared. Power pop with the odd dash of country and punk rock never goes out of fashion though, and in front of a room full of 30- and 40-somethings, the band dished out an evening of nostalgia that was enough to cast minds back Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Cards on the table: the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra is looking for a new music director. Having filled its new season with emerging talents – Andrew Gourlay, Daniele Rustioni, Ryan Wigglesworth and Ben Gernon, to name just four – it’s an open secret that any concert directed by a youngish, more-or-less unattached conductor in Birmingham for the foreseeable future is effectively an audition for the job. And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.All of which created a certain buzz around this Birmingham debut by the Romanian-born, Philadelphia-based Cristian Măcelaru. As winner of the Read more ...
Richard Bratby
There’s just something about an opera orchestra when it’s let out of the pit. The Royal Danish Orchestra is more than that, of course – it makes much of its six centuries of history, and since its past members included John Dowland, Heinrich Schütz and Carl Nielsen, why wouldn’t it? But the qualities that leapt out most energetically from this concert at Symphony Hall – the Orchestra’s sole UK date on a brief European tour – were those you’d expect from a band with theatre in its blood: a vivid sense of musical characterisation, and an instinct for pacing a musical argument over an evening, Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The Supersonic Festival of the weird and the wonderful may now be in its 12th year but it is still more than living up to its long-running tag-line, “For curious audiences”. This year, an eager audience was treated to sets by both the Will Gregory Moog Ensemble and post-metalists Liturgy, as well as most points in between. In fact, for those who like their sounds drawn from beyond the mainstream, Supersonic was again a gold mine of tasty treats – and, as usual, there were also plenty of sights and delights that didn’t involve any music at all. Performance art, audience participation and Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
This was a very "concert" performance indeed. Across the stage music stands stood like sentinels lest any rash singer attempted to stand out and – surely not – act. Such fears were misplaced (or the stands did their job) in the end, as the music was what mattered and everyone stood and sang, with one outstanding exception, the Kundry of Mihoko Fujimura.It can be no coincidence that of all the singers on stage she knew her role most intimately, and had worked for some years with Stefan Herheim in his celebrated production at Bayreuth. That said, Burkhard Fritz (pictured below) has sung the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Not unreasonably, anyone might imagine that a band might lose a bit of their usual vigour if they found themselves four albums into their career playing in a room not much bigger than a church hall, miles from home on a cold Monday evening. Not so the Subways. The Hertfordshire three-piece bounced onto the stage in the Temple room in Birmingham’s Institute and tore straight into the anthemic “We Don’t Need Money to Have a Good Time” and didn’t let up until they finally left the stage more than an hour later with sweat dripping down the walls in torrents.More impressively, they also had the Read more ...
stephen.walsh
You might imagine that composers in general would write songs. On my way to the BCMG’s programme of pieces from the songbook assembled by John Woolrich and Mary Wiegold for the Composers’ Ensemble 30-odd years ago, I tried and failed to think of a significant 19-century composer who didn’t write songs. But in the 20th century song seems to have become a dirty word, associated with mere popularist geniuses like Gershwin, Irving Berlin and John Lennon, then grafted back on to “classical” (as opposed to “music”) as a CD track label. “Serious” modern composers, it turns out, have to be more Read more ...
Guy Oddy
While Julian Cope’s albums are usually fairly expansive affairs which employ a vast array of instruments, an audience with the Arch Drude is a more intimate affair these days. There’s no backing band and the man takes to the stage armed only with a 12-string acoustic guitar, a microphone and a few effects pedals. There’s also a big bass drum set up on stage with “You can’t beat your brain for entertainment” written on the skin – but that’s just a prop and doesn’t get played.Cope started up by launching into “I’m Living in the Room They Found Saddam In” from 2005’s Citizen Cain’d album, and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Birmingham Hippodrome claims to stage the UK's biggest pantomime – a proud boast that highlights its productions' West End-level of investment. And this year's venture, Jack and the Beanstalk, is certainly glitzy and star-laden, while the sets and costumes are fabulous, and there's a 3D sequence as well as a live band, so the claim seems a fair one.Gary Wilmot is Dame Trot, whose three sons Jack, Simple Simon and Silly Billy endlessly get into scrapes. Silly Billy (the excellent Matt Slack, who really connects with the youngsters in the audience) is secretly in love with Princess Apricot Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Brighton’s guitar pop outfit, the Kooks have been churning out largely pleasant but fairly bland songs since their 2006 debut Inside In/Inside Out. Recent album Listen, however, has suggested that things might be changing. Less evident, but not entirely banished, are the unremarkable strum-alongs, with a rawer and funkier groove edging its way into a few of their tunes with some success. Similarly gone is the poodle hair and clothes that made them look like the Verve’s younger, more clean-cut cousins. When the band bounce onto the stage at Birmingham’s O2 Academy, they look like they’ve just Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
So we're off for another blast of between-the-wars ultraviolence with the Shelby gang from Birmingham, once again soundtracked by incongruous electric blues music. Time has moved on from the immediate aftermath of Great War hostilities and now we're into the Twenties, which are roaring as if they're in agony. The baleful Tommy Shelby (a curiously shaved and bleached-looking Cillian Murphy) is aiming to undertake "business expansion" by extending the Peaky Blinders' racketeering tentacles down to London.However, not everyone thinks this is a great idea. Younger brother John points out that the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Two years ago Penny Woolcock was at the heart of Birmingham street gangs in her documentary One Mile Way; that one was titled after the fact that two of the city’s competing outfits were separated only by the distance of the film’s title. In Going to the Dogs, she's back in the same 'hood, this time investigating the city’s dog-fighting scene, with the help of one of the earlier film’s lead protagonists, Dylan Duffus, who proved here a very able narrator-presenter.Tracking down, and ensuring the cooperation of the participants for Dogs… looked like it proved more challenging. No surprise when Read more ...