Bristol
Markie Robson-Scott
Animal behaviourist Jo-Rosie Haffenden, who lives in Spain, has some very good dogs (and a charming toddler, who knows how to sit). Can she transfer her training skills to three-year-old Graydon in Bristol, who has six tantrums a day, and 14-month-old Dulcie in Croydon, who has never gone to sleep in her cot? “Kids are more like dogs than people think,” she says in Train Your Baby Like a Dog, a new parenting programme called “dehumanising” in a Change.org petition asking the network to cancel the show, signed by nearly 25,000 people this week.But Haffenden’s approach, apart from the Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Having started their tour at the Barbican on Sunday, I Fagiolini descended on Bristol with their Leonardo da Vinci celebration on precisely the 500th anniversary of the great man’s death, a fact that earned them an extra round of applause from the proud but sometimes neglected Bristolians in St.George’s. How, though, do you celebrate so great a painter through music? The easy answer would be in the music of his day. But I Fagiolini’s director, Robert Hollingworth, and the Leonardo specialist Martin Kemp had a more interesting, perhaps riskier, recipe. They assembled a hybrid programme of Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Massive Attack have travelled a long way from the Dugout, the Bristol bar where the collective first tried their hand at spinning discs for a crowd whose cultural mix reflected the constant ferment of one of Britain’s most vibrant cities. The city welcomed them back, warmly as it will always do, at the Steel Yard, a vast purpose-built performance space in Filton, home of the Rolls Royce works that make jet engines for Boeing, still vibrant with the ghosts of the engineers and fitters that helped create Concorde, that symbol of European cooperation and future progress.Massive Attack’s set, Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Rob Smith & Ray Mighty are truly the unsung heroes of British bass music. Coming out of the same cultural melting pot in Bristol that gave us Massive Attack, Tricky, Portishead and mega-producer Nellee Hooper, they looked to be among the city's big successes when they first emerged in 1987. Their debut single, a cover of the Bacharach / David classic "Anyone who had a Heart" on their own Three Stripe label was a club success, they produced Massive Attack's debut single "Any Love", and Fresh 4's 1989 rave and chart hit cover of "Wishin' on a Star".However an uncomfortable major label deal Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Mark Kidel has made a beautiful, ethereal film projecting his version of Cary Grant and as such it’s destined to be picked over by the actor’s legions of fans, each of whom will have a different version. But what would the man himself have thought if he’d lived to see Becoming Cary Grant? Notoriously protective and ambivalent about his image, one can only hope that he’d approve of the documentary's sympathetic, melancholic tone.One of the biggest stars in Hollywood’s golden age, Grant appeared in over 70 films before retiring at 62. Kidel makes generous and judicious use of scenes from his Read more ...
David Kettle
“Well, that was really sweet,” one young audience member in front of me remarked on his way out of Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre. And yes, there’s no denying that director Wils Wilson’s colourful, psychedelic, summer-of-love-set Twelfth Night, the Lyceum’s season opener in a co-production with the Bristol Old Vic, is warm and generous, lovingly crafted, and – yes, touchingly sweet.More interestingly, perhaps, it’s enjoyably playful – and gently provocative, too – in its approach to gender. Shakespeare’s original sets the gender-fluid tone – with Duke Orsino falling for the aloof, recently Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Henry V is a play shot through with martial energy and the terrible chaos of war. The almost overpowering violence and energy that characterise the story give the unfolding of the drama a permanently disrupted form, as if the unpredictability of history and the reality of bloodthirsty men going berserk on the field of battle had undermined Shakespeare’s usual formal strengths.Elizabeth Freestone’s very lively and intelligent modern-dress production for Shakespeare at Tobacco Factory, which has moved to the company’s home stage in Bristol, struggles at times with the play’s disjointed nature Read more ...
Jo Southerd
Gota Fría, or “cold drop”, is a Spanish weather phenomenon associated with violent rainstorms, when high pressure has caused a pocket of cold air to dissociate itself from the warmer clouds. Meteorologists, please excuse my basic and probably erroneous interpretation; the point here is that any person who’s experienced mental ill-health will likely relate to the idea of a sudden dip in temperature, a torrential downpour, and the accompanying isolation. On Gota Fría, the Peru-born, Bristol-based singer-songwriter Beth Rowley explores darkness and light via classic songwriting, delivered Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Fenne Lily is a young Bristolian singer-songwriter whose voice will take her far. Her debut album is decent enough, and there are songs on it that reach out and grab you by the guts, but it’s her extraordinary, fragile voice that stays in the mind. Lily’s oeuvre is folk-acoustica but run through with electronics and reverb, putting her in a haunted place where she sounds as if she belongs in one of Twin Peaks' more peculiar scenes.The obvious comparison for much of this album is Lana del Rey, although Lily's voice is higher pitched. There’s something about the way she rides chords and rhythms Read more ...
Rory Mullarkey
“The Cherry Orchard is the greatest play ever written,” I declared, confidently, aged 16, to my mother, having just read The Cherry Orchard for the first time. She responded to my claim with a non-committal snort – remembering, perhaps, the production of The Seagull (the previous month’s “greatest play ever written”) I had dragged her to the Saturday beforehand, and which I had forbidden her from leaving at the interval because she was so bored – and continued with what she was doing, namely driving us to the dentist.But maybe her snort was prematurely dismissive? I’ve returned to the play Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Young Echo is a sprawling Bristolian collective, comprised of individual musicians Jabu, Vessel, Kahn, Neek, Ishan Sound, Ossia, Manonmars, Bogues, Rider Shafique, chester giles [sic] and Jasmine, who combine and re-combine in various permutations like Bandulu, FuckPunk, O$VMV$M, Gorgon Sound and ASDA. But here, for the second time in album format, they've put everything together under the one name and allowed it to blur together into something that is, frankly, very, very Bristol indeed. Slow, slow, beats with deep, deep bass, murmured rapping and poetry, plaintive melodic vocals, and a Read more ...
Phoebe Michaelides
Texan trio Khruangbin are a rare concoction, psychedelic rockers, for sure, but seamed with all manner of global influences, notably Thai pop but also running the gamut from Latin sounds to Middle Eastern scaling. Hitting the UK in support of their second album, Con Todo El Mundo, they initially presented an aloof front, which was compromised briefly by a minor technical glitch.This didn’t distract from the band’s striking retro-future aesthetic, especially bassist-singer Laura Lee, who wore a chic white leotard and red thigh-high boots like a supersonic empress from a kitsch old sci-fi film Read more ...