London
Adam Sweeting
Picking five creatively significant years was quite a smart way of tackling the huge career of David Bowie, though you could argue forever about whether producer/director Francis Whately had chosen the right ones. What about 1969 and the Space Oddity album, or 1970 and The Man Who Sold the World? How about a really bad year like 1987, which gave us Never Let Me Down and the egregious Glass Spider tour?But the film is what it is rather than what it isn't, and most of what we got was fascinating, and often terrific. In an opening collage of quotes from Bowie, Whately banged home the point that Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Neko Case wasn't about to launch a Yeah Yeah Yeahs-style pre-emptive strike aimed at the Village Underground's amateur camera-wielders. She doesn't mind the odd photograph, she said; just don't try to film her. It makes her feel a little uncomfortable. Didn't we all use to just remember?She's 23 now, with the sort of voice that can instantly hush the chattiest Shoreditch crowdAly Spaltro (below right), the songwriter better known as Lady Lamb the Beekeeper, remembers. It's in her songs, and in her stories: being 20 years old and getting refused entry to an over-21s Neko Case show in her Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Steve Earle is country music's great polymath - short story writer, playwright, novelist, activist, actor, oh yes, and singer and songwriter of some of the most acutely intelligent and literate songs in contemporary country. He's adept at evoking the human cost of American history, American politics and the lay of the promised land, and on his latest album, The Low Highway, the first song takes a long, slow panning shot of the body politic. It’s not in great condition. Happily, though, Steve Earle’s muse is.Not only that, this, one of his first band tours in years, with the gallantly named Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Stooshe are a manufactured London girl band. They were put together a couple of years ago by shrewd ex-girl-bander Jo Perry, a self-made London studio engineer and a songwriter for, among others, Peter Andre. Despite this prosaic, business-savvy backstory Stooshe emanate a sass that’s likeable. Unlike, say, Little Mix, there’s a certain garrulous, sweary bounce to them, a sense that perhaps they really are friends and really are having fun. On top of this, the influence of their (comparatively) easygoing attitude to body shape and appearance in a teen/tween market overrun with homogenized Read more ...
David Benedict
I mean, really, what is the point of Rossini? That’s actually not as stupid as it sounds. No-one has ever mistaken any of his operas for taut music-drama, and even the best of them are peculiarly difficult to pull off because without first-rate singers, everything collapses. That is, without doubt, not a problem facing the Royal Opera’s new La donna del lago. Trust me: London hasn’t heard such spectacular Rossini singing in decades.Nor, indeed, has London seen a production of this opera since Covent Garden’s 1985 outing which, I’m reliably informed, boasted (good news) the great Marilyn Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The disgraced ex-cop turned private investigator has become such a trope of contemporary noir that the fate of the first great modern detective, following the events of his first televised outing, is not particularly surprising. The Murder in Angel Lane has Paddy Considine reprise his 2011 role as the titular detective, but this time the mystery he is charged with solving has sprung entirely from the pen of Appropriate Adult’s Neil McKay rather than being inspired by true-life events.Forced out of the police on mental health grounds by the events of his last televised adventure, former Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
For a celebration of all that's supposedly best in British television, this year's telly-BAFTAs felt mysteriously flat and anticlimactic. Even perennial host Graham Norton seemed less fleet of foot than usual, though he did manage one caustic barb about the plank-like acting skills of Downton Abbey's Lady Mary. Perhaps he was distracted by his own dual nominations (he won for Entertainment Programme). The ejector seat from his chat show might have been the perfect accoutrement to add a bit of adrenalin to the occasion.An ominous early omen was the win for the tepid Last Tango in Halifax in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Another day, another murder to solve on ITV. Broadchurch, Endeavour and Foyle’s War all having recently ended, the channel has been in dire need of a fresh supply of corpses since, ooh, Monday morning. To the rescue, on consecutive nights, has come another brace of crime dramas. Both set in the past. With lady crime-solvers in play. All sorts of boxes ticked.First, to the 1980s, where Hayley Atwell has donned a copper’s uniform so that she can step into her late father’s shoes. Disappointingly, this mainly seems to involve being groped by drunken colleagues and blushing slightly when balled Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Sixty years of hard work, encapsulated in 90 drawings and a handful of thickly encrusted paintings, by the distinguished, obsessive, single-minded octagenerian artist Leon Kossoff (b 1926) vividly set out a passionate attachment to a simultaneously immutable and ever changing London. An East Ender, Kossoff has had several subjects: he has painted people, and has continually drawn after the Old Masters, first visiting the National Gallery as a schoolchild. His drawings after Poussin were exhibited at the National Gallery. But here for the first time, is an exhibition concentrating on Kossoff’s Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
What’s the price of betrayal? In Peter Nichols’s 1981 play it’s a painful splintering of the psyche. The betrayer mentally compartmentalises in order to be both affectionate husband and ardent lover; the betrayed loses her confidence, her purpose, even her identity until she is – in ways that Nichols makes theatrically explicit – beside herself.There are moments when this ghastly anti-romantic gavotte creaks faintly, carrying with it the sour whiff of the hangover from the sexual-liberation party games of the Sixties. But the drama, often compared to Stoppard's The Real Thing and Pinter's Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Rikki Beadle-Blair is a high-energy polymath. He’s a real phenomenon. Raised by his lesbian mum in sarf London, he wrote his first play at the age of seven and was, he claims, already directing four years later. Nowadays he creates challenging entertainment in film, education and theatre (18 new plays in six years). He also writes self-help books. His heart’s clearly in the right place. There’s only one problem — he’s not a very good playwright.Gutted, his latest trip down to the council estates of South-East London, is a family drama. It’s a grim tale of an Irish cockney matriarch, Bridie, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
With two chart-topping singles under their belt, Rudimental have arrived. The unassuming, feel-good quartet from Hackney have chopped through mainstream radio’s mug-step cheese and post-Guetta club pop with an efficient hatchet of drum & bass soul-funk. Their debut album makes them sound like a great, energized festival act too, with lots of beats’n’bass to make feet shuffle, laced with a musicality attractive to casual listeners. What’s more, much of it doesn’t come across as calculated. When the trumpet arrives on the number one hit “Feel the Love”, it has an easy swing, and the guitar Read more ...