Manchester
theartsdesk
The Prodigy: The Fat of the Land 15th Anniversary Expanded EditionThomas H GreenAlmost a decade after acid house changed the landscape of British music, it seemed rave culture was finally about to take over pop. The Chemical Brothers hit the top of the charts, assisted by Noel Gallagher, in Autumn 1996 with “Setting Sun”, Goldie led a wave of drum & bass eagerly signed by major labels, 12” singles were selling by the ton and, leading the charge, The Prodigy topped the single’s and album’s charts in mid-1997 on both sides of the Atlantic with “Firestarter” and its parent album The Fat of Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
Support bands tend to get short shrift, but it would be criminal not to give Evil Blizzard their due here. Made up of three bass guitarists with assorted effects pedals and a drummer who also sang, three members of the band were in pink pyjamas and wearing masks, while the fourth was in black leather and a Hawkwind hairdo. They produced industrial levels of noise around steady riffs and a variety of filthy bass sounds.One member removed his silver, robotic mask to reveal a scarecrow hood underneath, and a song later removed that too, only to be left with a third, featureless rubber face Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You could hardly wish for a better subject for Imagine than Jeanette Winterson. When we see her at the Edinburgh book festival, promoting her recent autobiography Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?, she’s got the audience eating out of her hand: they get the full "experience". Elsewhere, though, she’s quieter, reflecting on a short enough life - born in 1959, she’s only just over the half-century mark – that has been so full that Roger Parsons’ immaculate 80-minute programme took a 25-year intermission in the middle.We jumped from the end of her Oxford years, culmination of that strangest Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Having 30 “rats” running around hardly seems the stuff of festive fare, but since the begetter of the show is Carol Ann Duffy, known in her children’s writing for dark fairy tales, we might expect something different. And, after all, these rodents are actually local children dressed as ragamuffins. Rats, it seems, can be cute and not necessarily baddies – and, in any case, the Pied Piper is at hand.This is the world premiere of an imaginative entertainment concocted by director Melly Still and our Poet Laureate, inspired by the latter’s three stories in The Stolen Childhood, but taking in Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Oh, how it’s raining. Streaming down the windows of the dry goods store, Torrance Mercantile, in the Deep South, where Lady Torrance is marooned in a stiflingly small town and a loveless marriage with an awful secret. Depressing. “We’re under a lifelong sentence to solitary confinement in our own lonely skins,” says 30-year-old drifter Val Xavier in his snakeskin jacket, holding onto his only companion in his wanderings, his precious, celebrity-signed guitar.Life is bleak, but we know there’s escapism – and disaster – waiting to burst out. There’s Lady’s repressed sexuality, smothered by 15 Read more ...
philip radcliffe
It is considerate of Manchester’s two professional symphony orchestras to have organised their opening Wagner celebration salvoes so that they dovetail so neatly. The BBC Philharmonic opened their season three weeks ago with the Wesendonck Lieder, famously inspired by the composer’s infatuation with Mathilde, the wife of his wealthy sponsor Otto Wesendonck, and featuring those two well-known studies for Tristan und Isolde, "Im Treibhaus" (In the Hothouse) and "Traume" (Dreams). Last night came the Hallé with the Prelude and Liebestod of that very opera.With principal guest conductor Markus Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Wagner was not averse to highlights being plucked from the mighty Ring, even though it is an all-encompassing drive-through drama. Perhaps it’s as well, since the bicentenary celebrations of his birth are getting up steam and concert planners are at pains to pull out a few plums. After all, we can’t wallow in the whole of the cycle all of the time.For the start of his second season as Chief Conductor of the BBC Phil, Juanjo Mena (pronounced Huanho Mayna, he being a proud Basque) chose favourite dramatic excerpts from Götterdämmerung. Not a choice for the fainthearted, featuring the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The uproarious success of Downton Abbey, now firmly established as one of Britain's great national pastimes, seems to have had the happy effect of persuading ITV1 that it must make more drama. Thus, the autumn of 2012 has been ushered in by new ITV dramas swirling about our ears like tumbling leaves, from The Last Weekend and The Scapegoat to the comeback of Downton itself.More interestingly, the channel has also served up a batch of conspicuously female-centric pieces, albeit with mixed results. The murdered-girl story A Mother's Son felt like a series brutally curtailed by chainsaw, losing Read more ...
theartsdesk
R.E.M.: Document 25th Anniversary EditionKieron TylerAlthough the band themselves have not lasted out the 25 years since the release of their fifth album Document, R.E.M. haven’t dropped off the face of the earth. The memory will live, fed by reissues. Document built on the more straightforward approach of its predecessor, Lifes Rich Pageant, and was issued in the wake of their breakthrough hit “The One I Love”. A re-promoted “It’s the End of the World as we Know it (and I Feel Fine)” gave them another hit in early 1988. Both singles were included on the album. At this point R.E.M. were Read more ...
Laura Silverman
When Hindle Wakes opened in 1912 in London, the script was burned in the street. Stanley Houghton, a member of the Manchester School of playwrights, had exposed one of society's double standards: that it was fine for a man to have a guiltless fling before marriage, but it was not acceptable for a woman. The problem with Bethan Dear's earnest revival is that the play no longer holds the same moral force. Today, the idea that Fanny Hawthorn, a mill girl, goes away for the weekend with Alan Jeffcote, the mill owner's son, and then refuses to marry him is hardly shocking.Solidly constructed, Read more ...
philip radcliffe
What’s in a name? Pinchwife, Fidget, Horner, Squeamish, Sparkish… William Wycherley labelled his characters blatantly. No one is hornier than Horner, the womaniser who puts it about (sorry) that he is impotent after surgery for the pox. Pinchwife’s wife gets pinched and no one is more cuckolded than he. Mind you, he takes the “if you can’t beat 'em, join ’em” approach in the end when he says “cuckolds, like lovers, should themselves deceive”. Lady Fidget has ants in her pants and her not-so-virtuous group of ladies can hardly move for sexual desire. They are the cougars of their day. Even the Read more ...
theartsdesk
Lee Hazlewood: A House Safe for TigersGraham RicksonLee Hazlewood’s voice can still invoke awe. It's gravelly, sonorous, rasping, but incredibly affecting – even when he’s scraping around in the depths it always sounds musical. A reissue of a hard-to-find 1975 LP, A House Safe for Tigers was originally the soundtrack to a Swedish TV movie directed by Hazlewood’s friend Torbjörn Axelman. Hazlewood had moved to Sweden in 1970, partly to ensure that his son wouldn’t be drafted to Vietnam. He continued to record and release new material, most of which slipped under the radar.A House Safe Read more ...