New York
Jasper Rees
New York, late August 2010I am at the opening of a swanky new gallery. Around me, the latest daubs by the hottest names adorn the walls of room after room. It’s worth mentioning a couple of discrepancies from your regular opening. This is a canapé-free environment, for one. There is no chilled white wine, no pretentious appraisal of carefully lit works. Nobody has come dressed to thrill. In fact, nobody has come at all. Apart from me.As it happens, I am the only person who will ever be invited to view the complete collection, and it’s not as if I’m even a guest. I am here as an independent Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
This weekend’s three-day Minimalism festival at Kings Place comes to an end tonight looking at the cross-over between rock and new music in New York in the Seventies. It seems to me that the collision between popular and high-art music produced some of the most dynamic movements of the 20th century, not only in New York.In the 1920s, Paris had wildly original performances like Parade, with jazzy music by Erik Satie, design by Jean Cocteau and costumes (including dressing people up as skyscrapers) by Pablo Picasso, commissioned by the great ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev. Then there was Read more ...
howard.male
It’s a song which hangs in the air like pollen or reefer smoke, before gradually rising like a never-to-be-answered prayer. It began life as a lullaby but grew up to be a protest song, a scream of existential angst and even a purred invitation to sex. It’s a song like no other song, in that it has been covered more than any other song (its nearest competitors being “My Way” and “Yesterday”), and it was written by three Jewish immigrants before eventually being adopted by African-Americans as their own. A friend of Gershwin’s said, when reminiscing about hearing it for the first time Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Ken Kesey is one of these characters who gets filed under "Counterculture Legend", alongside the likes of Hunter Thompson and Abbie Hoffman, though his accomplishments are somewhat amorphous. His early achievements as a novelist are easier to quantify - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion put him pretty high up in the batting averages of modern American literature - but he gave up literature for film-making. By his own estimation, his subsequent 1964 road trip from California to the World's Fair in New York with his anarchic band of Merry Pranksters was his finest Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“It’s very deep, very private and full of love,” said Art Garfunkel of his relationship with Paul Simon. So private that for this examination of their swansong 1970 album Bridge Over Troubled Water the pair were interviewed apart, despite both being credited as executive producers. Whatever the nature of the love, 40-plus years on, bridges weren’t being built.Paul Simon didn’t seem too enthusiastic about revisiting his past. One of the few times a smile flashed across his face was when he recalled the journey he used to make to buy records by The Everly Brothers. Discussing the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Actors who migrate between stage and screen are often asked in interviews to assess the different disciplines. The answers tend not to vary much. On stage, they explain, you have to make a gift of your performance. In front of the camera, that invasive piece of equipment, you have to be selfish, to hoard, and maybe send out depth-charged truths in the form of discreet flinches and flickers. That’s what’s meant to happen anyway. It’s one of the minor miracles of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance in Jack Goes Boating that you can’t imagine he once played the same role in a New York theatre. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
This wasn’t going to offer any surprises. Bernadette Nolan, Lulu and Stacey Solomon would deliver the questions they’d rehearsed. Manilow would respond, then deliver the relevant song. He’s a charmer, and you’d have to be made of lead not to be lifted by some of his songs. But he didn’t need this audience and format. The interaction added nothing. His fantasticness doesn't need restating.Barry Manilow will never be hip. His path is similar to Randy Newman’s, but his early liaison with Bette Midler always meant he was going to be broader, lean towards the bold, the brash. Answering a question Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
New Order’s “Blue Monday” might be the bestselling 12” single ever. It might not be. Either way, Factory Records released it on the 12” format only and it was given dry runs by club DJs. Although Factory had an overriding visual aesthetic, it was a wilful label with little musical coherence and no set way of doing things. Dance music, though, was central to Factory, and the new compilation Fac.Dance celebrates that in a way that was impossible in the scattershot Eighties.Fac.Dance collects 24 tracks issued between 1980 and 1987. Most were originally heard on 12” singles and were either Read more ...
andy.morgan
All was quiet in room 509 when I turned up with my bottle of Jura whisky. Tinariwen’s sound engineer, Jaja, was watching a vampire movie on TV. Elaga, their rhythm guitarist, was sitting at a small, darkly varnished table eating pasta from a Styrofoam carton. Said the percussionist was lying on his bed, delving through the archive of photos and recordings on his LG mobile, keeping his own counsel as he usually does. As I entered I saw Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, Tinariwen’s iconic founder and frontman (pictured below right), standing by the window. He looked better than he had done that morning Read more ...
mark.hudson
Who needs to hear or see anything more of the creepily manipulative world of Andy Warhol’s Factory? We’ve seen the films (well, bits of them); we bought the album (the one with the banana on the front); we’ve bought and dispensed with the images (in cheap repro form) several times over. We’ve seen those grainily evocative images of the Velvet Underground, Edie Sedgwick, Gerard Malanga and co looking glassily back at us so many times we almost feel we were there ourselves.Yet David McCabe’s extraordinary images will give you another angle on that undeniably charismatic, epoch-defining world. Read more ...
Ismene Brown
There are various disinterments of supposedly iconic dance-makers going on in this year's Dance Umbrella (some live ones more dead than the dead ones), but no one is going to beat for sheer éclat Lucinda Childs’ astonishingly beautiful minimalist 1979 creation Dance, on this week at the Barbican.Minimalism is now a comfortable old sofa for today’s generations of dance-watchers, often handed very small platefuls of ideas, but this 60-minute piece has an understated poise and rich cleverness that shows American modern dance at the very top of its artistic game.Typically of this cool blonde US Read more ...
Ismene Brown
I wasn’t around to see when Karole Armitage won her spurs in her twenties as a punk ballet choreographer in America in the 1970s and early Eighties, so we must rely on her programme-sheet biography to explain to us that she is “seen by some critics as the true choreographic heir" to George Balanchine and Merce Cunningham. After last night’s dismal showing by her group, Armitage Gone! Dance, at the Southbank Centre, the only possible response is, “Pull the other one” and a firm slap across the hubris.It had started badly with Armitage stepping up in a sparse Queen Elizabeth Hall to lecture us Read more ...