Reviews
Thomas H. Green
The Last Dinner Party’s second album, From the Pyre, is one of this year’s most enjoyable. Its lead single, “This is the Killer Speaking”, is a belter that’ll be around for years. Their musical and pop chops are hard to argue with. They’re a band who can put on a show which combines theatrical opulence and rockin’ zest. I’ve seen them do it. Tonight, however, they undermine themselves during the latter half by sabotaging the concert’s forward momentum Things start well. The quintet, accompanied by a male drummer introduced as “Luca”, appear on a stage set akin to a ruined church Read more ...
Gary Naylor
You can add to “Would The Taming of the Shrew still be staged, were it not written by William Shakespeare?” the question, “Would My Fair Lady still be staged were it not for those timeless songs?” Such conjectures are but sophistry, but they do present a dilemma to a director, and it’s always interesting to see how each new production deals with the issues the book throws up.It’s 1912 and the Suffragettes are demanding the vote, the mores and fashions of a still new century are asserting themselves and the carnage of Flanders is not yet visible on the horizon. A phonetics professor, Henry Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Axis: Bold As Love, the second album by The Jimi Hendrix Experience, was released in the UK during the first week of December 1967. In America, it came out in January 1968. Now, it is the subject of a multi-disc box set titled Bold As Love.Why this puzzling new title – “Bold as Love” is the track closing the album – has been chosen is unknown. No reason for losing the word “Axis” is given in the accompanying book, or in the promotional material: which describes this as a “box set containing [the] landmark 1967 album Axis: Bold As Love.”
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Sarah Kent
Whoever thought of creating an exhibition comparing the brilliance of JMW Turner with that of John Constable deserves a medal – maybe Tate Britain’s senior curator, Amy Concannon? Even if you are familiar with the work, seeing their paintings hung side by side reveals surprising similarities as well as differences.The rivalry between them has not been cooked up as a marketing ploy; it was real. On show is a snippet from Mike Leigh’s 2014 film Mr Turner. It’s varnishing day for the Royal Academy’s annual exhibition of 1832. Turner saunters in with a brush load of crimson paint and dabs it onto Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having given us Peter Jackson’s monster documentary series The Beatles: Get Back four years ago, Disney have returned to the Moptop well to deliver this spruced-up reissue of the Beatles Anthology. This epic history of the Fab Four originally aired in six-episode form in the US and the UK in 1995, but that was expanded to eight instalments for VHS and LaserDisc releases in 1996.The USP of this latest version is a supposedly new ninth episode, a sort of post-match roundup assembled from mid-1990s interviews with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison with interpolations from producer Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Spies are basically actors. They create fake personas in order to achieve their ends. But the difference is that they do this 24/7. All the time. Especially during a secret operation. So the first thing to say about David Eldridge’s adaptation of John Le Carré’s 1963 classic, which first opened at the Chichester Festival Theatre last year, is that it offers the strange joy of watching actors playing characters who are themselves acting a role. The second thing to say about The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is that this is first of Le Carré’s novels to be put on stage – and in some respects Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
When Yard Act headlined the O2 Academy in Glasgow back in 2023, they might have thought returning there as a support act would indicate a career that had taken a wrong turn. That’s where they found themselves on this jaunt with the Hives, though the reality was less a reflection of their status as a band and simply that what was announced as an arena tour for the Swedish garage rockers had been downgraded to a more modest setting. Not that the Leeds quartet seemed affected by it. Singer James Smith was typically verbose as ever, praising his band, their music and Glasgow itself before Read more ...
Robert Beale
You have to admire Samantha Fernando’s concept of the “To Do” list. Hers has one item: “Do Less”. That’s the subtitle of one section of the new work, Wintering, for which she wrote both words and music.It was heard for the first time in the North of England last night in a concert by four voices of the Marian Consort and a Manchester Collective string quartet (the premiere was at the Wigmore Hall last week).Oddly enough, there’s nothing about winter in the evocation of a guided meditation, with a soprano voice speaking the random thoughts actually going on in the head of a participant, which Read more ...
Clare Stevens
Since 1981 Ryedale Festival has presented a mouthwatering array of concerts in picturesque churches and glorious stately homes in North East Yorkshire, characterised by interval drinks and picnics in lovely gardens or sunny terraces on long summer evenings. This year it took a short, sharp dive into a very different seasonal atmosphere, presenting its first Winter Weekend from 21 to 23 November, with just four events in the charming market towns of Pickering, Malton and Norton.Pianist Ethan Loch, who won the keyboard final of BBC Young Musician in 2022, set the scene in his opening recital on Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's not easy witnessing your own death. But that's the situation in which we find the lyricist Lorenz Hart at the start of Blue Moon, Richard Linklater's startling film about a creative maverick who is well aware that his own shining star is on the wane. Boasting longtime Linklater collaborator Ethan Hawke in his finest screen performance since this same director's Boyhood, the movie casts an unsparing glance at a great talent run amok even as it offers Hawke a renewed shot at the Oscar that has so far eluded him. (Hawke's last nomination, in fact, was for Boyhood 11 years ago.) Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The battle of the Scrooges is fast becoming an unofficial London theatrical tradition, as – for the third year – audiences must choose between the mince-pie-laden delights at the Old Vic and the atmospheric ghostliness of Ally Pally. Jack Thorne’s spikily imaginative, sumptuously staged version has been winning hearts and minds since 2017, but in 2021 Mark Gatiss, king of the ghost story, began his bid for Dickens devotees with an adaptation that’s Christmassy and crepuscular in equal measure. Since Gatiss’s deliciously ectoplasmic take is – comparatively – the newest kid on Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Even people who are unfamiliar with Kneecap’s sharp but raucous music may well be aware of the legal issues that have beset the Irish-English bilingual rappers over the last eighteen months. As support for the oppressed people of Palestine has caused them no end of grief in the UK, the USA and beyond.Fortunately, this has done nothing to tame this mouthy and opinionated trio, and with a partisan crowd which included many who loudly proclaimed themselves to be part of Birmingham’s Irish community, they dedicated “Get Your Brits Out” to “all the paedophiles in the Royal Family”. Similarly, Read more ...