Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
In a week in which the nation has debated the relevance of classical music, it was left to the LSO’s Eclectica concert series to have the final word. Incorporating world and electronic music alongside traditional chamber works and contemporary programmes, Eclectica’s concerts offer dressed-down, laid-back forays down the roads less travelled of the classical repertoire. With one of the 20th century’s musical greats as a grandfather and a growing reputation for his work as a producer, DJ and composer, incorporating classical music into a club idiom and setting, who better than Gabriel Read more ...
mark.hudson
That Tracey Emin is one of the defining personalities of our time isn’t in doubt. Even if you never want to hear another second of her guileless wittering, another word about her abortions, traumatic early rape and relentless onanistic neediness, you can't deny that her self-effected transformation from chippy Margate outsider to big-league art-world player represents something extraordinary. As to her work, it's been difficult to be certain of her value - or to entirely write her off - as there's never been the chance to see a big enough body of her work at one time. Read more ...
fisun.guner
There’s nothing like a reality TV programme to bring a community together. Or maybe not. The Street That Cut Everything took one suburban cul-de-sac in Preston and shook up its residents thus: if they wanted their bins emptied, their street cleaned, their benefits paid and their elderly and needy looked after, they had to do it themselves. The council were going to withdraw all services - bar the emergency services and schools - for six whole weeks. And if that doesn’t sound terribly long, it was certainly long enough to pit neighbour against neighbour when it came to voting over who Read more ...
david.cheal
They’re a fun band with some cracking tunes and they provided a vibrant night’s music last night at the Roundhouse, but where on earth did the idea come from that Noah and the Whale are a folk band? On this evidence, they’re about as folkie as Motörhead. Granted, they have a violinist in their line-up, but this is really no signifier of folkiness. In fact, the musician who sprang to mind most frequently during this pacy, compact show was Bruce Springsteen, especially on the material from the band’s recent Last Night on Earth album, with its heroic chord changes, its loose scansion and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
To the relief of many an international batsman, there has never been anything to rival the stupendous West Indies teams which bestrode Planet Cricket with intimidating ferocity from the late Seventies into the Nineties. Fire in Babylon is the story of the side that Clive Lloyd built, and the way it became a formidable socio-political force in the Caribbean as well as a sporting global superpower.The interlocking themes of sport, colonialism and the struggle against racial prejudice add up to a celluloid Molotov cocktail, and director Stevan Riley and producers John Battsek and Charles Steel Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It took until the fourth song of their set for Suuns to take off. Lurching into “PVC”, the Montréal quartet gelled. Monolithic drums, pounding, relentless bass guitar and slabs of sheet-metal guitar rolled off the stage. Harnessing the power of heavy metal, they’d achieved escape velocity. More powerful than on album, the unassuming-looking Suuns made a compelling case for their stripped-down, post-Krautrock rock.Before that, the stage belonged to Gyratory System, the vehicle of Andrew Blick. Recent instrumental album New Harmony was a hypnotic marriage of bloopy early acid house and motorik Read more ...
Sarah Kent
“As a student at Glasgow School of Art I used to visit the amazing anatomy, zoology and ethnographic collections at Glasgow University,” says Christine Borland. “I couldn’t understand why I was so intrigued, except for the question of how something so awful – so dead – could also be so beautiful. I was trying to unpick my responses, to understand how beauty and death could co-exist.”Ever since graduating in 1987, she has been unpicking her responses to medical specimens and old bones in installations that attempt to confer dignity on the dead. When she acquired a human skeleton from the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
America has been very good to Hugh Laurie. His starring role as Dr Gregory House has shot him to the top of the earnings tree in US television, while comprehensively demolishing existing preconceptions of him as the blissfully idiotic Bertie Wooster, or the half-witted Prince Regent in Blackadder the Third. You might even say that with House, Laurie finally got the chance to play Blackadder.It's a mutual transatlantic love affair, and Laurie's triumph as the manipulative medic has given him a platform from which to record an album of his adored blues and New Orleans music, Let Them Talk. In Read more ...
judith.flanders
Ballet galas are a curious institution. They mimic the form of “Greatest Hits” recordings, but what you get are rarely greatest hits, because they can’t be. Dance develops in its own time, its unfolding being an essential part of the magic. Rip a pas de deux (and galas circle around pas de deux like vultures in the Gobi desert) from its context, and you get pure dance, certainly; flashy dance, more than likely; lots of pyrotechnics, almost inevitably. But you don’t get the core, the magic, the reason people return over and over and over.Galina Ulanova was one of the greatest dramatic dance- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A low-budget Britflick in which four middle-class young men go on a sentimental road trip to Pembrokeshire: doesn’t sound like much of a movie, does it? The twist is that one of them has terminal cancer. To prick your interest further, he’s played by Benedict Cumberbatch. There is a small actorly elite whose members can read out the phone directory and make it sound like the King James Bible. Cumberbatch has lately become one of them. He’s the reason Third Star got past first base and boy does it lean heavily on the charisma of his performance.The title is a misquotation from Peter Pan – “ Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Current affairs can be an on-trend choreographer's nemesis. In the new triple bill at the Royal Ballet last night, you could watch a new video-game war-ballet by Wayne McGregor, while blotting out thoughts of the Taliban suicide massacre in yesterday’s headlines, and Christopher Wheeldon’s DGV, with its modish wrecked train set, while trying to forget that yesterday expensive retribution was demanded of Network Rail for the Potter's Bar train crash. Not wholly helpful associating, as neither piece is among their creator’s best.The evening’s success had to hang on the chiffon frivolity of the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Even if you are not of an age to have watched Monty Python’s Flying Circus or Fawlty Towers when they were first broadcast by the BBC, you will have heard of John Cleese. And if you are remotely a fan of comedy, you will hold Cleese in high regard as he is a writer, performer and actor of great talent, and this show, an overview of his life and career, proves it beyond argument.It’s waspishly titled The Alimony Tour and Cleese’s emotional baggage gets an enthusiastic airing for fully the first 10 minutes, during which he explains the show’s origins in his $20 million divorce from his third Read more ...