Reviews
robert.sandall
Speech Debelle – and she for one is not surprised. In a feisty speech accepting her nomination for the £20,000 prize, given annually to the best British album of the year, the 25-year-old rapper from South London warned the other 11 acts on the shortlist ahead of last night’s judgment that she planned “to take this one home”. By 10.20 last night the panel of judges agreed that she should, making Debelle the third female solo artist to win the Mercury in this century, following PJ Harvey in 2001 and Ms Dynamite in 2002, for her debut album Speech Therapy.Jubilant in victory, Debelle singled Read more ...
joe.muggs
Artists who are naturally awkward in their own skin can go in a number of directions. Many, including a good number of The Pastels' 1980s “C86” indie contemporaries, are content to simply be musically awkward, shambolic and ultimately rather pathetic and self-defeating. Others like, say, Talking Heads' David Byrne, charged with hyperactivity, take their awkwardness to the Nth degree and used it as a drive towards diverse creative explorations.Then there are those like The Pastels themselves – led by Stephen McRobbie, a man so uncomfortable-looking on stage he gives the impression that even Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
What exactly is the point of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies? I don't ask this with any malice or hostility, just in a tone of inquiry. It is a question that I think his new Violin Concerto, Fiddler on the Shore, raises. That is, is Davies still here to shock and annoy, or to assuage? The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Davies's baton presented the British premiere of the work last night, with Daniel Hope as the soloist, in the first of two proms that celebrated the composer's 75th birthday. Within its single-movement span were representations from the two opposing camps of Davies's life and Read more ...
Ismene Brown
There’s a sly in-joke in the plastering of Mark Morris posters over Sadler’s Wells when Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Rosas are currently inside it. Morris, the waggish American choreographer whose publicity shouts “Joy, Pure Joy”, dubbed her “De Tearjerker” when she followed him into the prestigious position of resident choreographer at Brussels’ Théâtre de la Monnaie.Joy is not what De Keersmaeker offers in Rosas danst Rosas. Resignation rather, tiredness, restlessness, boredom, unease, exhaustion, yes, in spades. This was the work that made her name 25 years ago, when she was herself only Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Slickness is not always a virtue in a television presenter, and Katherine Jenkins (The Week We Went To War, BBC1) has some way to go before she risks being accused of it. Her chief weapons are her blonde hair, cleavage and searchlight smile -- she isn't so much the new Vera Lynn as one of those pneumatic dream-babes that American aircrews used to paint on the noses of their B17s -- but even so she struggles to conquer a script that wallows like a torpedoed freighter.Her dialogue with assistant-host Michael Aspel, as he reminisces about being a wartime evacuee or eating austerity-style prunes Read more ...
anne.billson
Another year, another animated film which plonks us down into the ruins of civilisation. After WALL-E , it's the turn of 9, but this time the causes of the apocalypse are not ecological; it's the fault of big bad machines which, like the ones in The Terminator and The Matrix franchises, have turned against us and reduced our cities to rubble.The flesh-and-blood folk are all dead - there are a few glimpses of corpses which are discreet if slightly unnerving. The idea that mankind didn't make it casts an interesting pall over proceedings, but flashbacks show a scientist-cum-inventor trying to Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It says much for Ed Byrne’s talents as a stand-up that he can make his show Different Class, which he first performed a year ago, feel fresh and current. But with topical gags aplenty - many of which must have been written just hours before he took the stage at the Vaudeville Theatre in London, where is doing a month-long residency - it feels bang up to the minute.The show is ostensibly about Byrne’s confusion about where he, an Irishman, fits into the British class system. It’s simpler in Ireland, he says, because you just ask if someone has a horse - you’re upper-class if you can afford Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Adrian Lyne met controversy in the cinema with it head on, while Vladimir Nabokov's novel prompted one of the resounding Broadway flops of Edward Albee's stage career. (Trust me: I am among the few who caught its 1981 New York run.) So here is Lolita once more, this time filleted and distilled into a one-person show suspended somewhere between a stage reading and an actual play. Call it what you will, the result is mesmerising.By letting Nabokov's own sly, ever-shifting narrative voice do the talking, Richard Nelson's adaptation cuts to the quick in a way that the various other Lolitas simply Read more ...
josh.spero
If you tried to cross chefs, romantic comedy and cyberspace, you might end up with a YouTube video of Nigella Lawson recreating the diner scene from When Harry Met Sally. As much fun as that would be, it would hardly justify two hours of screen time. That’s where Julie & Julia comes in.From the same pen as When Harry Met Sally, Nora Ephron, come the stories of Julia Child (Meryl Streep), the diplomat’s wife who brought French cooking back to America, and Julie Powell (Amy Adams), a frustrated government worker who starts a blog where she records cooking her way through all 524 recipes in Read more ...
joe.muggs
Dot Allison was one of the true idols of my late teens. As the singer for Glaswegian E-comedown country-dub balladeers One Dove, her platinum bob and ruby lips, and ability to play otherworldly waif and sussed raver at the same time, made her seem impossibly glamorous – and even more importantly, the breathy purity of her voice as she sang “and where it is dark, there are ghosts / that give me hope” (in "White Love" – perhaps the greatest lost pop song of the 1990s) soothed me through endless adolescent traumas.One Dove managed just a single, glorious album in Morning Dove White, and Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
It was a hallucination, I know, yet it wasn't unconvincing. The lurching, Alpha-maleish pose on the podium, the muscular pawing, the slight animal crouch, all lent weight to the idea that I had harboured for most of last night's performance of Mahler's Tenth Symphony that conductor Riccardo Chailly was in fact a bear. It was one of those nights. Chailly and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra were creating a new reality from Mahler’s Tenth, a nightmarish one that was bedevilling my senses. So, for the duration of the performance, my world was decidedly wonky.The enormous Bergian outbursts in the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Oasis have split up, but The Beatles keep getting bigger. This week, in a synchronised splurge of Beatle product of almost D-Day like proportions, their complete remastered albums are being reissued, the group appear in virtual form in the computer game The Beatles: Rock Band, and the BBC continues the Beatles Week which kicked off in a blaze of Kleenex-moistening nostalgia on Saturday. The Sunday Times even managed to exhume an unpublished interview with John Lennon, in which he sabotaged the myth of the great Lennon-McCartney feud by confessing that he thought Paul McCartney was jolly good Read more ...