Reviews
Gary Naylor
I think my problem is that when I should have been listening in school assemblies or RE lessons, I had the Tom Tom Club’s joyous “Wordy Rappinghood” buzzing through my mind. That experience has given me a lifelong aversion to phrases like “The Word was made flesh”, the gospel of St John proving somewhat less than indispensable for me so far. Curiously, that quote, coming very early, marked a high point for two reasons: the novelty of the lip-synch approach had yet to wear off and genuinely interesting insights into the origins, power and unique qualities of speech communication were offered. Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
To mark this year’s summer solstice, a small audience gathered at London’s newest concert venue, the World Heart Beat Embassy Gardens, a small and perfectly formed hall bristling with “state-of-the-art” acoustics and digital facilities. On a balmy midsummer’s evening, the pianist and composer Rieko Makita invited us to reflect on the different moods and aspects of the night, in a programme that combined music with digital art projections.Makita is part of the ever-expanding movement in London to explore technology and new venues as a way of taking classical music to different audiences. For Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHFrank From Blue Velvet I Am Frank (Property of the Lost) + Column258 Interloper (The Workshop Sessions, Volume One) (Property of the Lost)Hastings label Property of the Lost has grown into a potent force, its stable of artists impressive, usually attached to a US-indebted garage aesthetic. Local band Frank From Blue Velvet’s eponymous 2022 debut was a tasty amalgam of southern gothic country filtered through punk sensibilities, its stand-out song, “Church of Prosperity” a deathless hit at Theartsdesk on Vinyl Mansions. I Am Frank steps forward and sideways, offering a Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The Courtauld Gallery’s Abstract Erotic is a delight for two reasons – because an institution that has often seemed locked in the past is now embracing change and also because the sculptures on show are clever, suggestive and subversively funny.For the first time since 1966, the exhibition brings together Louise Bourgeois, Alice Adams and Eva Hesse – the three women included by New York critic Lucy Lippard in a show of artists using offbeat materials like plaster, latex, rubber and papier maché. Reacting against the clean lines and sharp edges of the Minimalism currently in fashion, they were Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Kieran Hodgson is known to television viewers from Two Doors Down and to online fans for his spoofs of TV dramas; but comedy fans know him best for his high-concept stand-up shows, which draw heavily on his personal life.And so Voice of America, his latest live offering, follows in the same vein, charting as it does his lifelong love affair with America, formed years before he actually set foot in the 50 states.Hodgson runs us through how the attraction came about. Departing from the views of his keenly Europhile teacher parents and their dismissal of “American rubbish” – whether food or Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
If somebody submitted a treatment for a new costume drama series set in the 1930s in which not just one but two fictitious sisters from a fading aristocratic family pair off with leading fascists, while the cousin warning them off these liaisons is a future British PM, the pitch meeting probably wouldn’t last that long. Yet Britbox’s Outrageous, a six-parter on the U+Drama channel, tells exactly this true extraordinary story, and tells it well. Even without the lavish budgets of other period projects, it looks the part, with spot-on interiors and costumes. It even gets to grip with the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Theirs is truly rock in extremis, a précis of the youthful impetuosity and cathartic chaos at the heart of real rock ’n roll.”This extract from the essay in the booklet coming with the handsome box set High Time bluntly lays it out: The Sonics, as is also said, played “it fierce and feral.” Although “The Witch,” the topside of their debut single, was issued in November 1964, it was and is as ferocious as The Stooges, the most untrammelled aspects of punk rock and, geographically closer to home for The Sonics, grunge at its grungiest. A first reaction to hearing the single out of the blue was Read more ...
Katie Colombus
I first had a conversation about Benson Boone without realising it was him we were talking about. It went something like: “Did you see that horrifying moment at Coachella when Brian May got onstage with some American guy, and no one knew who he was? HOW DO THEY NOT KNOW?!” We berated youth culture, blinked – and suddenly, Boone had released a second album.Kneesliding into superstardom via TikTok, American Idol, and a few too many viral backflips, Boone’s debut Fireworks & Rollerblades had moments of pure algorithm bait. American Heart has that Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The 23 years since 28 Days Later and especially those since Danny Boyle’s soulful encapsulation of Britain’s best spirit at the 2012 Olympics have offered rich material for a franchise about deserted cities, rampaging viruses, hard quarantines and an insular, afraid country hacked adrift from Europe.28 Years Later takes this chance with punk chutzpah, right from a pumped-up prologue in which children watch Teletubbies to mask the sound of the adult world being eaten by Rage virus-infected zombies, only to be devoured too in a frenzy of close-up Anthony Dod Mantle camerawork, vintage digital Read more ...
Robert Beale
Two concerts in the BBC Philharmonic’s series in their own studio form the climax of studies at the Royal Northern College of Music for a small number of soloists on the postgraduate International Artist Diploma there, and also for some young conductors on the master’s course run by Mark Heron and Clark Rundell.The conductors get the chance to direct the BBC Philharmonic and the soloists perform with them – it’s a chance to spot stars of tomorrow. The IAD represents, says the RNCM, the highest level of performance achievement there, welcoming a select group of exceptional artists each year Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With Brad Pitt’s much-trumpeted F1 movie about to screech noisily into the multiplexes, it’s not a bad time to be reminded of the career of one of the sport’s indisputable greats. Alain Prost doesn’t seem too fussed about bigging himself up on social media or reality TV (L’Île d’Amour perhaps), but he’s the only French racing driver to have won the Formula One world championship, a feat he accomplished four times between 1985 and 1993. Nicknamed “The Professor” for his strategic skills and smooth car control, it might even be argued that he was a finer driver than other prodigies such as Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In the Saxony of 1725 – still in the grip of Europe’s “Little Ice Age” – Bach and his musicians would seldom have had to deal with the sort of midsummer sauna that enveloped Trafalgar Square last night. Yet, at St Martin-in-the-Fields, Masaaki Suzuki, the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists managed to beat the heat with an exhilarating shirt-sleeved journey through the cantatas that Bach wrote exactly three centuries ago for the Thomaskirche in Leipzig. Suzuki and his crew always looked cool but, excitingly, didn’t sound it. Here was choral and instrumental Bach performed Read more ...