Reviews
Kieron Tyler
Fifty years after their first album The Garden Of Jane Delawney was issued in April 1970, Trees seem to be better known than when they were active. Despite Françoise Hardy’s cover version of the title track a couple of years after it hit shops, the UK band’s debut album was a poor seller. Original pressings fetch upwards of £200. It’s the same with its follow-up, January 1971’s On The Shore. This one sells for at least £250.The band formed in London in 1969, split in 1972 and even though they recorded seven BBC radio sessions as well as the two albums, it took a while for their reputation to Read more ...
joe.muggs
As with so much in these unprecedented times, online performance is evolving, and fast: different approaches are becoming established formats. Some go ultra intimate – raw acoustic performances, live chats with fans – as if trying to strip away the digital divide. Big, serious rock bands with like Metallica and Radiohead try to keep their established fanbases sated with sheer volume of professionally recorded archive performance. DJs and electronic acts try and build on the models already provided by pirate radio or Boiler Room type platforms, while the more adventurous try and create virtual Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A top-rank cast swims against the tide in Uncle Frank, writer-director Alan Ball's well-intentioned but fatally contrived film that presumably contains more than a trace of the Oscar-winning filmmaker's own past. Telling of a gay southerner called Frank (Paul Bettany) who is called back to his native (and bigoted) roots from the freedom he has found as a university professor in New York, Ball's narrative begins intriguingly before swerving towards implausibility and melodrama that not even the always-terrific Bettany and a distinguished cast can forestall. The film begins as a memory Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
After a brief interlude of concerts with a live audience, we are back to streamed events from empty halls (though many venues in London will be opening up again from next Thursday, concerts in Scotland have never opened up to the public). Some ensembles have opted to sell tickets, others – including the Scottish Chamber Orchestra – to broadcast the music free but solicit donations. The economics of both models seem fraught with problems but at the same time the show must go on. But if that means in future I can sit in London and enjoy a concert from the Perth Hall that I would Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
You can practically smell the fumes coming off Thomas Vinterberg’s latest drama Another Round, known in Denmark simply as "Druk". Co-written with Tobias Lindholm, the story is anchored in a theory proposed by Finn Skårderud that humans have a blood alcohol level that is 0.05 percent too low. Therefore, to function at our best, we need to top it up. Four friends, all teachers at the same school, gather for a 40th birthday. Despite protests, Martin (Mads Mikkelsen) opts for soda and lemon over booze. However, the onslaught of jeers and teasing from his friends finally make Martin cave in Read more ...
David Nice
Colette’s sharply fantastical libretto for Ravel’s second one-act opera imagines wrongs exercised upon objects and animals by a naughty child revisited by the victims upon the perpetrator. In a giddying venture which may be the most imaginative use yet of circumscribed lockdown days, director and founder of the new Virtual Opera Project Rachael Hewer turns Colette into Carroll, and instead parades a sequence of illogical tableaux set in this time of Coronavirus. That they work so brilliantly is due to artist Pearl Bates's visual sorcery and the further design work of Leanne Vandenbussche as Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Many have struggled to bring a new slant to the horror genre, but writer-director Brandon Cronenberg has managed it with Possessor, his second full-length feature. Being the son of David Cronenberg, a pioneer of so-called “body horror”, obviously didn’t hurt, but Brandon is shaping up as more than just a chip off the parental block.Possessor centres around Tasya Vos (Andrea Riseborough), an agent working for a sophisticated assassination corporation. Guided by her handler Girder (Jennifer Jason Leigh), Tasya hunts her prey by being implanted into the brain of an unsuspecting stooge, which she Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Published in June 2016, J.D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy became a best-seller around the time of that November’s presidential election as people sought to understand why working class whites in the American heartland supported Donald Trump en masse. Vance’s account of his arduous upbringing at the hands of his drug-addicted single mother Bev incorporated his criticisms of the defeatist culture he grew up in. The film version directed by Ron Howard predictably focuses on the domestic upheavals endured by J.D. and his sister Lindsay. The socio-political context is submerged so deeply it’s Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Theatres are currently banned from moving scenery and props about on stage and you might expect this to present a major obstacle to a production of The Seven Deadly Sins. How else is the opera’s protagonist to be seen to visit seven American cities, succumbing to a different sin in each? But Opera North’s version of Kurt Weill’s 1933 “sung ballet”, in a new translation of Bertolt Brecht’s libretto, a new orchestration for 15 players and with new choreography by director Gary Clarke, has found unlikely inspiration in the restrictions. Even the safe-distancing of cast and orchestra is made to Read more ...
David Nice
“After black and gloomy night, the sun shines all the brighter,” sings hero Ariodante after a life-threatening bout of jealousy nearly scuppers a royal wedding. There’s a snag in Handel’s dramaturgy: all that sunshine in preparation for the nuptials in Act One isn’t really earned. It probably needs a live audience to beam love and support to the Royal Opera's engaging soloists, but you get the impression they’re trying really hard to an empty house, while orchestra and conductor behind them on the wooden box of a stage, though audibly supportive, show no visible joy in the proceedings.It Read more ...
Tim Cumming
There have been Felabrations, stage musicals, bands featuring his sons Seun and Femi that have continued the legacy. There has been the slew of re-releases from his massive catalogue, and a number of films, including Alex Gibney’s Finding Fela, and the 1982 classic, Music is the Weapon. In his afterlife, the legendary Fela Kuti and his music feels more alive than ever. More than 20 years after his death, and a funeral that attracted a million mourners (police claimed there were no crimes committed in Lagos over its three days) Afrobeat continues to pull dancers onto the floor in order to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“During 1975, 1976 and the first half of 1977 punk was the future but, after the highpoint of ‘God Save the Queen’, London punk already seemed spent. By the time that the Sex Pistols ‘Pretty Vacant’ was tumbling out of the charts in early September, there had been two huge hits that changed the way I heard music. Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’ and ‘Magic Fly’ by Space made it clear: electronics were the future. And it didn’t matter whether it was post-punk or the despised disco.”So begins the titular writer’s essay accompanying Do You Have The Force? (Jon Savage’s Alternate History Of Read more ...