Reviews
Veronica Lee
As we are learning each day during lockdown, necessity is the mother of invention. In Channel 4's case, it is learning how the wonders of modern technology can save a situation: to wit, The Steph Show was meant to come live daily from a shiny new studio in Leeds Docks, but yesterday debuted from host Steph McGovern's front room in North Yorkshire. McGovern, despite her self-confessed nerves and an occasional wobble from the technology, played a blinder in what she described as “Yorkshire Big Brother with one contestant” as robotic cameras captured her from various angles in her open Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Available in Britain now on YouTube for only a couple of days, Elton John’s iHeart Living Room Concert for America was put together in less than a week and was broadcast in the US on Sunday evening. In normal circumstances, the slot would have been occupied by the iHeart Radio Music Awards, which were to have been carried live from the Shrine Auditorium in LA.When the ceremony cancelled earlier this month, Fox execs wondered what they might replace it with – what would be appropriate given the encroaching horror? And if they could put something together, would the public be forgiving about Read more ...
aleks.sierz
With everyone in lockdown, observing physical if not social distancing, a story about isolation can have a particular resonance. And there are few places in the UK that are as isolated as some parts of the Scottish Highlands. Ali Milles’s tartan gothic thriller, The Croft, is partly a study of the advantages and disadvantages of living in a remote location, and partly a more speculative and suggestive account of how family tragedy repeats itself down the generations. This staging, an Original Theatre production, was touring the UK until the lockdown happened, and this hastily filmed recording Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Since she burst onto the global scene in 2014 with her debut album, Chaleur humaine, Christine and the Queens' (aka Chris, real name Héloïse Letissier) work has been difficult to pin down. Is the French pansexual singer-songwriter-performance artist's music synth-pop, alt-pop or, as she describes it, “freakpop”?No matter, because her records – the latest is February's surprise release of a six-track EP, La Vita Nuova, about a difficult time in her life – prove that she is endlessly inventive, both with music and lyrics (Letissier's as happy speaking and singing in English as she is in French Read more ...
Jessica Payn
South London-based publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions has once more been awarded the Republic of Consciousness Prize, confirming its status as a vital home for ambitious, edge-defining fiction. Now in its fifth year, the prize seeks to promote and reward the best in literary fiction from small presses in the UK and Ireland, which it defines broadly as publishers with fewer than five full-time employees. This year’s winning title, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s Animalia, translated by Frank Wynne, follows four generations of a peasant farming family in rural 20th century France, investigating their Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Marvel Cinematic Universe has been saturating the globe with its multi-format superheroes, leaving its DC rival looking clumsy and disorganised by comparison. However, DC’s “Arrowverse” – a roster of TV shows including Arrow, The Flash and Supergirl – is part of its fight-back effort, and now joining its ranks is this new take on the Batwoman character (E4).Kate Kane and her Batwoman alter ego first appeared in comic form in 1956, but this latest reincarnation leaps into the present with its androgynous-looking lesbian heroine, played by Ruby Rose (familiar from Netflix’s Orange is the Read more ...
David Nice
Only the birds will be singing at country opera houses around the UK this summer. Glyndebourne seems over-optimistic in declaring that it might be able to launch in July; other companies with shorter seasons have made the regretful but right decisions to call it a year. This reminder from 2017 of what such setups can achieve at the very highest level, newly downloaded on to the excellent OperaVision website, could hardly be more timely, nor the choice more uplifting for the soul: opera's greatest comedy, at a level of intimacy which the last major production to launch this year to date, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Michelle Wolf, best known to UK audiences as the comic who upset Donald Trump with some smart barbs aimed at his staff at the 2018 White House Correspondents' Dinner, has done some occasional dates this side of the pond (plus a run at the 2016 Edinburgh Fringe), so her fans will be grateful for Joke Show, a Netflix special, where she is on top form.She starts with a very strong section on the modern trend for people to get offended by just about everything, which must be a pain in the backside for a comic such as Wolf, much of whose material is edgy. Yet instead of laying into the easily Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Assassinate the President! Obliterate history by torching libraries and murdering historians! Crazy leaders and fake news are just a few of the subjects tackled by political journalist and thriller writer, Jonathan Freedland (aka Sam Bourne), in this, his fifth novel featuring the inventive, imaginative, intelligent trouble-shooter Maggie Costelloe. Maggie – see her name – is Irish turned American. Aside from an off-again on-again Israeli partner, her only relative is her sister, a school teacher computer nerd, who lives a fairly normal life in the American South with (gasp) a husband Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“My favorite in the place was Karen Dalton. She was a tall white blues singer and guitar player, funky, lanky and sultry. Karen had a voice like Billie Holiday’s and played the guitar like Jimmy Reed and went all the way with it. I sang with her a couple of times.”Well Bob, that’s how you remember it. Dylan was writing in his 2004 memoir Chronicles Volume One about encountering Dalton at the Fred Neil-compered Cafe Wha? in the first half of 1961. Part of what he says seems fair. On 1969’s It’s So Hard To Tell Who’s Going To Love You, the first of her two albums, she melded Billie Holiday’s Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“Friday night is Amami night” – that was the ad that ran from the 1920s through to the 1950s for a brand of “setting lotion”, a delightfully old-fashioned term. Those were the days when young women stayed home and did their hair, in preparation for a Saturday night out. Perhaps some of the girls (they weren’t yet “chicks”, maybe “birds”) in the late 1950s used the product when they went to Eel Pie Island, one of the country’s legendary music scenes.The nine-acre island in the Thames, just above the river’s only lock, was the subject of BBC Four’s documentary Rock ‘n’ Roll Island: Where Read more ...
Richard Williams
A combination of chopped-up newsreel and fever dream, “Murder Most Foul” is Bob Dylan’s most striking piece of work in years. This is the author of “Desolation Row” populating a 17-minute song with a lifetime of remembered cultural fragments, zooming out and panning back and forth from the single pivotal event of the Kennedy assassination, plucking references out of the heavy air.The voice is sombre, the mood subdued, occasionally lit by flashes of the absurd. Images like frames from the Zapruder film – date, time, location, automobile, wound, wife – are gradually eased aside to Read more ...