Reviews
Echo & the Bunnymen, Symphony Hall, Birmingham review – Mac and Will hit the road with added strings
Guy Oddy
This Echo and the Bunnymen gig in Birmingham is one that almost didn’t happen, on a tour to promote the soon-to-be-released The Stars, the Oceans and the Moon, their first album since 2014’s Meteorites. With their beloved Liverpool FC playing Real Madrid in the Champions League final, the band initially tried to shift the show to another day and put out a press release stating that long-stays Ian McCulloch and Will Sergeant wouldn’t be able to put their hearts and souls into things with their minds firmly focused on events in Kiev.It seems that their fans in the Midlands aren’t quite so Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s four albums all centre around off-kilter pop and flirtations with distortion; their latest LP, Sex & Food, carries this tradition forwards in a more laid-back manner. Their current European tour in support of the album seems to have lined up nicely with the schedules of American acts Deerhunter, Black Lips and Sam Evian (as well as much-hyped British act Boy Azooga), with all five artists descending on the Albert Hall in Manchester for the six-hour Strange Waves III.Between the criminally early start time of 5pm and Transport for Manchester’s bus timetabling Read more ...
Katherine Waters
A body can be pushed to the brink, to the point where thoughts flatten to a line of light, and come back from death, but the heart is complex and the damage it wreaks barely controllable. For Grace, Lia and Sky, the three sisters of Sophie Mackintosh’s debut novel The Water Cure, living by a discipline which tames their bodies and emotions to strict rituals is more than a matter of self-control – it is a matter of survival.They’ve been brought up by Mother and King, their father, in a sprawling dilapidated island hotel, away from the mainland where a toxic scourge to which men are Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In William S, Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch, a simopath was “a citizen convinced he is an ape or other simian. It is a disorder peculiar to the army and discharge cures it.” Being in uniform, then, reversed evolution.In October 1967, a British band called Nirvana released their debut album. With its Burroughs-referencing title, The Story of Simon Simopath was a 10-track concept album telling the story of a boy longing for the wings of butterfly. Getting his wish, he flies away from reality, suffers a nervous breakdown and then boards a rocket, meets a centaur and a goddess named Magdelana who Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is franchise film-making at its worst. A Han Solo: Year Zero origin yarn makes some sense, after Harrison Ford’s piratical hero finished on the wrong end of a lightsaber in The Force Awakens. But the apparently freewheeling approach of Solo’s ditched original directors, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, has been replaced by Ron Howard’s safe pair of hands, which administer an anaesthetic to any chance of deviant surprise.We find Alden Ehrenreich’s young Han scrabbling for a living on his backwater home planet, much as the hitherto wholly dissimilar Luke Skywalker and Daisy Ridley’s Rey Read more ...
Heather Neill
This exuberant production both clarifies and further complicates the conundrum of Peter Pan. In any production true to Barrie there is an underpinning of sadness, an acknowledgement of the losses we must all suffer: children leave home and adult responsibility takes the place of childhood innocence. And yet, despite the tragedies which dogged both Barrie's own life and those of the family who inspired this work, it is also a celebration of the youth and joy which Peter himself claims to represent. In this version, first seen in 2015, Timothy Sheader and Liam Steel mark the centenary of the Read more ...
Owen Richards
Comprehensively charting hip hop’s rise from the underground to the mainstream is no mean feat, but that’s exactly what Canadian MC Shad aims to do over four hour-long episodes. Originally shown in the US in 2016, and available in full on Netflix, Hip Hop Evolution has finally reached the British box via Sky Arts. Created with genuine passion, authenticity, and a dream list of guests, this documentary series proves to be essential viewing.Shad, an established rapper in his own right, became obsessed with hip hop in the 90s, but wants to go back to where it all began: the Bronx, hip hop ground Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Add Catalan writer Jordi Galcerán to the shortlist of European playwrights who are finding an international perch, in this case with a tricksy four-character play that has had more than 200 productions in over 60 countries. The UK premiere of The Grönholm Method follows six years on from a Los Angeles staging that boasted the same director (Mike Nichols protégé BT McNicholl) and leading man (Jonathan Cake as the bilious Frank), while a 2007 Spanish movie, The Method, expanded the premise for the screen. Given all this activity and attention, it's moderately surprising Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Before starting this review a decision was taken: that the over-used description of singer-songwriter Malcolm Middleton as a “Scottish miserablist” would not appear. However, this has proved impossible. Middleton is renowned, to the coterie who enjoy his music, for songs ripe with dejection but the first half of his set tonight is especially heavy with stark soul-searching. From the opening number, “Gut Feeling”, which contains the line, “I’ve got rows of wankers in my head shouting my gut feeling down”, to a song called “Love is a Momentary Lapse in Self-Loathing”, he assays a stark, poetic Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Calixto Bieito has a reputation as a radical theatre-maker, and by any standards The String Quartet’s Guide to Sex and Anxiety is an unusual, genre-breaking piece; Bieito has described it as “like a symphonic poem for a quartet of musicians, and a quartet of voices”. A mesmerising 90-minute melange on the subjects of its title – anxiety seems marginally the dominant emotion, somehow preceding sex – it’s a collaborative effort between the Heath Quartet (with whom Bieito worked on his ENO Fidelio five years ago) and four actors, Cathy Tyson, Mairead McKinley, Miltos Yerolemou and Nick Harris. Read more ...
David Nice
Singing satirist Anna Russell placed the French chanson in her category of songs for singers "with no voice but tremendous artistry". Mezzo Karen Cargill has tremendous artistry but also a very great voice indeed, a mysterious gift which makes her one in a thousand, and also rather good French (put that down to Scotland's "Auld Alliance, perhaps). Whether her particular choice of the Gallic repertoire was ideal to sustain three-quarters of a Wigmore song recital which fell a bit short of the greatness she undoubtedly owns is another matter.You spend all your life not hearing a gem, Hahn’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As the Brighton Festival 2018 draws towards its closing weekend, its Guest Director, the artist David Shrigley, has committed to an illustrated talk about his work that “will contain numerous rambling anecdotes but not be in the slightest bit boring”. In the programme, he claims to have promised this signed in his own blood. Such drastic assurance proves unnecessary. His talk his sardonically funny, sometimes causing waves of raucous laughter and applause to sweep across the packed Dome Concert Hall.The format is simple. Accompanied by a woman signing, who Shrigley often tells not to Read more ...