Reviews
Jasper Rees
Loadsamoney stomps on clutching a wad of twenties. He hasn’t been seen since the Eighties, he advises, because he became irrelevant. In the strict sense Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse have never been relevant. Relevant comedy has a habit of becoming irrelevant, which is why their Legends! tour is such a treat for audiences over a certain age. It issues a gloriously defiant two-fingered salute to time and tide and political correctness (we are welcomed as “ladies and gentlemen and transsexuals”).The years have worked their magic, too. When the Old Gits motor onstage on their mobility Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Exactly three years ago, Imagine Dragons played to 150 people in Glasgow. This time, there were 12,000 people in attendance. The ascent of the Las Vegas quartet (swelled to a five-piece for this tour) brings to mind Peter Cook’s withering assessment that David Frost “rose without trace”. Their 2012 debut Night Visions and this year’s Smoke + Mirrors have shifted in their millions in both the US and UK without the band making any discernible cultural impact.Imagine Dragons make brooding existentialist rock with a post-digital sheen. Self-billed as alternative, they are in reality custom-built Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The story of Orion, aka Jimmy Ellis, really was a case of truth being weirder than fiction. “He couldn’t have failed, if Elvis had never lived,” we heard from Shelby Singleton, boss of Nashville’s Sun Records, which launched his career – meaning that Ellis was born with a voice so close to the King’s that he couldn’t escape becoming something of a stand-in. There was no other direction for his talent, despite efforts to clear matters up by recording a song, “I’m Not Trying To Be Like Elvis”.The mask he donned over his eyes to give an extra element of mystery was a stipulation in his contract Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Martin Fry is unsure whether Worthing is enjoying itself enough for his liking. Clad in a sharply tailored grey three-piece suit, ABC’s frontman keeps asking us if we’re having a good time. The shouts of approval that greet the question suggest we are. In any case, he certainly seems to be.Age suits him. He always aspired to a classic crooner look and at 57, he’s achieved it. Having established all is well, he plunges on into a greatest hits set, attacking the catchy, mid-paced “King Without a Crown” from 1987 (actually not a Top 40 hit, but sounds as if it should have been). The song allows Read more ...
Richard Bratby
“The first section, following a short introduction, places a rhythmic sequence on its retrograde. The two layers are transposed independently (one going up, the other down) as the music progresses, and points of symmetry are highlighted when they occur”. No, me neither. Apparently Patrick Brennan’s Polly Roe also features a brief rhythmic quotation from Birtwistle’s Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum. More erudite ears may have been able to detect it.What anyone could hear, however, was that this fantastic little moto perpetuo is something special, beginning in shadowy half-tones to the Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Having released a self-titled debut album last year, soul singer Jarrod Lawson has been on a European touring offensive for much of this one. Very charming it has been, too, landing Lawson Soul Artist of the Year title at the 2015 Jazz FM Awards, and a string of stellar album reviews. Saturday’s London Jazz Festival appearance – there’s a lot of jazz in Lawson’s harmonic keyboard adventures – was the final night of a month-long European tour. On the evidence of the Shepherd’s Bush crowd, he already has loyal fans who know his music, and their number is increasing rapidly.There’s a sharper, Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Some rock’n’roll gigs are built upon the lead singer’s ego, others on the lunacy of the band’s drummer. The inaugural Fuzz Club London Weekender was unashamedly built upon guitars and effects pedals. Wailing feedback, screaming guitars and thunderous drumming bound together with spaced-out jamming and psychedelic projections were very much the order of the two days: a crowd spanning two or three generations of space cadets and acid-heads of varying beard-lengths, got their rocks off to a collection of bands from around the world who may have had one foot in the past but were very much taking Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Given how many members the band has had over its long existence, there will always be a running joke as to who’s who in The Fall? One thing we can say for certain is that the pretty, poised Greek woman on keyboards, the one who returns hand-in-hand with frontman Mark E Smith to the stage for the encore, is Elena Poulou, his wife of a decade-and-a-half. Alongside her, the band create a rollicking, potent brew. It is, however, her husband who everyone’s come to see and, somehow, his slurred, haphazard, and unpredictable performance caps the whole thing off.Where the usual stage time at the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Had he not become one of the pivotal members of Pink Floyd, it's not difficult to imagine that David Gilmour might have become an academic like his father Douglas (who was a lecturer in zoology and genetics at Cambridge), or maybe a high-flying lawyer with leftish inclinations. Despite having been at the vanguard of rock music in its greatest and most extravagant years, Gilmour was never a likely candidate for a dissolute life of rock'n'roll hedonism.During this expansive TV profile, he pondered over this himself. Inspired back in the Fifties by Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock" and Elvis' Read more ...
Sarah Kent
This is Susan Hiller’s first exhibition since her Tate retrospective in 2011, and as it includes work from the 1970s to the present, it can also be seen as a retrospective of sorts. But since the selection was obviously governed by what was available for sale, it inevitably offers a piecemeal view of her achievements.Nor can I do full justice to the work, which is complex and multi-layered, so I’ll concentrate on one aspect – the importance of unorthodox views and marginal voices (especially those of women who have been silenced for centuries) that challenge the hegemony of received opinion Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After Judy Dyble left Fairport Convention in May 1968, it was her replacement Sandy Denny who picked up critical kudos as the ensuing years unfolded. Dyble, though, did not drop off the face of the earth and, if credits were looked at closely enough and margins examined, it was evident she had a career in music as fascinating and often as admirable as that of Denny. Widespread consideration of her role in British folk and folk rock began after the issue of her album Enchanted Garden in 2004. Before that, Dyble’s last commercial release had been in 1970.The reissue of 1970’s Morning Way, her Read more ...
peter.quinn
Featuring the usual, divertingly eclectic mix of singers from the worlds of jazz, pop and soul, last night’s Jazz Voice announced the opening of the 2015 EFG London Jazz Festival with a programme that satisfied both aficionado and newbie alike. Arranged, scored and conducted by the unceasingly inventive Guy Barker, the epoch-spanning celebration of jazz-related anniversaries, birthdays and milestones stretching back from 2015 was hosted by the mellifluously voiced BBC Radio 3 presenter, Sara Mohr Pietsch.Joe Stilgoe was supported by a top-notch big band when he launched his outstanding album Read more ...