Liverpool
mark.kidel
Making a film about an artist with the phenomenal range and creative effervescence of someone like Elvis Costello was never going to be easy. There have been over 30 albums since he started out in 1977, hundreds of songs, many of which are as brilliant as anything written in the last 50 years, and a series of collaborations with artists including Paul McCartney, Burt Bacharach, Bill Frisell, Chet Baker, the Brodsky Quartet, Emmylou Harris, T-Bone Burnett and many others.Portraits of great artists and musicians inevitably throw up a similar creative conundrum: I encountered it with Ravi Read more ...
Claudia Pritchard
“I hate surprises!” joked Cilla Black, for 20 years host of the family reunion show Surprise, Surprise, in ITV’s toothsome tribute to her 50 years in showbusiness. She needn’t have worried, for there were no shocks in this clean-heeled gallop through her career, from gigs in her native LIverpool as Swinging Priscilla with The Big Three, to discovery by Brian Epstein, The Cavern Club, television and national treasuredom. Live guests on The One and Only Cilla Black, including Christopher Biggins and warmed-over contestants from old shows, were cut with prerecorded segments shot on location Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Following the completion of the White Album, and the conclusion of recording sessions in Los Angeles with new Apple signing Jackie Lomax, in late November 1968 George Harrison and his wife Pattie Boyd departed for Woodstock in upstate New York. They were heading for Bob Dylan country.Harrison had first fallen for Dylan early in 1964. The Beatles had played his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, over and over again in their rooms in the George V hotel in Paris, and were quickly seduced. On their second trip to America in August of that year they had met him for the first time, smoking Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Kieran Evans’s debut feature, adapted from the novel by Niall Griffiths, achieves a rare and accomplished sense of place in its depiction of Liverpool. It’s a place of chilly but not actually threatening cityscapes, with an air of space and windy sunshine, from which the film’s eponymous protagonists retreat into a private bedroom world.Kelly (Antonia Campbell-Hughes) and Victor (Julian Morris) catch each other’s eye across the dance floor, and they’re soon spiralling into a relationship. It's gradually revealed that she’s been hurt in the past, and has ended up with a very particular way of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark are too often remembered for their musical sins. Their long career has taken multiple twists and turns including way too much watery tweeness in the mid-Eighties, then, later on, soppy, occasionally successful attempts to crack American FM radio. Many forget that initially they were one of the first electro-pop bands, Liverpudlian Kraftwerk devotees whose early work stands up beside any equivalent act of the era.The classic quartet line-up, featuring Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphries, the creative core from 1978 until the end of the Eighties, reformed in 2005 Read more ...
fisun.guner
Glam. Were you there? If so, what was it all about? You might come up with a list: Roxy Music, Ziggy Stardust, shiny flares, Sweet, shaggy hair, the ubiquitous platform boot, T-Rex, glittery eye-shadow, lip-gloss pouts (on men). It was the era of dressing up and gender-bending as fashion statement, though it’s also true that the glamour in Glam Rock was more glitter paste than gold. Some of it remains pretty cool, but unlike the Sixties you probably wouldn’t want to go back there, or at least for no longer than it takes to get round this exhibition, though Glam! The Performance of Style is Read more ...
theartsdesk
We're extremely proud to be able to present this charming exclusive video by the London multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter (and animator) BJ Smith - a ray of sunshine in the winter greyness. It comes from the forthcoming Dedication to the Greats release on the Nu Northern Soul label, which features Smith's acoustic covers of tracks by hip hop artists: The Pharcyde's "Runnin'", and the track featured here, Mos Def's "Umi Says".Smith has been a low-key but impressive presence in underground music for a while now, collaborating regularly with international festival favourites Crazy P, Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
Those of us growing up in the heady days of 1960s Liverpool knew that four local lads were taking the world by storm. Some really grown-up people might even have been to The Cavern and seen the phenomenon in their early days. And yet there was always an enigma in the background: the figure who made it happen but about whom we knew almost nothing.Brian Epstein – pronounced Epsteen – seemed to have it all: wealth, good looks, ability, contacts. He was the gifted businessman who launched several epic popular music careers, not to mention a major music business in Liverpool which continued well Read more ...
theartsdesk
The Blue Nile: A Walk Across The Rooftops, HatsGraeme ThomsonThe Blue Nile occupy a unique spot in the musical landscape. Formed in 1980 by Glasgow University graduates Paul Buchanan, Paul Joseph Moore and Robert Bell, four albums in 30 years suggests a certain neurotic creative sensibility which resulted in a pretty slim legacy but served the music well.From their first single – 1981’s “I Love This Life”, included on these expanded reissues – to their last album High, in 2004, a dedicated and deliberate artistic ethos has driven the music. Aesthetically, there is something immensely pleasing Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Pop music has always been a cynical business. And yet, sometimes, I like to imagine an alternative universe somewhere before Simon Cowell made his millions and the reality television behemoth become the industry that it has become. The televised singing contest was just that: a true contest, a chance at fame for the shy unknown who may never have been "discovered" otherwise.Rebecca Ferguson would have been the star of that show. A softly-spoken Scouse single mother of two, her natural soul-inclined vocals won over a nation on The X Factor’s 2010 contest (well, almost: in the end she came Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was tough luck for Good Cop that the real-life killing of two female police officers in Manchester prompted the BBC to postpone its fourth and final episode, judging that its plotline of rookie cop Amanda Morgan acting as bait for a couple of knife-wielding thugs who preyed on women was too near the knuckle. This intrusion of headline events into the progress of the drama was also somewhat paradoxical, since while Good Cop presented some of the common symptoms of the mainstream policier, these were blended with an unusual mixture of morality play and psychological speculation.This lent the Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
You could say that the Titanic has been done to death, and that any new show would really need to say something different, something so far unknown, unearth a new angle, find new facts. To some extent, Treasured does that. Who’s ever heard of Mouser, the Titanic cat, who is supposed to have carried all six of her new-born kittens off the ship in Southampton? Allegedly her feline prescience sensed impending doom.White Star had also, it seems, wanted to build the ship in Liverpool – for which read Birkenhead on the other side of the Mersey – but the contract went to Harland and Wolff in Read more ...