Reviews
Veronica Lee
If I had a fiver for every time I have heard a comic described (usually by the comic himself) as “the new Bill Hicks”, I would be rather comfortably off. It’s tosh, of course, and, as his brother astutely says in American: The Bill Hicks Story, only Bill Hicks could be Bill Hicks, because what you saw on the outside was what was on the inside. Hicks himself is in no position to argue either way: he died, aged 32, from pancreatic cancer in 1994. Those who die at the height of their powers are usually conferred icon status; some deserve it; many do not. On balance, Hicks almost certainly does, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Last night in Wormwood Scrubs a prisoner hanged himself. Successfully. A doctor confirmed “that life is now non-existent”. Later on the same wing it happened again, only this time the suicide attempt didn't come off. For many years it has felt as if the great tradition of television documentary is now non-existent. Programmes like this give you hope that, like that second man on a wire in D Wing, it might just pull through.The workplace fly-on-the-wall has been a collectors' item ever since the channels started to multiply. The economics of embedding a film crew in a specific milieu, Read more ...
howard.male
“The Eighties – where do you bloody well start?” Geoffrey Palmer’s lugubrious voiceover seemed even more world-weary than usual as this hour-long special on the decade everyone loves to hate began. And I felt for him, I really did. Because I am, appropriately enough, the grumpy old hack who's not at all happy to be assigned the task of revisiting this decade in which, it has to said, just about everything was shite. But let’s get one thing clear. I hated this decade at the time, unlike most of the minor-celebrity talking heads hired to give their 10 pence worth on this show.It soon becomes Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It's 4.00 in the afternoon and Brighton Festival curator Brian Eno is fast-forwarding us to the future. Perched onstage behind an array of consoles, he tells us we're in for "something special for the end of term". The conceit is that the audience are students in the year 2069, indeed the event programme takes the form of notes for a university course on "Cultural Reconstructions". Rather than a single "lecture", though, there are three, and they will take us through to 11.00 tonight.Eno tells us before he begins that "after the Great Pulse of 2042" all digital recordings of the early 21st Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Something decidedly odd happened at one of last year’s Proms. In a night celebrating the golden age of the MGM musicals, one of the performers was Seth MacFarlane. The average Prommer wouldn’t have known MacFarlane from a poached egg. And even his devotees wouldn’t necessarily be too familiar with the face. But when in the course of the evening he started singing in a voice for which he is better known, the picture became clear. To some of the audience, anyway: MacFarlane is the genius behind Stewie Griffin.Family Guy needs no introduction. Or if it does, it won’t be getting one here. After a Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's an admirable project: to recast the interiors of stately homes as immersive artworks, a musical recital combined with sound installations designed to make the viewer look anew at their surroundings. Certainly as I entered the hallway of Hertford House in Marylebone, where the Wallace Collection is housed, the rich, shifting tones of Simon Fisher Turner's electronic sound manipulations filled the air like perfume, amplifying the opulence of the surroundings and making me – and others – linger on the grand staircase. This was ambient music in the truest sense, deep subliminal bass notes Read more ...
Ismene Brown
These past five days in May have seen some fairly oddball goings-on labelled as "New Dance at the Southbank Centre". Accidentally coinciding with other oddball goings-on on the national scene, since it was booked up long ago before elections were called. But no double-act in politics is likely to be quite as peculiar and weirdly stimulating as that between the Spanish cabaret artiste La Ribot (often to be found nude) and the postmodern French choreographer Mathilde Monnier, playing two sides of a woman who can’t help being at war with herself, like slapstick twins or conjoined politicians. Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The political tectonic plates were re-aligning, the economic indicators were jittery, but the cultural kaleidoscope also shifted a bit last night with the unveiling of Susheela Raman’s new material from her yet untitled new album, which on this evidence and some unfinished masters floating around could be one of the albums of the year. Names for the album being talked of include Vel, the Tamil for spear, Tamil Voodoo and Incantation (don’t do that one, guys, people will expect Andean pan-pipers, one of the few global influences you won’t be getting here).Raman, born in London from Tamil Read more ...
josh.spero
In my parents’ day, apparently, one just turned up at the cinema whenever one felt like it, even if that meant the first thing you heard on entering the auditorium was Bogart signalling the start of a beautiful friendship. That doesn’t wash these days – the auteur put paid to that – and given the short films commissioned by ICO/LUX to run before the feature, we can only approve. ICO, which supports independent film in the UK, and LUX, an agency for artists who work with film, asked eight international artists to make five-minute films, the results of which are being premiered at Cannes Read more ...
josh.spero
Sincerity is not a quality the contemporary art world seems to value: the masking of emotions under layers of irony is where we stand. But while Damien Hirst paints from a cynical palette, British Pop Artist Stuart Semple's Nineties-inflected paintings have sincerity to spare.The Happy House, his new show at Morton Metropolis and his first in London for three years, combines the commercial tropes of Pop Art as refracted through a certain naffness with self-portraits both visual and emotional. This is clear in the show’s outstanding picture, A Pounding Outside Poundland, where Semple recreates Read more ...
David Nice
Fantasies in apparent freefall, though in fact ruthlessly organised and blindingly well executed, were the name of last night's game - an endgame, as it happened, to the BBC Symphony Orchestra's hardest-working Barbican season before the marathon of the Proms. Buzzing, fluttering myriads of notes by Tippett and Martinů swarmed around a very necessary still centre in the majestic personage of Elisabeth Leonskaja, that great Minerva of the keyboard holding us spellbound in Schumann and Chopin.Leonskaja's encore, the Chopin E flat Nocturne, might seem like an odd place to start. But it was very Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Can we clear something up once and for all, please? Yet again this week an all too familiar headline caught my eye: “Is Juan Diego Florez the heir apparent to Pavarotti?” Or words to that effect. Why do these lazy (and/or ill-informed) editors and their headline writers keep asking the same rhetorical question? Surely they should know by now that the answer is a great big resounding “no”. Not because Florez is inferior or less famous or lacks the potential for superstardom (the marketing men have already gone into overdrive about him) but quite simply because he is a completely, utterly, Read more ...