Reviews
Jonathan Geddes
There was something devilish about Alex Kapranos at this homecoming gig, and not simply due to the blood red shirt the Franz Ferdinand frontman was wearing. Throughout the night the singer would cajole and conduct the crowd with finger-pointing flair, as if tempting them to join him on the dark side, and when he spoke it was to demand more from the audience like a preacher zealously seeking extra funding for a mega church.The response, inevitably, was warm and eager. The original line-up of Franz Ferdinand may have come from across Scotland, England and Germany, but they were forged in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“When we started out we were really just an amalgamation of three bands – the Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine and the House of Love,” said Ride’s Andy Bell in 2012. The arrival of the literally-named double album 4 EPs – collecting their first four EPs in one place – brings a chance to ponder this.Oxford’s Ride formed in 1988. “Like a Daydream” the kick-off track from Play, their 1990 second EP, confirmed they'd transcended their inspirations. A pacey raver with wild drumming, it featured an outstanding guitar solo which was a double-speed transmutation of what had originally Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Of all the classic musical scores that could appeal to a choreographer, three are catnip: Ravel’s Bolero, Bizet’s Carmen, and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Each has been set dozens of times and the veteran Swedish dancemaker Mats Ek has notched up all three.Such is the pull of Rite, in fact, that Ek has just created his second version, almost 40 years after his first. It wasn’t that he was unhappy with that earlier Rite, he told an interviewer, but he felt that the drama of the music had more to uncover – specifically on the subject of “young women being forced into a tradition, which has Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The Royal Academy’s Making Modernism is a welcome introduction to seven women painters working in Germany at the beginning of the last century. It wouldn’t surprise me if you’d never heard of Gabriele Münter, Marianne Werefkin and Paula Modersohn-Becker even though they enjoyed international reputations during their lives, since their male counterparts (Kandinsky, Klee, Jawlensky and Macke) are not well known here either.Käthe Kollwitz may be a more familiar name; her harrowing prints and drawings are so powerful they knock the spots off everything else here. One of her most famous etchings, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In a Renaissance artist’s studio, a wannabe master proved his skill by drawing a perfect circle. Perhaps playing Beethoven’s A minor Bagatelle (aka “Für Elise”) as an encore should count as the pianist’s equivalent. At the Barbican last night, Alice Sara Ott did just that with the ubiquitous ring-tone earworm.It came after an assured performance of Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Nathalie Stutzmann. And Ott traced its shape perfectly: feathery, supple, light, but not insipid. If the LSO’s rubric for this concert invoked “wild and stormy Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Writer and director Hugo Blick isn’t afraid of getting stuck into some knotty and morally complicated issues, whether it’s Middle Eastern politics (The Honourable Woman) or the Rwandan genocide (Black Earth Rising), but perhaps he wouldn’t be your automatic go-to guy for Westerns. Nevertheless, here he is, giving it some high-plains-drifter in a baleful tale of revenge, violence and twists of fate.It’s 1890, and we first meet Lady Cornelia Locke (Emily Blunt) in the prairie flatlands of Kansas. The landscape is gaunt and bleak, the view only interrupted by a rickety wooden hotel which looks Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Cecil Sharp House, citadel of folk music, finally resounded last night to the mellifluous tones of Barbara Dickson whose distinguished career began at the Howff Folk Club, Dunfermline, in the heady days of the 1960s folk revival. The choice of venue perhaps suggested an all-folk programme but while Dickson dug deep into her song bag the performance drew on numbers from across her remarkably varied career. While anyone hoping to hear her number one hit – “I Know Him So Well” – would have left disappointed, Ewan MacColl, whose favourite haunt it was, would have thought it all most inauthentic. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Living begins with a ravishing immersion in vintage footage of a lost world, primary colours popping on a Fifties summer’s day in Piccadilly. Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch’s opulent score adds to the poignancy of an orderly, comfortable England: the country which has slowed the heartbeat and buried the soul of Williams (Bill Nighy), a civil servant called Mr. Zombie behind his back.South African director Oliver Hermanus’s last film, Moffie, dealt with two gay soldiers suffering under the apartheid army’s brutish order; screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Remains of the Day inspired perhaps the Read more ...
Katie Colombus
In an intimate evening with Polly Jean Harvey MBE, the double Mercury Prize winning artist sang an altogether different kind of tune than you might expect.Reading from her new book of poetry, Orlam, a coming of age story about a not-girl-not-boy, set within the changing seasons of a mythical Dorset landscape, the songs we heard were odd little twists of nursery rhymes, whisper-sung in a strong West Country accent.Harvey describes the book in a nutshell as containing “ecstasy and filth, magic and jokes.” The collection of poems conjure a primal, fairy-tale world where a child’s fears take real Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Now into its fifth season, Netflix’s royal pageant is entering that danger zone where once-majestic TV series suddenly find they’re running out of steam. Perhaps Harry and Meghan’s publicity-hogging shenanigans and the real-life loss of the Queen and Prince Philip have somewhat overshadowed Netflix’s quasi-fictional drama. Perhaps everybody has become sick to death of rehashed versions of the life of Princess Diana.Whatever the reasons, The Crown now feels slightly jaded, re-running familiar themes and recycling whiffs of various historic scandals with yet another different cast. As ever, Read more ...
Harriet Mercer
Derek Owusu’s debut That Reminds Me won the Desmond Elliot Prize in 2020. When asked what it was that she loved most about Owusu’s semi-autobiographical 117-page book, Preti Taneja, chair of the judges (and winner of the prize herself in 2018) answered, without hesitation, “the form” and Owusu’s “compression of poetic language”. Owusu’s latest work, Losing the Plot, imagines what life was like for his 18-year-old mother when she arrived in London from Ghana in 1989. His fictional narrator’s mother swaps the “dusty trails of Jamasi” for the grey pavement of Tottenham, “a village of disguised Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
After an unavoidable delay theartsdesk on Vinyl returns with over 9000 words on new and recent releases, ranging across the entire spectrum of known music. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHEdrix Puzzle Coming of the Moon Dogs (On the Corner)Nathan Curran is an in-demand session drummer for the likes of everyone from Elton John to Kano. Ah, but like Hong Kong Phooey before him, he has an alter-persona that will surprise. Unlike Hong Kong Phooey, though, it’s not a canine crime-fighter cashing in on a global craze for martial arts. No, it’s a demented attempt to weld the fringes of jazz to retro sci- Read more ...