Reviews
India Lewis
Whatever your office Christmas party was like, I can (almost) guarantee that it wasn’t as much fun as this Fire Records event. Running from five to midnight in Studio 9294, with lashing rain cutting across the River Lea just behind the venue, it was like being invited to a party by someone you don’t know very well but know that you’re going to like very much.There were seven bands to see, with the possibility to slip in and out (which I did). Each band played a mini-set, with the length increasing as the evening wore on. This had its negatives and positives – the vignette-like brevity gave a Read more ...
Lauren Brown
Nalini Singh's debut thriller thrusts us into Golden Cove, a small coastal town in New Zealand at "the edge of nowhere” that isn't everything it seems. What on the surface is a sun-bleached paradise made recently popular with back-packers is revealed to be much more sinister. The crashing waves harbour a vicious maelstrom, people aren't who they purport to be, and behind the sunshine-smiles of the tight-knit community lies madness.The vision of a fiercely self-contained town where everyone has known each other since childhood is shattered when Miriama, a bright-eyed, (and much over-mentioned Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Animal intelligence has come to the fore as an essential and fashionable subject for study. Dolphins, elephants, bees, prairie dogs, gannets, whales, baboons, wolves, parrots, bats – not mention lance-tailed manakins and grey mouse lemurs – are just a few of our fellow creatures whose social behaviour is the subject of this pithy, elegant book.Although her book is dedicated to a number of animal companions, Eva Meijer does not approve of pets. Yet as any pet owner or farmer knows, groups of dogs, cats, cows, pigs and chickens can communicate. We acknowledge animal emotion, and recognise what Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Hugh Hefner established Playboy Records in 1972 as an arm of his male-targeted business empire. Amongst the singles issued in its first year were seven-inchers by jazzer Bobby Scott, proto-yacht rockers The Hudson Brothers, singer-songwriter Tim Rose, Björn & Benny (with Svenska Flicka), who were ABBA before they had a name, and Michael Jarrett, who’d written “I'm Leavin'” for Elvis Presley. In 1974, Playboy Playmate Barbi Benton came on board.Other notables included country staple Mickey Gilley, soul star Major Lance, soft rockers Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds and, late in the Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
In March 1937, the government of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk instigated what it called a “disciplinary campaign” against the Zaza-speaking Alevi Kurds in the Dersim region of eastern Turkey. What followed was a bloody, coordinated assault that resulted in thousands of civilian deaths and forcible deportations. The episode has “weighed on Turkey’s official history ever since” and supplies the context to Sema Kaygusuz’s Every Fire You Tend, translated into English by Nicholas Glastonbury. The novel, which grapples with memories that are both an obligation and a burden, is a brave rejoinder to an Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Putin and Mikhail Khodorkovsky are “strong”, a Russian journalist considers. “Everyone else – weak.” This is essentially Khodorkovsky’s opinion, too, after the former oil oligarch’s decade in a Siberian jail for suggesting the President was corrupt to his face on TV.Prolific documentarist Alex Gibney uses Khodorkovsky’s rise and fall to consider Russia’s Wild West, seven years in which seven oligarchs bought up half the economy, as below them chaotic new market forces shocked the nation with destitution and Sicilian levels of gangster mayhem, while Boris Yeltsin slumped zombie-like in the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
What Jenna (Tatiana Maslany, star of Orphan Black), likes doing is wrangling and coordinating, not creating – she hates that - which makes for a refreshing change in a heroine. Her new boyfriend Leon (Jay Duplass, pictured below, of the Duplass brothers), an ambition-free photographers’ assistant, tells her that, given her talents, what she must do is become a film producer and, in a lightbulb moment, her future is suddenly mapped out. They’ve just met while clubbing – he’s also a DJ - and there’s an instant attraction between them on the dance floor. But what will her ambition bring to their Read more ...
Florence Hallett
It doesn’t matter where you stand, whether you crouch, or teeter on tiptoe: looking into the eyes of Bernini’s Medusa, 1638-40, is impossible. The attempt is peculiarly exhilarating, a game of dare made simultaneously tantalising and absurd by the sculpture’s evident stoniness. This extraordinary work – all the more remarkable for being relatively little known – is no less than frank in its materiality, its buttery striations delicious to look at and almost irresistably tactile, its muscular mass of snakes a dangerous and beguiling invitation to touch.The Medusa’s face is no less equivocal in Read more ...
David Nice
What a jolting coincidence that one of the 20th century's angriest symphonic beasts should have a rare unleashing on a night of high national anxiety. Whether Vaughan Williams spewed forth his Fourth Symphony in response to darkening European clouds in 1934 or as a sublimation of sexual frustration, given his unhappy domestic life at the time, it hit us all hard last night. There was even some release of tension in the sheer energy of embattled themes and grinding dissonances, thanks to Antonio Pappano's stupendous control of a London Symphony Orchestra on fire.Most surprising, perhaps, was Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If good intentions were everything, Teenage Dick would be the play of the year. As it is, this British premiere at the Donmar of an Off Broadway entry from summer 2018 grants centre-stage, and not before time, to two disabled actors, one of whom – the mesmerically fearless Daniel Monks – plays the Shakespeare-inspired figure of the title. But viewed purely in terms of text, author Mike Lew's nod towards the Bard's most charismatically demonic anti-hero feels some way still from finished and is so busy changing gears that even Michael Longhurst, the director, has to struggle to make Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla’s programmes in Birmingham are so personal – so utterly bespoke – that in the event of her being indisposed, they present something of a problem. That’s what happened this week. The programme was vintage Gražinytė-Tyla – opening with Elgar’s two partsongs Op.26 (a reflection of her blossoming relationship with the CBSO Youth Chorus), and ending with that ravishing Cinderella of the Brahms symphonies, the Third: a nice nod, in the CBSO’s centenary season, to Elgar’s particular love of this work. In between came the UK premiere of the new orchestral version – co- Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The trouble with prejudice is that you can't control how other people see you. At the start of her career, playwright Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti's work was set in her own Sikh community. But, like other playwrights from similar backgrounds, she has tended to be pigeonholed in the category of "Asian playwright", and expected to write about clichéd subjects such as arranged marriage or religion. Now, however, she vigorously breaks free with this new play at the Royal Court, a story about life in contemporary Britain. This time she has expanded her cast of characters by creating a wonderfully Read more ...