Reviews
Adam Sweeting
“What is wrong with us? What are we doing here?” Liam Payne asked the camera, as we neared the end of his jaunt round picturesque Namibia with his quizmaster Ant Middleton. The short answer would be “it’s for the publicity, you idiot,” but of course he knows that full well. He’d just leapt off a cliff face and swung in wide circles on a rope above the russet-coloured desert far below. It looked quite fun actually.The formula here was Bear Grylls Lite, as special forces veteran Middleton took a “journey of a lifetime” across Namibia by road and rail with X Factor and One Direction veteran Read more ...
Guy Oddy
By the time Vampire Weekend reached Birmingham on their latest UK jaunt, they had unfortunately managed to mislay their support band, the colourful Songhoy Blues. This was a great shame, as the Malians would surely have added a bit of colour to the early part of an evening that would most certainly have benefitted from a bit of light and shade. Instead, the O2 Academy was treated to an extensive recording of baroque chamber music, piped through the PA system, that felt like it would never end.However, end it thankfully did and onto the stage bounced Ezra Keonig, dressed in white trousers and Read more ...
David Nice
So much was fresh and exciting about Michael Tilson Thomas's years as the London Symphony Orchestra's Principal Conductor (1988-1995; I don't go as far back as his debut, the 50th anniversary of which is celebrated this season). Carved in the memory are his concert performance of Rimsky-Korsakov's Mlada in "The Flight of the Firebird" festival, his high-octane piano playing as well as conducting in "The Gershwin Years", the transformative Prokofiev Fifth and Strauss Ein Heldenleben (both fortunately also recorded). He seems a more sober figure now, less swooping of gestures, eyes a little too Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A bit like all those people on the home front in 1940 (but only a little bit), we sit and nervously wait for news. Is World on Fire (BBC One) still listed among the living? Or even now is someone typing up the letter and sticking it in a brown envelope? “Fell bravely in the field … did its country proud etc…” Please may this ambitious Sunday-night drama live to fight another day? In seven highly impressive and involving episodes the first series has managed the near impossible and found an original way back to the Second World War.The portal in was the human heart, a messy and complicated Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The London Philharmonic’s Isle of Noises, a year-long festival dedicated to music of the British Isles, drew towards its close with this programme of Butterworth, Elgar and Walton. Marin Alsop was a good choice to lead, especially for Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast. Although well-known for her performances of British music, she’s not one to wallow in pastoral whimsy. Instead, she brings drive a focus, clearly defining all the rhythms and orchestral lines. And although that rarely makes for comfortable or cozy English Romanticism, it allows the LPO to demonstrate the impressive orchestral skills Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Jack Dee has made a career out of being a grumpy old man, even though he started on the comedy circuit in 1986 when he was 25. Back then, his dour, seen-it-all-and-not-impressed material was wonderfully at at odds not just with his age but also the same generation of alternative comics and their high-energy political sets.But now, at the age of 58, he has grown into the stage persona, and his unsmiling, deadpan shtick suits him perfectly.He dismisses the audience's welcoming applause with a sarcastic “Thanks anyway” but the more he disses them and their town, the more they lap it up. Of Read more ...
India Lewis
Gillian Wearing’s Arena documentary Everything is Connected (BBC Four) is a quietly innovative biography of an author whose works still resonate with their readers and the country within which she wrote. Wearing and George Eliot are a sympathetic match, both playing with a multiplicity of voices, delighting in the layman’s opinion as well as that of the expert. We see Eliot’s intellectuals, but also the modern version of her farmers, priests, and wayward sons. Wearing puts her words in their mouths, allowing them at times to slip into one another, blurring the boundaries between the speakers Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In September 1944, a heavily pregnant Resistance activist in the north of German-occupied Italy was arrested on a visit to Milan. Lisetta Giua, a law student and fiancée of the Jewish anti-Fascist chief Vittorio Foa, worked as one of hundreds of women staffette: vital underground operatives whose roles might stretch from courier and spy to liaison officer and saboteur. Lisetta, captured while away from her home in Turin, soon found herself in Milan’s notorious Villa Triste – a torture centre where a half-German Fascist degenerate named Pietro Koch practised almost indescribable “scientific” Read more ...
Jessica Payn
Visceral, gaudy, alien, otherworldly to the point of being almost improbably imaginative, the nudibranch serves as an appropriate figure for Nigerian-British writer Irenosen Okojie’s muscularly surrealist prose. Look up a picture of one if you haven’t before: the nudibranch is an exuberant, kaleidoscopic variety of sea slug. In the story that gives her newest collection of short stories its title, Okojie provides a short definition of the creature, which serves as a kind of epigraph: "Soft-bodied, marine gastropod molluscs which lose their shells after their larval stage. They are noted Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“It's Gonna Take a Miracle” just missed out on a mainstream US Top 40 placing after The Royalettes issued it as a single in June 1965. But the song had staying power. In 1971 Laura Nyro covered it, choosing it as the title track for the album she made with LaBelle. Deniece Williams’s version hit big in 1982.The song’s co-writer was Teddy Randazzo. He had arranged and produced The Royalettes’s interpretation, the first time it was issued. Their reading is as he conceived the song: the template for what followed. The other vocal group most associated with Randazzo is Little Anthony and the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Is there anything Tim Minchin cannot do? He sings his own songs, plays hot bar-room piano and tells jokes about the existence of God. He composes musicals, performs in Lloyd Webber and Stoppard, writes a multimillion-dollar Hollywood cartoon which he is allowed to direct – until he isn’t. As he explains in this riveting new show, the sell-off of a chunk of DreamWorks, the consequent nixing of his Aussie animation Larrikins in 2017 and his retreat to Sydney, brutally slapped a glass ceiling on his manic multitasking.The film’s cancellation plunged Minchin into a period of morbid self-pity. The Read more ...
Chris Harvey
Ólafur Arnalds is almost secretly huge. Millions adore the melancholy beauty of the Icelandic composer’s music, yet his name still brings blank stares from some. The Royal Festival Hall was predictably full to bursting, though, to see Arnalds perform as part of his mini OPIA festival, in which he took over the auditoriums and foyers of the Southbank to showcase an eclectic mix of experimental music. Melodic piano structures and looped electronica loomed large.“Opia”, from John Koenig’s compendium of made-up words, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, means “the ambiguous intensity of looking Read more ...