Reviews
mark.kidel
The inaugural Aga Khan Music Awards, a three-day event held last weekend in Lisbon, celebrated nearly 20 years of wide-ranging work dedicated to the preservation of ancient and threatened cultures, an impressive programme of educational initiatives, and the encouragement of musical exchange and experiment in the Middle East, Asia and Africa.These awards are far removed from the world of the Eurovision Song Contest, the Grammys, MOBOs or other well-spun and marketed events: the notion of excellence, which lies at the heart of the Aga Khan Music Initiative, is connected to ideas and practices Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The Crucible is a play that speaks with unrelenting power at times of discord, most of all when the public consciousness looks ripe for manipulation. Never more appropriate than now, you might think – and in a year in which the work of Arthur Miller seems all over the West End, the chance to see a more experimental production of his masterpiece of 17th century religious obsession, based on the Salem witch trials but reflecting as much the anti-communist hysteria of 1950s America, looks inviting. Especially so given that The Yard, the ambitious Hackney Wick studio space that is staging it, has Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Every month we start theartsdesk on Vinyl with the Vinyl of the Month, however, the truth is that, depending on your taste, many of the records reviewed below may be your own vinyl of the month. Whether reissues or new material or compilations, theartsdesk on Vinyl attends to all music on plastic. This time we run the gamut from country’n’western to Eighties pop to acid techno to Ozric Tentacles and much else. All sonic life is here. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHYves Jarvis The Same But By Different Means (Anti-)Montreal artist singer Jean-Sebastian Audet recorded three albums as Un Blonde but Read more ...
Chris Harvey
Drake walked on water at times in his opening show at the O2 Arena. Sadly this was solely down to the impressive video projection that filled the giant screens beneath his feet. The 32-year-old Canadian rapper is one of the biggest-selling stars in the world – at one point last year he had a hard-to-believe 27 tracks on America’s Billboard Hot 100 chart. But here he produced a patchy, stop-start performance, in which he seemed obsessed with whipping up the crowd to keep the energy levels high, when one glance at his own back catalogue could have told him – just play one great song after Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Piers Morgan hated This Time with Alan Partridge (BBC One) and predicted it would be pulled before the end of the series. This may be taken as a kitemark of quality. And yet the prime target for Steve Coogan’s satire was no voice in the wilderness. A lot of viewers professed themselves underwhelmed by the return of Partridge to mainstream broadcasting and voted with their remotes: the show managed to shed a third of his audience between the first and second episode.One of the disappointments for Partridge fans is that for five episodes he has been on if not best, then better behaviour, Read more ...
Katherine Waters
When in 1800 the architect Sir John Soane bought Pitzhanger Manor for £4,500, he did so under the spell of optimism, energy and hope. The son of a bricklayer, Soane had – through a combination of talent, hard work and luck – risen through the ranks of English society to become one of the preeminent architects of his generation. His purchase of the out-of-town Pitzhanger was both a way of cementing his station and, in razing and replacing the original Georgian house with a splendid and idiosyncratic home of his own specifications, showcasing his talents and architectural vision.Since Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Congratulations to Stephen Graham, guest-starring in this fifth season of BBC One’s Line of Duty, for still being alive at the end of episode one, a favour not routinely granted to headline names in Jed Mercurio’s diabolical labyrinth of deception. Then again, death needn’t necessarily be the end, as we were reminded when the late and exceptionally unlamented ACC Derek Hilton, the sleazy string-puller from series four, repeated on us here like a bad oyster.Mercurio isn’t just telling a story, he’s spinning a kind of Game of Villains epic that stretches out to unknowable horizons. Just as the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Support bands rarely get a mention in live reviews but Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs’ opening act for their present jaunt around the UK, Cattle are no bog-standard fare, designed to make the headliners look good. Comprising two drummers, screaming electronics, bass and howled vocals, they brought an apocalyptic sound that had much of the audience pummelled into submission well before their set was finished.There was certainly no way to ignore them as distortion and extreme volume swept all away with a sonic artillery barrage and a singer throwing himself around in a frenzy throughout a Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Stopped in the street for a vox pop by a BBC interviewer keen to “fill your air” with strife and bile, a character in Spring retorts that “there’s a world out there bigger than Brexit, yeah?” Newshound critics, take note. The symbolically named Brit (short, originally, for Brittany) works as a guard at a migrant detention centre. In its hellish corridors, people driven by suffering, abuse and terror out of regions much less favoured than navel-gazing Europe endure routine contempt and cruelty in a “kind of underworld”, a “place of the living dead”. As in the two preceding volumes of Ali Smith Read more ...
David Nice
If you can’t put a name to any of Jack the Ripper’s victims – and spin it however you please, victims they remain – then you shouldn’t buy the publicity about this new opera "bringing dignity back" to the murdered women in question. Isn’t it time to stop feeding the troll/killer, much as Jacinda Ardern did so swiftly and movingly under different circumstances last week, and let the five eviscerated corpses return to dust in peace? Composer Iain Bell, disturbed by their fates from an early age, sincerely thought otherwise. But though he serves up some carefully-considered vocal writing at ENO Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“We like people here in Estonia. I think we all here very much value being European. To all our British friends, we know that the offer of e-residency has been ticking-up constantly. You can find a sure foothold for your business here in Estonia. There’s enough space, please come.”In her welcome speech at Tallinn Music Week 2019, Estonia’s President Kersti Kaljulaid (pictured below right, photograph by Aron Urb) was unequivocal about how she sees her country. “Estonia is the creative hub of Europe,” she also said. “It’s an innovation-driven society. You are very welcome to set up your Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
This new collection, compiled by Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs of Saint Etienne, aurally delineates a period when much that was British had an edge of bleakness. Accordingly, Three Day Week – When the Lights Went Out 1972–1975 ought to be a grim listen, a slog during which the mind is improved and new outlooks are brought on board but is as lively as a tractor reversing through swiftly setting concrete.Glam rock and sparkly soul may have been on the chart menu, but as the back cover puts it: “In 1973 Britain was still a nation of outside bogs; tens of thousands were housed in wartime pre-fabs. Read more ...