Two years ago, Dylan played his best concert in years here at the Royal Albert Hall, the dim stage circled by vintage movie studio lights, and circling Dylan a band seasoned enough to bottle its own oil, delivering a new kind of quiet, late-night music. The broad unpredictability may have had gone, but so had those too-common troughs in quality and penchant for urban barns in Wembley. Could this new quality – forget the width – be sustained?After the release this year of Shadows in the Night, recorded at the same Capitol studio Sinatra used, with the same band that joins him tonight, a Read more ...

The title sequence of Bond number 24 is a bit of a nightmare, with Sam Smith's mawkishly insipid theme song playing over a queasy title sequence featuring a hideous giant octopus, but the traditional opening mini-movie is an explosive chain reaction which doesn't disappoint. This takes us to Mexico City on the Day of the Dead, where Daniel Craig's ghoulishly attired Bond is on a mission to take out a chap called Sciarra.He does this at some length, casually demolishing an entire city block and then engaging in an epic punch-up inside a loop-the-looping helicopter. But back in London, Bond, Read more ...

Standing in front of a table filled with small consoles, Beardyman reaches into a blue bucket for an audience-suggested title to the next song he’ll create live, from scratch, in front of us. “The Muppets on Trial” is what he ends up with. Tapping speedily at the equipment – presumably his custom-designed Beardytron 5000 Mk II – he loops his own beatbox percussion and haunting soundscape noises into a backdrop, then starts a preposterous dialogue wherein he does an extended impression of Miss Piggy in court, relating how Kermit mistreats her. As the song goes on, she and Elmo from Sesame Read more ...

There's a new kind of forum for electronic musicians. Certainly not a rave, and not just a recital to earnest nerds, built on a kind of patronage, but a long way removed from a standard corporate gig where you're just providing the interchangeable soundtrack to X or Y product launch. The realm of the technology party, often seen at conference-festivals like Amsterdam Dance Event and Sónar, but increasingly as a standalone thing throughout global cities, is something very 21st century, very odd, and still to be negotiated.But this is a necessary negotiation: technology is creating new Read more ...

Riccardo Chailly’s Strauss odyssey with his Leipzig orchestra peaked in Saxony last year, the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth. I was lucky to catch a razor-sharp Till Eulenspiegel and a saturated Death and Transfiguration in Dresden’s Semperoper close to the birthday. 14 months on, and the Barbican has nothing like the same necessary air to offer around a mini-residency of richly-scored symphonic poems. But Don Juan ought to be the perfect festive opener, and here it leapt into the void as only a truly alive, disciplined interpretation can.This was a great lover very much Read more ...

A haunted house, a mental asylum, a witch’s coven, a circus freak show. Check, check, check. And check. Is there no horror trope left unturned in American Horror Story? Nope. And that’s precisely the point – familiarity and postmodern camp go a long way to explaining the runaway success of the series. Ramping it up for Season 5 we go from the generic to the specific. Any student of the cinematic genre would recognise that carpet from The Shining. Yes, and those pallid kids that spook the corridors of the Hotel Cortez are just like those freaking twins – Come play with us, Danny. Come Read more ...

Once upon a time, quite recently, you couldn’t move for plays about youth. Now, there’s been an avalanche of dramas about ageing, usually in the context of dementia and family life. Maybe all of our main playwrights have suddenly grown up, or maybe the endless quest for novelty has deposited us on the shores of the current trend-setting idea. Nicola Wilson’s Royal Court debut is yet another play about Alzheimer’s, ageing and memory, but is it any different from Florian Zeller’s The Father, April de Angelis’s After Electra or Emma Adams’s Animals?The answer is yes. And then some. The situation Read more ...

As a YouTube comic Mawaan Rizwan is clearly at ease on screen, and right at the beginning of How Gay Is Pakistan? he was telling us about coming out as gay to his family last year: it was “the worst news ever for Pakistani parents”. Director Masood Khan’s film, occasionally hanging somewhat uneasily between its location on BBC Three and its origin in Current Affairs, followed him back to the country of his birth to seek an answer to the question: What would his life be like if he’d stayed in Pakistan as a kid?“Exciting but scary” was his first impression of the place, and it took a while for Read more ...

What a woman. Does the news that Kate Winslet is to play the polymath Lee Miller in a Hollywood biopic mean a kind of sanctified apotheosis of Miller's quite extraordinary life? The story is so dramatic it transcends any fiction. Her path was controversial, imaginative, accomplished, and in many ways profoundly sad, an emotional roller-coaster. But the legacy is astonishing, as more and more of her achievement as a photographer is revealed.Lee Miller (1907-1977) is shown here with many previously unpublished photographs. Her commissions for Vogue, as both feature writer and a photographer of Read more ...

Let’s not get carried away. The news, announced at the end of September, that vinyl sales generated more money than the combined income of Spotify, Vevo and YouTube’s free services sent waves of celebration through the record-loving community. $166 million vs. $222 million – yaaaaaay! Vinyl sales up 52% on last year and now accounting for a third of all physical sales – yaaaaaay again! But the truth is that paid subscribers to streaming services – as opposed to the “free” advert-funded model - raised over a billion dollars in income. Google “Vinyl sales now 1970s” and there are plenty of Read more ...

It's been the most heavily signposted illness in drama history. A twinge here. An "Oof" there. Chekhov's roiling guts. And tonight, His Lordship's mystery complaint finally took centre stage, in a scene that led one to wonder exactly how to remove three pints of aristocratic blood from a pristine white tablecloth.The latest shoehorned-in visitor from history, marvellously mustachioed health minister Neville Chamberlain (Rupert Frazer, pictured below) was on hand to witness Lord Grantham's (Hugh Bonneville) spectacular horror movie regurgitation: Alien's iconic John Hurt chestburst Read more ...

Here comes the President, and with him a timely reminder about what the Chinese have been digging up over the past 40 years or so to further demonstrate their exceptional imperial history over the past two millennia. Treasures of the Jade Empire rather breathlessly told us of revelatory excavations of the tombs of the Han Emperors, and the regional kings they nominated to act as surrogate rulers over their gigantic empire – its boundaries closely related to China today. The parallel argument to the archaeology was the achievements of the Han in unifying a vast landmass, in which Han Chinese Read more ...