Reviews
Matt Wolf
The images have a painterly precision in Uberto Pasolini's Still Life, as one might expect from a writing-directing effort from the onetime producer of The Full Monty that co-opts a style of painting as its title. Lead actor Eddie Marsan is often positioned at the centre of the shot, the meticulous visuals of a piece with a movie about a 44-year-old man who is himself fastidious to a fault as he goes about his job. That said employment has involved 22 years at Kennington Council tracing the relatives of people who have passed away means that John May (Marsan) spends a lot of time thinking Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
One of the dance world's better-kept secrets is the existence of a brilliantly inventive comic double-act consisting of two paunchy, balding 50-something men. Neither humour nor the over-50s are seen all that often in dance, but it isn't tokenism which makes dance insiders turn out in delighted force for choreographer Jonathan Burrows and composer Matteo Fargion: it's the knowledge that Burrows and Fargion's shows are one of the surest bets in dance for an evening that will be original, funny and clever in equal measure.I didn't get time to cast an eye on the incredibly brief programme note Read more ...
Sarah Kent
"My fatherland is South Africa, my mother tongue is Afrikaans, my surname is French, I don’t speak French. My mother always wanted me to go to Paris. She thought art was French because of Picasso. I thought art was American because of Artforum... I live in Amsterdam and have a Dutch passport. Sometimes I think I’m not a real artist because I’m too half-hearted and I never quite know where I am." (Marlene Dumas)Marlene Dumas is an artist alright; one of the best. If her paintings weren’t so exceptionally beautiful, this mid-career retrospective would feel overwhelmingly melancholic. This is Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Due to unfortunate circumstances I am unable to give a star rating to this show; 15 minutes into the second half a cast member collapsed on stage and the performance was cancelled. At the time of posting Ted Robbins (extreme right in the picture below) was recovering in hospital, in a stable condition, and we wish him a speedy recovery.I can of course write about what I did see, and much of it was great fun. Peter Kay's Phoenix Nights is a special live version of the sitcom set in a working men's club (the Phoenix) "just off Junction 7 on the M61" in Bolton (from where Kay hails). It's Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
If what you wanted to do was go out to the middle of the Mexican desert, invert the Cross and dip it in blood, screaming obscenities all the while, surrounded by a sunburnt band of fellow travellers all off their heads on mescalin, Tutuguri is definitely the music you’d want to do it to. Which is OK, because those are pretty much the images conjured up by Antonin Artaud’s poem-radio play To Have Done with the Judgment of God, which prompted Wolfgang Rihm to make a two-hour instrumental setting of this "Rite of the Black Sun" for large orchestra, taped chorus, howling vocalist (Leigh Melrose) Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Alice is always with us; the most quoted work of literature, after the Bible and Shakespeare. In fact, Desert Island Discs should probably add Alice to the mandatory Bible and Shakespeare as an automatic inclusion for the survival kit. Now 150 years after the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, written by a celibate mathematics don at Christ Church, Oxford, real name Charles Lutwidge Dogdson (pictured, below right), there are translations into countless languages, including that of the Australian aboriginals, who historically did not even have a written language.In the past few Read more ...
Heidi Goldsmith
Rarely in London do the lights rise up after a live gig to reveal eyeballs glistening with euphoria, total body sweat and a communal stitch gradually dying down among the water-guzzling herd. Indeed it’s an unusually bestial scene for Café Oto, mostly home to a more intellectual post-concert fervour. But fully-misted windows and naked midriffs, it turns out, suit their concrete Berlin-esque chic surprisingly well. In fact there are few London venues who, through persistently interesting programming, have retained enough artistic integrity to properly showcase a group of Congolese punk- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Motorpsycho: Demon BoxAfter a burst of guitar feedback, heavy, snail’s-pace drums pound. A massive, churning riff kicks in. The agitated singer tells of bad dreams and blisters on his skin. It’s heavy, lumbering and could define the most challenging end of grunge. Then, suddenly, barrelhouse piano enters the mix along with a Hammond organ. The whole dissolves into a freakout recalling Deep Purple as much the fried psychedelia of jazzy Krautrockers Brainticket. At just over 11 minutes, it’s quite a trip.The song is “Mountain”, a fantastic track from the 1993 Demon Box album by Norway’s Read more ...
Thomas Rees
You know what really grinds my gears? Bands that only have one. One gear, one level of intensity. For a good hour of last night’s set, diminutive diva Alice Russell, the voice behind countless Quantic hits and that cover of “Seven Nation Army” that no one would shut up about back in 2005, was guilty of just that. She was flatlining at mid-intensity, lost in the no man’s land between tension and release and it was a shame, because everything else about her set, the first of two sold out shows at Camden’s Jazz Café, was hard to fault.For starters, Russell’s voice is the real deal. It’s powerful Read more ...
peter.quinn
Gloriously feel-good, unashamedly retro, uniformly urbane, the Nicola Conte Combo presented a set that was bursting with fantastic melodies last night at Ronnie Scott's. Performing music from last year's Free Souls and his 2011 album Love & Revolution, listening to the Italian DJ, producer and guitarist's music is rather like falling into a jazz wormhole, a wondrous peregrination through the past, from the finger-snapping soul-jazz of Horace Silver (the great "Shades of Joy" surely nods to Silver's classic "Song For My Father") and the all-embracing polystylism of Archie Shepp, to the Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Some documentaries can feel like trying to view a desert landscape through a telescope. The need for tight focus on too large a subject can leave you constantly aware that there’s important stuff going on out of eyeshot. The stuff you can’t see becomes a constant irritant, like a pending tax return, or David Starkey. Kraftwerk: Pop Art, in significantly narrowing its focus, was more like studying a Petri dish under a microscope – and just as fascinating.The particular prism chosen for this band biography was the connection between Kraftwerk and the art world. This was centred around 2013 Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Did you know that Jack White’s Lazaretto album sold nearly 87,000 copies on vinyl last year? Sales continue to rise all over with European manufacturing facilities running at full tilt. Given the demand for vinyl has risen 800% in the last decade, that’s not so surprising. Dance music, as ever, lauds the format, with the massive Tomorrowland rave/festival in Belgium this July announcing a vinyl-only stage to be headed up by long time aficionado, Sven Väth. theartsdesk on Vinyl also continues to celebrate this resurgence with our wide-ranging monthly round-up.Jóhann Jóhannsson The Theory of Read more ...