Reviews
Lady Gaga, Twickenham StadiumSunday, 09 September 2012
After Lady Gaga's concert at Twickenham last night, I asked some of the Little Monsters scurrying back to the station the name of the last song she had sung. The song she sang right after declaring that she had to bring the evening to an early end.... Read more... |
The Thick of It, Series Four, BBC TwoSunday, 09 September 2012
What tremendous sacrifice did Armando Iannucci lay before the comedy Gods in order to be offered the gift of the coalition? Labour post-Blair singularly failed to provide rich pickings for political satire; Gordon Brown and his hangdog posse were... Read more... |
TabuSunday, 09 September 2012
A wondrous antidote to digital movies’ colonisation of the darkening continent of cinema, Miguel Gomes’s luminously black-and-white Tabu is a tripartite paean to the past: to the perils of Portuguese imperialism in Africa; to Hollywood silent movies... Read more... |
Art of Change: New Directions from China, Hayward GallerySunday, 09 September 2012
At the Hayward Gallery a young woman falls over backwards; her flight is magically arrested at a gravity-defying point of imbalance. Since she is blinking, one can safely assume that she is alive, present, and human rather than a waxwork or an... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Lee "Scratch" Perry, Cud, Taj Mahal, David CassidySunday, 09 September 2012
Lee “Scratch” Perry and Friends: Disco Devil - The Jamaican DiscomixesThomas H GreenAs bass culture conquers the musical universe, with even Justin Bieber diving into dubstep waters and gnarly electro-goth Skrillex one of the biggest earning new... Read more... |
BBC Proms: Vienna Philharmonic, HaitinkSaturday, 08 September 2012
The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra can play Haydn’s last symphony - No 104 “London” - in its sleep but that is not, I hasten to add, the impression one wants to take away from any performance of it and especially not in the city that inspired it. The... Read more... |
John Berger: Art and Property Now, Somerset HouseSaturday, 08 September 2012
John Berger isn’t a man who has suffered through appearing to take himself massively seriously. His way of phrasing his most modest utterance as though the fate of the world’s dispossessed hangs on his trenchancy is insufferable to some. But... Read more... |
I Am a Camera, Southwark PlayhouseSaturday, 08 September 2012
The Kander and Ebb musical Cabaret, inspired by the Berlin stories of Christopher Isherwood, is soon to return to the West End with Will Young. Its less well-known source is John Van Druten's 1952 play I Am a Camera. The title comes from the opening... Read more... |
BBC Proms: Perahia, Vienna Philharmonic, HaitinkFriday, 07 September 2012
You’ve never seen so many people at a Prom, thousands of them packed into every space of the Albert Hall inside, while outside a 100-metre line of hopefuls queued in vain to stand in a pit where a small cat couldn’t have been added. But then this... Read more... |
Cecil Beaton: Theatre of War, Imperial War MuseumFriday, 07 September 2012
The wide eyed little girl is sitting bolt upright in her hospital bed, clutching her large soft toy, her head encased in a voluminous bandage. Eileen Dunne, aged three, was injured by shrapnel during the London bombing in 1940, and Cecil Beaton’s... Read more... |
Jeffrey Lewis and the Junkyard, The Haunt, BrightonFriday, 07 September 2012
Astonishment is the emotion that creeps up most often when watching 36-year-old New York singer-songwriter Jeffrey Lewis. The term singer-songwriter does him an injustice, in fact, for these days it summons notions of strummed predictability,... Read more... |
ResonanceFriday, 07 September 2012
Science gone horribly wrong. Paper trails as long and arduous as the Northwest Passage. Rogue detectives, ruthless reporters, treacherous geeks and doctors plagued by recurring nightmares. With the end of the world at stake it’s all to play for in... Read more... |
