According to Pete Frame’s book Rock Family Trees, Fairport Convention had 15 different line-ups between 1968 and 1978, the period covered by the new box set Come All Ye – The First 10 Years. Fairport Convention #7, extant from November 1971 to February 1972, featured no one from the first three iterations of the band, which had taken them up to June 1969. Evidently, the actuality of Fairport Convention is fluid.Despite this, there is an established and (relatively) clearly defined arc. One traced by Come All Ye. Their first album, made with Judy Dyble as their singer, was a response to Read more ...

The sixth in a series of crime novels that began in 2011 with Or the Bull Kills You and which introduced readers to Chief Inspector Max Cámara, Fatal Sunset opens with our anarchistic hero summoned to see Rita Hernández, newly installed Commissioner of Valencia’s Policia Nacional.Officious, devoutly Catholic and eager to make her mark, clearing up the financial and administrative mess bequeathed to her by her (male) predecessor, Hernández is determined to fix the “insolent” Cámara and his sidekick Torres once and for all, to belittle him sufficiently that he leaves the Jefatura. Sacking him Read more ...

A 19th-century silver and wood pot in which to make chocolate, pertly graceful; 17th-century blue and white Delftware; a Chinese calligraphy panel; a 19th-century carved wooden god from the Ivory Coast; a bronze and gold earth goddess from South-East Asia. These are but a tiny sampling from the multitude of objects with which Matisse surrounded himself in his studio(s). A treasure trove of objects that Matisse once owned has been brought together for this Royal Academy show, combined with the work that they inspired.Matisse thought to ennoble the humblest of objects, to find delight in the Read more ...

Before reuniting us in high spirits with a pair of much-loved old friends, Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante and Brahms's Second Symphony, the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen under Paavo Järvi at the Proms took us into a darker, and unexpectedly affecting, place. Written for the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Flamma by Järvi’s fellow-Estonian Erkki-Sven Tüür evokes the mysterious, and terrifying, power of fire with a nod to its sacred role in Aboriginal culture.In June, just on the other side of Kensington from the Royal Albert Hall, Londoners witnessed and felt that power in the most horrific Read more ...

The 1960s were “hilarious”, says one young character in this revival, starring Broadway icon Stockard Channing, of Alexi Kaye Campbell’s 2009 family drama at the Trafalgar Studios. How so? “Oh you know, the clothes, the hair, the raging idealism.” The thought of hippies marching for political causes, smoking Gauloises on the Left Bank or storming the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, and all the time wearing sandals and beads. Yes, to anyone under the age of 60 that must seem funny. But not, of course, for anyone who was actually there – especially if they were a radical and a Read more ...

The little-known Canadian folk artist Maud Lewis is the Maudie of the title of Aisling Walsh's grim-faced biopic, which feels frustratingly incomplete where it really counts. Sally Hawkins's committed occupancy of this sweet-faced if largely woebegone soul compels attention, to be sure, but can't forestall the somewhat colour-by-numbers approach of the director Aisling Walsh: a movie given over to art all but demands more art of its own. I confess to never having heard of Lewis, though it's certainly interesting to note that one of her purchasers way back when was Richard Nixon, of all Read more ...

Representing the best of the current psych revival’s many faces, the scuzziness of The Moonlandingz and overwhelming groove of Goat all seem initially out of place amongst the mock-Greek décor of the O2 Academy Brixton. With an audience that doesn’t stop bopping through both the bands and stellar DJ sets in between, however, the night feels far more transcendental than awkward.There is a third act on the bill that also deserves mention. The futuristic pop of British alt-folk perennial Jane Weaver is nothing short of immense. The unearthly soundscapes of her most recent album, Modern Kosmology Read more ...

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets starts promisingly: there’s Bowie’s Space Oddity on the soundtrack (a bit clichéd but evocative) and a sly montage of personnel handovers at an international space station over the decades. Astronauts from different earthly nations are superseded by increasingly awkward and funny encounters between human astronauts and phantasmagorical creatures arriving for their tour of duty – which alien protuberance will include an approximate hand to shake? And just what is that slime?Unfortunately the witty opening is bulldozed all too rapidly by the Read more ...

The title of John Adams’s Naive and Sentimental Music is a bit of a tease. Read literally it promises – or threatens – unsophisticated mawkishness, though that is the last thing it delivers. But maybe it was this title, alongside relatively unfamiliar 20th century repertoire, that kept the audience away. For whatever reason this was the worst attended main Prom I have been to for a long time – and what a shame, as it was also one of the very best.The Philharmonia Orchestra under Esa-Pekka Salonen began with a musical palate-cleanser, the rarely heard Stravinsky arrangement of Bach’s Canonic Read more ...

“This is a true story. This is a story…” The self-referential nature of Noah Hawley’s baroque narrative arc was one of the great joys of the third season of Fargo. Over the past 10 weeks its constant invention, cinematic tricks and award-worthy performances have come together to produce the best drama of the year (so far).The story it tells is an old one: Cain slays Abel. Or rather Emmit kills Ray (Ewan McGregor in both roles). As someone who shall be nameless sang a long time ago: “Two little boys had two little toys”. In this case a stamp collection and a cherry-red Corvette. The Stussy Read more ...

How do you make a venerable warhorse frisk like a coltish show-pony? Hire William Christie as the trainer. In a performance of scintillating drama and crystal-clear definition, the past master of Baroque revival and re-invention coaxed the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and its thoroughbred choir across all the tricky fences on Handel’s long and winding course. At the end of Israel in Egypt, with the Egyptians vanquished and the Israelites freed, the voice of Miriam the prophetess – one of the two soprano solo parts – exhorts her people to “Sing ye to the Lord, for he has triumphed Read more ...

Camp Bestival 2017 was defined by the weather and how everyone reacted to it. DJ-impresario Rob Da Bank’s family festival, which reached its tenth edition this year, took place, as ever, on the Lulworth Estate in Dorset. However, where the previous nine have cast the grassland surrounding the rebuilt 17th Century castle in balmy, blissful sunshine, the tenth most certainly did not. The weather, then, is where theartsdesk starts and ends its overview, sandwiching a multiplicity of juicy reviews and other festival stuff…THE WEATHER (Part One)Friday and Saturday were dominated by an assault of Read more ...