Reviews
Guy Oddy
Some rock’n’roll gigs are built upon the lead singer’s ego, others on the lunacy of the band’s drummer. The inaugural Fuzz Club London Weekender was unashamedly built upon guitars and effects pedals. Wailing feedback, screaming guitars and thunderous drumming bound together with spaced-out jamming and psychedelic projections were very much the order of the two days: a crowd spanning two or three generations of space cadets and acid-heads of varying beard-lengths, got their rocks off to a collection of bands from around the world who may have had one foot in the past but were very much taking Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Given how many members the band has had over its long existence, there will always be a running joke as to who’s who in The Fall? One thing we can say for certain is that the pretty, poised Greek woman on keyboards, the one who returns hand-in-hand with frontman Mark E Smith to the stage for the encore, is Elena Poulou, his wife of a decade-and-a-half. Alongside her, the band create a rollicking, potent brew. It is, however, her husband who everyone’s come to see and, somehow, his slurred, haphazard, and unpredictable performance caps the whole thing off.Where the usual stage time at the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Had he not become one of the pivotal members of Pink Floyd, it's not difficult to imagine that David Gilmour might have become an academic like his father Douglas (who was a lecturer in zoology and genetics at Cambridge), or maybe a high-flying lawyer with leftish inclinations. Despite having been at the vanguard of rock music in its greatest and most extravagant years, Gilmour was never a likely candidate for a dissolute life of rock'n'roll hedonism.During this expansive TV profile, he pondered over this himself. Inspired back in the Fifties by Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock" and Elvis' Read more ...
Sarah Kent
This is Susan Hiller’s first exhibition since her Tate retrospective in 2011, and as it includes work from the 1970s to the present, it can also be seen as a retrospective of sorts. But since the selection was obviously governed by what was available for sale, it inevitably offers a piecemeal view of her achievements.Nor can I do full justice to the work, which is complex and multi-layered, so I’ll concentrate on one aspect – the importance of unorthodox views and marginal voices (especially those of women who have been silenced for centuries) that challenge the hegemony of received opinion Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After Judy Dyble left Fairport Convention in May 1968, it was her replacement Sandy Denny who picked up critical kudos as the ensuing years unfolded. Dyble, though, did not drop off the face of the earth and, if credits were looked at closely enough and margins examined, it was evident she had a career in music as fascinating and often as admirable as that of Denny. Widespread consideration of her role in British folk and folk rock began after the issue of her album Enchanted Garden in 2004. Before that, Dyble’s last commercial release had been in 1970.The reissue of 1970’s Morning Way, her Read more ...
peter.quinn
Featuring the usual, divertingly eclectic mix of singers from the worlds of jazz, pop and soul, last night’s Jazz Voice announced the opening of the 2015 EFG London Jazz Festival with a programme that satisfied both aficionado and newbie alike. Arranged, scored and conducted by the unceasingly inventive Guy Barker, the epoch-spanning celebration of jazz-related anniversaries, birthdays and milestones stretching back from 2015 was hosted by the mellifluously voiced BBC Radio 3 presenter, Sara Mohr Pietsch.Joe Stilgoe was supported by a top-notch big band when he launched his outstanding album Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
What is it about Vermeer? Just mention the name and there will be queues around the block. It’s true that there are a handful of other artists with that charisma, but none so rare as Vermeer. The Girl with a Pearl Earring is not only the subject of a recent novel and a film, but also a kind of poster for Holland as a whole, and the star of the recently reopened Mauritshaus in the Hague. At the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam you can hardly see the handful of Vermeers for the crowds.Such power to attract is shared by a few others, including several Dutch masters – think Rembrandt and Van Gogh – Read more ...
David Nice
It’s never funny like Ligeti’s Le grand macabre, though it touches on that joke apocalypse’s more nebulous soundscapes. Nor is it obviously dynamic like David Sawer’s From Morning to Midnight, with which its title is not to be confused (there are no transitional stages here, only birth and death). Wagner’s cosmic sweeps don't entangle the banal with the numinous like this. So what exactly is the new opera Morning and Evening?Of only one thing I’m sure: Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas and Norwegian writer Jon Fosse have created a world, before and after life as we know it, like no other Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
David Sington’s The Fear of 13 is many things – blisteringly immediate, compelling, emotionally devastating – but at times it may have you pondering whether it fits into any traditional “documentary” category.Over the hour-and-a-half of its run, it has us readjusting our perceptions on that score, as well as teasing us slowly towards understanding its subject. The mystery starts with the opening screen title that tells us that, after two decades on America’s Death Row, a convicted murderer has petitioned the court that his sentence be carried out – that he be executed. The monologue that Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Maggie Smith is in her element as Miss S in the film version of Alan Bennett's 1999 play The Lady in the Van, her partnership with the playwright-actor one of the defining components of the storied career of the octogenarian dame, whose renown has leapt the decades due in no small part to the Harry Potter and Downton Abbey franchises. And if this latest exercise in bravura doesn't quite deliver the emotional sucker punch of her solo turn in Bennett's Bed Among the Lentils, which Smith performed on screen and stage, the chance to see a genuine acting legend give her all to the begrimed Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
What dancemaker wouldn't want to tackle Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) at some point? Just as the Stravinsky score changed music, the original Ballets Russes production changed dance - and was then, conveniently, so completely forgotten that no master-text exists. Everyone is free to take the Stravinsky and run. Or rather, dance: as Michael Clark has observed, one of Sacre's gifts to a choreographer is the in-built necessity of dance to the scenario, in which a victim is chosen by a crowd and forced to dance to his or her death.Yet Sasha Waltz, one of Germany's foremost Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Pro patria mori. Now there’s the test for Henry V - perform it on Remembrance Day. The “band of brothers” shtick relies on an idea of patriotism from an age when there was no need to define something so heartfelt, and an idea that kings and commoners were all in it together when fighting the enemy. After all, Henry orders the good English soldiers to rape French girls, smash the heads of French grandfathers, and skewer their babies on pikes, no questions asked. The bonuses of patriotism, if you like.But Royal Shakespeare Company artistic director Gregory Doran presents a handwringing, post- Read more ...