1980s
Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent, Whitechapel Gallery review - photomontages sizzling with rageTuesday, 30 July 2024
Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent at the Whitechapel Gallery includes many of the artists’s most iconic political photomontages. Beginning in the 1970s, Kennard created images that by speaking truth to power, gave protest movements like CND (... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Tomorrow's Fashions - Library Electronica 1972-1987Sunday, 28 July 2024
The conundrum central to library music is that it was not meant to be listened to in any normal way. Yet, in time, this is what happened. What ended up on the albums pressed by companies like Bruton, Chappell, De Wolfe and others was heard by... Read more... |
Album: Deep Purple - =1Saturday, 20 July 2024
Ever since their 2013 album Now What?! hard rock veterans Deep Purple have been on a roll, both creatively and commercially. They’ve seemed a revitalised force. An album of covers aside, their output since has also sold/streamed multitudes. Not bad... Read more... |
MaXXXine review - a bloody star is bornWednesday, 10 July 2024
Mia Goth’s mighty Maxine finally makes it to Hollywood in Ti West’s brash conclusion to the trilogy he began with X (2022), which has become a visceral treatise on film’s 20th century allure, and the bloody downside of dreaming to escape.X riffed on... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Moving Away from the Pulsebeat - Post-Punk Britain 1977-1981Sunday, 09 June 2024
“Moving Away from the Pulsebeat” is the final track – barring the locked-groove return of the two-note guitar refrain from “Boredom” – of Buzzcocks’ March 1978 debut album, Another Music In A Different Kitchen. At five minutes 40 seconds it didn’t... Read more... |
Boys from the Blackstuff, National Theatre review - a lyrical, funny, affecting variation on a television classicThursday, 30 May 2024
Prolific playwright James Graham was born in 1982, the year Alan Bleasdale's unforgettable series was televised. From Nottingham rather than Liverpool, Graham recognised in his own surroundings the predicaments of the main characters, the bonds... Read more... |
Travels Over Feeling: The Music of Arthur Russell, Barbican review - a sublime evening undercut by tonal shiftsMonday, 27 May 2024
Last night’s Travels Over Feeling: The Music of Arthur Russell (a concert in part accompanying the recent publication of a book about his life by Richard King) was a brilliant way to honour the legacy of a fascinating, challenging, and sublime... Read more... |
Pop Will Eat Itself, Chalk, Brighton review - hip hop rockers deliver a whopperMonday, 13 May 2024
By midway, things are cooking. “Can U Dig It?”, a post-modern list-song from another age (Ok, 1989), boasts a whopping guitar riff. Keys-player Adam Mole, his ushanka cap’s ear-covers flapping, leaps onto his seat, waves his synth aloft. Frontmen... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Little Girls - Valley SongsSunday, 12 May 2024
The name, Caron and Michelle Maso explained to Los Angeles radio DJ Rodney Bingenheimer, was a literal description. “We’re both like five feet. We’re all grown up, but we’re still little.”Little Girls, the band the Maso sisters formed and fronted... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Congo Funk! - Sound Madness from the Shores of the Mighty Congo RiverSunday, 14 April 2024
Brazzaville is on the north side of the Congo River. It is the capital of the Republic of the Congo. Kinshasa is on the south side of the Congo. It is capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly known as Zaïre. The cities face each... Read more... |
This Town, BBC One review - lurid melodrama in Eighties BrummielandMonday, 01 April 2024
Industrious screenwriter Steven Knight has brought us (among many other things) Peaky Blinders, SAS: Rogue Heroes and even Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?, but This Town may not be remembered as one of his finest hours. Here, we find Knight... Read more... |
Foam, Finborough Theatre review - fascism and f*cking in a Gentlemen's Lavatory that proves short of gentlemenThursday, 28 March 2024
In a too brightly tiled Gentlemen’s public convenience (Nitin Parmar’s beautifully realised set is as much a character as any of the men we meet), a lad is shaving his head. He’s halfway to the skinhead look of the early Seventies, but he hasn’t... Read more... |
