Morcheeba reach their 30th anniversary this year. The 1990s band, a unit once synonymous with phrases such as “trip hop” and “chill-out”, are up to album number 11. Their multi-million-selling oeuvre is based around a hazy combination of low-slung hip hop beats, stoned electronic atmospherics, spacey, slightly John Barry wah-wah guitar, and the luxurious voice of frontwoman Skye Edwards. Because the formula is always approximately the same, each album wins or loses dependent on whether they’ve nailed a sweet set of songs. On this occasion they do.Morcheeba has been the duo of singer Skye Read more ...

There’s nothing more healthy than dissing your own dad, and filmmaker Amalia Ulman says that her old man was “a Gen X deadbeat edgelord skater” when she was growing up in the 1990s. The phrase brings the half-forgotten world of Generation X back to us from the mists of time, with its slackers and Douglas Coupland books and mumbling evasions.The New York-based Ulman says she wanted to explore this Gen X world in her second feature, Magic Farm – but rather confusingly she sets it in the present amid the X-ers’ successors, the Millennials. From her angle, there seems scarce difference between Read more ...

The Ealing-like comedy heist caper Two to One is Natja Brunckhorst’s second feature as a director, after the 2002 short film La Mer, but most people will remember her for an extraordinary performance as a 13-year-old actor in Uli Edel’s 1981 cult film Christiane F. The following year, she had an equally memorable walk-on in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s last film Querelle.Edel’s movie controversially depicted the empty lives of teenage drug addicts in West Berlin a decade before the collapse of East German communism and the fall of the Wall. In Two to One, Brunckhorst fast-forwards, as it Read more ...

Patrick Marber’s powerful debut about gambling men is 30 years old, born as the Eighties entrepreneurial boom was starting to sour but before poker become a game for mathematical whizz kids. What it reveals as it maps the male psyche seems as pertinent as ever. Into the gladiatorial arena of a weekly poker game among restaurant colleagues comes a (disguised) pro player, and the results are explosive. There are no women here, which is the point. Their disapproving tongues aren’t needed as the combatants are perfectly adept at skewering themselves. These are men who have mistaken risk- Read more ...

Record Store Day 2025 is tomorrow (Saturday 12th April 2025)! At theartsdesk on Vinyl we’ve been sent a selection of exclusive RSD goodies. Check the reviews. Then check your local record shop! See you amongst it.THEARTSDESK ON VINYL CHOICE CUT FOR RECORD STORE DAY APRIL 2025Marianne Faithfull Burning Moonlight EP (Decca)A fitting and thoughtfully put together final release from an icon. Marianne Faithfull, who died in January this year, aged 78, was a one-off singer and creative, also a proper 1960s countercultural heavyweight, a woman who lived the best and worst of bright, fast hedonism. Read more ...

Mike Scott is The Waterboys. Launched by wide-eyed 1980s folk-rock, and “The Whole of the Moon”, he’s long since roamed into whatever stylistic gumbo he fancies. The latest album – the band’s 16th – is a concept piece, a 25-track sonic biography of the late Hollywood maverick Dennis Hopper.It’s sometimes entertaining, sometimes preposterous, and sometimes pure cringe. The songs follow the chronology of Hopper’s life. For instance, there’s a floaty Floyd-ish song early on called “Blues for Terry Southern”, in honour of Easy Rider’s co-writer, while near the end is “Golf, They Say”, a southern Read more ...

Donald Rodney’s most moving work is a photograph titled In the House of My Father, 1997 (main picture). Nestling in the palm of his hand is a fragile dwelling whose flimsy walls are held together by pins. This tiny model is made from pieces of the artist’s skin removed during one of the many operations he underwent during his short life; sadly he died the following year, aged only 37.His body was crumbling under the onslaught of sickle cell anaemia, a disease that almost exclusively affects people of African descent and for which there is no known cure. In one of his notebooks, beside a Read more ...

Ridley Scott’s 2001 film Black Hawk Down was a technically superb blockbuster bristling with thunderous action sequences and famous actors, though its gung-ho depiction of the heroics of American special forces during the appalling Somalian civil war always felt a little uncomfortable.A quarter of a century later, Netflix’s three-part series Surviving Black Hawk Down, directed by Jack Macinnes and produced by Ridley Scott Associates, attempts to paint a more even-handed picture. It’s a documentary-style account of events, told by some of the real participants, interspersed with action Read more ...

So the Royal Opera had assembled a dream cast, conductor (Edward Gardner) and director (Richard Jones). The only question until last night was whether composer Mark-Anthony Turnage would be at his remarkable best. His operatic journey has been uneven, but one thing is now certain: adapting the first Dogme 95 movie, Festen by Thomas Vinterberg, so shocking at a time (1998) when the issue of child abuse rarely surfaced in drama, has yielded music theatre of flawless pace and range.No-one should expect a faithful reflection of the film (which I haven't seen since its release knocked me for six Read more ...

Manic Street Preachers’ earnest and literate pretentiousness is both their Achilles Heel and their superpower. Their greatest songs are amped by full investment in whatever awkward path they’ve cussedly marched down. At these times, their ever-vaunted love of fist-pumping classic rock lives up to itself.Such qualities have occasionally made them magnificent. On the other hand, when the songs can’t match the lyrical or conceptual ambitions, the whiff of bombast and stadium dirge is pungent. Critical Thinking, unfortunately, too often falls into this category.This is, says bassist-vocalist Read more ...

The utopian messiness of 1990s dance music culture is now so far back in time that what remains, for those under 40, is an idea, a meta myth. It is one that ALT BLK ERA embrace. Where the Nineties was a smorgasbord of futurism, vanguard electronic exploration and hedonic madness, the excellently titled debut album Rave Immortal reimagines it through the prism of catchy TikTok snippets and rampant rock punch. The result is not, perhaps, the intended, explosive Prodigy-play-Download riot, but buzzy ebullient pop.Nottingham sisters Nyrobi and Chaya Beckett-Messam, who are both teenage or nigh-on Read more ...

Last month a portrait of Alan Turing by AI robot AI-Da sold at Sotheby’s for $1.08 million – proof that, in some people’s eyes, artificial intelligence can produce paintings worth as much as those made by human hands.Depending on your view of AI, this can either be a very exciting or deeply depressing idea; whichever way you lean, it makes Tate Modern’s exhibition of work by the pioneers of machine art extremely timely.This exhaustive (and exhausting) show starts in the 1950s with Japanese artist Atsuko Tanaka. In response to the neon signs brightening up Osaka’s streets in the aftermath of Read more ...