1990s
Kieron Tyler
Music from Sudan is overshadowed by the country’s recent history. At the end of June 1989, Colonel Omar al-Bashir assumed control and it became a one-party state. Shariah law was introduced. Osama Bin Laden was resident in capital city Khartoum from 1991 to 1996. Tension between the mostly Muslim north and mostly Christian south undermined any facade of stability al-Bashir sought to impose. The south was declared independent in 2011. Conflict in Darfur, in the west of the country, left 300,000 people dead and led to just over 3 million displaced people.These are, of course, headlines. True Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Carla Simón’s debut feature Summer 1993 is a gem of a film by any standards, but when you learn that its story is based closely on the thirtysomething Catalan director’s own early life, its intimacy becomes almost overwhelming. It has at its heart a simply terrific performance from Laia Artigas as Simón’s six-year-old heroine Frida, the intonations of her face conveying variations of emotion that are powerful beyond anything words could achieve.Following in the tradition of cinema about childhood, we experience events as much through Frida’s eyes as we do from any knowing, adult perspective. Read more ...
Ralph Moore
The Robert Smith-curated Meltdown festival in London came to a close on Sunday night with a spectacular, concept-driven headline set by The Cure, or CUREATION 25, as the band was actually billed, presumably because of a previously contracted show at Hyde Park that's due to take place in two weeks’ time. Like Nine Inch Nails on Friday night at the same Smith-curated venue, seeing a band of this stature up close on such blistering form is a dream come true for fans, who have come far and wide to see Smith and his cohorts: bassist Simon Gallup plus Reeves Gabrels on guitar, Jason Cooper on drums Read more ...
joe.muggs
Ryuichi Sakamoto has conquered underground and mainstream with seeming ease over four decades, never dropping off in the quality of his releases. Indeed his most recent projects, following his return to public life after treatment for throat cancer in 2014-15, are among his best. The async album was rightly listed by many, including theartsdesk, as one of 2017's best; the async remodels remixes showed him absolutely keyed in to the electronica zeitgeist, and Glass, his live collaboration album with Carsten Nicolai aka Alva Noto is a worthy addition to the duo's extensive Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Their ninth album should please Morcheeba fans. Take the song “Find Another Way”, for example. It rolls in like a haunted breeze, an acoustic/twangy combination preceding front-woman Skye Edwards, one of the sweetest-sounding vocalists in pop, and she still has it. Tarred with the brush of being the bland dinner-party face of 1990s trip hop, due to their easy way with a pop song, there was always more to Morcheeba than many credited. “The Sea”, “Part of the Process”, “Trigger Hippy”, “What New York Couples Fight About” and others are simply delicious songs. The happy news is that Blaze Away Read more ...
David Nice
Why would any conductor resist Mahler's last great symphonic adventure? By which I mean the vast finale of his Tenth Symphony, realised in full by Deryck Cooke, and not the first-movement Adagio, fully scored (unlike most of the rest) by the composer and puritanically regarded as the end of the line by supposed Mahlerians. Not Simon Rattle. Ever since his Bournemouth recording of 1980, he has kept faith with Cooke's noble venture to fill out an entire symphonic structure of unassailable conviction, and to judge from this visceral yet painstakingly articulated LSO performance, he feels it ever Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Jeremy Cunningham (b.1965) is bass player and a founding member of The Levellers, as well as being a visual artist in his own right. During the 1990s The Levellers, and most especially their 1991 album Levelling the Land, became a phenomenon. The group were punk-influenced folk-rockers whose songs were often polemic and political. It was no coincidence that their main flush of popularity was during the premiership of John Major. They became a focus for anti-government feeling, especially among those affiliated with the travelling and festival communities (remember Major’s “New age travellers Read more ...
Owen Richards
Arnaud Despelchin’s My Golden Days is a strange beast; it is both a sequel and prequel to the gloriously titled 1996 film My Sex Life…or How I Got into an Argument. Yet it tells its own story in the life of Paul Dédalus (Mathieu Amalric). Its original French title Three Memories from My Youth is more interesting and accurate than the bland UK release title, which sounds more like a silver screener starring a selection of British dames.Paul Dédalus is heading back to Paris after many nomadic years as an anthropologist across central Asia. Feeling nostalgic, he first Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Lisa Halliday’s striking debut novel consists of three parts. The first follows the blooming relationship between Alice and Ezra (respectively an Assistant Editor and a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer) in New York; the middle section comprises a series of reflections narrated by Amar, an American-Iraqi while he is held in detention at Heathrow en route to see his brother in Iraqi Kurdistan. The final third consists of a transcript of Ezra’s Desert Island Discs recorded some years later.The book focusses on how power imbalances inflect relationships. This is quite clear when Alice’s giddy Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Tonya Harding and the kneecapping of Nancy Kerrigan – what a story it was, back in 1994. Even if you knew nothing about figure skating, you followed the tale of Tonya, the red-neck, white-trash Olympic hopeful from Oregon, her more elegant rival Nancy and the clumsy plot, hatched by Tonya’s estranged husband and other bozos, and perhaps Tonya herself, to ruin Kerrigan’s chances in the Winter Olympics.If you're expecting answers or insight from I, Tonya, you'll be disappointed. It may be better to come to it without prior knowledge. It stars an impressive, fiercely focused Margot Robbie in the Read more ...
Helen Wallace
This was an evening of silence and shadow, a chill, moonlit meditation, where each sound demanded forensic attention. Enter the world of Luigi Nono and his admirers. As his compatriot Sciarrino wrote of Lo Spazio Inverso, which opened the concert, "Islands pulsating with sounds skim over lakes of silence… now we hear even the slightest tensions in the intervals as something new."Sunday’s concert at St John’s Smith Square completed the Principal Sound weekend, which focuses on music of the last half-century, this year Nono’s late works. Performed by crack contemporary vocal group EXAUDI ( Read more ...
Owen Richards
When first announced, Derry Girls seemed a strange prospect. Derry during The Troubles wasn’t an obvious choice for a sitcom; neither was writer Lisa McGee, whose only previous comedy outing London Irish was slammed for negative stereotyping. Not many would have predicted one of the funniest new shows of the year, but that’s what we got.In last night’s final episode, Erin seized control of the school’s magazine after the editor was struck down by illness. Abandoned by the team for her brazen opportunism (and basic lack of decency), she formed a ragtag editorship from the Read more ...