1990s
judith.flanders
Is David Bintley the one that got away, the wrong turning the Royal Ballet took in the early 1990s? I have long thought so, and watching their current triple bill, the feeling only grows. Bintley trained at the Royal Ballet School, graduated into Sadler’s Wells (now Birmingham Royal Ballet), and became house choreographer for the Royal in 1985.Then, in 1993, he fled. Two years later he took over at BRB, and the man who should, probably, have steered Britain’s premiere classical company for the next quarter-century has instead quietly, and productively, guided their second, sister company in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Nirvana: In UteroNext April marks 20 years since Kurt Cobain took his own life. Paving the way for that tragic anniversary is a reissue of 1993’s In Utero, the album which unintentionally became the band’s musical epitaph. Their third, it was written and recorded after Nevermind (1991) had pushed Nirvana to world-wide success. The pressures surrounding the creation of In Utero must have been immense and are utterly unimaginable to anyone outside the band or not close to it.Yet In Utero was and is an incredible album: the full-bore affiliation of Cobain’s ear for a pop melody and his Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Back when Placebo were the androgynous face of late period Brit-pop, back when singer Brian Molko’s every sneered utterance was snapped up by a lapdog music media desperate to fuel their retro-guitar addiction, they were supremely annoying. They trod well-worn musical ground, did so with an unappealing, entitled arrogance, and sold millions. Like Suede, they even made sexual debauchery and ravenous drug-taking look dull and passé. Thus, I have to admit I came to their seventh album with the intent of giving it a good hiding. It’s a surprise, then, to find it an emotive, involving stab at Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
It feels odd to consider cyberpunk - once the very bleeding edge of science fiction - as nostalgia, but what was once seen by some as an almost credible future is now to be found in the cultural dump-bin marked NINETIES, alongside the Tamagotchi, platform trainers and clamshell mobile phones.The world of Shadowrun is niche even with cyberpunk. Originally a tabletop RPG, the game mixes the latter's standard palette of hackers, corporate warriors and neon-noir, with the magic and monsters of urban fantasy. Elves and Orks (note spelling: these are not Tolkien's brutish Orcs but rather a tech- Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
This one-off appearance in a dingy, basement venue seems to be the entirety of Luke Haines’s promotional effort for his new album, Rock and Roll Animals. A few years have passed since he approached mainstream success as front man of The Auteurs and later as part of Black Box Recorder. In the intervening years he has taken the healthy notion that quality does not equal popularity to a possibly illogical conclusion that popularity had better be avoided entirely, just in case.Luckily for the enlightened few he has carried on making albums, increasingly esoteric in subject matter but which, given Read more ...
bruce.dessau
The specially erected sign on the lamppost on the way in said "Sheffield". For one night only the People's Republic of South Yorkshire seemed to decamp to Somerset House in honour of one of its numerous musical sons. A trickle of chippy north-south divide ran through last night's gig, with quips about the la-di-da PM and the price of London drinks, but the music undoubtedly united everyone as Hawley warmed to his fans: "I might get you a beer later…I did say one between the lot of you."Hawley does not have a new album to plug, which meant – hooray – that he and his solid band played plenty of Read more ...
bruce.dessau
When the Stone Roses first made a splash with their eponymous debut album in 1989 they were almost perfect. The only mistake was a brief flirtation with flared trousers. Nearly a quarter of a century on in north London the strides were strictly straight-legged. The only flares were the red ones some clot in the audience kept lighting. I don't envy his prospects if health and safety ever get hold of him.As for the music, this show, the first of two nights in the capital, certainly burnt brightly, but only in places. At times Ian Brown's vocals sounded flatter than the sozzled audience Read more ...
Russ Coffey
In its day Alice in Chains’ so-called “sludge metal” – something a bit like the sound of industrial machinery pulled through treacle – was some of most darkly brilliant music to come out of Seattle. Much of this was down to Layne Staley’s drug-soaked lyrics which eventually proved prescient: in 2002 he succumbed to an overdose. Seven years later, when guitarist Jerry Cantrell resurrected the band, many wondered how long the new line-up could keep it up.On the strength of this new album they can do it as long as they like. The droning guitars, sledgehammer drums and bitter melodies on The Read more ...
joe.muggs
I have to admit I was That Hipster with Underworld: loved them circa 1991, stopped being intensely interested around the first album, diverged almost completely after “Born Slippy” went supernova circa 1995. It was wonderful the way that Karl Hyde bodged together torn up fragments of overheard conversations into his rave-dada lyrics to express the delirium of the rave era, but as the band's instrumental film soundtracks started to become the most interesting thing about them, perhaps foolishly I wrote him off as a one-trick pony, never again to repeat the inspiration of “Mmm Skyscraper I Love Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
What if John Lennon had left The Beatles in 1962? What if they had continued without him? And what if he had still become the acid-tongued, ready-with-a-quip character the real world became familiar with? Snodgrass took those what-ifs and ran with them to depict a parallel world that was less the “hilarious comedy drama” trailed by Sky and more a gloomy, slightly creepy oddity made even more so by Ian Hart’s deft, second-nature portrayal of a Lennon floundering on life’s scrapheap.Hart has played Lennon twice before and this third outing took him into an imaginary scenario originally created Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
A severed toe, a shotgun, copious blood, vomit and snot, and a live snake. Sprinkle them liberally with Shake’n’Vac masquerading as cocaine, douse in booze, piss and petrol, set the whole lot alight and you have something of the loud, lurid volatility of this drama by the Scots writer Simon Donald.First seen at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre, it transferred to the Donmar Warehouse in 1993 in a production by Matthew Warchus, garnering its author that year’s Evening Standard award for Most Promising Playwright. A forerunner of what came to be known as the In-Yer-Face wave of drama Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Sandie Shaw: Sandie/Me/Love Me Please Love MeThe former Sandra Goodrich probably would have emerged in the Sixties as an embodiment of the era. She could have been a model, actress or a TV presenter. But it was music that found her, and it suited her a treat. The reissue of her first three albums – each supplemented by the relevant singles and B-sides – is a powerful reminder of her potency. When The Smiths brought her on board for “Hand in Glove”, it further stressed her pivotal role in British culture.Her naturalness obscured the fact that she was a great singer. Ease of delivery did Read more ...