2000s
Chamayou, BBC Philharmonic, Wigglesworth, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review - Boulez with bonbonsMonday, 13 January 2025Top Brownie points for the BBC Philharmonic for being one of the first (maybe the first?) to celebrate the birth centenary of Pierre Boulez this year. His Rituel – in memoriam Bruno Maderna was paired somewhat uneasily with a second half of bonbons... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Celebrate Yourself! The Sonic Cathedral Story 2004-2024Sunday, 12 January 2025Yeti Lane’s second album The Echo Show was released in March 2012. The Paris-based duo’s LP was stunning: holding together overall, as well as on a track-by-track basis. There were obvious influences: Kraftwerk, late-period Spacemen 3, motorik, My... Read more... |
The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical, The Other Palace - all Greek to meSaturday, 30 November 2024Percy Jackson is neither the missing one from Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and Michael, nor an Australian Test cricketer of the 1920s, but a New York teenager with dyslexia and ADHD who keeps getting expelled from school. He’s a bit of a... Read more... |
[title of show], Southwark Playhouse review - two guys and two girls write about writing, delightfullyWednesday, 20 November 2024Not just a backstage musical, a backroom musical!In the 70s, Follies and A Chorus Line took us into the rehearsal room giving us a chance to look under the bonnet to see the cogs of the Musical Theatre machine bump and grind as a show gets on its... Read more... |
Lygia Clark: The I and the You, Sonia Boyce: An Awkward Relation, Whitechapel Gallery review - breaking boundariesThursday, 10 October 2024Brazilian artist Lygia Clark is best known for taking her abstract sculptures off the pedestal and inviting people to interact with them. Dozens of constructions named Bichos (Beasts or Critters) (pictured below right) are hinged... Read more... |
Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit, Tate Modern review - adolescent angst indefinitely extendedWednesday, 09 October 2024Like an angry teenager rejecting everything his parents stand for, American artist Mike Kelley embraced everything most despised by the art world – from popular culture to crafts, and occultism to catholicism – to create what he ironically called “... Read more... |
Michael Craig-Martin, Royal Academy review - from clever conceptual art to digital decorWednesday, 25 September 2024Michael Craig-Martin was the most playful and provocative of the conceptual artists. His early sculptures are like visual puns, a play on the laws of nature. On the Table, 1970 (pictured below right), for instance, appears to defy gravity. Four... Read more... |
Moby, O2 review - ebullient night of rave'n'rock'n'Johnny CashFriday, 20 September 2024Sometimes a gig suddenly and completely elevates. Such is the case tonight when Moby, on his first UK tour in 12 years, plays “Extreme Ways”, his 2002 anthem for hedonism and its desperate consequences. What has been an adequately entertaining night... Read more... |
10 Questions for DJ-producer Dave ClarkeWednesday, 24 July 2024Dave Clarke (b. 1968) is, arguably, Britain’s greatest techno DJ. Although, in fact, he has lived in Amsterdam since 2009. He is also a producer of repute. His Red singles of the mid-Nineties are regarded as groundbreaking productions.He followed... Read more... |
Next to Normal, Wyndham's Theatre review - rock musical on the trauma of mental illnessFriday, 05 July 2024We open on one of those suburban American families we know so well from Eighties and Nineties sitcoms - they’re not quite Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie, but they’re not far off. As usual, we wonder how Americans have so much space, such big... Read more... |
Album: Kasabian - HappeningsWednesday, 03 July 2024Great bands’ output can, famously, be predicated by the intense interaction between members, often between a central creative pairing. This can be a harmonious mutuality but, more often, music is built from tension, from difference, from the frisson... Read more... |
Wilding review - a life enhancing experienceThursday, 13 June 2024Imagine you’ve inherited a castle in West Sussex plus five square miles of farmland. You continue the family tradition of mixed arable and dairy farming, but the soil is so depleted that yields decrease, year on year. Even with the help of... Read more... |
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