Bristol
joe.muggs
I met Mark Stewart once. It was on a platform at Clapham Junction, I wouldn’t normally approach a famous person like that, but I felt I had to pay my respects. It turned out he was getting on my train – going down to Dorset to “visit his old Ma” – and we talked on and off down to Southampton. He was hilarious, half scholar and gentleman, half lively uncle at a family function loudly telling old-school “blue” jokes, all in the thickest West Country burr this side of The Wurzels. I was glad I had done the gauche thing, doubly so after he died in 2023. Where meeting your heroes can sometimes Read more ...
mark.kidel
There's something luminous about the Brad Mehldau Trio. The music they create with such joy shines with a special clarity, in which ever-changing forms constantly reveal lines of shared thought, explicitly, yet purveying an abiding sense of wonder. Intellect – and there is plenty of that – is matched here with the fire of inspiration and the thrill of constant surprise.There are so many facets to the lucid dreaming that’s played out by these three exceptional musicians – Felix Moseholm on bass and Jorge Rossy on drums, and the maestro himself. There’s no end to the thrill of intimate Read more ...
joe.muggs
When I was writing the introduction to my book, Bass, Mids, Tops: An Oral History of Soundsystem Culture, I came up with a phrase, which I ended up putting on promotional badges: “BASS CULTURE IS FOLK CULTURE”. It referred to the way riffs, refrains, ways of acting were passed down the generations, from reggae to rave to grime and on. But it also quickly took on more meaning, about where soundsystem and club music exist in society.Hull-raised, longtime Bristol-based Sam “Binga” Simpson exemplifies a lot of this. First, he’s a scholar of the vernacular: this album in particular really shows Read more ...
mark.kidel
There is an atmosphere of otherworldly stillness within the stony womb of a large dilapidated church in Bristol, at the bottom of St Michael’s Hill, the winding road that climbs up to what used to be the favoured place of execution, where the city’s sombre gibbets stood.For a special show by the singer-songwriter Patrick Duff, this deconsecrated place of worship, provides a perfect space to present a mostly new set of remarkable songs, in which he explores with touching candour lost loves, the torment of a confused identity and disillusion with a world of over-reaching ambitions and lies. He’ Read more ...
graham.rickson
It’s difficult to believe that the last stop-motion Wallace and Gromit short graced our screens way back in 2008. Describing the pair’s new outing as a return to form is unnecessary: this duo never lost it in the first place.Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is a direct sequel to 1993’s The Wrong Trousers, a deserved Oscar-winner which, despite lasting just 30 minutes, has a marvellous cinematic sweep, every frame loaded with detail. Co-director Nick Park originally intended Vengeance Most Fowl to last half an hour, “but we started thinking of more ideas… it kept growing bigger.” The Read more ...
mark.kidel
The Marriage of Figaro is undoubtedly one of the greatest operas ever written. Mozart’s masterpiece is a display of musical perfection that never ceases to touch the heart and stimulate the musical mind.This gripping and enormously entertaining tale of love, illusion and betrayal, draws its appeal and strength from an array of fallible characters, laid bare by their foibles and yet united in humanity. Opera Project’s paired down production at Bristol’s Tobacco Factory, stays close to the brilliance of music and plot, never tempted to bring this magisterial work up to date or score points from Read more ...
mark.kidel
Apart from being one of Britain’s greatest songsmiths of the past 50 years, Elvis Costello – from the early adoption of the rock’n’roll King’s first name – has produced a form of naked self-expression, blurred by intricately-tailored pretence. Though this is “art”, never artifice.The geek of old has gone through several phases of metamorphosis – though something of the original persona remains, albeit battered and matured. While he was fast and furious in youth, a New Wave phenomenon, he has found a more measured stride, and the irony that was played down is now something Elvis revels in Read more ...
mark.kidel
Something of a jazz supergroup this one: with drum virtuoso, the ubiquitous Seb Rochford, Jim Bar of Get the Blessing, Adrian Utley – formerly of Portishead, a prolific collaborator and producer, but with a heart rooted in jazz, and sax and flute-player Larry Stabbins, among other credits a co-founder of Working Week, recently returned from 10 years’ sailing around the world.Playing mostly improvised music, and deftly navigating a space between fierceness and sensitivity, the four musicians (and friends) have created a dialogue of singular voices that converse and battle with Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Kwame Owusu’s 55-minute one-hander does just what it says on the tin: it features a young student who dreams he is drowning. But its brevity is no bar to its being a dense and intense experience, worthy winner of last year’s Mustapha Matura Award.Nineteen-year-old gay Malachi (Tienne Simon) has gained a place at university in Bristol to study English Literature. He adores reading, especially books by Black authors and, above all, sci-fi and fantasy. But his arrival at uni is blighted by a recurring dream that intensifies with each iteration: his room is at the bottom of the ocean, and a Read more ...
Cheri Amour
As second-wave feminism vouched in the late 1960s, the personal is political. For Billy Nomates, the moniker of Sleaford Mods-approved musician Tor Maries, that sentiment is rife.Entrenched in her eponymously titled debut in 2020, the songwriter tapped into flailing societal structures, dead-end jobs in dead-end towns and the dichotomy of the Fat White Man. Despite touching on such evocative and self-assured issues, Billy Nomates came to being after a period of intense instability.Leaving the West Country with a relationship and a job in tow, Maries set up her seemingly picture-perfect life Read more ...
mark.kidel
Dr Semmelweis, a star vehicle for Mark Rylance, one of Britain’s most versatile and talented actors, fills the Bristol Old Vic with a dizzying kaleidoscope of words, sounds and images. Tom Morris – the theatre’s energetic and inventive director – and his team have created a show that combines physical theatre, dance, the live music of a string quartet, and a sparingly used revolving stage to dazzling effect. The text is a collaboration between Rylance and writer Stephen Brown.The story focuses on the revolutionary work of Dr Semmelweis, a mid-19th century Hungarian doctor who discovered that Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This latest offering from the ubiquitous World Productions (creators of Line of Duty, the farcical but strangely popular Vigil, Bodyguard etc etc) is a whodunnit, a howdunnit and a whydunnit, as it explores the mysterious disappearance and death of university student Hannah Ellis. Thanks to a smart and sometimes blackly-comic script by Ben Richards, Showtrial is a notch or two above a lot of the cut-and-paste dramas that have been clogging the schedules lately, and even goes so far as to credit the viewer with being able to discern that there may be more to somebody’s personality than its Read more ...