Birmingham
Guy Oddy
Age can do interesting things to musicians who have once been regular fixtures in the media and who reappear in the public consciousness some years later. Time, it has to be said, has been kind to the two remaining members of Simple Minds’ original line-up. The band’s guitarist, Charlie Burchill, may look like Stan Smith, the star of the cartoon American Dad but he looks good with it. Jim Kerr also seems to be ageing gracefully. In fact, he looks better than he did almost 30 years ago, having dumped the dress-sense that seemed to take pointers from Blackadder the First, with a beret.Support Read more ...
Guy Oddy
This year 2013 marks the 50th anniversary of two landmark albums, both of which were composed and recorded by bassist, pianist and all-round jazz colossus, Charles Mingus. Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus is a reimagining of some of Mingus’s tunes from the 1950s in a way that has influenced acclaimed jazz-rock amalgamates such as Get The Blessing. The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, on the other hand, is a spawling, orchestral masterpiece that is often described as Mingus’s greatest work. This autumn, Arnie Somogyi, a double bassist of some repute who's played with the likes of Amy Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Without doubt, 2013 has been the year of Rudimental on Planet Pop: a second number one single with “Waiting All Night”; a number one debut album with Home, hugely successful festival appearances, and plenty of TV coverage. It’s no wonder that the youth of the West Midlands (and some of their mums and dads, by the look of things) turned up to see the band in their droves at this O2 Academy show that’s been sold out for weeks. “Eagerly anticipated” doesn’t cover it.Things kicked off early with plenty of warm-up action from Joel Compass and then Shakka’s laid-back grooves and finally DJ Gorgon Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Much hype has been whipped up around this tale of a gang of thuggish, racketeering bookies in Birmingham just after World War One. It's a pretty good cast, with Helen McCrory's Aunt Polly laying down the law within the criminal Shelby family, Cillian Murphy playing her ambitious nephew Tommy and Sam Neill as sinister Belfast copper Inspector Campbell. But this opener still felt a little wobbly on its feet.A lot of it was down to the accents, which can be slippery little devils to get right (we know how easily attempts at Welsh can end up detouring to Mumbai). Since this is Birmingham, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Being assigned to review Editors on the Other Stage at Glastonbury 2007, when Shirley Bassey was on the main Pyramid, was not a good way to consolidate my already fragile critical relationship with the Brummie quartet. Their music pushed my mind to predictable comparisons, ones many had drawn before – Joy Division, notably. Thus I avoided them from thereon, left them alone and they left me alone, going on to sell millions of albums of gloom-flecked indie, tinted with a – to my ears, rather unsatisfying - smidgeon of electronics.Now their fourth album arrives bearing possible good news (at Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Lady Barber (1869-1933) née Hattie Onions, had her portrait painted in sumptuous style about 30 times, mostly in a sub-Orpen vein, and almost all by the unknown Belgian Nestor Cambier. But that was the very least of her occupations. Her husband, the lawyer Sir Henry Barber (1860-1927), had made a fortune in Birmingham property, and became quite the gentleman. Retired in his thirties, he took to riding to hounds and judging horses in the company of royalty, while his wife created a nationally known alpine rock garden around their mansion in Henley-on-Thames.Their largesse funded what in fact 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 ...
stephen.walsh
“A book,” says the Boy-Illuminator in George Benjamin’s latest opera Written on Skin, “needs long days of light.” He speaks for Benjamin himself, a composer who, for all his fabulous musical mind and ear, has never found composition easy and has often struggled to produce work of any kind that satisfies his own meticulous standards.His one previous opera, Into the Little Hill, might be thought to exemplify this struggle, with its astonishing refinement of detail and almost studious denial of the facile or melodramatic. Written on skin it could well have been. It was intriguing to renew its Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Nick Rhodes (b 1962) is a founding member of the group Duran Duran. Their synthesizer player and driving force, he is the sole member to have been in every incarnation of the band. Duran Duran started in Birmingham in 1978 when Rhodes was only 16, a post-punk synth-pop act indebted to Roxy Music and David Bowie. The other members were singer Simon le Bon, bassist John Taylor, drummer Roger Taylor, and guitarist Andy Taylor, although Stephen “Tin Tin” Duffy was frontman for the first year of their existence.Duran Duran became known as leaders of the New Romantic movement, famed for their Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Is scatophilia on the loose at the BBC? After The Secret Life of Rubbish, billed as "a view of the history of modern Britain - from the back end where the rubbish comes out", creatively programmed with a repeat of The Toilet: An Unspoken History on the same night, you might be forgiven for thinking so. Both reach, so to speak, the parts that most other television documentaries don’t.I’ll leave the toilet, or rather its energetic presenter Ifor ap Glyn (pictured by a privy, below right), to speak for himself. Ap Glyn covers familiar and not-so-familiar historical ground, from Thomas Crapper to Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Singing camels, paddling trombonists, airborne string quartets and a libretto so barmy it makes David Icke sound like Richard Dawkins. Birmingham, welcome to the world of Karlheinz Stockhausen. The German composer devoted 25 years of his life composing his giant, seven-day, operatic cycle Licht. We in Britain have only ever had the chance to see one segment when in 1984 Donnerstag aus Licht was premiered at the Royal Opera House. The rest have slowly reached the light of day. Mittwoch aus Licht finally received its world premiere last night. But it has been a tortuous path for Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Cafés, ballets, it’s all the same to the mighty petty bullyboys of the London Olympics, who have not only devised two of the most revolting mascots in Olympic history (the one-eyed slugs Wenlock and Mandeville) but also employed teams of apparatchiks in your name and mine to compel artists and small businesses not to infringe their entirely dubious copyright in the Olympic motto. David Bintley came out much the better of a last-minute squabble a fortnight ago about his new ballet’s name - he had to truncate it to Faster, from his original “Faster, Higher, Stronger”, so that LOCOG could keep Read more ...