festivals
Thomas H. Green
One effect of the film I Get Knocked Down, a playfully constructed journey around the life of Chumbawamba vocalist Dunstan Bruce, is to remind that socio-political rage was once woven into the fabric of popular music. Old footage from the band’s Leeds squat, Southview House, in the early Eighties, shows one of them jovially composing a song called “Norman Fowler is a Shit-stain in Margaret Thatcher’s Underpants” on an acoustic guitar (Norman Fowler was Thatcher’s Secretary of State at the time). It’s funny and silly, but also made me long for the era when art-fury was a common cultural Read more ...
caspar.gomez
My friend George claims to have nightmares about The Great Escape. In them he’s standing in an endless queue, never reaching the front, never entering the venue, and never seeing the band he wants to see. That was his experience the only time he attended, and he consequently reckons The Great Escape is rubbish.“I’ve been going for years and that’s never happened to me,” I said to him.“Yeah, well, you’re press, aren’t you,” he responded, with only a smidgeon of bitterness.“I s’pose so,” I replied, with only a smidgeon of smugness.But now photographer Finetime and I are standing outside Horatio Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Onstage at The Old Market in Hove, New York’s Mykki Blanco has been waving around a knot of garlic bulbs as if it were a wand or occult aspergillum. At some point during Blanco’s punchy rendition of 2016 single “Loner”, or possibly the dizzier “Summer Fling”, they transfer it to the flies of their trousers, let it hang there, all mischief. They explain that this is the result of the band becoming obsessed with “a mad coven of witches in Italy”.Whatever, it certainly adds to the freeform conviviality. Blanco (pictured left) no longer adopts a draggy look. The non-binary MC first enters wearing Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The gentleman in the centre of the picture above is Ivan Dorn. In Ukraine, he’s a pop star. A big pop star. His music, as he puts it on stage during the show opening Tallinn-Narva Music Week, is “pure Ukrainian house music.” Yep, there’s the bing-bong piano lines and cowbell beats of the pop end of house.Before 24 February this year an Ivan Dorn live appearance would of course be fun, an uplifting experience with a jumping-up-and-down audience doing lots of arm waving. This is confirmed in Tallinn where his enviable charisma is tempered by a charming awkwardness telegraphing he’s not fully Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The latest edition of Peter Culshaw’s occasional global radio shows focuses totally on Ukraine, looking at music, art, culture and resistance.Culshaw has reported over the years on the Odessa Film and Jazz festivals for theartsdesk, and written for the Odessa Review, Songlines and the Guardian on Ukrainian music and film. He argues that Ukraine was becoming too attractive, democratic, hip and culturally and technologically innovative – and that such a flowering had to be stamped out by Russia before it spread. We also discuss whether World War 3 has actually started.His co-pilot for the whole Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Hilarious, potty-mouthed and mesmerisingly beautiful, Nadine Shah is on superb form at the Ramsgate Festival of Sound’s closing evening show. And aside from the banter there is, of course, that remarkable voice – hugely powerful and somehow perfectly suited to this enchanting outdoor venue. In fact, this is the first time the Winterstoke Sun Shelter has been used for a gig – I doubt it will be the last. It was simply magical. We are here to listen to possibly the last live performance of last year’s critically acclaimed album Kitchen Sink. The whoops and cat calls of “Club Read more ...
David Nice
Feet firmly planted on fertile native soil, but always open to the world, lyric-dramatic soprano Birgit Nilsson soared into realms no-one from the rolling hills and coastline of Sweden’s Bjäre peninsula, where she grew up, could possibly have imagined. The Met, Bayreuth, and all the other great opera houses of the world fell over themselves to acquire stakes in her special incandescence, but she always returned to her home region.Her parents’ farmhouse became a summer home, and their only child laid flowers on their grave when she gave recitals in the church at Västra Karups where she’d sung Read more ...
David Kettle
The popcorn on offer as you enter the Pleasance’s performing space at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre quickly fills the air with its rich, sugary scent. It’s a smell that sets the scene nicely for a show set in a cinema, but also an aroma that takes on increasingly heavy, cloying, sickly – and inescapable – connotations as Screen 9 progresses.Twelve people were killed and 70 injured in July 2012 at a mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado, at the midnight premiere of the Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises. For its debut production, London-based Piccolo Theatre has devised a verbatim Read more ...
David Kettle
Ageing Mick wakes up on Portobello beach with two gold rings in his pocket, and embarks on the bender to end all benders in order to work out what or who they’re for. Young Gilly has a poorly pug named Mr Immanuel Kant, but can’t face having it put down. Gaynor has suffered from fibromyalgia for decades, but must put it aside if she’s to see her newborn granddaughter. Dougie and Ciara are preparing for their life-changing arrival with one last hedonistic night on the dance floor.On the face of it, Frances Poet seems to be following a well-worn path as the five Edinburgh lives in her quietly Read more ...
David Kettle
Fear of Roses Assembly Roxy ★★★One of the more disconcerting aspects to this year’s Fringe is different venues’ contrasting reactions to the easing of Covid restrictions. Some – like Army @ The Fringe and the Traverse Theatre – maintain limited audience numbers and careful distancing, as well as insisting on mask wearing. The Stand at the Corn Exchange even requires a negative lateral flow test for entry. Others, like Assembly, have performing spaces packed with audience members sitting shoulder to shoulder, and mask wearing apparently voluntary (though there are bars within the Read more ...
David Kettle
Tunnels Army @ The Fringe ★★★ As has already been noted, it’s a funny old Fringe this year: only a fraction of its normal size; with audiences that seem either Covid-wary or disconcertingly enthusiastic; with some venues taking advantage of restriction relaxations to open up to jam-packed houses (and infuriating many who’d booked on the basis of social distancing), and others maintaining Covid measures, with outdoor performing spaces and careful hygiene. In short, it’s a bit of a mess, but hey, isn’t that in the spirit of the Fringe? If anything, the smaller programmes in what Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Harry Grafton (b. 1978) is the preferred title of Henry Fitzroy, 12th Duke of Grafton, custodian of Euston Hall in Suffolk and the man behind the Red Rooster Festival. The latter, during its six pre-COVID years of existence, built a reputation for presenting fresh, fiery and exciting American roots music. All being well, it returns this August. Grafton started in the music business in the early years of this century in Nashville, Tennessee, where he also had a radio show. His Stateside sojourn culminated in a job on the Rolling Stones global A Bigger Bang Tour. Upon the death of his father in Read more ...