Liverpool
The wisdom and wit of Carla LaneWednesday, 01 June 2016
Carla Lane, who has died at the age of 87, was the first from Liverpool. Before Alan Bleasdale and Willy Russell, long before Jimmy McGovern, hers was the loudest Liverpudlian voice on television portraying ordinary working people's lives. From The... Read more... |
Going Going Gone, BBC FourThursday, 26 May 2016
In Going Going Gone Nick Broomfield was fighting to get access all over again – but it wasn’t exactly the same kind of challenge he’d faced with Sarah Palin or some of his previous targets. Doors were closed, but the keepers of the keys here were... Read more... |
10 Questions for Comedian Alexei SayleTuesday, 12 April 2016
Alexei Sayle (b 1952) first came to fame at the birth of alternative comedy, as MC at the Comedy Store in London at the dawn of the 1980s. He cemented his reputation via his recurring role in the anarchic student sitcom classic The Young Ones, as... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Oslo: Vasily Petrenko, the Leningrad Dynamo, comes to townWednesday, 24 February 2016
I've never thought of myself as a Shostakovich fan, tending to regard what I know of his output as bleak and forbidding. Photographs of the stone-faced composer with the mortuary attendant's demeanour haven't helped.All this changed after a night... Read more... |
Tuba concerto unveiled in LiverpoolFriday, 09 October 2015
How many tuba concertos are there? How many pieces are there where the guys from the heavy battalion can really shine as soloists? Well, possibly, here is one: this was the world première of Robin Holloway’s Europa and the Bull, billed as a... Read more... |
Johnston, RLPO, Petrenko, Philharmonic Hall, LiverpoolMonday, 05 October 2015
If you’re going to employ tens of extra musicians for Strauss’s gigantic Alpine Symphony, it’s probably just as well that a few other "biggies" are programmed in the same concert. So it was at the Philharmonic Hall, where the Strauss shared the... Read more... |
Hot August Night: The Beatles at Shea StadiumSaturday, 15 August 2015
Half a century ago today, on a warm August Sunday night in New York, The Beatles played a 30-minute concert in a baseball field. Home to the New York Mets the venue was called the William A Shea Municipal Stadium and had opened in spring 1964.In... Read more... |
Ian McCulloch, St Pauls Arts Centre, WorthingSunday, 22 March 2015
Things do not start well. Ian McCulloch, in trademark shades, apparently not aged a jot since Echo & the Bunnymen’s 1980s glory days, hits the stage in an offensive strop. He is performing a solo acoustic set from a chair. Beside him on a table... Read more... |
RLPO 175th Birthday Concert, Petrenko, Liverpool Philharmonic HallSaturday, 14 March 2015
When the curtain came down on Liverpool’s year in the limelight as European Capital of Culture, back in 2008, there may have been some who thought that the party was over. Things in the city’s arts world were never going to the same, however, and... Read more... |
First Happenings: Adrian Henri in the ’60s and ’70s, ICASaturday, 07 February 2015
If you bought a Beatles album in the Sixties, chances are you also bought The Mersey Sound, that best-selling collection of poems by the Liverpool poets Brian Patten, Roger McGough and Adrian Henri. It was launched at the Cavern Club in 1967 to... Read more... |
Carducci String Quartet, St George's Hall Concert Room, LiverpoolThursday, 05 February 2015
When you’re visiting someone for the first time, it’s probably just as well that you make a good impression – or else you may not be asked back. If that’s what the Carducci String Quartet was trying to do on their début visit to Liverpool, then they... Read more... |
Tsujii, RLPO, Petrenko, Philharmonic Hall, LiverpoolFriday, 21 November 2014
The knots on the purse-strings have certainly been untied at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and it was good to hear another world première in less than a week. This time it was the turn of Michael Torke, the composer of Ecstatic Orange and Yellow... Read more... |
