Liverpool
Adam Sweeting
It probably hasn’t escaped your notice that we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the triumphant vindication of the Beatles' decision to quit touring and instead exploit the possibilities of the recording studio. Could there be anything new to say about an album so thoroughly analysed, anatomised, eulogised and mythologised?Eager to answer that question with a resounding “yes” came Howard Goodall, bounding eagerly into the studio to tell us why, exactly, Sgt Pepper is so blinking marvellous and how it blew open the doors to a limitless new Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Letter to Brezhnev, released in 1985, was a delightful curio with sharp edges. A trans-cultural riff on Romeo and Juliet, it told of the sudden romance that erupts between a Kirkby girl and a visiting Soviet sailor one night on the tiles in Liverpool. I have a strong memory from 32 years ago of feeling overwhelmed by the film’s iconic image, of the lovers' last kiss through a chain-link fence before his ship sails back to the USSR.Peter Firth, who played Peter the sailor, was the closest the cast came to a star. As is explained in the abundant supply of extras of this re-release, like many Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Turning the real-life murder of an 11-year-old boy into a four-part TV drama carries obvious risks (might it be exploitative, sick or in bad taste, for instance?), but judging by this opening episode of Little Boy Blue (ITV), screenwriter Jeff Pope has skilfully walked the line. His account of the shooting of Rhys Jones in Liverpool 2007 managed to combine sympathy with objectivity, and laid out the story with a careful restraint which was far more effective than shrill hysterics would have been.The way it’s told here, Jones was the unwitting victim of a local gang war between the so- Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
The new season at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic is focusing on revolutionaries. Bach, Beethoven and Berlioz all feature strongly over the next few months, as will Stravinsky and – where else but Liverpool? – The Beatles.The RLPO has another reason to celebrate, too. It’s 10 years since Vasily Petrenko took up the baton as chief conductor of the orchestra and much has changed in that decade, not least the edgily confident way in which Petrenko and the RLPO explore the repertoire. The start of the 11th season with Petrenko at the helm presented audiences with something of a marathon: all Read more ...
james.woodall
It could be a book, film, TV or radio piece, essay or exhibition. If it’s about or based on The Beatles, the question is always the same: how on earth can anything new be said? In the case of Ron Howard’s Eight Days a Week: The Touring Years, surprisingly quite a lot, is the answer.Factually, there’s little with which the Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind director can grab even the most noddingly acquainted. Four boys from very modest backgrounds test themselves as a band in the early 1960s in Europe’s raciest city (Hamburg), get noticed in a scuzzy Liverpool basement by a posh shopkeeper (Brian Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
In the town of Nizhny Novgorod where Maxim Gorky was born, it was said that “the houses are made of stone, the people of iron”. Vassa Zheleznova, the titular matriarch of this rarely performed play, is one such person. She is a businesswoman of steely will and juggernaut energy whose tragedy is to see her family destroyed by the same bourgeois values that she has fought so fiercely to preserve.At least, that’s how the playwright conceived it when he revised his 1909 text, under Stalinist pressure, in 1935. But now Emily Juniper has come up with a new version for theatre company The Faction Read more ...
Ed Owen
British filmmaking does gritty suburban dramas better than anywhere. Stories stripped of superficial action, from Ken Loach’s early work through to more recent stand-out films like Tyrannosaur. The Violators offers a new voice producing a superb feature set in a bleak Merseyside suburb. Debut director Helen Walsh is better known as a novelist, creating tales thick with human drama, sometimes in grim settings, and The Violators adheres to this template.Three siblings live together under the care of their constantly smoking, constantly angry older brother Andy (Derek Barr), terrified that their Read more ...
Jasper Rees
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 Liver Birds to Bread, from Butterflies to Solo, her comedies covered the waterfront of womanhood: husband-hunters, divorcees, matriarchal grandmothers, unhappy wives, mistresses.Later in her life she became at least as famous for her animal sanctuary in Sussex, situated on the grounds of a vast manor. When I visited her there in 2000, we talked in Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
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 anonymous local council functionaries, or the “media department” of Cardiff docks (who’d have known?). Broomfield seemed bemused more than anything else when told he couldn’t just turn up and film in the latter’s public spaces; of course, he kept the camera rolling anyway.Intimidating, it wasn’t. Instead the prevailing feeling behind these two films Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
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 well as appearances in a number of Comic Strip Presents… films. He has written and fronted a host of sketch shows, including the Emmy Award-winning Alexei Sayle’s Stuff.Sayle retired from stand-up for a decade and a half but returned to the stage in 2011 and has since successfully toured new material. He has had a sporadic career in film, radio and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
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 out with the Oslo Philharmonic under the wizardly baton of Vasily Petrenko, who yields to none in his commitment to Shostakovich's work. Their performance of the composer's Fifth Symphony was a revelation (to me, at any rate) in its heart-stopping leaps between minimalist shivers of strings and catastrophic detonations of brass and percussion, its Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
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 concertante for tuba and orchestra. It is a joint commission between the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony. But Liverpool won the toss to perform it for the first time in Philharmonia Hall.The main thing to bear in mind is that the tuba is a lyrical instrument, capable of all sorts, not just the bass notes in Wagner music-dramas Read more ...