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theartsdesk
The Hospital Club's h.Club 100 Awards are so-called because they consist of 10 awards in 10 categories, each of which has 10 nominees. Nine of the awards are confined to a specifc area of the creative industries (stage, theatre, music etc). The exception is the Rising Stars category, open to anyone under the age of 25. Last year's winner was Nina-Sophia Miralles, founding editor of the online magazine Londnr.Londnr.com is a destination of choice for readers in search of lively, unexpected cultural insights that are hard to find in any other single location. From food to architecture via Read more ...
Tim Cumming
It’s the seventh Songlines Encounters festival, with musical meetings ranging from Portugal (Thursday’s Ricardo Ribeiro) to India (Friday’s Bollywood Brass Band with South Indian violinist Jyotsna Srikanth). Its closing Saturday night saw English folk singer, song collector and consort of the nightingale, Sam Lee, with Vindauga, a quartet of musicians from Norway and Scotland – singer Unni Lovlid, hardanger fiddler Erlend Apnesath, Scottish violin player Sarah-Jane Summers, Juhani Silvola on electric and acoustic guitar, and the harmonium of Andreas Utnem.Their repertoire ranged from swirling Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
2017 is proving the year of celebrating queer. To mark 50 years of the decriminalisation of homosexuality, we are enjoying a host of cultural and historical reminders, from Tate Britain to the British Library, and many locations in between, all affording a degree of prominence that over most of the last century would have been inconceivable. And now we have Peter Ackroyd’s Queer City to put it all in context – 'Twas ever thus, if you like – charting the history of gay life in the capital from the Romans to the present day.The historian par exellence of London, and chronicler of Read more ...
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 ...
Jessica Duchen
How to change the way we hear Chopin and Beethoven: play Bach first. Richard Goode opened his Royal Festival Hall recital with the Partita No.6 in E minor, perhaps the most enigmatic and challenging of its siblings. Its intricate contrapuntal lines and harsh, crunching harmonies cast a long shaft of light over the rest of the programme. Without Bach, it seemed to suggest, neither of the other two composers would have written as they did.With Goode, a recital is all about the music (that might sound like stating the obvious, but one can’t guarantee it with every pianist these days). The Read more ...
Will Rathbone
Matt Hartley's personal take on London's housing crisis returns to the Hampstead Theatre's studio space downstairs and is sure to hit audiences where, so to speak, they live. First seen at the same address in a production not open to the press, the play examines the spiralling costs associated with property in the capital and how those pressures affect the current generation of 20- and 30-somethings trying to make this town their home.Two couples agree to share a one-bedroom flat in south London for a year in order to save for the future, only to find that the cramped living conditions, not Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Nostalgia is dangerous; return to your childhood haunts and what was huge is now tiny, what once was magical at the movies is now mundane. Luckily this is not the case with Melody (also known under a distributor-enforced title as S.W.A.L.K.), unseen since its first release in 1971 when I was even younger than its central characters, a couple of 12-year-olds who fall in love much to their parents’ and teachers’ disapproval. It’s as charming now as it was then.Mark Lester and Jack Wild, then fresh off the megahit musical Oliver!, play two south London lads whose friendship is interrupted Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Actor Oliver Chris, who plays William in Mike Bartlett’s ingeniously-crafted play about the monarchy, was doing some pre-transmission fire-fighting by going round telling interviewers he couldn’t see what anybody (eg the Daily Mail) could find to get upset about. Why would they? King Charles III only depicts the ghost of Diana speaking with forked tongue, a political and constitutional crisis, and an internal putsch within the Royal Family. There’s even a jibe about Harry’s paternity. And all this after having buried the Queen.To be sure, the piece has already enjoyed a lavishly-acclaimed run Read more ...
Liz Thomson
I’ll never forget the first time: Saturday 17 June, 1978, Earls Court. The concert lives on in my mind’s ear still – those not fortunate enough to be there should listen to Live at Budokan (on which, that autumn, in Liverpool’s Probe Records, I spent more than a week’s grant money), recorded on the same tour. A month later, Saturday 15 July, Dylan headlined at the Picnic, at Blackbushe, which felt like our Woodstock.1978… The summer of Bob Dylan. I’d been a fan for years, when my classmates were screaming for the Osmonds and David Cassidy. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that summer, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The title of this exhibition is typical of Pink Floyd’s mordant view of the world, not to mention their sepulchral sense of humour. Needless to say, the band that took stage and studio perfectionism to unprecedented lengths have pushed the boat out here, memorialising over 50 years of their collective history with thoroughness and fanatical attention to detail.The event was four years in the planning, with all three surviving members pitching in and giving it their blessing, and drummer Nick Mason attending “many a long meeting” as he coordinated the event with curator Victoria Broackes and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The simplest ideas are often the best. Here’s one – take AC/DC’s Tyneside-born vocalist Brian Johnson and get him to chew the fat with a list of fellow rock’n’roll veterans. Later in the series he gets to meet Sting, Nick Mason and Lars Ulrich, but for this first show (on Sky Arts) the guest was Roger Daltrey of The Who.The formula worked remarkably well. Johnson kicked it off by driving down to Daltrey’s old stomping ground of Shepherd's Bush in a battered Morris Minor (“that’s the first car I bought my missus,” Daltrey recalled). After a brisk tour of a few local landmarks from The Who’s Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Text can sometimes be a prison. At its best, post-war British theatre is a writer’s theatre, with the great pensmiths – from Samuel Beckett, John Osborne and Harold Pinter to Caryl Churchill, Martin Crimp and Sarah Kane – carving out visions of everyday humanity in all our agonies and glee. But the mountain of written words that they have built is only a part of the live theatre experience, and it is increasingly being questioned by playwrights themselves. Now at the Royal Court, Simon Stephens, author of the West End hit adaptation The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, offers Read more ...