tue 28/03/2023

Newcastle

Album: Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs - Land of Sleeper

During the Dark Ages, it wasn’t unusual for people throughout England to raise the prayer “From the fury of the Northmen, deliver us, O Lord!”. Over a thousand years later, with the release of Geordie rockers Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs’ new...

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Blu-ray: Get Carter

Director Mike Hodges's Get Carter (1971) has been praised as the best British gangster film. I would go even further, and put it up against the best gangster films of all time, on the same level as Lang’s The Big Heat (1953), Melville’s Le...

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Rigoletto, Opera North review - Covid shocks, debut pleasures

Beware of joining the Duke of Mantua’s sleazy feast in time of Covid too late, as I did on Opera North’s Newcastle leg of its Verdi journey. You may find more than a couple of the distinguished guests on stage have fallen sick – three, no less, on...

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Album: Sam Fender - Seventeen Going Under

Grand, sweeping romanticism with strong Celtic leanings is the order of the day lately, in a way it hasn’t been since the 1980s heyday of U2, Waterboys, Bruce Springsteen, Dexys and Simple Minds. The likes of Lewis Capaldi, Dermot Kennedy, Declan...

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Test Signal: Northern Anthology of New Writing review – core writing from England's regions

“On the Ordinance Survey map, it has no name”, writes Andrew Michael Hurley, of the wood that nevertheless gives its name to his essay. “Clavicle Wood” provides the first chapter in the Test Signal: Northern Anthology of New Writing. It is...

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Album: Maxïmo Park – Nature Always Wins

Composed in the first lockdown, and recorded remotely, the seventh album from Newcastle’s Maxïmo Park was produced by Ben Allen (Animal Collective, Deerhunter). But it is not so much a record of the times as a snapshot of a time in the...

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Northern Chords Festival, Church of St James and St Basil, Newcastle review - high, lucid and bright

Whatever happens next – and even in Tier 3 the Royal Liverpool Phlharmonic goes on playing to carefully distanced audiences – this will be remembered by all participants as a day of dazzling brilliance, its bright autumn light matched by so much of...

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Classical CDs Weekly: Albert Roussel, Roy Budd, Propellor

Albert Roussel Edition (Erato)Be grateful that Albert Roussel became a composer at all. Born in 1869 and orphaned at a young age, he was a talented pianist who joined the French navy as a teenager. Music was an enjoyable distraction during his...

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DVD/Blu-ray: Stormy Monday

Using Hollywood stars to prop up British crime thrillers is an ignoble tradition. Guy Ritchie’s Snatch misused Brad Pitt, but John Wayne’s execrable Brannigan is probably the worst example. So one’s hopes aren’t high for Stormy Monday, a 1987 noir...

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Boy Meets Girl, BBC Two

Any romcom that begins with a woman saying the line “I was born with a penis” is OK by me. And that's how Boy Meets Girl, a superb new comedy created by Elliott Kerrigan, begins a six-part series.Kerrigan and co-writer Simon Carlyle have neatly made...

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Wet House, Soho Theatre

When gifting the unheard a voice, the temptation is often to make it a solemn one. Thankfully, Paddy Campbell has, for the most part, sidestepped puritanical preaching in his debut play based on experiences working at a ‘wet house’, a homeless...

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Listening, BALTIC 39, Hayward Touring

Traditionally, art exhibitions have been about looking, but as more and more artists cross boundaries to engage with sound, touch and movement or to use film and video, work that is static and silent is becoming the exception rather than the rule....

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