Features
Tom Birchenough
Poetry on the underground – we all know it: those well-intentioned verselets that set out to brighten the weary traveller’s journey. But poetry about the underground? You begin to worry about some sub-Larkinesque aubade on the brevity of life and the length of the trip. In Three Men on the Metro, poets Andy Croft, W N Herbert and Paul Summers face the challenge squarely, though they skip the stations of their native Tyne and Wear, bypass what passes for a mass transportation system in London, and journey to the mother of all metros – Moscow.In the process they discover as much about what’s Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The career of Andy Serkis tends to point in one direction: darkness visible. Onstage, more recently on screen, he has inhabited a series of characters for whom violence is second nature. His Bill Sikes was utterly deranged, though a pussycat next to his Ian Brady in Longford (pictured below), whose ghastly charisma he seemed intuitively to understand. Serkis’s performance-captured Gollum gave global audiences the creeps. And that was him somewhere under the computer-generated fur as the ultimate unreconstructed he-man Kong. Whence it is but a small step to Ian Dury. In sex&drugs&rock Read more ...
josh.spero
Your browser could search a long time for philiproth.com. There are some writers, it is plain, who are not the web type. I find it hard to envision a site garnished with a picture of a smiling – scowling – Roth standing outside his Connecticut farmhouse, beckoning web traffic to read his latest blog post (“My new year’s resolutions”) or even providing a biography beyond the terse notes on his flyleaves. An author who is reclusive in life is unlikely to be prodigious online. You would not define these solely as “literary” writers, but the high priests of prose style are not often found in the Read more ...
Joe Muggs
The received opinion is that the music of the 2000s has been characterised by fragmentation, discontinuity, faddishness and a lack of coherent identity. And while that perhaps is true on a macro scale, within underground music completely the opposite has been the case: throughout the decade dance and electronic music underwent a process of consolidation, of putting down roots, and sounds new and old have been establishing or re-establishing themselves as fixtures on the cultural landscape.The decade began inauspiciously – the late-1990s explosion of superstar DJs and “superclubs” in a state Read more ...
robert.sandall
The point at which the, ah, Noughties revealed themselves to me as a decade in search of more than just a decent name arrived when Sky News' showbiz gofer phoned up to ask me to come on and blah about this exciting new band that everybody was talking about, Arctic Monkeys. I'd only heard their first single, “Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor”; but that was OK with the gofer because what really interested Sky was how the band had achieved their popularity. Allegedly Arctic Monkeys, he said, were the first group who had built a following on the new social networking site MySpace.Never mind Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The girls have produced the best pop of the Noughties: Kylie’s “Can’t get you out of my Head”, Missy Elliot's “Get Ur Freak On”, Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love”, Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab”, Duffy’s “Warwick Avenue” and Lady Gaga's "PokerFace" were just way better and more innovative pop music than that produced by the legion of blokey indie types (with a few honourable exceptions, like the Arctic Monkeys). This is without even mentioning M.I.A. whose "Paper Planes" was the sound of a whole new pop sensibility being born and triggered an extraordinary viral copycat video cult on YouTube. Or Bjõrk, who Read more ...
Veronica Lee
A happy new year to all our readers - and it’s a particularly happy new year for some, as they anticipate buying a new outfit for a trip to Buckingham Palace to collect the gongs awarded to them in the 2010 New Year’s Honours List. Those honoured in the arts include a few big names alongside one or two surprises, and we at theartsdesk.com send our heartiest congratulations to all those honoured.Two of the biggest awards go to Nicholas Hytner, director of the National Theatre, and actor Patrick Stewart, who are both knighted for services to drama. Hytner, 53, has been director of the National Read more ...
mark.hudson
2010 begins with a worldbeating blockbuster capable of breaking all attendance records – and it ends with another. It’s more than 40 years since Britain saw a major exhibition of the work of Vincent van Gogh; 40 years in which the tormented Dutch genius has gone from being merely an extremely famous and influential painter to, by common consent, the world’s favourite artist, the man who sacrificed himself for his art, whose light-filled canvases tell us most about what we think art should be – never mind that many of them are of dark, rain-drenched Dutch fields.The Royal Academy’s The Real Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
After every bubble comes a bust, and if I had shares in the reality television boom that came to define TV in the Noughties, I’d be on the phone to my broker right now. 2010 won’t be the first Big Brother-free year since the last century, because first we have some celebrities debasing themselves in January, and a last bunch of wannabes having their three months of Heat magazine cover stories over the summer, but the world-dominating Endemol juggernaut has had the good grace to bow out after that.All the other big ones – Jungle, Strictly, X Factor – are beginning to seem so last decade, as Read more ...
sue.steward
Every day till 3 January theartsdesk will carry a survey of one of the arts we cover. We begin with Photography. Photography books are exploding on to the market like fireworks just as the book as a tangible object is becoming increasingly endangered. And with so many titles emerging from established and pop-up publishers, it’s a hard task to pin them down to the best of 2009 without some shocking omissions. So I’ll call them “Favourites” - and await cries of outrage about who’s in and who’s out.
First, some regretted omissions: the National Portrait Gallery’s Beatles to Bowie exists thanks Read more ...
graeme.thomson
It was a month before Christmas and I was watching venerable folkies the Battlefield Band at Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall. Halfway through their set they played “Robber Barons”, a new song about the nefarious medieval practice of German feudal lords charging exorbitant tolls on traffic travelling on the Rhine; as the verses mounted, it moved – seamlessly, like all good folk songs – to expose the habits of the unscrupulous bankers of the early 21st century.The message was clear: times may change, but we are still at the mercy of a different kind of robber baron, lining his own castle with silver Read more ...
sheila.johnston
"Where?" you ask. In the extreme north-east of Turkey, wedged in between the Black Sea, the Georgian and Armenian borders and the snow-capped Pontic Mountains, the hardscrabble town of Artvin clings tenaciously to a near-vertical hillside. Population: 25,000. Hotels: a handful, all rustic. Distance from the small coastal airport of Trabzon: three hours up a precipitous road. Nearest cinema: 50 miles. In short, the perfect spot for an international film festival.Search for Artvin (left, photo: Murat Kocaağa) on English-language Google and you won't turn up much. Claimed by successive waves of Read more ...