Africa
Adam Sweeting
Previous series of Mad Dogs have seen the quartet of middle-aged geezers embroiled with the Serbian mafia and tangled up in drug deals, conspiracies and murder. For this series three opener, the curtain rose on our bedraggled lads caged up in a derelict prison camp. They were wearing Guantanamo-style orange jumpsuits. Having expected to go to Barcelona on a container vessel at the end of series two, here they were banged up under a shrivelling Moroccan sun.Much of the piece was taken up with the quartet being baffled and bamboozled, amid some tight-lipped wiscrackery, as they tried to work Read more ...
Tim Cumming
There have been memorable nights at the Foundling Museum recently, with Alasdair Roberts delivering a superb solo show in April, while on Friday the Nest Collective hosted a double bill of Zimbabwean-born singer Eska and Bristol’s masters of English folk minimalism, Spiro.I’d seen Eska at Essaouira’s Gnawa Festival last year, performing with Soweto Kinch and Hamid El Kasri – she was so good they invited her back with her own band this year – and on the strength of her opening set in the Picture Gallery, the folks in Essaouira have chosen well. She has a powerful, emotive, and mellifluous Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Early on in Dangerous Edge: A Life of Graham Greene, John le Carré remembers Greene telling him that childhood provides “the bank balance of the writer”. Greene remained in credit on that inspiration front throughout his life, even while he struggled financially in his early writing days with a young family; later in life, too, he lost everything to a swindling financial adviser – the move to France was to avoid the Revenue.Greene went to Berkhamstead School, where his father was headmaster, and was bullied, not least for the assumption that he was a spy for paternal authority (the spy Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Alexander McCall Smith is Scottish, and writes fiction, but he doesn’t write “Scottish fiction” as most of us understand the term. In his world view there are no used needles and discarded condoms littering tenement stairwells, no spotty hedonists popping pills to a blue-streaked soundtrack of effing and cussing. It seems extraordinary that no other author has hit upon his extraordinarily successful formula for shifting units in bookshops all over the world.Low on dead bodies and high on softly pedalled humour and lightly sprinkled moralising, the No 1 Ladies' Detective Agengy series of Read more ...
Thembi Mutch
A crowd of men and younger women in full burkahs gathers, bewildered by the sight: an African woman, in West African “Mumu” (khaftan) and a covered head, playing Ghazals (Islamic calls to prayer). Accompanied by an acoustic guitar, a clear voice, sitting on a café terrazza, Nawal transports us: until it is broken. “How dare you use the name of Allah in a song?!” cries out a dishevelled street vendor, visibly upset. “But you use keyboards in your praise of Allah” she retorts calmly.It is 1pm, several hours before the Sauti Za Busara festival is about to begin. From the 12th-century Omani fort Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It is now part of the fixtures and fittings on British television. Its original stars, once alternative comedians, have become leathery gerontosaurs of the establishment. And yet on Comic Relief the grammar of giving has been largely immune to evolution. A star – usually a comic - goes out to Africa and reports back from a community in dire need of a basic necessity to alleviate suffering and death. They mug charmingly for the camera, make friends with the children and ask for your money.It’s a trusted method, but this year Richard Curtis has tried to shake things up a little. Rather than Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Inevitably, in box sets collecting the works of a single director one film will overshadow the others. So it is with the four discs of The Claire Denis Collection, where 2009’s White Material expresses the temperament, texture and compositional style of a Denis film more effectively than its three companions. This doesn’t mean that White Material should be watched first, or that it’s better than Chocolat (1988), Nénette et Boni (1996) or Beau Travail (1999), just that it is the finest distillation of Denis to date.Assessing a director from four films plucked their wider oeuvre is risky, but a Read more ...
mark.kidel
Toumani Diabaté is the uncontested star of the Malian kora, but his Bamako neighbour Ballaké Sissoko is a close rival. His natural modesty, reflected in the coolness of his musicianship, has prevented him from acquiring the international status of Diabaté, but what he lacks in worldly ambition is amply compensated by an unassuming yet heart-warming spirituality.At Peace is in some ways a sequel to Chamber Music, the award-winning album Sissoko made with the versatile French cellist Vincent Ségal. Ségal, the producer of the new CD, has avoided merely serving up Vol. 2. This time around, the Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
For years there have been pundits predicting that just as our high street restaurants and football teams represent a much more globalised world, surely pop music would follow suit. Fifteen years ago my local high street had a Wimpy Bar, a curry house and a wine bar – now we have Vietnamese, Turkish, Keralan and Mexican eateries to name a few – and the street is much better for it. Pop music, though, has been clinging to its Anglo-Saxon power bases in the US and the UK (the language helps, of course). But in 2012 you could claim that the most significant group and track were outside Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Not the least interesting aspect of Give Us The Money, an examination of the effectiveness of famous pop stars campaigning to end poverty in Africa, was how historical it felt. Homing in specifically on Bob Geldof and Bono, who between then have spent decades hectoring the public, berating politicians and schmoozing billionaires with a view to alleviating the sufferings of millions of starving Africans, it was a glimpse into a lost world of stadium rock, furry non-HD video and political yesterday's men, like Gordon Brown and George W Bush.The commentary seemed to promise a controversial Read more ...
andy.morgan
The carriage swayed violently, sending a bottle of Perroni sliding across the Formica table top and into the quick hand of Malian guitarist Afel Bocoum. As we sped along, the sun sent flecks of light up the walls, across the ceiling, along the luggage racks and back down over assorted musicians who were sleeping, lounging, talking or playing music together in small groups. A green noise of trees and hedges blurred past our window, whilst barebacked hills seemed to stand completely still in the blue distance. The Africa Express was cruising through Dumfries and Galloway on its way to down to Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Take the day, and a stiff drink afterwards, as you’ll need it for this thoughtful and deeply disturbing exhibition. A picture, goes the cliché, is worth a thousand words, and nowhere more so than in this heartbreaking, beautiful and affecting anthology, which manages to speak with unparalleled directness, yet with nuanced subtlety.Here are over 400 photographs by 12 artists, spanning the world, and shown with outstanding clarity, helpful pacing and variety. It is a self initiated record of perhaps the greatest turning points of the last century as the world moved on from centuries of Read more ...