Australia
Guy Oddy
The Academy 2 may not be the biggest venue in Birmingham, but it was packed on Friday evening for the first gig of Dope Lemon’s much delayed Rose Pink Cadillac tour – to support an album that was finally released after delays of its own back in January. In fact, such was the mass of bodies waiting in anticipation for Angus Stone’s crew to take the stage that it took the best part of half an hour just to get served at the bar before the action started.Dope Lemon eventually took to a stage that was wrapped in a fog of dry ice, illuminated by blue stage lights, dressed like the Grateful Dead in Read more ...
Simon Thompson
The Edinburgh International Festival is playing its part in the UK/Australia Season 2021-22 (no, me neither) by hosting this concert from the Australian World Orchestra. It’s comprised of Australian musicians who play in orchestras across Europe and North America, as well as in Australia itself.Consequently, it’s as global as it’s Australian, and you could sense that both in their choice of programme as well as the way they played.Their take on Dvořák’s Seventh Symphony, for example, sounded decidedly Central European, with a lovely brightness to the strings but with a good sense of the music Read more ...
David Kettle
First, a bit of housekeeping. Maybe it was the three-and-a-half-hour duration, or maybe the unfamiliar Sri Lankan subject matter, or maybe even the very un-festival-like hot weather that put people off an evening inside Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre. Or maybe (very possibly) continuing Covid concerns. Whatever the reason, it’s dispiriting to see so few people in the audience for what must surely be one of the most ambitious and most powerful theatrical offerings taking place in Edinburgh this year.Counting and Cracking is a multi-generational, multi-lingual, multi-locational, decades-spanning Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Period drama from Australia is something of a rarity on our televisions, so The Newsreader scores for novelty alone. It’s not startlingly innovative in form, but it does what it sets out to do in a highly satisfying way. Which is to tell a tale of everyday misogyny, racism, homophobia and backstabbing in the Aussie television industry of the mid-1980s.Running throughout are regular datelines, starting with the weekend of the Challenger disaster in February 1986 and progressing through to Chernobyl the following April. This timeline isn’t just adding handy topical references: these are the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Nitram, Australian director Justin Kurzel’s deeply disturbing film about the man responsible for the Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania in 1996, seems especially topical after the Uvalde school shootings, one among several other shootings in the US in May.Martin Bryant, aged 28, killed 35 people and wounded 23 in the historic site of Port Arthur (he’s now serving concurrent life sentences without the possibility of parole). At the time, it was the deadliest mass shooting in history. No longer, of course. And at the end the film reveals that although Australia acted fast to change its gun laws, Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Commenting on Australia’s horrendous colonial history at the start of an audio commentary packaged with this BFI Blu-ray release of John Hillcoat’s impeccably directed, newly restored The Proposition (2005), Alexandra Heller-Nicholas declares, “It’s fucking awful.”Critics are usually more circumspect on the record, but Heller-Nicholas’s reflection on the genocide of the First Nations people and the attendant squalor visited on the Lucky Country by the lawless settlers of the 19th century strikes the right note. She and her colleague Josh Nelson sustain her anger and disgust throughout their Read more ...
caspar.gomez
My friend George claims to have nightmares about The Great Escape. In them he’s standing in an endless queue, never reaching the front, never entering the venue, and never seeing the band he wants to see. That was his experience the only time he attended, and he consequently reckons The Great Escape is rubbish.“I’ve been going for years and that’s never happened to me,” I said to him.“Yeah, well, you’re press, aren’t you,” he responded, with only a smidgeon of bitterness.“I s’pose so,” I replied, with only a smidgeon of smugness.But now photographer Finetime and I are standing outside Horatio Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Despite a five-year career and no breakout hits, Australian outfit Confidence Man has grabbed the attention of some heavyweights.Signed to Heavenly Records, a label which knows their Roscoff onions from the common-or-garden variety, their 2017 single “Bubblegum” was remixed to bouncing brilliance by the late, great Andrew Weatherall, and there they are, squeezed between Clairo and Courtney Barnett on Glastonbury 2022’s banner poster. Their second album fulfils such faith. It’s a primary-coloured, sexy, cheeky dancefloor explosion.It's pop, but with a 1990s feel, as in doused in beat-bustin’ Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I would suggest watching River on the largest possible screen, so you can bask in the breathtaking beauty of the visuals. Directed by the Australian Jennifer Peedom, who won awards for Mountain and Sherpa, the documentary celebrates the magnificence of rivers and reminds us that we are utterly dependent on water for our survival. “Humans have long loved rivers,” says narrator Willem Dafoe but, he asks, “as we have learned to harness their power, have we also forgotten to revere them?”The answer, of course, is “yes” and the film reveals our propensity for treating rivers merely as resources – Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Tragically, Shane Warne’s sudden death at age 52 means that Amazon’s new documentary about him has suddenly become an obituary as much as a celebration.Directed by John Carey, David Alrich and Jackie Munro, Shane does a solid job of tracing Warne’s ascent to cricketing glory, with contributions from an array of friends, teammates and family members. Best of all, there’s plenty of input from the man himself, since the ebullient Warne was never at a loss for words either on or off the pitch.As much as anything, his story was a powerful demonstration of mind over matter. Initially, he would have Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Neglected classics, whether books, plays or ballets, are usually neglected for a reason, and so it is with the three-act ballet Raymonda. A hit in 1898 for the Imperial ballet in St Petersburg but unperformed in this country since the 1960s, its ineffectual heroine, fuzzy sense of geography and offensively silly plot have made it impossible to stage in full – at least in Britain. In Russia, whose ballet culture has a higher tolerance of such things, the work remains central to the repertoire, complete with foiled kidnap by a muslim villain but minus more than half the original choreography, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although Storm Queen begins forcefully with the suitably tempestuous “Heaven,” the most affecting track on the second album from Melbourne’s Grace Cummings is the sparse, reflective “Two Little Birds.” The two performances capture the opposing poles defining Cummings: whether to go full-bore with her malleable voice, or whether to keep it direct within a delicate instrumental framing.“This Day in May,” the ninth track, takes both approaches with highs and lows comparable to Leonard Cohen’s now played-out “Hallelujah.” It’s followed by the title track, which has the stately, windswept majesty Read more ...