London
Bernard Hughes
Artist-in-Residence at the Wigmore Hall Hilary Hahn brought her residency to an end with a collaboration with the exciting Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, a notably youthful and ethnically diverse group, who brought with them a notably more youthful and ethnically diverse crowd than the hall usually entertains.The programme was American music, combining a couple of mid-20th century masterpieces with newer works by living composers. The older music largely came out ahead.Although I have known and loved the Samuel Barber String Quartet for 30 years I had never previously heard it live. I don’t Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Standing just inside the door of the Whitechapel’s downstairs gallery is a luggage trolley laden with parcels (pictured below, right). This forlorn object looks as if it’s waiting to be collected, but the owner seems to have gone AWOL.The packages are labelled, not with names and addresses but descriptions of the contents, as if they had come from a museum archive.“Bima curtain,” reads one label. “Large, dark blue velvet cloth with heavy gilt ribbon trim and gilt fringing. Condition: torn in several places, much stained, creased and damp when found.” The items were retrieved from the gutter Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Pinned eyes stare from a frozen husk of a face as a clubber comes down, cradled high over London on a window-cleaner’s perch. Director WIZ’s 18-minute video for Flowered Up’s rave epic “Weekender” (1992) takes you on the E’d up odyssey of Little Joe (Lee Whitlock), from skinning up at work through clubland peaks to chilly aftermath.This BFI release pairs this perfect marriage of music, film and moment’s 2K remaster with Chloé Raunet’s new documentary I Am Weekender. Here Jeremy Deller dubs Weekender “the first meditation on rave culture”, Lynne Ramsay, who similarly caught clubbing’s hazy Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Pretty Red Dress opens with a classic Motown-esque girl group belting out a show tune before cutting to Travis (Natey Jones) as he leaves prison. Waiting for him outside is Candice (Alexandra Burke); she’s sitting in her Audi, singing along to the radio.At home is their teenage daughter, Kenisha (Temilola Olatunbosun), happy enough to have her dad back in their Lambeth flat on a council estate, but facing her own problems at school with both authority and friends.Candice works as a cashier at a local supermarket but dreams of being a performer; she spots a sequin-studded, bright red mini- Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There are better musicals in town, but can you find me a more spectacular show in a more comfortable theatre? I doubt it. Not that Jonathan Church's new production at Sadler's Wells is flawless. It's a 90-year-old blockbuster so, for all its references to breadlines, insecure employment and heat-or-eat decisions, one wonders if so much effort might be better expended on something a little more recent, a little less bound by the cliches of musical theatre? And there's also Les Dennis neither dancing nor singing. Why? If you set aside such minor gripes, one can delight in a show that Read more ...
India Lewis
Small Worlds, the second novel from Caleb Azumah Nelson, is a delight: a book with a real feeling for sound and dance, and a sense of place from London to Ghana and back again. It’s a story of a first romance, the intricacies of family life, the importance of music, and the difficulties still faced by people of colour in the UK today. While it may not seem like it will set the world on fire, it’s a beautifully observed picture of the twists and turns of life and of love.Our protagonist, Stephen, is a young black trumpet player, destined for great things until he flunks his exams, forcing a Read more ...
Kate Whitley
We at the Multi-Story Orchestra have been writing a new piece of music about social media. In one of the writing sessions I remember one of our musicians spending every second she wasn't playing on her phone, checking likes and comments as she'd released something that day. That feeling – being at the mercy of an unwinnable urge to be validated by other people's approval - is what our new piece is about.It was so cool hearing our young people's takes on it. They've grown up with social media in a way I can only imagine, and the original idea for a piece about social media was theirs. We wrote Read more ...
Cheri Amour
Five years ago, breaking dry January a few days early, I joined a throng of folks amongst the merch boxes and strip lights of Rough Trade East to see Dream Wife. The London-based trio has come a long way since those small-scale shows in the backroom of a Brick Lane record shop.Their last release, So When You Gonna… was the only indie album recorded and produced by all women at the time to break into the Official UK Top 20 album charts. And they’ve shared the stage with the bands who likely informed them to pick up their instruments, opening for Garbage and The Kills across North America.Half Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The Bond film theme plays and the lights go up at the Bush’s Studio space to reveal, not a tuxedoed superspy, but a slim figure in casual clothes sitting on a raised platform. He starts his first speech, then stops, makes asides to the audience, then restarts it. Then wishes it was a film, “which it isn’t”.The figure is Nikhil Parmar, writer of this 60-minute play, who peoples the little stage with a whole neighbourhood: his family, cousins, friends and fellow tenants. Usefully, he has given them all different ethnic accents to help us work out who is who. Scenes rapidly transform, cued by Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s 27 years since Gretchen Peters released her debut album, The Secret of Life, championed by Bob Harris and the late Terry Wogan, whose morning-tide enthusiasms also helped propel Eva Cassidy and Beth Neilsen Chapman to success - the term “Americana” hadn’t yet been invented!Peters has been touring Britain for some 25 years, unusually for an American recording a live album here (The Show: Live from the UK), which captured her just pre-Covid performing a career-spanning selection of songs with the all-female Southern Fried String Quartet. She’s won, or been nominated for, a raft of Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Two years on from Sean Holmes’ production and seven on from Emma Rice’s (both of which featured diverse casts), Elle While takes a turn with the old warhorse’s lovers and fairies, its sparring couples and its Morecambe and Wise-like shambles of a play-within-a-play. The question hangs in the air – what to do to excite audiences, some of whom are so familiar with A Midsummer Night’s Dream that, a row behind me, they were laughing a beat before the punchlines were delivered?The result of such consideration is a bit of a mishmash of things that work, some that don’t and quite a lot in- Read more ...
joe.muggs
There is a truly fascinating story to be written about the hidden Punjabi influence on UK bass music. Maybe it’s natural for kids growing up with the huge booming sounds of dhol and tabla drums to gravitate to big bass speakers, but some of the most unique and influential producers in the interface between reggae, grime and dubstep have been from Punjabi backgrounds: notably Kromestar, V.I.V.E.K. and brothers Sukh Knight and Squarewave.And perhaps most successful of all is Pahuldip Singh Sandhu from Newham, aka Steel Banglez. SB first made his mark in grime, and has effortlessly adapted to Read more ...