Reviews
Mark Kidel
Two men trade licks: one of them delves into the heart of the blues, a potent dose of the boogie, the medicinal music of the Mississipi Delta. The other with a mournful voice and violin draws on the equally stripped-down and drone-inflected roots of Southern Italian tradition. The Italian also plays a range of frame drums with phenomenal energy and technical prowess. Mixing the rocking and rolling lilt of John Lee Lee Hooker with the frenetic pulse of pizzica music from Italy might seem an unlikely combination, but the result of collaboration based on a shared passion for the music of Read more ...
Tim Cumming
As The Rolling Stones – sans a much-missed Charlie Watts – generate old fashioned, 20th-century rock'n'roll excitement in the stadiums of north America this autumn, their final great studio album, 1981’s Tattoo You, returns to the new releases shelf after 40 years. It's available in a range of editions, from the standard single remastered album through a deluxe double set that comes with a disc of “Lost and Found” outtakes, to a “super-deluxe” four-disc boxed set encompassing a hardback book and the band’s live performance from the second of two dates at Wembley, on 26 July 1982.The Wembley Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
As a teenager in 1967, I asked for a Mary Quant make-up box for Christmas and my parents reluctantly complied. It was so thrilling to hold that plastic white box with the black daisy in the middle and the big mirror in the lid and to be able, at last, to experiment endlessly with the eye-shadows, the pearly face-lighter, the Starkers foundation (“Forget about colouring, go for shaping” said the instructions, excitingly).I already had her white zip-front PVC mac with a black collar and cuffs, bought from Fenwick or Selfridges, slightly too long but easy to chop off at the hem, and, like Read more ...
aleks.sierz
I’ve lived in Brixton, south London, for about 40 years now, so any play that looks at the gentrification of the area is, for me, definitely a must. Like many other places in the metropolis, the nature of the urban landscape has changed both due to gradual factors — such as migration — and spectacular events — like the Brixton riots of 1981 and 1985. Archie Maddocks’s new play, A Place for We, which is produced by Talawa Theatre Company and the Park Theatre, comes to the stage after being shortlisted for, although not winning, the Bruntwood Prize and the Alfred Fagon Award. Its cast is led by Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Two tribes, both alike in dignity in fair Vanara, trade goods and insults in a post-apocalyptic world in which fire is known to The Kogallisk but not to The Pana. When The Oroznah, a shaman respected by both feuding factions, foretells a long winter to come, The Pana must do all they can to steal the fire from The Kogallisk in order to survive the long nights.But the two bright young heirs have other ideas – Mohr, the sensitive Pana warrior, catching the eye of Ayla, the idealistic Kogallisk princess, and another way to salvation emerges.With a tour planned for 2022 and a buzz generated Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Conceived on a global scale to depict the enormity of an alien menace from outer space, Apple's new series Invasion has grand ambitions, but crash-lands like a pile of space junk. After a few hours of this, waiting for something to happen, you’ll be yearning for a trawl through Netflix or Walter Presents.Created by Simon Kinberg and Davis Weil, with a reported budget of $200m, Invasion seeks to depict the consequences of its unearthly incursion by showing the varying fates of a contrasting group of characters. In Afghanistan, we hook up with a squad of US soldiers led by bullish, rifle-waving Read more ...
David Nice
Tom Rakewell Esquire, the Glyndebourne edition generally known as “the Hockney Rake” though it is very much director John Cox’s too, is 46 years old. The great Bernard Haitink, who conducted the first airing in 1975 at a time when Stravinsky's extraordinary score was hardly the repertoire staple this production has helped it become, has just left us, but it’s poignant that one of his disciples, Kerem Hasan, is in charge of the tour revival. With young singers at the top of their game, musical and dramatic tradition is very much alive and firing, however sophisticatedly, on all cylinders. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Channel 5’ s decision to remake James Herriot’s much-loved Yorkshire vet stories was an inspired one, and this second series has effortlessly carried on the mood of gentle observation, nostalgia and slapstick comedy amid scintillating Yorkshire Dales scenery. A teeming cast of dogs, cats, horses, cows and chickens is permanently on call to provide fuel for the adventures of Herriot and the Farnon veterinary dynasty.Much of the time, the second series has merely rung a few changes on the formula perfected last time around, but fans of the show (and of Herriot’s original books) won’t mind. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Forty five minutes into their set Field Music play “A House is Not a Home”, from their 2006 second album Tones of Town. An hour in, “Them That do Nothing” from 2010’s Measure is aired. They end with “Orion From the Street”, the opening track from their recent Flat White Moon album.Afterwards, leaving the venue and pitching into the assault of Friday night Camden, its shouters and stumblers, a voice is heard above the din saying the show was a great introduction to Field Music as they’d played what amounted to a greatest hits set. Yes, but more was going on.Flat White Moon explicitly draws Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
“What a lovely sound that was!” declared Music Director Thomas Søndergård, bounding onto the podium of the Usher Hall. He was referring, of course, to the warm applause greeting the Royal Scottish National Orchestra on its first full outing in front of an Edinburgh audience in nigh on 18 months. Readers in England might be faintly surprised that many weeks after a largely unmasked Prom season in London, Scottish audiences are only now creeping back into their familiar spaces, and in the case of the Usher, masks are still compulsory, with conspicuous social distancing reducing the capacity of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Over 1974 to 1978 Graham Collier issued five albums on his own imprint Mosaic. There was another in 1985 and eight releases on Mosaic by other musicians, but for its first four years the imprint was dominated by the British jazz composer, bassist and bandleader’s own work. In the same period, three books Collier had written came out. There was Jazz – A Students' and Teachers' Guide, published by Cambridge University Press, Compositional Devices, published by America’s Berklee College and Cleo and John, about Laine and Dankworth. Collier was busy.He had graduated from Berklee in 1963 and went Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Jaws was the Moby Dick of late 20th century capitalism, a fantasy about fear and the unknown for a society that had rarely felt more secure and powerful. Despite the tremors caused by the Watergate scandal and the loss of the Vietnam war, the US would be the wealthiest country in the world for the next three decades and in Jaws Steven Spielberg announced himself as its chief mythmaker.This shark-tooth-sharp comedy, which has swum relatively seamlessly down to the West End from the 2019 Edinburgh Festival, is an enjoyable three-hander about the near-disasters behind the scenes in the film’s Read more ...