The Czech New Wave sprouted out of a fertile collaboration between film and fiction. Milan Kundera started out as a lecturer in film, lest we forget; one of his pupils was Miloš Forman. Both flew the communist nest to live and create abroad, which is why their names reverberate down the decades much more than those of the director Jiří Menzel and novelist Bohumil Hrabal, whose collaboration on Closely Watched Trains won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1967. They followed it with the delightful Larks on a String but, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia having put an end to the Prague Read more ...

Googling for academic articles about Britney Spears is one rabbit hole I've managed to avoid falling down thus far, but one imagines there are reams of the things. From demonically driven Disney child star via pigtailed Lolita and sex-droid air hostess to shaven-headed loon lunging aggressively towards her public through the paparazzo's lens, she's provided no end of provocative and iconic images, and stirred up all kinds of problematic issues around post-feminism, celebrity and voyeurism, while remaining an odd non-presence at the centre of it all. Not an obvious provocateur like Madonna or Read more ...

Judging by the ballyhoo London’s Vaccines generated at the beginning of the year, it seemed a dead cert that they’d be pretty spiffy. If not the best thing since sliced bread, then they’d at least be fairly toothsome. Based on this, though – their debut album – it’s impossible to see what the fuss was about. What Did You Expect From The Vaccines? is alright, a bunch of familiar indie building blocks reassembled in a way that neither thrills nor surprises.Of course, there’s nothing wrong with music that reconfigures existing templates. If it sparkles, has verve and panache, and – cut-up Read more ...

Andrea Dunbar’s story was extremely grim when first told in her 1980 play The Arbor (I’m unable to explain why, for a leafy retreat in so English a context - however decimated - the American spelling is used) and it remains so: a medieval catalogue of domestic abuse, alcoholism, racism, stupidity and misery bordering on caricature. Was it really so bad in Bradford in the 1970s? Apparently so. Is it still? I’ve no idea.For that species of ignorance, I’d be accused in many quarters of wilful, southern, middle-class self-protectionism. Yet I’m not so sure. We all have our crosses to bear. Most Read more ...

This impressive debut from the Devon-born Bray teems with allusions to a raft of classic British songwriters, not least Nick Drake and John Martyn, though Bray also claims to have had his synapses jangled by everyone from Led Zeppelin and Nirvana to Crosby Stills & Nash and Joni Mitchell. It's his English Pastoral mode which leads off the disc in the shape of opening track "The River Song" (obviously no possible relation to Drake's "Riverman"), with its wistful acoustic guitar, strings and harmonica. It's followed by the gorgeous "Rise", a rolling elegy to memory, nostalgia and Read more ...

There’s a gorgeous song on this album called “With Love”, on which singer Guy Garvey rhymes “dentures” with “adventures”. And there, in a nutshell, you have Elbow: juxtaposing grubby, prosaic earthbound reality with soaring romance, finding magic in the everyday. And what accentuates this gift of theirs is Garvey’s habit of singing in his native Lancastrian vernacular (why, apart from the Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner, don’t more English singers sound like English singers?); his accent summons up images of mottled northern townscapes and lowering skies, while lyrical flourishes such as the “ Read more ...

Judging a CD by its cover has always proved fairly reliable in my experience, but in this instance it also wouldn’t seem unreasonable. For this young Sao Paulo-born singer-songwriter did all the charmingly whimsical artwork herself and its gentle Surrealism (the featureless face that doubles as the silhouette of a tulip) does reflect the understated quirkiness of the music.It’s easy to think of Brazil as simply the home of samba and bossa nova, but in the past few years there’s been a wealth of intelligent innovative pop and rock of many different shades reaching our shores from this Read more ...

Alan Bleasdale, along with Dennis Potter one of the truly original voices of British television drama, has spent the past decade in silence. His brand of epic narrative, his penchant for letting his characters talk and talk, went out of fashion when along came a generation of younger writers who nicked Yosser Hughes’s catchphrase - “I could do that” – and slipped into his slots. He has returned with this, a sweeping drama replete with all the Bleasdalian virtues: a huge cast of characters, an astute eye for the historical hinterland, and a belief that human decency abides in Read more ...

Let's get the obvious out of the way: yes, this is incredible. Not just the sounds, nor the ambitious staging of Hans Christian Andersen's last story as a ballet, but the fact that, 30 years since they met, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe are still making music that's both relevant and gloriously excessive to a frankly crackerdog mental degree. They've tinkered with classical themes before, of course, from setting “Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat” in 1988's “Left to My Own Devices” to their 2004 live soundtrack to Battleship Potemkin, but this is something else. Piling on romantic themes Read more ...

Cologne label Kompakt has been home to a plethora of very fine electronic dance music over the last decade. They also occasionally develop acts, as in proper bands rather than professorial Teutonic sorts standing behind laptops with intense, funereal expressions, pale-lit by console glow. Los Angeles couple Danny and Tiffany Preston don't look professorial. In the only publicity shots I've seen they traipse through the desert dressed in Arab garb, carrying synthesisers and machine guns. It's a good look and bodes well.Apparently the duo's first bit of kit was a Lebanese Casio with Read more ...

Poor Charlie Fink. First losing Laura Marling to Marcus Mumford, and then, last month, suffering the indignity of having to watch Mumford & Sons win Album of the Year at the Brits. Still, on recent evidence he’s the one with the real talent, and the confidence with which he changes style implies he knows it too. On 2009’s The First Days of Spring Fink had morphed from naive nu-folk into sophisticated Bill Callahan-style acoustica, and now he’s gone all Eighties pop-rock. Unsurprisingly for such a radical change of sound, Last Night on Earth has divided opinion, with the way people feel Read more ...

Kurt Elling’s new one has the potential to push him out of the hermetic world of jazz insiderdom where he has been a big figure now for over a decade. It's produced with the right mixture of restraint and pizzazz by Don Was. Elling has sometimes been seen as the nearest thing to a successor to Frank Sinatra. His inventive ease dancing vocally over the strict metres, his charismatic ability to front a band, not to mention his sharp suits and his love of a killer melody are Sinatraesque.But like his fellow top American jazzers such as Brad Mehldau and Cassandra Wilson – both also in their Read more ...