1980s
Blu-ray: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2Friday, 07 March 2025
Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) was uniquely disturbing, with its monster Leatherface’s first primal eruption to hang a victim on a meat-hook rivalling Psycho’s murders for shock and fright. It was only as the bludgeoning effect... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Drugstore CowboyTuesday, 25 February 2025
Rehab people will tell you there are three stages to drug abuse: fun; fun with problems; problems. There’s also a fourth phase, where there aren't any problems, because you’re dead.Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy maps out the territory between... Read more... |
Donald Rodney: Visceral Canker, Whitechapel Gallery review - absence made powerfully presentSaturday, 22 February 2025
Donald Rodney’s most moving work is a photograph titled In the House of My Father, 1997 (main picture). Nestling in the palm of his hand is a fragile dwelling whose flimsy walls are held together by pins. This tiny model is made from pieces of the... Read more... |
Cyndi Lauper, OVO Hydro, Glasgow review - still having chaotic fun after all these yearsMonday, 10 February 2025
Cyndi Lauper was preceded onstage by a brief video that zipped through her career, which she drily declared was just in case someone was at the gig by mistake. It’s tempting to wonder what an unexpected visitor might have made of this farewell tour... Read more... |
theartsdesk on Vinyl 88: Violent Femmes, Ringo Starr, ARXX, Dexter Gordon, Black Star, Dennis Bovell and moreTuesday, 28 January 2025
VINYL OF THE MONTHBuñuel Mansuetude (Skin Graft/Overdrive)This is a balls-out punk rock’n’roll mess, grunge that’s eaten the hash-cake then swigged a pint of Bourbon at high speed. Buñuel is Eugene S Robinson of San Francisco noiseniks Oxbow,... Read more... |
Album: Gary Kemp - This DestinationMonday, 27 January 2025
If I’d listened to this blind, I would have absolutely no idea who it was by. This isn’t the voice I remember on those Spandau backing tracks. In fact, it’s a sound straight from mid-80s soft rock. If that makes you feel queasy, step away now.... Read more... |
Lockerbie: A Search for Truth, Sky Atlantic review - Colin Firth stars in gruelling dramatisation of the 1988 terror attackFriday, 03 January 2025
The destruction of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie on 21 December 1988 was one of the ghastliest events in what would become known as the War on Terror, and 36 years later it’s still shrouded in mystery and ambiguity.Lockerbie: A Search for Truth... Read more... |
Best of 2024: Music Reissues WeeklySunday, 29 December 2024
A reissue can be an aide-mémoire, a reminder that a record which has been off the radar for a while needs revisiting, that it deserves fresh attention.In that spirit, this column has looked at straight vinyl reissues of albums of varying styles,... Read more... |
A Midsummer Night's Dream, RSC, Barbican review - visually ravishing with an undercurrent of violenceWednesday, 11 December 2024
Hermia is a headbutting punk with a tartan fetish, Oberon looks like Adam Ant and Lysander appears to have stumbled out of a Madness video. Yet Eleanor Rhode’s exuberant A Midsummer Night’s Dream – which has transferred from a triumphant run at... Read more... |
Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet, Tate Modern review - an exhaustive and exhausting showMonday, 02 December 2024
Last month a portrait of Alan Turing by AI robot AI-Da sold at Sotheby’s for $1.08 million – proof that, in some people’s eyes, artificial intelligence can produce paintings worth as much as those made by human hands.Depending on your view of AI,... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Magazine - Real Life, Secondhand Daylight, The Correct Use of SoapSunday, 17 November 2024
“Let's walk down memory lane the Magazine way. Let's regurgitate fifth-rate Low [the David Bowie album] period pieces. Let's plonk plonk plonk with ponderous sub-Pink Floydery. Let's do the wallpaper waltz. This is not pushing back the barriers. It'... Read more... |
How To Survive Your Mother, King's Head Theatre review - mummy issues drive autobiographical dramedyThursday, 31 October 2024
It is unsurprising to learn in the post-show Q&A that each audience receives Jonathan Maitland’s new play based on his 2006 memoir differently. My house laughed a lot (me especially) but some see the tragic overwhelming the comic, and the laughs... Read more... |
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