1980s
Thomas H. Green
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, accompanied by a trio of Italian musicians. Across this two-record set, which comes on gatefold double on vinyl that looks like a neon green alien has thrown up breakfast, the quartet are having a ball. Robinson leads the charge, his shrieking vocals whirlpooling around a caterwauling riff assault that’s psychedelicized in the manner of bands such as Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
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.Apparently Gary, like the rest of us, has been having a bit of a rough time. The pandemic, doomscrolling the news, the sudden realisation he hadn’t properly mourned his parents – all of this built up to an episode of anxiety and self-doubt. You’d expect the man that written some of the most popular pop songs of all time (selling more than 25 million Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
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 has been adapted from the book The Lockerbie Bombing: A Father’s Search for Justice, by Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph, and leads the viewer through Swire’s tortuous quest to winkle out the real facts behind the bombing which killed his daughter Flora, along with 258 other passengers and crew as well as 11 people on the ground.The depiction of the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
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, from various periods; from the well-known to those which attracted barely any consideration when they first surfaced. In the latter category, there is the reissue of Horizoning by the Canadian folk-inclined singer-songwriter Stefan Gnyś whose sole album had, until 2024, never advanced beyond the 12 two-sided acetate discs which were specially cut in Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
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 Stratford-Upon-Avon – is no straightforward Eighties tribute, but a psychedelic mashup that’s as ravishing as it’s gritty.Lucy Osborne’s versatile design whisks us from the sinister grandeur of the opening – in which a sun resembling a military flag hangs over the stage to remind us that Theseus has wooed Hippolyta by force – to the hallucinogenic Read more ...
Sarah Kent
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, this can either be a very exciting or deeply depressing idea; whichever way you lean, it makes Tate Modern’s exhibition of work by the pioneers of machine art extremely timely.This exhaustive (and exhausting) show starts in the 1950s with Japanese artist Atsuko Tanaka. In response to the neon signs brightening up Osaka’s streets in the aftermath of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“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's frighteningly bland conservatism.”So said Garry Bushell in his March 1979 Sounds review of Magazine’s second album Secondhand Daylight. He went on. “'Silly Thing' [the single by the rump Sex Pistols] is one hundred times more exciting. 'Unconventional People' [the then-recent Royal Rasses single] is one hundred times more relaxing. [Sham 69’s] ' Read more ...
How To Survive Your Mother, King's Head Theatre review - mummy issues drive autobiographical dramedy
Gary Naylor
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 dry up. When it comes to humour, as is the case with mothers, it’s each to their own.It’s an unusual production right from the off when the playwright, who is also a main character, is also acting himself too – but not entirely, as there’s a pre-teen and post-teen version of him too, played by different actors. Got all that? When you add his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Delirium has greeted Disney’s eight-part adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s 1988 novel Rivals (part of her Rutshire Chronicles series).Perhaps it’s nostalgia for the previously-unloved Eighties, or maybe it’s because its non-stop conveyor belt of adultery, skulduggery and political incorrectness feels like some kind of liberation from the joyless paranoia of the 2020s. It also has lots of Eighties pop hits to keep it rattling along, from Tears for Fears and Blondie to ZZ Top and Depeche Mode.The rivals of the title are Rupert Campbell-Black, a former Olympic showjumper and now Minister for Sport in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 2022, Spritualized’s Jason Pierce described his musical goal as "trying to find somewhere between Arvo Pärt and The Stooges.” Amongst the most arresting and explicitly Pärt-styled results of this quest to link the minimalist composer with Iggy Pop‘s pre-punk confrontationists was the affecting "Broken Heart," from his band’s 1997 third album Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space.Pierce hasn’t been alone in declaring a fidelity to Pärt. In 2009, former Public Image Ltd bassist Jah Wobble cited Pärt as his choice of Sunday morning music. He was moved to tears while listening. In 2005 Read more ...
David Nice
Most of us have been there: an impasse in a marriage, a bereavement in a dysfunctional family. Leonard Bernstein certainly had when he composed Trouble in Tahiti in 1952, basing the unhappy couple on his own parents and even the incipient problems in his own relationship with Felicia Montealegre (see the superb film Maestro), and 30 years later the sequel, A Quiet Place, when Felicia’s early death from cancer had left him unhappy and guilty.Odd, then, that both works keep us emotionally at arm's length, either by stylisation (the one-acter, with the libretto by Bernstein in verse) or by going Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Like an angry teenager rejecting everything his parents stand for, American artist Mike Kelley embraced everything most despised by the art world – from popular culture to crafts, and occultism to catholicism – to create what he ironically called “blue collar minimalism”. “An adolescent,” he declared, “is a dysfunctional adult and art is a dysfunctional reality”.Noisy, anarchic, silly and disturbing, Kelley’s unruly output makes for uneasy viewing. Despite Tate Modern’s attempts to civilise and rationalise his work, the galleries are filled with the raucous din of loud music and singing plus Read more ...