1990s
Sarah Kent
The title of Joy Gregory’s Whitechapel exhibition is inspired by a proverb her mother used to quote – “you catch more flies with honey than vinegar” – and her aim is to seduce rather than harangue the viewer.
It’s a good stratagem, especially if you are pointing to things your audience may prefer not to consider. And Gregory’s images can be beautiful (the seduction); but in order to avoid a diatribe, she often approaches her subject obliquely and quietens her voice to a whisper, requiring the viewer to pay close attention and hone in on the message.
If most photographers use the Read more ...
Robert Beale
Am I dreaming? Did I really see a living composer of contemporary music given a prolonged standing ovation for conducting his own works in the Bridgewater Hall, twice over?We all know the difference between polite applause for new music and real enthusiasm. And John Adams seems to have a following who show the real thing – of a variety of age groups, too. The California-based creator began his own festival with the Hallé on Thursday night with two pieces which were part of the celebration of the opening of the hall 29 years ago, one of them – Slonimsky’s Earbox – then receiving its world Read more ...
James Saynor
People sometimes go to the movies for the violence and maybe even for the sex. Until recently they didn’t particularly buy a ticket for the bad language, but lately, British cinema has been making this a selling point. In Wicked Little Letters (2023), profanity-laced correspondence circulated among buttoned-up Brits; now we have I Swear, based on the life of John Davidson, who almost single-handedly taught Britain about the perils and inspirations of those with Tourette syndrome (or “Tourette’s”).Where Wicked Little Letters tried to elicit a tee-hee response to a rather boring chain of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Pop Will Eat Itself deserve to be more celebrated. The Stourbridge outfit were one of the first 1980s bands to realise the potential of smashing punky indie-rockin’ into hip hop and electronic dance.They had hits, many great songs, and covered the same territory that later gave The Prodigy mega-success (Delete Everything contains a rackety reimagining of the two groups' 1994 collaboration, "Their Law"). Unfortunately, a combination of their major label stabbing them in the back, and being perceived by some critics as cartoonishly adolescent, faded them out in the mid-Nineties. But they Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Although they haven’t had a hit single in almost 20 years, Faithless remain a potent commercial force, continuing to rack up festival headline sets and big-selling albums. Longterm member Maxi Jazz left the band in 2016 but Champion Sound is the first album by remaining duo Rollo and Sister Bliss since his death in 2022. It is overlong at more than 75 minutes, but its four distinct sections pass in a warm MDMA throb.The quartet of song-suites are each themed. The first, entitled Forever Free, is introduced by Jazz prior to three tracks of pulsing head-nod. “In Your Own Groove”, with its Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
If you saw it blind, with no information about its origins, Eight Postcards from Utopia might look like 70 minutes of outtakes from lost Fast Show recordings, the bits where they lampooned the TV they had watched on foreign holidays and the spoof ads they concocted.There are no commercials for Cheezy Peaz in this documentary, a mad montage of Romanian commercials from the 1990s, after the socialist regime and its autocratic leader had been despatched, but there are ads for almost every other category of goods you can think of, from high finance to laxatives. The fun is watching what the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
What a delight it is to see the director, the star, even the marketing manager these days FFS, get out of the way and let a really strong story stand on its own two feet. Like a late one at the Brixton Academy itself, this is a helluva night out.After a transgressive, life changing trip to London from school in Scotland to see Chuck Berry at The Rainbow, Simon Parkes wanted to be a rock’n’roll star. He was soon spitting out the silver spoon (but he never lost the easy charm and ironclad self-confidence that clings to the privately educated, a trait he cheerfully calls upon as and when) and Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Now 45 years in the past, its dazzling star gone a decade or so, The Long Good Friday is a monument of British cinema. Its extraordinary locations, caught just before London’s Docklands were transformed forever, speaks to a past world. But the wheeler-dealer, Harold Shand, played by Bob Hoskins at the peak of his powers, left many ancestors, from his near contemporary, Arthur Daley, to a few who have ascended to the highest Offices of State.One such, conjured into life by Robin Hawdon in the early 90s, is Arthur Bullhead (of course, Arthur Bullhead) owner of The Bunty, moored on the Thames Read more ...
Sarah Kent
When in the 1990s, Jenny Saville’s peers shunned painting in favour of alternative media such as photography, video and installations, the artist stuck to her guns and, unapologetically, worked on canvases as large as seven feet tall. While still a student at Glasgow School of Art, she painted Propped, 1992, one of the most challenging and memorable female nudes in the history of art (pictured below right). This enormous painting confronts you on entry to her retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery, and it is still a knock out. Perching awkwardly on a tiny pedestal is a Read more ...
Bonnie Raitt, Brighton Dome review - a top night with a characterful, very American blues rock queen
Thomas H. Green
If you walked into a bar in the US, say in one of the southern states, and Bonnie Raitt and her band were playing, you’d have the best night of your life. They are the kind of purely American rhythm’n’blues experience, tempered with FM radio balladry, that somehow works best, and perhaps only, on those endless highways and dusty plains.Tonight she imports that spirit – the best of America at a time when the world is seeing the worst of it – to a 200-year-old hall full of septuagenarians on the British south coast.Raitt plays for an hour-and-a-half and has real presence, a gregarious chatty Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Hamad Butt studied at Goldsmiths College at the same time as YBAs (Young British Artists) like Damien Hirst and Gillian Wearing; but whereas they would become household names so their work is now familiar, he disappeared from view. It makes his Whitechapel retrospective feel like a rediscovery – incredibly fresh and immediate.Stepping into the main gallery, you are infused with a supreme sense of calm. Hanging from the ceiling is a Newton’s cradle – 18 glass orbs suspended a few inches apart on fine wires (main picture). Glowing golden yellow, these fragile vessels are serenely beautiful. Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
While the Gallagher brothers scrabble around in the dirt for their rich pickings, an altogether more dignified experience is on offer from Sheffield. More is Pulp’s first album for 24 years, which is a sobering fact for those of us who still remember the first time. Thankfully, this isn’t a reprisal of past glories but a vibrant and moving work of some significance. They’ve ripened delightfully and are living proof that age does not diminish creativity or relevance.The title of the first single had me worried. While slightly dreading a return to having left an important part of Read more ...