Brighton Festival
Thomas H. Green
There is a sequence in theatrical circus troupe Casus’ new production, Driftwood, where three of the five members sit, each between the legs of another, in a row, facing the front of the stage. They look as if they’re about to do the rowing dance people in the Eighties used to do to the Gap Band’s “Oops Upside Your Head” at suburban discos. That is not what they do. Instead the front one rolls back onto the one behind, who in turn rolls back onto the one behind and, before you know it, the three off them have formed a human totem pole. It’s one of those things where your eyes can’t quite Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
The main room of the Duke of York’s is humming. Brighton’s cinema-goers and music-lovers have turned out in their droves to catch Wrangler (an electronic outfit made up of Cabaret Voltaire’s Stephen Mallinder, Tuung’s Phil Winter, and producer Benge) and art-pop-singer-cum-soundtrack-composer Mica Levi “subvert boring live soundtracks” in their attempts to recreate two "lost films": The Tourist and The Colour of Chips.Colm McAuliffe, Creative Producer of The Unfilmables project, describes The Tourist as “depraved, sexy, and debauched”. Set in an underground alien sex cult, the script was, at Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The two main commands coming from the stage at this evening's Brighton Festival event are “Everybody jump, jump” and “Put your hands in the air and go side-to-side”. The crowd are mostly under 30 and emanate dancing energy from the moment the doors open, as DJ Molotov warms up. The set-up is basic, a DJ and some mics, but that’s as it should be for, on one level, this evening takes hip hop back to its Bronx block party origins, away from all the bling nonsense that’s taken it over. On another level, it’s a very British affair.High Focus, a Brighton record label founded in 2010, are Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The capacity crowd at the Brighton Dome occasionally bursts into noisy life, whooping, whistling, roaring with indignation as poet and Brighton Festival 2017 Guest Director Kate Tempest performs her album of last autumn, Let Them Eat Chaos. During the raging, coruscating, vitally pertinent “Europe is Lost” a loud sense of audience outrage explodes as she spits the incendiary lines, “Caught sniffing lines off a prostitute’s prosthetic tits/Now he’s back to the House of Lords with slapped wrists/They abduct kids and fuck the heads of dead pigs/But him in a hoodie with a couple of spliffs/Jail Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There are two types of family-friendly entertainment; the kind you’d happily watch a bit of whether you have small children in tow or not (The Simpsons, The Clangers, Laurel & Hardy, etc), and those where you grit your teeth, hold your nose, and wither a little inside for the sake of attendant little ones (Tinkerbell and the Pirate Fairy, The Tweenies, Postman flippin’ Pat, etc). Attending this show, I had no idea which side of the fence it would fall. It says “Age 3+” in the programme but, by the same token, has received plaudits from serious broadsheet media. Turns out it’s a gem. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Few Brightonians now set off in boats from what was formerly the fishing village of Brighthelmstone. Not many of us even get as far as the Pier. Brighton Festival director Kate Tempest’s mission to reach the city’s far-flung corners was therefore well-served by Five Short Blasts: Shoreham, in which Australian artists Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey turned a boat into a sound installation built from the culture and ambience of Shoreham-by-Sea, which would cast off into the English Channel. Choosing Shoreham, a separate and very different town and East Sussex’s main fishing harbour, enriched Read more ...
Nick Hasted
New Orleans musicians are diplomats as well these days. The Crescent City’s greatest son, Louis Armstrong, once made a live album, Ambassador Satch, in which, backed by the State Department, he toured post-war Europe as the finest the USA had to offer. His nation’s apartheid reality soon made him threaten to withdraw this national service, and he became similarly bitter towards a hometown as racist as anywhere in America. Tonight, the Hot 8 Brass Band declare themselves from “a city built on nothing but music and culture”. But the scarring high waterline left by Hurricane Katrina (known Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There is a moment in Under The Skin when it’s finally revealed what happens to the men Scarlett Johannsson’s deadpan alien has been seducing and bringing back to her various crash pads. In the strange gloop-scape these unfortunate individuals find themselves in a loud, sense-stabbing cinematic shock is delivered, followed by minutes of the screen taken over by shots of slow, floating beauty. During this sequence the London Sinfonietta, conducted by Mica Levi, who wrote the film’s score, comes into its own, giving the key moment a seismic physical punch.Classically trained to a high level, Read more ...
David Nice
Anyone who missed the opening Southbank concerts of the Chinike! Orchestra, figurehead of a foundation which aims to give much-needed help to young Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) classical musicians, could and now can (on YouTube) catch snippets of the players in action on the splendid documentary about young cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason. There's no doubt at all that Kanneh-Mason, BBC Young Musician 2016, who reprised his already celebrated interpretation of Haydn's C major Cello Concerto in All Saints Hove on Saturday night to launch the Brighton Festival, is the real deal, and so are the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
For The Birds is art as event, described in the Brighton Festival programme as “an immersive night-time adventure into a wild avian landscape”. It takes place throughout the Festival and, judging from its opening weekend, looks likely to prove very popular. To attend, you take a bus from one of two spots in Brighton (one central, one outlying) and are shipped to a “secret woodland location”, then asked to follow lights strung overhead on a mile long trek during which a wide selection of pieces boggle the eye, ear and mind.The installation artist-cum-landscape architect Jony Easterby has made Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Shirley Collins was one of the Sixties British folk music revival’s central figures. Having built a reputation as a highly rated innovator and interpreter during the course of the decade (initially with her lover/partner, American folklorist Alan Lomax), she released her Anthems in Eden album in 1969, a key text for all that followed in folk and folk-rock. She went onto co-found the Albion Country Band and the Etchingham Steam Band in the Seventies but, by the end of the decade had retired from music, due to vocal dysfunction caused by the stress of her second husband, Fairport Convention/ Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Eddie Otchere is best known for the plethora of photographs he’s taken of artists from hip hop’s golden age, circa the late-Eighties/early-Nineties. He’s shot everyone from icons such as Jay-Z and Biggie Smalls, to the late Aaliyah to a startling series of images of Wu Tang Clan. Born and raised in London, he was also very much involved in documenting the birth of British bass culture on the drum & bass scene, most especially the seminal Metalheadz night at the Blue Note. More recently, Otchere spent time as an Assistant Curator at the National Portrait Gallery and in 2007 was partly Read more ...