Brighton
DVD: Pink String and Sealing WaxTuesday, 26 April 2016
Although the Ealing Studios’ melodrama Pink String and Sealing Wax was set in the 1880s and based on a play first performed in 1943, the film hit cinemas in late 1945 when World War II was barely over. The war saw a fundamental shift in the role of... Read more... |
CD: The Fiction Aisle - Heart Map RubricThursday, 07 January 2016
This album is a gorgeous New Year surprise. Much of it is a delicious investigation of old-fashioned pre-rock songwriting, but done from the heart rather than for kitsch kicks. Sometimes this means it wanders into easy listening which, after all,... Read more... |
Absolutely Me, Caro Emerald, Brighton CentreSunday, 06 December 2015
Caro Emerald first appears, spotlit, in one of the aisles of the Brighton Centre’s eastern balcony. Clad in a pleated knee-length black skirt and an eye-jarring yellow and red shirt that brings to mind Russian expressionist art, she kicks things off... Read more... |
Carleen Anderson: A Tribute to Sarah Vaughan, Theatre Royal, BrightonSunday, 24 May 2015
Carleen Anderson’s range of vocal scales and styles is matchless in contemporary pop. Where she aims those enviable resources is the only issue anyone could have with her, a matter of taste she’ll eventually make irrelevant tonight with a flood of... Read more... |
Benjamin Clementine, Theatre Royal, BrightonFriday, 22 May 2015
Benjamin Clementine’s idea of repartee with the audience is producing a clementine orange and smiling shyly. Clad in his trademark greatcoat-over-naked chest, with bare feet and outrageous pompadour hair, he sits at a spotlit grand piano and... Read more... |
Cat's Eyes live score for The Duke of Burgundy, Brighton DomeFriday, 22 May 2015
There’s an extraordinary moment, in Peter Strickland’s deeply sensual, desperately funny and feverishly powerful S&M love story, when a camera travels slowly into the darkness between a woman’s thighs. It’s an extraordinary moment in the... Read more... |
The Joey Arias Experience, Theatre Royal, BrightonThursday, 21 May 2015
Brighton whooped as if she had never seen risqué entertainment last night, as cabaret veteran Joey Arias brought his Billie Holiday-meets-bawdy-standup show to the Brighton Festival. Able to switch between sincere tribute and brilliantly,... Read more... |
Rachel Kneebone, Brighton FestivalSaturday, 16 May 2015
In an oft quoted moment of self-deprecation, WH Auden once described his own face as looking like “a wedding cake left out in the rain”. But the poet might have thought twice if confronted with the Porcelain confections of Rachel Kneebone. The... Read more... |
Kate Tempest, George the Poet, Brighton Corn ExchangeFriday, 15 May 2015
Kate Tempest's long blonde-brown hair flailed as she prowled the stage, red-faced from exertion, adhering not a jot to the media’s tick-boxes for femininity. She is smaller, by far, than her backing band, dressed down in baggy sweatshirt and jeans.... Read more... |
The Beautiful Cosmos of Ivor Cutler, Theatre Royal, BrightonThursday, 14 May 2015
The author of such inimitably evocative melancholia as “If All The Cornflakes” and the many episodes of “Life In A Scotch Sitting Room”, Scottish poet and songwriter Ivor Cutler had a stellar cult following for many decades until his death in 2006.... Read more... |
GoGo Penguin, Corn Exchange, BrightonTuesday, 12 May 2015
It’s a shock to see the Corn Exchange’s hundreds of seats sold out for a jazz piano trio. When I first heard GoGo Penguin two winters ago, it was in an East London basement, where new recruit Nick Blacka’s thunderous double-bass was inspiring a few... Read more... |
Nathan Coley, BrightonThursday, 07 May 2015
Thanks to its international festival and a thriving catalogue of fringe events, May brings a great deal of noise to Brighton. Putting artwork into this saturated landscape can never be easy. But Nathan Coley has managed to inject some critical... Read more... |
