drugs
Iggy and The Stooges, Royal Festival HallFriday, 21 June 2013
Having witnessed Neil Young’s shambolic O2 concert on Monday – Young treating the occasional venture into his back catalogue with listless contempt whilst serving up multiple banalities from his recent albums – I considered skipping seeing more... Read more... |
The Orb Exclusive: Thomas Fehlmann DJ mix and Alex Paterson interviewWednesday, 12 June 2013
If anyone in British music still deserves that rinsed-to-death term "maverick" it is Battersea-born "Dr" Alex Paterson. From roadie for postpunk industrialists Killing Joke in the early Eighties, he went on to work as an A&R then - originally... Read more... |
Gimme the LootWednesday, 01 May 2013
It’s the sort of New York summer week where the sidewalk melts. But in writer-director Adam Leon’s SXSW Grand Jury prize-winning cool breeze of a debut, the mood stays amiably balmy. It’s the tale of teenage Bronx graffiti artists Malcolm (Ty... Read more... |
Mayerling, The Royal Ballet/ Le Jeune Homme et La Mort, English National BalletSunday, 21 April 2013
The acting tradition is refined in British ballet to a height not matched anywhere else in the world - distilled in Frederick Ashton’s ballets, expanded in Kenneth MacMillan’s. This repertoire has produced a stream of exceptional dance actors over... Read more... |
Nile Rodgers: The Hitmaker, BBC FourSaturday, 30 March 2013
It was one of those entirely unverifiable "facts" that music documentaries increasingly prefer over genuine insight: early on in this serviceable but routine overview of a truly stellar talent, we were told that Nile Rodgers’s guitar has “played on... Read more... |
The Dark Side of the Moon: The Dark Side of the RainbowWednesday, 27 February 2013
Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour once commented that whoever had the idea of synchronizing the 1939 Hollywood classic The Wizard of Oz (with the sound turned down) to his own band’s The Dark Side of the Moon was “some guy with too much time on his hands... Read more... |
Montgomery Clift: The Right ProfileMonday, 04 February 2013
Both on screen and off, Montgomery Clift was sensitive, hesitant, introspective, self-destructive and often tortured. A personality that expressed itself on film as if afraid of what the camera would reveal. There were at least three faces of Clift... Read more... |
DVD: Keep the Lights OnFriday, 25 January 2013
Director Ira Sach's autobiographical tale of Erick and Paul's 10-year relationship shows the passion and destruction that can occur in any relationship. Here, we follow the decade of ups and downs that happen between documentary filmmaker Erik (... Read more... |
CD of the Year: Mark Lanegan - Blues FuneralWednesday, 02 January 2013
Quite reasonably, many of 2012’s year-end reviews focused on the triple celebrations of the Jubilee, Olympics, and Royal pregnancy. For many, the year was quite different. In February, on Blues Funeral, Mark Lanegan’s end-of-the-world vocals... Read more... |
Lives in Music #4: The Book of Drugs by Mike DoughtyFriday, 21 December 2012
Such is the warts and all nature of the rock star biography that something as personal as the addiction memoir has become almost passé. Lucky then that Mike Doughty – one-time frontman of cult 90s alt-rockers Soul Coughing turned eclectic solo... Read more... |
CD of the Year: Flying Lotus - Until the Quiet ComesThursday, 20 December 2012
End of year lists are, of course, wildly arbitrary – based on what raddled writers can scrape from their memory-barrels come deadline day, with half an eye on what we think our colleagues are going to pick so our choices will end up in aggregated... Read more... |
Hit So HardFriday, 16 November 2012
If the subtitle - The Life and Near Death Story of Patty Schemel - didn't make it clear enough, Hit So Hard was never going to be your average "rockumentary". At about eight minutes in, before the titular drummer properly establishes us in the 1990s... Read more... |
