drugs
Adam Sweeting
Originally there was never any plan to take Top Boy into a second series, but its arrival in autumn 2011 provoked such acclaim and enthusiasm (mixed with a bit of useful controversy) that Channel 4 could hardly help themselves from recommissioning it. It has partly been a phenomenon driven by social media, where fans have persistently discussed the show and demanded another series over the intervening two years.The upshot was that writer and Hackney resident Ronan Bennett went back to his research and his word processor, and next week we'll see what happens next to Sully (Kane Robinson) and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Stacey Dooley is a chirpy media personality from Luton who first created TV ripples in 2008 on a BBC Three show called Blood, Sweat and T-Shirts. She made an impression then as a high street fashion fan who bridled at the Third World labour involved in much cheap garment production.So far, so Wikipedia - I’d never heard of her and was nonplussed when she popped up like a ditsy, toothy holiday rep fronting a travelogue programme investigating Peru’s ascension to the forefront of global cocaine production. This hour-long show was the first of three Stacey Dooley Investigates specials about the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“How much risk are you willing to take when the only benefit is pleasure?” asks toxicologist Dr John Ramsey, as if pleasure in itself were not worth risking much for. He has a collection of over 29,000 psychoactive drugs but doesn’t seem to have much fun with them. He pulls them out of their little drawers, prods them and tells us how in the old days he and his toxicologist chums would have a celebratory drink when a new drug hit the market. Nowadays an avalanche of them is upon us. The message throughout Legally High is that Britain is being swamped by new drugs but every time the government Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In the late Eighties one of the most sonically unhinged bands of all time came together in East London. Terminal Cheesecake caused few commercial waves but gathered a devoted coterie of fans for their unholy racket at pummelling concerts. Their sound was initially crunching riff-rock smeared with head-frying psychedelia and deranged electronic effects but throughout a career of five albums – Johnny Town-Mouse (1988), VCL (1989), Angels in Pigtails (1990), Pearlesque Kings of the Jewmost (1992) and King of All the Spaceheads (1994) – they gradually drifted into monstrous exercises in marijuana Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Based on Jens Lapidus's novel Snabba Cash (great title, even if it is meaningless to English-speakers), Easy Money is yet further evidence of the allure of the Scandi way of looking at the world. It's ostensibly a crime thriller, featuring healthy doses of violence and drug-dealing, but equally it's an examination of class warfare, divided loyalties and racial tension. It all adds up to a portrait of Stockholm and Swedish society which blows open comfortable assumptions about Scandinavia being some kind of benign social paradise.It opens at the gallop with a nifty jailbreak sequence, as Jorge Read more ...
garth.cartwright
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 veteran American rockers. But one should never pass on a chance to see The Stooges and, as their last London concert was in 2010 (beyond supporting Soundgarden in Hyde Park one sodden Friday last summer – what kind of insult is that where The Stooges open for Soundgarden?), the atmosphere before their Meltdown performance was one of huge expectation. Read more ...
joe.muggs
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 collaborating with The KLF's Jimmy Cauty - formed The Orb in the heat of the acid house explosion to bring the world "ambient house". Inexplicably the loose collective, which has featured Berlin producer Thomas Fehlmann as a key member, became huge, their dub basslines and loony-tunes samples somehow encapsulating the psychedelic oddness of the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
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 Hickson) and Sofia (Tashiana Washington) who, disrespected at every turn by a tougher graffiti gang, decide to tag a legendarily impregnable, daffy holy grail: the sign that pops up at Mets baseball games when a home run’s scored. All that stands between them and graffiti immortality, Malcolm is convinced, is the $500 his contact inside the stadium Read more ...
Ismene Brown
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 the decades, some home-reared, others drawn from abroad like moths to flames by the chance to dance ballets where no archetypes can be found, only real people in situations of such prescribed individuality that the performers themselves can become their most individual.There isn’t a more demanding role than Crown Prince Rudolf in Mayerling, a ballet Read more ...
graeme.thomson
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 two billion dollars' worth of hits”. Who really knows? Who actually cares? You don’t measure the sheer joy of Chic’s “Good Times” or Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” by counting the cash or doing the math. You simply use your ears.As Johnny Marr pointed out, Rodgers is responsible for countless records “you’d have to be made out of stone not to be Read more ...
caspar.gomez
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”. The hippy culture of the Seventies contained many who fitted that description, as well as multiple baggies of what they then called “pot” to help. As the video age dawned, poring over Dorothy and Toto’s adventures soundtracked by Floyd’s prog-angst classic became almost a rite of passage for advanced stoners.By the mid-Eighties I was in my late Read more ...
ronald.bergan
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. The early public one of the dark, romantic, handsome star of the fan magazines; the face of extraordinary beauty marred after a car accident in 1956, and the private face of drink, drugs and a series of unloving homosexual encounters. Although the accident itself had not really disfigured him too seriously, it seems to have scarred his character Read more ...