Manchester
Jasper Rees
This May the Hallé is celebrating Dvořák. The orchestra’s music director Sir Mark Elder has previously mounted a festival of the Czech composer’s work in Chicago, but now brings him home to Manchester. Nature, Life and Love features seven concerts in under three weeks, and will obviously feature an outing for the big symphonies, nos 7, 8 and 9, and the hugely popular cello concerto. But it’s not just about the headlines of Dvořák’s music.Among other sweetmeats – three Overtures, some Slavonic Dances, the Moravian Duets – the programme includes more arcane pleasures: an early-evening look at Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was in August 1968 that Graham Nash, then still a member of The Hollies, took a cab from LAX airport in Los Angeles to Joni Mitchell's house in Laurel Canyon. He was just embarking on a love affair with Joni, but also about to blast off on a different kind of adventure with the two musicians who greeted him at her house, David Crosby and Stephen Stills.When Nash added his high vocal harmony to the other two voices as they sang a new Stills song, "You Don't Have to Cry", it was the first spark of a California soft-rock revolution. Crosby Stills and Nash, later joined by Neil Young, would Read more ...
Matthew Wright
ITV’s Manchester crime series Prey has, like a Premiership football club bought by a billionaire, returned for a new season with the same name but different faces. But these aren’t the shiny young faces of virtue that populate the footballing aristocracy. Prey focuses on compromised officers of the law: righteous protagonists gone to the bad, who lend the plot intriguing shades of grey that match its moral tone with the weather and scenery.Last series it was John Simm’s DC Marcus Farrow, implicated in his wife’s murder; this time prison officer David Murdoch (Philip Glenister) became both Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s been worth the wait. There’s something about the affection Shane Meadows feels for his characters; the street action that doesn’t often (in this opener especially, though that may well change) tip into overt drama; the family elements that could, but don’t quite veer towards the soaps in style (if anything there’s a hint of parody?); and the sense of a period of time lovingly given its special details and intonations, that makes this latest instalment of This Is England feel almost like a reunion with old friends (plus a few sidekicks we haven’t quite got to know yet).The delay in the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Mothmen: Pay Attention!On their 20-minute “Mothman”, Manchester’s The Mothmen took a trip fusing bendy Captain Beefheart-style guitar, dub, insistent percussion and a Krautrock sensibility. The side-long track closed their album Pay Attention!, originally issued in March 1981 by the On-U Sound label. As a sign-off, “Mothman” was undoubtedly arresting but however absorbing it was, this was the sound of history. The workout was recorded by a line-up of The Mothmen which split shortly after it was recorded in May 1980.The band carried on with a reconfigured membership, but Pay Attention! is Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The Fall has always delivered great album titles, and Sub-Lingual Tablet is right up there with the best – Witch Trials, Hex, Caustic, Are You Are Missing Winner… The song titles, too, have a medicated, sub-lingual ring that no other artist could pull off – “Junger Cloth”, anyone? – guaranteed to wipe away all psychiatric waste...Several songs take on the soft-focus Stasi surveillance of mobile social media – the rage and fury of “Facebook Troll” – Smith’s multi-layered vocal stylings, whiplash shrieks and raw blizzard of gleeful hatred are breathtakingly purgative, the song's Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The Whitworth Art Gallery was showered with meteors in a spectacle devised by the artist Cornelia Parker on its reopening weekend – appropriately Valentine’s Day. The £15m project (architects MUMA) has doubled the exhibition spaces, reclaimed the Victorian Grand Hall from offices, added state-of-the-art on-site storage and more space for conservators. Here is public art with sculpture and installations on the building itself, and in the surrounding park – landscape art not only in its park setting but within new gardens, and with the building providing wrap-around scenic views. There Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Martin Hannett & Steve Hopkins: The Invisible GirlsWhile acclaimed for his glacial productions for Joy Division and New Order, Martin Hannett was also a musician in his own right. With bass guitar in hand and alongside composer-keyboard player Steve Hopkins, the duo recorded as The Invisible Girls. Under that name, they provided music for albums by John Cooper-Clarke, ex-Penetration singer Pauline Murray and provided a sonic bed for Nico. They also contributed to Hannett-produced records by Durutti Column and Jilted John.The Invisible Girls celebrates a more under-the-radar Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Due to unfortunate circumstances I am unable to give a star rating to this show; 15 minutes into the second half a cast member collapsed on stage and the performance was cancelled. At the time of posting Ted Robbins (extreme right in the picture below) was recovering in hospital, in a stable condition, and we wish him a speedy recovery.I can of course write about what I did see, and much of it was great fun. Peter Kay's Phoenix Nights is a special live version of the sitcom set in a working men's club (the Phoenix) "just off Junction 7 on the M61" in Bolton (from where Kay hails). It's Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Decamping to Manchester from Philadelphia after a personal crisis seems an unlikely move. But this is what Brian Christinzio – who is BC Camplight – did in 2012. How to Die in the North was recorded in Bredbury, near Stockport.As cross-continental relocations go, Christinzio’s is improbable but – whatever the the demons he was escaping – it has proved a tonic for his music. The first two BC Camplight albums, 2005’s Run, Hide Away and 2007’s Blink of a Nihilist, were good but not remarkable, piano-borne, singer-songwriter efforts that posited Christinzio as a quirky Ben Folds or Sufjan Stevens Read more ...
philip radcliffe
With a bloodthirsty, corpse-devouring plant called Audrey at the centre of events, we can only be in the Little Shop of Horrors. It’s a far cry from Jack and the Beanstalk, but the Royal Exchange is known for providing alternative and, usually, zany seasonal entertainment. And they don’t come any zanier than this, especially under Derek Bond’s zippy direction.One of the longest-running off-Broadway shows, the grisly tale has been hanging around for more than 50 years in one form or another. Written by Howard Ashman, with music by Alan Menken, and based on the Roger Corman film with Charles Read more ...
philip radcliffe
No one is more prescriptive than Tennessee Williams when it comes to stage and set directions. As he got older and wiser he made allowances for directors and actors to have their say. “The making of a play is, finally, a collaborative venture,” he concluded. What he would make of the Royal Exchange’s self-styled “bold adaptation” of his favourite play, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1955, is debatable. A co-production with the Royal & Derngate in Northampton and Northern Stage, there’s nothing “bold” about this Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and, though much trumpeted in pre-publicity, an Read more ...