Music and Opera

Viewers watching a good romcom need to fall in love with three things. The boy, the girl and the affair itself. The new Hampstead melodrama, Blackout Songs, scores just one out of three. Rebecca Humphries is adorably chic and sexy as the Soho seductress who drifts from bar to bar, picking up men. Her toyboy is a disappointment, a teenage deadbeat who has none of her louche gusto. And his character is a puzzle when it ought to be crystal clear. At the start of the action he wears a neck-brace and speaks with a stammer. In the next scene, his neck has healed and his stammer has vanished as

Paul Weller releasing a collection of solo B-sides is cause for mild celebration. After all, the Jam were one of the great B-side bands. ‘Tales From The Riverbank’, ‘The Butterfly Collector’, ‘Liza Radley’ – all A-list songs, relegated to the subs’ bench. Remember the B-side? That bijou, creative safe space which didn’t merely permit but positively encouraged artists to write parallel narratives of exploration, experimentation and extemporisation. I still remember the first B-side I fell in fascination with. It was called ‘Christ Versus Warhol’, a queasily psychedelic, wilfully odd indulgence on the wrong side of the Teardrop Explodes’ determinedly poppy ‘Passionate Friend’. I felt like the protagonist in Gregory’s Girl.

The screw may twist and the rack may turn: the Tower of London, in Jo Davies’s new production of The Yeomen of the Guard, is a dark place indeed, and that’s as it should be. ‘Men may bleed and men may burn,’ intones Dame Carruthers, as she delivers a magic lantern show about the history of the Tower, complete with colour slides of famous beheadings. In The Mikado Gilbert uses capital punishment as a particularly spiky punchline, but in The Yeomen of the Guard, sentence of death has been passed before the curtain has even risen. The shadows are lengthening from the off, and even Sullivan’s cheeriest melodies have a

Do you remember Osvaldo Golijov? Two decades ago he was classical music’s Next Big Thing: a credible postmodernist with a lush and listenable tonal flair, and an Argentinian with an interestingly complex European heritage in a millennium where everyone agreed – for a while, anyway – that the future was Latin American. Major labels recorded his music as soon as it was premièred; he was popular. Too popular for some – I remember a contemporary music promoter lamenting, with the demeanour of a housemaster who’s just found the head boy smoking behind the bins, that Golijov ‘hadn’t developed as we’d hoped’. Anyhow, Golijov was big, and then something stalled. Commissions

I was moved and shaken by Crystal Pite’s Flight Pattern when I first saw it in 2017. In richly visualised imagery, it proposed two ways of interpreting the horrific footage of the refugee crisis of 2016: either as a matter of anonymous, voiceless masses, portrayed as a body of dancers moving across the stage like a skein of migrating swallows beyond reason or control; or as a ragtag of desperate, furious individuals with every dignity and possession taken from them – somebody’s husband or wife, somebody’s daughter or son, fighting for survival – a plight conveyed in the impassioned dancing of Marcelino Sambé and Kristen McNally. Five years on, Pite

Oh, nostalgia – so much better than it used to be! You’d never have guessed pop music was once the preserve of teenagers had you been visiting the Greenwich peninsula last week – not from the crowds, or from the artists. Here were Roxy Music, whose four core members boast a combined age of 295, playing what might be their last ever show. Here were the Tops and the Temps, bands each with just one original member left – 86-year-old Duke Fakir of the Tops, 80-year-old Otis Williams of the Temps. And here was the absolute youngster of the lot, Robbie Williams, a stripling of 48, but 32 years into

It was so dark, my friend noted, you could have had sex or done a Hitler salute. No stage lights, no stair lights, no desk lights, no door lights, no usher lights, no exit signs. The few wisps of illumination that did steal in created colossal shadows, giants freeze-framed on the walls. In these snatches the wooden ribcage interior of the Barbican Hall looked demonic. A few photons lit up the Autechre boys, Rob Brown and Sean Booth, who flickered like blue flames rising from a hob. A few more nudged into view the ceiling that had become a vast charcoal grisaille. When, occasionally, someone left, the tiny glowing portal