The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
American Football are a band whose legend was formed by the internet: some Illinois college kids who made an album for a little label in 1999, went their separate ways, and in their absence found that a huge number of people had responded to their music. They duly reunited in 2014. They are often identified
Earlier this year, ITV brought us Red Eye, a six-part drama set mainly on an overnight plane from London to Beijing. Displaying a heroic indifference to plausibility, the show was an increasingly deranged mash-up of every thriller convention known to man – while still posing (when it remembered to) as a thoughtful exploration of realpolitik.
At a Hollywood party in the 1940s, the garrulous socialite Elsa Maxwell spotted Arnold Schoenberg, then teaching music at UCLA, looking miserable. So she pushed him towards the piano with the words: ‘Come on, Professor, give us a tune!’ I couldn’t help thinking of those words on Friday night, when we heard the first Proms
Why Am I So Single? opens with two actors on stage impersonating the play’s writers Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss. You may not recognise the names but you’ve probably heard of their smash-hit, Six, which re-imagined the tragic wives of Henry VIII as glamorous pop divas. This follow-up show is a spoof of vintage musicals
Grade: B+ Almost all modern popular music is afflicted by a desperate yearning for importance, and thus – as it translates these days – electronic bombast, which is of course available now at the flick of a switch in the studio. The song is not enough, nowhere near enough. What you need, to elevate your
This week’s Archive on 4 is a treat for David Bowie fans. Francis Whately, the producer behind several of the BBC’s Bowie films, including The Last Five Years, has patched together old recordings and new interviews with Bowie’s lovers and friends to examine his life in West Berlin between 1976 and 1978. It was a
Klaus Makela is kind of a big deal. He’s a pupil of the Finnish conducting guru Jorma Panula – the so-called ‘Yoda of conducting’ – and he’s chief conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic as well as the Orchestre de Paris. Within the next three years he’s scheduled to take the baton at both the Chicago
Song for song, line by line, blow for blow, Elvis Costello remains the most consistently fascinating songwriter Britain has produced in the past 50 years – an opinion which seems these days to be mostly confined to a smallish section of an ageing demographic. Certainly, Costello’s music has, as far as I can tell, proved
As the Proms season enters the home straight, it’s moved up a gear, with a string of high profile European guest orchestras. First up was the Czech Philharmonic playing Suk’s Asrael Symphony under Jakub Hrusa before moving on to Janacek’s Glagolitic Mass the following night. These grand, glittering monuments of Czech music were garnished with
A few years ago, my nephew informed me that he and his friend were planning to come up to London for the weekend for the Wireless Festival. Did they need somewhere to stay? He looked at me like I was a mad old man. No, of course not. They were going to camp. In Finsbury
Recent acquisition of some insanely expensive hearing aids aimed at helping me out in cacophonous restaurants has set me thinking about the extent that modern life allows us to filter our intake of noise. This is big business. As sirens wail and Marvel blockbusters and rock concerts crash through legal decibel levels, controlling sound levels
Grade: A- One of the best one-liners attributed to Sir Thomas Beecham refers to the stridently avant-garde Karlheinz Stockhausen: ‘I’ve never conducted his music, but I once trod in some.’ It’s almost certainly apocryphal, but the implied verdict is widely shared. Stockhausen played up to the caricature of the self-obsessed ‘squeaky gate’ composer, though his
‘Boo!’ came a voice from the stalls. ‘Boo. Outrage!’ It was hard not to feel a pang of admiration. British opera audiences don’t tend to boo; we’re either too polite or too unengaged. But there we were in Act Three of Kirill Serebrennikov’s production of The Marriage of Figaro – just after the scene where
As the American superstar starts singing another slow, sad, rather beautiful song, my mind begins to drift. I’m thinking that our appreciation of music is so much about the who, the when and perhaps most crucially the where; the significance of place is an under-examined element in our relationship with what we’re hearing at any
Shifters has transferred to the West End from the Bush Theatre. It opens at a granny’s funeral attended by the grief-stricken Dre, aged 32. Dre was raised by his ‘Nana’ as he calls her – rhyming it with ‘spanner’ – and he weeps when he realises that his mother has failed to show up. A
On Saturday, Made in Korea: The K-pop Experience began by hailing K-pop as ‘the multi-billion-pound music that’s taken the world by storm’. Unusually, this wasn’t TV hype. Last year, nine of the world’s ten bestselling albums were by Korean acts (the sole westerner being Taylor Swift). Even odder for people over 40, according to such
Waterperry is one of the UK’s youngest summer opera festivals: it started up in 2018, at the northern limit of the species’ natural habitat. You leave the motorway at Oxford services and double back through the fields to the hamlet of Waterperry. Drive past the ‘Cats Crossing’ sign and the life-sized effigy of Rowan Atkinson
One of the first things I learned after seeing Big Thief triumph at Green Man is that some long-time fans are worried about them. There’s an extra percussionist; the bassist has been replaced; and the singer is now front and centre. Have they just become a conventional rock band, people mutter. Have they lost the
Grade: B Country music has become the acceptable route through which American pop stars resuscitate their floundering careers: sales are down, kid – shove a fiddle in the next one. And a pedal steel. And git some of those country dudes to collaborate. Especially Dolly. But also Hank Williams Jnr, if you can. Makes them
Towards the end of Declan McKenna’s snappy, enjoyable 90-minute set at the Edinburgh International Festival, something quite powerful occurs. The English singer-songwriter returns alone to the stage for the encore and proceeds to play a version of ABBA’s ‘Slipping Through My Fingers’ with only his electric guitar as accompaniment. It becomes a strange, emotionally layered
Artistic partnerships are elusive things. The best – where two creative personalities somehow inspire or goad each other to do better than their individual best – can seem so natural that they’re almost easier to identify by their absence. No one’s queuing up to revive Richard Rodgers’s Rex (lyrics by Sheldon Harnick). Pretending to rate
Remember when we all knew what indie meant? Indie was what John Peel played. It was music that was recorded, manufactured and distributed independent of the major labels. In practice, that tended to be music played by young white people, usually more in hope than expectation of either competence or success. As the years passed
There’s sound thinking behind this summer’s resuscitation of London City Ballet – a medium-scale touring company popular in the 1980s that went bust in 1996. Given that larger institutions operating outside London such as Northern Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet are hamstrung by ever-tightening budgets that leave them increasingly risk-averse, there’s a crying need for
Salzburg Festival doesn’t mess about. The offerings this year include an adaptation of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain in Lithuanian, a Soviet-era operatic treatment of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, and Igor Levit tackling one of the Himalayan peaks of the piano rep. Kiddies, meanwhile, could enjoy the children’s opera Die Kluge (brilliantly done), a Nazi-era allegory on
The Proms have started but there is a world elsewhere, and in Worcester Cathedral the 296th Three Choirs Festival set sail with a concert that couldn’t have happened anywhere else. A few years back I caused grave offence when I described the Three Choirs as a ‘home of lost causes’; as if, coming from The
The ploy of releasing an album without any advance warning comes into play when an artist feels they are being paid either too much or too little attention. The stealth arrival of Jack White’s new solo album falls firmly into the second category. Putting out music in this way ensures additional media coverage and a
Grade: A+ Yet another double bill of Mozart’s Piano Concertos 20 and 23! There’s an online database of 185 recordings of the first of these, the brooding K466 in D minor, and the classically perfect K488 in A major isn’t far behind. Can there really be anything new to say about either of them? The
There are certain long-established rules for describing Patti Smith. Google her name and the words ‘shaman’ and ‘priestess’ and you’ll see what I mean. For the best part of 50 years she’s been treated as though she’s a mystical object, a human convergence of ley lines, as much as a rock singer. In the courtyard
Our subsidised theatres often import shows from the US without asking whether our theatrical tastes align with America’s. The latest arrival, The Hot Wing King, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning play about unhealthy eating. The production opens in a luxury house in Memphis, occupied, rather strangely, by four gay men who dress gracelessly in cheap, flashy