Bluedot, Jodrell Bank Observatory, Orbit stage, July 7 2017. Twenty-two years have whipped past since Leftfield released their pioneering album Leftism and joined the ranks of Chemical Brothers, The Prodigy and Orbital in steering British music away from the total heat-death of endless guitars. The Orbit tent is packed for a full performance of the […]
Bluedot: Anchorsong, reviewed by David Hartley
Bluedot, Jodrell Bank Observatory, Nebula stage, July 7 2017. Part of the joy of a festival like Bluedot is happening upon a spare hour and filling it with an act you’ve never heard of and know nothing about. The festival itself makes much of the idea of discovery, so much so that it is practically […]
Bluedot: Jeff Forshaw, Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos, reviewed by David Hartley
Bluedot, Jodrell Bank Observatory, Mission Control, July 7 2017. It’s a tall order trying to explain life, the universe and everything – or at least how it all started – to a tent full of festival folk on a cloudy Friday in a field in Cheshire in forty minutes. But particle physics Professor Jeff Forshaw […]
Manchester International Festival: Holly Herndon and Yael Bartana, reviewed by Luke Healey
Dark Matter: Holly Herndon, Gorilla, June 30; Yael Bartana, What if Women Ruled the World?, Mayfield Depot, July 5, 2017. In a blog post dated 9 March, 2017, Manchester International Festival’s Director John McGrath framed the contents of this year’s edition as ‘a picture of the world today’. While McGrath maintains that ‘We don’t set […]
Love Supreme Jazz Festival 2017, reviewed by Ian Pople
Love Supreme Jazz Festival, Glynde Place, June 30-July 2. So, Love Supreme is five. And there was a swing back to jazz (pun intended) this year. Topping the bill on Sunday on the main stages were Robert Glasper and Gregory Porter; and Herbie Hancock ended the day in the Big Top on Saturday. On the […]
Richard Barnett, Seahouses, reviewed by Ken Evans
Richard Barnett, Seahouses, (Valley Press, £7.99). Is it too fanciful to hope, that a cultural archaeologist, in six hundred years, might turn over in their hands, the delicate, beautiful rectangle of processed wood, print technology, and creative design, that is the small press poetry volume of today, and marvel? They would be right to marvel […]
Sheena Kalayil, The Bureau of Second Chances, reviewed by Ian Pople
Sheena Kalayil, The Bureau of Second Chances (Polygon, £8.99). The trope of the recently widowed man returning to the ‘mother’ land from another country might, in other hands, have seemed just that, a trope. The man who’s returned from time to time and built a house near to his home village, amid the land which […]
Lucha Libre, Albert Hall, reviewed by Luke Healey
In 2015, the multi-Emmy award-winning television producer Mark Burnett, brains behind such reality shows as Survivor and The Apprentice, launched Lucha Underground, a weekly episodic professional wrestling show realised in partnership with Hollywood director Robert Rodriguez. Bringing wrestlers from the American independent scene and Mexico’s AAA promotion together with supernatural storylines and a pulp-cinematic production […]
William Palmer, The Water Steps, reviewed by Ian Pople
William Palmer, The Water Steps (Rack Press, £9.95). There is a corner of English poetry which is forever Georgian. It traces its roots back to Edward Thomas and tends to go there directly; it does not pass Larkin and has a nodding genuflection to Yeats, but it goes straight to Thomas. This means that it […]
Mai Der Vang, Afterland, reviewed by Ian Pople
Mai Der Vang, Afterland, (Graywolf Press, $16.00). If the Hmong peoples of Laos have any presence on this side of the Atlantic, it may be in the unfortunate environment of Clint Eastwood’s film Gran Torino, described by Timeout as the ‘ultimate “get off my lawn” movie.’ In that film, Eastwood’s grouchy character forms a relationship […]
Bitter Tears: The Films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, HOME, reviewed by Tristan Burke
Bitter Tears: The Films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, HOME, May 7-31. It is well known that the great West German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s work rate was prodigious. In a brief career between 1969 and 1982 he directed forty films and two television series, and wrote twenty-four stage plays and four radio plays. He not […]
Herding Cats, Hope Mill Theatre, reviewed by Fran Slater
Herding Cats, Hope Mill Theatre, May 25 2017. Billed only as a black comedy that depicts the dark humour of loneliness, little could have prepared audiences for some of the extremes that Herding Cats would go to to demonstrate the depths to which a lonely life can take you. Justine (Kayleigh Hawkins) turns to the […]
Maxïmo Park, Albert Hall, reviewed by Marli Roode
We are giddy and overdressed. Our drinks lifted above our heads, we follow each other into gaps to find our place in the crowd. ‘It’s a sold-out show, you know,’ we say to each other. We do know, but it has to be said. It’s the requisite observation at gigs, meaning a rare second place […]
Strange and Familiar, Manchester Art Gallery, reviewed by Simon Haworth
Strange and Familiar: Britain as Revealed by International Photographers, curated and organized by Martin Parr and Barbican Centre, London; Manchester Art Gallery. Located on the upper floor of Manchester Art Gallery, this fascinating exhibition brings together a diverse lineup of prominent international names in contemporary photography. Both the range of styles and approaches unique to […]
Four pamphlets from If a Leaf Falls Press, reviewed by Lucy Burns
Sam Riviere has been producing a series of very limited edition pamphlets from his micro press, If a Leaf Falls Press, since 2015. 34 pamphlets have been published so far (though more are always being added to the list), with some first publications and work from poets you might not have heard of listed alongside […]
The Japanese House, Gorilla, reviewed by Lydia Walker
The Japanese House: a band that have never been on my radar pops up in an email of new live shows up for reviewing. I conduct a quick Google search and find out that it is in fact the solo project of Buckingham’s Amber Bain. Who is Amber Bain? Turns out she’s collaborated with The […]
The Crucible, Manchester Opera House, reviewed by Peter Wild
The Crucible, Manchester Opera House, May 8 2017. “There is a prodigious fear of the court in the country,” we are told in the second half of Douglas Rintoul’s production of Arthur Miller’s 1950 play, The Crucible – and for a minute, there is a ripple, a shudder, across the audience in the Opera House, […]
Nicholas Murray, A Dog’s Brexit, reviewed by Ian Pople
Nicholas Murray, A Dog’s Brexit (Melos Press, £5.00). Nicholas Murray’s ‘Get Real’ a verse satire on the coalition government was published in his fine book Acapulco, also from William Palmer’s Melos Press. That poem used a modified Burns stanza to show just how hypocritical the coalition was; in all it’s fine rhetoric about balancing books […]
The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, reviewed by Hannah Bressler
The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, edited by Peter Kahn, Ravi Shankar, Patricia Smith (University of Arkansas, £18.99). The ‘Golden Shovel’ form was created by Terrance Hayes to honour Gwendolyn Brooks. The rules are simple: 1. Borrow a line from a Gwendolyn Brooks poem, or another poem you admire 2. Use each […]
Jorie Graham, Fast, reviewed by Ian Pople
Jorie Graham, Fast, (Carcanet, £12.99). Much is made of Jorie Graham as a ‘phenomenologist’; ‘phenomenology’ being ‘the description of things as one experiences them, or of one’s experiences of things.’ Further distinctions follow, one of which is often the rejection of Descartes’ division of mind and body, and also the rejection of usual distinction of […]
MK Ultra, HOME, reviewed by Imogen Durant
MK Ultra, directed by Rosie Kay, HOME, May 3 2017. From its opening declaration, ‘This is Fake Theatre’, it is clear that MK Ultra is a performance that intends to challenges the notion of truth and its role in modern media. Taking its name from a mind control programme developed by the CIA in the […]
Sounds From the Other City, Salford, reviewed by Luke Healey
The thirteenth annual Sounds From the Other City festival took place on 7 May, once again radiating outwards across Salford from the complex around Islington Mill. This area has continued to develop as an epicentre for the more experimental side of Manchester’s independent scene in the twelve months since the festival’s last installment, with satellite […]
Tank, HOME, reviewed by Emma Rhys
Tank, Breach Theatre, HOME, May 4 2017. It’s the 1960s. Consciousness is being expanded by LSD and a house is being flooded with water to accommodate a specious romance between a woman named Margaret and a dolphin named Peter. Sex n’ drugs n’ dolphins. FADE IN: Dolphin Point Laboratory, St Thomas, Virgin Islands. Psychonaut John […]
Twelfth Night, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Ruari Paton
Twelfth Night, directed by Jo Davies; The Royal Exchange Theatre, April 20. Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night depicts the events that take place after a shipwreck separates twins Viola (Faith Omole) and Sebastian (Daniel Francis-Swaby), leaving them to fend for themselves in Illyria with no knowledge of the whereabouts or wellbeing of the other. Viola seeks refuge […]
How My Light Is Spent, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Marli Roode
How My Light Is Spent, by Alan Harris, directed by Liz Stevenson; April 24 2017. “What’s the play about?” Zoe asks me over too-spicy pho that she will feel sloshing around later – audibly I swear, did you not hear it – whenever she moves in her seat in the dark of the Studio Theatre. […]
Peter Robinson, Collected Poems 1976-2016, reviewed by Ian Pople
Peter Robinson, Collected Poems 1976-2016 (Shearsman, £19.95). At the start of his preface to The Salt Companion to Peter Robinson, Roy Fisher writes, ‘It’s unusual in English poetry nowadays to find a writer of Peter Robinson’s sophistication occupying himself with what appears, at least, to be autobiography.’ And later, ‘Often the well placed ‘I’ is […]
Jane Eyre, The Lowry, reviewed by Peter Wild
Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë, dir. Sally Cookson; The Lowry, April 12 2017. Ah how audacious, the audience clucked in the interval. So intelligent, so rousing. Such fine performances. Such an ambitious set. And oh how we loved the songs. And Jane herself. The whole – so lavish, so sumptuous, such a modern, innovative reworking […]
Moth, Hope Mill Theatre, reviewed by Fran Slater
Moth, by Declan Green; Hope Mill Theatre, April 14 2017. Moth begins with two almost catatonic looking characters in school uniforms walking slowly down opposites sides of the stage while a cacophony of sound and light surrounds them, building to a point that makes the audience tense and uncomfortable before a word has even been […]
William Letford, Dirt, reviewed by Lucy Winrow
William Letford, Dirt (Carcanet, £9.99). As you might expect from the compact title of William Letford’s second collection, encounters with dirt are various and persistent throughout. In ‘Purification,’ we meet a hapless individual struggling to function after a night of heavy drinking: “crack open the eyes make fists with feet hangover check negative / stand […]
Luke Wright, The Toll, reviewed by Chloé Vaughan
Luke Wright, The Toll (Penned in the Margins, £9.99). I don’t usually laugh when I read poetry. This is probably because I’m miserable and like to read morose poems. However, I genuinely laughed out loud on the bus when I was reading the ‘Essex Lion’ in Luke Wright’s poetry collection The Toll. This is a […]
Thomas Dilworth, David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet, reviewed by Ian Pople
Thomas Dilworth, David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet (Jonathan Cape, £25.00). When David Jones suggested that the engraver and painter Eric Gill had ‘a different kind of otherness’ he might quite easily have been writing about himself. As Thomas Dilworth’s subtitle suggests David Jones’ ‘otherness’ took many forms. Kenneth Clark called Jones the painter, ‘absolutely […]
George Saunders, interviewed by James Reith
“This is going to sound very chichi,” Saunders begins, “but I’m at the Beverly Hilton in LA.” He’s trying to find a seat, poolside, away from other people, so that he can talk to me over the phone. With characteristic humour, he’s quick to downplay any notions of book-tour glamour: it’s “combination of joy and […]
Emily Berry, Stranger, Baby, reviewed by Annie Muir
Emily Berry, Stranger, Baby (Faber & Faber, £10.99). Emily Berry’s second collection, Stranger, Baby – published this year by Faber & Faber, is luminous green and hard to put down. Berry’s first book Dear Boy (2013) is, as its title suggests, openly concerned with the nature of address. From the first line of the first […]
Rory Gleeson, Rockadoon Shore, reviewed by Eve Foster
Rory Gleeson, Rockadoon Shore (John Murray, £14.99). Rockadoon Shore, Irish writer Rory Gleeson’s debut novel, makes use of its form somewhat atypically: not only are we presented with a large cast of main characters and relatively few side-characters, but we are allowed inside the heads of all the main characters in a revolving carousel of […]
The Woman in Black, The Lowry, reviewed by Emma Rhys
The Woman in Black, directed by Robin Herford, The Lowry; March 20 2017. Having watched plenty of horror films in my time, I was surprised to find myself viscerally spooked after reading one of the few horror novels I have ever read, The Woman in Black by Susan Hill, in preparation for this review. I […]