Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer is a documentary that got by me last year – but watching the DVD made me a…
Posts Tagged ‘Reviews’
Marshall Fine: DVD reviews: Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer, Watchmen: Director’s Cut
July 24th, 2009 |
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Theatre review: Enron
July 23rd, 2009 |
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Minerva, Chichester
It’s a sign of Chichester’s new adventurousness that, in partnership with Headlong and the Royal Court, it is staging theatre’s latest attack on corporate corruption. Lucy Prebble’s hugely ambitious play, covering the rise and fall of the Texan energy company, Enron, is an exhilarating mix of political satire, modern morality and multimedia spectacle.
Spanning the years between 1992 and the present, Prebble’s play makes Jeffrey Skilling, Enron’s top executive, the prime mover and principal villain, rather than Kenneth Lay, its founder. It is Skilling who gets the top job by coming up with a vision of the future: one in which Enron doesn’t merely provide natural gas but trades in energy, the internet and even the weather. But Skilling is aided by financial officer, Andy Fastow, who creates exotically named shadow companies in which Enron’s escalating debts are disguised as assets. Eventually the whole bubble bursts, with the company’s debts revealed as $38bn, Skilling sentenced to jail and Lay dying before being sentenced.
Prebble’s overwhelming point is that nothing has been learned: that, even as Enron employees were losing everything, others were pocketing fat bonuses, as they might today. But the virtue of both her play and Rupert Goold’s brilliant production is that they capture the dual face of capitalism: its turbulent energy and hubristic vanity. The first half of Goold’s production reminds one of Citizen Kane in its dazzling, vaudevillian energy: stock prices are imprinted on human faces, traders whirl and gyrate like dancers, analysts sing close harmony numbers. This is the free market as jazzy fantasy in which Skilling says of Enron, “we’re not just an energy company – we’re a powerhouse of ideas”.
Prebble and Goold, aided by Anthony Ward’s breathtaking designs, show that Enron was a vast fantasy in which everyone was complicit: not least the lawyers, analysts and investors who believed in this self-created bubble and kept it afloat. The power of Samuel West’s fine performance as Skilling lies in its very lack of demonism. In West’s assured hands, Skilling becomes a man who combines brilliance and stupidity and grows from a nerdy ordinariness into a tycoon through the idea that future income can be written down as earnings the moment a deal is signed.
Tim Pigott-Smith as Lay also rivetingly presents us with a devout, backslapping figure who sanctions Skilling’s dirty tricks without wanting to know the details. There is rich support from Tom Goodman-Hill as the innovative Fastow surrounded by red-eyed raptors devouring Enron’s debt and from Amanda Drew, playing the one person who seems to believe that profits must be related to productivity. Even if Enron isn’t the last word on the free market debacle, it is a fantastic theatrical event.
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How To Write Review Blog Posts That Make Money
July 15th, 2009 |
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This is a guest post from Robb Sutton, a Blog Mastermind graduate student who blogs at Mountain Biking by 198, which has brought in over $70,000 in review product in its first year. Robb’s just released a new report called Ramped Reviews, which will teach you how to get thousands of dollars worth of free [...]
Under the weather
July 9th, 2009 |
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(Sony)
Earlier this week, the Onion offered a musical newsflash. “Jack White Teams Up With NBA Commissioner David Stern in Latest Side Project” ran the headline, above a story that White was about to release an album called Confederation of Seven under the name Lakota Brick: “According to the 33-year-old White, Lakota Brick consists of himself, primarily on reed organ, and Stern, 66, on vocals and electric guitar.”
It’s hard to suppress a smile, given the imminent arrival of the Dead Weather’s album, Horehound. In the chart of Things People Want Jack White to Do, “play drums behind the woman out of the Kills then release the results as an album” ranks pretty low; higher than, say, launching his own bums’n'tums workout DVD, but some way beneath making another record as unequivocally brilliant as Seven Nation Army, the latter currently celebrating an unbroken 326-week run at No 1 in the chart of Things People Want Jack White to Do, where it has obstinately held top spot ever since the release of Seven Nation Army.
The Dead Weather – on which White collaborates not just with Alison Mosshart of the Kills, but Queens of the Stone Age’s Dean Fertita and Raconteur Jack Lawrence – seems a deï¬antly strange fit, not least because White is widely celebrated as the noble upholder of various grand musical traditions with a direct connection to the very spirit of the blues, while the Kills are viewed not so much as a band as a flimsy hipster affectation, their borrowings from druggy alt-rockers Royal Trux latterly dogged by Kate Moss, whose attachment to guitarist to Jamie Hince seem to have done for their remaining credibility what the Luftwaffe did for Coventry cathedral. You can see why Mosshart was keen to take up White’s collaborative offer. For one thing, he seems to have managed to cop off with a supermodel without fetching up in OK! looking like a bit of a pranny. For another, his proposition seems admirably selfless: Mosshart takes centre stage; White, as he put it, “was like, ‘OK Alison, I’m your drummer now’”.
As it turns out, the Dead Weather isn’t quite the exercise in spotlight-abnegation that has been suggested. White produces, sings, co-writes seven songs, looms large in photos – as a 33-year-old man who persists in dressing up like the Child Catcher off Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is perhaps wont to do – and has his ï¬ngerprints all over the band’s name and the album’s title. In addition, it’s hard to think of a recent album on which the drums are so foregrounded. You end up listening to them far more closely than you do Mosshart’s vocals, always aware of who the star of the show really is.
The latter isn’t a problem in itself. Indeed, the fact that White is a fabulous, Keith Moonish drummer is one of the things that makes the Dead Weather sound fantastic, along with Fertita’s use of something called a Guitar-Organ, a prosaically named 60s curio that failed to take off, despite sounding, at least on the evidence presented here, like the onset of armageddon. They crash thrillingly through the blown-apart blues of opener 60 Feet Tall and single Hang You From the Heavens, while their cover of Dylan’s New Pony provides the one moment when Mosshart really comes into her own, the original’s sour misogyny turned against itself by a female voice. I Cut Like a Buffalo, meanwhile, grabs your attention with its sheer improbability, offering the gobsmacking sound of Jack White rapping over a loping reggae beat, a state of affairs not nearly as horrendous as it looks on paper. He’s actually really good at it, spitting out menacing, staccato couplets. Drumming, rapping: you wonder what hitherto-unimagined skill White will reveal his mastery of next. Animal husbandry? Growing giant vegetables? Sword dancing?
But for all its shock value, I Cut Like a Buffalo isn’t much of a song and that, rather than Mosshart’s thin voice, turns out to be Horehound’s big problem; there’s a lot of songs that initially sound great, but leave no lasting trace. You listen to Treat Me Like Your Mother or No Hassle Night and wish they’d spent longer than the much-vaunted fortnight making Horehound; you’d sacriï¬ce some immediacy for better-crafted songs. As it is, it starts promising, but ends up feeling like the very thing it purports not to be: another calling card for Jack White’s multifarious talents.
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Under the weather
July 9th, 2009 |
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(Sony)
Earlier this week, the Onion offered a musical newsflash. “Jack White Teams Up With NBA Commissioner David Stern in Latest Side Project” ran the headline, above a story that White was about to release an album called Confederation of Seven under the name Lakota Brick: “According to the 33-year-old White, Lakota Brick consists of himself, primarily on reed organ, and Stern, 66, on vocals and electric guitar.”
It’s hard to suppress a smile, given the imminent arrival of the Dead Weather’s album, Horehound. In the chart of Things People Want Jack White to Do, “play drums behind the woman out of the Kills then release the results as an album” ranks pretty low; higher than, say, launching his own bums’n'tums workout DVD, but some way beneath making another record as unequivocally brilliant as Seven Nation Army, the latter currently celebrating an unbroken 326-week run at No 1 in the chart of Things People Want Jack White to Do, where it has obstinately held top spot ever since the release of Seven Nation Army.
The Dead Weather – on which White collaborates not just with Alison Mosshart of the Kills, but Queens of the Stone Age’s Dean Fertita and Raconteur Jack Lawrence – seems a deï¬antly strange fit, not least because White is widely celebrated as the noble upholder of various grand musical traditions with a direct connection to the very spirit of the blues, while the Kills are viewed not so much as a band as a flimsy hipster affectation, their borrowings from druggy alt-rockers Royal Trux latterly dogged by Kate Moss, whose attachment to guitarist to Jamie Hince seem to have done for their remaining credibility what the Luftwaffe did for Coventry cathedral. You can see why Mosshart was keen to take up White’s collaborative offer. For one thing, he seems to have managed to cop off with a supermodel without fetching up in OK! looking like a bit of a pranny. For another, his proposition seems admirably selfless: Mosshart takes centre stage; White, as he put it, “was like, ‘OK Alison, I’m your drummer now’”.
As it turns out, the Dead Weather isn’t quite the exercise in spotlight-abnegation that has been suggested. White produces, sings, co-writes seven songs, looms large in photos – as a 33-year-old man who persists in dressing up like the Child Catcher off Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is perhaps wont to do – and has his ï¬ngerprints all over the band’s name and the album’s title. In addition, it’s hard to think of a recent album on which the drums are so foregrounded. You end up listening to them far more closely than you do Mosshart’s vocals, always aware of who the star of the show really is.
The latter isn’t a problem in itself. Indeed, the fact that White is a fabulous, Keith Moonish drummer is one of the things that makes the Dead Weather sound fantastic, along with Fertita’s use of something called a Guitar-Organ, a prosaically named 60s curio that failed to take off, despite sounding, at least on the evidence presented here, like the onset of armageddon. They crash thrillingly through the blown-apart blues of opener 60 Feet Tall and single Hang You From the Heavens, while their cover of Dylan’s New Pony provides the one moment when Mosshart really comes into her own, the original’s sour misogyny turned against itself by a female voice. I Cut Like a Buffalo, meanwhile, grabs your attention with its sheer improbability, offering the gobsmacking sound of Jack White rapping over a loping reggae beat, a state of affairs not nearly as horrendous as it looks on paper. He’s actually really good at it, spitting out menacing, staccato couplets. Drumming, rapping: you wonder what hitherto-unimagined skill White will reveal his mastery of next. Animal husbandry? Growing giant vegetables? Sword dancing?
But for all its shock value, I Cut Like a Buffalo isn’t much of a song and that, rather than Mosshart’s thin voice, turns out to be Horehound’s big problem; there’s a lot of songs that initially sound great, but leave no lasting trace. You listen to Treat Me Like Your Mother or No Hassle Night and wish they’d spent longer than the much-vaunted fortnight making Horehound; you’d sacriï¬ce some immediacy for better-crafted songs. As it is, it starts promising, but ends up feeling like the very thing it purports not to be: another calling card for Jack White’s multifarious talents.
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Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
July 4th, 2009 |
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Like James Bond, the Harry Potter movies just keep chugging along, immune to the outside cinematic world, ensconced in their universe of quidditch and muggles, inferi and death eaters. They have perfectly fitted their source material from day one: each arriving regularly with a thud on the doormat every year or so since 2001, achieving a near-institutional status that has eluded the Narnia adaptations.
There had been mutterings, however, over this sixth in the Potter series, pushed back from its original planned release date last Christmas. Monkeying with the schedule tends to alert the paying public that all is not well. The Half-Blood Prince is adapted from JK Rowling’s penultimate novel, but so desperate are the producers not to compromise their revenue stream that the final book, the Deathly Hallows, will be divided into two parts.
Nevertheless, there’s little here to suggest there has been any let-up in the Potter machine. The eponymous schoolboy – still in owlish spectacles as he hits 17 or so – is up against skeletal blond Draco Malfoy, on some kind of vile mission from evil genius Voldemort. Hogwarts’ main asset against him is Professor Horace Slughorn (played by Jim Broadbent in that cod-Dickensian style that is practically compulsory for the Potter cast). Slughorn’s brain contains key memories of Voldemort’s schooldays and Harry must extract them.
There’s lots of blushing, stammering and smooching. Will Harry lock lips with Ginny? Is Ron smart enough to see that Hermione … well, it’s not Skins. Hands are kept above the waist at all times.
Putatively winsome all this may be, but what it actually does is throw the series’ biggest weakness into sharp relief: film-making can (and does) control pretty much everything – except how the cute juvenile leads grow up. Still, director David Yates knows how to play all the cards. Although a touch ungainly, his film is solidly constructed, with lots of fine effects. If, as Potter approaches his final confrontation with Voldemort, the wizardly battles begin to resemble Lord of the Rings, it’s hardly a handicap; this is tried and tested cinematic language, and does all it needs.
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Last night’s TV
July 1st, 2009 |
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The Mumbai killers were trained assassins. Dispatches showed they were also just boys
Sometimes a terrible news event is so hard to get your head around, the only way to get some kind of grip on it, and what it means, is to zoom in on the detail. Dispatches: Terror in Mumbai (Channel 4) did this to extraordinary effect. Using interviews, news coverage, amateur and CCTV footage, plus – most powerfully of all – recordings of phone calls between the terrorists on the ground and the guys pulling the strings in Pakistan, it pieced together the unfolding of events last November, when shooting and bombing attacks rocked India’s largest city.
At VT railway station, it is the police who are caught on CCTV and found guilty, if only of a lack of courage. They cower behind pillars or run away, confused and frightened. The bravest tries to fire his ancient bolt-action rifle at the terrorists, but it jams, so he picks up a plastic chair instead and throws it in frustration. The war on terror, fought with plastic furniture. Fifty-two people were killed at the station.
A Turkish businessman and his wife who were staying at the Trident Oberoi hotel tell of how they were spared because of their faith, while the bodies of those less lucky pile up around – and on top of – them. Meanwhile, cameras at the Taj Palace hotel across town show two young backpackers walking into the lobby, their rucksacks filled with assault rifles, pistols, grenades, hundreds of bullets and enough dried fruit and nuts to last a couple of days of killing.
One of the most heart-wrenching images from the film is of a two-year-old Jewish boy, filmed through a window. He is clearly agitated, walking in circles, looking down at the bodies of his dead parents. But perhaps most poignant of all are the recordings, taped by the Indian secret services, of the instructions delivered over the phone to the terrorists by their controllers: they tell us so much about indoctrination. “Throw some grenades, my brother, there’s no harm in throwing a few grenades. How hard can it be to throw a grenade? Just pull the pin and throw it. For your mission to end successfully, you must be killed. God is waiting for you in heaven.”
And the boys – because they are only boys – say “God willing” and do as they are told. But they haven’t been turned into killing machines to the exclusion of everything else. The pair at the Taj Palace, Mumbai’s grandest hotel, are mesmerised by the splendour they find there, opulence they never knew existed.
“There are computers with 30-inch screens,” one tells his boss down the phone in wonder.
“Computers? Haven’t you set fire to them?” asks the commander, getting irritated.
The boy continues: “It’s amazing. The windows are huge. It’s got two kitchens, a bath and a little shop … “
There’s something almost touching about it. For a second, he is not a brainwashed, trained assassin; he’s a kid in a sweet shop. In this terrifiying, moving, human story it shows there is humanity everywhere, even where you may not expect it.
Imagine … David Hockney: A Bigger Picture (BBC1) should have been brilliant. The film-maker had three years of amazing access to the usually media-shy painter, at home in California, at home in Yorkshire, and peeks – more than peeks, takes long looks – over the painter’s shoulder at work. But, structurally, it is a bit of a mess, wishy-washy perhaps, which isn’t something you should be saying about anything to do with Hockney. We jump backwards and forwards across the Atlantic, from summer to winter, from watercolours to oils, to photography being over to it beginning again, to another winter, or is it the same winter again – who knows? I lost my way a bit, to be honest, as did the film.
The subject just about saves it. There’s a twinkliness about Hockney, a witty knowingness, a Yorkshireness that has survived 30 years in LA (he went, he says, because both the shadows of the trees and the boys’ bodies are better defined over there). Even when you have no idea what he’s talking about, he makes perfect sense. He paints quite good pictures, too. Bloody big, some of them.
Art Against the Odds (Channel 4), this week’s series of Three Minute Wonder films after the news, is about the opposite end of the art world spectrum. While acres of Tate wall space are being handed to Hockney on a plate, these are nice little portraits – thumbnail sketches, really – of artists fighting to get a tiny corner of the summer exhibition at the National Gallery. Alice Tait, a young illustrator, is worried her work will be looked down upon among the fine artists’ pieces. She needn’t have have worried, because her work is turned down. It won’t be looked upon at all.
• What did you think? Have your say at guardian.co.uk/culture/television
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Who fired up Glastonbury?
June 29th, 2009 |
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Lily Allen was rude, Neil Young was gleeful and Dizzee Rascal was, well, dizzy. We look back on the hottest bands at Glastonbury 2009
Blog: How was Glastonbury for you?
There’s no doubt that a Friday afternoon slot at a Glastonbury recovering from a torrential rainstorm is a tough gig for Fleet Foxes. Their eponymous debut album has been rightly bathed in acclaim, but its currency is blissful, bucolic folksiness: with the best will in the world, a bespattered crowd staring glumly down the barrel of yet another weekend trudging through mud and sleeping under damp canvas is perhaps not the most receptive audience for a selection of songs about the unmitigated wonderfulness of the great outdoors.
And so it proves. In truth, it’s not really the songs’ subject matter that’s the problem so much as their subtlety. The performances are note-perfect, their harmonies gorgeous. However, the band look deeply ill-at-ease on the vast Pyramid Stage, and their music struggles to hold a crowd reeling not merely from the inclement weather but a baffling, unscheduled, interminable preceding set from Pharrel Williams’s funk-rockers N*E*R*D, who turn up late, then charmlessly refuse to vacate the stage (“you paid 200 dollars to see a full show,” shouts Williams by way of explanation, blithely overlooking the fact that the crowd contains not a single person who’s paid to see NERD at all).
In different circumstances, Fleet Foxes might sound fantastic but, White Winter Hymnal aside, they struggle to draw the audience’s attention from the more robust entertainment provided in their midst by two filth-caked men cheerfully beating each other about the head with what seem to be petrol cans filled with cider.
No such problems for Lily Allen, blessed with a catalogue of jaunty hits expertly retooled for a festival audience – “Come on you ravers!” she bellows as Smile surprisingly mutates from pop-reggae into frantic drum’n'bass, displaying an ability to project a hugely likable personality to the back of a vast audience. After Fleet Foxes’ visible unease, there’s something hugely appealing about Allen’s self-confidence. “Help me out with the second verse!” she cries midway through The Fear: this seems deeply ambitious, given the unwritten rule that festival audiences invariably only know the first three lines of any given song, but they turn out to be word-perfect.
She dedicates Fuck You to the BNP (“those bastards”) and encourages the audience to sing along with middle fingers raised, performs a fantastic cover of Britney Spears’ Womanizer – the original’s blank facade replaced by a knowing swagger – and offers an insight into the impressive modernity of her family, mentioning the presence of her grandfather stage left, then performing It’s Not Fair, a pretty blunt song about male sexual inadequacy, underlining its reference to fellatio with a quick mime.
Elsewhere on Friday evening, Lady Gaga once again demonstrates her steadfast refusal to allow gimmickry to overshadow her important musical message, shooting fireworks out of her bosoms and playing piano while standing on one leg, her posterior exposed to the elements. In fairness, it smacks less of the usual tiresome attention-seeking than a concerted effort to create a splash of clubby glamour in distinctly unglamorous environs.
Meanwhile, given the reverence in which their back catalogue is held and their spotless live reputation, the recently reformed Specials are about as close to a guaranteed success as Glastonbury gets, aided by the fact that they seem to have grown old with an impressive grace. There’s an intriguing disparity between their music’s grim subject matter and the jubilation with which it’s received: never have so many songs about nuclear war, recession and the inherent ghastliness of late-70s Coventry sounded so celebratory.
By contrast to the Specials’ sure-thing status, headliner Neil Young arrives trailing a 40-year reputation for unpredictability: he’s been on relatively crowd-pleasing form recently, but as any long-term fan will tell you, what Young has been doing recently is no guarantee as to what he’ll do next.
A certain trepidation might explain why the audience takes a while to warm to him, but as it gradually becomes apparent that he’s going to roll out the classics, the response becomes more fervent, his performances increasingly tumultuous, the endings of every song drawn out into ever-longer, ever noisier codas. By the time he performs Rockin’ In the Free World, his ornery old face has been split by a huge grin: he keeps returning to the chorus over and over again, organising the crowd into an arm-waving mass. When the song finally ends, and the crowd roars, Young grabs the microphone and roars back at them, his fists raised in triumph.
An encore of the Beatles’ A Day In the Life is even more spectacular. It concludes with Young ripping the strings off his guitar and beating it with a microphone stand, before running to the back of the stage and unexpectedly performing a vibraphone solo. It sounds slightly bathetic, arriving as it does on the heels of a blizzard of feedback that feels like the end of the world: you rather get the impression that he just doesn’t want to get offstage, and having rendered his guitar unplayable, is desperately casting about for something to do. Improbable as it may sound given his grouchy reputation, Young appears to be having a Glastonbury Moment.
Saturday dawns with Tinariwen, the cyclical grooves and call-and-response vocals of their Tuareg desert rock sounding oddly soothing as the sun continues to shine. Spinal Tap pay a rather glowing tribute to the recently departed King Of Pop – “if it ‘adn’t been for Michael Jackson, there would never ‘ave been a Spinal Tap,” offers Nigel Tufnel – and bring on Jamie Cullum, the latest in a long line of special guests keen to perform with the world’s most famous parody rock band: alas, the audience seem less impressed by the appearance of the boyish jazz pianist than they are by the arrival onstage of an inflatable model of Stonehenge.
But the real surprise of Saturday afternoon is delivered by Dizzee Rascal, who draws an unexpectedly vast crowd. You might reasonably expect his sound to chafe against the dopily benign atmosphere of Glastonbury in the sun: despite his new-found ability to lodge himself at the top of the singles chart, it still sounds abrasive. Indeed, it’s probably the most challenging music that emanates from the Pyramid Stage all weekend, but the rapper appears to have matured into a fantastic, engaging live performer, couching his stew of harsh beats and samples and bleak lyrics – “let me take you down to London city, where the attitude’s bad and the weather’s shitty,” snaps one song – in shameless crowd-pleasing, including at one juncture, an appearance of the time-honoured cry of “oggi oggi oggi”. The audience goes berserk.
The kind of person who bemoaned Jay-Z’s appearance at Glastonbury last year, and views the appearance of urban artists on the main stage as an unnecessary distraction from the festival’s true calling to promote indie and classic rock, might note that when Dizzee Rascal’s set ends, the audience goes altogether, leaving Neil Young’s sometime cohorts and Woodstock veterans Crosby Stills and Nash performing to a sparsely-populated field. Stephen Stills takes a photograph as he walks onstage, presumably in order to show friends at home what a distinctly underwhelming Glastonbury crowd looks like.
It seems probable that most of the audience has headed off in the direction of the Dance Arena, in the vain hope of seeing La Roux. Dubstep DJ Skream’s remix of her hit In For The Kill has already provided the highlight of his Friday afternoon set, but the audience for the genuine article spills so far out of the tent that, on its fringes, it’s literally impossible to see or hear anything of her performance. People stay nonetheless: if you’re looking for a symbol of her rise, here it is.
Back at the Pyramid stage, Kasabian do their spirited best, but there’s no upstaging Bruce Springsteen, even when he’s obscured on the video screens by a giant banner emblazoned with the words I LOVE SAUSAGES. You could argue that what he does is pretty hokey and histrionic – “we’re building a HOUSE made out of HOPE!” he cries at one juncture – and there seems to be a feeling that he might have peppered his set more liberally with hits, but it’s hard to deny his ability to project to the back of a vast crowd, honed as it has been by decades playing the world’s biggest venues.
He swings around his mic stand like a pole dancer, dons a Stetson for the finale of Outlaw Pete, plunges repeatedly into the audience and steals their banners – sadly, I LOVE SAUSAGES remains tantalisingly out of reach – tears telephone directories in half, inflates hot water bottles until they burst, etc etc. He opens with Joe Strummer’s old song about Glastonbury, Coma Girl and the Excitement Gang, which frankly could have been written for him.
Virtually everything else he plays has a communal air-punching quality, an air of charged triumphalism (Workin’ On A Dream manages to maintain this air even during an extended whistling solo, which is no mean feat), and the climactic numbers – Born To Run, Dancing In the Dark, Glory Days – are triple-tested and infallible. Glastonbury, understandably, eats it up
The big winners: three performers who grew in stature
La Roux
La Roux’s success was hardly a surprise, given that her single In for the Kill is currently the third biggest-selling of the year, but the size of the crowd she attracted to the Dance Arena was confirmation of how big a star Elly Jackson has become this year.
Neil Young
A genuinely remarkable, tumultuous performance from rock’s most unpredictable old-stager. Not a man famed for being easily impressed by festivals – he famously called Woodstock “shit” – Young looked moved by the crowd’s response.
Dizzee Rascal
It wasn’t a breakthrough moment as such – he’s just had two No 1 hits in a row, so he’s hardly wanting for public acceptance or attention – but nevertheless, the sheer size of the crowd and its reaction confirmed the East London rapper’s arrival as an improbable mainstream star.
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Blur provide the magic moment
June 29th, 2009 |
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The best Glastonbury headliners in an age? It really, really, really did happen
Opera writer, farmer, lawyer, musician, but when they reform as Blur it’s a joy, says Laura Barton
Who: Blur
Where and when: Pyramid stage, 9.50pm, Sunday
Dress code: Damon’s going for the Mike Skinner geezer look with his gold chains and Fred Perry shirt. Alex James has finally sorted himself out with a haircut and a wash. Dave Rowntree looks like he’s taking time out from legal work to drum with his old schoolmates (funny that …). And Graham? He’s still the coolest Blur member by a few dozen miles.
What happened: And so this is what it’s come to. The man who once masterminded grand Chinese operas. Who boasted of writing compositions in the pentatonic scale. Who spent the last decade striving to be noted for his serious musicianship. And here he is, rolling around the floor screaming “woo-hoo!” over crackling cartoon punk-rock and looking like he’s having the time of his life. Tch! He should be ashamed! Did Blur not see the serious, studied musicianship of Neil Young? Can they not remember the lessons set by the Boss, that all Glastonbury headline sets must involve seven hours of sturdy rock while the crowd crosses their fingers in the hope of hearing Yawn in the USA? I mean, just who gave these guys permission to have the time of their lives?
Because, tonight, Blur are sticking their fingers up to dad-rock by falling in love all over again with the dumb art of playing pop music – and playing it loudly. Girls and Boys literally throbs with sordid energy, Song 2 sees the crowd threatening to pogo themselves off the earth’s axis, and Parklife turns every man, woman and anarcho-crustie into a cockney geeza.
It’s hit after hit after hit. From She’s So High to the Universal, via Popscene, For Tomorrow and Country House, it’s nothing short of relentless.
Some thing’s haven’t changed, of course. Dave is virtually anonymous, Graham spends the most thrilling, spinetingling moments staring at his fretboard and Alex stands on the stage amps, desperate to hog the spotlight that little bit more than his bandmates. We wouldn’t want it any other way.
But for all their energy, it’s the sad songs that work best: To the End, The Universal, This is a Low. Weirder still is the reaction to Tender, a song never really rated (at least by me) as a classic, transformed into a joyous hug-a-long that reverberates around the crowd after the first encore and the second encore.
It’s at this point – when previously dismissed tracks acquire a new life of their own – that you realise something truly magical is going on. Because tonight’s headline slot is not just about the music. It’s not even about nostalgia. It’s about friendship – and the truly heartwarming sight of two best friends throwing aside their differences and starting afresh.
It’s also the cherry on the cake of a trend that’s defined the weekend. Despite talk of the “dad-rock” lineup, Blur made sure that the real winner at this year’s Glastonbury was pop music. They weren’t alone, of course. Earlier in the weekend, La Roux packed a tent out with glitter-strewn girls who clearly wanted to be just like her. Dizzee created a Pyramid stage frenzy by unleashing a series of b-b-b-bonkers mainstream hits. And Lady Gaga showed that a 20-minute guitar solo can’t really compete with straddling a motorbike and baring your arse. Battle lines had been drawn – it was the pop scenesters who triumphed.
So sure, Young played a great gig for his fans. And Springsteen put on a fantastic show for Boss devotees. But Damon, Graham, Alex and Dave? They put on a show that touched every heart in Pilton.
Who’s watching: Seemingly everyone apart from the most obsessive Black Eyed Peas fans. And we’re all hugging each other.
High point: Damon breaking down in tears after To the End. Talented but not always entirely likable singer proves he’s human after all.
Low point: Just the one tiny flaw: Alex James’s sweat patches.
In a Tweet: Blur: the best Glastonbury headliners in an age? It really, really, really did happen.
• Read Laura Barton’s take on Blur’s performance
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The Boss: a colossal, unashamed ham
June 28th, 2009 |
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The Boss materialised on stage like Hercules in denim, but his blue-collar belters were more Broadway than Pyramid stage
There is a religious quality to Brucedom. Disciples tend to tell benighted heathens that all they need to do is let Springsteen into their hearts and surrender to his almighty Bossness. “You have to see him live,” they say. “All will be revealed.” Doubtless some people at the Pyramid stage on Saturday had a Damascene experience but for many others, in those parts of the field which thinned out dramatically during the elephantine, two-and-a-half hour set, the light failed to materialise.
On one level, Springsteen’s sheer passion and energy are something to behold. He gives a good impression of being the most virile 59-year-old on earth, running, soloing, hollering, and sweating the good sweat. Next to Neil Young, who would look at home sitting in a rocking chair scaring children off his lawn with blasts of feedback, he looks like Hercules in denim. Everything about him is writ large, in block capitals, underlined. And if it grabs you, if the immensity strikes you as majestic rather than faintly ludicrous, it must be thrilling stuff. Alas, this critic, despite doing his homework, putting in the hours and opening his mind to the fullest, found it fundamentally silly.
For someone acclaimed as a perceptive blue-collar bard, he’s rarely far from self-parody. Many of his songs sound like numbers from a Broadway musical about a guy who works in a garage. If you drank a shot every time he sang the words work, dream, streets, highway or refinery, you would be unconscious within an hour (less than halfway through the set). During Working on a Dream (two shots), he begins testifying like a southern preacher, or, more accurately, like a Saturday Night Live comedian doing an impersonation of James Brown, about building a house of lurve, a building of soul and a loft extension of hope.
But then it seems that the whole point of Springsteen is that he’s a colossal, unashamed, scenery-chewing ham. Born to Run is both the most preposterous song in his catalogue and the most heart-thumpingly joyous. Dancing in the Dark and Glory Days are elevated, rather than marred, by their corny use-before-1985 synth riffs. More of a problem than the garage-guy lyrics, the oh-lawdy business and Clarence “Big Man” Clemons‘s reliably ghastly sax solos, is the realisation that, despite Springsteen’s stature, he has very few songs that have entered the mass consciousness. Only the three just mentioned – along with Because the Night and Thunder Road – excite mass singing all the way to the back. Calls for Born in the USA go unanswered. Fair enough, because it’s a good song massacred by its bombastic arrangement and is now avoided by the very man who made it, but during long stretches of bar-band rock and American Land’s horrible Irish jig, one wished he would throw another bone to the agnostics.
There were the odd special moments. Springsteen paid tribute to his hero Joe Strummer, by opening the set with Coma Girl, a relatively unknown Mescaleros track that was written on the Glastonbury site itself. Apparently, his band learned how to play it on the tour bus down. Being bored, irritated and only occasionally thrilled by the man routinely called the most electrifying performer in rock is no fun at all. He is clearly a good guy with a heart as big as New Jersey, he radiates warmth and charisma and he is, on occasion, a marvellous songwriter. Who wouldn’t want to be converted on a Saturday night in Glastonbury? Unfortunately, this critic felt like someone standing in front of a magic-eye picture and being told that, if he stares long enough, he will see the Statue of Liberty but who finds, two-and-a-half hours later, that it’s still just squiggly lines.
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