| | | Cate Le Bon: Pompeii review – introspective isolation album | | by Phil Mongredien Jan 30, 2022 | | (Mexican summer)
An almost entirely solo affair, the Welsh musician’s sixth album encapsulates feelings of lockdown with a nod to mid-70s Bowie While Cate Le Bon’s last album, 2019’s Reward, was written in relative seclusion in the Lake District, at least that was through choice. The disorienting pandemic isolation that was the backdrop to the creation of her sixth LP has resulted in a far more introspective record. Composed entirely alone (she’s described it as an “uninterrupted vacuum”) and recorded with her longstanding collaborator Samur Khouja, Pompeii is noticeably more subdued than much of her earlier work. Where once there was a playfulness in the arrangements, the slow and austere songs here sound as if they’re carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders. There’s little respite in the lyrics either, which frequently add to the feeling of claustrophobia: “Did you see me putting pain in a stone?”, “I’m kicking at the corner/ Recycling air”. There are still plenty of moments to savour: a succinct guitar solo on Remembering Me that says all it needs to in 10 seconds; strident brass flourishes on Running Away; the relative lightness of touch on the gorgeous Moderation and Harbour; the occasional echoes of Julia Holter and mid-70s Bowie throughout. Indeed, on one level it works well as a companion piece to the collective lockdown experience, right down to the uniformity of pace and mood. Whether that’s a period anyone wishes to revisit, however, is a different matter. Continue reading... | | | | | Harry and Meghan voice concern to Spotify over Covid misinformation | | by REUTERS Jan 30, 2022 | | Sussexes say they are committed to continuing to work with the music and podcast streaming platform The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have told Spotify they are concerned about Covid-19 misinformation on its platform, saying they are committed to continuing to work with the company, a spokesperson for their Archewell foundation has said. Neil Young and Joni Mitchell are removing their music from the streaming service, saying that it has allowed the airing of misinformation about Covid vaccines. Continue reading... | | | | | Free Love by Tessa Hadley review – an affair to remember | | by Anthony Cummins Jan 30, 2022 | | A married woman’s fling with a young 1960s rabble-rouser is the centrepiece of this elegant, shrewd and complex novel The energy in a Tessa Hadley novel typically flows from a character’s unvoiced longing or suppressed desire, gestured at in flashback over the course of a present-day narrative seamlessly encompassing the previous half-century, as in 2015’s The Past or 2019’s Late in the Day, titles that sum up the mood, if not the excitement, of her work.
At first glance, Free Love breaks with all that. It takes us from 1967 into 1968 in the company of a flighty middle-aged mother of two, Phyllis, who quits married life in the stockbroker belt with a Foreign Office high-up after falling for a mouthy young dinner guest, Nicky, the would-be revolutionary son of family friends working in oil. An after-dinner search for a child’s missing sandal supplies the pretext for a clinch in the dusk; soon, Phyllis is knocking on the door of Nicky’s rundown flat in eye-openingly multicultural west London every Wednesday, under cover of visiting her father in Leamington Spa.
If there’s folly here, it’s part of the novel’s trick to tempt us to see it as belonging only to Phyllis, when the tangled roots of the situation truly lie elsewhere. As Hadley shifts fluently between the points of view of the various parties involved, the novel turns as much on long-buried family secrets as it does the yearnings of itchy-footed middle age. Each member of Phyllis’s household, including her children, Colette, 16, and Hugh, nine, know something the others don’t; we’re in the dark, too, thanks to a twist that rests on Hadley not quite playing fair when, halfway through, the novel first accesses the thoughts of her husband, Roger.
Hadley’s complex sentences are purring marvels of engineering, always weighted just so, cut-glass English with a continental inflection, fond of a comma splice, the dialogue marked with a dash. A brilliant writer of interiority who can also do great scenes, she has a gift, especially, for portraying the state of wanting to be wanted, or simply to be seen – a recurring longing in her fiction, whose characters often have cause to be careful what they wish for. We see Phyllis, aching and raw, privately exulting while getting the dinner on back at home; we see the electric thrill of a touch of hands between long-separated lovers; or Colette, drunk, wanting to go “all the way” with a man, “her consciousness swooping over her like a hawk”.
If she shares a theme with Martin Amis and Michel Houellebecq – the pros and cons of the sexual revolution – her method couldn’t be more different: not comic grotesque or authorial hypothesis, but patiently inhabiting her characters, leaving it to us to gauge how their actions are shaped by the weight of experience, a technique that can’t help but elicit readerly sympathy. Yes, Nicky’s political grandstanding puts us in mind of Citizen Smith – when Phyllis extols the virtues of the NHS, he replies: “Keeps the factory workers healthy, so they can work for longer” – but Phyllis’s awakening at his hands isn’t mocked, exactly; Hadley’s too subtle, too generous for that. Continue reading... | | | | | Francis Bacon: Man and Beast review – the brutal truth | | by Tim Adams Jan 30, 2022 | | Royal Academy, London
The painter’s preoccupation with our animal urges is laid bare in this magnificent collection of nightmarish brutes and lovers in torment The first hint of what is to come is a large bared canine tooth, in Head 1 (1948). The painting featured in Francis Bacon’s debut London exhibition the year after it was made, and it greets you now in an opening room of its own at the Royal Academy. The human form in the painting, which emerges out of a black background within a sketchy geometry of a cage, has been reduced to a contorted mouth arising out of a body that suggests a side of lamb or a pork belly. It is that enlarged fang that holds your attention, though, gesturing not so much at the transformation of Jekyll into Hyde, but the sure evidence that the rough beast never went away. More than his earlier flayed carcass of a crucifixion, that first Head reveals the preoccupation in Bacon’s art that persisted right up to his death; the question that this often magnificent and properly disturbing retrospective nags at on every wall: just how animal are we? Continue reading... | | | | | Carlisle Castle restores 15th-century carvings thought to be by prison guards | | by Mark Brown North of England correspondent Jan 30, 2022 | | Carvings can be seen more clearly thanks to painstaking removal of sediment and water damage There are carvings of dolphins, horses, boar, salmon, mermaids, a magnificently endowed leopard, George and the dragon, and a fox preaching to some chickens – a 500-year-old warning not to trust people in authority. The carvings, about 300 of them, at Carlisle Castle are the subject of a restoration project to save them from the elements and allow them to be seen more clearly than they have been for generations. Continue reading... | | | | | Kerry Godliman review – relatable laughs that get the job done | | by Brian Logan Jan 30, 2022 | | Blackheath Halls, London
The After Life star invites us to join her as the butt of the joke in her clever, gag-filled observations on life in the internet age Kerry Godliman’s show title, Bosh, is taken from a Greg Davies phrase on Channel 4’s Taskmaster: “Here comes Godliman, boshing along.” The idea is that the south Londoner is a practical person, brisky working things out and getting them done. But life gets in the way – which is where the comedy comes in. The brusque efficiencies of her mothering are contrasted with parenting books and their aspirational ideals. Teenage romance 1980s-style is celebrated contra later digital dating developments. Elsewhere, we find Godliman trying to book a holiday and discovering that, in the age of the internet, the process has been recast as a high-stakes race against time. As those examples imply, it’s not a conceit that greatly distinguishes Godliman from the many other comics exaggerating their dismay at modern living. Rare is the middle-aged joker without a routine educating young people about life pre-mobile phones – although they don’t all have lines as good as Godliman’s one about flirting and aubergines. Happily, that’s one example among many memorable word-pictures – like the one about using the breathing hole in massage tables to practise being a nun. In tandem with the 48-year-old’s mouthy persona – forthright of opinion but always happy to chuck herself under the bus – this ensures that Godliman’s 70-minute tour de familiar horizon never feels secondhand. Kerry Godliman is at Bloomsbury theatre, London, on 5 February, then touring. Continue reading... | | | | | |
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