Archive for January, 2009
The Museum of Childhood
The Museum of Childhood is not somewhere you go voluntarily. It’s the kind of place your year five teacher thinks is ‘fun’ and ‘educational’ enough for a class trip, where the students mope about and break things, dreading the paragraph they will inevitably have to pull out of their hineys about it the next day.
Banging Drum – Power to the People
As the January editions of most music magazines decreed, 2008 saw a great crop of talented new break-through acts gain the mainstream coverage they deserve. But who’s gonna be big in 2009? The BBC’s Sound of 2009, widely respected as the what’s hot barometer in the music world, announced it’s top ten list earlier this [...]
Bentleys Oyster Bar and Grill
Walking into Bentleys is a bit like stepping into a time warp. It’s very classic, with printed wallpaper and pictures of ducks and other shooting paraphernalia on the walls. There’s a plethora of white table cloths, silver pepper pots and starched napkins, a quiet, understated, landed-gentry style hush, and the service is classic old school, [...]
Salute Petra: A Tribute to Luciano Pavarotti
It seems that opera is very much like physical exercise. Most people know very little about it, tend to avoid it as best they can, mock those who do take pleasure in its multifarious delights, yet nevertheless claim at any available social opportunity, so as not to appear slobbish and unsophisticated, that they truly relish [...]
Green Chilli in the Heart of Hammersmith
Indian food is a great comfort to us Brits in winter; piles of meat, vegetables, and lots of rice and bread with which to shovel every last mouthful of sauce in. It was therefore with some trepidation that I approached Green Chilli’s new super-healthy Ayurvedic menu – distinctly lacking in meat (and indeed wheat), and [...]
Camden Arts Centre Goes Solo
For some reason the Camden Arts Centre runs two solo shows of two very different artists and CAC’s declaration that they ‘share an intensity which is both personal and profound’ seems quite farfetched to me.
The British Museum’s Babylon: Myth and Reality
For many Londoners the ascendancy of sin, exaltation of deviltry, incurrence of the wrath of God, fall of man and the crumbling of a once great empire is but the chronicle of any given inebriated Friday night out in Soho. For those of us however who have either a keen interest in ancient world history [...]
Chancery Blame and The Gadjo Club
This isn’t the first place I’d look for spirited high jinks and melodic romance: along a disused train track on a dim back alley in Dalston. But tonight Passing Clouds, an ex-printing works-cum-arts club and inspired sanctuary of creative cool, is packed to the gunwales for Chancery Blame and The Gadjo Club’s EP launch. And [...]
Mr Motivator’s London Eye Workout
Oh this bizarre and wonderful city. Only ‘neath the grey skies of London could you behold such a sight. In the shadow of the London Eye, 52-year-old grandad Derrick Evans yesterday lead two hundred of London’s most (fool?)hardy citizens through a leg-pumpingly, kaleidoscopically colourful performance of the Funky Chicken.
Dining at The Guardian Canteen
A hack from a national newspaper recently lured me to lunch at his brand new HQ. All was not well within its wavy, gleaming glass walls. Apparently the canteen was in critical condition. An imported catering company ‘barely able to cope with the numbers’ was making meals a misery. I dutifully cancelled Claridges and made [...]
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