Peter Barrett
F**king Men at the Arts Theatre
‘This is America. It still matters what you do with your dick’
Priscilla Ahn at the Pigalle Club
Any set list that contains a Harry Nilsson song, a Willie Nelson song and a song about boobs gets the thumbs up from me.
Evan Dando at the Macbeth, Hoxton
It has been a long-held belief of this writer that ‘guerrilla’ gigs are thoroughly deserving of their peculiar name on account of the fact that they, like so many militant rebel organisations, are badly run, short on cash and full of lunatics. This week’s musical insurgence at The Macbeth in Hoxton proved to be no [...]
Brown’s Bar and Brasserie
An Englishman, a Frenchman and an American walk into a bar. They like the place. They pool their money and buy it. They open it up together on their terms. The Frenchman (sullen, unpredictable, genial) heads for the kitchen. The Englishman (courtly, urbane, affable) designs the décor. The American (quick-witted, smooth-tongued, amorous) takes charge of [...]
Richard Thompson Live at the Barbican
Playboy magazine could never have seen it coming. It was 1999 when Los Angeles’ most hallowed of cultural monthly publications sought the recommendations of renowned musicians in order to compile the definitive list of the ‘10 greatest songs of the millennium’. Of all the contributors and all the contributions to this supreme register of musical [...]
Dega Breaks, Haunts and To The Bones
Just over my left shoulder hangs a large black and white print of the late, great Muddy Waters, the celebrated ‘Father of the Chicago Blues’. As a struggling country blues musician in Issaquena County, an impoverished patch of pre-war, segregated Mississippi, Waters scraped a living playing to illegal juke joints filled with gamblers, brigands and [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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.
Mandy Patinkin Lights Up Duke of York’s Theatre
It is credit to Patinkin’s consummate stage performance that he can make this many mistakes and still have such an assemblage of London’s finest pearl-clad showgoers whooping for more.
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