Issue 628

Storm Thorgerson

Born in 1944, Storm Thorgerson’s childhood would not have been thought unusual were it not that he went to school with Roger Waters and Syd Barrett. ‘Roger and I had two connections, one of which was through our mothers, who happened to be pals, and…

Star Trek

There’s an old Star Trek salutation – to live long and prosper. But not even original series creator Gene Roddenberry could have imagined just how long and prosperous Star Trek would be. Since airing on American TV in 1966, the show has spawned six…

White Lies

Despite its grand themes of life and death, To Lose My Life or Lose My Love was the first album of 2009 to go straight in at number one. Not bad for a debut album and a cracking start to the year for London trio Whites Lies. Having begun life as punky…

Gregory Burke: Hoors

Gregory Burke feels more mellow, more at home with himself than the thirtysomething who entered the public domain with the premiere of Gagarin Way in 2001. At that time there was a sense of a man dazzled by the sudden attention the play brought him.

Old age and Hollywood

Hollywood producer and one time Clinton supporter Mike Medavoy understands. Old age and Hollywood is the double you just don’t mix. In between closing deals and sitting on the board of California’s Anti Terrorism Information Center, Medavoy once penned…

Swimming

Underwater, swimming guru Steven Shaw has the effortless grace of an aquatic creature. Sheathed in a short wetsuit – half-man, half-seal – he whizzes from one end of the pool to the other, propelled only by the occasional flick of a limb. Along with…

Branford Marsalis Quartet - Metamorphosen

JAZZ While brother Wynton has garnered greater attention over the years with a string of ambitious large scale projects, the saxophonist has arguably produced the more consistently satisfying body of work on record. This quartet with pianist Joey…

Star Trek

ACTION/ADVENTURE Star Trek is something that didn’t appear to need rebooting. The show debuted in 1966 and over the next 40 odd years, we’ve had 79 episodes of William Shatner, several TV spin-off series (The Next Generation and Voyager etc) and ten…

Marmaduke Duke - Duke Pandemonium

ELECTRONICA/ROCK The second album from the collision of chaos that is Biffy Clyro’s Simon Neil and JP Reid of Sucioperro is the next chapter in the life of the mysterious and magnificent Marmaduke Duke. And it seems to be that chapter where we find…

Phil Collins: The World Won’t Listen

REVIEW INSTALLATION PHIL COLLINS: THE WORLD WON’T LISTEN This is one of those rare exhibitions where a verbal articulation cannot do justice to the work on display. The three-part video installation ‘The World Won’t Listen’, filmed in Colombia, Turkey…

Sounds Like Teen Spirit

DOCUMENTARY This endearing pop-documentary, the debut feature of Brit Jamie Johnson, fits into the growing genre of ‘kids competition’ films, for which Jeffrey Blitz’s 2003 spelling bee documentary Spellbound is still the benchmark. Johnson’s subject…

Paul Vickers & The Leg

INDIE/POST-PUNK OPERA It’s not at every pre-weekend indie night you witness the premiere of a 20-minute post-punk opera performed by a supergroup quartet of men in animal costumes. Yet that’s exactly what’s on offer in the debut of Itchy Grumble, a…

Watchmen: Tales of the Black Freighter

ANIMATION/ADVENTURE Tales of the Black Freighter, or ‘the pirate story’ as it’s also known, is the comic-within-the-comic that threads through the narrative of the Watchmen graphic novel. Excised from the film adaptation, it appears here as a…

. . . And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead

ROCK … And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead are one of those few acts who have established a strong and loyal fanbase without the majority of the world’s population being any the wiser. Having evaded the sting of a troubled flirtation with a…

A Time to Love and a Time to Die

WAR/DRAMA For his penultimate American film in 1958, Douglas Sirk, master of Hollywood melodrama, returned to his native Germany to shoot his most personal film. Adapted from the novel by Erich Maria Remarque (author of All Quiet on the Western…

Sometimes a Great Notion

DRAMA Briefly seen in the UK under the title Never Give an Inch, Sometimes a Great Notion was a long gestated but never accomplished project by Sam Peckinpah before becoming one of the most unfairly underrated gems in the directorial canon of the…

Bill Wells & Maher Shalal Hash Baz - Gok

JAZZ/FOLK Inhabiting the Cartesian co-ordinate that melodically aligns Tokyo with Falkirk, Gok is a sublime anthology of avant-garde lullabies and gentle jazz, from Scots outsider dignitary Bill Wells and Japanese folk-punks Maher Shalal Hash…

First Word: Miles Jupp

First record you ever bought? The first LP I bought was Tony Hancock’s ‘The Blood Donor’. The first piece of music was possibly Starship’s ‘Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now’. I think I bought that at a fête when I was about seven, I’m not sure why. I’ve…

Kazuo Ishiguro

It’s a well-worn belief within literary circles that knocking out a short story collection is a sure-fire way to financial ruin. They just don’t sell well. Never have and probably never will. Yet many of literature’s towering figures have dabbled in the…

Julian Argüelles

Saxophonist Julian Argüelles is originally from the Birmingham area, but has spent a lot of his time in East Lothian since moving to Scotland five years ago to join his partner, singer Cathie Rae. He may be an adopted local, but his work on the jazz…

Julian House: The New Spirit Happening

The future as we imagined it floated into view somewhere between 1950 and 1975. This was when a peculiarly English strain of science-fiction emerged, fuelled by postwar possibilities and Cold War paranoia. Quatermass and The Pit and Village of the…

21212

Next month, chef Paul Kitching and his partner Katie O’Brien complete their move from Juniper, Manchester’s only Michelin-starred restaurant, to a full townhouse on Royal Terrace on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill. A £4m project, this 38-cover restaurant – plus…

ECA's Fashion Show

Edinburgh College of Art’s annual fashion degree show has long been a key date in the calendar of fashion-forward ‘Burghers, who know that the innovative designs on display tend to transcend expectations for a student fashion show. ECA graduates have…

Sugaring-Off Cabin and How Do I Get Up There?

SKETCH SHOWS The stock of the TV sketch show couldn’t be lower right now after the vastly-hyped airing and subsequent critical mauling of Horne and Corden. And this monstrosity dribbled our way not too long after similar BBC3 calamities such as…

Saint Etienne

POP It’s customary these days, upon the release of a band’s greatest hits collection, to ask if they’re splitting up. Having brought out London Conversations last year, Sarah Cracknell gets the denial out of the way early: ‘I know it’s a funny…