I first heard Gil Scott-Heron’s song ‘The Revolution Will No Be Televised’ on the grassroots independent media project www. indymedia.org when it was covering Prague’s ‘S26’ demonstration against the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in September 2000. I was there for the demo – an overwhelming experience that changed my life and worldview. It also sent…
We already know that David Lynch secretly loves Clueless and his recently-launched own brand of coffee makes a damned fine cup. It’s also evident that in his latest Interview Project, Lynch picks up the camera where Warhol’s Screen Tests left off and created a reality road movie that would be at home in any art…
June 21, 2011 Christ Church, Spitalfields Any attempt at describing the work of French composer Eliane Radigue is bound to be far inferior to the feeling of experiencing it. Her work cannot be explained in traditional musical terms. Here we find no conventional use of movement, rhythm or pitch. That said, her compositions are neither…
Disco Inferno’s footprint on contemporary pop music may not be immediately apparent, at least to those most concerned with chart positions or timeless, X-Factor-friendly tunes, but the importance of this Essex trio is belatedly beginning to find recognition amongst a new breed of enveloping-pushing sonic alchemists from M.I.A. to No Age; Matmos to Battles. After…
“The band deserve a real shot, we can’t let anything get in the way.” The latest in an ongoing series following Winterbird, the tiny Lancastrian record label founded by Jamie Holman I found a band. A band to fall in love with and believe in. There was a purity about them which touched all who…
3 March – 22 May 2011, Barbican Art Gallery A woman is standing on a flat roof; she is wearing a red top and trousers and is performing a series of choreographed movements against a grey vista of fire escapes and water towers. On the roof of the building, directly behind her, is another dancer…
All Visual Arts’ cavernous new Kings Cross space recently played host to two works by different artists, brought together to create a happy yet unsettling dialogue. Alice Anderson’s Fort-Da comprises a towering wooden bobbin wrapped in fist-sized ropes of gleaming red hair, one of which escapes the coil and dangles in the air draped from…
At the Penguin Cafe – The Royal Ballet, Royal Opera House, March 16 Taking my seat within the grand surroundings of the Royal Opera House, I was struck by the peculiar Englishness of the atmosphere and the aptness of the eccentric triple bill on offer. From the camp extravagance of ‘Rhapsody’ and ‘Sensorium’s’ restrained sensuality,…
When Twin Peaks appeared on UK television in 1990, the critical reaction was unequivocal and unprecedented. Art-house buffs and casual viewers alike were in agreement: this was seriously great. Dave Watkins explains what made Twin Peaks a killer serial. Co-created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, writer for the immensely popular Hill Street Blues, and…
How telling it is that the seminal image driving David Lynch to create his formidable 1986 adventure into darkness, Blue Velvet, was that of a severed human ear! The ear is a hole into the brain, and the eyes two more through which the camera has turned us into willing voyeurs. But voyeurs don’t just…