Music Archives

What have they done to The Devil Wears Prada?

Cinema

The Devil Wears Prada (2006) is one of those films which, if chanced upon when flicking television channels, I will always stick with for a bit. It has zing. It has bite. It has memorable lines that I can remember without having to look them up. (‘Are we going to a hideous skirt convention?’) But mostly it has Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly, the wonderfully toxic editor-in-chief of Runway fashion magazine. She is still terrific. But while the landscape has moved on, the characters have remained the same and halfway through I started to drift. Another blow is that it’s become more sentimental and less satirical. In other words – and I hate to be the one to say it – it’s not as good as the original. Where are we, 20 years on?

James Walton

In a fairer world, The Cage would receive a lot more attention than Half Man

Television

Half Man, Richard Gadd’s follow-up to the all-conquering Baby Reindeer, began with approximately ten seconds of some people at a wedding in rural Scotland having a good time. Two episodes later, they’re still about the only characters we’ve seen who aren’t having a gruesomely bad one. After that brief blast of jollity, the show moved to a nearby barn where the groom Niall (Jamie Bell) and his old chum Ruben (Gadd) were renewing their acquaintance in what would prove a characteristic way: with Niall looking terrified as Ruben menacingly recalled their former intimacy, menacingly caressed him, menacingly taunted him and menacingly smashed him repeatedly in the face.

Damian Thompson

The magic ears of Hyperion

Classical

How do we evaluate Hyperion’s Romantic Piano Concerto series, which over a period of 35 years recorded more than 200 works for piano and orchestra? Was it one of the glories of the catalogue or a repository of works whose ambitions exceeded their achievement? The answer, of course, is that it was both. The paradox is unavoidable. You can’t assemble a giant collection of mostly forgotten concertos on the assumption that they all deserve to be famous – which, to be fair, Hyperion doesn’t claim: the liner notes often concede that a piece ‘perhaps understandably failed to secure a place in the repertoire’ or some such euphemism. But they may deserve to be recorded. Keyboard pyrotechnics can be their own reward, compensating for vapid melodies or structural lumps.

Michael Hann

Big Thief is this generation’s R.E.M.

Pop

By the time Adrianne Lenker of Big Thief was born in 1991, Kim Gordon had already released seven albums with Sonic Youth. It’s not that there were no women in bands in the 1980s but there were few enough that the concept of the ‘Women in Rock Special’ was very familiar to desperate music journalists. It was also still the case that, within bands, women were seldom granted centre stage – unless they looked extraordinary or ran the band. That meant Gordon, and Kim Deal of Pixies, were more celebrated than any male bassist of a 1980s indie band. (Keith Gregory of the Wedding Present, for example, was never considered brain-meltingly cool simply for existing.

Lloyd Evans

Why actors love to play lunatics

Theatre

One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, adapted from Ken Kesey’s book by Dale Wasserman, is exactly like the movie but without Jack Nicholson’s star power. The cast have to impersonate lunatics for 150 minutes and they clearly love their job. Playing madmen comes naturally to actors and it’s an easy task because no creative discipline is required. Lunatics are capable of anything so the actor needn’t feel anxious about making a false move or indulging in an improbable gesture. Anything goes. The result is a hectic display of lazy, unfelt, superficial and repetitive caricatures. One actor holds a toolbox in his lap like a pet dog. Another jerks obsessively. A third leans against a pillar with his arms held out, dribbling and twitching.

Richard Bratby

Is this the missing link between Bach and Haydn?

The Listener

Grade: B ‘Is that Haydn or Mozart? One can’t always be sure,’ remarks Kenneth Clark in the 18th-century episode of Civilisation, and there’s the British intelligentsia’s relationship with music, right there. Imagine saying that about any other art form, and still passing as a connoisseur. ‘Rembrandt or Poussin? Not much in it, really.’ ‘Michelangelo or Raphael? I can’t honestly tell.’ Don’t be like Kenneth. Brush up on your 18th-century idioms, and rediscover the qualities that make Mozart and Haydn so great – with regular dips into the also-rans of the classical era.

Rupert Christiansen

How good is Wayne McGregor?

Dance

‘Professor Sir Wayne McGregor CBE’ runs the headline to a biographical essay in the programme for the Royal Ballet’s triple bill of his recent work. Knighted and honoured at the heart of the dance establishment, McGregor has a solid reputation as the trusty insider who is also a radical outsider. What a dangerous place for an artist to be. Yet he is without question someone of considerable stature. With intelligence and persistence, he breaks through barriers and dares to do things differently. Adept at establishing creative partnerships, he moves tirelessly across all forms of dance, from manipulating the avatars for the Abba light show to inspiring the young at his east London dance school and directing the dance biennale in Venice.

22 April 2026

Graeme Thomson

How good are the Rolling Stones’ alter egos, the Cockroaches?

Pop

Would you pay a tenner on the door to see the Cockroaches, the Fireman, Patchwork, the Network and Bingo Hand Job play your local pub? This unpromising line-up becomes a little more appealing (perhaps) upon learning that these are pseudonyms used by, respectively, the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Pulp, Green Day and R.E.M. over the years. Pop stars spend the first part of their careers trampling over their grandmothers in the unseemly rush to demand the world take notice of who they are, and the second part whining about being pigeonholed. The only thing harder to escape in the music industry than your name is your original haircut. Hence, the pseudonymous offshoot, offering a degree of separation with very little sense of jeopardy.

Deborah Ross

Terrifically atmospheric: Rose of Nevada reviewed

Cinema

Rose of Nevada is the third film in Mark Jenkin’s Cornish trilogy and if you have seen the first two (Bait, Enys Men) you will have booked your cinema ticket already. Rooted in characters shaped by the histories and tensions of Cornwall’s fishing folk, Jenkin’s film-making is uniquely tactile, textured and sensory. It has been said you can’t watch one of his features without feeling the rust on your hands and the salt in your hair. I would even add that it may be a while before you find your land-legs again.

Richard Bratby

The artistic collapse of Welsh National Opera

Opera

On the first night of Welsh National Opera’s new Flying Dutchman, the company’s co-directors walked on stage to salute their departing music director Tomas Hanus. There were cheers, of course; Hanus has been a courageous MD and his Wagner was thrilling. But no one has been appointed to succeed him, and that morning WNO had announced a 2026-27 season that amounts to a near-total artistic collapse, with just two full-scale operas. A major international company has been reduced to a community arts provider, and a Pollyanna press release announcing ‘a powerful statement of renewal’ did nothing to quell the feeling that the lights are going out on Cardiff Bay. It’s not just Cardiff, either.

Sam Leith

The perfect game for any thwarted sadist

15 April 2026

Rupert Christiansen

Excruciating tedium from Pina Bausch

Dance

You’re never too old to dance we are told nowadays. This encouraging injunction has been taken up by everyone from the likes of Mikhail Baryshnikov and Alessandra Ferri, who have found wondrously creative ways to compensate for their declining virtuosity and stamina, to septuagenarians who insist on bopping to Abba at their grandchildren’s wedding parties. I confess that in the interests of research I took to ballet classes when I was well into middle age: it was not a pretty or edifying sight. There is a lot to be said for oldies sticking to the military two-step. The Australian choreographer Meryl Tankard has a different view of the matter. Kontakthof is the work of the sainted Pina Bausch, dating from 1978.

Michael Hann

The joy of Belle and Sebastian

Pop

Do Belle and Sebastian have the most polite audience in pop? Normally when a pop singer leaves the stage to promenade through the audience, they are besieged. Even in seated venues most stars will make sure to take a security guard with them. I once saw bouncers drag women in red dresses away from Chris de Burgh at the Royal Albert Hall. Not with Belle and Sebastian. When Stuart Murdoch stepped off the stage, barely anyone even stood up. One chap had a little dance with him but no one reached out for a touch of his hand. He climbed from the arena floor to the stalls that circle it, and made his way into a row, where everyone swivelled their seats to let him pass. Yet as soon as he gave them permission, dozens of them were up on stage dancing with this joyful band.

Deborah Ross

Glenrothan is painfully bad

Cinema

Glenrothan is Brian Cox’s directorial debut and I wish there were a nicer way of putting it but, Brian: please, please, don’t give up the day job. The screenplay, meanwhile, is by David Ashton, whose only previous film credit seems to be Freddie as F.R.O.7 (1992), a James Bond spoof starring a six foot animated frog voiced by Ben Kingsley. (‘Toadally awful’ is the first comment on IMDb.) The only thing that might actually make you laugh is the foreshadowing The film stars Cox and Alex Cumming as estranged brothers Sandy and Donal and here’s what you need to know about the pair: 40 years ago Donal left Sandy and the family business (a whisky distillery in Glenrothan) for America and hasn’t been in touch since.

Richard Bratby

Heart-melting loveliness from John Rutter

Classical

Anyone for a spot of acoustic science? Apparently the distinctive colour of a musical note is concentrated almost wholly in the attack: the first split-second; the beginning of the sound wave. Obscure or somehow cut off, that first bite of a note or chord and what’s left sounds – well, not the same as everything else, exactly, but a great deal more samey. It’s like wine-tasting while holding your nose. Everything becomes neutral, and suddenly it’s remarkably easy to fool the senses. The Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino seems to enjoy playing these games. In Le voci sottevetro (1999) – four arrangements of works by the homicidal madrigalist Carlo Gesualdo – a quick splash of tuned percussion does the job of hiding the start of a line.

Lloyd Evans

The torture of Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen

Theatre

Copenhagen by Michael Frayn is a problem play. It debuted at the National in 1998 and ran for two years in the West End before transferring to Broadway. Since then, no UK producer has mounted a revival. Something must alarm investors. It’s a very chatty show. Three actors with three wooden chairs appear on a plain stage reciting dialogue about a meeting in Denmark in 1941 between the physicist Niels Bohr, his missus, and a family friend, Werner Heisenberg. The discussion focuses on the main developments in atomic science during the 20th century. Mrs Bohr, played by Alex Kingston, is there to offer a female angle on the ruminations of the two mega-nerds.

8 April 2026

James Delingpole

HBO Max isn’t worth subscribing to

Television

HBO Max is the latest streaming channel trying to lure you into yet another of those £10 a month subscription contracts you only remember having signed up for about three years later when you’re trying to work out why you are so skint. Its showpiece series is The Pitt which attracts ten million viewers per episode and has been called ‘the best medical drama on television in years’. This is a category of excellence I find about as enticing as ‘most amusing form of cancer’ or ‘most ineradicable variety of testicular lice’. But, just for you, I watched to see what the fuss is about.

Rod Liddle

Don’t blame Kanye for his abject idiocy

The Listener

Grade: C– Kanye? No, I can’t, quite. I will always quietly overlook the idiotic political sensibilities of the conformist millennial legions who comprise our pop charts – the keffiyeh-clad Hamas wannabes, the BLM halfwits, the greenies, the men-can-be-women wankpuffins – in order to let their music be judged on its own merits, free from boomer political disdain. But songs such as ‘Heil Hitler’ and all those swastikas? Well, they are just a stretch too far for me. The man is an abject moron. Some will say, so what? There have been loads of abject morons down the years in pop. Why draw a line in the sand for Kanye West? Good question. And it turns out it’s not his fault.

Lloyd Evans

The National Theatre needs help

Theatre

In The Print is a docudrama about the bitter war between Rupert Murdoch and the unions in the mid-1980s. Murdoch was determined to computerise the production of his UK titles and to terminate the far left’s stranglehold on his business. Daily papers are vulnerable to last-minute strikes and his thieving employees made no secret of their larcenous tactics. The print workers, known as ‘inkies’, earned £1,000 a week for 16 hours’ work and their union, Sogat, behaved like a bunch of racketeers. They laughed at Murdoch by submitting wage claims for employees called ‘Donald Duck’ and ‘Ronald Reagan’. Murdoch fought back with smart, imaginative tactics that Sogat, under Brenda Dean’s leadership, couldn’t handle.

Graeme Thomson

Unrelentingly entertaining: Basement Jaxx reviewed

Pop

How would you like your nostalgia served, sir (and it is usually ‘sir’): in mist-shrouded monochrome or crazed lysergic Technicolor? Last week I saw two bands in the same venue, a few days apart. Neither having released any new material for more than a decade, both duly crammed their sets with their greatest hits. And yet one felt like the future, and the other like the past. Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe, aka turn-of-the-millennium electronic duo Basement Jaxx, should be credited for having great sport with that in-built characteristic of almost all electronic outfits. Namely, that two or three blokes pushing a bunch of keys and buttons cannot hope to ever forge the kind of compelling visual identity so crucial to rock groups.

Richard Bratby

An outstanding Turn of the Screw

Opera

Never let it be said that The Spectator fails to follow up an arts story. Long-term readers will recall that in the edition of 6 March 1711 Joseph Addison investigated the supply of live sparrows for the first production of Handel’s Rinaldo. ‘What, are they to be roasted?’ he asked, reasonably enough. No, they were ‘to enter towards the end of the first Act and to fly about the Stage’. Still, you need to keep an eye on these theatrical types and although there was certainly birdsong in the latest revival of Rinaldo – the end-of-term opera at the Royal Academy of Music – I can report it was recorded. No sparrows were cooked in the making of this opera. Mind you, Handel purists took a bit of a battering.

Deborah Ross

A hypnotic new adaptation of The Stranger

Cinema

François Ozon’s The Stranger is an adaptation of Albert Camus’ 1942 novel about a clerk who – spoiler alert* – senselessly murders an Arab in broad daylight on a hot Algerian beach. Why did he do it? ‘It was because of the sun’ is all he can suggest. Existential ennui: that’s what’s at play here, which isn’t generally a great draw at the cinema. It would come way down on most people’s lists. But miraculously, Ozon has managed to make a film about boredom without making a boring film. If nothing else, the radiant black and white aesthetic will grab you from the off and then never let go. Visually, it’s divine. The novel – which was published as The Outsider in this country – opens with the line: ‘Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure.

Rupert Christiansen

A mesmerising new work from English National Ballet

Dance

Crystal Pite is one of a handful of truly original choreographers today, extending the boundaries of her art form without going all doolally about trendy gender issues, AI or neuroscience. She is rooted in something more universal – the tension between conflict and connection, between what draws us together and what keeps us apart. ‘We want to individuate,’ she says. ‘Yet we want to belong.’ Out of this grows Body & Soul, in which individuals fight their way out of great swarms and cocoons, only to be sucked back into an inexorable flow that snakes and stiffens, multiplies and divides.

31 March 2026

Deborah Ross

The Drama makes no sense

Cinema

The Drama is the latest from Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli whose films (Sick of Myself, Dream Scenario) always cause a stir, and this is no exception. It stars Hollywood big-hitters Robert Pattinson and Zendaya as a happily engaged couple whose forthcoming wedding may not go ahead after one discovers a disturbing truth about the other. What is this disturbing truth? It would be a spoiler to tell you – even though the details are splashed all over the internet and have already created a backlash. (Don’t look it up. Or do. I’m not your boss.) It is intended to shock but it may not be as shocking as it thinks it is – or even very convincing.

Michael Hann

It’s time to redefine what we mean by classic rock

Pop

Classic rock used to be an American radio genre made up of bluesy guitar bands from the past. It spawned Fathers’ Day compilation albums, a magazine and endless lists where ‘Stairway to Heaven’, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and ‘Free Bird’ argued among themselves about which was the public’s favourite. But that’s not classic rock any longer; that’s heritage rock, music by the dead or dying. When the radio format was invented, the bands it celebrated were largely extant, or only recently departed; the oldest of the musicians were not yet 40. Their music was both current and nostalgic because new groups were still nicking from them, and their songs weren’t yet period pieces.

James Walton

Over-cautious and clumsy: The Downfall of Huw Edwards reviewed

Television

It’s not easy for a drama to be over-cautious and clumsy at the same time. Or to turn a real-life story that shocked (and, let’s face it, titillated) the nation into an oddly flat piece of television. So how did the much-hyped Power: The Downfall of Huw Edwards manage to do both? The answer, I’d suggest, is by failing to interrogate – or even engage much – with its own material. Instead, it opted to simply pass on the facts drawn from its own research, making only the most half-hearted and sometimes contradictory attempts to explain them. The programme began with Edwards (Martin Clunes) in his voice-of the-nation pomp, as he announced the Queen’s death.

Lloyd Evans

Self Esteem is the star of this David Hare musical

Theatre

Teeth ’ n’ Smiles is not quite a musical. David Hare’s 1975 play about rock’n’roll includes a handful of tunes performed by a group of failing musicians. It feels like several dramas rammed together. One strand concerns the aimless witter of instrumentalists who lounge around backstage discussing drugs and groupies. Another strand follows the lead singer, Maggie, and her destructive appetites for booze and casual sex. The third element concerns the band’s manager, Saraffian (Phil Daniels), who knows nothing about showbusiness and seems keen to advertise his ignorance to the world. Saraffian is a Dickensian figure who talks like Fagin and believes that pop stars should resemble school prefects.

Richard Bratby

The joy of American romanticism

The Listener

Grade: A– For some record collectors, the fun lies in comparing recordings of standard repertoire. For others, it’s more about exploring – discovering works that are extinct in the concert hall, but which the inscrutable economics of recording make viable. If you’ve a habit of forming modest crushes on wallflowers and unfashionable composers, the news that Chandos is recording the orchestral music of Edward MacDowell (1860-1908) will bring a pleasant flush of blood to the cheeks. MacDowell, in short, is what American classical music sounded like before there was such a thing as American classical music – before Copland, Gershwin and all that jazz. Romantic, in other words; very, very Romantic.

25 March 2026

Deborah Ross

For those of a nervous disposition, is Sinners worth it?

Cinema

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners won four Oscars and was nominated for 16 and I’d yet to see it. Sometimes the labels associated with a film can be off-putting and, for me, ‘horror’ and ‘vampires’ have the same effect as, say, ‘experimental’ or ‘like a poem’ or ‘directed by Michael Bay’. It’s now landed on the streamers and it seemed like an omission that needed correcting, so I spent around ten hours with it. It’s only 135 minutes but should you hit pause every time it gets scary that’s how it might roll. Please don’t sell me a vampire film when it’s a zombie one, even if I don’t like either The film is a genre-mashing beast, told with gusto from the off – and you get nearly an hour of pause-free time, even if you know what’s coming down the track.