Culture

Culture

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

The Gospel at Colonus

Taking Sophocles’ least-known play and reinterpreting via the hymns and songs of gospel music is, damn it, just the sort of thing that you expect from Edinburgh* in August. Thankfully, Lee Breuer’s plundering – adaptation is too limited a term – of Oedipus at Colonus is a monumental success. If you ever get the chance

Saturday Morning Country: Emmylou Harris

You can never have too much Emmylou and her appearance, backed by the brilliant Hot Band, on the Old Grey Whistle Test in 1977 is a joy from start to finish. Here she is with Making Believe – a Jimmy Work song that had previously been a hit for the great Kitty Wells too.

Suburban hymns

Features

Arcade Fire’s third album The Suburbs is in a long, glorious tradition of pop lyricism inspired by everyday life, writes Christopher Howse Arcade Fire’s first album Funeral was not about a funeral. But, goodness, when we saw Régine Chassagne hammering away at her keyboard in red elbow-gloves with her husband Win Butler singing one of

Balls clutches at straws

Many CoffeeHousers will have heard Ed Balls’ preposterous performance on the Today programme this morning. We have transcribed it below, to put it on the record. Three things jump out at me. The way that Balls is the last purveyor of Brownies, still talking about new jobs when all of the new jobs can be

Made of Glass

Philip Glass doesn’t approve of intervals. Last week, at Yale University’s Sprague Memorial Hall, the prolific composer gave a preview of what audiences in Dublin, Edinburgh and Cork could expect from his piano performances a few days later. He starts by declaring that pauses in performance “damage the concentration” – and he ended it in

Saturday Morning Country: Josh Ritter

Occasionally, people complain that this series isn’t contemporary enough and that it ignores the good country music that is still being produced in spite of the commercial interests of Nashville-pap. That’s a fair criticism. So here’s an acoustic version of Josh Ritter’s Folk Bloodbath – a hymn to the murder ballad which is, as Radley

Saturday Night Country... John Denver

Way back when back in the distant times I was at college I had – still do, in fact – a friend who was a John Denver fanatic. Aged 20 or so he’d seen the great troubador more than 20 times. In those days I had not yet seen the country light and, sad to

Kurt’s my man

Music

This week I am handing over the column to David Vick, who has contributed what I regard as the best (so far) of all the Top Tens I have received. Sound in judgment and admirably wide-ranging, Vick has in particular introduced me to Kurt Elling, an amazing jazz vocalist, still only in his early forties,

Tuesday Afternoon Country: Hank Williams Celebration Edition

Mercifully, the election ain’t the only show in town. There’s actual, real good news elsewhere. For instamce, 57 years after his death Hank Williams has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his contributions to American culture. Better late than never. So here, to celebrate, is audio of perhaps his most famous and thus perhaps the

Too close to Heaven

I dunno how this passed me by, just missed the news I suppose. But apparently Alex Chilton died a week or two back – which is no great surprise, in one way, but sort of shocking in another. He was one of two or three heroes of mine in that limited but enlivening medium, rock

Sunday Afternoon Country: The Flatlanders

Their 1970s album was called More a Legend than a Band and that was about right since it and they disappeared for 20 years. Happily the Flatlanders returned and continue to amaze with their groovy, mildly mystical brand of Texas country. Here they are with a song from their album Hills and Valleys called Homeland

R.I.P Mark Linkous

It’s a pretty thin and overrated medium, rock music, and too much energy is expended lauding its practitioners. But Mark Linkous, who is dead having shot himself, was one of a small handful with genuine talent which sometimes, just sometimes, teetered into real brilliance. Few people have used the medium better, or understood better how

Sunday Morning Country: Kitty Wells

Kitty Wells was born in 1919 and she’s the oldest living member of the Country Music Hall of Fame. So it’s well past time she featured here and, this being so, it’s sensible to play her first big hit It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels. If Hank Williams was the inspiration for everyone

Monday Night Country: Gillian Welch & David Rawlings

Bryan Curtis has an excellent piece at the Daily Beast on the current state of country music. Well, the state of commercially successful, Grammy-nominated country music anyway. As you might expect, it’s depressing stuff. Basically, you have a choice between Carrie Underwood and Taylor Swift and perhaps the best that may be said of this

Sunday Evening Country: Waylon again

Been a whole lotta time since Waylon was seen around here. Time to rectify that so here’s the great man singing A Good Hearted Woman which is what every outlaw needs though since all mommas also know they really shouldn’t let their babies grow up to be cowboys you’d think that means they’d be doubly

Sunday Afternoon Country: Ricky Skaggs & Tony Rice

Well, Sunday afternoon high-class, great-pickin’ gospel really. Alison Krauss has always cited Tony Rice as one of the biggest influences upon her career and here he is, accompanied by the great Ricky Skaggs, performing what is, in my view, a beautiful version of the classic The Soul of Man Never Dies:

An apology and some other stuff...

I think I owe my colleague Hugo Rifkind an apology for my comments about his piece on climate change a week or so ago. I think I said that he was a gibbering idiot, a lice-ridden whore and the source of all evil in the western world, I can’t remember exactly – something typically measured.