Culture

The highs of Stevie Wonder’s Hyde Park show were magnificently high. The vast band were fully clicked into that syncopated, swampy funk, horns stabbing through the synths, the backing singers adding gospel fervour. And Wonder – now 75 – sang like it was still the 1970s, his voice raspy one minute, angelic the next. Anyone who heard that phenomenal group play ‘Living for the City’ or ‘Superstition’ and didn’t feel ‘ants in my pants and I need to dance’, as James Brown once put it, should resign from life: they do not deserve such joy. That said, there were oddities. We were blessed with visits from four of Wonder’s nine children, two of whom were given whole songs to sing while the great man had a breather, as were three of the backing singers.

Grade: B+ There’s quite a lot to dislike about Wet Leg, even aside from their stupid name. The entirety of their lyrical canon, for starters – vapid and petulant millennial inanities, 50 per cent performative braggadocio, 50 per cent adolescent carping. Or there’s the commodification of their sexualities: they’ve traded up to being bi, just before the market peaks. Or there’s Rhian Teasdale’s frequent, bone-idle recourse to an affected, half-spoken monotone in lieu of, y’know, a tune – that shtick had begun to pall even before the end of their debut single, ‘Chaise Longue’. Or the unremitting chug chug chug of the guitars and the fact that Teasdale sings in the manner of a 16-year-old when she’s actually 32. All this and more.

The Australian twins Danny and Michael Philippou started off as YouTubers known for their comically violent shorts – Ronald McDonald Chicken Store Massacre (2014) has accrued 67 million views. They then raised the money to make their first feature. This was the quietly disquieting Talk To Me (2022), which cost $4.5 million and made $92 million. Bring Her Back (they like three-word imperatives, these lads) is their second and it may not be as successful. It stars Sally Hawkins and this isn’t, alas, horror at its most fun, inventive and camp. This is horror horror: gory, grisly and one that properly goes for it at the end – which, if you are not a horror nut, can’t come soon enough.

Like spider plants and exotic cats, certain artists are best suited to the great indoors. Lana Del Rey, for instance, proves the point that just because you can sell enough tickets to fill a stadium doesn’t mean you should necessarily perform in one. Some music blossoms in the sun, some ripens in the shadows. Billie Eilish belongs in the latter camp. Even though her biggest hit, ‘Birds of a Feather’, was the most streamed song on Spotify last year and is now approaching three billion listens, and her duet withCharli xcx on ‘Guess’ was another ubiquitous sound of 2024, her appeal remains slightly subversive.

The memory of Nye Bevan is being honoured at the National Theatre. Having made his name as a Marxist firebrand, Nye was quick to take advantage of the privileges enjoyed by the governing classes whom he affected to despise. He entered parliament in 1929 and began to hang around the Commons bar plying female MPs with double gins. His future wife, Jennie Lee, referred to him as a ‘rutting stag’. Was he a serial bed-hopper as well as a problem drinker? It’s hard to tell from this bland, reverential portrait of a socialist martyr. The director, Rufus Norris, adds song and dance routines, requiring the services of two choreographers, as if to suggest that Nye was a gifted crooner with a great pair of pins as well. Is that true? Or just part of the packaging?

On the continent this summer, new operas from two of Britain’s most important composers. Oliver Leith likes guns, animals and dissolving sickly sweet sounds in acid baths of microtonality. In one recent orchestral work, the conductor becomes a pistol-wielding madman; his next, Garland, a vast pageant premiering on 18 September at Bold Tendencies, Peckham, sees a horse become a musician. He’s 35 and already has a school. Listen out for it – in the London new-music scene you can’t move for Leithians. The telltale sign is the sound of twisting metal: shiny pitches that warp and bend until brittle. He’s English but in an outsidery way – jokey, gentle, sad, eccentric. The opposite of arch, insidery Benjamin Britten.

For bands of a certain vintage, the art of keeping the show on the road involves a tightly choreographed dance between past and present, old and new, then and now. It’s not a one-way transaction: there should be some recognition that the people you are playing to have also evolved since the glory years of the indie disco and student union. Halfway through the first date of Pulp’s UK tour following the release of More, their first album in 24 years, I started thinking about Withnail & I. Watching the film repeatedly as a young man, the booze-soaked antics of the dissipated ‘resting actor’ and his addled supporting cast seemed like great larks, albeit in extremis.

These days the heart sinks when Deutsche Grammophon announces its new releases. I still shudder at the memory of Lang Lang’s 2024 French album, in which he drooled over Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte; when I reviewed it I suggested that if the poor girl wasn’t dead when he started, then she certainly was by the time he’d finished. Now she’s been killed again, this time by the guitarist Robin Scherpen, whose Ravel Reimagined offers us ‘a peaceful and serene soundscape’. Then there’s Rêverie from Nemo Filou, a trio whose cocktail-lounge noodling allows ‘the listener to drift off into bliss’, and Sleep Circle, a ‘re-recorded version of the 2012 project Sleep’ by DG’s in-house snoozemeister Max Richter.

Paralysed rather than empowered by the heavy hand of Big Brother Arts Council, the major subsidised dance companies are running scared and gripped by dismally risk-averse and short-termist attitudes. Free from the deadening metrics of diversity quotas and targeted outcomes, smaller more independent enterprises – London City Ballet and New English Ballet Theatre among them – can be lighter on their feet: they have inherited something of the pioneering spirit of Marie Rambert and Ninette de Valois a century ago and they deserve support. Another such is Ballet Nights – a series of one-off galas masterminded by Jamiel Devernay-Laurence, who doubles up as an embarrassingly brash compère, introducing each performer as though they were contestants at a rodeo. I wish he wouldn’t.