P.10 Jenny Hval
P.22 Jackie Hagan
P.32. Sinead Russell
P.34 Sarah Eyre - Sey (2015)
June 2015
I N D E P E N D E N T
C U LT U R A L
J O U R N A L I S M
Issue 27, June 2015 Š Radge Media Ltd. Get in touch: E: hiya@theskinny.co.uk T: 0161 833 3124 P: The Skinny, Second Floor, Swan Buildings, 20 Swan Street, Manchester, M4 5JW The Skinny is distributing 22,710 copies across Liverpool and Manchester, a wide range of advertising packages and affordable ways to promote your business are available. Get in touch to find out more.
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Editorial Northwest Editor Film & Deputy Editor Events Editor Music Editor Art Editor Books Editor Clubs Editor Comedy Editor Deviance Editor Fashion Editor Food Editor Tech Editor Theatre Editor Travel Editor
Lauren Strain Jamie Dunn Simon Jay Catling Dave Kerr Sacha Waldron Holly Rimmer-Tagoe Daniel Jones John Stansfield Kate Pasola Alexandra Fiddes Jamie Faulkner John Donaghy Alecia Marshall Paul Mitchell
Production Production Manager Designer Sub Editor Editorial Assistant
Amy Minto Thom Isom Kristian Doyle Will Fitzpatrick
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Nicola Taylor Caroline Harleaux Issy Patience
Lead Designer
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General Manager
Kyla Hall
Editor-in-Chief Chief Operating Officer Publisher
Rosamund West Lara Moloney Sophie Kyle
Printed on 100% recycled paper
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Contents
THE SKINNY
Contents Up Front 06
Chat & Opinion: Welcome to the magazine! Get your last minute news with Stop the Presses, midday culinary musings in What Are You Having For Lunch? and competition excitement in Spot the Difference. Plus, Shot of the Month and the eerie clairvoyance of BALLS.
30
Deviance: Our Deviance ed tried her hand at naturism and she bloody loved it.
32
Fashion: Graduates from Liverpool School of Art and Design discuss their inspirations and hopes for the future.
34
Showcase: Sarah Eyre explores gender, identity and the female body through the uncanny and surreal use of everyday objects.
37
Food & Drink: Two women from Liverpool take on our wasteful culture with the Real Junk Food Project and we check out two new coffee joints, Idle Hands and Filter + Fox. Plus all your local foodie news.
Features
10
Jenny Hval discusses her latest record, Apocalypse, girl, an intensely delivered, multi-faceted deconstruction of issues around sexuality, capitalism and femininity.
12
Being split between two continents and three cities hasn’t managed to stop Outfit from making one of the year’s best albums. They tell us about being free from expectations.
15
John Maclean reveals how he went from making music promos with his Beta Band pals to giving directions to Michael Fassbender on fairytale western Slow West.
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Hudson Mohawke talks trap, spreading his wings and giving up childhood vices ahead of the release of second album Lantern. Are comedy nights in the Northwest getting, well, weirder? One quarter of sketch/ variety/fight club night Quippodrome, Edy Hurst investigates the diversification of the local comedy scene. Alex Ross Perry’s third film, Listen Up Philip, sees Jason Schwartzman and Jonathan Pryce channel Philip Roth to play literary A-holes. We chat to the up-and-coming American indie director. Plus a preview of HOME's Viva! Mexican Cinema weekender
21
Our Art editor looks at The Harris’s new exhibition Oculist Witnesses, featuring the work of Sovay Berriman, Lindsey Bull and Ruth Claxton.
22
Manchester comic, poet and theatremaker Jackie Hagan discusses her eccentric solo show Some People Have Too Many Legs ahead of her Didsbury Arts Festival gig, while rising spoken word star Ameena Atiq talks about writing as an outlet.
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Tech: MMORPGs (or, Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) are just a bit of fun, right? But what if a gamer begins functioning as his/her avatar on a deeper level?
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Clubs: Read our picks from this summer's smörgåsbord of clubby festivals.
52
Books: Literary highlights this month include Davi Sedaris and poetry project Other Rooms; plus we’ve reviews of newly published poetry collections from Ryan Van Winkle and William Wantling.
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New Leeds-based radio station KMAH North’s bubbling electronic underground – we go behind the scenes.
29
Canadian noisemongers Fist City’s new record, Everything Is a Mess, is full of anger. Guitarist Evan van Reekum tells us why.
June 2015
Music: We get psyched for another Africa Oyé with a lively chat with DJ Esa and look back at a bunch of other fests in our live roundup; plus new records from Leftfield, Sun Kil Moon, Major Lazer and Everything Everything. Art: Your exhibition highlights for the month; plus reviews of Eastern Exchanges at Manchester Art Gallery and Leonora Carrington at Tate Liverpool.
26 is establishing itself as a hub for the
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Review
49
As she releases her third collection, Blood Child, Eleanor Rees considers the politics of poetry.
Artist Anthony Schrag is about to embark on a three month perambulation to Venice Biennale; along the way he’s going to ask himself, What’s the point of Venice Biennale?
Travel: Have selfie culture and social media transformed the experience of travel? One writer yearns for a lost time of human connection and hostels without Wi-Fi.
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08 Heads Up: Stuff to do – so much of it, in fact, we’ve lovingly arranged it in calendar form for your planning convenience.
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Comedy: Ahead of the festival breezing into town again, our Comedy editor ask why MIF’s comedy programme ignores both the ‘Manchester’ and the ‘International’ parts of its title; plus, our Spotlight falls on Will Duggan. Film & DVD: Indie whippersnapper Alex Ross Perry’s third film, Listen Up Philip, comes to our screens and Jonathan Oppenheimer follows up The Act of Killing with the similarly bracing doc The Look of Silence, while a classic (Paper Moon) and two stinkers (The Interview and Jupiter Ascending ) head to home video.
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Competitions: Win tickets to 4x4 at the Lowry, a one-of-a-kind performance piece melding juggling and ballet.
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Listings: Praise be for the summer solstice: you’ll need as many hours in the day as you can muster to do all this lot.
2015
SATURDAY 20 & SUNDAY 21 JUNE Sefton Park, Liverpool
12:30pm – 9:30pm both days FREE admission
For further festival information visit africaoye.com africaoye
Contents
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Editorial
T
he national mood has been glum of late – no guesses as to why – so, first, an invitation: come and cheer yourselves up with a night of great comedy from some of the best emerging acts in the Northwest at The King’s Arms, Salford, on 12 July! Our tireless Comedy editor has put together an ace bill of young comedians – all of whom have bravely withstood our gruelling Spotlight interviews (“If you could be haunted by anyone, who would it be and why?”) – as part of Greater Manchester Fringe Festival. Tickets are just a fiver and available from greatermanchesterfringe.co.uk or on the door on the night, and the lineup boasts all of these truly incredible people (and we’re not just saying that, we’ve actually seen them all and everything): Norris & Parker, Danny Sutcliffe, Will Setchell, Jayne Edwards, Sam & Tom, Will Duggan, Jack Evans and MC Freddy Quinne. (NB This event wasn’t actually programmed as a response to the election outcome, I’m just using that as a crutch for this lovely letter I’m writing to you at 6am in the torrential rain, you know the score by now *weeps softly*). Anyway! On to the issue at hand – quite literally, actually, the issue in your hand. As Comedy’s investigation of a wave of new, alternative-format nights in the Northwest (page 18) and Clubs’ profile of an exciting new radio station based out of Leeds (p26) go to show, this edition of The Skinny is full of people doing things differently. These strident voices take in the likes of theatre-maker Jackie Hagan, who admirably channelled the shock of having to suddenly have a leg amputated two years ago into brave, funny new material; artist Anthony Schrag, who’s setting out on a three-month walk to Venice as a comment on the problems of the Biennale, and Ameena Atiq, the Yemeni poet who is rising to prominence
on Liverpool’s spoken word scene and appears at Liverpool Arab Arts Festival this month. Elsewhere, Canadian surf-punks Fist City offer salient comment on growing social and racial tensions in the US, and John Maclean goes from making music with the Beta Band to making a western with Michael Fassbender. As you do. Also around this time of year, degree show season begins in earnest, and our coverage commences with a look at the work of Liverpool School of Art and Design’s Fashion grads on p32. Keep an eye on our next few issues for reports from the region’s art schools, and for our favourites profiled in the monthly artist Showcase. ‘Til then, this month’s centre spread is occupied by lens-based artist Sarah Eyre’s unnerving explorations of gender through wigs and entropied balloons. Last but absolutely not least – in fact she’s very much first, taking our cover this month – is the honestly magnificent Jenny Hval, whose fifth album Apocalypse, girl explores gender roles, media propaganda surrouding ideas of feminity, and why people choose religion and desire. This issue of The Skinny was brought to you by horrible remixes of Carly Rae Jepsen. Naturally. ON THE COVER: Jenny Hval By Dustin Aksland “I was born and raised in Modesto, California. George Lucas made a movie about it called American Graffitti, check it out. I currently live in Brooklyn, NY. Woody Allen has made many movies about it, check them out. When I’m not shooting, you can find me working on my motorcycle, riding my motorcycle, talking about motorcycles or watching motorcycle racing.” dustinaksland.com
Spot the Difference
Shot of the Month
Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Liverpool Sound City, 23 May by Stuart Moulding
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Chat
If you reckon your peepers have been able to decipher between the two, head to the skinny. co.uk/competitions and outline your findings. Do it! You could win a copy of the ace Animals by Emma Jane Unsworth, courtesy of our pals at Canongate.
www.jockmooney.com
No fashion show, awards ceremony or supermarket opening is complete without the glamorous, flowing locks of apparel wizard Donatella Versace. We mean, look at the two pictures of her here, being all chic on some red carpet or other. But if you look really closely you’ll notice a discernible difference between the two Dogatellas.
Competition closes midnight Sunday 28 Jun. Winners will be notified via email within two working days of closing and will be required to respond within 48 hours or the prize will be offered to another entrant. Our Ts&Cs can be found at theskinny.co.uk/about/terms-and-conditions
THE SKINNY
It’s our pleasure to announce that The Skinny have another Skinny Spotlight comedy show planned for next month, this time in association with Greater Manchester Fringe Festival. Like last year’s event at The Kazimier in Liverpool, we’ll be showcasing some of the best young comics in the Northwest, curated by our Comedy editor John Stansfield, at The King’s Arms, Salford, on 12 July. Here’s the awesome lineup: Norris & Parker, Danny Sutcliffe, Will Setchell, Jayne Edwards, Sam & Tom, Will Duggan and Jack Evans, with MC Freddy Quinne. It all kicks off at 7.30pm and tickets are just £5 from greatermanchesterfringe.co.uk or on the door. Woo! Thanks to everyone who entered our Sounds from the Other City photo competition – we had an incredible 300+ entries! (We asked you to share your snaps from the day on Twitter or Instagram with the hashtag #SFTOCSkinny to capture the spirit of the festival – and to win lots of ace prizes kindly donated by the event's
New music and film night Broadcast kicks off this month as Deep Hedonia and Liverpool Small Cinema celebrate the collaborations of filmmakers and musicians around the Northwest, presenting music videos and shorts set to new compositions. Performing on the launch night are Rosen and JC, both upcoming purveyors of audio collaging and quiet noise (24 Jun, 7.30pm, £5). This is the first in a series and Deep Hedonia are looking for contributions from Northwest based producers and filmmakers. More at deephedonia.com. Parklife (6-7 Jun) have announced details of their official afterparty series, Afterlife. Sat 6 Jun sees a sextet (that means seven, you dirty pups) of official afterparties, including Tiga joining Catz n Dogz at Drop the Mustard; Manchester’s Ben Pearce headlining Lightboxx’s night at The Ritz, and Ape & Metropolis bringing a secret lineup to Sound Control. Sun 7 Jun brings Jamie Jones’ Paradise to the Albert Hall, supported by residents Richy Ahmed and Patrick Topping, while The Warehouse Project curates an extra special and completely unannounced show at The Ritz and Drop the Mustard’s second afterparty at
The July Issue: Out 30 June
Mr Scruff will be playing at The Garden Party
South welcomes London duo Maribou State. More at afterlifemcr.com. The Summer Arts Market is back for a third year at St George's Hall, Liverpool 18-19 Jun, with more than 100 artists, designers and makers proffering their wares, from paintings and screen prints to accessories, tableware and textiles. There'll also be food, drinks and other tasty treats from Cuthbert's Bakehouse, plus live music. £2 entry, under 16s go free. Grey Lantern and Bad Uncle’s third Box Social lineup comes to Klondyke Bowls Club, Levenshulme on 1 Aug. The lineup includes Flamingods, Happy Meals (interviewed in our May
with Mystic Mark
TAURUS This month the airport police in Bali find the wrap of MDMA you forgot to take out of your wallet and you’re sentenced to 500 years in the electric chair.
GEMINI You’re used to grabbing each day by the balls, never giving a moment’s thought as to why a day even needs reproductive organs. But one day in June you grab the day’s balls so hard it tears the delicate reproductive ducts inside the testicles meaning that tomorrow never comes, and you’re stuck inside today forever.
Eden
their new LP. We’ll also have an in-depth chat with Mia Hansen-Løve about her French Touch movie Eden, and we’ll also be scouring the local degree shows to report back on the exciting emerging talent.
Online Only
Eyes to the website The organisers of the idyllic Gottwood festival (11-14 Jun in a forest, yo) select their acts not to miss. theskinny.co.uk/clubs
Our favourite Scottish ruffian Michael Pedersen commemorates 20 years of literary magazine The Dark Horse. theskinny.co.uk/books
Our Film section prepares to head up to Edinburgh International Film Festival, and has interviews with Walter Hill, Peter Bogdanovich, EIFF director Mark Adams and our pick of the programme at theskinny.co.uk/film
We’ve got an interview with Dracula. Just because. theskinny.co.uk/comedy
June 2015
The Garden Party celebrates 10 years at The Faversham with a big new festival at The Tetley, Leeds, on 29-30 Aug: two days of music, food and drink in the heart of the city. The music lineup has just been released and plenty of acts caught our eye, including Todd Terje, John Talabot, Joy Orbison, Bicep, Mr Scruff and many more. There’s also immersive art and street food courtesy of Leeds Indie Food Festival and Mad Ferret Productions. What more do you want from a bank holiday weekend? thegardenpartyleeds. com, @The_GardenParty
BALLS. ARIES alarmed to find that your period You’re has begun blotting dark red advertising messages on to the inside of your sanitary towels. This month’s reads ‘Why not try a cool refreshing Foster's.’ You wonder how they’re getting access to your uterus.
You’ll be able to pick up our July issue in the usual ace venues and cultural institutions from 30 June, where you’ll find The Sonics gearing up for festival season and LA alt-rockers Failure letting us in on the records that have influenced
issue), Grey Hairs and Petrels, with more to be announced. Also expect DJs, a record fair and tasty grub. ÂŁ8 earlybird, ÂŁ10adv.
CANCER As much as people love cat videos on the internet, they don’t seem to be too keen about the videos you made about the inside of their cats. LEO This month you meditate so hard you start to pick up Capital FM. VIRGO Your dog doesn’t love you. It secretly fantasises about being owned by the next door neighbour.
LIBRA In this month’s episode of the XXXFactor, Simon Cowell rolls his eyes as he stops you in the middle of your limp, half-hearted soapy boob wank and dismisses it as the worst he has ever seen.
SCORPIO In the pursuit of soft skin and a great complexion, you read in Elle that Cleopatra used to bathe in ass milk. Inspired, you spend all month milking your bum on the rim of your bath before climbing in and rubbing the cold, nourishing, luxuriant liquid all over your naked body, just imagining how soft and kissable your skin is about to become.
SAGITTARIUS This month you convincingly disguise yourself as your brother’s wife and deceive him into having sex with you, but during the act he accidentally calls out your real name and you’re left a little bit freaked out that you’re even related to this weirdo. CAPRICORN Capricorns are very sensitive to wasted time; not wanting to misplace a second in their busy schedule they brush their teeth in the shower, drive while they sleep, bash out spreadsheets while they make love and shit out breakfast while eating lunch. AQUARIUS This month you manage a telepathic breakthrough in communication with your cat. Melding your mind with the consciousness of your pet, it tells you quietly but firmly to get out of its fucking house. PISCES The marketplace meets your demands as a consumer this month when it produces an ultra-realistic whoopee cushion, one that leaves a small red and brown stain on sofa cushions and follows-through at weddings.
twitter.com/themysticmark facebook.com/themysticmark
Chat
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Photo: Elinor Jones
promoters.) It was tough whittling them down, but we managed it. Just. You can see all 30 brilliant shots by heading to theskinny.co.uk and searching ‘#SFTOCSkinny’ in our little search bar. Neat.
Compiled by: Simon Jay Catling
Stomachs are churning and teeth are chattering among the region’s comedians as they prep for Edinburgh, while the newly opened HOME is starting to make its presence felt with the ¡Viva! Mexican Weekender. Your guide to the month starts here.
Wed 3 Jun
Chilean space rockers Föllakzoid make their Manchester debut in the tight confines of Soup Kitchen's basement, the group having recently immersed themselves even further in hypnotic repetition on their Sacred Bones-released third album, III. Check reality in at the door. Soup Kitchen, Manchester, 7.30pm, £8.50
Aside from being one of the best-named nights in Manchester, Lord of the Tings have also put on reliably raucous grime, garage and UK funky parties since they began a year ago. Bass music beat maker Melé drops by to celebrate their first birthday. South, Manchester, 11pm, £7
Melé
Föllakzoid
Mon 8 Jun
Tue 9 Jun
Wed 10 Jun
Returning to the UK to support their second album Forest of Lost Children, Japanese psych rock troupe Kikagaku Moyo take plenty of influence from their countrymen Acid Mothers Temple (while having a more rigid, cohesive sound than their peers). Full third-eye opening capabilities intact, of course. Soup Kitchen, Manchester, 7pm, £8
At the heart of the annual Liverpool Arab Arts Festival is the symposium Shaping Change: Women, Culture and Art. Looking at what happens when female creative aspirations breach the boundaries of cultural norms, the event features Yemeni rapper Amani Yahga and Nazir Afzal OBE, a tireless campaigner on women’s rights issues. The Bluecoat, Liverpool, 10.30am, Free
As Edinburgh preview season gets fully underway, New York-based upstart Alex Edelman has more reason than most to make sure his show's in tip top condition. Having won last year's Edinburgh Comedy Award for Best Newcomer, all eyes will be on the comedian's Seinfeld-esque neurotism. XS Malarkey at The Pub/Zoo, Manchester, 7pm, £5 (£3)
Experimental poetry project The Other Room will be pushing the boundaries of the poetic form at The Castle tonight. Three poets – Luke Allan, Amy Cutler and Peter Hughes – will be among those reading, all attempting to flip genre conventions on their heads. The Castle Hotel, Manchester, 7pm, Free
Amani Yahya
Alex Edelman
Kikagaku Moyo
Photo: Veronique Vial
Sun 7 Jun
The Other Room
Sun 14 Jun
Mon 15 Jun
Tue 16 Jun
Six Organs of Admittance's Ben Chasny comes to town now long shorn of the new folk tag that followed him at the turn of the millennium. Chasny has been prolific over the 15-plus years of his career, and latest album Hexadic adds to one of the 21st century's truly unique bodies of work. Gullivers, Manchester, 7.30pm, £8.50
In our last issue, magician Derren Brown impressed upon us the importance of comedy in his routine; despite that, it's likely that mouths will be left hanging open with shock rather than laughter as he hits the road again for another display of mystery and illusion. Empire Theatre, Liverpool, 15-20 Jun, from £27.90
Having announced, in April, plans for their upcoming Islington Mill residency, Burrow, promoters Fat Out launch it this week. Programming the Mill's venue space for the next two years, the forward-thinking curators kick off with James Blackshaw, a Dan Deacon show from Now Wave and noise rockers Sly & the Family Drone. Islington Mill, Salford, times and prices vary
Derren Brown
James Blackshaw
Six Organs of Admittance
Sun 21 Jun
Africa Oyé, the UK’s biggest free festival of African music and culture, returns to Sefton Park for its 23rd year with its usual eclectic mix of artists alongside workshops, DJs and delicious food from around the world. Among the headliners this year is Omar. Read our preview on page 46. Sefton Park, Liverpool, 20-21 Jun, Free
Positing itself as the Manchester Independent Biennial, Nowt Part Of runs for seven days in the build up to the Manchester International Festival itself. A vast schedule of events kicks off with MABS (Manchester Acoustic Blues) Fest today, with theatre taking place at Salford's Eagle Inn. Various venues, Manchester, 21-28 Jun, prices vary
Africa Oyé 2014
Photo: Michael Sheerin
Sat 20 Jun
Nowt Part Of
Fri 26 Jun
To close their Seven Gates season, which explores the rich heritage of Polish classical music, the RNCM's Symphony Orchestra, Chorus and Chamber Choir revisit one of the canon's greats: Krzysztof Penderecki. Written in 1996, his Symphony No. 7 receives its UK premiere tonight. RNCM, Manchester, 7.30pm, from £15
Probably best avoided by the weak of bladder, artist Jake Laffoley's Toilet time-compression allows only a two-minute time limit for audience toilet breaks, as he explores the traditional regulation of time through physical performance and asks whether the dynamics of our life, social space and possibility for political action would be diminished if timed so precisely. The Royal Standard, Liverpool, 7pm, Free
Seven Gates
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Design: Aaron Groves
Thu 25 Jun
Toilet time-compression
THE SKINNY
Photo: Aaron Groves
Heads Up
Tue 2 Jun
Fri 5 Jun
Sat 6 Jun
FACT's latest exhibition Build Your Own explores connections between craft, technology and community. Looking at new technology such as 3D printing, prosthetics and robotics, four new commissions will showcase the potential of skill-sharing and collaborative making in the modern world. FACT, Liverpool, until 31 Aug, Free
Abandon Silence welcome the summer by teaming up with Croatian dance festival Dimensions for a special European-leaning event, featuring Maurice Fulton and Irish supremo Krystal Klear. Newcastle revellers Audio Asylum will also be taking over the Kaz's Rat Alley for this seasonal kickstart. The Kazimier, Liverpool, 10pm, £12.50
Originally conceived as the Mad Ferret festival (remember that?), Parklife never fails to attract the big guns. This year looks no different, with Grace Jones, Caribou and Nicolas Jaar among those descending on north Manchester. Heaton Park, Manchester, 6-7 Jun, prices vary
Abandon Silence
Sat 13 Jun
Norwegian solo artist Jenny Hval puts out her latest record Apocalypse, girl this month, an intensely delivered, multi-faceted deconstruction of issues around sexuality, capitalism and femininity. A former tour mate of St. Vincent and Swans, Hval is just as gripping a presence live. Gullivers, Manchester, 7.30pm, £7
It might not enjoy the fanfare of Live at Leeds up the road, but Wakefield's Long Division festival is just as enjoyable a multi-venue crawl as its Yorkshire counterpart. Highlights of a rock-orientated bill include Welsh punks Future of the Left, Pulled Apart by Horses and Menace Beach. Various venues, Wakefield, 12-14 Jun, prices vary
The Krunk Fiesta returns for a summer special and a typically grand new theme, Vogues Animales. Afriquoi, Kero Kero Bonito, Dogshow and more will set the soundtrack to a night of animal costume at The Kaz— err, sorry, 'La Auditorium D’Animales'. The Kazimier, Liverpool, 3pm, £15
Jenny Hval
Future of the Left
Thu 18 Jun
Fri 19 Jun
The annual Create Salford showcase sees the University of Salford's creative courses students show their final year wares over four days of exhibitions, presentations and performances. Undergraduates from Visual Arts to Television and Radio will be showing their work to the public, hoping for wider exposure as well as a good grade. Various venues, Salford, 17-20 Jun, Free
Not that we want to go too far, but we reckon Outfit are one of the best bands to come out of Liverpool this millennium. Now split apart all over the world, tonight's an increasingly rare chance to see them, as they celebrate the launch of their brilliant second LP Slowness. The Kazimier, Liverpool, 7.30pm, £10
One of the most anticipated films of the ¡Viva! Mexican Weekender is Hilda, the debut feature from writer-director Andrés Clariond Rangel. A study of the corrosive effect of dysfunctional race, class and gender relations, it's a black comedy that won Verónica Langer the Best Actress award at the Morelia international Film Festival in 2014. HOME, Manchester, 19-20 Jun, prices vary
Outfit
Zoey Hyland
Photo: Andrew Ellis
Wed 17 Jun
Photo: Julia Naglestad
Fri 12 Jun
Photo: Chris Payne
Thu 11 Jun
Krunk Fiesta Greg Wilson
Hilda
Tue 23 Jun
Wed 24 Jun
Alun Cochrane limbers up for his assault on Edinburgh by road-testing his new show, which promises to be a hoot given Cochrane's reputation as a pair of incredibly safe hands when it comes to witty observational humour. He's joined in his preparation tonight by Justin Moorhouse. The King's Arms, Salford, 7.30pm, £TBC
Edinburgh preview season continues at XS Malarkey with sketch maestros Beasts fine-tuning their often calamitous shenanigans ahead of another run up north. Expect more of a variety show than sketch from this madcap trio, whose ascent has seen them appear on BBC Radio 4. XS Malarkey at The Pub/Zoo, Manchester, 7pm, £5 (£3)
Belgrave Music Hall host a screening of Salad Days: A Decade of Punk in Washington. A superb overview of the DC punk and hardcore scene that spawned Bad Brains, Minor Threat, Fugazi and countless others, the doc looks at 1980-1990, when DIY grew quickly to become an international movement. Belgrave Music Hall, Leeds, 6.30pm, £7.50
Beasts
Sat 27 Jun
Sun 28 Jun
Mon 29 Jun
The award-winning Organised Chaos Productions bring their latest piece to Liverpool. Told in reverse, Lightspeed follows the relationship of Emma and Charlie, who fall into each other’s ideological fantasies and unrealistic realities; although one of the couple never reveals their true feelings. Lantern Theatre, Liverpool, 7.30pm, £12.50 (£10.50)
With a heat to go at the time of writing, we don't yet know the full list of finalists for this year's Hot Water New Comedian of the Year, but, as they've previously championed names like Liam Bolton and Adam Rowe, we trust them in anointing the stars of the future. Hot Water Comedy Club at The Holiday Inn, Lime St, Liverpool, 7pm, £3 (£1.50)
Visually stunning and offering a sharp point of view on the state of our global society, Planetary gains a screening at HOME. The Guy Reid-directed feature asks us to re-evaluate ourselves as a species, and to reconnect spiritually with each other in order to save the planet. HOME, Manchester, 6.20pm, £7.50 (£5)
Lightspeed
June 2015
Photo: Ciaran Dowd
Mon 22 Jun
Alun Cochrane
Photo: David Howarth
Grace Jones
Salad Days
Hot Water Comedy Club
Planetary
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Photo: Planetary Collective
Desktop Prosthetics, DoES Liverool
Photo: Jason Abbott
Thu 4 Jun
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Feature
MUSIC
THE SKINNY
What Are We Taking Care Of? Daring Norwegian polymath Jenny Hval rejects being an artist and questions everything from religion and capitalism to femininity, gender roles and sexuality on her stirring new LP Interview: Simon Jay Catling
G
iven that Jenny Hval’s 2013 album, Innocence Is Kinky, evolved from a silent-film concert through various forms, including a book and a sound installation, before crystallising into an LP, you wouldn’t expect the process around her follow-up to revert to anything approaching orthodox – even if it has been done amid a jump in label profile, from the experimental Rune Grammofon of her native Norway to Chicagobased Sacred Bones. Around the release of her previous album’s frank exploration of gender identity and materialisation of sexuality, Hval told the website Frontier Psychiatrist, “I’m the type of artist who benefits from not having to sit down at a piano and think to myself, ‘So, I’m going to make an album. Now what?’” So it proves, as her latest record, a paradoxically icy yet emotionally delivered big picture of an LP, Apocalypse, girl, came out of formative creative musings that initially weren’t intended to be an album. “Kinky had come out and I had some time over the summer so I just did a lot of improvisations, but I didn’t really feel like starting from scratch,” she explains over Skype from her Oslo home. “I needed something to start me off and I was in this headspace where I didn’t want to be feeling like I was an artist. The artist space has been so standardised,” she furthers. “Anything you put out is always just mirrored back on you, so everything seems so planned and cynical in a way. The life of an artist is very much caught in a capitalist net, as well as being copied by the capitalist system and the system of social media. Things like selfie culture and identity, this constant self-consciousness.” Hval’s efforts to avoid feeling like she was falling once again into that world involved taking inspiration from things like instrument demonstration clips and karaoke cover versions on YouTube, instances where she felt music was being created without artistic expression at its core. Additionally she recorded demos that took the form of what she describes as “really horrible, pre-made background music; the sort of music you’d put on your wedding video.” It induced a feeling of liberation. “I’ve never been a karaoke person; I can’t really do it,” she says. “But I guess I effectively created karaoke bars in my home, sang very embarrassing songs that I made up, and out of it came this energy. Energy that was very destructive but very liberating and very happy in a way.” The former University of Melbourne creative writing student (she also studied literature
June 2015
at the University of Oslo) has a CV that suggests someone who struggles to reconcile being pushed into the channels and structures that dictate the conventional industry release of an album. Apocalypse, girl will be the third under her own name; she also has two under the moniker Rockettothesky, has recorded with renowned producer John Parish, toured with Swans and St. Vincent, and has a slew of other EPs and collaborations under her belt. Other works include a master’s thesis on Kate Bush, a novel in 2009’s Pearl Brewery, as well as numerous essays and ruminations on everything from Patti Smith to Paris Hilton’s 2004 sex tape, One Night in Paris. The sound installation that informed Innocence Is Kinky came from the idea of the female face on-screen as presented in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. Hval confesses she felt a greater kinship with visual artists during the making of Apocalypse, girl (“At a certain point I realised ‘you’re all embracing the mainstream music scene more than I am’”) and describes the record as a series of scenes rather than songs. Towards the very end of our chat, she admits: “I don’t have that much faith in the interview as an art form. Reading out a lyric aloud explains more than any explanation of it would.” There’s the suspicion that it, in part, acts as a gentle shutting down of a conversation that’s wound up too close to promotional campaign protocol around a release that’s just one of many different mediums and ways in which Hval constantly seeks to express and further herself. She’s most likely correct. However, it’s hard not to ask more about an album that, in exploring gender roles, media propaganda surrounding ideas of femininity, why people choose religion and, at the root of it all, desire, delivers a critique on many of the West’s socio-political wounds with a sharp intelligence that doesn’t hinder its emotional heft. On an album influenced by conversations with Norwegian noise veteran Lasse Marhaug – which led to both the decision to focus on an album and to hire him as producer – and featuring contributions by Swans’ percussionist Thor Harris, Welsh improviser Rhodri Davies and Jaga Jazzist pianist Øystein Moen, among others, it’s Hval who soars highest. In content and delivery, her vocal performance is at once poised and perturbed, swinging between hushed spoken word to soaring operatics that feel like they’re straining
to reach the heavens she frequently seems to be trying to make sense of. This is notable, of course, on the track Heaven, a perfect mirage of minimalist electronic pulses and graceful string arrangements that break through a woozy twilight hue – “I’m 33 now, that’s Jesus’ age,” she whispers at one point. Then there’s perhaps the album’s thematic centrepiece, That Battle Is Over, which, over a shuffling beat that bears distant allusions to a hip-hop break, pools textures of rich drones together and pulls in all of her questions under an overriding sense of growing older and a search for more.
“I effectively created karaoke bars in my home, sang very embarrassing songs that I made up, and out of it came this energy” Jenny Hval
catalyst for re-examining a previously uncomfortable period of her life. “I was constantly confronted with the idea that I would burn in hell, and that’s very violent, even though you just think it’s crap and it makes you laugh. The song That Battle Is Over is speaking about trying to deal with ideas that are thrown out at you all the time, that you don’t agree with but they become part of you anyway. Or you realise that in some crazy way they resonate in some way with you to the point where you have to deal with them.” Personal confrontation is a constant theme, the line “Feminism’s over. Socialism’s over” perhaps the most powerful of many that intentionally put their creator in the shoes of those whose ideas she opposes, in an attempt to empathise with rather than simply dismiss them. “I need to challenge my own prejudices, and maybe I also have ideas that are misogynistic or anti-socialist in me that I have to also face. We have different reasons to be on the outside or to lean towards the left, and there are different motivations, and to understand how they are different and where we come from is something that’s deeply interesting.” That’s something the UK could certainly do with taking on board in current circumstances, although the politics and messages of fear that the right-wing press utilised so successfully in the recent general election aren’t tools used only in our country. “Living in Norway is weird because on the one hand we are very liberal, but on the other hand we have tabloid media and they’re all over our daily lives,” Hval says. “They keep pushing out these horrible news stories about research and statistics. It places so much guilt and shame on the individual, it’s like all this health advice that’s written about: you’ll get this type of cancer if you eat this. It’s weakening us and making us fear ourselves.” Hval’s brilliance comes in the concise and extremely, well, human way in which she structures her thoughts, her music a jarring mirror held up to the world but also, at its root, providing a very simple, affecting ode to love and its necessity in ongoing battles for parity against societal ills. And she’s right as she finishes by simply pointing out that Apocalypse, girl is “a journey that speaks for itself.” It just so happens to be a particularly breathtaking one.
Hval grew up in the bible belt of Norway and found herself disconnected at high school, sharing classrooms with students whose parents were often high up in church circles. “On the one hand we were all friends, on the other hand we were violently opposing each other’s world views and I’d always just wanted to escape it,” she ponders. “But then it came back [for this album] and I thought maybe I’m revisiting it because I realised I was also kind of envious of the way that my fellow high school students could explore things like religious ecstasy and devotion. This kind of energy that I just could not connect with and maybe felt like was a taboo or something in my life.” Apocalypse, girl is released on 8 Jun via Sacred Bones. America, a place of increasing interest to Playing Gullivers, Manchester on 11 Jun Hval thanks to her new label and recent touring, jennyhval.com is referenced both at Apocalypse, girl’s beginning and end, and she admits it was perhaps the
MUSIC
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A Relationship in Pixels From Liverpool’s next big thing to a band sprawled across three cities and two countries, Outfit sound closer than they ever have before
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relationship through pixels is a strange thing, a stasis held via a connection that maintains the dull glow of a laptop screen switched on late at night. Skype curates a version of your partner, their facial expressions skipping and pausing in a patchwork of the familiarity you remember. Their voice is there but not there, disembodied and muffled, the crackle of the line cutting the nuances that used to make your heart flutter. Attempts at intimacy are broken down into kilobytes, spat out thousands of miles away. Holly Herndon’s Platform, recently released on 4AD, and her attitudes around the potential for emotional resonance with online communication and smart technology are important and refreshing antidotes to a narrative still borne out in music criticism of machines evoking a disconnect and coldness in their users’ music. Yet if she speaks positively of such technological kinship then it’s timely that, on the other side of the world, Outfit are releasing a new record in Slowness that in part ruminates on the process that someone would have to go through to reach the same outlook. Sat alongside his older brother Nick, the pair drinking red wine from cups in the shade of a veranda hidden within the labyrinth of their
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Interview: Simon Jay Catling Photography: Andrew Ellis
former abode, the 20-bedroom Croxteth Lodge in Liverpool, frontman Andrew Hunt considers the impact of his own long-distance relationship on his perceptions. Although now married and living permanently in New York with his wife, most of the previous three years has involved much transatlantic toing and froing, interspersed with long bouts of longing. “The laptop was quite a sentimental place for me during that time,” he smiles. “It was almost like a weird shrine. Particularly at night there’d just be the glow coming from there and it’d feel like this portal to another place that felt very comfortable – and it did feel very real. We’d go to sleep with each other, she’d fall asleep and I’d be up doing something. I don’t think those things are cold.” Slowness makes good on the refinement hinted at when The Skinny caught Outfit trying out new material in the upstairs of Gullivers in Manchester last autumn. With their 2013 fulllength debut, Performance, offsetting sweetly delivered pop hooks against a moody hue of coolly detached vocals and carefully considered krautrock and house influences, the five-piece looked to be gearing up for a future assault on the dancefloor. Instead, though, they’ve veered
sense of isolation from your body,” Andrew says. “When I was apart from my wife over here I was essentially living a life of a single person, but without the sexual purpose. It’s looking at yourself in terms of a relationship, or lack thereof – not having that mirror to hold up in front of you.” Feelings around detachment manifest themselves in other ways than the group’s personal relationships. Take The Smart Thing, written by Andrew as he pondered coming home to New York to vote; he describes watching the leaders debate as “an anchor to back home.” Talking in the raw aftermath of a general election that saw the establishment of a Tory government, there’s a general sadness between the two brothers, not just at a result that’s seen the country shift further to the right, but also at the reaction of the left. “We’ve seen so many Facebook statuses about how evil people are for not being considerate to other people, this sort of snake-eatingitself kind of attitude: ‘What a worthless shit you are for not understanding other people’s opinAndrew Hunt ion,’” Nick muses. “Not saying that everything’s relative and there is no right decision, but I guess “With the first record you don’t hear the it’s that sort of cheesy thing of being the change individual sounds as such,” comments Nick. you want to see in the world. Chasing other peo“There’s great ones in there but because it was ple’s minds is kind of an irrelevance in terms of so layered you could mute half the tracks and it the things that work on yourself.” would still sound really good,” he says, adding Outfit aren’t political in the sense that some with a laugh: “we should’ve remixed that record old hacks would like today’s musicians to be, but with half of the sounds there.” then theirs is a position shared by many peers – At Slowness’s core lies disconnection, bethat blunt rally-crying and closed-off judgement tween Andrew and the UK, and between bandmates themselves (synth player Gorton now lives isn’t particularly beneficial. “Writing about our internal experiences and spiritual dimension is a in London, for example). It’s an album that easily bit more universal than trying to write or commupulls apart music journo clichés an organicnicate political ideas, certainly in the type of musounding album indicating a natural creation process; the group, restricted by how often they sic that we make and the people we are on stage,” comments Nick. “We’re a band of five white lads – could all get together in Liverpool, recorded it would us hectoring people about socialism comin two pressurised blocks across the road from municate to the same degree as talking about our where we sit now in their self-made studio. “It personal experiences in a way that transcends was a bizarre decision to make this a live band some of those more tribal things?” record because we weren’t actually together for Away from their personal lives, Outfit’s a long period,” Andrew admits. “When we worked on the album we tended to be together, it wasn’t perception of themselves as a band has altered too. 2013’s Performance came out off the back of all emails and file swapping. But the distance came into it more in terms of lyrics on the album a move to and subsequent return from London; and a general emotional feel of it, the sense we’re the band commendably disregarded their own early hype to ensure that the debut LP was someall kind of displaced a bit and remembering who everyone is and who we are in relation to the peo- thing of a slow burner. That they’re previous tour mates with Manchester’s Reich-influenced tuneple that we love.” smiths Dutch Uncles is telling; there are definite Central to that is the relationship between parallels to be drawn between two groups who’ve the younger Hunt and his wife. The album’s title written great pop songs that sit a little too offtrack deals with what he describes as the “lancentre to ever become pop hits – a triumph of guage of images” that made up his relationship while they were apart. “Be it images of something artistry if not commercialism. “I think we’d recognised over the course of that’s happened or images you’ve composed in releasing the first album and touring it that we’re your head,” the singer adds. “To an extent it’s not really ever going to be a very Radio 1-like always a fiction the way you put them together – ‘singles’-type band,” says Nick. “We’re too odd to and then when you’re reunited you have to come ever be a full pop band and so it felt like rather to terms with the almost jarring reality of what than landing between those things, it’d just be it’s actually like when you’re in a room together.” better to admit who we are and work more toOn Happy Birthday that feeling of awkwardness wards a different sort of thing.” Andrew admits around someone you know so well’s physical an element of “pig-headedness” coming into presence is recognised in the doubting vulnerthe new record “like, ‘we’ve just made all these ability of the line “Is it the right time that I’ve melodic pop songs and no one gives a fuck,’” but chosen to be here, to see you, to want it?” it’s clear that maturing beyond a careerist bent “We used words like ‘water’ or ‘air’ a lot and has ultimately benefitted them in the making they’re really suitable, because in any relationof Slowness. “Free from the burden of expectaship you have to change,” comments Nick. “After tions,” he laughs. “I totally envy us. But, yeah, I’m three months of not seeing each other I guess excited already about writing a third record” – you can’t go back to that original state, although something you wouldn’t bet against happening that’s the case in any relationship too. You no matter how physically far apart the are: some have to change, you have to move.” Elsewhere, relationships transcend physicality. Genderless stands out in contrast to the rest of the album’s spacious, richly melodic textures. It Outfit play Parklife Weekender, Heaton Park, Manchester, instead judders through a claustrophobic series 6 Jun and The Kazimier, Liverpool, on 18 Jun. Slowness is released on 15 Jun via Memphis Industries of propeller-like electronic rushes before finally breaking through. “It’s really trying to get at a facebook.com/outfitoutfitoutfit the other way, stripping back and intentionally limiting their sound palette so as to allow certain elements to come to the fore. The tick-tock of David Berger’s percussion on Happy Birthday laments the passing of time; the portentous oscillating swells of spine-tingling finale Swam Out comes punctuated by Skype sound effects – Hunt premiered the song individually to fans who called him up across the video call app; while Thomas Gorton’s fizzing synth smear effect often provides the sole corrosive in tracks unafraid to push bright piano melodies and nakedly emotional vocal pirouettes. As progressive pop made within the orthodox structure of a guitar band on these shores, it sits easily unmatched so far this year.
“It wasn’t all emails and file swapping”
MUSIC
THE SKINNY
The Spirit of India
A celebration of Indian classical music and dance
24 July - 31 July 2015
The Capstone Theatre, Liverpool Featuring a spectacular line-up of some of India’s finest artists including Rama Vaidyanathan Bharatanatyam Prashant Shah Kathak Sheejith Krishna Bharatanatyam Sanjukta Sinha Kathak
Madras String Quartet Pandit Ranajit Sengupta Sarod Anil Srinivasan Piano Patri Satish Kumar Mridangam
Venue The Capstone Theatre, Liverpool Hope University, L6 1HP Online bookings www.milapfest.com/whats-on/ Individual and festival passes available now Tel 0151 291 3949 (Mon-Fri 10am - 5pm only)
www.milapfest.com
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June 2015
27/05/2015 11:23
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LUCY BEECH:
ME AND MINE 16 JULY – 27 SEPTEMBER 2015 LAUNCH WEDNESDAY 15 JULY, 6-8PM The Tetley, Hunslet Road, Leeds, LS10 1JQ, UK www.thetetley.org
AT THE LOWRY
‘their brand of dirty gypsy folk reverberates through the walls…’ The Stage on The Letter Room
“Ain’t you heard there’s a storm coming?” Stamp your feet, bang your washboards whilst The Letter Room tell you a tale of what happens when there’s nothing left but the people.
The Letter Room
Five Feet in Front Thu 25 & Fri 26 June 14
The Manchester Writing Competition 2015 Manchester Poetry and Fiction Prizes
First prize: £10,000* Entry fee: £17.50 Deadline: 25 September 2015 Enter online or request a postal entry pack: www.manchesterwritingcompetition.co.uk/sk writingschool@mmu.ac.uk +44 (0) 161 247 1787/1797
thelowry.com/studio 0843 208 6010
*Terms and conditions apply
THE SKINNY
Way Out West For his debut feature film, John Maclean has ventured where few UK filmmakers have gone before: the wild expanse of the Old West. The former Beta Band knob-twiddler talks about going from making films with his bandmates to directing Michael Fassbender
T
he American West is a landscape that has loomed large over movie history. Westerns moved from the shadows of the ‘pulp’ literature they superseded at the dawn of film to become the predominant genre of modern cinema’s most formative years, the 40s and 50s. As such, heavyweight directors ever since have found themselves drawn to the Western: Robert Altman, Quentin Tarantino, Jim Jarmusch and the Coen brothers (among many others) have all engaged in different ways with the American West and the titans of film who drew its cinematic boundaries – John Ford, Howard Hawks and Anthony Mann, and later Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah. As such, it’s a bold move for your first step into the world of feature film to be taken on the prairie. But that’s exactly what John Maclean has done with Slow West, his visually arresting and ethereal tale of a melancholic, well-reared young Scot (Kodi Smit-McPhee) making his way west across the American continent to find and protect his childhood sweetheart, under the guidance of Michael Fassbender’s morally ambiguous, brooding cowboy. Maclean made the move into cinema after making his name as a mainstay of the Scottish music scene, first as part of The Beta Band and then in The Aliens. He describes how his interest in cinema can be traced back to his early days at art school in Edinburgh where he worked “at the Cameo cinema, watching double bills and getting a film education there, and then when I was studying art in London I worked at the Gate cinema. I was always working in cinemas and interested in film.” His first experience behind a camera came shooting promos for his group. “Straight away I said to the record company that I’d like to do the music videos for the band, and that was the next education – starting to work with crews, and how to edit, and make films with no money, and use The Beta Band as my actors.” Music videos were an invaluable crashcourse in how to shoot something striking on a tight budget. “I was trying not to make a single video that was just a performance of the band playing,” he says. “They were all kind of short films in themselves. Some of them had bits of dialogue and sound. It felt like I was trying to make little bits of short films, with stories.” As a result, “it didn’t feel like a massive leap after I got out of being in bands to start making short films.”
June 2015
“It’s crazy that I went from basically my friends acting to Michael Fassbender being the first professional actor that I’d ever shot!” John Maclean
Slow West is actually the third collaboration between Maclean and Fassbender, the duo having previously worked together on two short films, including the BAFTA award-winning Pitch Black Heist (2011). “I got to know Michael’s agent,” Maclean explains, “and he showed Michael some of The Beta Band videos, and Michael saw something in them. One evening I managed to meet Michael and he was shooting at the time, but he said ‘I’ve got a day off, do you fancy doing something?’ It started off professionally, and then on each project we did we got more and more used to collaborating – it became very interesting.” The shift in gear from filming bandmates in music videos to working with one of the world’s foremost actors isn’t lost on Maclean. “It’s crazy that I went from basically my friends acting to Michael being the first professional actor that I’d ever shot!” Was he nervous shooting him for the first time? “Yeah! It was comedic. I almost fell over. I’d been used to people not taking what I was trying to do seriously, mates basically too coy or shy or cool to do the ridiculous things, or to have the confidence to really ‘act.’ And then all of a sudden he switches it on, and he becomes somebody else. It really hit me the first time I saw that.”
The choice of a Western was partly informed by Fassbender’s allegiance to Maclean’s work (the part was written for him after he agreed to be a part of Maclean’s first film), and partly by the videos Maclean had been working on. “The narratives for the videos for The Beta Band were almost like silent movies; they weren’t really script-heavy. With the first film I did with Michael I took a bit of that ethos, which was to try to make a visual story, rather than trying to do something really wordy.” Part of the appeal of the Western to filmmakers is its sheer ‘openness’ – the landscapes can play just as big a part as any character, while the canonical tropes of the genre are there to be played with and subverted as well. Trained as a visual artist, Maclean sees the appeal of “genre in general, because you can keep dialogue to a minimum. When you’re making a noir, or a thriller, or Westerns, you don’t have to have people talking for long periods of time.” Indeed, although Slow West’s dialogue is authentic and engaging, it’s the film’s visual palette that proves its most arresting feature, with Maclean turning his New Zealand locations into an American landscape full of gangsters, charlatans, and honest people trying to earn a buck, or running away from dark European pasts. It was important for him to have this European element central to the story – the idea of a Scottish character displaced to the American West was where it began. “I think you have to stick to the truth. I’m sure ET was about dealing with loss of a parent or a friend. For me, Slow West felt like the love story of a Scottish boy who was in love with a girl who was out of his league. So, that felt like an element of truth! Or seeing America through a European’s eyes, of a traveller, rather than making a film that’s really about Native Americans or about the politics of America.” When we draw comparisons with Paris, Texas, Wim Wenders’ similarly plaintive exploration of American landscapes and lost love, Maclean is eager to concur, describing it as a “a dream-like European vision of America,” one in tune with his own formative experiences of travelling through the States with The Beta Band and, earlier, on a road trip with friends. “I was always fascinated by America. The real America, where you travel around and you meet people and they’re friendly and accommodating, and the landscape’s stunning. And then there’s the other half of me that saw ‘cinema America’: when you’re in small towns you think of David Lynch, when you’re in New York you think of Scorsese, when you’re in LA you think of Chinatown. It’s so filmic – that appealed to me.”
FILM
Interview: Sam Lewis Maclean enthuses about the films that informed Slow West, explaining his desire to “avoid the Spaghetti Westerns, because they’ve been done as well as they could have been done. When people try and do it now, I think that’s when you start seeing clichés. So I was looking much more at early Westerns like John Ford, Shane, High Noon and Red River.” There’s also hints of Altman’s classic McCabe & Mrs Miller in Slow West’s emotional subtly, and of the Coens’ black humour in the film’s more violent passages. Nevertheless, it was the fiction of the time that Maclean turned to to conjure a sense of the real dramatic landscape of early America. “Instead of reading ‘history of the West’ books and looking at mythical documents, I was really reading a lot of books written at the time of the West – the Little House on the Prairie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder and reading Mark Twain and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ambrose Bierce, which gives you much more of a flavour of the time. Even some accounts of Scottish people who would go out to America.” Maclean worked on the film’s lilting folk soundtrack alongside Australian composer Jed Kurzel (The Babadook, Snowtown). Their first aim, he says, was “to stay away from Morricone, because it’s just untouchable, so I wanted to look at something else. I was going back to traditional music and thinking about European music mixed with American music – 3/4 waltzes, staying away from anything that couldn’t have been done at the time, like electric guitars and keyboards. I wanted melody; I collect film soundtracks and there’s so many droney soundtracks now that I really wanted something melodic again.” Slow West presents the sweep of the American desert as a blank slate waiting to be written over and reinterpreted by anyone gutsy enough to take it on, an expanse that can either be read as melodically romantic as film’s soundtrack or as existentially threatening. In Kodi Smit-McPhee’s Jay Cavendish we are presented with a dreamer thrust into the harsh truths of life at the dawn of a nation, a battle between idealism and realism that informs the film throughout. As Maclean explains, he wanted “a certain different flavour of the West than the revisionist, mythical stuff. That was important.” As those early travellers discovered, the West can make or break you. Only at the start of his journey, Slow West shows promise enough to mark Maclean out as a pioneer with a real future ahead of him. Slow West is released 26 Jun by Lionsgate
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Keeping Kids Dancing The LuckyMe, Warp, and GOOD Music linchpin has a prolific work rate, but Hudson Mohawke is only just getting around to releasing his own second album. He talks trap, spreading his wings and giving up childhood vices
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uch has changed since Ross Birchard graced the cover of The Skinny back in 2009. Having signed to Warp with only a few 12-inches under his belt, he released a debut album, Butter, whose dayglo palette was well received in some circles, but still seen by many as a niche concern. His ascent since then has been so rapid that it reads almost like an internet fairytale. Much has been made of HudMo’s sudden encounter with Kanye, the extensive contributions to Yeezus and his signing to the production arm of the GOOD Music imprint. Yet while the Louis Vuitton Don has plucked many a producer out of obscurity (Paul McCartney, anyone?), few can claim responsibility for a sound that has been so fundamental to the pop agenda in recent years. Birchard’s supergroup with Canadian producer Lunice under the TNGHT moniker has been the blueprint for club-ready, maximalist hip-hop ever since Higher Ground’s demented horns burrowed their way into our ears back in 2012. The endless string of collaborations which followed in this period may have prevented HudMo from working on a follow-up in his own right until recently, but the eventual release of Lantern, his second album, could not be more perfectly timed. With a captive audience that ranges from serious musos to EDM bros, the producer now has a golden opportunity to showcase his own uncompromising ideas. It’s an enviable position, he agrees over the phone before he jets off for another mini-tour of America: “I feel quite lucky to be in these circumstances. To be able to combine working with people like Antony [Hegarty] alongside RnB people and completely unknown people… it’s that sort of blend of genres and aesthetics that I always wanted to bring together.’ Inevitably, the success that HudMo has achieved in the intervening years since Butter means that some will have fairly rigid expectations of how they’d like this album to sound. Not that he cares. Daringly, the tracklist of Lantern doesn’t feature any rappers at all, instead comprising a number of vocal cuts which hark back to Birchard’s beginnings making RnB bootlegs: “This project last year was working with 40 rappers. Everyone expected me to make a rap album or something like that. But I’ve been wanting to make a song-based record.” Equally bold is Birchard’s determination to collaborate with friends, many of whom are relative unknowns. The advantages of this decision are evident in the brilliant, controlled performances he coaxes out of his guests, whose gameness ensures that they aren’t drowned out by his production style: “People like Miguel, he’s someone who I’ve been in touch with for years, since before he was an established artist. He’s one of those few people who gets himself into that position but is still in touch with his roots as well.” One thing Birchard has borrowed from Kanye’s playbook is his collaborative method of production. For the purists, this approach might seem like sacrilege. Birchard argues that it makes the process more spontaneous, more musical and more refined: “I feel like it gives more energy to the project to have a bunch of people working on it rather than to have one guy sitting in the studio at like five in the morning, alone. That’s not vibey, it’s more methodical. This way opens you up to new approaches. And when you’re working with a bunch of people, less is more.”
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Interview: Tom Short
Thanks to Birchard’s more mature style of songwriting, direct influences are harder than ever to spot on the album, though he cites Dilla and Madlib as two major touchstones: “I had the pleasure of meeting J Dee in Glasgow before he died, back in 2002. To have the chance to have a little conversation and shake hands was something. As far as Madlib… we’re not like super tight or anything. But these are the people who were my idols when I was growing up. I just love their approach to production, it was so nonchalant.”
“The UK underground electronic scene is kind of po-faced. That’s not something I’ve ever been into” Ross Birchard
It’s easy to draw comparisons between HudMo and his heroes on a track like Ryderz, where a manipulated D.J. Rogers sample is played for a full minute and then pitched in every possible direction with gleeful dexterity. But there’s another common tendency among these producers to go far beyond what anyone might expect from someone who primarily deals in samples. Arguably the strangest track on the album isn’t electronic at all: the mini-overture of Kettles. Building from passages of whirling woodwind to fanfares of triumphant, densely orchestrated brass, it could pass as an excerpt from a Mahler symphony. It’s a track Birchard is especially proud of, though he’s a bit worried about how it’s going to be received: “I’m still not sure whether people are gonna be like, ‘What the fuck is this?’” he laughs. “It was something that I definitely wanted to include. It was an experiment for me; rather than beat-making I was writing a piece of classical music.” He intends to perform it live with a full orchestra at some point, so expect to see him towering over the conductor’s podium, Goldie-style, in the near future. For many who will listen to Lantern, it will be hard not to notice how far Birchard has departed from the sound that brought him an international audience. When compared to the swaggering hooks on the TNGHT record and the glut of watered down ‘trap’ music which came in its wake, the sophisticated arrangements on Lantern provide a more refined thrill. Is this a conscious effort on his part, given the dubstepstyle backlash which that sound has since received? Far from washing his hands of the TNGHT sound, Birchard is still bowled over by its gamechanging success: “I thought it was really fun when that record came out because that whole EDM thing hadn’t happened yet. You had DJs from all sorts of genres playing this record, from Richie Hawtin to Calvin Harris; it was a universal thing. It kind of reminded me of what I hear about the so-called ‘hip-hop’ DJs of the 70s and 80s who weren’t really about playing one specific genre; they’d also be playing disco or breakbeat. That project exposed me to a wider audience,
a lot of people who listened to TNGHT weren’t aware of my earlier music. I’m curious to see how they all react to this project.” One of the unexpected consequences of HudMo’s hit-making phase is that it has led people back to his earlier music: “Some of the stuff that I play when I DJ are old songs of mine, from four or five years ago, and people are like, ‘What’s that?’ When the first album came out, people were a bit confused by it. It’s almost like people talk about that record more now.” Though always careful to avoid a humblebrag, he cannot disguise his satisfaction with the fact that the world has finally caught up: “It’s flattering to see the kind of nods here and there within a lot modern pop stuff to stuff that myself and Rustie and a lot of Numbers crew in Glasgow were doing five or six years ago.” Perhaps, The Skinny suggests, one of the reasons people didn’t know what to make of his music at first was because so much of it is
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overwhelmingly happy. Birchard is animated on this point: “I want to make music that lifts your arm hairs, rather than falling into line with some purist underground attitude. This is no disrespect to anyone, but the UK underground electronic scene is kind of po-faced. That’s a kind of British attitude I guess. It’s not something that I have ever been into. It’s probably because I grew up listening to a lot of hardcore and stuff that’s very high energy and euphoric.” As anyone who reads HudMo’s Twitter account will know, the Glaswegian has a refreshingly juvenile sense of humour for a producer who works with Kanye West, the man who never smiles. After our early morning call about the serious business of his imminent return, his response to the question of what he would advise the HudMo of old brings some levity: “Probably eat less pizza.” Playing Parklife Weekender, Heaton Park, Manchester on 7 Jun. Lantern is released on 15 Jun via Warp hudsonmohawke.com
THE SKINNY
On Stranger Tides One quarter of sketch/variety/fight club night Quippodrome, Edy Hurst sets sail to explore a sea change in comedy nights around the Northwest. Are things getting weirder?
Illustration: Sophie Heywood
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t has never been easier to watch and experience live comedy. Whether it’s TV shows such as Live at the Electric, Live at the Apollo and Live at the Palladium, or live sets on YouTube, or live shows on Netflix, it’s clear that comedy is ‘live’ and ‘somewhere.’ It is possible to digest a comedian’s whole creative life over a bag of Doritos and a broadband connection. And while this offers a massive wealth of choice, it’s a strange phenomenon that people experience a ‘live’ feeling without it actually being, you know, live. Whether it’s a star-studded McIntyre night, or a US export of a latest hour, these are shows that don’t really give an audience a feeling of what’s live. Taking benefit from the cutting room, every joke that makes the edit has landed. Audiences will be filled with the comedian’s fans, because why wouldn’t they be? They’re successful and skilled enough that they’ve sold a whole tour based on their name alone. The ability to consume such amounts of ‘straight standup’ en masse has lead live audiences to seek out something a little different when choosing their evening out. And many promoters have reacted in kind. ‘Weird’ nights and those that play with the traditional comedy club structure, pushing for a focus on the one-off event, are sprouting up in their multitudes. They make people feel like they’re part of something that’s only going to happen once, something that can’t be replicated no matter how many YouTube hits a video gets. The big successes of last year’s Edinburgh Fringe, Phil Ellis’s Funz and Gamez, as well as Gein’s Family Giftshop, showed that tastes for live comedy are changing. Both based in the Northwest, Gein’s themselves run a monthly gig at the King’s Arms in Salford which sees them invite a menagerie of acts to the stage, alongside their monthly showcase of brand new material. And while Funz and Gamez was intended as a special for the Fringe, the improvised children’s show is a collection of sketch, standup and character-driven comedy all in one show, no doubt influenced by and influencing peers in the Northwest. Further variety nights such as Peter Slater and Lee Fenwick’s SOS TV Live, Sham Bodie and Twisted Comedy have been allowed to flourish with this thirst for something different for audiences. Sham Bodie is, as host and co-founder Ben Tonge describes it, “a variety show at heart.” And in this respect, the show runs a tight structured ship, offering a notoriously difficult mixture of comedians and bands. It’s often thought that it is difficult to balance the energy and the different tastes required of potential audiences – not so, claims Tonge: “The musicians and comedians have seemed to really enjoy playing the same gig. Apart from when Phil Ellis threw bread rolls at the Bell Peppers.” While a hearty dose of audience interaction from Tonge (from hot dog eating competitions to audience bingo) helps to create a high and engaging energy, Tonge admits “we owe a lot of the credit to the audiences we have been getting – they’re along for the experience of the whole night, and are dead happy to jump from comedians to music and back again.” Based in the Northern Quarter, Sham Bodie sits alongside a number of other fantastic nights including the aforementioned SOS TV Live, a night of exciting character comedy, and Hayley Ellis’s House Party, both based in the Three Minute Theatre at Affleck’s Palace. What these nights show is not just a wide array of formats and types of comedy performance, but also a willingness of audiences to be swept
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up by the proceedings. Though it is not just the avant-garde theatre spaces that are on board with these nights. Manchester comedy institution The Frog and Bucket recently set up Twisted Comedy, where each month one of the country’s best circuit acts headlines; the final show had hulking Canadian absurdist Tony Law alongside guests Masai Graham, Stephanie Laing, Jo D’arcy, Rob Kemp and this month’s Spotlight, Will Duggan.
“What these nights show is the willingness of audiences to be swept up by proceedings” In a similar vein to Set List, the US show where acts must perform completely improvised material based on audience suggestion, Twisted provides audiences with a chance to watch comedians react on their feet to factors beyond their control. As founder Amanda Philips explains, “The headliner makes three arbitrary rules that the other comedians must follow. These could be anything – speak in a particular
accent, talk about squirrels, pretend you are in the shower the entire time.” Whereas many of the other nights featured deliberately move away from the established comedy club space, Twisted embraces it. “It makes a difference having a comedy night at a dedicated comedy club, especially when you are trying something very new and unusual,” says Philips, and working with the reputation of the Frog has helped “a level of trust to be already there.” And this idea certainly helps, with the most recent night packed not only with punters but also acts looking to watch comedians pushed to their limits. Liverpool’s Hot Water Comedy is also not one to shirk away from different kinds of nights and has found great success with its comedy rap-battle night, ‘Crapbattles.’ Pitting two comrade comedians together as they lyrically rip one another to shreds, like Twisted it allows an audience who will have been able to watch the acts’ sets online beforehand witness them in another light, where anything could happen (providing it’s in rhyming verse). Debs Marsden covered such duels for The Skinny back in January and they continue to flourish, helping to prove that there is an audience for events deliberately welcoming the unexpected, the haphazard and the unique. Tempting as it is from a journalistic point of view to herald a new dawn in comedy, with hitherto unimagined riches of live laughter experiences, that’s not really the case. Speaking to a number of the promoters running these nights, they’ve been influenced by a huge range of other comedy nights and events, from TFI Friday and
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Vic and Bob right through to The Comic Strip, whose members Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson famously ran 20th Century Coyote while at Manchester University, and even further back to music hall. Though you needn’t look that far back for another upswing in non-traditional nights. The spirit of live diversity and different performers was something Mick Ferry echoed with his night Mick Ferry’s Space Cadets, run by himself and Northwest promoter Rob Riley. Based initially at TV-21, the night ran for a number of years, moving in the process to the Comedy Store. With an opening and closing comedian, there was space in between for something that Ferry describes as “not odd, but different.” There were “burlesque dancers, magicians, a guy who could kick himself in the head and a guy who set fire to his pubes – he could only do that twice a year though.” Failing this, they would have an indoor sports day in the middle. Now with Mick Ferry as part of the sketch group Funz and Gamez, the same unpredictable anarchy features in the children’s comedy show, with a collection of improvised and pre-planned bits that play not only with the live comedy night but also as family entertainment. For whatever reasons, these nights keep springing up; but rather than a straight and ascending staircase, with each new step going upwards, the scene instead moves in cycles. Trends emerge and recede like waves on the beach, washing ashore things long since forgotten in a new configuration. For more comment on the local comedy scene: theskinny.co.uk/comedy
THE SKINNY
Portrait of the Artist as an Abhorrent Young Man
Take to the Road
Alex Ross Perry is one of the most exciting names in American indie cinema. We chat to the 30-year-old writer-director about his latest film, Listen Up Philip, a caustic comedy centred on an obnoxious young novelist played by Jason Schwartzman
Mexican cinema comes to HOME (or should that be CASA?) with the second of this year’s ¡Viva! weekenders
Interview: Patrick Gamble
Words: Jamie Dunn
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he title of Alex Ross Perry’s third feature, Listen Up Philip, a witty New York-set literary comedy, refers to the film’s tremendously narcissistic protagonist, Philip Friedman (played by Jason Schwartzman). However, director Alex Ross Perry also suggests the film’s moniker is a nod to the influence of American novelist Philip Roth. “We kind of gave Philip Roth to anyone looking for it,” says the 30-year old by phone. He’s clear that Schwartzman’s character isn’t a stand-in for Roth, but the film could be perceived as a riff on the author’s 1979 novel The Ghost Writer, a story about a young writer who accepts an invitation to the rural home of an older, prize-winning novelist. The mentor figure in Listen Up Philip is Ike Zimmerman, played with tremendous hubris by Jonathan Pryce. Perhaps he could be a proxy for Roth? “There’s a lot of authors that orbit around the way a guy like Ike is,” Perry explains. “Another writer whose pull and sensibility influenced the movie is Richard Yates. I’m a huge fan of his. He was a notoriously hard-drinking tough guy.” Philip occupies an extremely strange world, a timeless epoch where characters listen to vinyl and there isn’t a mobile phone in sight. Was this a statement about our growing reliance on technology, or a pining for a bygone era? “It’s just a nicer way to spend a couple of hours when you go into a movie theatre,” Perry suggests. “When you go watch a film you shut down your phone – it’s probably the only time during the day you’re not checking it – and you enter into a world where a lot of the distractions that exist in your life are not present in the film.” Listen Up Philip’s hypnotic jazz score and gorgeous 16mm cinematography feels like a paean for a lost time, a period Perry clearly yearns for. “I really regret not being alive during the time where authors like Ike were famous enough to be met on talk shows and dominate the cultural conversation.” This sentiment is echoed by Philip in one scene when he wistfully evokes Zimmerman’s heyday as a time when “women were looser” and more likely to be impressed by writers. It’s a misogynistic reading of the era, but one that Perry agrees with in principle. “It’s really interesting that this wasn’t 50 years ago: it was close enough in my lifetime that a writer of fiction could be a bona fide celebrity. Now there are perhaps five writers who are that prominent, but in 1980 there were 50. I wanted Ike to be one
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of those writers, so I borrowed a lot from the East Coast writers of the time whose work really blows my mind.” Listen Up Philip isn’t your average American indie comedy. It’s a pastel-shaded bildungsroman with numerous novelistic digressions, complete with narration from an off-screen storyteller (voiced by Eric Bogosian), a device that brings together the film’s literary pretentions with its cinematic aspirations. This type of omniscient narrator is a tool notoriously sneered at by cinema purists, something Perry vehemently disagrees with. “When you’re not using a device like that you have to rely on dialogue to piece together the intricacies of the relationships or backstories between the characters and I find that dialogue to be fairly tedious. Some people are always going to recite some information that they vaguely remember hearing in a film class 20 years ago, that there are devices that are better left on a page, but I don’t understand why those people take something they were told by a film professor who has never made a film so literally.”
“The characters argue with one another because that’s two sides of me arguing” Alex Ross Perry
It would be easy to assume that Philip’s story is an autobiographical one about a young upcoming artist struggling with his ambitious personality. The film doesn’t merely focus on the relationship between Philip and Ike, however. Perry also takes time to observe the women who surround his male characters, specifically Philip’s girlfriend, Ashley, played by Mad Men’s Elizabeth Moss. “Philip’s a young man who’s roughly my own age and who wears clothes that I like,” says Perry, “but there’s a lot more about me in Ashley’s lifestyle and her relationship with her own career [as a photographer], and the seriousness with which she takes it, than
there is with Phillip’s angry indifference to be a necessity of his lifestyle. The fun of the movie for me is that Ike, Phillip and Ashley represent different aspects of my personality. The whole point of the movie for me is taking a situation, splitting it into diametrically opposed perspectives, and then letting it play out. The characters argue with one another because that’s two sides of me arguing.” Perry isn’t one to rest on his laurels. While Listen Up Philip has been held up in distribution purgatory in the UK, he’s already completed and screened his follow-up, Queen of Earth, a feminist exploration of jealousy that marks a tonal, if not entirely thematic, departure from the misanthropy of this film. So what prompted this remarkable shift in style? “Well, mostly it was how close together they were made, and an interest in not repeating myself,” he says. “Thematically the films have a great deal in common and they deal with the same types of people – it’s just told in a slightly different way. Queen of Earth is a women’s story instead of a story of how strong women prevail over weak, terrible men. That was just one of the fun ways we inverted what we’d done before.” The overriding theme in both films is society’s current relationship with entitlement, something Perry is keen to discuss. “It fascinates me. A lot of great fiction has been written about characters that struggle with that. In Philip you have a character that feels entitled to success and the trappings of success, and in Queen of Earth you have characters that feel entitled to privacy. Entitlement can take on any number of forms, but there’s something very interesting to me about someone who genuinely feels 100% in their soul that they deserve something. The point is watching them adjust to a world where either they get it, like in Philip, or they don’t, like in Queen of Earth.” On his first two films, Impolex and The Colour Wheel, Perry made effective use of non-professional actors. In these most recent pictures, however, he has proper film stars interpreting his characters. How’s he found the transition? “I had no reason to assume I could get [professional actors] when I was putting Philip together. My previous films were all made with my friends, so it’s really great to have these well-known actors who have been on hundreds of movie sets be like ‘these guys are alright, these guys know what they’re doing.’ It was a real surprise to learn that these people are great collaborators, and take what they do very seriously, that was really exciting and humbling.” While he’s relished the opportunity to work with talented young actors like Schwartzman, Moss and Katherine Waterston (who stars with Moss in Queen of Earth), he seems most stirred by the prospects of the British audiences’ reaction to Jonathan Pryce’s performance. “I’m very excited about the film’s release in the UK,” he tells us. “I think people over there are going to understand and appreciate what Jonathan Pryce does in this film. For me it’s some of the most impressive acting I’ve ever seen and one of the most exciting things I’ve ever been involved with, so I’m thrilled for the film to have a kind of new life over there.” We can only agree. Pryce’s turn is acerbic, funny and deeply sad. A bit like the film, really. Listen Up Philip is released 5 Jun by Eureka! Entertainment
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OME breaks its ¡Viva! cherry this month with a weekend celebrating the cinema of the largest Spanish speaking nation, Mexico. Festivities kick off with the UK premiere En el último trago (18 & 20 Jun). The programme tells us it’s a buddy road movie centred on the comic misadventures of a trio of octogenarians as they make their way through rural Mexico. If you’re thinking along the lines of The Last of the Summer Wine Goes Loco, you needn’t worry, there’s not a bathtub sliding down a hill in sight. HOME will welcomes director Jack Zagha Kababie to the screening, who’ll join the audience for a Q&A after the film. Before the comic shenanigans of opening night, HOME’s artistic director of film, Jason Wood, will put Kababie’s work in context with an introduction to Mexican cinema and the road movie tradition (18 Jun). Wood has a soft spot for the genre (his all time favourite film is one of the best, Chris Petit’s Radio On), and what he doesn’t know about the Mexican new wave could be written on the back of your opening night ticket stub. Be sure to take a pen and paper, you’ll want to note down all the titles Wood recommends. Continuing the road movie theme is Güeros (22 Jun), the debut film from Alonso Ruiz Palacios. Shot in black-and-white, the film is a laconic hangout movie following three brothers as they take to the tarmac in search of an elusive folk singer so good he’s rumoured to have once made Bob Dylan weep. The film is knockabout, but it’s also gently political. It calls to mind Mexican new wave knockouts Y Tu Mamá También and Duck Season in the way its social commentary plays out as a spiky backdrop to the more ephemeral worries of the relatively well-off protagonists. More overtly political is Hilda (19 & 20 Jun), which focuses on the relationship between a lonely middle-aged housewife and her fiery maid, who begins to remind the older woman about her revolutionary past: “Being part of a country stricken by so many inequalities and home to millions of poor people, the Mexican upper class is a mixture of waste and guilt, of acts of charity, classism and exclusion, and a walking contradiction,” says director Andrés Clariond Rangel of the film. “I wanted to make a social portrait without overlooking the protagonist’s emotional complexity.” Paraíso’s (20 & 21 Jun) themes, like its characters’ torsos, are softer. The gentle comedy follow a rotund couple who are deeply content with their comfortable life in one of the easygoing suburbs that satellite Mexico city. Their equilibrium takes a knock, however, when they’re forced to move to the capital. It’s a bit soapy at times, but it’s also heartening to see a romantic comedy where the protagonist don’t conform to the beauty standards we are used to seeing on the big screen. HOME’s cafe will also be doing its bit to bring a Latin American flavour to Manchester, serving up a selection of Mexican-themed treats – we’re also promised the ¡Viva! favourite Churros and hot chocolate will be on the menu. ¡Viva! presents New Mexican cinema, 18-22 Jun at HOME, Manchester homemcr.org
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THE SKINNY
That’s Entertainment Preston’s Harris Museum & Art Gallery encourages us to “dance first, think later” with two new exhibitions to visit in June. We talk to Oculist Witnesses artist Sovay Berriman about her ever morphing sculpture, nomadic herding odysseys and molluscs that hunt wizards...
Interview: Sacha Waldron
Sovay Berriman - Entertainment Suite (2015)
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ebruary 2015 marked the beginning of an exciting new programme of exhibitions, commissions and events at The Harris Museum and Art Gallery in Preston. Curated by Clarissa Corfe, the 16-month programme takes the Samuel Beckett quote “Dance first, think later” as a starting point to explore ideas of performativity and the human conditions of tragicomedy and absurdity. Fitting, as the line itself comes from Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, the ultimate gloomy funny frustratathon in which the characters Vladimir and Estragon endlessly wait for the character or entity they call Godot. The programme so far has been impressive, opening in February with the exhibition The Varieties, which played with conventions of the 19th- and 20thcentury dance hall and was co-curated by artist Harold Offeh. In May, two new exhibitions opened: the first major solo show from London-based Lucy Beech (whom you may have seen in the most recent Bloomberg New Contemporaries show) and a group exhibition, Oculist Witnesses: According to Duchamp. Beech’s solo exhibition also includes her most extended film work, Me and Mine, which follows the loose story of a female undertaker as she navigates the changing landscapes and people involved in the business. Performance is also an important element of Beech’s practice and she has been collaborating with fellow artist Edward Thomasson for a number of years. Often these performances involve several participants and take the form of expanded therapy sessions (stay with us) in which the participants seek to find new ways to solve their internal struggles and problems by movement, actions and sound. If you catch this article before 6 June then make a plan to see Beech and Thomasson’s specially conceived performance for Preston Guild Hall (between 11am and 5pm. It’s free; just drop in). If you manage to miss Beech’s Preston show entirely then you can catch it in Leeds as it tours to the Tetley (who
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were also co-supporters in the commissioning of the work) from July to September. Oculist Witnesses: According to Duchamp is another kettle of fish entirely. The exhibition brings together new and existing work from Sovay Berriman, Lindsey Bull and Ruth Claxton and takes Richard Hamilton’s The Oculist Witnesses as its starting point. Hamilton made the glass plate piece in 1966 as a reconstruction and interpretation of Duchamp’s famous Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23) for Tate’s Duchamp retrospective, as the original was too fragile to be moved from its home at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The work is now held in the Whitworth’s collections and the Harris have loaned it from them for this exhibition. Like Hamilton’s seminal interpretation, many of the more contemporary works also deal with ideas of re-configuration and re-purposing. This is perhaps best seen in Berriman’s sculptural work, titled Entertainment Suite, which has already been on quite a journey (by way of Exeter, Bristol and down an alleyway in Margate) and is re-configured here at the Harris in its fifth iteration since 2010. Constructed from timber and acrylic sheets in what amounts to a miniature explosion suggestive of a semi-assembled or de-assembled set or stage, the work responds to the architecture of the Harris – is it also in conversation with the other works in the show? “I always make a site visit,” says Berriman, “and this has to happen before I can plan any iteration of Entertainment Suite. So the conversation is with the gallery architecture rather than other works. It shifts and alters with each iteration, taking into consideration the exhibition space, but also what other developments and research are taking place within the rest of my practice at the time of each iteration. So for instance the form at Harris has attempted to be more open than previous iterations but generally, and what is fundamental to Entertainment Suite is that it was
conceived as a fragmentary sculpture. Each element of it could come in or out of the sculpture, or be shown independently.”
“Any exhibition is an opportunity to test something” Sovay Berriman
The work’s iteration at the Harris sees the structure open up to the atrium of the Harris’s exhibition space but, as is often the case, also reflects research and ideas from other projects Berriman is currently working on. “I have an ongoing project called Molluscs Hunt Wizards,” says Berriman, “which explores markers and boundaries in desert and plains landscapes – that’s my current focus.” The work often takes the form of pencil drawings, crosshatched planet-like objects co-existing with clean lines in what could be architectural drawings for some future spacey time, and postcards that chart the ongoing narrative of the project. “During the beginning research stages of the project I travelled via Beijing to the Mongolian Gobi,” says Berriman on her website, “where guides helped me to learn more of nomadic herder relationships with, and reading of, the epic and often harsh terrain. I returned by rail to Beijing to fly to Australia, where, using both Melbourne and Sydney as bases, I made excursions into the central red deserts and the World Heritage Willandra Lakes region. I met with artists and rangers who helped me find access to the desert, and understand something of its landscape and the significant points within it.” Sounds like a pretty incredible adventure. You can follow the development of the project on Berriman’s website and blog. “I’m working
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on a new piece for Molluscs Hunt Wizards that involves a level of participation,” says Berriman, “and also a publication that will bring together the postcards, drawings and blog posts of the first part of that project when I travelled to Mongolia, China and Australia.” So how does all of this relate back to the installation at the Harris? “The main influence from Molluscs is the openness,” says Berriman. “I wanted the work to really open up towards the atrium ceiling of the gallery and this relates to the wide landscapes that feature in the project. The large wrapped ball (which you see on the structure) is also a main feature of Molluscs Hunt Wizards, as it is a ‘marker.’ It shifts the focal point of Entertainment Suite, and also softens it – in my view. Molluscs Hunt Wizards is about being movable, journeying to seek markers and boundaries, but also about making those markers while you’re seeking them – as a narrative it’s an odyssey. As a sculpture Entertainment Suite is creating its own narrative with its shifting form, it certainly has ambitions to be an odyssey in its own right. Placing the soft marker (blue ball) in Entertainment Suite marks a point in the evolution of that sculpture, and also brings it in line with the ideas of Molluscs Hunt Wizards. Molluscs Hunt Wizards in some ways is just a very large sculpture, a more amorphous version of Entertainment Suite.” The idea of markers is an interesting one in the case of a lot of art-type objects. To view Berriman’s work in the exhibition the viewer certainly would not be aware of most of the backstory and context that make up the visual form. Can we say, then, that most of the stuff of exhibitions is in fact just visual markers for a whole world of ideas, thoughts and research that is hidden suggestively within its surface, glue, nuts and bolts? Perhaps the actual object could be anything and what is really important is that there is something, and the exhibition space is a test site or an opportunity for the creation of new knowledge. “It’s important to say that each time I am given an opportunity to show Entertainment Suite I think about what it is that I and the work needs, to try it out or to learn about it,” says Berriman. “So any exhibition is an opportunity to test something. Learning, learning spaces and their edges, the potential we all have for learning, how we respond to learning spaces and their edges and what relationship fantasy has to all of this – i.e. allowing us to imagine it, to test how it or we might be or feel post-learning – are all important to how I make work. They are part of the thought process and always present in the studio.” Oculist Witnesses (and Lucy Beech) continues until 4 July at the Harris, and the Dance First, Think Later programme continues with Art From Elsewhere, the Hayward touring exhibition curated by David Elliot in October and the really promising-sounding final exhibition, Beyond the Sublime (Jan–April 2016), which uses the Theatre of the Absurd and the work of Samuel Beckett as a starting point to explore notions of repetition, farce and tragicomedy. A key element of this will be the Harris Museum’s latest commission and acquisition from Nathaniel Mellors, with whom the Harris won the Contemporary Art Society Annual Award 2014. All very good reasons to get yourself to Preston over the coming year. Oculist Witnesses: According to Duchamp, until 4 Jul, Harris Museum, Preston harrismuseum.org.uk
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Flying Solo Comedian, poet, theatre-maker and all-round local legend Jackie Hagan explains how a tremendously difficult year helped her hone her craft Interview: Andrew Anderson
Speaking Out Ameena Atiq performs at Liverpool Arab Arts Festival this month. The Skinny talks to the rising star of spoken word Interview: Rosie Hopegood
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ou’d be hard pushed to find many 20-yearolds like Ameena Atiq. Feisty, driven, fiercely intelligent and enormously talented, this is one spoken word poet to look out for. Born to Yemeni parents and raised in Liverpool, Atiq has eschewed the expectations of her family and steadily carved out a name for herself in a small corner of the Liverpool arts scene. “I had a difficult time when I first said I wanted to become a poet,” she says, “but I knew that the single best thing I can do is write. It’s been a slow process but my parents have finally accepted it, and of course I understand their hesitations.” Atiq’s success is no mean feat; her reputation in the city is such that she will soon be performing alongside award-winning poet Hamdan Dammag at Liverpool Arts Festival. For Atiq, her poetry is a platform to get her voice heard on the issues that matter to her: “I’ve always been passionate about things that are going on in the world, but I found it hard to get people to listen. I became interested in debating, but I felt like a lot of the time my message was falling on deaf ears. But when you perform poetry, your audience is right there and most of the time they’re engaged with what you’re saying.” Atiq’s subjects range from women’s rights to the loss of culture that comes with dual nationality, and she hopes to make a difference to the way her audience views the world. “I know you can’t influence everyone with your work, but if you can inspire one person then that person might go on to inspire another,” she says.
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One of the aims of Liverpool Arab Arts Festival is to explore the ways in which Arab communities worldwide respond to contemporary changes from within, and this is a subject that interests Atiq greatly. “When we have young Arabs who are living in a different part of the world, they drift away from our cultures,” she says. “But if we knew more about our own history, we’d understand more about the issues we are facing today. When we leave our Arab culture behind, we’re really just drifting away from ourselves. I think it’s important to have a British identity and a Yemeni identity: it’s two in one.” For Atiq, her heritage, as well as her faith, are the fuel for her art. Though she has been brought up in the UK, she still strongly associates herself with her Yemeni roots. She writes and performs in English, but aims to complete her first poem in Arabic this year – a challenging task that she hopes will make her feel closer to her Yemeni family. Though poetry is popular in Yemen, it’s unusual for women to perform it, something Atiq hopes will change with time. “When I first started to perform poetry, a lot of people I know who are also Yemeni would tell me that they write poetry too. It’s amazing that there are all these pockets of people writing in secret. They only felt confident to tell me because they knew I’d hurdled the obstacle where I had to be accepted.”
reating a new comedy show isn’t easy: you’ve got to jot down your jokes, practice your punch lines and hone the whole thing until it causes even the most serious sides to split. Back in 2013, comedian, poet and performer Jackie Hagan was working on just such stuff, having won Contact’s Flying Solo competition, a prize that comes with funding for a tour of rural venues. “It’s the Arts Council trying to get artists into places where people don’t engage with the arts very much,” explains Hagan. “I think they thought I was quite cosy – like a dinner lady – so I’d work in rural venues.” One thing you don’t normally have to contend with, though, is having a limb cut off – which is exactly what happened to Hagan. Just two months after Flying Solo, she was rushed to hospital when her right leg turned white; eventually, she had to have it amputated at the knee. Not that she let that stop her. “My original pitch was about what it means to be a proper grownup, because I didn’t feel like one,” says Hagan, “And then all this stuff happened and they were chopping bits off my leg and I thought ‘My God, now I do feel like an adult.’ So I ended up doing a show about having my leg off instead.” Some People Have Too Many Legs was the result, a heartfelt, hilarious and slightly eccentric show that dealt with Hagan’s problematic year in a positive way. “Solo shows are such a self-obsessed thing to do anyway, so you’ve got to make sure you’re entertaining,” continues Hagan. “So that meant I was just thinking of the best side of it. Instead of going ‘woe is me,’ I was dressing my stump up as celebrities.” This make-do manner is typical of Hagan, whose artistic output has always embraced lo-fi aesthetics, and who describes ‘fancy’ clothing to The Skinny as “a T-shirt that doesn’t have toothpaste on it.” What really impresses, however, is not so much her bravery or her humour, but rather her ability to turn an ordeal into an opportunity. In less than a year she has toured the country,
published a book, run a ton of workshop sessions and even appeared in the pages of Chat magazine. She’s currently working on a script for Graeae Theatre about non-conformity called Mark E. Smith Was My Mum, as well as a documentary piece for Bluesci – a Trafford-based organisation that supports mental health and wellbeing – and Sale Waterside Arts Centre that looks at how working-class people cope in the face of adversity. “It’s been a mad whirlwind of a year doing all the stuff,” she reflects. “When I look back on it I think, ‘God, you didn’t have to do all that, you didn’t have to be superwoman, you could have sat down for five minutes.’ Well, actually I was sat down because I was in a wheelchair, but you know what I mean.” As a result of all this hard work, Hagan feels she has taken her craft to the next level. “You’ve got to learn fast: how to sell a joke to audiences who are shocked by your presence. In the first 20 minutes I could just feel the audience looking at me and thinking ‘what is that?!’” she laughs. “I just learned another level of charm. I mean, it is already a hard sell anyway – amputee comedy – so I just had to get better [at it] really quickly. And be shameless about self-promotion.” The next step for her now is to re-work the material from …Too Many Legs into a format suitable for the grizzled cynics of city centre comedy clubs and pubs. “My new stuff is also more accessible – my comedy used to be a lot weirder,” she concedes. “But you can’t be snobby – if you’ve got to make a joke about Jedward or go the places they need you to go, then you can. “I’ve got better at meeting the audience halfway,” she reflects. “I used to think that was selling out, but it’s not: it’s just being better at what you do.” Jackie Hagan performs Some People Have Too Many Legs at Didsbury Baptist Church as part of Didsbury Arts Festival, Manchester, 24 Jun, 8pm The show is available as a book via Flapjack Press; flapjackpress.co.uk jackiehagan.weebly.com
Photo: Lee Baxter
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Ameena Atiq will be performing alongside Hamdan Dammag as part of Liverpool Arab Arts Festival at the Bluecoat, 11 Jun, from 6pm
BOOKS / THEATRE
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The University for World-Class Professionals
An Oldham Coliseum Theatre Production
Friday 19 June - Saturday 4 July
MA Creative Writing Complete a full-length book under the guidance of established writers directed by Carol Ann Duffy • Novel • Poetry • Writing for Children & Young Adults
MA English Studies
A brand new musical with a ‘90s indie soundtrack
with specialist pathways available in: • Contemporary Literature & Film • The Gothic
Cathy Crabb and Lindsay Williams Directed by Kevin Shaw By
Study in Manchester or by online distance learning
Original Compositions by
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A Liverpool Everyman & Playhouse and Nuffield, Southampton co-production, in association with Complicite
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June 2015
23
Concrete Jungle As she releases her third collection, Blood Child, poet Eleanor Rees discusses her political incentive, celebrates the imagination and defends the role of the local poet
Interview: Holly Rimmer-Tagoe Illustration: Beth Crowley
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he streets of Liverpool are a terrain in transformation, bursting with ghost-like, aimless wanderers. A mermaid is trawling through a darkened alleyway; a barren suburban house is bleeding. The city is breathing and animate; it disguises shape-shifters and changes of an emotional, energetic and erotic kind. At least, this is how it is in the mind of Eleanor Rees. Rees’s poetry has already attracted the attention of the literary glitterati, receiving early praise from the likes of poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy and Whitbread Prize-winning poet Michael Symmons Roberts. (Rees herself has received the Eric Gregory Award and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2007.) Her work is deeply entrenched in myth and folktale and is notable for its ability to sustain an energetic and visceral impulse; she continually teases and twists the written word to evoke new meanings and realities. Stones are reimagined as a ‘love bite’ from a ‘mountain’s mouth’ and skylights become ‘precious stones in a crown.’ When The Skinny meets up with Rees to talk about her new collection, Blood Child, there is a sense of collective melancholy in the air. Liverpool, a Labour stronghold, is just learning that the Conservative Party have won the election and, as if by providence, the skies are overcast and foreboding. Rees is surprised by the result: “The election is hugely depressing. I’m still quite in shock about it. I grew up under the last lot of Tories in Birkenhead and, in some ways, that has probably informed all of my writing ever since. That’s probably even why I became a poet, which is a slightly odd reaction, but it’s about trying to protect your own values and there aren’t a lot of spaces in our society where you can protect your own values. A personal coping mechanism, when I was younger, was to write. I wrote poetry to try and express what I felt I needed to say. That’s developed over time into something perhaps a bit more literary and complex, but essentially it’s the same motivation.” Blood Child tracks the process of change, in all of its trifling and colossal guises, and draws on both gothic horror and fairytale tropes, though the two genres are in no way mutually exclusive. For a form often associated with younger readers and children’s literature, and some kind of Disneyesque, ‘happy-ever-after’ reverie, fairytale narratives are often rooted in extreme violence, domination and suppression. Rees’s reliance on impersonal nouns – individuals are never named, but referred to as ‘man,’ ‘child’ and ‘woman’ – is straight out of a Grimms’ fairytale (and also nods to Angela Carter, whose influence on Rees’s work is palpable). Such motifs represent an attempt to “write a different version of the self,” a self that is “collective” and “communal” rather than “concerned with its own self-interest.” A later poem in the collection, The Cruel Mother, uses connotations of the ‘wicked stepmother’ role – a female caregiver without maternal feeling – to explore some deep-seated fears and anxieties of the modern world. You don’t have to look very far to see that the poem seeks to question the consequences of maltreatment and misogyny, as well as nature’s harsh transitions. Rees doesn’t see the escape into the imagined as a retreat, but rather as a necessary path to illuminate the real. “I like descriptive language in poetry particularly,” she says. “I think that’s what poets should be doing, describing the world. Of course, there are lots of different ways to do that and you can make things up as a way to describe the world. So you make up a story,
June 2015
a fiction, to describe something that’s real, but there’s always a real world outside of myself that I am negotiating and enacting with and it’s that dynamic that produces the creative response.”
“Writing poetry is about trying to protect your own values. There aren’t a lot of spaces in our society where you can protect your own values” Eleanor Rees
Indeed, across Rees’s work, this “real world” is always strongly associated with place. She has an academic interest in the role of the local poet and perceives the writer in the context of the
community, rather than as an abstract, solitary figure confined to observation. The Liverpool Poets are a huge inspiration for Rees – she mentions them countless times throughout the interview and Adrian Henri is referred to in the collection’s first poem. She describes herself as “interested in the idea of the local poet and the role of the poet working in a particular context. The context defines, to some extent, what the poem is and how the poem emerges. “I’ve been very interested in locality and environments and those interests came out of the fact that I was writing in Liverpool,” she continues. “A poet always needs an audience and they always need a place to write from. In some ways, it’s quite straightforward, but we are so used to thinking about books being somehow separate from people and from places that I thought it was worth restating that.” The city in literature has always been a place for the aberrant other, from Robert Louis Stevenson’s monstrous double of Jekyll and Hyde to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unknowable enigma and magnum opus of excess, Jay Gatsby. Rees uses the historical depiction of the city – a place where imaginary forces are allowed to roam undisturbed and skin can be shed among the anonymity of the urban crowd – but her focus is different. In Rees’s city, nature is always intruding, a force that cannot be contained – and, unusually, the parks and grasslands of the landscape take precedence over metropolitan concrete.
BOOKS
What motivates Rees’s persistent return to issues of ecology and environment? Her choice is deliberate, and, ultimately, political. “It comes from the politics of the work in that environmental politics is very important to me, and one of the key issues that we need to think about,” she says. “The environment isn’t separate from human beings; human beings are natural creatures that exist within habitats. We’re not always the dominant creature. There are other forces that are as strong as we are. If there is a radical or political element to what I’m doing, that’s how it manifests.” Rees describes poetry as a “virtual reality”; it is created in a particular place and time, but it can also produce new spaces and possibilities, ones in which past and present collide in unexpected ways and ideas do battle. “Blood Child is about changing the frame and changing the way we look at something, [which] then moves on the argument and the energy. It’s an energetic, emotional movement as much as a rational movement,” she says. Rees may be hesitant about the “bleak times” ahead, but she can be assured that there is always that alternative space, facilitated by the imagination, waiting in the balance; other realities waiting to be grabbed. Blood Child is out now, published by Liverpool University Press, RRP £9.99 eleanorrees.info
Feature
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Behind the Scenes: KMAH Broadcasting from the back streets of Leeds, new radio station KMAH aims to spread a bit of limelight on North-based DJs
N
estled above a beauty salon and a photography studio in the dead centre of Leeds’s shopping district, DJs, guests and good natured hanger-onners visiting KMAH Radio are hustled not past rows of women awaiting a pedicure or a young family killing time before a shoot, but up four precarious looking flights of metal stairs. It’s a dizzying experience at the best of times, but for any selectors returning from an indulgent weekend of work and dealing with a hangover, jet lag or worse, the trip up and down the reconstituted fire escape feels borderline perilous. But for both the talent making it to the top of the stairs, as well the thousands already tuning in, KMAH represents a definitive moment for the North’s bubbling electronic underground and beyond. Founded by long-time Leeds residents and promoters Kristian Karyl, Mike Stockell, Hamish Cole and Arthur Barr, the name makes up the quartet’s initials but also offers a discreet nod to classic Chicago stations such as WLJB and WBMX, where the likes of Jeff Mills, back in his days as ‘The Wizard,’ and Richie Hawtin were integral parts of a diverse network of enthusiastic local selectors. Despite the huge difference in era, technology and environment, it’s this sense of community that fundamentally inspires the station’s founders. “It’s about keeping people together who’ve got their own groove, people coming together and playing great records that you’ve never heard of,” explains Barr, who also runs the popular FullBarr label. “A few years ago there were nights against each other, a lot of negativity, but this has brought people together. People come here to do what they want to do. There’s no competition in KMAH.”
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Interview: John Thorp Illustration: Amy Minto
Barr is joined today by Mike Stockell; although all four heads of KMAH have equal say in the station’s operations, the pair deal with the daily studio operations, be that binning the weekend’s empty cans of lager or ensuring there’s a lengthy jazz odyssey ready to roll in case a DJ is running late. Karyl and Cole deal with scheduling and promotion respectively, and are absent with amusingly contrasting reasons; the former is expecting a baby alongside launching his radio project, while the other is currently lost somewhere in Berlin’s Panorama Bar, celebrating his birthday. Leeds is a city with a strong musical scene, but while lacking the population of Manchester and London, like many other university strongholds in the UK its nightlife undeniably revolves around the immense student populace, who don’t always remain present and correct even when the city’s creative and music talent stay put. For inspiration, KMAH have looked west. “A really good friend of mine lives in Bristol, and where they’ve really got it nailed is everyone supports each other’s nights,” explains Stockell. “The guys making the hardest techno going support the people making nu-disco. And that’s starting to happen here, that mentality towards each other, and that’s what we hope will come of it.” The roster of DJs and shows on KMAH is a patchwork of local party crews and labels combined with a smattering of impressive, more internationally recognised names. Renowned crate digger, author and dance music archivist Bill Brewster hosts his Disco Jungle once a month, and masterful producer Maurice Fulton is also on the books. Long-time Warehouse Project resident Krysko couldn’t make a
recent show due to the imminent arrival of his first child, but fortunately his friend Andrew Weatherall volunteered a recording of a back-toback set between the two instead. The precociously talented young techno producer Happa presents his regular show, Big Tunes & That, with a crew of similarly good humoured pals, and the vibe is that of pirate radio at its cheekiest and smartest.
“It’s about keeping people together who’ve got their own groove and playing great records that you’ve never heard of” Arthur Barr
Yet, KMAH isn’t about status and the pair recognise the small shows as “the lifeblood of the station.” They’ve already been discreetly fielding requests for the possibility of airtime from names they might have thought to be unattainable, and yet their ambitions are tastefully rooted in quality, be that in or out of underground music’s established limelights. “As long as it’s interesting and well done, that’s just
CLUBS
my [criteria] really, that’s what matters,” Barr elaborates. “If the right proposal comes along, be it for spoken word or otherwise, we’d take it. We used to have a monthly show on Sweatlodge radio in Berlin, and we wondered if anyone was listening, and then we ended up getting a threehour warm-up in room one at Fabric after a year. So we know this sort of radio definitely works.” In the three months since its launch, KMAH has exceeded its founders’ expectations in terms of support, and after a few technical mishaps, now broadcasts daily from noon to midnight. “It’s been very intense,” admits Stockell. “But it’s just troubleshooting, trying to solve problems within ten minutes. It was very stressful, the sheer stress of it had us shouting at each other. But having everything happen in a month was a blessing in disguise.” Online radio is now firmly within the reach millions of music fans as well as aspiring broadcasters, and yet it feels that, outside of template-setting stations such as NTS, it’s a phenomenon that has yet to fully flourish. And yet, the music, the talent and the passion exists, as KMAH’s warm reception has more than demonstrated. In an age of instant streaming and archives, what is the lasting appeal of radio? “There’s a statistic that 80% of people want to hear music they already know, and that’s the purpose that commercial radio serves,” observes Stockell. “I’m in the other 20%. I want to hear new music and trust tastemakers to provide the right mood. I’m personally 80% rooted into house and techno, but having the radio there allows me to get into other music. To be able to trust those selectors.” While the station undoubtedly leans towards a club-friendly, 4/4 template, the more offbeat selections on KMAH are infectious enough to pleasantly disturb any working day. There’s room for balearica and psychedelic indie rock from local institution The Outlaws Yacht Club, experimental electronica on Bambooman’s Healthy Living broadcast and deep-dug Afrodisco from club night Banana Hill. All of the shows are neatly stored on Soundcloud, or at least until the platform’s notoriously overzealous anti-piracy bots haul them off, and, come September, the men behind KMAH plan for the station to have a larger impact with club nights and maybe even a breakfast show focusing more on the local community. Despite Leeds’s proliferation of great venues, the recent legacy of groundbreaking labels such as Hessle Audio and even its internationally known rock festival, it sometimes feels as if the city’s musical heritage is overlooked, especially in relation to once trendsetting venues in dance music such as the original Warehouse. While not driven by an ounce of negativity, a more substantial musical future for the city is definitely something on the collective mind of KMAH. “For Kristian in particular, he was tired of people doing great things in Leeds and then moving to London or Berlin,” notes Stockell. “One of the fundamental points of setting up the station is to give Leeds more limelight. And the student turnaround can be an issue, but the heads of all varieties are there, and the stuff we get is solid. I want more underground things, and hopefully we can be a driving force in that. Choosing people who you respect musically, and seeing what they do with their two hours, be it once or twice a month, the results are just astounding. It’s amazing to be able to give people a platform for that.” KMAH broadcasts 12pm-12am seven days a week kmah-radio.com
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Cheaper than Flying Scotland-based participatory artist Anthony Schrag will spend the next three months walking to Venice, in the process questioning the value of the Venice Biennale
W
ith too much pomp and infinite prosecco, the Venice Biennale unleashed its 2015 incarnation at the beginning of last month. Though Scotland’s presentation by Graham Fagen has already been covered with a five-star review online, Scottish art will also be making its way to Venice over the summer in the form of Anthony Schrag. On foot, he’ll be making the artist’s pilgrimage to Venice. With distinct suspicion, he remarks that Venice is thought of as “Like Mecca. Every good Muslim must go to Mecca once in their lives; every good artist must go to the Venice Biennale once in their lives.” Lasting for three months in total, Schrag’s journey has been carefully route-planned to take in several pilgrimage sites. Giving a sense of the scale of his endeavour, his path has also been modified to take account of the curve of the earth. With 450 hours of walking to be completed, Schrag has in front of him a summer of eight-hour days of walking at a swift pace. “It’s a blessing. I’m just about to finish my PhD, I’ve got all these questions about my practice, what next, turning 40, and I get to have three months just to think about them.” Then again, he’s “also got the Alps in the way, they’re not going to be warm.” As well as these broader questions facing Schrag, for this project he sets out to address a more specific question: “What does Venice offer?” This question is particularly relevant for Schrag’s mainly participatory artworks, which in general are not represented in the Biennale. “As with any kind of art,” Schrag describes that participatory art “comes with its own set of languages, its own understanding of aesthetics, power politics, and yet it’s not really welcomed into Venice because it’s not considered art.” It was with these issues in mind that Schrag developed Lure of the Lost: A Contemporary Pilgrimage, along with Huntly-based Deveron Arts. Schrag is a long-term collaborator with the Aberdeenshire arts organisation and describes
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Interview: Adam Benmakhlouf
them as “kind of rock and roll, because they don’t subscribe to the normal tradition of what art is.” Conventionally speaking, “art is so much about the production of an object, about the display of those objects and about places.” So it’s particularly impressive to Schrag that 20 years ago, Deveron Arts decided to deviate from these norms. Schrag describes his relationship with Deveron Arts as “agonistic,” which is also how he describes his and Deveron Art’s relationship to the Biennale in making the Lure of the Lost project. “Agonism” as a concept Schrag derives from political theorist Chantal Mouffe. He describes it as a “A productive conflictive relationship – that’s the kind of relationship I find most proactive.” Proceeding this way does not entail tearing down an institution, but instead “to propose an opposition, to work uncomfortably together, [and] to challenge each other.” It was in this spirit of this kind of “agonism” that Schrag and Deveron Arts considered a project which they situated entirely within Venice, and which would import Deveron Arts’ locally based ethic to Venice. “The town is the venue” is the motto for Deveron Arts, who actively engage with their town of Huntly, its history and people. For this first proposal, the idea was to engage with the non-transient population of Venice: “The everyday people that live there, that run the shops, and try and actually do something with them.” This was an attempt to cast some doubt on the usual strategy of Biennale exhibitors, who “export an idea that’s fully formed.” Taking this outsider approach to the festival further, Schrag will now spend only a few days in Venice itself. Instead, over the course of his 450 hours of walking across Britain, France, the Alps and Italy, he will position himself complicatedly, as he problematises the Venice Biennale’s relationship with its site, but without a fixed site during this time. “I would argue possibly that I aim to have more of a responsibility to the
places I actually visit than a lot of the Biennale sites which are there for six months of the year.” Instead, between his eight-hour shifts of walking every day, his goal “is to arrive at the place and to meet someone and live in their life and to live as they do in that moment and understand what they do, be limited by their rules and by their places.”
“I’m challenging the Venice Biennale but it doesn’t know I’m there” Anthony Schrag
It is also in this final form that the idea of the pilgrimage became relevant. Named directly after St Anthony, the patron saint of the lost, Schrag thinks of the trip as “Just going and getting lost.” And as is conventional for the pilgrim, Schrag will take tokens that people give him to Venice, like relics. In particular, Schrag might take with him the acorns of Joseph Beuys’s oak trees in Kassel, first presented as part of Documenta, leaving one in Venice, “making a triangle between two of the biggest art situations in the world and Huntly, Aberdeenshire.” As well as the conceptual demands of the trip, Lure of the Lost is also something of a physical trial. “I’m doing training, and I’m physically up for it. Undoubtedly I will have endless blisters, there will be chafing, it will be painful.” This kind of physically demanding work isn’t new to Schrag, who for a number of years has continued a work entitled Wrestling Artists. “I wrestle
ART
artists to figure out who is the better artist.” For example, he lasted ten seconds before a collective of six (including a national judo champion) brought him down. “There’s a satisfying enjoyment in pushing yourself. You feel good for doing it. I’ve always really enjoyed the physical side of things much more.” Nevertheless, he does concede that although the physical element of Lure of the Lost is not a worry, “it’s the psychological side that’s more concerning.” He doesn’t plan on spending all of his walking time alone, however. “We are inviting people to walk along but basically they have to understand that I have a certain speed to keep up. I can’t dawdle.” Schrag and Deveron Arts hope that some of the people he meets on his way to Venice will join him in the final six to eight hours of the journey, rather than staging an arrival performance. “We’re all part of this entering Venice.” As well as a physical and psychological trial, Schrag believes “It’s a trial for Venice as well.” He likens it to his project last year, when he invaded Iceland. Since Iceland currently doesn’t have an army, Schrag tried invading the country to see if anyone would stop him. “I was having this war with a country that didn’t know I was having a war against it.” This is just the same for Schrag with Lure of the Lost, “I’m challenging the Venice Biennale, and asking all these questions about it. But it doesn’t know I’m there.” Here’s hoping Schrag will fare as well against the Biennale as he did in Iceland. “I planted my flag at the parliament, no one stopped me. I am actually the supreme ruler of Iceland, by the way.” Anthony will leave Huntly on 14 Jun and walk through Skipton on 6 Jul and Mossley on 8 Jul To help him with funds towards his supplies and equipment, he has launched a crowdfunding campaign at: wefund.com/project/lure-of-the-lost-a-contemporarypilgrimage/p67015 theartpilgrimage.wordpress.com
THE SKINNY
Photo: Stuart Armitt
Anthony Schrag - Lure of the Lost 003
Fist in the Air Surf-inflected Canadian noisemongers Fist City get angry on their excellent new album Everything Is a Mess – we caught up with guitarist Evan van Reekum to talk politics, punk and riding waves in landlocked towns
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o put it bluntly, we’re fucked. This much is obvious. Just look around you – here in the UK we’re still reeling from the victory of a slender Conservative majority vote, with spending cuts and further austerity measures high on their agenda, contrary to received wisdom with regards to reviving an ailing economy. Then there’s the US, where communities are still in turmoil after racial tension and police brutality spilled over into riots and murder. And that’s just two of the most privileged western countries – think we’ve got it bad? You should see what’s happening in Iraq and Syria right now. ‘Fucked’ is the only reasonable summation. And what’s our cultural response to this? Well, nothing. Musicians with genuine political ripostes have either been ridiculed by a rightwing-dominated media or remain hidden in the underground, preaching to the converted, away from anything resembling a significant platform. As for mainstream pop… well, one of the UK’s biggest bands recently announced they were gonna freak out the squares by dropping their folksycommon-man gimmickry in favour of… bog-standard guitar-based balladry. More songs about relationships and stuff. The bland leading the bland; a cacophony of musical effluent; a self-conscious, say-nothing artistic black hole. The fires haven’t all burned out, however. Take Fist City: a riotous surf-punk band from Canada’s province of Alberta, and on new album Everything Is a Mess, they’re seriously pissed off. “When we wrote the album, the Ferguson riots were in full effect. Now it’s happening in Baltimore,” says songwriter and guitarist Evan van Reekum from his home in Lethbridge. “This record has a lot to do with police brutality in the United States, and very unjust murders. It’s a huge issue. It’s terrible what’s happening down there. The body count is just huge.” You can hear their righteous response in the furious clatter of recent single Fuck Cops; a post-hardcore garage sprawl powered by sheets of ravaged guitar and a powerhouse rumble from drummer Ryan Grieve. It’s worth remembering that punk has always been a voice for the disenfranchised – when you’re on the bottom rung, you’ve got to shout upwards. It’s all part of this band’s raison d’être, as Evan explains: “We all grew up being underdogs in various ways, being bullied. Keir and Britney [Griffiths, siblings and Fist City vocalist and bassist, respectively] grew up as black kids in a community full of right-wing religious people. It was pretty brutal for them growing up, though they wouldn’t want me to make them out as victims.”
June 2015
The band’s last album – 2013’s It’s 1983 Grow Up! – dealt with similar themes of disaffection, but songs like Never Bored felt more like kids acting out than responding to adverse circumstances. Was there a conscious thematic shift with this record? “Yeah, I guess we wanted to start taking things a lot more seriously. We’d talked about being a lot more outspoken on issues of bigotry – here it’s not uncommon to walk down the street and have someone drive by in a truck and yell ‘faggot’ at you. Growing up, our lives were full of that. ‘Hipster art fag, blah blah blah.’ I just don’t understand those viewpoints at all. “But we started writing the record, and the situation in Ferguson was progressing and we were becoming more and more angry. There’d be videos of police killing people with their handguns – I’ve seen videos of people with both hands being held against a car, and still being shot multiple times. It’s just an abuse of power that was wholly disappointing, so as we were writing the record we became more and more tense and frustrated.” Lyrical content isn’t the only thing that’s changed since writing the last record either. Moustachioed frontman Kier was still known as Kirsten until a few short years ago – his gender transition from female to male was still relatively recent even when recording It’s 1983. This time around he’s audibly much more comfortable with the changes that such a dramatic life choice will inevitably bring. Clearly cautious in representing his friend’s personal life, Evan is nonetheless
Interview: Will Fitzpatrick Photography: Stuart Moulding Do Fist City define themselves as a punk band? “The definition is so blurred,” he replies. “I know what people think punk is, as far as pop culture is concerned – like these really terrible mall-punk bands or whatever. When I was working at a record store, this kid pointed at a Hüsker Dü record and said, ‘That’s not real punk’. Then he pointed at Rancid and was like, ‘That’s real punk’. I was so flabbergasted by that. But now that the definition of punk has changed and is changing so much, I think we’d rather just be a band. “If punk still means living in a squat and getting wasted or being totally straight-edge, we do not live that lifestyle any more. We definitely like the subversive values associated with punk traditionally, but personally, when I’m at home on my computer, I think, ‘Wow, I’m the least punk person ever’. I fly fish and I collect records!” Indeed, Evan fills his time much more efficiently than stereotypical views of punk rockers would have you believe: “I work a lot, kind of a workaholic I guess. I have two DJ gigs per week, and I work at the record store two days a week, I have another full-time job doing marketing… I’m always busy. I don’t feel there’s any other way.” And what of DIY – is that still central to the band’s identity? “That depends. All of a sudden we have an agent in Europe, and a press person, so I guess technically no. In Canada we book all of our own shows, we do all of our own press, but a lot of DIY bands would probably be pretty pissed if we did identify as DIY. We still make our own videos and that kind of stuff, but just out of necessity. We’re just trying to go with the flow, I guess, and not get in anybody’s way, you know?” So where does this leave Everything Is a Mess? Evan van Reekum “Good question. I want people to enjoy it, I Conversation returns to the music itself, and want people to get it. I guess I want to follow it up the seeming incongruity of surf sounds emerging with something good, and just tour a lot… I would from landlocked areas like Fist City’s hometowns love this band to be in a place where we could comfortably do our own thing and live the way we of Lethbridge and Calgary. Sure, bands as varied want to live without it being a battle all the time.” as The Beach Boys and Man or Astro-Man? have dabbled in (and even defined) some of the genre’s He pauses once more, perhaps reflecting on the mess, the anger and Fist City’s struggle for selfsignature tricks without so much as picking up assertion in a world that keeps trying to shout a board. So what is it about those evocatively down voices like theirs. “I guess we’re trying to twanging guitars that captures the imagination achieve a level of success where we don’t feel like of dry-shoed suburban types? Evan laughs. underdogs any more.” “There is a hilarious irony that we just plain can’t surf. But with that kind of music it’s easy to Everything Is a Mess is released on 22 Jun via be punk and badass, and still be interesting and Transgressive Records fun. It’s where those two things meet. You can fistcitycult.com be loud and aggressive and angry, but still make people dance and have a good time.” forthcoming in terms of how this affects the Fist City narrative (spoiler: it doesn’t really). “Kier is the rock of the band,” he says, warmly. “He’s always been the person that’s kept it together; the person that any one of us could go talk to at any time. I don’t think we’ll ever lose that. It’s a weird thing for me to talk about on his behalf, but if it has changed the band at all, it’s been positive because we’re all happier that he’s happier.” By way of contrast, The Skinny notes that Against Me!’s Laura Jane Grace became a spokesperson for trans issues after revealing her gender dysphoria in a starkly public manner. Kier, whose transition began in markedly quieter circumstances, is more reticent to raise the subject. Evan nods. “For sure. I think that Kier is very wary of being outspoken about it. Last year Kier was approached to write a blog post for a trans activist’s website and he declined, because it’s very much his own journey. I think that’s his humble attitude towards it, he doesn’t really wanna be the centre of attention, you know? He definitely won’t start a conversation about it, but he’s open to talking about it. It’s a strange limelight. Within the group, we never ask questions. It’s just the way it is; this sort of fantastic thing that happened. We’re all pretty grateful that it has.”
“We all grew up being underdogs in various ways”
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LE Y ST FE LI
Travelling in the Digital Age Words: Izzy Gray Illustration: Lydia Brownlee
Has social media made us anti-social? An honest insight into the world of 21st-century travel...
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n March this year, the Musee d'Orsay in Paris decided to lift its ban on photography. Some say it was a decision made after the pressure of public demand; others would argue that it was made in haste, after the culture minister Fleur Pellerin made a bit of a faux-pas by breaking with policy and uploading a cheeky shot of a rather nice Bonnard onto her Instagram account (#oops). Either way, it was a move that would prove controversial, and after visiting the gallery myself last month, I was left wondering whether it may be a decision officials would come to regret. The problem? Selfies. That's right; selfies. Now I'm not an art snob by any means, nor am I averse to the odd moment of iPhone portraiture; I do, however, think that there is a time and a place for selfies, and a prestigious art gallery is not such a place. As I stood in the Post-Impressionist room, I found myself staring not at the artwork, but at a swarm of tourists whose behaviour had caught my eye. I watched, entranced, as one by one they repeated the same monotonous process: finding a painting they vaguely recognised and throwing a cursory glance at the name plaque, before promptly turning their back on the said artwork, outstretching their arm to find the most flattering angle (of their own features, I should add, not the painting) and finally, a quick sort of the hair before SNAP!... another addition to the Facebook timeline was born. I was speechless. Here we were, standing in one of the most renowned galleries in the world, surrounded by some of the most significant creations in modern art, close enough to see the bloody brushstrokes, and people were more interested in their own reflections than their environment. I looked around the room, somehow hoping to find reassurance that what I had observed was just an anomaly; the more I searched, however, the more evident the scale of the problem became. At every recognisable painting, three or more would-be photographers hovered like vultures waiting to swoop on a rotting carcass. For every moment of silent contemplation that was had, another was interrupted by the sounds of shutters snapping. With every frustrated member of staff who tutted and tsk'd, another retreated to a dark corner in defeat. I got the distinct impression that they were fighting a losing battle, and their faces said it all: ‘Welcome to the Orsay, the epicentre of 21st-century narcissism.’ For me, the tipping point came after a near collision between the elbow of a surly American lady and my left eye as she jostled her way into the prime selfie stance. ‘I'm sorry,’ I felt like snapping. ‘Am I spoiling your view of you?’ I held back, but somewhere in the distance I'm sure Gauguin would have been spinning in his grave. It was only three years since I had last visited the gallery, and yet so much had changed in that time. People had changed. It was as though selfie fever had swept across a whole generation, and I was standing in the midst of an epidemic. I watched as those around me moved like drones, their functions mechanical, their impulses guided by the light which shone like beacons from the screens of their smartphones. I couldn't help but feel a little sad. ‘Has social media changed us that much?’ I wondered. ‘Has our obsession with selfies made us selfish travellers?’
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“I can’t help but feel a little sentimental as I think back to how travelling must have been before smartphones and Twitter feeds” The truth is, things have changed. We live in a digital age, and things are constantly evolving. What was once considered an ironic display of self promotion has now become standard and accepted behaviour. The way we interact with others has changed, and so it's no wonder that the way we interact with the world around us will change too. While technology has certainly made travelling easier, it's also enabled a generation to visit sights across the world without really visiting them. By that, I mean the people who will spend hundreds of pounds travelling to Giza, only to spend an hour at the foot of the pyramids, and then dedicate half of that time to tweeting about how truly #amazeballs the experience was (slash is). With the pressures of social media always lingering at the back of our minds, we feel compelled (and I say ‘we’ because we're all guilty of it…) to share our experiences as and when they happen, as though if we didn't, it would somehow change the fact that they had actually happened at all – which is crazy, if you think about it. And then there's the social aspect of it all, the fact that when we bury our noses into our devices, we close ourselves off from those around us, whether they are friends, family or strangers. Because social media is a relatively new pheno-menon, the research into its sociological implications is only just beginning to emerge; already the results are worrying, with one recent study by Edinburgh's Heriot-Watt University identifying a clear link between selfies and the breakdown of relationships. It seems a little ironic that social media could be making us more antisocial, and yet the evidence is stacking up. It's an issue I became aware of when backpacking two years ago. Before setting off on my round-the-world trip, I'd built up a pretty romantic notion of what it would be like staying in hostels, with visions of late nights spent around bonfires and impromptu road trips coming to mind. In reality, it wasn't quite like that. I'm not saying that I didn't have a great time, or that I struggled to meet people on the whole, but I don't think it's exactly a coincidence that the best hostels I stayed at were the ones which didn't offer free WiFi. Where once, backpackers would have congregated in common rooms, sharing tales and advice over boxes of chep wine, now they bickered over PCs, or hid themselves behind the familiar screens of their tablets. Of course, there were those who genuinely preferred their own company, but there were also those who lacked confidence and struggled with homesickness, and I couldn't help but wonder whether their daily obsession with messaging friends back home was helping the problem or compounding it. I'll never forget a conversation I overheard
between a young Scottish girl and her mother back home: “I want to come back. I'm so lonely,” she sniffled into her laptop screen. “Of course you're not,” cooed her mother. “You've been having a wonderful time. I've seen all your photos.” “I haven't made any friends.” “That's not true. I've seen you tagged with lots of other people.” “Yes. You've seen me tagged, but I haven't made any friends.” The poor girl wanted to go home, and yet her own mother, misguided by the façade of her Facebook page, had no idea. It made me so sad that we, as a society, feel the need to maintain our happiest appearances online, when often we can in reality be feeling anything but. We seek comfort in online validation, and yet it's virtual. Beneath it all, we're still human, and somewhere down the line, the cracks will begin to show. This lass learned the hard way that you can Instagram all you like, but there's no filter for real, bitter loneliness. Travelling is tough. It's one of the most exhausting, overwhelming and testing things a person can do, and there should be no shame in admitting that. It'd be really refreshing to read a genuinely honest timeline narrative, yet somehow I think ‘I'm lonely and miss home’ is about as likely a status update as an admission of having a mosquito bite the size of Vesuvius upon your buttcheek… true story… Travelling in the digital age certainly has its challenges, but it's not all bad. In fact, many would argue that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.
TRAVEL
Who would have thought, twenty years ago, that you'd be able to book a hostel at the touch of a button? That within seconds, you could compare flight prices from around the world, and plan your entire route without even leaving your sofa? That a phone could replace a map? The advances in online communication have made travelling easier, cheaper, faster and more accessible; they've inspired a generation to plan, to share ideas and explore the world in a way never before imagined. They've also enabled us to keep in touch with friends and family back home, to let them know that we're OK, to be able to see their faces when we're feeling low. And yet, I can't but feel a little sentimental as I think back to how travelling must have been before smartphones and Twitter feeds. Would it really have been so bad to just rock up in a town, with nothing but the bag upon your back and a map in your hand? To send a postcard rather than the occasional ‘like’? To get lost once in a while? To choose a hotel without reading reviews first? OK, maybe TripAdvisor can stay… I suppose like all things it's about getting the balance right. By all means, tweet about a place, just don't forget to enjoy it too. Don't be afraid to head off the beaten track, and do things you haven't read about in six different blogs first. Be considerate. Meet others, meet travellers, meet the locals, but don't be afraid to have private moments too. Don't go to a gallery and act like a wanker. And don't forget to take a few mental pictures too. You'll be surprised how long they last. theskinny.co.uk/travel
THE SKINNY
How to Date a Feminist (Tip #1: Don’t assume they’re a dominatrix.) Deviance questions the fetishisation of feminism and its consequences for sexual liberation
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s a feminist dating within straight relationships, I often feel I’m expected to live up to the fantasy of the dominatrix. The deviant. The casual shag who’ll take the reins because I’m liberated. And do you know what? I’m sick of this expectation. “You’re into kinks? So you’re a feminist, right?” – Tinder man, 2015. Exhibit A: The well-meaning Tinder acquaintance, assuming that sexuality and ideologies are necessarily related, and that kinks and feminism are synonymous. I hate to say it but sometimes I just like to be fucked. Dominated, not dominant. Yet people seem to have a hard time entertaining the idea that a feminist might be into submissive, rough and hard fucking. And that can be really inconvenient. “What? I mean, like, yeah I’m down with that but you’re a
Words: Harriet Protheroe-Davis
feminist!” (another Tinder guy, 2015). It seems that I’ve gotten myself into the position of being told – even by those who are very politically thoughtful – what my sexuality should be. To me, this subtly cries of hegemony. Hegemony that causes people (typically cis men) to project feminist fantasies onto liberated women. These fantasies create a restrictive expectation that feminists perform an identity that is no longer defined – or chosen – by themselves. I’m just going to be blunt and call this out as inverse patriarchy. Feminists have continually tried to drive a stake through the heart of the essentialist beast that says women are a static category with a uniform set of needs. Yet for some reason this similar conception hasn’t translated to understanding ‘the feminist’ itself. Feminists don’t all
think the same, don’t all act the same, don’t have uniform needs, expectations or aspirations. So why, when dating, do I continually feel like I’m being put into a restrictive ‘feminist’ box? Why should feminism be used as a way to sneakily re-incarnate hegemonic ideas about dominant women? Sexual liberation in which women may attend to their own sexual appetites and desires is one of the most important gains for feminism. Yet this liberation, in my experience, is frequently used to homogenize expectations of strong women. Why this has me furiously bashing the shiny letters of my keyboard is because women under these expectations often begin policing their own sexual choices, wondering what type of sex they should enact in order to uphold the ideas of strength and power. Does first date sex make me
a bad feminist? Does withholding first date sex make me a bad feminist? What will submissiveness say about my politics? I will confess, all of these questions run through my head when dating. I feel like my choices are limited and expectations weigh heavy on me. Feminism declares that women can choose what they want to do with their bodies, yet the added epithet of the necessarily strong woman too often becomes an expectation that women play out a fantasy of domination. So the take-home message for all you straight guys dating a feminist is the following: I’ll dominate yah honey, sure thing, but don’t presume I want to because of my politics.
are blazing a naked trail. My nudity wasn’t seen as an invitation for praise, analysis, attention or assault. Being on the receiving end of such respect was deeply refreshing, and something that a textile world could – and should – learn from naturism.
Liverpool Sun and Air Society A naturist campsite which welcomes visitors for spa and sauna sessions on Fridays and yoga on Sundays. Find out more at lsas.org.uk.
In at the Deep End “HALT! ABORT! YOU’RE NOT WEARING ANY CLOTHES!” Presenting the story of Deviance’s debut skinny dip Words: Kate Pasola Illustration: Dale Crosby Close
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icture the scene: you’re in what feels like a staff room with around 15 people. A reassuringly scratchy carpet underfoot, the familiar crackle of polystyrene cups buckling in idle hands. Conversation is easy, everything is normal. Run-of-the-mill, even. Oh – except everyone’s absolutely bollock and nipple naked. Including you. For many, the scenario above is the stuff of brie-before-bed nightmares, a screengrab from an archived 4oD documentary, or a stage-fright coping technique. For me, it was Sunday night, and I’d been invited to join a weekly naturist swimming event – an opportunity for a wee dip, lycra-free. We were sharing a cup of tea (naked) and I was working up the nerve to go swimming (also naked). Attending a naturist event was a terrifying prospect. I’m a total prude when it comes to my own body, and have been since childhood. My grandmother learned this in Beamish when I fell into a puddle and she made the mistake of trying to publicly remove my wet t-shirt. My fouryear-old self wrestled her to the floor, incensed that I’d been subjected to such exposure in full view of the Great Beamish Public. Outside the Pockerley Railway too, of all places. As it turns out, trying out naturism is just like riding a bucking bronco. You never think it’ll happen to you, but if it does, just don’t overthink it. Stepping naked into a room full of strangers feels like skydiving and remembering you’ve forgotten the parachute mid-fall. It’s actually quite hard to jump into a pool when your brain is screaming “HALT! ABORT! YOU’RENOTWEARINGANYCLOTHES!” I was joined by all types of punters. There were the relaxed naturists who rested ankle over knee-cap with all the confidence of Gary Barlow at the Brits. There were the nude-curious, who’d whetted an appetite after engaging in skinny dipping abroad. There were even other first-timers, identifiable by their intermittent eye-widening, visibly re-realising that they were bare-arsed in the middle of a room of strangers.
June 2015
Pre-swim, I spoke to a friendly guy called Billy. He’d gotten into naturism in order to come to terms with having his bladder replaced with an external urostomy bag as part of his cancer treatment. “I thought, how am I going to have the confidence when meeting women with this thing?” he told me, semi-indicating the plastic pouch attached to his pelvis. I accidentally looked, but Billy was unfazed. He encouraged me to go for a swim and try out the acrobatics equipment suspended from the roof. I passed on the latter, but he gave me a demonstration. There are some things a person can’t unsee; for instance, a starkers gentleman hanging from a trapeze rope and flying inexorably through the air of a public swimming pool, as if participating in an unclothed Total Wipeout. But, quite frankly, I don’t want to unsee it. Billy looked liberated. He very literally couldn’t give a flying fuck if anyone looked at his pelvis. Funnily enough, no one was looking. In a room full of nudity, the batshit part of the brain that does backflips at the sight of a schlong – airborne or otherwise – is tranquilised. And that’s just the start of the awesome parts of naturism. I remembered what human bodies looked like, resetting my conditioned little brain, hitherto deprived of the sight of normal nipples, dimpled backs and thighs that look like mine. Also, with no sartorial cues to hand – save a wedding band/executive decisions in the pubic realm – I found myself searching for something, anything on which to anchor a conversation. I quickly realised – horror of horrors – that we were going to have to put in some work to get to know one another; asking questions and actually listening to the answers. But, for me, the most exhilarating part of public birthday-suiting was being reminded that my naked body needn’t necessarily be sexualised. In the clothed world, even an unfastened button is politicised. It leads to unsolicited discussions, saliva-soaked catcalls, upward eyebrow movements. But the naturist community
Fancy giving naturism a go? North West Naturists Organises monthly naturist swims at the Worsley Pool Complex, Walkden. Usually the last Saturday of the month, but check before attending via northwestnaturists.co.uk.
DEVIANCE
North Western Sunbathing Society A five-acre stretch of countryside close to Macclesfield, designed for naked sunbathing in a natural environment. Check visitor policies on the website before attending at hillside-online.co.uk.
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Photography by Sinead Russell
A Class Apart Amid the bustle of degree show preparation, final year students from the Fashion Design and Fashion Communication courses at Liverpool John Moores University take time out to tell us their hopes, dreams and inspirations
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t’s that time of year again when the fashion world waits with bated breath to scope emerging graduating talents. End of year shows are a huge highlight up and down the country, so here The Skinny takes a peek at the work of one of our favourite institutions, Liverpool John Moores University – better known as LJMU – ahead of its highly anticipated annual catwalk show showcasing the best and the brightest of the Northwest of England. LJMU will also be participating in the much-renowned Graduate Fashion Week: one of the most prestigious and highly anticipated graduate fashion events, not just in the UK but worldwide. Showcasing some of the UK’s very best contemporary fashion design, the collections are extremely varied in concept, drawing inspiration from themes such as gender identity, 80s football culture, dolls’ tea parties and the Renaissance. Although the LJMU catwalk show is super exciting, we also wanted to focus on the unsung heroes of the fashion world, so as well as Fashion Design students, we also caught up with Fashion Communication students, who make up half of the course at LJMU, to talk about their work and future aspirations. Fashion Communication is an area that can be overlooked, generally garnering less attention than its design counterpart, but in the past few years the number of students has skyrocketed. As LJMU put it simply, “Fashion Communication focuses on visual and creative skills ranging from advertising, branding and
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media, fashion analysis and trend prediction, events and public relations as well as styling and photography.” How we interact with and view fashion is just as critical as the designs themselves, and these interactions are delicately curated by these students. Engaging in self-initiated projects, the Communications students represent the next generation of stylists, photographers, editors, art directors, trend forecasters – the list could go on. From editorial experience to working with PR or event companies, these students will at times work alongside their design counterparts to create bespoke imagery. This year they even created their own publication, titled Unfold Magazine, focusing on editorial themes from culture and diversity to sustainability and the environment. Each student’s experimental and individual creative flair is encouraged, and it’s reflected in both the Fashion Design and Fashion Communications students’ work, making the LJMU show a must-see. The LJMU degree show opens in the John Lennon Art and Design Building on 28 May with two special opening night catwalk presentations. It will be fully open to the public from 29 May until 12 June. If you are unable to make those dates then you can also check out the talent from LJMU at GFW (Graduate Fashion Week) at the Truman Brewery in London between 30 May-2 June. For more info on Graduate Fashion Week: gfw.org.uk.
Rachael Plows (Fashion Design) The Skinny: What were the inspirations for your collection? Rachael Plows: An exhibition called Picturing Science in New York triggered my inspiration – it looked at space objects and sea creatures through new technology. This made me look further into deep sea and space and its connections to earth in the future. What is your trademark piece? My trademark pieces are the two knitted jumpers, as I wanted to showcase my print and shapes in different types of knit. I thought it would be interesting to have a contrast of a hand-knitted jumper with jacquard knit. The jacquard incorporates my print whereas the hand knit reflects the print within the shapes of the knit. What is the biggest lesson you learned while studying? I’ve learnt that it’s important to stay humble and take every opportunity no matter how big or small and learn from it, and to always put your all into everything you do. If you could pass on one piece of advice to someone interested in studying fashion, what would it be? If you’re not desperate to work in the fashion industry and work day and night to get there, it isn’t worth going into. If you’re motivated and
FASHION
Interview: Mona Lisa MacLean
are willing to push yourself to work as hard as you possibly can it’s the best experience you could imagine.
“I take my camera everywhere with me trying to find places, people and textures” Anna Higson
Sophie Pittom (Fashion Design) Tell us about your collection? My Faded Grandeur womenswear AW16 collection is a composition of deteriorating extravagant interiors, decaying foliage, and injections of bold neon. Vintage lace becomes new and fresh with modern elements of bright neon plastics, while extravagant embellishment and hanging threads link decaying and ostentatious ideas together to form innovative tactile garments. These are placed with carefully considered classic shirts with masculine details to contrast the relaxed feminine silhouettes.
THE SKINNY
What are your inspirations? The inspiration for my collection emerged from my visit to Brodsworth Hall, as I was drawn to lavish interiors being carefully preserved contrasting with aspects that had fallen away over time. Details such as fading wallpaper and fraying upholstery influence my distressed textile elements, that are then transformed with the addition of bright neon plastics replicating bold electric wires. This heaving textile element is partnered with relaxed, 1920s-style feminine silhouettes with a hint of masculine details such as shirt collars and plackets. What are your signatures? My textile elements and attention to detail. Different processes including machine embroidery, applique, embellishment, hand embroidery and beading are brought together to form heavy couture-level surface decoration that takes hours to achieve. What is your trademark piece? My 1920s-style slip dresses with a heavy use of lace, as I am entering the Sophie Hallette lace competition, and have taken a variety of different lace designs and explored combining them with different techniques. The lace in Faded Grandeur has been felted, over-layed, appliqued, fresh cut, painted, stiffened and embroidered to really push the boundaries of how lace can be presented.
June 2015
Sinead Russell (Fashion Communication) What are your inspirations? Ken Grant and Alexander McQueen.
Photo: Jennifer Hawley
Rachael Plows
Sophie Pittom; photography by Anna Higson
The career opportunities in fashion communication are broad and if you are freelance you can work for a range of clients to keep your ideas fresh.
How would you describe your aesthetic? Social documentary. What area of fashion do you hope to be involved in? Art direction, photography, styling and graphic design. That’s a lot. Maybe more than that as well. Tell us about your graduate collection? I made two graphic publications, one was a youth culture magazine based on Boyhood and Girlhood. The other was a Northern Ireland Mural- and Troubles-inspired ’zine. I wanted to make my work as broad and as approachable as possible, but still personal for me. Anna Higson (Fashion Communication) What drew you to study fashion communication? I originally started on the Fashion Design pathway, but soon realised my interests lay with the drawing, illustration, graphics, layout and the making side of fashion so I switched to Fashion Communication. In the last few years I’ve really developed my photography, I take my camera everywhere with me trying to find places, people and textures that bring a fresh eye and a source book I can use for my fashion imagery.
“If you’re motivated and willing to work as hard as you possibly can, studying fashion is the best experience you could imagine” Rachael Plows
Where do you see yourself in five to ten years? I really want to stay in the North, I love Liverpool and the Northwest as there is there is so much culture and [so many] places to draw inspiration from. There is a movement away from the South that particularly centres around the arts and I want to be part of this. Using Liverpool as a base I hope to travel in Europe and beyond to extend my visual language. Tell us about your graduate collection. I have two final projects, one is a ’zine concept called Wander which is about exploring a city and documenting all its little and overlooked stories mixed with fashion photography and music I’ve seen in the Northwest, combining typography and illustration. The second was a trend package, Outland; country workwear mixed with found textures and photography. I loved gaining inspiration from farming; it’s often overlooked but I was so inspired. It’s been one of my most enjoyable projects. LJMU School of Art and Design Degree Show, John Lennon Art and Design Building, Liverpool, 29 May-12 Jun ljmu.ac.uk
What are your inspirations? My dream is to one day have a successful ’zine that combines everything I love: textures, music, culture and stories told through photography. I am inspired by many photographers and hope to have a name for myself working on high-profile projects from music to fashion and lifestyle.
FASHION
You can also follow the course at wearefashion.co.uk
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Penetralia (2015)
Sarah Eyre “M
y work is concerned with an abiding fascination for the uncanny and the surreal in everyday objects, as well as an ongoing exploration of relationship between skin, hair and wigs and their relationship to gender, identity and the female body. “Flaccid started as an interest in the loss of control of the body. This is mimicked by these twisted balloons, which resemble contorted limbs. As the balloons deflate, they might appear to represent flaccidity; ageing, wrinkled skin. But, as you watch them they seem to find new spurts of energy and re-shape themselves into different things; with each new contortion and turn they have a new identity and they re-mould themselves. The entropy of their deflation isn’t a single straightforward decline, instead within it we see something very different, the inanimate
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becomes animate, the dead rubber latex, brightly coloured, uncannily re-boots itself. “My recent body of photographic work, Wigs (2012-14), was informed by a previous documentary study into detritus left lying around a red-light district in Manchester. I became interested in fallen hairpieces (artificial extensions, weaves, etc.) that I regularly found in the street. These strange relics were graphic metaphors for what went on in the area, either as evidence of broken femininity, quite literally ‘fallen woman,’ or as symbols of the underlying violence that the women risked working there. They could also represent the sloughed off remains of women who had shifted from one social state to another, from one persona to another. “My new works, Penetralia and Furl, build on my previous project, Wigs; but rather than
explore narrative and symbolic associations around the posed wig, I have chosen to investigate the wigs’ suggestive possibilities in their disembodied state. Wigs are intended to be worn on the body, and through the body’s surfaces they are easily subsumed into the wearer’s identity. But a disembodied wig has to acquire its identity and presence through its own means: its interior and exterior become interchangeable – suggesting new possibilities for interpretation. “For both series, I have manipulated and photographed wigs in order to draw attention to their oddness, while maintaining some allusions to their previous, feminising function. By cutting through the resulting photographs I am literally opening up the wig in order to create playful relationships between interior and exterior, as well as suggest different spaces where new meanings
SHOWCASE
can be explored. As fragile paper experiments, they hint at the delicate nature of femininity as a masquerade, and offer glimpses of the surreal and uncanny in otherwise everyday objects.” Sarah Eyre is a lens-based artist and part-time lecturer. She recently exhibited Wigs at FORMAT International Photography Festival in Derby and her work has appeared in Source and Of the Afternoon magazines. Penetralia was made while on PAPER gallery’s Tracing PAPER mentoring scheme. The resulting exhibition opens at PAPER gallery, 14-20 Mirabel Street, Manchester, M3 1PJ, on 6 June (ends 18 July). paper-gallery.co.uk saraheyre.co.uk
THE SKINNY
Furl (2014)
Mindy, from the series Wigs (2012-14)
June 2015
SHOWCASE
Flaccid (2013)
35
Food News Still feeling those election blues? Take solace in the fact that June offers a beer festival, a way to combat food waste and the latest British Street Food Awards heats Words: Anna Tully
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Taste the Difference Two women from Liverpool are setting out to reduce food waste with the city’s first Real Junk Food Project
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t a time when hundreds of thousands of Britons are having to turn to food banks, the fact that in the UK we throw away an estimated 15 million tonnes of food every year can leave a bitter taste in your mouth. Step up, The Real Junk Food Project, a movement aiming to help bring down the amount of avoidable food waste in the UK by intercepting food that would otherwise go to waste from supermarkets, restaurants and other sources. The food is intercepted by arrangment with these sources and then turned into nutritious meals for anyone and everyone, offered on a ‘pay as you feel’ donation basis. Originally launched by former chef Adam Smith in Leeds in 2013, The Real Junk Food Project now has around 40 other cafes across the country, as well as interest from abroad. As a network, it has intercepted over 67 tonnes of food and fed almost 40,000 people. Now, two of the movement’s newest recruits, Gabby Holmes and Natalie Hughes-Crean, are bringing the project to Liverpool. It all started last November, when Holmes fired off a quick email to Smith to see if there was a way she could get involved with the project in Liverpool. Smith replied, asking simply: “Do you fancy starting something?” A couple of weeks later, while searching online for ways to get involved with reducing food waste, Hughes-Crean came across the Facebook page Holmes had set up for The Real Junk Food Project Liverpool. Fast forward six months, and The Real Junk Food Project Liverpool has over 40 volunteers and has catered numerous events across the city, not to mention hosting its own ‘Binner Party’ evenings. “We held our first Binner Party at The Brink on Mother’s Day,” Hughes-Crean tells The Skinny. “We cooked for 35 to 40 people using 43 kilos of intercepted food. The menu was pretty amazing; we had whole salmon, a huge range of cured meats, soups, Danish pastries. At all our events we aim to provide vegetarian and vegan options, too.” An obvious challenge is the inability to plan menus in advance. “We never know what’s going
June 2015
Words: Claire Reid Illustration: Georgina Tee to be intercepted,” Holmes explains, “but that’s all part of the fun! Thinking on our feet and working out what we can make. It’s like Ready Steady Cook but on a massive scale. “We love when people are shocked by our food. I think some people have this idea that we’re going to be cooking using kitchen scraps but the food we intercept is absolutely perfect and is still in its packaging. If we didn’t tell people, they’d never know they were eating intercepted food.” The Real Junk Food Project uses a ‘pay as you feel’ basis, but, Hughes-Crean points out, there’s no emphasis on a strictly financial payment and people can donate their time or skills. “At our Mother’s Day event we had one woman pay in boxes of spices; another guy offered to make us a video, someone else offered to bring us along to networking events.
“We love when people are shocked by our food. If we didn’t tell them, they’d never know they were eating intercepted food” Gabby Holmes
“We’d never turn anyone away and we don’t want people to feel that the only way they can pay us is with money. If you’ve got a skill, or even if you just offer to help us wash up, this is all just as important to us.” Holmes and Hughes-Crean are currently on the lookout for premises and plan on having
a pop-up within the next month, with the aim to keep this open for around three months. Interest from landlords or investors could see them moving to a permanent location. Behind all the cooking there is a very important message they want to get across: food waste is just part of a much bigger problem with the way we distribute and produce food. Projects like this can help draw attention to the problems that exist. The pair are quick to point out that the ‘food insecure’ – the term for people who aren’t always sure where their next meal is coming from – are not just the homeless and unemployed. Increasingly, those in full-time employment are having to turn to food banks as they struggle to make ends meet in the current market. They’re us; they are our friends and neighbours. “The amount of food waste in the UK is criminal,” states Hughes-Crean. “That’s why, as well as doing the cooking and promotion of our events, we’re also logging all the food we intercept and using these figures to help educate and inform the public.” “In the long term we want to see more education about food waste,” Holmes adds. “And, obviously, we’d like to see a massive reduction in the food that is wasted – ideally, we’ll work ourselves out of a job!” It’s hard not to be impressed by the passion and effort these women and their volunteers are putting into the project. And, while complaining about food waste and food poverty is necessary to raise awareness, it’s great to see a group of people inspired to make a real difference. “Before catering an event last year, I was in my kitchen baking cakes until 4am,” says HughesCrean. “There were so many, I was making them in roasting tins! It is a lot of man hours, but we wouldn’t do it [if we] didn’t really believe in what The Real Junk Food Project stands for. It’s a lot of hard work but it’s a real labour of love.” The Real Junk Food Project Liverpool held their most recent Binner Party on 31 May at The Brink, Parr Street. For more information on upcoming events check out their Facebook page (search ‘The Real Junk Food Project Liverpool’) or find them on Twitter at @realjunkfoodLiv
FOOD AND DRINK
e glad that the month of May is over – we’ve finally come to terms with the election result and can now guiltlessly slip into comfort eating consolation as we bemoan our FPTP system. So, where to start our gluttony? One we’ve had our eye on for a while is Blind Tiger, set to open on Seel Street in Liverpool any day now. The menu isn’t yet finalised but we’ve spied a lot of bao (Chinese steamed buns) with fillings like crab and apple, served with a caramel dip, as well as Szechuan beef with black vinegar and mint. Their Facebook page promises 50 premium whiskies as well as plenty of saké to boot. facebook.com/blindtigerlpool The Liverpool Craft Beer Expo returns once more between 18-21 Jun. This year it takes place in the beautiful Constellations event space in the Baltic Triangle. Full of urban greenery, it makes for the perfect backdrop to your 7% craft beers. No hula hooping with the tyres please, people. liverpoolcraftbeerexpo.com
Blind Tiger
Over in south Manchester, Levenshulme Food and Drink Festival is championing local foodies between 12-21 Jun, with regular Levy market traders Little Italy Kitchen hosting not just pasta-making workshops but also a fishy South Italian pop up garden restaurant. Elsewhere, expect Thai cookery classes, meet-the-brewer evenings and pie-making competitions! Find full event details at levenshulmefadfestival.com If, after all that consuming, you find yourself feeling a little guilty, you can rebalance your soul by getting involved with Disco Soup on 20 Jun at The Wonder Inn in Manchester. Organised by The Real Junk Food Project, attendees will be invited to get involved with the transforming (aka cooking) of food otherwise destined for the bin. The event starts at 1pm, with a PAYF (pay-as-youfeel) donation. And don’t forget, on 13-14 Jun, Leeds plays host to the Northern and Scotland heats of the British Street Food Awards, which are entering their sixth year. britishstreetfood.co.uk
Lifestyle
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Idle Hands
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The people behind this pop up shop near Piccadilly station are keeping their appendages rather busy brewing up great coffee When someone first mentioned a place called Idle Hands to The Skinny, all we could think of was that awful stoner horror movie from the ’90s. And Jessica Alba in an inexplicable state of undress, bound to a car and destined to be squished on a garage roof. But let’s put aside the phrase’s connotations with poor filmmaking, for a moment, and talk about Idle Hands, a pop up coffee shop that recently began a planned six-month residency on Piccadilly’s station approach. Countering the theory that a city always presents its worst aspects near its train stations, Idle Hands is one of several places – including the Piccadilly Tap, and Hunt & Darton’s recent, ephemeral art/food installation – showcasing something a little bit different on a promenade that’s home either to big chains or tenacious but little-known stalwarts. Significantly, the stretch also provides a steady flow of people who might well be happy to have an alternative to Greggs and Caffè Nero. So it’s promising not only for the people behind it, but also the punters. Not long after opening, it had already attracted a big name, straight off the train. Walking in and standing in the queue for the first time, we overhear an unmistakeable voice. None other than Tim Westwood is in da queue. Flashbacks to teenage years listening to his Radio 1 Rap Show and doing Dre impressions ensue. Westwood likes his coffee, apparently; there’s even a video of him critiquing his own cappuccinos on YouTube. On shift that day is Dave Wolinski, a familiar face for anyone who has frequented North Tea Power. Wolinski, Lucy Phillips, and Tom Cowcher (formerly of NTP and Liverpool’s Bold Street Coffee) are the team running the show. We share a little “yeah, that was Westwood, baby!” moment before getting down to the business of the coffee.
Before anything is said about the hot beverages: an admission. It’s hard to review a coffee shop, as a non-connoissuer. We may think we know a bad coffee from a good one; when milk is scorched and an espresso over-extracted and bitter. We’ve tried pour-over, AeroPress, and cold brew. But experts? No. Even so, a flat white and a long black are enough to tell us that Idle Hands is firmly in the good camp. The attention to detail is palpable, too, from the equipment to the sourcing of beans from some of the finest roasters in the UK, like Workshop and Square Mile. Reading their Twitter feed shows just how into coffee these guys are. When asked about the croissants on display, our man says they bake them there. We express our amazement that they can manage what is a lengthy and complicated process in such a modest setup, at which point he clarifies that someone else makes and delivers them but they’re finished off in house. Nice try. Still, they look fantastic, flanked by slices of salted caramel chocolate tart. The Tunnock’s teacakes and caramel wafers – yet another tinge of nostalgia – are a nice touch that diffuses any air of pretension. The food offerings go beyond pastry and northern biscuits (or are they cakes?). Levenshulme’s Trove provide the bread for a selection of daily sandwiches and staple menu items. A bacon and avocado sarnie on their sourdough will set you back a not unreasonable £4.50, but there’s also toasted crumpets and granola for those who need a cheap bite as they head to work in the morning. Manchester city centre, despite its wealth of indie coffee shops, is not yet spoilt for choice. Even less so when you get near any commuter rail station. So it’s safe to predict Idle Hands will do very well. [Jamie Faulkner] If you liked Idle Hands, try: North Tea Power, Manchester Coffee Fix, Gatley, Cheadle Bold Street Coffee, Liverpool
Filter + Fox
Idle Hands, 8A Gateway House, Station Approach, Piccadilly, Manchester, M1 2GH
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@idlehandscoffee
Neighbourhood vibes, top coffee and great attention to detail; we discover a new hidden gem near Liverpool One
Idle Hands
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Lifestyle
Filter + Fox
In a city with its fair share of well-known restaurants, it’s always a pleasure to find an indie gem that still feels undiscovered. That is exactly part of the appeal of Filter + Fox, tucked away on Duke Street. On an afternoon visit, we are warmly greeted by proprietors Owain Williams and Chris Edwards, who have brought to bear their wealth of experience in the restaurant industry to create this new venue, which calls itself a ‘cafe bar and hideout’. There is a great philosophy of friendliness behind Filter + Fox, and from the moment you walk in you feel like a regular patron, such is the welcome from the beaming staff. With details including houseplants, scatter cushions and a bar where bottles of interesting drinks from around the world jostle for space, the bohemian ambience is frankly heartwarming. There is a real neighbourhood hideaway feel to the restaurant, with tables of happy customers sharing charcuterie platters or sipping coffee while they people-watch. Seated at the bar, we look on as Edwards whips up an on-trend Aperol Spritz cocktail, bringing a welcome Mediterranean feeling to a grey afternoon in Liverpool. As we sip the drink, Williams and Edwards explain their focus: great produce, which they carefully source from a number of local suppliers, such as the Liverpool Cheese Company in nearby Woolton. The premium ingredients are channelled into the ever changing selection of small-plates and sandwiches on offer, which are charmingly detailed on a blackboard hanging on the wall. The dishes are all prepared behind the bar, adding an enjoyable sense of theatre to
FOOD AND DRINK
the experience. There is a daily selection of decadent cakes, too, for those in need of a sweet treat. We opt for a hearty sandwich of tenderstem broccoli, pancetta and lemon, served on crusty bread smothered in a delicious pesto. Bravo indeed: these ingredients complement each other perfectly and make what is a simple sandwich rather unforgettable. Eager to try another dish from the small plate selection, we pick a salad of grilled aubergine with basil, sun-dried tomatoes and feta cheese, which provides an explosion of deliciously simple flavours that whisk you away to a sun-drenched terrace on the Amalfi Coast. To cap off the meal: an excellent latte made with coffee sourced from Brick Lane roastery Nude. This is served with chocolate wafers on a handmade silver tray bought in a Marrakech market by the owners during their many travels; it’s little touches like this that make Filter + Fox truly special. Come the evening, lights are turned down low and candles are lit to create an intimate feeling, which brings to mind the kind of place you might discover on the streets of New York. The eclectic soundtrack continues and Filter + Fox fills up with a fun-loving crowd who seem to be enjoying the impressive selection of wines and cocktails. Attention to detail is always something that can transform a good restaurant into a great one, and at Filter + Fox no detail is overlooked. The bohemian interior, exceptional service, bespoke cocktails and wonderful food all combine to make this little hideaway a place we’ll be returning to again and again. [Camille Allcroft] If you liked Filter + Fox, try: Volta, Manchester Idle Hands, Manchester Bold Street Coffee, Liverpool Filter + Fox, 27 Duke Street, Liverpool, L1 5AP @FilterandFox
THE SKINNY
DIM SUM & DRINKS
O P E N I N G SPRING 15 SEEL ST LPOOL
WORK AT MARBLE If interested, email CVs to admin@marblebeers.com
June 2015
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RNCM Skinny quarter June 15.pdf
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18/05/2015
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28-34 HIGH ST, NORTHERN QUARTER, MANCHESTER, M4 1QB
THERUBYLOUNGE.COM H @THERUBYLOUNGE H @CLASSICSLUM H CLASSICSLUM.COM
SHOWS…
MAY 27: CLASSIC SLUM presents THE UKRAINIANS + guests
THE CHRISTOPHERS + THE RIVER NORTH MAY 28: INDIE WEEK EUROPE presents MASK OF BEES + THE 99 DEGREES + RAWCUSS + AERO TWISTED & THE ARCANE LISTED + RISING WITHOUT A KINGDOM MAY 29: HALF WAY HOME + guests THE NOVASONS + KIERA LAWLOR + THE ARBOURDECKS MAY 30: INDIE WEEK EUROPE presents THE DUNWELLS + guests STONE IRIS + FAIRCHILD
MAY 31: INDIE WEEK EUROPE FINALS JUNE 2: THE LAFONTAINS JUNE 5: VOODOO ROCK MANCHESTER presents HARD ROCK HEAVEN featuring GUNS 2 ROSES + POIZON + TOXIC TWINS + MOTLEY CREW UK
JUNE 6: SKA FACE + guests 5FT FEZ JUNE 11: TAV FALCO’S PANTHER BURNS + guests BROWN BROGUES + THE DIRTY HEELS
JUNE 12: WAXAHATCHEE JUNE 13: DOTS & LOOPS 9TH BIRTHDAY PARTY featuring THE POP GROUP + guests GUM TAKES TOOTH + KOGUMAZA +
DEAD SEA APES
JUNE 18: BAKED A LA SKA ALBUM LAUNCH PARTY +
DJ COOPS
JUNE 25: KOBRA AND THE LOTUS JUNE 26: CARNATION + guests STRANGE WAYS + GENERAL WASTE +
THE KOSMANAUGHTS
JUNE 27: AFTER ADOPTION BENEFIT featuring SOUL REVOLUTION JULY 2: STEPHEN BAILEY ‘SHOULD’VE BEEN A POPSTAR’ JULY 3: I DIVIDE + guests SILHOUETTES JULY 4: CLASSIC SLUM present CURTIS ELLER’S AMERICAN CIRCUS INDEPENDENCE DAY BALL + guests BONE-BOX JULY 7: STRUNG OUT + guests VERSUS THE WORLD + FAIR DO’S JULY 9: GREATER MANCHESTER FRINGE FESTIVAL: THE MESSIAH JULY 10: EXTRA LOVE + guests JEREMIAH FERRARI JULY 11: GREATER MANCHESTER FRINGE FESTIVAL: THE MESSIAH JULY 13: ANTON NEWCOMBE AND TESS PARKS JULY 17: GREATER MANCHESTER FRINGE FESTIVAL: THE MESSIAH JULY 18: GREATER MANCHESTER FRINGE FESTIVAL: THE MESSIAH JULY 21: GREATER MANCHESTER FRINGE FESTIVAL: HEAVY BREATHING JULY 22: GREATER MANCHESTER FRINGE FESTIVAL: HEAVY BREATHING JULY 24: JOHN POWER (CAST / THE LA’S) ACOUSTIC SHOW JULY 25: POLSKA WERSJA JULY 29: CLASSIC SLUM present THE GORIES + guests THE HIPSHAKES + THE FRUIT TONES
JULY 31: PHRE THE EON AUG 1: STOP STOP AUG 11: TEENAGE BOTTLEROCKET + guests A WILHELM SCREAM AUG 12: HOLLYWOOD ENDING AUG 15: PETER PERRETT (THE ONLY ONES) AUG 15: CLASSIC SLUM present ESPER SCOUT + guests
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MONSTERS AS HUMANS @ THE BLUE CAT CAFE / STOCKPORT
AUG 22: ABSOLUTE BOWIE SEPT 3: CUZ (featuring MIKE WATT - MINUTEMEN / FIREHOSE / STOOGES & SAM DOOK - THE GO! TEAM)
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SEPT 4: NU METAL MELTDOWN featuring STIFF BIZKIT (A TRIBUTE TO
NU METAL ICONS LIMP BIZKIT) + STEAL THIS BAND (A TRIBUTE TO SYSTEM OF A DOWN) + TONEDEF (A TRIBUTE TO DEFTONES) SEPT 11: CLASSIC SLUM present CUD ‘THE ASQUARIUS TOUR’
SEPT 12: YOUNG KATO SEPT 25: THE CHORDS UK (featuring CHRIS POPE) + guests T HE SPEED OF SOUND + THE TRANSMITTERS
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LUP_Skinny_Ad.indd 1
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SEPT 26: ALTAR FLOWERS SEPT 30: TOM MCRAE OCT 9: SLAUGHTER & THE DOGS (40TH ANNIVERSARY ORIGINAL
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LINE UP)
OCT 10: CLASSIC SLUM present RAE MORRIS @ THE RITZ OCT 11: BEN MONTAGUE OCT 17: THE 20TH ANNUAL BRITISH RORY GALLAGHER TRIBUTE CONCERT featuring SINNERBOY + JACQUES STOTZEM + FALL
APART + THE AIDEN PRYOR BAND
OCT 30: LIAM FROST AND HIS BAND + guest ROBBIE CAVANAGH NOV 1: HARRY MANX NOV 13: Y-KEY OPERATORS DEC 5: NOASIS + guests THE RECREATION
CLUBS…
VOODOO ROCK @VOODOOROCKMCR
VERY 1ST FRIDAY I 11PM I £4 NUS + CHEAP LIST + FLYER + B4 MIDNIGHT THE BIGGEST ALTERNATIVE ROCK NIGHT IN THE UK ACROSS 2 ROOMS
REMAKE REMODEL @REMAKE_REMODEL1
EVERY 1ST SATURDAY I 11PM I £3 GUESTLIST £5 OTD THE NATION’S SAVING GRACE OF ALTERNATIVE ROCK’N’ROLL. ALL KILLS, NO KILLERS
BREAK STUFF @BREAKSTUFFCLUB
EVERY 2ND FRIDAY BI-MONTHLY I 11PM I £3 ADV A NIGHT OF NU METAL NOSTALGIA. THE SOUNDTRACK OF A GENERATION. WITH CLASSIC ‘ATTITUDE ERA’ WRESTING CINEMA HOSTED BY HXC WRESTLING + 32 BIT CONSOLE AREA
POP CURIOUS? @POPCURIOUSCLUB
EVERY 2ND SATURDAY I 11PM I £6 OTD IT’S POP MUSIC. PLAYED LOUD. BESPOKE POP PLAYLISTS EACH AND EVERY MONTH
HOWLING RHYTHM @HOWLINGRHYTHM
EVERY 3RD SATURDAY I 11PM I £4 OTD THE VERY FINEST IN 60’S SOUL + MOTOWN + GRITTY RHYTHM & BLUES + FUNK
PUMP UP THE JAM @PUMPUPTHEJAMMCR
EVERY LAST FRIDAY I 11PM I £4 OTD BACK 2 THE 90’S FROM THE HOWLING RHYTHM TEAM. EXPECT HUGE 90’S NUMBERS, SPANNING DANCE, HACIENDA GROOVE, AND A DASH OF HIPHOP
ULTIMATE ANTHEMS @ULTIMATEANTHEMS
EVERY LAST SATURDAY BI-MONTHLY I 10.30PM I £6 ADV THE UPTEMPO SISTER NIGHT TO ULTIMATE POWER: NEW SONGS, BUT THE SAME PRINCIPLES: EVERY SONG YOU NEVER HEAR AT ANY OTHER CLUB NIGHT. EVERY SONG YOU CAN PUNCH THE AIR TO RELENTLESSLY, WHILST HUGGING A STRANGER AND SCREAMING THE CHORUS TILL YOUR LUNGS GIVE OUT. NOTHING BUT ANTHEMS ALL NIGHT LONG THAT YOU NEVER HEAR ANYWHERE ELSE: MASSIVE TUNES, SINGALONG CHORUSES & A EUPHORIC ATMOSPHERE
ABSOLUTE SH**E @ABSOLUTE_SHITE
EVERY LAST SATURDAY BI-MONTHLY I 11PM I £3 ADV OVER 4 HOURS OF NON-STOP GARBAGE. “THE WORST NIGHT OF YOUR LIFE.” A PROPER PARTY - CHEAP ENTRY, CHEAP DRINKS, & THE MOST WONDERFUL PARTY TUNES EVER PLAYED AT YER AUNTY’S 3RD WEDDING. LEAVE YOUR CREDIBILITY AT HOME, SAY IT PLAIN & SAY IT PROUD - THIS THING IS ABSOLUTE SH…..
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AND OVER THE COUNTER AT THE SUPERB PICCADILLY RECORDS, OLDHAM ST, MANCHESTER
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THE SKINNY
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Festival Watch
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Get stuffing the chill bags for a civilised few weeks at Oyé, Liverpool Arab Arts Festival and MIF Words: Laura Swift
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s we begin to wean you off all-day venue crawls and slowly on to the idea of going outside, June offers events you can dip your toe into without going full-blown rented-a-luxuryyurt took-out-a-third-loan festival-season mad. (NB: this will commence in July.) Parklife (6-7 Jun) and Africa Oyé (20-21 Jun) are the significant outdoorsy dates on the Northwest calendar this month, though we wager you couldn’t find two more different festivals in terms of mood. For big names, bigger drops and a tedious week at work in the immediate aftermath, you’ll have probably already booked yourself tickets to Parklife (feat. Grace Jones, Caribou, HudMo); for feelgood neighbourhood vibes, you can’t beat Oyé. The UK’s biggest free festival of African music and culture, it’s got great acts (Omar, BKO Quintet, Frankie Paul), a proper community atmosphere with free dance and music workshops, and one of our favourite DJs in Esa (read our interview with him on page 46). Making up the music element of this year’s Liverpool Arab Arts Festival (6-14 Jun) are Palestinian singer Reem Kelani, set to appear in the stunning Concert Room of St. George’s Hall on 12 Jun (7.30pm, £15 (£10)), and Simona Abdallah, who will be leading a drumming workshop at the Bluecoat on 14 Jun (2.50pm, free). Abdallah plays the darbuka, or ‘goblet drum’; having taught herself as a teenager, she is now one of the only few women to play the instrument professionally. Planning ahead, the time is almost upon us for Manchester International Festival (2-19 Jul) – and while you’ll have to be eagle-eyed for any final releases of tickets for the likes of FKA twigs and Bjork, it’s still possible to book for a number of exclusive shows (remember: everything’s a world premiere). The contemporary classical strand is looking tempting, with the debut of clarinettist and composer Mark Simpson’s new piece The Immortal to take place at The Bridgewater Hall (4 Jul), and Arvo Pärt coming to Manchester for the first time – for a collaboration with Gerhard Richter at the Whitworth Art Gallery (various dates), and for an evening of his music at The Bridgewater Hall co-curated with Manchester Camerata director Gábor TakácsNagy (12 Jul). The Warehouse Project-curated 12-hour rave at Mayfield Depot, meanwhile – they’re calling it 10x10 – features witty weirdo DJ Koze, a usually punishing Maurice Fulton and the aerated electronics of Midland (18 Jul). Additionally, Kieran Hebden aka Four Tet appears with Tyondai Braxton and Koreless at the same venue on 17 Jul. Last but not least, it’s the first foray into festival-ing for Whitworth Young Contemporaries, who on 11 Jun host an afternoon of live arts activities and performances, from circus skills to spoken word, all for free (Whitworth Art Gallery, 5-9pm).
Parklife Weekender, Heaton Park, Manchester, 6-7 Jun, from £89.50 (weekend), £54.50 (day), parklife.uk.com Africa Oyé, Sefton Park, Liverpool, 20-21 Jun, 12.30pm9.30pm, free, africaoye.com Liverpool Arab Arts Festival, various venues, 6-14 Jun, arabartsfestival.com Manchester International Festival, various venues, 2-19 Jul, mif.co.uk Whitworth Young Contemporaries, Whitworth Art Gallery, 11 Jun, 5-9pm, free, @WhitworthYC #whitworthhijack
June 2015
Jenny Hval
Gig Highlights Three idiosyncratic songwriters (Waxahatchee, Natalie Prass and Jenny Hval), two outsiders (Ariel Pink and Dan Deacon), a fond farewell (Cyril Snear) and a one-off homecoming (Outfit). That's your month’s gig highlights
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ans of a knotty story are spoilt for choice this month with the arrival of three fine, idiosyncratic songwriters: Waxahatchee, Natalie Prass and Jenny Hval, all cut from a very different cloth, but each a commanding vocalist and lyricist. Hval’s latest record, Apocalypse, girl – out on Sacred Bones this month – is an intensely delivered, multi-faceted deconstruction of issues around sexuality, capitalism and femininity. Possessing a voice of quite startling virtuosity that’s underpinned by a frankness in her lyrics, the Norwegian has previously risen gracefully to the challenge of supporting the likes of St. Vincent and Swans. She gets to take centre stage at Gullivers in Manchester on 11 Jun (and you can read our chat with her on page 12). Katie Crutchfield aka Waxahatchee first caught the attention of this writer with her second album, Cerulean Salt, a collection of naked arrangements for sleep-dipped guitar and febrile voice released in 2013. Her most recent, Ivy Tripp, is both softer and more complex, the broader sonic palette serving to soothe her earlier rawness. The Ruby Lounge (12 Jun) doesn’t quite feel the right setting for her – but then, the ideal place would probably be around a fire at camp somewhere deep within the American wild, so, y’know. (She also plays Leeds Brudenell Social Club on 17 Jun.) Natalie Prass indirectly made headlines recently when tourmate Ryan Adams took to the stage in a spotted dress, announced himself as ‘Natalie Sass’ and played what would have been her support set for his show in Copenhagen (there’d been a problem with her flight). Adams’ fervent championing is part of a fast-growing chorus of praise for the Richmond, Virginiahailing singer, who has said she nearly gave up on music before a friend suggested she seek out an old schoolmate, one Matthew E. White, and his house-band/production collective, Spacebomb. Sure enough, they hit it off, and Prass’s debut album became Spacebomb’s sixth. A strangely neither out-of-time nor contemporary-sounding record with dewy chamber pop arrangements and precise little licks of horn, it is suspended somewhere between Joanna Newsom and Joni; the concert hall and the lost highway (you can understand the connection to Adams). Prass brings this classy project to The Deaf Institute on 25 Jun – one of only five UK dates. (For more antique American gleam, note that Howe Gelb’s elder statesmen of folk grit, Giant Sand, are coming to Liverpool St George’s Hall on 3 Jun.) If three shows from three fascinating
women in one month isn’t enough for you, then we have a few more suggestions. Back in the early noughties, Six Organs of Admittance was a name uttered in the same breath as the likes of – with increasing inaccuracy – Ray Raposa’s Castanets, Devendra Banhart and (very) early Phosphorescent, names from the so-called ‘freak folk’ movement, the label of which somewhat underserved a huge range of musical output and odd personalities. Hexadic is solo guitarist Ben Chasny’s most specific project to date, employing a chance-based system of composition of his own devising (and which you can now read more about at sixorgans.com, Chasny having recently completed a book and a set of playing cards that will help others to make music by the same method). If you’re heading to Birmingham’s Supersonic Festival, you can hear him deliver a talk on combinational systems like this one; his Gullivers date on 14 Jun – and Leeds Brudenell Social Club on 16 Jun – will be all about the music, but we’re sure you can mither him about secret sonic codes after these shows nonetheless. Those for whom Six Organs’ foundational sound of scorched, Fahey-esque guitar remains their favourite of his modes will be heading out again two nights later for James Blackshaw at Islington Mill (16 Jun). The first date in programming collective Fat Out’s two-year residency project at the Mill – which they’re calling Burrow – brings the Takoma-influenced musician to the venue’s newly redesigned main room alongside the opening of a new exhibition by artists Jermyn MTK and Tasha Whittle, who will be performing in the gallery space next door. Almost as prolific as
Words: Laura Swift and William Gunn
Chasny, Blackshaw has ten albums’ worth of material to draw on, so while he’ll likely be prioritising material from his more song-based current album, Summoning Suns, you can also hope for a survey of his beautifully revolving, constellating fingerstyle guitar work. A quick mention, too, for outgoing Mancunian progressive rockers Cyril Snear, who’ll be playing their farewell show at Soup Kitchen on 6 Jun. The time-signature exploring riffniks fall into our own admittedly subjective bracket, ‘Should’ve Been Bigger.’ They’ll be missed. Two outsiders of different – almost opposite – stripes visit the Northwest this month in the form of Ariel Pink and Dan Deacon. It’s hard to know what you’re ever going to get with Ariel Pink live; the lo-fi pop curio can be by turns incredibly frustrating and genius. When he hits his peak, though – as you hope he will at District in Liverpool (13 Jun) and the Brudenell in Leeds (14 Jun) – he’s more than capable of sending audiences on a transformative trip. Deacon is a far safer pair of hands. A noise-pop artist from New York who makes a game of breaking down the barrier between audience and performer, his shows frequently take on a form of communal catharsis. Dancing guaranteed at Islington Mill (17 Jun). Last but not least, we’ve bigged them up in this column the last two issues already thanks to their seemingly never-ending tour, but go see Young Fathers, yeah? The Kazimier, Liverpool, 7 June. Over and out.
Do Not Miss Outfit The Kazimier, Liverpool, 18 June
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ith their stunning second album Slowness, Outfit have both sidestepped and embraced all those music journo cliches. They’ve avoided the sophomore slump, made a step up, whatever you want to call it. A record driven by the geographic separation of both frontman Andrew Hunt from his wife and the band from each other, it eschews much of the disco and house grooves that inflected their debut, Performance, in lieu of refinement, reflection and hair-raising emotive pop grandeur. Live, the band are running to an
MUSIC
increasingly light schedule – this will be the first show they’ve performed in the Northwest since last autumn’s new material preview at Gullivers in Manchester. It’s a by-product of the five-piece splitting themselves into two countries and three cities, which gives this one-off homecoming show an added sense of occasion – not least as Outfit are becoming ever more certain to go down as one of Liverpool’s most respected bands of the new millennium. [William Gunn]
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rrrrr Eleven years and counting: Sounds from the Other City returns to once again transform Salford’s central artery, Chapel Street, from grey thoroughfare to a hubbub of music, food and drink, and unspeakably good humour. As the crowds stream into and out of Islington Mill’s ticket exchange – where one volunteer whispers to another, “Just so you know, there’s only 20 tickets left!” – the sun finally pokes though, and the ‘other’ city’s streets are awash with smiles and expectation. Fitting it all in is an impossibility. Hopping from venue to venue, squeezing as much value from your £20 wristband as you can becomes a clashfinder-driven art form. There are stages overseen by the likes of Sways Records, Grey Lantern and Sham Bodie. Video Jam have commisioned a group of acts including Acre Tarn and Esper Scout to provide live scores for a series of short films, and Deep Hedonia bring the afterparty goodness. Jupiter-C open the Now Wave stage at the Mill. With boy-girl electro duos ever more the weakened currency of an inflated market, it takes smart moves to stand out. Unlike Shield Patterns (who fill the ‘secret guests’ slot at Gizeh Records’ residency at The Crescent later in the day), Ashiya Eastwood and David Kane eschew lyricism in favour of a dread minimalism. In lesser
hands, the effect might be blank and stupefying. But Jupiter-C play smart with their trim soundboard, and their punishing beats, Kane’s guitar and Eastwood’s vaporous vocals model a stark brutality. Picture Crystal Castles doing The Ballads Album and you’re halfway there. Better still, Google how they got their name and it all starts to make sense. Londoners Groves follow. Five lads with a vogue-ish, ‘clean’ indie-pop sound that’s sent the usual outlets into varying levels of frothing, they could well send the cynical running for the doors. Keyboard-playing singer; grown men wearing white socks; bubbling, groove-led tunes... Check, check, check. But! There’s something here for sure. Look up new single Send High and see if they’re less Keane and more Wild Beasts. Groves have a long way to go but they earn another look. A full, appreciative house seems to agree. Around the corner at The Crescent (every venue is, ultimately, ‘around the corner’ at SFTOC), Tomorrow We Sail hold a packed room rapt. After a period of inactivity, the Leeds-based outfit have returned to the live stage following the release of debut album For Those Who Caught the Sun in Flight last year. New material dominates their set and it sounds colossal. Lead singer Tim Hay, as ever, loses himself inside the tumult and Ella May Blake swaps keyboard stool for mic stand – a savvy move. If you can picture The Swell Season backed by Mogwai, and if postrock folk-rock sounds like a good idea, catch up
Ex-Easter Island Head and BBC Philharmonic players
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Review
sharpish. Forget tomorrow: today we soar. As ever with SFTOC, collaborations and one-off experimentation – often in untypical, temporary venues – add to the festival’s unique flavour. Over at Vimto Gardens, Ex-Easter Island Head team up with players from the BBC Philharmonic for a new ensemble piece. The first of two performances brings an appreciative crowd to what is little more than a building site. It’s stirring stuff, strings and percussion knotting together, minimalist but expansive – and fitting, perhaps, that amidst a swathe of regeneration, two distinct but sympathetic parties fuse old and new with such vitality. Across the road in a large marquee in Bexley Square, Manchester’s Red Deer Club label has commissioned a group of ten like-minded musicians to commemorate the 1931 march that saw 10,000 protesters assemble at the (then – now a block of flats) town hall as a result of government cuts. Mmm. Let’s ponder that one for a moment. Led by singer-songwriter Liz Green, the collective also features Najia Bagi and Sara Lowes, whose dizzying prog-folk odyssey The Joy of Waiting is one of the highlights of 2015 so far. The enterprise is a literate and boisterous call to arms, and the fact that rehearsals began just a month before the performance is testament to the commitment and talent of a unique troupe. Emerging Russian dream-poppers Pinkshinyultrablast pitch up mid-afternoon on the Hey! Manchester stage at a rammed St
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Philip’s Church. Led by singer Lyubov, they go about scouring our synapses with infectious glee. If only more bands had the consideration and gumption to summarise their entire aesthetic within the confines of their chosen moniker. At times it takes a few (dozen) bars to distinguish certain songs, but no matter. Dropping this lot into such rarefied surroundings is like releasing a starving fox into a hen house. It’s nothing less than fitting, though, that topping Hey! Manchester’s bill amidst the pews is Jane Weaver, one of the year’s most unexpected but deserving success stories. Last year’s The Silver Globe was a genuine word-of-mouth breakout, Piccadilly Records making it their Album of the Year. The buzz around the venue is palpable. The door staff nervously finger their tally counters. “One in, one out?” you can almost hear Michael Palin exclaim. “We used to dream of one in, one out.” Manchester has fallen hard for Weaver’s sci-fi lullabies and tonight she’s the day’s hottest ticket, even if her between-song chat suggests she still thinks it’s a set-up. “Thank you so, so much for coming,” she says amidst whoops. During a pulsing Mission Desire, she drifts away, as if borne on the wind. We follow willingly. As ever, Sounds from the Other City delivers moments unique and magical, and it does so all day long, year after year. Long may it continue. [Gary Kaill]
Jupiter-C
THE SKINNY
Photo: Alexander Bell
3 May
Photo: Alexander Bell
Sounds from the Other City 2015
Photo: Alexander Bell
Pinkshinyultrablast
Sleaford Mods probably weren’t surprised by the general election result; to them, whatever the outcome, Britain’s rotten to the core. For those equally angry or apathetic towards where our country’s heading, Nottingham’s austere post-punk duo Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearn could not have arrived in town at a better time. Opening with Bunch of Cunts, Fearn mans the laptop between sips of lager while Williamson’s poetry yanks the Academy 2 through an assault course of cultural debris. From his brutal evisceration of middle management in Fizzy to Routine Dean’s gang chant of ‘I hate what you do and I don’t like you’, Williamson is an incendiary ringleader, lording his laddishness by blowing mock kisses to the crowd. Such goading goes down a treat in former industrial heartlands like Manchester, of course, lending the crowd a visceral menace when Boris
Super Furry Animals Albert Hall, 6 May
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Was there ever any doubt that the return of the Super Furry Animals wouldn’t disappoint? Even in their absence, the band’s constituent parts have continued to push various strands of lush psychedelic pop, not just Gruff Rhys much-acclaimed typically idiosyncratic solo releases and projects, but also Guto Pryce’s summer yearnings as part of Gulp. Then there’s the feeling that when the Welshmen went on ‘hiatus’ in 2009, they actually meant it in an earnest, not-waitingaround-for-a-reunion-payday sense of the word. Sure, this returning tour is to celebrate a 15th anniversary reissue of the group’s Welshlanguage album Mwng (from which six tracks are aired tonight,) and at the Albert Hall their setlist rarely strays from greatest hits territory; but in all other aspects this feels as much like ‘getting
22-24 May
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Friday This year, Sound City has moved away from the heart of the city to the cramped Bramley-Moore Dock. The result is a sonically claustrophobic version of the standard festival site as the stages bleed into each other, resulting in volume wars that almost completely drown out subtler acts like Flo Morrissey, who sings with a wilting chromaticism and lovely melancholy beyond her years but whose delicate tone is barely a match for the surrounding noise. However, despite these malfunctions this year’s talent is stronger than ever; diverse and progressive, and doing its best to pulse through the compressed atmosphere. To wit: the first act of the Friday, Ady Suleiman and band, who present an inventive neo-soul, their musicianship on a par with a match-fit Jamiroquai and their lyrics reflecting intelligently on issues of mental health and religious belief. [Charlie McKeon] The docks remain fairly empty until many
June 2015
Mew
The Ritz, 19 May
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If anything’s to brighten this sticky city night, Mew should manage it. Marking 20 years since they got together at school, the recent release of their sixth LP, + - (Plus Minus), and the return of original bassist Johan Wohlert, the Danish outfit have much to celebrate – and are met with growing cheers as they jog onstage one by one, frontman Jonas Bjerre last. It’s the first in a series of slightly gauche but charming rock moves, which take in boots on monitors, guitar-to-guitar face-offs and a mic pointed into the crowd – all somewhat incongruous with their lissom, puzzled prog-pop, but lending the atmosphere an infectious optimism. Intuitive pairings of songs from Frengers and And the Glass Handed Kites form the backbone of tonight’s set, Witness and Water Slides proving the limber highlights from the new album in between. It’s the reworks of tracks from the former, though – Am I Wry? No evolving into 156,
back to business’ as it does a reunion. Back to business means turning 2003’s Slow Life into a monstrous third-eye devouring force that pushes pop into psychedelia in a way that’d make many of today’s crop of ‘neo-psychedelic’ wah pedal-toting garage rock bands swear off the green forever. It means dusting off the effortlessly infectious Northern Lites, it’s odd mix of calypso drums and colliery brass nearly drowned out by the sold-out audience hollering the song’s chorus. Further nods to their past come when Rhys, languid and laidback as ever throughout, brings out his red Power Rangers helmet towards the set’s end, before a quick band costume change for raucous finale The Man Don’t Give A Fuck sees them don those infamous yeti outfits, in a display of glorious silliness that few of their disciples have ever picked up. [Simon Jay Catling]
Flo Morrissey
Liverpool Sound City 2015
Mew
turn up to see Everything Everything test large slabs of their irresistible new album, Get to Heaven, on the festival circuit while dressed in red robes, like feelgood priests of hypnotic pop. Their ridiculous ‘Baby it’s alright to feel like a fat child in a pushchair’ lyric from No Reptiles has people conversing long into the night. Elsewhere, the Cargo Stage is a modest little tent that definitely isn’t ready for the chaos that erupts when Stormzy appears at little gone 11pm. The man arrives three hours late, sends the place wild with multiple performances of Where Do You Know Me From?, then leaves. It is the most impromptu headline performance of impromptu headline performances, but worth the wait. [Matthew Cooper]
Shudder, and fan favourite Flexxin are just as intricate as they are on record. Their biggest talent, though, is just how easy they make having a good time look. [MC] Rather fortuitously taking to the main stage at the weekend’s sunniest point, Stealing Sheep bring a dose of eccentric synth-pop and girl power to the otherwise dull and windy docks. The trio hammer away enthusiastically on their Moogs beneath a Clockwork Orange-like video projection, which gives a futuristic surrealism to the set. [CM] While this year's bill perhaps lacks an abundance of excitable ‘buzz’ bands, it more than makes up for it in other ways. While the main stage is, well, the main stage, the real star of the show is the Baltic Stage. Set inside an old warehouse, it feels as if it’s solely crafted for Evian Christ’s pounding 1am Trance Party. The ferocity of Joshua Leary's distorted approach to electronic music, coupled with a no-holds-barred light show spanning three huge screens, provides a unique experience – though it does raise the question of why there aren’t more off-kilter, visually experimental electronic acts on the bill. [MC]
Saturday Out-there Manchester quintet Dutch Uncles are everything you’d hope them to be, frontman Duncan Wallis’s questionable but totally spellbinding dad-at-a-wedding dancing present throughout (and bringing smiles to an already sun-soaked set). Upsilon, from new album O
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Photo: Nick Bojdo
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Johnson’s name (dropped in McFlurry) beckons a hundred Vs to be flicked in the air. Despite Williamson’s intoxicating swagger and the oppressive minimalism of Fearn’s arrangements, the Mods’ gallows humour often makes for perversely life-affirming material. “This song’s about the next five years... And the five years after that and the five years after that. There’s no end to the fuckin’ misery!” Williamson proclaims to a nihilistic cheer. Right on cue, Fearn kicks in Jobseeker’s hilariously facile keyboard beat and the crowd starts a raucous mosh to a depressingly familiar tale of life driven by rudderless unemployment. There is a genuine necessity for a British band like Sleaford Mods right now, giving voice to the disenfranchised working class who are too often marginalised by indie filler. As the pair leave the stage with triumphant gestures to the Gregorian suicidal ideation of Tweet Tweet Tweet, it’s clear that if we’re going to survive another Tory reign, the Mods will become more vital than ever. [Chris Ogden]
Snow Brigade shuddering into Shespider – that truly thrill, and act as a reminder of just what a strange, intoxicating album Frengers, on its release in 2003, really was. Its native sound was a sort of nervy hyper-vigilance that found exuberant release in seething, half-thwarted choruses; and the live treatment of 156 tightens this interplay to vertiginous effect. Purposefully stalling their way through the verses serves to draw out the sinister beatitude of Bjerre’s falsetto (“From my boat / I can see your house / but now the lights are off / and there is no one home”), and means that that final, celestial summons, when it comes – “Don’t you just love goodbyes?” – appears cathartic for more than a few members of the audience. The simple but striking production design – spokes of light travel the backdrop like fissuring ice – partners Mew’s lack of onstage pretension in making this a gig that’s memorable for both band and fans’ honest, unshowy glee. [Lauren Strain]
Sunday With his beach-blonde brand of prophetic electronica, Johnny Sands kicks off the final day. Once crowned the best dressed man in Britain, he also catches the ear with a reverb-washed croon. The tunes are what count, though, and Sands has all the substance to back up his style. Clarence Clarity, meanwhile, play an adrenalinepumped half hour with an urgent sense of menace and angst. Aside from the surplus of screeching and self-belief, there is a creative unpredictability to their peculiar funk-rock. Stealing the Sunday are the night’s fun and camp headliners, Belle and Sebastian, whose charming, playful pop could crack a smile from the hardest cynic. There’s silly dancing, trumpets and tongue-in-cheek lyrics, all paired with a great sense of melody and contemporary reference. They’re irresistible, ending the weekend on a warm and sweet note; and, as we leave the site for the last time, the perks of the new location prove more visible in the darkness as robotic samba dancers and the glimmer of a neon-bright funfair spill through the crowds. [CM]
Stealing Sheep
Review
43
Photo: Stuart Moulding
Manchester Academy 2, 15 May
Photo: Stuart Moulding
Sleaford Mods
Album of the Month Outfit
Slowness [Memphis Industries, 15 Jun]
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Their 2013 debut Performance didn't spark throughout, but its clutch of on-the-money highlights announced Outfit as an act keen – and equipped – to toy with the staid conventions of pop. Slowness is more accomplished by some distance, and a surer, fuller demonstration of their developing songcraft. Deftly sequenced, from opener New Air's electro stutter to a clutch of mini symphonies (Smart Thing, Boy) via the mid-set atmospherics of Wind or Vertigo, they confirm their headway with the closing Swam Out, whose epic, ascending coda is a (not so) distant cousin of The Blue Nile's Saturday Night. Indeed, the Glasgow trio's
Hudson Mohawke
Everything Everything
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Lantern [Warp, 15 Jun]
Get To Heaven [RCA, 22 Jun]
Six years separate Ross Birchard's effervescent debut Butter and his thirstily-awaited follow-up Lantern. His 808-obsessed work in the meantime with TNGHT and Kanye might be a brash style increasingly aped by rising trap stars like RL Grime, but his roots aren't quite as obnoxious; Butter was prismatic, kaleidoscopic, footloose. A bit bonkers, basically. Eerie baby-voice ‘Hudson, Mo!’ signature notwithstanding, his attention-deficit eclecticism has evolved into a confidently varied curatorial ear. Solid pop-balladry (Very First Breath, Deepspace) and slower jams (Indian Steps, Resistance, Warriors) collide harmoniously with the itchy, crystalline electronica that typified his debut. Portrait of Luci recalls FUSE's tropicalia; Shadows, Scud Books and happy closer Brand New World gleam with candid, Saturdaymorning-cartoon energy, all major-key glitter and brass. Birchard is a long-established talent behind the decks, but Lantern – a defiantly slick sophomore LP – proves that being in high demand has in no way diluted his craft. [George Sully]
Three albums in and folk are eyeing northern quartet Everything Everything closely; surely they must misstep eventually? Alas, Get To Heaven is as polished as Arc and as inventive as their earnest debut Man Alive, cherrypicking math rock intricacies, indie rock sensibilities, and synth-fired 80s fetishising when it suits them. Try Regret's nostalgic, percussion-thumping verses, Spring / Sun / Winter / Dread's quickfire lyrics and layered chords, or the regal, anti-capitalist assassination paean Fortune 500; the record's not short on hits, and rarely does it idle. Thanks in part to Stuart Price's Midas production chops, Get To Heaven's arrangement is atomically mastered: satisfyingly complex drum patterns and choice bass and guitar lines, offset by Jonathan Higgs’ addictive falsetto. It's a proven formula, but throw in cheeky wordplay (“Did you think that everything, everything would change?” Higgs wryly asks on Regret) and EE are a welcome counterpoint to today's starchily sincere indie brood. A repeatedly rewarding follow-up. [George Sully]
hudsonmohawke.com
everything-everything.co.uk
influence is evident throughout, with Slowness's deceptively full soundboard built on a trim foundation of delicate keys and crisp percussion. Outfit reference an outlying sector of mid-80s alt-pop, a glossy side road that saw its prime exponents forsake the wiry, nervy guitars of post-punk in favour of synths, beats and – crucially – space. So much space here: Andrew Hunt's voice lives and breathes within it. It's a careworn but lovely thing, with shades, at times, of Talk Talk's Mark Hollis. This is an album for the small hours, a record you'll turn to as the bottle empties, the ashtray fills and the light of dawn creeps through the blinds. Its scale is modest but its daring is limitless. [Gary Kaill] facebook.com/outfitoutfitoutfit
J Fernandez
Many Levels of Laughter [Joyful Noise, 8 Jun]
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After three EPs, J Fernandez finally comes through with debut full length Many Levels of Laughter – and hasn't lost any of his DIY eclecticism. Built on salvaged equipment and recorded at home, Fernandez's kooky, gentle record shows he's still got plenty of left-field ideas for soft, sculptural sound-conjuring. Read My Mind has shiny, articulate guitarwork which feels like it's blowing raspberries, and Filled With Joy plays with jazz in a fun, swingin’ kinda way. Yet at times the ambient, complicated soundscapes Fernandez creates teeter on the monotonous, a well-placed trim could have more fully showed off the record's assets. Wheezing Vox Jaguar organ sounds tumbled with Casio loops and a broken Moog synth occasionally feel like a candle-lit vigil for the 1960s, but sprinkles of deft extra touches keep Many Levels... from feeling like you might've heard it all before. There's a dissonant, breathy-noise which runs through several tracks; it's piercing and not altogether pleasant, but it's exactly what saves the LP from sounding a little too giddy on nostalgia. [Katie Hawthorne] facebook.com/jfernandezsongs
FFS
Jenny Hval
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FFS [Domino, 8 Jun] Some musical partnerships are just meant to be. Take Ron and Russell Mael of Sparks, making colourful and unorthodox pop together for fast approaching half a century, their muse as strong as ever. Now take FFS: a union with Franz Ferdinand born from mutual appreciation, which combines idiosyncrasies from each to create something fresh and distinct. As the title of Collaborations Don't Work indicates, a wry sense of humour is one of the shared qualities to work its way into FFS's genetic profile (an archness evidenced elsewhere by lyrics rhyming “climbing Mt. Fuji” with “Hello Kitty Uzi”). Other inheritances are more clearly traceable to one or other parent, but neither act's influence holds sway: rather, the two sides meet in the middle and have fun with the possibilities. Out of this six-mind brainstorm emerges a classy melange of sweeping disco-pop, jaunty operatics and playful artrock; often knowingly silly, but always seriously good. [Chris Buckle] ffsmusic.com
Apocalypse, girl [Sacred Bones, 8 Jun] “Think big girl, think big like a King,” begins Jenny Hval on her first album for Sacred Bones – one which journeys from the Norwegian artist's bedroom to bible belts in both her homeland and the US, before ultimately seeing Hval lose herself and express a wish to be unborn amidst the lapping drones of ten minute closer Holy Land. Religious imagery springs up everywhere, from on That Battle Is Over's murmurs of heaven to comparing her age to Jesus’ on the string-embellished richness of Heaven. Hval continues a long-held fascination in exploring gender roles on Sabbath, as well as taking on tabloid media and the expectations they propogate on women, her voice thick with sarcasm when spitting “feminism's over and socialism's over.” It's her frequent attempts to empathise with these opposing views – doing so with a stunning vocal performance dilating from breathy spoken word to sky-gazing operatics – that makes for an incredibly arresting commentary on the state of the West. [Simon Jay Catling] jennyhval.com
Daughn Gibson
Wolf Alice
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Carnation [Sub Pop, 8 Jun]
My Love Is Cool [Dirty Hit, 22 Jun]
Miaoux Miaoux
School of Velocity [Chemikal Underground, 1 Jun]
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“Oh my god. It really is beautiful,” croons Julian Corrie – aka Miaoux Miaoux – on Luxury Discovery. Both statement and song title, work, will soon feel entirely appropriate: School of Velocity, his second album, is a precisely pitched, space-age evoking body of work. At turns demandingly hyperactive and eyes-shut mellowed, the record snips and steals from the worlds of electronica. Tracks like Giga Shrug and Unbeatable Slow Machine are fluid, seductively elastic in a manner indubitably Prince-like, but selfaware at every turn. It's The Quick is a misbehaved, decepti-vely formidable dancefloor monster that's explicitly designed to make you sweat. Peaks Beyond Peaks starts sweetly, but builds into a trance-led labyrinth with no memory of how you got there. Corrie's producer background is self-evident, but his ability to tease out textured complications from familiar songwriting origins renders School of Velocity a possible classic-in-the-making. [Katie Hawthorne]
Mates Of State
You're Going To Make It [Fierce Panda/Barsuk, 15 Jun]
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Carnation is a frustrating record. According to Gibson, it's marked by a sense of “malign opulence.” He says, “if All Hell was candy and Me Moan gourmet beef jerky, then Carnation is delicious melon.” It's reflective of the pervasive sense that this album is trying really, really hard to do something different. But, like prayers for rain, simply willing the weirdness to come isn't always quite enough. Co-producer Randall Dunn (Sun O))) sometimes coaxes something special from Gibson's grand-scale visions: Shatter You Through is all bottom-of-your-belly reverb and ‘80s disco punctuation, and I Let Him Deal shows off Gibson's catchiest Morrissey impression amidst a sea of doom-laden, rolling swing beats. But more often than not, the tracks are blown-out, overwrought – overshadowed by unnecessary melodrama or uncomfortably self-conscious balladry. Carnation is built on indulgence: a gratuitous, unpredictable experience that sometimes leaves the listener on the outside of an in-joke. [Katie Hawthorne]
Bin those preconceptions now. Turns out Ellie Rowsell's claim (when she spoke to The Skinny back in March) that those pitching her band as 90s alt-rock revisionists might have cause to rethink once they heard their album, was more than mere showboating. Five years after Rowsell formed Wolf Alice with bassist Joff Oddie, they deliver an invigorating, genredefying debut whose pop savvy sets it comfortably apart from the schmindie workaday. From the wrong-footing opening of Turn To Dust's gossamer folk to the acoustic Swallowtail (where drummer Joel Amey takes lead vocals), My Love Is Cool delights in tearing up the script. Fluffy is still mighty, as is epic recent single Giant Peach. But it's the newer detours (the parade ground backbeat of Silk, the skewed balladry of Soapy Water) that impress and, it seems, define this breathless endeavour. My Love Is Cool is the sound of indie pop having the paddles applied. [Gary Kaill]
Connecticut's favourite husband-wife duo return with a five-song burst of new wave-tinged melodicism, as warm and wonderful as ever. It's splendid from the off, as the electro sequences of Staring Contest prop up a giddily teenage sense of romance, while I Want To Run channels the heart-bursting rush of Belinda Carlisle's grandest anthems. Stirring stuff. Mates Of State's last EP (2004’s All Day) was a transitional phase; a break from the ‘neo-prog-pop’ of their first three records and a tentative toe into calmer waters. You're Going To Make It may not represent a similar line in the sand, although following drummer Jason Hammel's suggestion that the album-as-concept is “probably dead”, we can presumably look forward to more quick hits like this. Take a listen to the chorus of Gonna Get It, all windswept defiance engulfing Kori Gardner's firm-footed optimism – you'll be grateful for whatever they throw your way. [Will Fitzpatrick]
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wolfalice.co.uk
facebook.com/matesofstate
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Review
RECORDS
THE SKINNY
Desaparecidos
Neil Young
No Joy
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Payola [Epitaph, 22 Jun]
The Monsanto Years [Warner Music, 15 Jun]
More Faithful [Mexican Summer, 8 Jun]
When the last Desaparecidos album surfaced in 2002, emo wunderkind Conor Oberst was only 22, but his ideas were fully formed: The ‘Disappeared’ produced a Pinkerton-esque rock album that projected its self-loathing towards the pitfalls and vanities of suburban American life. This long-awaited follow-up feels less coherently thematic, but 13 years on Conor's still trying to make sense of the world by railing against it – everything from slacktivism to Sheriff Joe Arpaio to the music industry gets a kicking. Payola is mostly good fun, particularly in the grip of furious, anti-establishment anthems like The Underground Man and Te Amo Camila Vallejo. There are missteps – 10 Steps Behind questions religious headscarves, and it ain't pretty – but even so, this existential howl against cruelty and injustice lends itself to some admirably infectious punk rock with enjoyable delusions of new wave grandeur. Welcome back. [Will Fitzpatrick]
Forty-seven years after his debut solo record, the prospect of another angry outing from Neil Young is not one that'll set pulses racing. On this occasion, however, the ever singular Young achieves something that, at least in recent years, he's rarely been guilty of: relevance. The Monsanto Years is a crystallisation of some of Young's hardest-fought political positions. And it comes at a time of minor global awakening on many of these fronts. Railing against the influence of the corporate world – with the eponymous GMO producer the primary target for his diatribe – this is a concept album, thematically and musically. Similar melodies drift in and out of different tracks, framing the piece in an almost operatic manner. Recalling Bruce Springsteen's underrated Wrecking Ball, this is the work of a veteran who has had enough and has hit on a way in which to package his frustration in a way that is tuneful, accessible and timely. [Finbarr Bermingham]
It won't change your life. It might not even change your day, but album number three from Jasamine White-Gluz and Laura Lloyd makes good on their original fizz-bomb fuzz-pop manifesto. This time around, the approach is more measured and the overdrive pedal gets the odd breather. But this is no sell-out, and No Joy still deserve more credit than the usual lazy ‘nu gaze’ plaudits. At its best, as on the rampant I Am An Eye Machine, More Faithful is an inch away from essential: a few more hooks would make all the difference. A sneaking suspicion remains that, despite their way with both a tune (the beautiful, hushed Everything New – a dead ringer for early Veruca Salt) and a ruckus (the MBV-referencing Hollywood Teeth), they don't truly, fully believe in themselves. More Faithful makes the case for sticking around but their best, you suspect, is yet to come. [Gary Kaill]
desaparecidosband.com
neilyoung.com
nojoymusic.com
Leftfield
Jaakko Eino Kalevi
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Alternative Light Source [Infectious Music, 8 Jun] Ah, the 1990s. One long Danny Boyle soundtrack of a decade. And while legitimate classics such as Leftism and Rhythm and Stealth helped to document our comings and goings, Alternative Light Source – Leftfield's first studio album in 16 years – suggests that at least one party from back then is still going. Now with Neil Barnes in sole control, he's assisted by hired hands including TV On The Radio's Tunde Adebimpe (opener Bad Radio) and court jesters Sleaford Mods (Head and Shoulders). Yet whilst acerbic and atmospheric – Little Fish a contusion of distended, seasick beats, Storm's End all sly and mesmerising – such souped-up electronica never pushes against the listener. These ten tracks often allude to kinks and sharp edges without necessarily delivering either. The result is a record that sounds curiously dated, items such as Bilocation (Poliça's Channy Leaneagh on vocals) and lead single Universal Everything certainly piquing interest, but also leaving us yearning for a sharper blade. [Duncan Harman] leftfieldmusic.com
Son Lux
Jaakko Eino Kalevi [Domino/Weird World, 15 Jun] Kalevi's new self-titled album is a comprehensive introduction to an artist surely destined to become one of synthpop's quirky new posterboys – and not just because on its opening track, also named after himself, he repeats his own name like a Pokémon with a fondness for arpeggiators. There's plenty more evidence of his humorous side, including lyrics as frank as ‘no one cares about you or your things’ and as cutting as ‘sparks sparkle’, as well as synth voices ripped straight from a high school Yamaha's preset bank; the ‘flute’ on Deeper Shadows is particularly special. Also clear is his knack for simple, effective scoring (Mind Like Muscle's bass part takes some beating) and his versatility, proving as capable of pulling off Steely Dan-tinged jazz breaks (Night At The Field) as he is a straight faced Serge Gainsbourg homage (Don't Ask Me Why). Sure there are fillers and Kalevi gleefully embraces style over substance, but Jaakko evinces a peculiar, alluring personality. [Andrew Gordon]
Bones [Glassnote Records, 22 Jun]
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Ever the evolving project, Ryan Lott's Son Lux – now a three-piece – have migrated again, from Joyful Noise to Glassnote. This is, by one count, Lott's tenth release (EPs, reimaginings, etc.) – and thus far he has shown a visionary's restlessness. Thematically robust, Bones is as operatic and orchestral as any Son Lux offering to date, deftly conjuring scale and drama, evoking time, change, and death. Swooning, wavering synths are the breeze over cold, industrious percussion, with each moment feeling distinct yet part of the whole. Flight is spacey, airborne; This Time is rich, earthy and tribal. Lott's unique choral vocal, often pained or modulated, reaches bassier depths on I Am The Others. But to follow the joyous bombast of Lanterns, we need more than a pinned-on structure and a handful of catchy cuts. Having previously flexed such diverse sonic muscles, the band now tread a more familiar (albeit proven) path, too practiced to elicit that same frisson, but effective nonetheless. [George Sully] sonlux.tumblr.com
jeksviihde.blogspot.com
Fist City
Sun Kil Moon
Major Lazer
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Everything Is A Mess [Transgressive, 22 Jun]
Universal Themes [Rough Trade, 1 Jun]
Garagey slop at its best: on this second ‘official’ album, Alberta surf-punx Fist City nail something potent, poppy and purposeful. The ramalama urgency of Bad Trip and Hey Little Sister indicates a band determined to get into your head by burrowing into your feet and hips, while Fuck Cops (with its two-fingered dismissal of ‘racist pigs’) splatters searing venom across a mean-tempered shuffle. It's a noise that rages and swings so hard you'll be left with no choice but to listen – like Sonic Youth launching jellybeans at the heads of Man or Astroman?, and effortlessly cool with it. Ultimately, Everything Is A Mess deals with the chaotic shambles we all endure on a daily basis; lives unstructured and oppressed by violence beyond our control, yet defiantly surviving in the face of all that. It careens from jangling fury to purifying freakouts without batting an eyelid. Most of all, it's a superb record from a great and fast-improving band. [Will Fitzpatrick]
By the end of The Possum, the first track on Sun Kil Moon's follow-up to last year's ultra-acclaimed Benji, the universal themes that mainman Mark Kozelek woozily implores us to consider revolve around industrial metallers Godflesh, composer Maurice Ravel and the sad fate of the track's eponymous species. These super-specific pop culture references, assuaged by lyrics which are essentially morbid short stories with little recourse for conventional song metre or rhyme are quintessential Kozelek in 2015; indulgent but incredibly compelling. Of course, there's more to Kozelek than merely a 21st century Lloyd Cole of lyricism; his guitar playing is exemplary, especially in tandem with the subtle punctuation of erstwhile Sonic Youth man Steve Shelley on percussion. As the name suggests, Universal Themes is an uncommonly vast album but the warped homespun wisdom of Kozelek in full flight ensures his soaring, perambulating muse is never entirely out of reach. [Colm McAuliffe]
fistcitycult.com
caldoverderecords.com
Girlpool
Before the World Was Big [Wichita, 1 Jun]
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Just like the self-titled EP that preceded it, there is – on the face of it, at least – almost nothing to Before the World Was Big. With percussion eschewed, it's left to Harmony Tividad's bass to pick up the low-end slack; Cleo Tucker, meanwhile, tailors her sparing use of the guitar to suit the mood. Ultimately, though, the L.A. duo place vocals first and all else second; it was always going to be their harmonic interplay that formed the crux of their first record. It works, too, with consistency and cohesion. Chinatown is a beautiful account of anxiety and self-esteem issues – “If I loved myself, would I take it the wrong way?” – and Dear Nora, framed by flickers of warping guitar, shines a sentimental light upon life within the band. Crowded Stranger might be the highlight; the tale it spins of claustrophobia and isolation is smartly matched by the instrumentation. There's nothing wasted on here; testament to the fact that you can be precise and heartfelt at the same time. [Joe Goggins]
EP Review Outblinker
Pink / Blue [Good Grief, 15 Jun]
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It’s hardly surprising that Outblinker’s membership come from a largely DIY punk background. The repetitive glitch which fades into their debut EP’s Pink side is soon joined by a mischevous guitar riff, purposeful drums and quirky synthesizers. The jam becomes more distorted and playful the further it pans out – a breakdown at the seven-minute mark turns the entire preceding section on its head. Can never sounded this disgruntled. Blue loosens the tense mood – rolling drum patterns are coupled with eerie tones and buzzing synths. It’s a b-side with purpose, wrapping up their impressive mission statement in a heavily scenic, ponderous instrumental. This is slick, modern kraut for an uneasy Britain, and it doesn’t need words to say so. [Ross Watson]
Peace Is The Mission [Mad Decent, 1 Jun] Self-professed ‘culture mash-up’ and dancehalldork Diplo side-project Major Lazer broadcast their third LP Peace Is The Mission, a now-trademark collab-a-thon with tonnes of guests. We're talking hip-hop (2 Chainz, Pusha T) alongside pop (Ellie Goulding) and alt-pop (MØ, Elliphant, Wild Belle). Eclectic to some, contrived and chart-baiting to others. The kinetic, ridiculous squeak of Roll The Bass, or Too Original's infectious pop-dancehall bounce, are a far cry from Free the Universe's space-reggae ballad Get Free, but PITM is a hurried record at a mere half hour. When it sags (the ponderous Goulding anthem Powerful, the autotuned Night Riders), it counts badly against such snappy hits as the video-games-meets-rasta-R'n'B banger Light It Up. PITM will either press your buttons as smart disco nonsense should or it'll mash your keyboard like an uninvited cat, a distractible pop-culture vehicle with too much going on. [George Sully] majorlazer.com
The Top Five 1
Outfit
2
Miaoux Miaoux
3 4 5
Slowness School of Velocity
Sun Kil Moon
Universal Themes
Jenny Hval
Apocalypse, girl
Hudson Mohawke Lantern
facebook.com/outblinker
girlpoolmusic.com
June 2015
RECORDS
Review
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Party in the Park Africa Oyé favourite Esa returns to this year’s festival to DJ the main stage, joining a stellar lineup. He talks to us about travel and discovery; plus, we select four further acts to catch at the UK’s biggest free celebration of African music Interview: John Thorp
aving seen record-breaking attendance and a wider remit of music than ever, Africa Oyé arrives for another year in Liverpool’s Sefton Park on Saturday 20 and Sunday 21 June 2015. One of the most ambitious free festivals in the UK, it’s steadily developed a stellar reputation as one of the greatest celebrations of African music in Europe, pulling together both international acts and vibrant local talent into a weekend of music. Headline acts include Frankie Paul, Omar and Cumbia All Stars. Maintaining the lively atmosphere on the main stage this year is a unique trio of DJs. Pioneering BBC selector Andy Kershaw is joined by 1Xtra talent DJ Edu, and, most excitingly of all, Esa Williams, a producer with one of the most eclectic backgrounds and careers in contemporary club music, skirting electronica, techno and traditional rhythms. Spending his childhood in South Africa, by 21, Esa had taken advantage of a work exchange programme and found himself in Scotland. But before his move to Glasgow and the inevitable immersion in the hedonistic world of Sub Club and the legacy of labels like Soma, Williams first found himself in Aberdeen. “I was selling gas and electricity door to door, Aberdeen to the coast, visiting all these little villages. I came from South Africa in December, so that’s summer, and it was minus seven or eight,” he recalls. “Then I met a girl and moved to Glasgow, and somehow or other I managed to stay there.” Before his death on the frontline of the police force in 1999, Esa’s father had been a DJ, and his son had inherited many of his records and begun to invest in his own, many of which made the journey north of the border. Away from his heritage, Esa found that his love for the music only increased with time and distance. “I was becoming serious about it, because those guys in Glasgow were very serious about it,” he remembers. “But there wasn’t an opportunity to play African music. I remember trying to persuade Optimo to let me do a traditional South African set. Then five years ago I met Brian D’Souza; we started Highlife and everything changed! But I was already educated in techno, house and those more formative sounds in Glasgow.” Brian D’Souza is better known to many as the curiously monikered Auntie Flo, a Glaswegian with Goan heritage and a similarly open-minded approach to rich, international and experimental sounds. Together, the two founded cult party Highlife, where they applied these offbeat sounds to a more traditional club template. Before long, the two were engrossed and involved in Huntleys & Palmers, a label run by their friend Andrew J Thomson. The trio regularly DJ together, and much of the music Esa produces with D’Souza is released through the label, including collaborations improvised and recorded in Cuba and Kenya. For Esa, who now teaches music software as an occupation, these were unique opportunities to meld his grip on technology with more traditional and even unearthed methods and styles.
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Esa
festivals such as Africa Oyé, Esa feels that several factors have contributed to African music’s popularity continuing to bloom, some of them perhaps as simple as a slight shift in the perception of genre. “For the past decade, people had been attempting to come to terms with the label ‘world music,’” he suggests. “When that label was around, I didn’t know what it was. In South Africa, world music is from Britain, Germany any other country. I think people are starting to take that label less seriously and open up to new sounds, and young people especially are trying to find new music now technology has come on.” Still, Esa is just as keen to preserve and to uncover as he is to discover or push his aesthetic forward. “Brian and I have just finished recording an album with a Ghanaian singer, and she sings in a language that people aren’t really using now,” he says. “We were hoping to create something that people might enjoy on a wider scale, as part Esa Williams of a new breed of talent or a new breed of ideas.” For a while now, Esa has resided in London, “The British Council gave us the money to and can’t see himself leaving any time soon; he is go out [to Cuba and Kenya] and I saw it as a great quick to establish that the naturally diverse capiopportunity both to teach and work with all these tal has left him “happier than he’s ever been.” artists in their traditional styles,” he explains, au“I’m overwhelmed with opportunities in the dibly humbled. “So the experiences for me have African community and beyond and I’m still findbeen unreal. I have just returned from Uganda ing out so much and meeting so many interestand visited a village with a xylophone that only ing people. It’s a learning experience that I don’t exists there and has only been played by around want to give up.” seven people. It was interesting to open up conversations with the elders there about how Four to see: we might use that sound to complement what Omar (playing Africa Oyé on the Saturday) we were doing, without appropriating it. They His first release on Gilles Peterson’s truly legendtold me that, 12 years ago, it only had 12 notes, ary Talkin’ Loud label was now 25 years ago, but whereas now it has 25. These people are just as for his fans and collaborators, including Erykah advanced as you. In Cuba, there’s no internet, Badu and the late ODB, Omar has remained a and yet people were asking me questions about force to be reckoned with in the worlds of soul Ableton that were too complicated for me.” and jazz – now even occupying a unique posiHaving been in the UK for a decade and tion as an MBE for his services to music. Suffice watched his opportunities flourish alongside to say, he has both a rich back catalogue and a
“In South Africa, world music is from Britain, Germany, any other country. I think people are starting to take that label less seriously”
MUSIC
constant desire for experimentation that render him perfect for a headline slot at Africa Oyé. BKO Quintet (Saturday) One of the most intriguing additions to Africa Oyé’s 2015 lineup is the Mali-based BKO Quintet, a cult live act credited with helping to sculpt a new tradition in Malian music; something unifying, experimental and undoubtedly lively. Their debut collection of recordings, Bamako Today, showcases a sound that will undoubtedly have plenty in Sefton Park shifting their feet. Frankie Paul (Sunday) Owing to his blindness as well as perhaps his evocative, throaty singing style, Frankie Paul is often referred to as ‘the Jamaican Stevie Wonder.’ And while Paul has never enjoyed quite the same degree of enormous crossover success, he is known and respected by reggae fans for having one of the vastest and most consistent collection of singles ever seen in the genre. Having clocked up an astounding 30 albums since the early 80s, he remains a go-to figure for new artists on the scene. Good luck predicting the setlist for this one… Gordon Masiala & NKA Musica (Saturday) Finally, returning for his first performance at Africa Oyé since 2009, Gordon Masiala is set to perform with his band, NKA Musica. A godfather of rumba, salsa and Afro-Cuban music in general, he is part of a fourth generation of Congolese pop musicians in the diaspora, shepherding a band respected not only for their notoriously tight performances but also for their incredible suits and general style. Let’s hope the mud stays away for Mr Masiala in particular. Africa Oyé, 20-21 Jun (12.30pm-9.30pm), Sefton Park, Liverpool, free Esa plays on the Sunday (21 Jun)
THE SKINNY
Photo: soandso.me
H
≥ SUMMER CONCERTS
AT THE BRIDGEWATER HALL, MANCHESTER • JUNE–AUGUST 2015
SUNDAY 28 JUNE, 3PM SEVEN PLANETS & A COSMIC ROCK Including music from Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who and a performance by the Hallé Children’s Choir.
WEDNESDAY 1 JULY, 7.30PM FOUNDATION OF LIBERTY Featuring Foden’s brass band performing with the Hallé in a celebration of the birth of democracy.
SATURDAY 11 JULY, 7.30PM HAPPY BIRTHDAY MR SINATRA Gary Williams joins the Hallé to perform Sinatra’s greatest songs from Come Fly with Me to My Way.
SATURDAY 18 JULY, 7.30PM PUTTNAM PRESENTS ... David Puttnam reflects on his career with a magnificent soundtrack performed live by the Hallé.
SATURDAY 1 AUGUST, 7.30PM LAST NIGHT OF THE HALLÉ PROMS The traditional end to the season featuring Jerusalem, and the Pomp and Circumstance March No.1.
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June 2015
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Illustration: www.verbals-picks.com
THE SKINNY
Art Highlights Our Art editor selects her must-see exhibitions for June, from the results of PAPER gallery’s mentoring scheme (which includes this month’s Showcase artist, Sarah Eyre) to performance art involving toilets Words: Sacha Waldron
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he last few weeks brought us late party nights in museums and galleries across the Northwest (LightNight and Manchester After Hours), a general election and the whisperings of summertime. The late nights were fun, we ended up with a depressing Tory government and it’s started raining again. Woo-bloody-hoo. Let’s get on to what’s happening in Northwest art this month, with our round-up of the best art exhibitions in Liverpool, Manchester and beyond. Waterside Arts Centre in Sale opens its new exhibition, One Year On, on 5 June (preview 6-8pm). The show brings together the prizewinners from 2014’s Open exhibition and continues to 19 September. Also opening the same weekend is PAPER gallery’s new show (6 Jun-18 Jul), which showcases new work from the nine artists who have been part of the recent Tracing PAPER mentoring scheme.
At the Whitworth later on in June is an event for all you young ’uns out there (well, 1525 year olds anyway). The Whitworth Young Contemporaries will be staging their first event in the gallery on 11 June from 6pm to 9pm. They’ve already announced their initial lineup, which includes D/R/U/G/S, BPM, Lady Ice, Project Jam Sandwich and Inna Voice alongside screenprinting workshops from One69a, graffiti from OutHouse and spoken word from Young Identity; and, it seems, tons more is still to be announced. One of Manchester’s newest spaces, TAG (The Adaptable Gallery), located at 235 Deansgate, has opened its second exhibition – new painting, prints and light-boxes from James Moss. The show is open every day until 21 June, 8am-6pm (Sundays 9am-5pm). In Liverpool, The Royal Standard launch their summer series of LIVE! events on 12 June.
Sarah Eyre - Paper Furl (2014)
Each evening will feature new experimental performance work; first up is recent UCLan MA graduate Rachel Pursglove, who will carry out a live performance of her video work The Struggle, which deals with objects as the manifestation or embodiment of external pressure (7-9pm). The second performance (26 Jun, 7-9pm) is apparently about restricting the time people go to the toilet in museums and galleries. Yikes. From 6 to 14 June, Liverpool Arab Arts Festival hits the city once again, and the full programme has just been released. Some highlights of the nine-day festival will be its film strand, with shorts from The Yemen Peace Project and a selection of films from the BBC Arabic Festival
Leonora Carrington
Eastern Exchanges
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Tate Liverpool
When the featured artist of an exhibition is a Lancashire-born Mexican surrealist, you can almost guarantee you’ll encounter some wonderful weirdness. It’s strange, then, that Leonora Carrington’s exhbition fails because it is perhaps just too much of an oddness overload. Upon entry to the wide, attic space of Tate Liverpool, the retrospective comes out swinging with The Magical World of the Mayas – an enormous, panoramic painting that feels straight from a 70s LP space opera cover, with its falling ghosts hoisting rabid wolves amidst disembodied faces, which hang ethereal amongst alien hills. As busy as any Hieronymus Bosch (the artist discovered him aged 23 while in Madrid, having suffered a breakdown and while living in an asylum), the work must be scoured all over for its subversions, every inch layered with some absurd, enchanting invention. This painting soon loses some of its lustre, however, when a few laps of the extensive collection have been made. It’s not that Carrington is not an interesting painter, it’s just that her own specialities feel stretched thin due to the large amount of her work displayed. As opposed to other stylistically relatable artists such as Rene Magritte, Carrington also tends to return to her trusty motifs – limbs, human-animal hybrids, arcane symbolism – too frequently. Sometimes, it seems, her work thumbs clumsily between the heights of the Surrealists that so clearly inspired and her own artistic concerns – appearing as regurgitation rather than trailblazing. This isn’t to say that there aren’t bafflingly brilliant pieces throughout that need to be
June 2015
2014 shown at FACT and the Bluecoat; it also includes intros, panel discussions and Q&As. (Check the LAAF website for the most up-to-date info.) From 6 June, Unity Theatre will be hosting the festival’s main exhibition, Silent Voices, from Liverpool-based photographer Elaine Stapleton, who captures everyday life in Bil’in, a village in occupied Palestine, by giving children aged between eight and 18 cameras to explore their own lives and surroundings. This work will be displayed alongside Stapleton’s own. For your monthly pick of the best new exhibition openings, previews and one-off art happenings, head to theskinny.co.uk/art
Manchester Art Gallery
The scale and scope of Eastern Exchanges is imposing, with three vast galleries filled with quintessential East Asian works of craft, art, fabric and built structure, curated to delve deep into the historical artistry of China, Japan and Leonora Carrington, The Pomps of the Subsoil 1947 Korea. As an opening to the exhibition, the viewer encounters two towering centrepieces: an examseen. The Giantess (The Guardian of the Egg) is ple of an early 19th-century lacquer Norimono one of the best examples; a Godzilla-like princhair (the traditional Japanese sedan chairs that cess with cornfield locks, striding amongst a sea once were carried on the shoulders of affluent of monsters. Her more playful work is infinitely men’s servants), and a contemporary work by interesting and criminally unexplored. The wry Felicity Aylieff entitled Chinese Ladder (2007) – a sketch I am an Amateur of Velocipedes, for examcolossal tower (or giant pot) made up of large, ple, forms an odd pencil amalgam of ghost and stacked porcelain slabs shaded blue and white, carriage that feels more sincere in its abstraction which was made in collaboration with factories in than much of the repetitive brushwork featured. Jingdezhen, China Delicate Fly is another terrific experiment, a thin The exhibition is arranged into loose secinked cut-out of an insect with another growing tions. The first, entitled Distinctively Eastern, with its own shell that is detailed in great colour deals predominantly with 18th-century objects and shade; the cut out sockets starkly white and artefacts. An Imari dish, lightly coloured with against the biology board that props it up. images of Buddha, was oddly paired with Danful It is a shame then that there are just too Yang’s modern and unshakably delicate porcemany samey paintings here. If Tate had halved lain kitsch creatures from the Girly series (2010). the exhibition size, the issue of pictorial malaise Here also we see the inclusion of the Chinese would’ve certainly been less of an issue, and it imperial dragon robes – one striking with its doesn’t help that no really rigorous biographical prominent yellow background foregrounding the backbone is established. Rather, fairly innocuous emblematic dragon, denoting power and grace; quotes by the artist stencilled into various corthe other a deep orange shawl fit for a prince. ners only help to solidify her evidently unfocused These items suggested narratives within East style. This exhibition is still certainly worth a visit Asia’s ecclesiastical evolution and, like much else in spite of these curatorial concerns. Indeed, the in this ‘chapter’ of the exhibition, were complex madness of the images has calmed but a jot since in history and custom. their emergence, with the repeating egg shell Trade between Britain and China deheads of The Temptation of St. Anthony and Mr. veloped within the 1600s and this caucus of Ruiz in the Nightingale’s light-heartedness parkingdoms prompted a revision of how East ticularly worth seeing. [Tom Kwei] Asian crafts were constructed. This story is told here under the umbrella title of East Meets Run ended West. Work includes the famille rose vase – an infusion of Chinese Taoist philosophy and the
ART
Lin Cheung, Willow, 2008 - 2009
British penchant for landscapes and gardening. Elsewhere, Lei Xue’s tea trinkets (2001-3), made from porcelain and forged to symbolise crushed cans in the traditional blues and whites, bridge the gap between the high craft of hand-painted pottery with the throwaway soda cans of our modern age. Isolated due to political and trading endeavours until the early 20th Century, there is an unresolved allure to the art of Korea. It was only in the late 1880s that the country was forced by Japan to open up trade with the wider world. This narrative is explored in the exhibition’s final chapter, Future East. The Sanggam practices of etching motifs upon dry clay and filling this with black and white slip are evident throughout the exhibition’s contemporary works, but many challenge this notion and favour a pared down minimalistic approach such as Jung Hong Park’s uncomplicated vases Red Room Vessels (2014). The distorted Water Drop Vessel by Ka Jin Lee and Fumio Enomoto’s traditional weave stool demonstrate the simplicity that is present throughout much of recent East Asian craft. On the whole, Eastern Exchanges delivers on its promise and presents a fragmented journey entangled and embellished with a staggering depth of relativity and poignancy. Much like the expedition through the centuries, however, certain aspects still remain elusive. [Clive Hammond] Run ended
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Avatars in Virtual Worlds Beyond slaying dragons and collecting gold there is a deeper level of interaction in MMORPGs, revolving around personal identity and self-comfort — and it’s facilitated by a relationship between the gamer and their avatars. Intrigued? Let’s take a look...
Words: Santini Basra
Guild Wars
I
n our day-to-day lives we find ourselves restricted in so many ways – what we look like, the money in our pocket, where we live, whom we work for, our social connections, the laws of physics – but there are places where these restrictions do not apply: virtual worlds. While there are many different spaces that constitute virtual worlds, some of the most well-known worlds are those from MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) such as World of Warcraft, Second Life and Guild Wars. To inhabit these worlds, players must create avatars. Usually an avatar is just a tool to allow a gamer to enter and interact with the virtual world, but in some cases, an avatar’s function can develop beyond this. Especially within socially driven games, it can happen that a gamer develops an emotional connection with his or her avatar and the avatar starts functioning on a deeper level than originally perceived, unlocking certain social behaviours that lie dormant within a gamer. In many cases, as beautifully documented in Robbie Cooper’s book Alter Ego: Avatars and their Creators, these avatars can act as secret identities for their gamer: office assistant by day, flying panda by night – guardian of the virtual realm. The word itself – avatar – hints at this use, it originates from Sanskrit, and originally referred to the descendant of a deity. In these cases the avatar is allowing the gamer access to basic simulations of experiences that they would never otherwise come across. Quotes such as “my avatar looks like my real self, but about twenty years younger” and “I decided to make a superhero reflecting my inner self, so I created La Blonde, the supra super heroine” are common within the book; in these cases the avatar and its respective powers replace something the gamer feels he or she is lacking. Nick Yee, a social scientist at Ubisoft who used to be a research scientist at the Palo Alto Research Centre mentions this effect: “People with a higher body mass index – likely overweight or obese – create more physically idealised avatars, which are taller or thinner.” While typically these ‘powers’ fall into the archetypes of the superhero – super speed, flight, strength, death rays and all the rest – occasionally the power that is afforded by the avatar is
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seemingly much more mundane, like the ability to talk anonymously, the ability to change your appearance, the ability to act without repercussions: what we might call social superpowers. These banal and outwardly everyday abilities, afforded by the avatar, have resulted in the avatar being utilised by certain gamers (perhaps unconsciously) for more serious issues. The ability to be anonymous in an MMORPG allows for a whole range of expression (which normally would be repressed) to be explored through an avatar. This anonymity is also true of many areas of the internet generally (think of 4chan and Reddit), however with the addition of an avatar – a semi-tangible form – often these expressions can be more complex. On one level, the avatar affords the ability to remove real-world visual stimuli, thus personality can take a more important role than image, and one can see that in certain scenarios this may have a large effect. For example those who are often visually stigmatised, such as the disabled, can overcome that boundary and experience social interaction online in a virtual space, judged only on personality. One disabled gamer within Cooper’s book illustrates this well: “I have a lot of physical disabilities in real life, but in Star Wars Galaxies I can ride an Imperial speeder bike, fight monsters, or just hang out with friends at a bar.” Beyond this, culturally or socially repressed behaviours and views are often expressed in games, and while these may often result in racist or sexist comments, in other cases you may – as one gamer I spoke to suggests – have more liberating experiences: “Virtual worlds allow you to experiment and perform actions that you would otherwise be incapable of or not permitted to (socially or legally) in the real world. Where under one culture certain actions might not be permitted – such as a devout Muslim woman showing her face in public – here she would have been able to build an avatar similar to herself or how she wants to be represented, and experience this despite it not being permitted among her culture.” Other such examples can be found in the exploration of sexual orientation and even gender identity. Especially in early life when one might be unsure about their personal preferences on these matters, the virtual world can be a
safe place to experiment, expose and understand sometimes latent desires and thoughts. One gamer named Danielle talks about her experiences in World of Warcraft as a teen, and how her experiences in the world with her avatar prompted her to transition: “The biggest thing of immeasurable value was getting to have a part of my life where I was referred to by a female name and female pronouns. There was something for me about that that was instantly comforting, something that highlighted how much male pronouns bothered me in my daily life outside of World of Warcraft.”
“Virtual worlds allow you to experiment and perform actions that you would otherwise be incapable of or not permitted to (socially or legally) in the real world” Although she was male at the time, for some reason unknown to her she chose to create a female avatar, and through interacting online via this avatar she started to have realisations about social discomforts in her day-to-day life. She goes on to talk about how her avatar helped shape her female identity after transitioning: “I had several different characters in the game, meaning I could decide which one I felt like playing on any given day and know that that would affect what people called me. One of the names
TECH
I used for a while in Warcraft was a high fantasy variation on Danielle that, along with some other experiences experimenting with the name, led to me deciding to stick with Danielle as my name in the real world going forward.” Danielle’s case is a clear example of an avatar’s ability to expose, explore and personify a latent desire in a space that is relatively safe. Not only are you interacting behind the veil of anonymity, but also you are in a world that is completely abstracted from your own. World of Warcraft, as with most other MMORPGs, unwittingly manages to disguise many of these raw interactions behind the rich narrative of slaying dragons and collecting gold. Another Warcraft player, Gary, mentions the absurdity of this: “The dichotomy of it is hilarious. The other day this guy I was talking to was an electrician, and we were talking about being an electrician versus going to college. He and I were having this long two-hour conversation about going to college and the merits of not going to that sort of organisation, as we were running around with swords fighting goblins.” This high-fantasy veil provides a platform to abstract many issues, and explore them unconsciously through a long period of time in the background. While such modes of social interaction can be extremely positive, there is a fundamental issue: the huge gap between virtual worlds and day-to-day life. Danielle mentions that World of Warcraft became a safe space for her, but that “it’s tough to convince yourself to leave a place you feel is more comfortable that the world around you.” While many positive and enriching forms of interaction can occur, there is little scope for behaviour, online identity and social comfort to transfer from the virtual world to the physical world. Ultimately the question that must be asked is: is this a phenomenon that should just be left alone, or should some of the larger game companies recognise the unique explorative qualities of the worlds that they have created – and in the interest of social responsibility, find some way of providing support to their players? mmorpg.com
THE SKINNY
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Festival Clubbing Highlights Need to make plans for the summer? Here are some decent choices within a thousand miles of Britannia UK Wales has seen a number of quality weekenders sprout up over the past decade or so, all committed to a winning formula of fresh musical talent, novel art installations and imaginative locations. Gottwood is perhaps the most obvious example; the annual woodland gathering has been growing for five years now and they’re bringing the goods yet again on 11-14 Jun. On the bill you’ve got the likes of Zip, Zenker Bros, Tornado Wallace, MCDE, Radioactive Man, Luv*Jam, Leon Vynehall and Craig Richards teaming up with Ben UFO. The organisers have also been working on the live element this year, bringing in Andrew Ashong, Mouse Outfit and Point G to showcase their latest dabblings. There’ll also be an appearance from Steevio, the brains behind Freerotation. Held in the ideal houseparty setting of Baskerville Hall on 10-13 Jul, Freero consistently boasts one of the best lineups and atmospheres we’re privy to on these sunny shores. This year features Donato Dozzy, Karenn, Lakuti, Lowtec, Aybee and Soulphiction, as well as regular faces Sven Weisemann, Objekt and Move D – good luck getting a ticket. Green Man and Festival No. 6 are also decent options for later in the year, both roughly defined as bespoke banquets of music, arts and culture. The latter takes place on the Portmeirion coast in the first week of September, 3-6 Sep. As well as Maurice Fulton, DJ Harvey, Optimo and Gerd Janson, there’s live artists like Belle & Sebastian, Hookworms and a full range of comedy acts and drama talks going on round the town. As for the rest of the UK, The Garden Party present their latest community venture in Leeds city centre on August Bank Holiday weekend with Mos Def, Little Dragon, Todd Terje and Joy Orbison all present. Also later in the year, the new incarnation of Beacons Metro promises a wealth of choice spread across Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds during October. If you’re down south, Field Day returns to Victoria Park on 6 Jun with another pretty varied roster – Caribou, Madlib and many more. Same goes for Secret Garden Party on 23-26 Jul. The theme for this year is ‘childish things,’ which promises plenty of jelly, ice cream and even more dungarees than originally expected. Abroad If you fancy heading to warmer climes, Meadows in the Mountains looks like it’s shaping up to be pretty special. Based in the Rhodopes
June 2015
Photo: Ross Gilmore
This month’s highlights from the Cervantes Institute – and some tips for the summer
Gorka Benítez
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Words: Daniel Jones
Mountains, Bulgaria on 12-14 Jun, Meadows brings in Quantic, Mop Mop, Binh and Al Dobson Jr. to help direct play for the weekend. Sónar makes a return to Barcelona on 18-20 Jun, with another strong programme – Voices from the Lake, Helena Hauff, Arthur Baker and guaranteed sunburn. Secret Solstice is a slightly cooler (sorry!) option, bringing Moodymann, Nightmares on Wax and the intriguingly-named Lord Pusswhip to the heart of Iceland. Or there’s the fledgling Weather festival in Paris on 4-7 Jun, one for all you culture vultures out there looking for a lastminute deal. The sounds of Juan Atkins, Moritz von Oswald and Matthew Herbert alone are probably worth more than a cheap flight. Over in Deutschland, seeing how tickets for Nachtdigital sold out within minutes of being released, you might stand a better chance of getting to Melt, which runs between 17-19 Jul in Leipzig. Look past ostensible headliners Alt-J and Darwin Deez and you’ll find some pretty tasty prospects: Shed as Head High, Marcel Dettmann, The Black Madonna and Steve Rachmad to name a few. Elsewhere in Budapest, there’s one called B.My.Lake on 19-22 Aug, which is now in its third year. Set on, you guessed it, a big lake, this is your alternative to Sziget, and still only a short trip away from the capital and its fabulously cheap pints. Lineup includes KiNK, Sven Weisemann, Efdemin, Recondite and Lake People. Dekmantel look sure to build on the success of their previous two years by taking over Amsterdamse Bos once more on 30 Jul-2 Aug. It remains one of the few contenders for best lineup – Shackleton, Jeff Mills and MCDE all return, while Roy Ayers Ubiquity, Madlib and Villalobos are especially welcome additions. If you’re a particular fan of Dutch hospitality then you may also consider Awakenings, a relative who’s-who of techno that has been running for a fair few years now – that’s on 27-28 Jun, also in Amsterdam. Then there’s Croatia and Serbia, which together have more picturesque settings than you can shake your passport at: Dimensions, Exit, Hideout, Garden, Soundwave, Sonus, Electric Elephant, Stop Making Sense... the list goes on. I’ll allow you the pleasure of going through those at your leisure. So, anyway, that’s your lot for the summer ahead. Spread joy and don’t forget to take a waterproof jacket just in case it rains. For festival previews and reviews: theskinny.co.uk/clubs
anchester Jazz Festival takes over the city the first two weeks of August, and jazz’s historic connection to the Spanish-speaking world is acknowledged with two events organised in association with the Cervantes Institute. First up, on 1 August, Cuban pianist and composer Pepe Rivero introduces his two most recent albums – tributes to Chopin and Thelonius Monk – which mix classical music with Cuban beats and flamenco flourishes (Thwaites Festival Pavilion in Albert Square, 3pm, £4). Next, saxophonist Gorka Benítez, a leading light in the Basque jazz scene, brings his latest LP A Marte Otra Vez to the same venue on 8 Aug, performing as a trio with bandmates Ben Monder (guitar) and David Xirgu (drums). However, there’s only so much of a taste of Spain you can get in Manchester city centre – a place not, let’s face it, known for its leisurely Mediterranean ambience. Recognising that many readers may be choosing to holiday in Spain this summer, the Cervantes Institute have chosen a few highlights of the Spanish calendar for those keen to experience more than just beaches and “dos cervezas.” At the top of the list – and we’ll agree with this one – is Barcelona’s annual festival of progressive and multimedia music and arts, Sónar (18-20 June). Its carefully curated lineup pools some of the biggest and best acts from the world of electronic music in one of Europe’s most beautiful cities. The enduring party of Chemical Brothers? Sure. A rare appearance from reclusive geniuses Autechre? Of course. Skrillex? Erm… oh, go on then. If you’re Bilbao-way, the Cervantes selects Azkena Rocks (19-20 Jun). It rocks indeed, with Queens-kid at heart Jesse Malin and his old band of punk-rockers D Generation high up on the bill, and a headline set from Mastodon on the Saturday. In Madrid, Mulafest (25-28 Jun) proffers Hudson Mohawke and DJ sets from John Talabot and Mount Kimbie, while Oviedo gets Turbonegro in support of Iggy Pop at Faan Fest (19 Sep). Elsewhere, Granada comes alive with the more traditional International Festival of Music & Dance (19 Jun-10 Jul), San Sebastián hosts Jazzaldia (22-26 Jul), featuring diminutive jazz-popper Jamie Cullum, and Santander boasts one of Spain’s oldest festivals in its International Festival (1-29 Aug). To get the most out of your vacation, you can, of course, brush up on your Spanish in advance with a regular or intensive course at the Cervantes Institute on Deansgate in Manchester. Once abroad, you can seek out IC-accredited centres across Spain, including the headquarters in Madrid. ¡Felices vacaciones!
TLK 2 STDNTS Target 50,000 students across Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds. The Skinny Student Handbook, published Sep 2015 To secure your advertising space or for more information call The Skinny sales team on 0161 833 3124 or email sales@ theskinny.co.uk
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CLUBS
Review
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Book Highlights From a medieval Fifty Shades of Grey to an evening of experimental poetry, the start of summer brings a diverse selection of literary events to the Northwest Words: Alice Horne Illustration: George Morton
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iverpool’s Arab Arts Festival (LAAF) is back this June, bringing its eclectic mix of art, music, dance, film and literature to venues across the city in the only annual programme of its kind in the UK. Historian and writer on Arabic literature Robert Irwin discusses the recent translation of medieval Arab fantasy collection Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange at The Bluecoat on 6 Jun. Found in a single manuscript in a library in Istanbul, Tales of the Marvellous is the earliest known collection of Arabic stories – think Arabian Nights, only stranger and, apparently, sexier. Dubbed the medieval answer to Fifty Shades of Grey, these tales are sure to fascinate, if not raise a few eyebrows. Opened to the public for the first time in October last year, Manchester’s newest literary landmark champions its Victorian heritage this month. Elizabeth Gaskell’s House hosts the first of two Victorian literature workshops, both dedicated to 1853: a formative year in England’s
BOOK OF THE MONTH Book of Numbers By Joshua Cohen
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Joshua Cohen has put together something really hefty in Book of Numbers. It’s work, though it’s enthralling work if you can get it. We start with a vaguely autobiographical thread, with struggling writer-narrator Joshua Cohen, and get snared with him into another. He’s tasked with ghostwriting a reclusive tech mogul’s life story. The pop cultural touchstones quickly make themselves available – Google, Jobs, Assange – though they don’t fetter Cohen. He’s nimble with them. Ghostwriter and ghostwritten are, in fact, both Joshua Cohens. From this conceit, real-life Cohen wades out into a very particular philosophical morass. In this age of information ubiquity, what becomes of the self? Are we divided or replicated? Perhaps we’re eroded, every ripple of binary shearing off another wee bit. Or maybe we’re spliced one into another – two Joshua Cohens meld. Of course these concerns are occupying myriad other thinkers and creators. Cohen’s work stands out because it’s witty. It’s got intellectual clout and a rare comic grace. Though Book of Numbers’ sprawl is aweinspiring, it can sometimes feel loose. There’s emails at the end that verge on ‘tl;dr.’ And, perhaps because this is such a bold piece of work, it’s problematic in parts. Cohen’s drawing of partner Rach, for instance, is rarely sympathetic. Still, Book of Numbers gamely flirts with greatness. Nothing coy about it. [Angus Sutherland] Out 4 June, published by Harvill Secker, RRP £18.99
literary history. Join Sherry Ashworth, writer and visiting teaching fellow of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University, on 3 Jun for an evening of discussion about Charles Dickens’ social commentary in Hard Times. Elsewhere, American humour writer and essayist David Sedaris brings his sell-out tour to Liverpool. Author of New York Times bestselling titles such as When You Are Engulfed in Flames and Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, Sedaris’s sharp social critique and observational wit make his readings as laugh-out-loud funny as any standup comedy. See him at the Echo Arena on 13 Jun. The start of summer certainly seems to bring out the poetic in Manchester, with three such events across the city this month. On 4 Jun, the historic Portico Library hosts readings from prize-winning poet and retired mathematician Martin Zarrop, Judy Kendall – a translator and lecturer in creative writing at University of Salford – and poet Jean Harrison. Meanwhile
The Other Room, an experimental poetry project based in Manchester, will be pushing the boundaries of the poetic form at The Castle Hotel on 10 Jun. Elsewhere, performance poetry organisation Apples and Snakes brings the popular Hit the Ode to Manchester this month. Hosted by native Mancunian Ben Mellor, a winner of BBC Radio 4’s National Poetry Slam, Hit the Ode will feature three exciting guest poets from across the UK and beyond. Head to Contact Theatre on 17 Jun for an evening of spoken word poetry at its freshest. Finally, science meets fiction on 17 Jun as Manchester-based publishers Comma Press host an informal discussion about the relationship between science and literature. In attendance are Comma Press founder and editor Ra Page, professor of unconventional computing at Manchester Metropolitan University Martyn Amos, and director of the Sleep and Memory
In the Enemy Camp: Selected Poems 1964-74
Review
Victorian Literature Workshops: 1853, Elizabeth Gaskell’s House, Manchester, Wed 3 Jun, 7pm, £5, elizabethgaskellhouse.co.uk An Evening with David Sedaris, Echo Arena, Liverpool, Sat 13 Jun, 7.15pm, £26, davidsedarisbooks.com Poetry at the Portico, The Portico Library, Manchester, Thu 4 Jun, 6.30pm, £8.50 (£5), theportico.org.uk The Other Room, The Castle Hotel, Manchester, Wed 10 Jun, 7pm, free, otherroom.org Hit the Ode, Contact Theatre, Manchester, Wed 17 Jun, 7.30pm, £6 (£3), contactmcr.com When Science Meets Fiction, The Salutation Pub, Manchester, Wed 17 Jun, 4pm, free, commapress.co.uk
Liberty Bazaar
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David Chadwick
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‘Things never became easy’ for William Wantling, wrote Charles Bukowski, and ‘that’s why he continued to write well.’ And remain criminally undiscovered, enduring a life of suffering – war, penitentiary, addiction, death – to make Bukowski turn green with envy. But for all those harsh landscapes he inhabited, the Enemy Camp remained his reputable home town of Peoria, Illinois, where, as he claims in the titular piece of this collection, ‘I can’t find one lousy joint of weed and nobody here ever heard of peyote.’ Wantling’s poetry is soaked in booze, peppered with track marks, sweating a mix of obscene truths and imaginings like the man himself after gulping down his favourite codeine cough syrup. Sentences flow over lines and across stanzas, raising questions while dragging you ever onward through squalid yet stunning tales; always with rhythm, rarely rhyme. These are perfectly set to page with truncated words, slang and ampersands providing visual markers to the mood and movement of the work. His Heroin Haikus are short, sharp uppercuts. Then, in a piece simply named Poetry, he glides from pondering the literary devices of consonance and assonance into a lethal shanking in the San Quentin yard – a self-deprecating reflection on the redundancy of words when faced with the life and death physicality of the big house. For many who approach this outstanding collection, the brew may prove too strong. But ‘Ah Baby, don’t pout. The game is a good one.’ [Alan Bett]
There are certain buttons a writer can push for any individual reader that initiate a simple, powerful ‘yes to this’ response and pretty much destroy the potential for anything approaching objectivity. The moment Ryan Van Winkle began a poem with a lyric from The Decemberists, this reviewer was pretty much gone. The Portland folk-rock group actually make an ideal touchstone for understanding Van Winkle’s latest collection, The Good Dark. Imagery of woodland scenes and drifting snow, red berries and the sound of the sea hark back nostalgically to a simpler time, softly recalling lost childhoods and past loves. Though the images draw on a time gone by, the focus is still very much on the now – on love and life in the modern world. This harmonising of the old and the new, the classically romantic and the intensely modern, is characteristic of both The Decemberists’ music and Van Winkle’s verses, and he extends it to the works he references within his own – heading his poems with quotations from an eclectic panoply of sources ranging from Abraham Lincoln to David Lynch to Snoopy. The Good Dark feels like poetry written in the quiet time a little after a heartbreak; a time for sitting still and calm contemplation. It moves between stabbing pain, deep melancholy and cautious optimism, always with the same gentle touch. [Ross McIndoe] Out now, published by Penned in the Margins, RRP £9.99
Out now, published by Tangerine Press, RRP £12.00
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Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange, The Bluecoat, Liverpool, Sat 6 Jun, 1pm, free (booking required), arabartsfestival.com
The Good Dark
By Ryan Van Winkle
By William Wantling
Laboratory at the University of Manchester, Penelope Lewis. Expect to hear about scientific dystopia, the new technologies of reading and Comma’s latest anthology, Beta Life.
High society is a form of captivity in this rollicking tour through Victorian Liverpool, which also happens to be a searing indictment of Britain’s role in the American Civil War. Luckily, David Chadwick’s historical thriller is compassionate and exceedingly smart, examining Anglo-American relations with the precision of a surgeon. Two protagonists battle it out to allow their story to have the final say. Young Trinity Giddings is a slave girl in the American south, planning to run for freedom on the night of her mother’s funeral. Her escape is told brilliantly, hijacked by brief, impressionist images of division. Her journey across the Atlantic lands her in the care of ‘richcrats,’ Liverpool’s liberal elite, who seek to conscript her as a propaganda piece. Meanwhile, General Jubal de Brooke is plucked from the smoking hell of war and sent to England as an ambassador for the Confederacy. Both of these characters are forced to deal with themselves and each other, navigating the entrapments and collusions of civilised aggression. Chadwick’s prose paints his shuffling urban milieu with a nose for detail, inhaling the rich tang of docklands crowds, the sweeping egalitarianism of street life forming a tragic backbone for the limitations of the rich. What really stands out, however, is the twin narrative, muddying the heroic waters yet acknowledging their existence in a time of violent opposition. It amounts to a revealing look at vested interests, and the fact that Britain has more blood on its hands than it would care to admit. [Joshua Potts] Out now, published by Aurora Metro, RRP £9.99
BOOKS
THE SKINNY
Spotlight: Will Duggan The smart standup talks beating up Pop Idol contestants, making 15 minutes last 40 and being guided by ghosts Interview: Edy Hurst
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o the impressionable (and probably emotionally scarred) youth who attended last year’s Edinburgh success story Funz and Gamez, he will forever be known as Bonzo the Dog in the Foster’s Panel Prize-winning show. But Will Duggan is more than just the drunken stag party attendee who got lost. He is also a superb standup in his own right, performing sharp, honest comedy delivered with an arsenal of finetuned vocabulary. Though he still aspires to be known as ‘that guy from that thing.’ First gig: “Saki Bar, Rusholme. February 2008. I felt like a God amongst men. It went well and I assumed I was a genius. Though in reality the audience were all my friends and were being very kind. I did Beat the Frog two days later and lasted a sweet 30 seconds. I didn’t do any more gigs for a year.” Best gig: “Manford's Comedy Club in Matlock. One of those gigs where the audience were just wonderful, all the acts were on their game and the venue knew exactly what to do to make the night run smoothly. I felt the closest to a rock star that I ever will. Plus they bought me a Chinese.” Worst gig: “Great question. I had been gigging for about a year and had been asked to do 15 minutes before a famous telly comic at a charity gig. I went down in my suit, ate my dinner and waited. Just before I was due to go on the organiser told me that said telly comic hadn’t arrived and would I mind doing an hour and a half. I explained that to be honest I was sort of pushing it with 15 minutes. He told me to do what I could. He went on the stage and said to the audience of about 400 very rich, posh, middle-aged people ‘Who’s looking forward to seeing <famous telly comic>?’ They all cheer. He says, ‘He’s not here. Please welcome Will Duggan.’ I managed 40 minutes. To absolute silence.”
June 2015
Favourites on the Northwest circuit: “We are spoiled in the Northwest for good acts. The people I started with who have become my close friends are all spectacular. Kiri PritchardMcLean, Pete Otway, Brennan Reece, Gein’s Family Giftshop, James Meehan, Katie Mulgrew, Harriet Dyer. My favourite is Will Duggan though. He’s so, so beautiful.” Best heckle: “Best heckle I’ve ever heard was one aimed at me in Cardiff. A fight broke out while I was on stage. I tried to have a chat with those fighting and one of the guys said, ‘Sorry about this mate. I think you’re doing a grand job but this cunt won’t shut up.’ Then he immediately hit him. There was absolutely nothing I could say.” If you could be haunted by anyone, who would it be and why? “Peter Cook. I reckon he’d work wonders for my career.” If you were on death row, what would your last meal be? And why are you on death row? “I’d be on death row because I’d finally flip and massacre the ever-living shit out of everyone who's ever wronged me. I have a list. Last meal would be doner kebab. Large.” What’s the largest animal you think you could beat in a fight? No weapons. “Rik Waller.” Question from past Spotlighter Danny Sutcliffe: How do you operate a fire extinguisher? Please hurry. “Anaesthetise it first. Then cut it open. Fix it. Stitch it shut. Let it recover. Give it any required post-op treatment. Easy.” You can catch Will Duggan at Gallaghers, Liverpool, 6 Jun; the Funz and Gamez Tooz preview, Burscough Wharf, 13 Jun; Laughter Lounge, Warrington, 28 Jun and finally at the King's Arms, Salford, as part of The Skinny Spotlight on 12 Jul
MIFs and buts Manchester International Festival offers a full comedy programme this year, and while the lineup is solid and varied, our Comedy editor wonders where the locals are Words: John Stansfield Illustration: Will Daw
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topping by every couple of years like an absentee father, the Manchester International Festival turns up with hundreds of great stories of friends old and new, then whisks you away on myriad adventures before leaving you broken and exhausted on your mum’s doorstep. This year’s instalment is no different, with perhaps more old friends than new (we’re looking at you Björk and Albarn!) and always from further afield geographically than where you really want your (definitely metaphorical) dad to be. MIF does wonders for tourism and seems to aim to inspire rather than induct the local talent. Though they have dipped their toe in the comedy waters in the past, with 2013’s Smokey’s Barbers and the odd time they’ve given Johnny Vegas free rein to create something ridiculous, this year they have gone in two-footed with a full comedy programme. To oversee this, they have asked London’s The Invisible Dot to curate a three-pronged attack on your funny bone with a mix of live theatre, multimedia and standup. First up is The Crocodile, a new play written by Tom Basden, based on the short story of the same name by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Basden has priors working with some of the best comedy names around (and James Corden). He’s a frequent collaborator with fellow Invisible Dot favourite Tim Key and has been BAFTA nominated for his work on Channel 4’s Fresh Meat. The play is described by the writer as a “daft and deft satire on art, animals and selling out,” and should be a nice transition from the heavier subjects the festival tackles with its dramatic pieces to the lighter side of the comedy section. Adam Buxton will also be on hand to introduce some of his friends and his own new material in the elaborately titled Adam Buxton & Friends, running from 3-5 July. It will no doubt ape his usual BUG show stylings where he picks apart the very nature of the Internet and what it is that makes it so very hilarious. The third
COMEDY
prong of this comedy trident, though, is perhaps the most exciting, with a host of The Invisible Dot’s favourite acts heading to their late-night cabaret lineup. James Acaster, Tom Basden, Natasia Demetriou & Ellie White, Mae Martin, Nick Mohammed, Sheeps and Liam Williams will all be here in the Pavilion Theatre that transforms Albert Square into Festival Square over the course of the festival. There is no doubt that this is an outstanding lineup, and that The Invisible Dot is a good choice to put together such a high calibre of acts, but there is still the strange feeling that the city in which the festival takes place has been criminally overlooked. The Invisible Dot is based in London, as are all the acts, and the only international amongst the lineup is the Canadian Mae Martin. Martin spent a short time with The Second City in Toronto, which would have made an interesting addition to the comedy section of a supposed international festival. If they are to ignore the ‘International’ part of MIF so brazenly, then it might have been nice to put some emphasis on the ‘Manchester’ part of the festival. Many of the people on the cabaret lineup have appeared at some time or another on the XS Malarkey stage (James Acaster headlines on Tue 16 Jun). Meanwhile, Group Therapy were the first weekend club to rather bravely put on Sheeps to headline at Gorilla back in November of last year, and have hosted Adam Buxton’s shows too. Though it is the festival’s first time dealing with a comedy section, it might be better if they looked closer to home to source both promoters and comics to breathe more life into what is a very exciting time for Manchester’s comedy scene. Instead they have taken the easy option and completely ignored the hardworking folk that put on comedy week in, week out here in the city. See you in a couple of years, Dad. Hopefully you’ll have more interest in your own kids by then.
Review
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Film Event Highlights Cockney gangsters, dandy vampires, gonzo journalists and singing nuns: it’s another eclectic cinematic offering this month Words: Simon Bland
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une is here, which means only one thing: we’re officially halfway to Christmas. Before you rush out and bulk buy some tinsel, though, there’re a few filmy events that are well worth your time. First up, Stockport Town Hall hosts a Sound of Music sing-along (19 Jun) celebrating 50 years of catchy tunes and awkward Von Trapp romance. Filmed just one year after Uncle Walt’s passion project Mary Poppins, Robert Wise’s Sound of Music showed audiences that Julie Andrews had much more to offer than a just a spoonful of sugar. As the film turns half a century old, it’s still as powerful and resonant as ever and remains one of the most important entries in its leading lady’s IMDB CV. After an indie alternative? Head to Moston Small Cinema for touching drama I’m With You (12-13 Jun). Based on real events, this tearjerker follows Emily, a girl who discovers her dead father has left a series of homemade DVDs for her to watch at key moments in her life. Meanwhile in Liverpool, FACT has music doc The Damned: Don’t You Wish That We Were Dead (9 Jun) looking at the forgotten pioneers of punk and featuring exclusive interviews with Motorhead’s Lemmy, The Clash’s Mick Jones and many more. Director Wes Orshoski will be live for one night only too: he’ll be around for a post-screening Q&A.
Listen Up Philip
Black Coal, Thin Ice
Slow West
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Director: Diao Yi’nan Starring: Liao Fan, Gwei Lun-Mei, Wang Xuebing Released: 5 Jun Certificate: 15 In Black Coal, Thin Ice, writer-director Diao Yi’nan takes the tropes of a classic noir detective tale – a down-and-out alcoholic cop with a haunted past, a mysterious woman with an air of danger, cases and characters that refuse to stay dead – and transplants them into modern China. Zhang (Fan) is the cop in question – wrecked by a murder case that takes the lives of several of his friends, he becomes hell-bent on solving it himself when the killer re-emerges five years later. Wu Zhizhen (Lun-Mei) is the woman – a widowed laundry worker whose boyfriends have developed a habit of turning up dead ever since her husband’s own violent demise. The film is as dark and cold as its title, unravelling its mysteries amidst frost, fog and murky streetlights. The slick veneer of the American gumshoe movie is traded for a naturalistic style in keeping with the rundown streets its characters live upon, and the result is a stark, harsh murder mystery interspersed with Wong Kar-wai-esque moments of odd urban beauty. [Ross McIndoe]
Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films
Director: Mark Hartley Starring: Dolph Lundgren, Alex Winter, Franco Nero Released: 5 Jun Certificate: 18
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The Long Good Friday
There’s more than one movie anniversary this month. Gangster epic The Long Good Friday brings cockney powerhouse Bob Hoskins back to the big screen for the film’s 35th birthday. Director John Mackenzie’s gritty tale sees Hoskins firing on all cylinders as cockney hardman Harold Shand, a mobster whose dreams of going straight go tits up when a rival syndicate tries to muscle in on his turf. Helen Mirren and a young Pierce Brosnan round out the cast of what’s become a Brit crime classic. Go wish it Happy Birthday at FACT (21 Jun). Grimm Up North have a couple of belters for you too. Neil Jordan’s seminal Interview with the Vampire comes to The Dancehouse (11 Jun), chronicling the ups and downs of Anne Rice’s legendary neck-biter Lestat de Lioncourt and bigging up vamps before it was cool. Also, Terry Gilliam does a good job of unraveling Hunter S Thompson’s twisted Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, roping Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro into the shoes of Raoul Duke and Dr Gonzo, respectively. Head to Manchester Central Library on 4 Jun if you want to take the trip deep into bat country – but please, bring your own ether.
54
Review
Slow West
Director: John Maclean Starring: Michael Fassbender, Kodi Smit-McPhee Released: 26 Jun Certificate: 15 There’s a steely confidence to John Maclean’s debut feature, a lyrical fairytale in which a doe-eyed Scottish teen (Smit-McPhee) treks west in search of the object of a puppy-love crush. “He’s a jackrabbit in a den of wolves,” says the flinty bounty hunter (Fassbender) who offers him protection on his journey. Maclean’s askance outsider’s view of America’s Old West is bracing. He strips away the pioneering myths and shows it for what it truly was: a melting pot of foreign cultures snatching whatever was up for grabs. This ugly human nature is depicted with beauty and wit. As shot by master cinematographer Robbie Ryan, each scene bursts with inventive imagery, from the spread-eagle skeleton of a moronic woodcutter beneath the tree he was felling, to a shootout in a corn field where the gunmen bobbing up to take their shots look like targets in a game of Whac-A-Mole. Maclean’s dialogue is similarly poetic. “Let’s build a rail to the moon,” says the kid. Like his protagonist, Maclean’s a dreamer shooting for the stars. [Jamie Dunn]
Listen Up Philip
Director: Alex Ross Perry Starring: Jason Schwartzman, Elisabeth Moss, Jonathan Pryce Released: 5 Jun Certificate: 15
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Following Not Quite Hollywood, his 2008 documentary about the Australian exploitation cinema of the 1970s and 80s, writer-director Mark Hartley returns to profile more outrageous movies from around the same time. Electric Boogaloo looks at the rise and fall of Cannon Films under the rule of Israeli cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, who forced their way into the Hollywood game with low budget, sometimes bizarre genre films with an apparent lack of quality control and savvy new ways of getting films financed (going to Cannes with posters promising stars they hadn’t even contacted, yet alone contracted). Thanks to the sheer number of films featured, Electric Boogaloo is never dull, but it rarely feels like more than a lengthy clip reel, lacking Not Quite Hollywood’s less broad contextual analysis; the absence of both Globus and the just-departed Golan definitely hurts it. And while it’s fun revelling in Death Wish sequel shlock, more curious projects from Godard and Cassavetes that inexplicably ended up at the studio get too fleeting a look. [Josh Slater-Williams]
With its portentous narration and bike-riding/book-writing aesthetic, this third feature from Alex Ross Perry is a masterclass in tarnished twee. Shot on faded 16mm and never once depicting digital technology, its charming retrograde trimmings are essentially a Trojan horse for the title character’s caustic tirades. Jason Schwartzman leads as an ambitious Brooklynite novelist whose artistic process seems to hinge upon the creation of personal conflict, the author’s sociopathic behaviour often following in the footsteps of his heroes. When one such inspiration offers to take Philip under his wing, the protagonist carelessly abandons his girlfriend and we see how each character’s actions impacts upon the next. The relationship between pain and productivity is a popular subject within metafiction, and Perry addresses it without succumbing to trite platitudes. The writer-director seems more interested in asking whether hurt or isolation is worth the perceived end goal. Yet while it takes guts to present a tale in which no one achieves redemption, Listen Up Philip could be accused of sacrificing humanity for style. [Lewis Porteous]
The Look of Silence
She’s Funny That Way
Director: Joshua Oppenheimer Released: 12 Jun Certificate: 15
Director: Peter Bogdanovich Starring: Imogen Poots, Owen Wilson, Jennifer Aniston Released: 26 Jun Certificate: 12A
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The prospect of crafting a worthy successor to the phenomenal The Act of Killing is a daunting one, but with The Look of Silence, Joshua Oppenheimer has risen to the challenge. Although less formally daring than its predecessor, it proves the perfect companion piece, shifting from a wide-angle lens on the 1960s Indonesian genocide, to an intimate close-up. In the earlier film, the perpetrators basked in the camera’s limelight. Many now shift uncomfortably and defensively beneath its gaze, confronted with their crimes here by Adi, whose brother was murdered in the purge. An optometrist, he goes door-to-door conducting eye-tests while attempting to combat the moral myopia of his brother’s killers. Complicity lives in the reticence – evoked in the title – that oft settles on proceedings, but is arguably the only sane response to indescribable barbarism. “The past is the past,” says one man. “I don’t want to remember.” Adi’s only riposte is his quietly crushing dignity, which forms the heart of this more personal film that is once again imperative and devastating viewing. [Ben Nicholson]
FILM
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Peter Bogdanovich’s movies come marinaded in his love of Hollywood’s Golden Age. In this dizzy soufflé he’s channelling Lubitsch, Sturges and Hawks. Like them, he creates an off-kilter comic world that’s hermitically sealed but airy. The setting is New York, but it’s the New York of the movies, a city of eight million where everyone’s connected by a single degree of separation. The outlandish plot takes the form of intertwined romantic imbroglios centred around Brooklyn call girl Izzy (Poots). A theatre director with a Pretty Woman-complex (Wilson) has just given her 30 grand to give up turning tricks and pursue acting. This sends her number one John (Austin Pendleton) into meltdown. A belligerent therapist (Aniston), her putupon playwright husband (Will Forte) and the world’s most conspicuous private-eye (George Morfogen) pile on the comic complications. Like the 40s screwballs it pinches from, it’s daft and often hilarious – particularly angry Aniston. What’s missing, however, is the romance; the heat. We’re left with a delicious and frothy cappuccino, but without any of the espresso hit. [Jamie Dunn]
THE SKINNY
Jupiter Ascending
Difret
The Interview
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Director: Andy Wachowski, Lana Wachowski Starring: Channing Tatum, Mila Kunis Released: 29 Jun Certificate: 12A In the Wachowskis’ latest, Channing Tatum plays a flying wolfman from space. The film to fit that description is going to be outlandish, unusual, action-packed and at least a little comical. Jupiter Ascending is all of those things. It might also be imaginative, visually impressive, emotionally engaging, exciting and genuinely funny. Jupiter Ascending is not really any of these things. Channing Tatum plays a flying wolfman from space, and this film is somehow boring. A vast universe is created, with civilisations on far flung planets with technology far beyond our own, and aristocratic power struggles dating back before our own began. But from the opening scenes of Kunis as a modern day Cinderella, scrubbing apartments while dreaming of a better life, all the way through to the obligatory blockbuster finale where the rest of the budget is spectacularly combusted in a shower of CGI, not one moment of the movie is interesting. [Ross McIndoe]
Director: Zeresenay Mehari Starring: Tizita Hagere, Meron Getnet Released: 29 Jun Certificate: 12A Zeresenay Berhane Mehari’s film is unusual for a work of Ethiopian cinema. Shot in 35mm, it eschews the more export-friendly English language for Amharic, and boasts Ethiopia’s first ever female director of photography and a large cast of predominantly female actors.The story follows Hirut, a 14-year-old girl, who’s abducted on her way home from school. Beaten and raped by her would-be groom, Hirut snatches a gun and shoots him in self-defence. When Hirut is arrested for murder, humanitarian lawyer Meaza fights for the girl’s right to freedom, negotiating the ingrained misogyny of both Ethiopian tradition and modern bureaucracy. Difret is thus concerned with Ethiopian feminism in both method and narrative, unflinchingly telling the story of how one girl’s unprecedented legal victory led to the criminalisation of ‘telefa,’ or the abduction of girls for forced marriage, still endemic in Ethiopia today. [Rachel Bowles]
The backdrop: green-screen North Korea. The premise: self-serving entertainment hacks Dave Skylark (Franco) and Aaron Rapaport (Rogen) are coerced by the CIA into assassinating Kim Jong-Un (Randall Park). Hilarity allegedly ensues. Great comedy can take aim at any subject, and make us feel terrible for laughing when it hits the mark. In comedic aim, The Interview is scattershot, firing at race, sexual orientation and gender. But a typical line from Aaron – “Did you say China? And did you just say dong?” – demonstrates how far it misses its targets. As though already apologising for his part, Franco’s character winces away criticism, cultural gulfs, and a volatile dictator with the mantra: “They hate us ’cos they ain’t us.” To which, at one point, Aaron responds with startling acuity: “No. They hate us because we’re fucking terrible.” And in this fluke moment of truth, he states all there is to it. [Kirsty Leckie-Palmer]
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Miss Osbourne
Jauja
Director: Lisandro Alonso Starring: Viggo Mortensen, Ghita Nørby Released: 8 Jun Certificate: 15
Paper Moon
Director: Peter Bogdanovich Starring: Ryan O’Neal, Tatum O’Neal Released: Out now Certificate: PG
Director: Walerian Borowczyk Starring: Udo Kier, Marina Pierro Released: Out now Certificate: 18
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Part realist anti-western, part Tarkovsky-esque head-scratcher, Lisandro Alonso’s fifth feature is an arthouse masterpiece with enough traditional narrative momentum to hold sway before delivering a mystical one-two punch of mind-bending abstraction. With its richly saturated, meticulously composed landscapes – at once sweeping and claustrophobic – this is the year’s best-looking film, but it’s also a sneaky critique of egomaniacal control. Mortensen plays Dinesen, a 19th-century Danish captain leading an expedition into the Patagonian desert with his beautiful young daughter in tow. When the girl flees camp with a handsome soldier, he mounts a one-man rescue mission as a mysterious Kurtz-like figure, wreaking bloody havoc across the countryside. The titular ‘Land of Plenty’ is a mythical paradise that leads all who try to find it to become irretrievably lost. Like Dinesen himself, you’ll probably feel lost too by the end, but the haunting images of Jauja will not leave you any time soon. [Michelle Devereaux]
Director: Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg Starring: James Franco, Seth Rogen Released: 8 Jun Certificate: 15
rrrrr Walerian Borowczyk’s uniquely erotic take on Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic gothic tale of split personality re-imagines Dr Jekyll’s experimental transmutations into Mr Hyde not as social regression but libertine rebellion against the suffocating social mores of upper-class fin-de-siècle society. Dr. Jekyll’s family and guests gather to celebrate his engagement to Miss Osbourne and, in classic Buñelian fashion, bourgeois ritual repeatedly interrupts the desires of the couple. As guests start to appear brutally raped and murdered, Borowcyzk’s film unravels into something between a lurid giallo and proto-New French Extremism. Despite its manic brilliance, Strange Case suffers from problematic sexual and racial politics, with the camera’s gaze leering at incestuous sexual abuse, and wordless juvenile and black characters present only for the fleshly spectacle of their rapes at the hands of supposed übermensch Mr Hyde. [Rachel Bowles]
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In the early 70s Peter Bogdanovich was a superstar director. After monochrome elegy The Last Picture Show and breakneck farce What’s Up, Doc?, he struck gold again with Paper Moon, a screwball slowed down, a black-and-white con-artist road comedy with bittersweet spirit and sober reflection on how folks got by during the Great Depression. Father-daughter combo Ryan and Tatum O’Neal play Moses and Addie – he’s a swindler (and probably her long-lost dad), she’s a cute little nine-year-old who smokes like a trooper and proves a quick study at scams. Paper Moon sees through Addie’s scowls and Moses’s refusal to show emotion to find a tender bond, forged in a series of hilarious scrapes. The title underscores the fakery and the romance of both criminality and moviemaking, and Bogdanovich shoots in a style somewhere between warm pastiche and gritty realism. Sweet, playful, reverberant – this is a perfect movie. [Ian Mantgani]
ADVERTISING FEATURE
Northern Greats: The Yoga Lounge As she prepares to hold a mass yoga event marking the summer solstice, we speak to Yoga Lounge owner Jane Dowler for the latest in our series meeting residents of the Great Northern
Y
oga has enjoyed a surge in popularity in recent years. From 20-minute ‘express’ sessions for busy workers trying to find peace on their lunchbreaks to intensive residential retreats, there seems to be a variety of this ancient practice for everyone, whatever their level or schedule. Open for two years, The Yoga Lounge in Manchester’s Great Northern Warehouse is the first dedicated Hot Yoga studio in the UK, offering a unique fusion of styles and sequences that keeps things challenging but remains accessible for beginners. Now, to celebrate the summer solstice on 21 June, the team behind The Yoga Lounge are planning a mass yoga event to take place in the square outside the GNW building. Ahead of this festival of sun worship, we spoke to founder Jane Dowler to find out more about the day, as well as her passion for yoga. The Skinny: What was your inspiration behind setting up The Yoga Lounge? Jane Dowler: I only started yoga when I was about 36. I was always quite fit – I did lots of runs and 10ks and half marathons and went to the gym – but as I got older... you kind of feel a bit less flexible, and achey. So I heard about hot yoga via Bikram [Bikram Yoga, in Manchester’s
June 2015
Northern Quarter], and I absolutely fell in love with it. I was hooked; I gave up my gym membership, I was going four, five times a week. I was in the changing rooms one day chatting to a girl about it, and she said you should Google ‘hot yoga’, there’s lots of different styles out there. Allie Hill – her studio is called Yoga Haven – I went on one of her retreats and I was just blown away by her method; it was as good as Bikram but better, because there was more variety. I follow someone called Baron Baptiste; I’m going training in New York in August, he’s like a hot flow style. I’ve also been to Absolute Yoga in Thailand, another style of hot yoga. So I’ve just chosen the best bits of all of them, really, and fused them together to make the Yoga Lounge’s style. What does the Yoga Lounge’s style involve? We have our own signature sequence, the Hot 60. It’s 60 minutes long, 40 postures, for the whole body and mind so it’s a balanced sequence. The heat is good because it makes your muscles more pliable. It’s like when you heat metal up, it becomes quite loose, soft; that’s what happens to your muscles. Hot yoga makes it more into a physical workout.
The Yoga Lounge
Can you tell us more about the yoga event you have planned for the summer solstice? In yoga, traditionally [for the summer solstice] they do 108 salutations, to kind of cleanse. In Times Square every year in New York they have a huge event that’s like 13 years in. It’s a change of season festival, and it’s huge in NY, it’s always on the telly – a bit like a marathon. It lasts about four hours. They don’t practice [all] 108 salutations [there] purely because it would be quite intense for people, so they have a variety of teachers on, which is what we're going to do. We’re going to have a four-hour ‘yoga-thon’ with some of Manchester’s best teachers. They’re not just from The Yoga Lounge; Andrea Everingham, who owns One Yoga, is going to lead it. She’s got 15 years’ experience in Manchester as a yoga teacher and she’s phenomenal in her energy; she’s really good at getting the crowd going.
it’s the weather! It was one of our teachers who suggested it. And then I thought, if we’re going to do it we should do it for a charity. We’ve done some donation classes and most other teachers in Manchester have done donation classes for Nepal. So I’ve contacted Unicef and they’re going to support us. It’s a free event but people can donate what they want. I’ve put it on Facebook and we’ve already got people who can’t make it [but still] want to donate a couple of hundred pounds. Hopefully we’ll raise quite a bit! To sign up for the summer solstice yoga event on 21 June (11am start), contact The Yoga Lounge: theyogalounge. co.uk. Find The Yoga Lounge on Twitter at @theyogaloungeuk thegreatnorthern.com | @gnwarehouse
Have you held an event like this before? It’s the first time it’s ever been done in the UK; they’ve never even done it in London. Maybe
DVD
Review
55
Win Two Tickets to Gandini Juggling: 4x4 at The Lowry
Directed by world-renowned juggler Sean Gandini and choreographed by Royal Ballet dancer Ludovic Ondiviela, 4x4 sees four jugglers and four ballet dancers share a stage for the first time. Following the international success of Smashed, 4x4 sees Gandini Juggling return to its love affair with pure patterns and mathematics, and is a sensational cross-art form experience.
The Guardian ’s four-star review called it “a show of elegant, wistful beauty.” The Times praised “a splendid blend of talents imbued with both elegance and wit” and The Stage thought it “a clever, cool and wondrous show that gives delight.”
For your chance to win a pair of tickets to see 4x4 on 1 July at The Lowry in Salford, simply head across to www.theskinny.co.uk/competitions and correctly answer the following question: What is the world record for the most balls juggled, according to Guinness World Records? a) 3 b) 11 c) 23 Competition closes midnight Sunday 21 June. Winners will be notified via email within two working days of closing and will be required to respond within 48 hours or the prize will be offered to another entrant. Our Ts&Cs can be found at www.theskinny.co.uk/about/terms-and-conditions thelowry.com/event/4-x-4
Advertise Here! If you’re reading this advert, so are 125,000 other people this month. Ask your friendly neighbourhood sales team how you can advertise too. To find out more contact us on 0161 833 3124 or sales@theskinny.co.uk
@TheSkinnyNW
I N D E P E N D E N T
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Illustration: www.verbals-picks.com
THE SKINNY
Manchester Music Tue 02 Jun THE LAFONTAINES
THE RUBY LOUNGE, 19:30–22:30, £7.50
Motherwell outfit deftly combining portions of hip-hop, pop, rock and electro into one thumping melodic block of noise. ROBYN HITCHCOCK (EMMA SWIFT)
BAND ON THE WALL, 19:30–22:30, FROM £10
Self-described as making ‘paintings you can listen to’, the Londonbased singer/songwriter does his e’er impressive thing. FÖLLAKZOID
SOUP KITCHEN, 19:30–23:00, £8.50
Chilean-based cosmic musos, dabbling in everything from classic rock to punk. Oh, and it’s pronounced foll-ack-zoid, FYI. RIOGHNACH CONNOLLY & HENRY BOTHAM
MATT AND PHRED’S JAZZ CLUB, 21:00–00:00, FREE
Blues, jazz and swing trio, enriched by Rioghnach Connolly’s warm vocals. ESTIVAL 2015
MARTIN HARRIS CENTRE FOR MUSIC AND DRAMA, 13:10–21:30, PRICES VARY
The Manchester University Music Society host their annual equivalent to the Proms, packing in nine concerts over the course of four days. DINNER
GULLIVERS, 19:30–23:00, £5
Captured Tracks-signed indie racket. GISELA JOÃO
ROYAL NORTHERN COLLEGE OF MUSIC, 19:30–22:30, FROM £14
The new fado singer making waves in Portugal looks to do the same in the UK.
ALLAH-LAS
ANTELOPES
GORILLA BAR MANCHESTER, 19:30–23:00, £10
EAGLE INN, 20:00–23:00, £4
Los Angeles-based rock quartet keeping true to their Californian roots, building their sound on fuzzy harmonies, well-worn Fenders and suntans. CHRISTIAN MCBRIDE TRIO
BAND ON THE WALL, 19:30–22:30, FROM £18
The local three-piece garage rockers headline the latest Sunny bill. SPACE CASSETTE (AGE OF GLASS + HENGE + WALK + MARC CONSTANTINE + MORE)
SECRET LOCATION, 21:30–05:00, £9
A night of live electronic music and ritual dancing. RNCM SESSION ORCHESTRA
The renowned American jazz bassist takes to Manchester as a trio, along with pianist Christian Sands and drummer Ulysses Owens Jr.
ROYAL NORTHERN COLLEGE OF MUSIC, 19:00–22:00, £10
MATT AND PHRED’S JAZZ CLUB, 21:00–00:30, FREE
THE ANNUAL THREE BRASS BANDS CONCERT
JAMIE BROWNFIELD QUARTET
A mix of bebop, mainstream swing and New Orlean’s funk from British Jazz Award up-and-comer, Jamie Brownfield. ARIANA GRANDE
MANCHESTER ARENA, 17:30–22:30, FROM £32.50
American singer and actress who recently split with Big Sean after a whole eighth months. Woah. FICKLE FRIENDS
SOUND CONTROL, 19:00–22:30, £6
A BBC Introducing and Club NME showcase featuring the Brighton five-piece. ESTIVAL 2015
MARTIN HARRIS CENTRE FOR MUSIC AND DRAMA, 13:10–21:30, PRICES VARY
The Manchester University Music Society host their annual equivalent to the Proms, packing in nine concerts over the course of four days. RNCM BRASS BAND AND BLACK DYKE BAND
ROYAL NORTHERN COLLEGE OF MUSIC, 19:30–22:00, £10
The RNCM Session Orchestra continue to turn contemporary favourites into classical renditions.
ROYAL NORTHERN COLLEGE OF MUSIC, 19:30–22:00, £7
The youth brass bands of Wigan, Bolton and Astley join forces to present an evening of original compositions and popular brass arrangements, combining the sound of over 100 brass players.
Sat 06 Jun HIDDEN ORCHESTRA
MANCHESTER ACADEMY 3, 19:30–23:00, £15
Joe Acheson and his Edinburgh based outfit, duelling acoustic and digital percussion, piano, violin, bass and samples in one gloriously experimental whole. CHANTEL MCGREGOR
BAND ON THE WALL, 19:30–22:30, FROM £11
Yorkshire singer/songwriter working her virtuoso guitar magic on the blues genre. SKAMEL
MATT AND PHRED’S JAZZ CLUB, 21:30–01:00, £5
Wed 03 Jun
The brass bands unite to play Brahms, Ellerby and LovattCooper.
A preview of C’est Un Safari, the group’s new album.
O2 APOLLO, 19:00–23:00, £19.50
Fri 05 Jun
10-piece ska band from Blackpool, encouraging folk to let loose and dance like loons.
GEORGE EZRA
Young Bristol singer/songwriter known for his bluesy, acoustic balladry. SYLVAN ESSO
GORILLA BAR MANCHESTER, 19:30–23:00, £10
Amelia Meath’s supposed-to-be solo project, which turned into a duo when she met electronic producer Nick Sanborn. GUAJIRO CALENTANO
MATT AND PHRED’S JAZZ CLUB, 21:00–00:00, FREE
Mexican singer and songwriter brings his relatively new group across to the UK. SHURA
SOUP KITCHEN, 19:00–22:15, £7
Pop producer and singer/songwriter, aka Aleksandra Denton when she’s off stage. ESTIVAL 2015
MARTIN HARRIS CENTRE FOR MUSIC AND DRAMA, 13:10–21:30, PRICES VARY
The Manchester University Music Society host their annual equivalent to the Proms, packing in nine concerts over the course of four days.
AN EVENING WITH AMANDA PALMER
ROYAL NORTHERN COLLEGE OF MUSIC, 19:00–22:00, £19.50
YOUNG GUNS
MANCHESTER ACADEMY 2, 19:00–23:00, £12.50
London-based rock five-piece headered by the mighty Gustav Wood. TRISTAN MACKAY
THE DEAF INSTITUTE, 19:00-22:30, £12
The Devon-based songwriter heads out on tour for his second album, having been ‘discovered’ by Grammy Award-winning producer Martin Levan. SOUNDS OF THE ENGINE HOUSE
INTERNATIONAL ANTHONY BURGESS FOUNDATION, 20:00–22:00, £5
A project formed in 2010 dedicated to programming the work of living composers, joined by flautist Maria Chybowska and pianist Leanne Cody, play new works by David Curington, Ben Gaunt, and Francesca Le Lohé. JAH WOBBLE’S INVADERS OF THE HEART (SPHELM)
SOUND CONTROL, 19:00–22:00, £15
The PiL man is joined by some-time Stone Roses guitarist Aziz Ibrahim to celebrate his illustrious career as a musician. KING BEE
The DIY songstress hosts a special ‘An Evening With...’ live session, on the road in celebration of her new book The Art of Asking.
MATT AND PHRED’S JAZZ CLUB, 21:30–01:00, £5
Thu 04 Jun
SID GRIFFIN
BIG COUNTRY
WATERSIDE ARTS CENTRE, 19:30–22:30, £20
Dunfermline-born 80s rockers formed when Stuart Adamson left The Skids in 1981 and recruited guitar partner Bruce Watson head out on a Best Of tour. JOE PUG
GULLIVERS, 19:30–23:00, £8.50
Chicago-based singer/songwriter who abandoned playwriting in favour of becoming a musician. TINARIWEN
BRIDGEWATER HALL, 19:30–22:30, FROM £21
Tuareg musicians mixing electric blues and traditional Malian vocals, with lyrics rather hypnotically sung in French and Tamashek.
The Dave Wilde-formed group bring their blend of funk, groove and jazz to the stage. BAND ON THE WALL, 19:00–22:00, FROM £8
The former Long Ryders front man brings his alt-country sounds to the UK, in support of latest album The Trick Is To Breathe. ESTIVAL 2015
MARTIN HARRIS CENTRE FOR MUSIC AND DRAMA, 13:10–21:30, PRICES VARY
The Manchester University Music Society host their annual equivalent to the Proms, packing in nine concerts over the course of four days. A CAREFULLY PLANNED FESTIVAL #5 LAUNCH (TIGERNAUT + MAHOGANY + BEARFOOT BEWARE + BABY BRAVE) FALLOW CAFE, 20:00–02:30, FREE
Carefully Planned announce plans for their forthcoming October festival with a free party and a host of live music to boot. BRAVE THE NORTH
KRAAK, 19:30–22:30, £4
The indie rockers launch their new EP 15.
June 2015
SKA FACE (5FT FEZ)
THE RUBY LOUNGE, 19:00–22:30, £7
THE HALLÉ (BEETHOVEN)
BRIDGEWATER HALL, 19:30–22:00, FROM £11
The Hallé’s summer schedule sees the renowned orchestra go through some of the finest pieces of the classical canon. CYRIL SNEAR
SOUP KITCHEN, 19:30–22:15, £4
The genre-bending Mancunian math-rock chameleons are calling it a day with this final headlining show.
PARKLIFE (METRONOMY + EVERYTHING EVERYTHING + JAMES BLAKE + GHOSTPOET + MORE)
HEATON PARK, 12:00-23:00, PRICES VARY
Returning for its sixth year, the Parklife Weekender pitches up in Heaton Park for another two-day festival of jamz, inevitably resulting in a mass pilgrimage of the student population. AN EVENING WITH HOWARD JONES
MANCHESTER ACADEMY, 19:00–23:00, £29
The synth-pop master draws on his back catalogue, including renowned albums Human’s Lib and Dream Into Action. THE HAPPY HOLLOWS (REYKJAVIK KIDS)
THE CASTLE HOTEL, 19:30–23:00, £6
Los Angeles-based trio signed to indie label Pesky Fruit. LUCKY T. JACKSON
KRAAK, 19:30–22:30, £6
The Manchester four-piece bring their soulful pop to Kraak. RNCM SESSION ORCHESTRA
ROYAL NORTHERN COLLEGE OF MUSIC, 19:00–22:00, £10
DISTRACTFOLD ENSEMBLE
DAMIEN RICE
DREAMER
STUART MCCALLUM RESIDENCY
TANKUS THE HENGE
INTERNATIONAL ANTHONY BURGESS FOUNDATION, 19:00–22:00, £7
ALBERT HALL, 19:00–23:00, £SOLD OUT
MATT AND PHRED’S JAZZ CLUB, 21:30–01:00, £5
MATT AND PHRED’S JAZZ CLUB, 21:00–00:00, FREE
MATT AND PHRED’S JAZZ CLUB, 21:30–01:00, £5
Contemporary instrumental and electro-acoustic music from a dynamic group of musicians. KIKAGAKU MOYO
SOUP KITCHEN, 19:00–22:15, £8
Face-melting psych heads fond of late-night jams and off-kilter tangents.
INTERNATIONAL CONCERT SERIES (DIDO AND AENEAS) BRIDGEWATER HALL, 19:30–22:00, FROM £12
HEATON PARK, 12:00-23:00, PRICES VARY
Returning for its sixth year, the Parklife Weekender pitches up in Heaton Park for another two-day festival of jamz, inevitably resulting in a mass pilgrimage of the student population.
American music duo of pianist Jon Schmidt and cellist Steven Sharp Nelson, joined by their touring live collective. TAV FALCO’S PANTHERN BURNS
THE RUBY LOUNGE, 19:30–22:30, £12.50
SOUND CONTROL, 19:00–22:00, £8
ROB BUCKLAND AND PETER LAWSON
Rob Buckland and Peter Lawson celebrate 25 years performing together with the release of their new album Duality, featuring music by Tim Garland, Barbara Thompson, Jason Rebello, Graham Fitkin, Andy Scott and Rob himself.
Mon 08 Jun THE SLOW SHOW
GORILLA BAR MANCHESTER, 19:30–23:00, £12.50
Recently-formed Manc band chock with American alternative folk references, but with a distinctive Northern English touch. PATTI SMITH
O2 APOLLO, 19:00–23:00, £30
The legendary rock’n’roller, poet and artist takes to the stage some 40 years after her debut LP Horses was released, familiar yowl and husk well and truly in place. THE BOHICAS
SOUP KITCHEN, 19:00–22:00, £7
The Essex/London rock’n’roll foursome gear up for the release of their debut LP.
Tue 09 Jun JUAN ZELADA
THE CASTLE HOTEL, 19:30–23:00, £7
Talented Spanish singer/songwriter and musician, doing vocals and piano while accompanying himself with the acoustic guitar.
THE BOOGIE WILLIAMS TRIO GRANDE
MATT AND PHRED’S JAZZ CLUB, 21:00–00:00, FREE
Boogie Williams is joined by Alan ‘The Hat’ Whitham on bass and Richard young on drums, playing soul jazz, boogie and 60s groove. 5 SECONDS OF SUMMER
MANCHESTER ARENA, 18:00–23:00, FROM £25
Aussie pop-meets-rock boyband formed in Sydney back in 2011. BBC PHILHARMONIC (NIELSEN SYMPHONY CYCLE 1)
BRIDGEWATER HALL, 19:30–22:00, FROM £10
The BBC Philharmonic’s summer schedule sees Auntie’s finest orchestra explore classical mainstays and more leftfield compositions. DU BLONDE
THE DEAF INSTITUTE, 19:00–22:30, £10
Newcastle singer/songwriter Beth Jeans Houghton in her new Du Blonde guise, still making rather sweet nu-folk ditties.
Wed 10 Jun ELVIS COSTELLO
BRIDGEWATER HALL, 20:00–22:30, FROM £37.50
The Grammy Award-winner and Music Hall of Fame inductee draws upon 35-odd years of – let’s face it, a pretty damn impressive – back catalogue.
GILBERT O’SULLIVAN AND HIS BAND
ALBERT HALL, 19:00–23:00, £40
The mawkishly sentimental 70’s pop crooner brings his band to the Albert Hall. Shit’s gon’ get cheesy. ETERNAL TAPESTRY
Thu 11 Jun
PARKLIFE (GRACE JONES + NAS + CARIBOU + FKA TWIGS + MORE)
SOUP KITCHEN, 19:00–22:15, £5
ROYAL NORTHERN COLLEGE OF MUSIC, 15:00–17:00, £10
Sun 07 Jun Manchester-based singer/songwriter and artist signed to Skinny Dog Records, playing a gig on his home turf.
BRIDGEWATER HALL, 19:30–22:00, FROM £26.50
Tennessee-hailing rockers – oft shortened to Panther Burns – led by hirsute frontman Tav Falco.
The US-of-A experimental psych rockers hit town.
GIDEON CONN
THE PIANO GUYS
Eight-piece fun and soul outfit based in Manchester, playing a selection of 70s funk alongside more modern material.
Blow and Purcell are reprised in the latest International Concert Series.
The RNCM Session Orchestra continue to turn contemporary favourites into classical renditions.
THE CASTLE HOTEL, 19:30–23:00, £3.50
The soft-voiced Irish singer/songwriter returns to the live circuit with his new LP My Favourite Faded Fantasy.
KRAAK, 19:30–22:30, £8
BRITISH SEA POWER (BO NINGEN)
THE RITZ, 19:00–23:00, £17.50
The Brighton indie-rockers do their romantic, pastoral longing thing to suitably fine effect. THE BURNING HELL
EAGLE INN, 19:30–23:00, £7
Canadian folk artist Mathias Kom returns to the UK with a full band in tow for this latest round of Burning Hell shows.
ROBBIE COLES
Weston-Super-Mare-based singer-songwriter best known for his ‘long ginger hair’ apparently. Not sure what that says about his music. ANDREW JACKSON JIHAD
POSTCARDS FROM JEFF
Alternative dream-pop meanderings of Joss Worthington, crafting a cinematic experience with his multi-layered experimentation.
PLAYLOUNGE (THE WINTER PASSING + RICE MILK + COP GRAVEYARD) THE CASTLE HOTEL, 19:30–23:00, £5
The London/Brighton-hailing noise rockers hit Manchester. BBC PHILHARMONIC (NIELSEN SYMPHONY CYCLE II)
BRIDGEWATER HALL, 19:30–22:00, FROM £10
The BBC Philharmonic’s summer schedule sees Auntie’s finest orchestra explore classical mainstays and more leftfield compositions.
THE DEAF INSTITUTE, 19:30–23:00, £10
DOTS & LOOPS 9TH BIRTHDAY (THE POP GROUP + GUM TAKES TOOTH + KOGUMAZA + DEAD SEA APES)
JENNY HVAL
THE RUBY LOUNGE, 18:00–22:30, £18
Arizona DIY punk lot return to the UK. GULLIVERS, 19:30–23:00, £7
The affecting singer and sharp vocalist tours the UK in support of her beautiful new album Apocalypse, girl.
WHITWORTH YOUNG CONTEMPORARIES (BUGZY MALONE + PROJECT APEX + MORE) WHITWORTH ART GALLERY, 17:00–21:00, FREE
A showcase of some of the region’s burgeoning music and artistic talent.
Fri 12 Jun ASH
SOUND CONTROL, 19:00–22:30, £SOLD OUT
The Irish Britpopsters play all the usual hits and live favourites of a 20+ year career. And none of them have even reached 40 yet. ALE-TERNATIVE #20 (DUKE AND THE DARLINGS + THE BABY JANES)
BREWDOG, 19:00–22:00, FREE
A free night of alternative pop courtesy of the Duke and the Darlings bunch, gathering steam over the past year and offering a stage to up-and-coming talent. FLEETWOOD MAC
MANCHESTER ARENA, 18:30–23:00, £SOLD OUT
The legendary British-American ensemble play a set of hits, joined by returning songbird Christine McVie after a 16-year absence. WAXAHATCHEE (PINKWASH)
THE RUBY LOUNGE, 19:30–22:30, £10
Solo project of songwriter Katie Crutchfield, DIY and confessional in her songwriting approach. ELECTRIC EEL SHOCK
FALLOW CAFE, 20:00–23:00, £8
The Japan rockers make their return visit to the UK, out celebrating their 21st anniversary tour. LITTLE BARRIE
BAND ON THE WALL, 19:00–22:00, FROM £8
Nottingham-formed trio (since relocated to London) riding along on a mix of garage rock, r’n’b, surf and psychedelia sounds. DURHAM UNIVERSITY BIG BAND
MATT AND PHRED’S JAZZ CLUB, 21:30–01:00, £5
One of the UK’s most prestigious university big bands parade their diverse range of classic and contemporary jazz. THE SENIORS
SOUP KITCHEN, 20:00–22:15, £5
Indie folk band aiming to touch the heart, soul and dancing feet! HURRIERS (JOE SOLO)
THE KING’S ARMS, 20:00–22:30, £5
The Barnsley-based five-piece bring their vehemently Socialist rock on the road. LIAM MCCLAIR
GULLIVERS, 19:30–23:00, £TBC
The increasingly ubiquitous Cheshire-based singer songwriter (also the son of Brian McClair, Manchester United fans) headlines.
Sat 13 Jun BAD MANNERS
MANCHESTER CLUB ACADEMY, 19:30–23:00, £17.50
More in the way of party ska hits, with the larger-than-life Buster Bloodvessel still gurning away at the helm.
The shoegaze and psychedeliaminded promoters celebrate nine years of shows with a special bill. LOVE BUZZARD
FALLOW CAFE, 20:00–23:00, £4
The turbocharged duo do their bluesy riffs, filthy lyrics and stomping drums thing. THE MIKE BAKER SAXOPHONE SEXTET
WATERSIDE ARTS CENTRE, 19:45–22:00, £6 (£4)
A wide variety of jazz standards, light classical pieces and West End extracts.
BL9 MUSIC WEEKENDER (HAPPY MONDAYS + ECHO & THE BUNNYMEN + PETER HOOK & THE LIGHT + THE FARM + MORE) GIGG LANE, 12:00–23:00, PRICES VARY
A host of indie heavyweights from yesteryear descend on Gigg Lane.&nbsp;
Cinematic Orchestra guitarist trying out new material in the realm of beats, electronica, classical orchestration and jazz. FOTHERINGAY
BRIDGEWATER HALL, 19:30–22:30, FROM £21
The veteran folk four-piece return with their newest album Nothing More: The Collected Fotheringay.
Thu 18 Jun KATHRYN WILLIAMS
INTERNATIONAL ANTHONY BURGESS FOUNDATION, 19:00–22:00, £13
The Liverpudlian singer songwriter presents her new album Hypoxia, inspired by Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. THE MATT HOLBORN QUARTET
MATT AND PHRED’S JAZZ CLUB, 21:00–00:30, FREE
A newly formed group of musicians playing contemporary gypsy jazz, with violinist Matt Holborn at the helm. BBC PHILHARMONIC (NIELSEN SYMPHONY CYCLE III)
BRIDGEWATER HALL, 19:30–22:00, FROM £10
Six sharply dressed gentlemen from London drawing on rock, ragtime, reggae, blues, funk, disco, gypsy punk and Django. KIDSMOKE (LOE + MOWBIRD)
THE CASTLE HOTEL, 19:30–23:00, £4
The local garage pop group descend on The Castle. OLI BROWN BAND
BAND ON THE WALL, 19:30–22:30, FROM £8
The young blues artist who recently won the British Blues Awards for Male Vocalist, Best Album, Best Band and Best Young Artist. Someone get this man a bigger trophy cabinet. SFX: PROJECT JAM SANDWICH
ROYAL EXCHANGE THEATRE, 18:00–19:00, FREE
The world music troupe, who formed at the Royal Northern College of Music, are the latest to perform for the Royal Exchange’s free entry SFX series.; TRAFFORD YOUTH PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA
WATERSIDE ARTS CENTRE, 19:00–22:00, £6
The youngsters return for another run through the classical canon. DANTEVILLES (AFFAIRS)
The BBC Philharmonic’s summer schedule sees Auntie’s finest orchestra explore classical mainstays and more leftfield compositions.
Swoonsome local indie types.
MANCHESTER ARENA, 18:00–23:00, FROM £55
BRIDGEWATER HALL, 19:30–22:00, FROM £25
TAKE THAT
GULLIVERS, 19:30–23:00, £TBC
Sat 20 Jun JUSTIN CURRIE
Mark, Gary and Howard continue to pretend that Take That still exists without Jason and Robbie, the frauds.
The Scottish singer/songwriter, famous for his role as a founding member of Del Amitri.
ALBERT HALL, 19:00–23:00, £SOLD OUT
MATT AND PHRED’S JAZZ CLUB, 21:30–01:00, £5
LEFTFIELD
The dance culture pioneers show the young ‘uns how it’s done. BAKED A LA SKA
THE RUBY LOUNGE, 19:30–22:30, £7
JULIE DEXTER
Award-winning vocalist who crosses genres from jazz to soul and world music. SARAH CRACKNELL
GORILLA BAR MANCHESTER, 18:30–22:00, £20
Sun 14 Jun
Manchester-based ska 11-piece – best known as the high-energy house band from monthly club night, Shake n Bake – celebrate the launch of their new album.
GULLIVERS, 19:30–23:00, £8.50
THE CASTLE HOTEL, 20:00–23:45, FREE
MANCHESTER ACADEMY 2, 19:30–23:00, £18.50
SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE (HORRID + THE YOSSARIANS)
New-folk-styled musical project of guitarist Ben Chasny. PILE
THE MARBLES JACKSON (NEV COTTEE)
The multi-national shoegazers celebrate the launch of their new album Notes To The Dust.
THE CASTLE HOTEL, 19:30–23:00, £4
The explosive Boston-based fourpiece come to the UK.
AN EVENING WITH PEGGY SEEGER (NEILL MACCOLL AND CALUM MACCOLL)
Mon 15 Jun
BAND ON THE WALL, 19:00–22:00, FROM £15
OBN III’S
GULLIVERS, 19:30–23:00, £8.50
The Austin shredders bring their usual racket.
Tue 16 Jun JAMES BLACKSHAW
ISLINGTON MILL, 19:00–23:00, £6
The 12-stringed wonder that is James Blackshaw draws on his usual myriad influences; classical, Indian and minimalist genres amongst ‘em. BLIND MONK TRIO
MATT AND PHRED’S JAZZ CLUB, 21:00–00:00, FREE
Three Northwest musicians putting a fresh spin on the classic, chordless jazz trio format. THE MOODY BLUES
O2 APOLLO, 20:00–23:00, £41.50
English rock band formed in 1964 in Birmingham, now with 18 platinum discs under their belts. BOXED IN
GORILLA BAR MANCHESTER, 19:30–23:00, £9
Musical brainchild of Oli Bayston, formerly of indie outfit Keith, taking his name from a Francis Bacon painting. SHEPPARD
THE DEAF INSTITUTE, 19:00–22:30, £10
Multi-platinum Aussie outfit riding high on the back of their hit single Geronimo. PIERRE BENSUSAN
BAND ON THE WALL, 19:00–22:00, FROM £10.50
Independent Music Award winner and guitar virtuoso.
Wed 17 Jun JD MCPHERSON
MANCHESTER ACADEMY 2, 19:00–23:00, £14
The Oklahoma-based songsmith brings his raw and visceral brand of rockabilly and r’n’b to Scottish shores. DAN DEACON
ISLINGTON MILL, 20:00–23:00, £10
The Baltimore-based composer plays a set of his sonically-driven hyper beats.
The folk music veteran shows no signs of slowing down following the release of her 22nd solo album Everything Changes. JAMES RILEY + RICHARD LOMAX
GULLIVERS, 19:30–23:00, £7
Singer songwriter double headlining bill. SLY AND THE FAMILY DRONE
ISLINGTON MILL, 19:30–23:00, £6
Furious alien noise-rock from Basingstoke.&nbsp; NO REDEMPTION SONGS
WORKING CLASS MOVEMENT LIBRARY, 19:00–22:00, £10
A film and music performance with songwriter Brenda Heslop, her band Ribbon Road and &nbsp;photographer Keith Pattison, made to mark 30 years since the miner's strike.
Fri 19 Jun CUT HANDS
ISLINGTON MILL, 20:00–23:00, £12
African-Haitian inspired project of noise icon William Bennett, a percussive and hypnotic combination of polyrhythms created to induce trance like states. THE BLUES BAND
THE LOWRY: QUAYS THEATRE, 20:00–22:30, FROM £20.50
20 albums and thousands of gigs in, The Blues Band return for another UK tour. BASS DRUM OF DEATH
THE RUBY LOUNGE, 19:30–22:30, £11
The brainchild of John Barrett but now with a full-time band line-up, Bass Drum of Death bring their Nuggets-inspired rock back to the UK. WHAT’S THE ALTERNATIVE?...THIS IS! (FRENCH BOUTIK + THE SPEED OF SOUND)
THE KING’S ARMS, 21:00–00:00, £10 (£6)
The latest WTA? Night, which promises to reject corporate pop and revel in true independence.
Formerly one-third of Saint Etienne, Cracknell takes another stab at her solo career nearly two decades after her last one. THE MOVIELIFE
The influential Long Islanders get back on the reunion trail some 12 years after splitting. BUGZY MALONE
THE RITZ, 19:00–22:00, £8.50
The 24 year-old rapper continues his rise as one of the UK’s most promising new artists.
FRAGMENT FESTIVAL (CASTLES + CHARLIE BARNES + WELL WISHER) GULLIVERS, 13:00–23:00, £10
Two-venue all-dayer of rock and alternative music, featuring the return of emo-rock royalty Well Wisher. FRAGMENT FESTIVAL (FALLS + FAWN SPOTS + MORE)
THE CASTLE HOTEL, 19:30–23:00, £10
Two-venue all-dayer of rock and alternative music, featuring the return of emo-rock royalty Well Wisher. RNCM KEYBOARD FESTIVAL
ROYAL NORTHERN COLLEGE OF MUSIC, 10:30–22:00, PRICES VARY
Two days of concerts and performances in ode to the keyboard. Head to rncm.ac.uk for more info. RAGHU DIXIT
ROYAL NORTHERN COLLEGE OF MUSIC, 19:30–22:00, £18
The alternative Indian singer/ songwriter and guitarist continues to draw lyrical inspiration from classical poets, amid a vibrant blend of folk, blues, rock, Sufi, funk, reggae, bhangra and Latin sounds.
Sun 21 Jun DEAD KENNEDYS
THE RITZ, 19:00–23:00, £17.50
Caustic 70s punk rockers now with Ron Greer on vocal duties. THE GO! TEAM
SOUND CONTROL, 19:30–23:00, £14
The Brighton-based cult live faves weave their energetic and chantheavy web of indie-pop. F.L.O.B MUSIC SHOW CASE
MATT AND PHRED’S JAZZ CLUB, 19:00–00:00, £5
Fresh Loaf of Bread present another host of home-grown talent.
THE MEMBRANES
THE DEAF INSTITUTE, 19:00–22:30, £10
The 80s post-punk unit ride the wave of their reformation.
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Manchester Music NATHANIEL RATELIFF + THE NIGHT SWEATS THE DEAF INSTITUTE, 19:30–23:00, £10
Indie folk rock hard-knock from Denver, Colorado, touring with his band of spirited musicians. LEO MORAN AND ANTO THISTLETHWAITE
WATERSIDE ARTS CENTRE, 19:00–22:00, £15
The Saw Doctors duo present a stripped down set of some of the band’s most famous songs. MUTO (NAPPES~SONORES)
ISLINGTON MILL, 17:00–22:00, £TBC
MUTO present an exploration of spatially and perceptually concerned live and recorded sound. SUMMER SOLSTICE (PANTONIC ALL STARS + FOOLISH ROGUES + STRETFORD BRASS)
THE HORSE AND JOCKEY, 12:00–20:00, FREE
The Horse and Jockey throw a carnival-esque party to celebrate the solstice. MANCHESTER ACOUSTIC BLUES FESTIVAL (PETER PRICE + MAL GIBSON + DAI THOMAS + PETER VON TOY)
WIDER OPPORTUNITIES CONCERTS THE LOWRY: QUAYS THEATRE, 19:30–20:30, FROM £3
Over a 1000 young musicians from across Salford get involved over a series of concerts. Matinees available. AN EVENING WITH PRIMUS
O2 APOLLO, 19:00–23:00, £29.50
‘An Evening With’ makes this show by American metal veterans Primus sounds a lot more civilized than it’s likely to be. THE HALLÉ CELLOS: OPERA FAVOURITES
WATERSIDE ARTS CENTRE, 19:30–22:00, £14 (£7)
The respected cellists run through some Opera classics, from Purcell to Puccini. SEVEN GATES
ROYAL NORTHERN COLLEGE OF MUSIC, 13:15–22:00, PRICES VARY
Exploring and celebrating the classical music and culture of Poland over several concerts and performances. More at rncm.ac.uk.
Fri 26 Jun EYEHATEGOD
SOUND CONTROL, 18:30–22:00, £15
The New Orleans noisemakers – founded by Jimmy Bower under a different line-up back in 1988 – take to Manchester, building their sound on elements of southern rock, blues riffs and hardcore punk. EMILY PORTMAN TRIO
ROYAL NORTHERN COLLEGE OF MUSIC, 19:30–22:00, £15
A new addition to the British folk scene, award-winning and all that. JACE EVERETT
MANCHESTER ACADEMY 3, 19:30–23:00, £14.50
Nashville singer/songwriter best known (by us, at least) for True Blood theme song, Bad Things. THE GRAMOTONES
BAND ON THE WALL, 20:00–23:00, £10
Mancunian four-piece, drawing influences from the Northwest’s musical heritage to craft a Brit pop sound with a clear nod to the 60s.
EAGLE INN, 16:00–22:30, £8
Britney Spears, Beyoncé and Iron Maiden get the new gypsy jazz treatment in this toe-tapping performance.
WIDER OPPORTUNITIES CONCERTS
THE LOWRY: QUAYS THEATRE, 19:30–20:30, FROM £3
Over a 1000 young musicians from across Salford get involved over a series of concerts. Matinees available. SEVEN GATES
ROYAL NORTHERN COLLEGE OF MUSIC, 13:15–22:00, PRICES VARY
Exploring and celebrating the classical music and culture of Poland over several concerts and performances. More at rncm.ac.uk.
Wed 24 Jun KYLA BROX
MATT AND PHRED’S JAZZ CLUB, 21:00–00:30, FREE
UK-based blues and soul singer/ songwriter, redefining her sound as a duo performance, joined by Danny Blomeley on guitar. TAYLOR SWIFT
MANCHESTER ARENA, 18:00–23:00, FROM £35
The Tennessee songbird hits town as part of her world tour.
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Mancunian stargazing five-piece, making dreamy pop songs with a unmistakably Northern psych edge. JOHN LEGEND
BRIDGEWATER HALL, 20:00–22:00, FROM £40
As in son of ol’ blue eyes himself, performing his pa’s songs.
WIDER OPPORTUNITIES CONCERTS
GYPSIES OF BOHEMIA TRIO
GULLIVERS, 20:00–23:00, £6
FRANK SINATRA JR
THE LOWRY: QUAYS THEATRE, 19:30–20:30, FROM £3
MATT AND PHRED’S JAZZ CLUB, 21:00–00:30, FREE
PURPLE HEART PARADE (THIS OTHER KINGDOM + VELVET MORNING)
BAND ON THE WALL, 19:00–22:00, FROM £8
Mon 22 Jun
The Tony Award-winning star performs her first Scottish date, backed by a 25-piece orchestra live on stage.
Terri Shaltiel returns to Manchester with her powerful and soulful voice, offering original 60s and 70s inspired sounds in the realm of Etta James and Roberta Flack.
Soul talent showcase featuring artists from across the globe.
Two days of concerts and performances in ode to the keyboard. Head to rncm.ac.uk for more info.
O2 APOLLO, 19:00–23:00, FROM £35
MATT AND PHRED’S JAZZ CLUB, 21:30–01:00, £5
MUSIC CONNEX LIVE SHOWCASE (CAROL RIDDICK + MARYANNE ITO + CARMEN HENDRICKS + TRISTAN + MORE)
ROYAL NORTHERN COLLEGE OF MUSIC, 10:30–22:00, PRICES VARY
IDINA MENZEL
TERRI SHALTIEL
THE RUBY LOUNGE, 19:00–22:30, £10
RNCM KEYBOARD FESTIVAL
Tue 23 Jun
The prolific Canadian singer/ songwriter performs songs from his much-admired back catalogue of elegant melancholic pop songs.
One of Wales biggest funk and soul bands come to the Ruby Lounge.
Some of the region’s most talented orchestral collectives team up for this mass concert.
EAGLE INN, 19:00–23:00, £9
RON SEXSMITH
ROYAL NORTHERN COLLEGE OF MUSIC, 19:30–22:00, £29.50
AFTER ADOPTION BENEFIT (SOUL REVOLUTION)
GREATER MANCHESTER MUSIC HUB CELEBRATION CONCERT 2015
As part of the Manchester Independent Biennial, the Manchester Blues Acoustic Festival showcases a host of local homegrown talent.
Sat 27 Jun
The nine-time Grammy Award winner brings his velvet soft R’n’B to the UK. Thank God.
BRIDGEWATER HALL, 15:00–17:00, £12 (£10)
MANCHESTER ACOUSTIC BLUES FESTIVAL (BLUESMAN MIKE FRANCIS + KYLA BROX + RYAN MCGARVEY)
Exploring and celebrating the classical music and culture of Poland over several concerts and performances. More at rncm.ac.uk.
MANCHESTER ARENA, 18:00–23:00, FROM £37.50
As part of the Manchester Independent Biennial, the Manchester Blues Acoustic Festival showcases a host of local homegrown talent.
Over a 1000 young musicians from across Salford get involved over a series of concerts. Matinees available.
SEVEN GATES ROYAL NORTHERN COLLEGE OF MUSIC, 13:15–22:00, PRICES VARY
MANCHESTER BEETHOVEN ORCHESTRA
Thu 25 Jun
JOHNNY HUNTER QUARTET
MATT AND PHRED’S JAZZ CLUB, 21:00–00:30, FREE
Blind Monk Trio drummer, Johnny Hunter, branching out with a new project, offering up fresh, contemporary jazz. STONEGHOST
SOUND CONTROL, 19:30–23:00, £6
London-based heavy rock lot taking their cue from Black Sabbath et al.
WIDER OPPORTUNITIES CONCERTS
THE LOWRY: QUAYS THEATRE, 19:30–20:30, FROM £3
Over a 1000 young musicians from across Salford get involved over a series of concerts. Matinees available. NATALIE PRASS
THE DEAF INSTITUTE, 19:30–23:00, £11
The Nashville-based singer/ songwriter tours her self-titled new LP. EXODUS
MANCHESTER ACADEMY 3, 19:30–23:00, £17.50
The thrash metal mainstays from the Bay Area come to the UK for another aural assault. Horns up! AIDEN PENNER + MICHAEL CERA
GULLIVERS, 19:30–23:00, £10
The Unicorn man is joined by Hollywood royalty in the form of everyone’s favourite lovable geek, Michael Cera. SEVEN GATES
ROYAL NORTHERN COLLEGE OF MUSIC, 13:15–22:00, PRICES VARY
Exploring and celebrating the classical music and culture of Poland over several concerts and performances. More at rncm.ac.uk.
MOSCOW TRANSPORT (GIRL FRIEND + TEAR TALK + THE BEAR AROUND YOUR NECK) THE CASTLE HOTEL, 19:30–23:00, £4
Indie pop for fans of Foals apparently. Which is good because we like Foals. THE BAD MAN CLAN
MATT AND PHRED’S JAZZ CLUB, 21:30–01:00, £5
Five-piece electric blues band playing original and cover material. WIDER OPPORTUNITIES CONCERTS
THE LOWRY: QUAYS THEATRE, 19:30–20:30, FROM £3
Over a 1000 young musicians from across Salford get involved over a series of concerts. Matinees available. FRANKIE VALLI & THE FOUR SEASONS
MANCHESTER ARENA, 18:30–23:00, FROM £45
Frankie Valli and his touring mainstays, The Four Seasons, head out on another tour more than 50 years after their first. DEATH TO THE STRANGE (THE MOODS + THE NEW SOUTHERN ELECTRIKK)
THE RITZ, 19:00–03:00, £6
Local showcase of garage rock plus afterparty. THE HALLÉ SUMMER GALA TEA DANCE
HALLÉ ST PETER’S, 19:30–22:00, £20
The Hallé’s summer schedule sees the renowned orchestra go through some of the finest pieces of the classical canon.
RNCM SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA, CHORUS AND CHAMBER CHOIR (PENDERECKI + LUTOSLAWSKI + PENDERECKI) BRIDGEWATER HALL, 19:30–22:00, FROM £15
The RNCM orchestra, chorus and chamber choirs visit the Bridgewater for an exploration into the classical music of Poland.
ROYAL NORTHERN COLLEGE OF MUSIC, 19:30–22:00, £10
The Beethoven Orchestra decide to, um, not play Beethoven. Instead you get Grieg and Dvorak. Which’ll do. IRONWOOD
ROYAL NORTHERN COLLEGE OF MUSIC, 19:30–22:00, £8
Ironwood explores the practices of Brahms.
Liverpool Music Tue 02 Jun
PARRJAZZ (JEREMY SASSOON)
FREDERIKS, 20:30–23:00, FREE
The weekly jazz showcase night pitches up in a new home on Hope Street.
Wed 03 Jun GIANT SAND
ST GEORGE’S HALL, 19:30–22:30, £16.50
Thu 04 Jun COASTS
O2 ACADEMY, 19:00–23:00, £10
Bristol-based five-piece known for making shimmery pop sounds that go well with cold cider and a sunny day. Or, y’know, beer and dark clouds. HOLLY JOHNSON
LIVERPOOL PHILHARMONIC HALL, 19:30–22:30, FROM £21.50
Liverpool-born pop songwriter returns home, three decades after telling the world to ‘Relax!’ SECRET CIRCUS
STUDIO 2, 19:00–23:45, FREE
Poetry, performance art, dance, music, and Burlesque! Don’t forget your feathers and top-hats.
Fri 05 Jun CHAMELEONS VOX
O2 ACADEMY, 19:00–23:00, £15
Mark Burgess plays the Chameleons’ 1985 LP, What Does Anything Mean? Basically, live and in its entirety. HERITAGE BLUES ORCHESTRA
LIVERPOOL PHILHARMONIC HALL, 19:30–22:30, FROM £19.50
A self-styled ‘blues version of Buena Vista Social Club’, whatever you choose to make of that. SILICON DREAMS 2015
STUDIO 2, 19:00–23:45, £20
The electronic music festival descends on Liverpool, bringing with it the cream of the synth pop crop. WE BANJO 3
The Vancouver-based rapper and Youtube sensation comes to the UK.
RNCM ALUMNI REUNION CONCERT
ROYAL NORTHERN COLLEGE OF MUSIC, 15:00–17:00, £10
One of the foremost performers of Palestinian folkloric song, Reem Kelani’s critically acclaimed music includes elements of classical Arabic music, folk and jazz.
Mon 29 Jun THE OVERTONES
BRIDGEWATER HALL, 19:00–22:00, FROM £21.50
Vocal harmony quintet based in London, where they were discovered whilst working as decorators. Obviously. GLADYS KNIGHT
O2 APOLLO, 19:30–23:00, FROM £40
The four-time Grammy Award winner and Motown veteran explores her vast back catalogue. BLACK REBEL MOTORCYCLE CLUB
ALBERT HALL, 19:00–23:00, £20
The moody San Francisco rockers return to the UK for the first time in two years, affected cool and bluesy dirge still very much in place.
The Phil tackle Elgar’s classic, among other selections. JIMMY & THE REVOLVERS
STUDIO 2, 19:00–23:45, £5
5 SECONDS OF SUMMER
ECHO ARENA, 19:30–23:00, FROM £25
Aussie pop-meets-rock boyband formed in Sydney back in 2011.
Fri 12 Jun ATOMIC KITTEN
O2 ACADEMY, 19:00–23:00, £21
Kerry Katona et al celebrate 15 years by playing their ‘greatest hits’ (we use that phrase lightly). REEM KELANI
THE BLUECOAT, 19:30–22:00, £15 (£12)
One of the foremost performers of Palestinian folkloric song, Reem Kelani’s critically acclaimed music includes elements of classical Arabic music, folk and jazz. THE LUKA STATE
THE SHIPPING FORECAST, 19:30–23:00, £5
Four piece hailing from that notorious hotbed of rock and roll, Winsford in the UK. CROCODILES
STUDIO 2, 19:00–23:45, £10
San Diego garage rock duo made up of Brandon Welchez and Charles Rowell. KIDS ON BRIDGES
ARTS CLUB, 19:00–23:00, £5
The Liverpudlian trio celebrate the release of When The Needle Drops, from debut album Kidology. LOVE BUZZARD
MAGUIRE’S PIZZA BAR, 20:00–23:00, £4
The turbocharged duo do their bluesy riffs, filthy lyrics and stomping drums thing.
The rock troupe head up a night of local rock and roll. WAVE WEEKENDER
ARTS CLUB, 18:00–23:00, £7
One day mini festival showcasing young up-and-coming talent from Liverpool and the surrounding areas. ARIEL PINK
DISTRICT, 19:30–23:00, £15
The lo-fi LA goth specialist (aka Ariel Marcus Rosenberg) makes a welcome return. SPRING INTO THE FOUR SEASONS
THE ATKINSON, 19:30–22:30, £15
THE ZANZIBAR CLUB, 19:30–22:30, £4
The popular local singer songwriter headlines.
LIVERPOOL PHILHARMONIC HALL, 20:00–22:30, FROM £37.50
The Grammy Award-winner and Music Hall of Fame inductee draws upon 35-odd years of – let’s face it, a pretty damn impressive – back catalogue.
Tue 16 Jun SUZANNE VEGA
LIVERPOOL PHILHARMONIC HALL, 19:30–22:30, FROM £28.50
The much-loved songstress makes her live return, performing new material alongside earlier classics from her impressive back catalogue.
PARRJAZZ (THE MANOUCHETONES)
FREDERIKS, 20:30–23:00, FREE
The weekly jazz showcase night pitches up in a new home on Hope Street.
LIVERPOOL PHILHARMONIC HALL, 19:30–22:30, FROM £13
Broadway’s neglected masterpiece - Sondheim’s achingly beautiful A Little Night Music - deals with love in all its wondrous, humorous and ironic permutations.
LEO MORAN AND ANTO THISTLETHWAITE
THE ATKINSON, 19:30–22:30, £15
The Saw Doctors duo present a stripped down set of some of the band’s most famous songs.
Tue 09 Jun CLUB ORIENTALE
UNITY THEATRE, 20:00–22:00, £10 (£8)
Students from the Sirocco Academy of Egyptian Dance present a kaleidoscopic performance of movement and colour.
LOOP
Longstanding London-based trance-styled guitar lot, founded back in 1986 by Robert Hampson and his then girlfriend Becky Stewart. MICHAEL CHAPMAN (BRIDGET ST JOHN)
THE ATKINSON, 19:30–22:30, £12
The Thurston Moore-collaborator and British folk mainstay heads out on the road.
Sat 20 Jun
THE GOOD FRIDAY PROJECT (UNCONQUERED SONS + MORE) THE ZANZIBAR CLUB, 19:00–22:30, £5
Gothabilly from London.
MAMA ROUX (THE SPRINGTIME ANCHORAGE + THE STAMP)
THE MAGNET , 20:00–03:00, £5
Mama Roux present the launch of their debut EP, performing their own breed of aerie atmospheric music.&nbsp; DISNEY IN CONCERT
LIVERPOOL PHILHARMONIC HALL, 18:00–21:00, FROM £13
A multi-media concert that sees the Phil explore some of your favourite Disney tunes. ALL THE KINGS AND QUEENS
STUDIO 2, 19:00–23:45, £6
The up and coming synth pop duo head out on the road.
Vibrant Glasgow folk collective mixing traditional rootsy Scottish tunes with contemporary influences, all bagpipes and whistles and loveliness. LAURENCE JONES
The electronic music festival descends on Liverpool, bringing with it the cream of the synth pop crop.
Stillhet Music return with their regular showcase.
RINSE (VIOLET RIOT)
THE ZANZIBAR CLUB, 19:30–22:30, £4
TREACHEROUS ORCHESTRA
SILICON DREAMS 2015
STRINGS AND THINGS
Fri 19 Jun
THE ATKINSON, 19:30–22:30, £12
STUDIO 2, 19:00–23:45, £20
STUDIO 2, 19:00–23:45, £2
Billy Walton and co. churn out their singular brand of funky blues.
Africa Oyé the UK's biggest festival of African music and culture, takes to Sefton Park for its 23rd year, showcasing an eclectic mix of artists and ramping up the vibes with workshops, a DJ tent, an active zone and delicious food from around the world.
A blend of live music combining the spirit of Songs of Praise and the world-famous Last Night of the Proms.
The Scottish hip-hop trio return with their rather glorious line in DIY rap and synchronised dance moves.
BILLY WALTON BAND
THE ATKINSON, 20:00–22:30, £10
AFRICA OYÉ
PROM PRAISE
YOUNG FATHERS
Guitar virtuoso taking in blues, Spanish, Middle Eastern and Russian stylings.
SEFTON PARK, 12:30–21:30, FREE
LIVERPOOL PHILHARMONIC HALL, 19:30–22:30, FROM £10
THE KAZIMIER, 19:30–23:00, £10
CLAUDE BOURBON
THE LANTERN THEATRE, 19:30–22:00, £10.50
THE KAZIMIER, 19:30–23:00, £14.50
ELVIS COSTELLO
THE ZANZIBAR CLUB, 19:30–22:30, £4
Sun 07 Jun
Broadway’s neglected masterpiece - Sondheim’s achingly beautiful A Little Night Music - deals with love in all its wondrous, humorous and ironic permutations.
Mon 15 Jun
A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC
MARK FRITH (DIXIE DAYE + FRONTLINE + ARCTIC MUSKETEERS)
A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC
LIVERPOOL PHILHARMONIC HALL, 19:30–22:30, FROM £13
Stoke-on-Trent based indie types.
Wed 17 Jun
Sat 13 Jun
The mighty Liverpudlian guitarpop ensemble play a selection of new stuff off their forthcoming LP, Slowness.
The Northern Chamber Orchestra play the Vivaldi classic.
Sat 06 Jun
A host of local acts take to the Zanzibar Club stage.
SNAK THE RIPPER
Wed 10 Jun
THE ATKINSON, 19:30–22:30, £12
BRIDGEWATER HALL, 15:00–17:00, FROM £11
THE KING’S ARMS, 19:30–21:30, £TBC
The weekly jazz showcase night pitches up in a new home on Hope Street.
Award-winning bluegrass quartet from Galway. AFTER THE RUSH HOUR (SUPERGROOVER + FURTHER THAN FOREVER + WASTED LIGHTS)
The Hallé’s summer schedule sees the renowned orchestra go through some of the finest pieces of the classical canon.
THE DREAM OF GERONTIUS LIVERPOOL PHILHARMONIC HALL, 19:30–22:30, FROM £13
Howe Gelb’s ever-rotating musical Thu 11 Jun collective celebrate their 30th year WHEN I AM KING in existence. STUDIO 2, 19:00–23:45, FREE SARAH MAISELL + CRAIG CHEE Local four-piece rock, you know THE ATKINSON, 19:30–22:30, £8 the sort. Virtuoso double headliner.
Sun 28 Jun
THE HALLÉ (SEVEN PLANETS & A COSMIC ROCK)
PARRJAZZ (JANUSZ CARMELLO) FREDERIKS, 20:30–23:00, FREE
OUTFIT THE KAZIMIER, 19:30–23:00, £10
THE ATKINSON, 20:00–22:30, £10
DICE.fm
THE GODFATHERS O2 ACADEMY, 19:00–23:00, £12.50
British rock’n’rollers formed back in 1985 by brothers Peter and Chris Coyne from the ashes of their previous band, The Sid Presley Experience. KRUNK FIESTA
THE KAZIMIER, 15:00–04:00, £15
The Krunk Fiesta returns with a new theme, Vogues Animales, with Afriquoi, Kero Kero Bonito, Dogshow and more setting the soundtrack.
AN EVENING WITH PEGGY SEEGER
THE CAPSTONE, 20:00–22:30, £17.50
The folk music veteran shows no signs of slowing down following the release of her 22nd solo album Everything Changes.
THE EAST POINTERS THE ATKINSON, 19:30–22:30, £10
Canada-based folkie types tour the UK.
Thu 18 Jun
TONY VISCONTI AND WOODY WOODMANSEY WITH GLENN GREGORY PERFORM THE MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD (MARC ALMOND)
O2 ACADEMY, 19:00–23:00, £20
David Bowie bandmates producer/ bass player Tony Visconti and drummer Woody Woodmansey perform Bowie’s The Man Who Sold The Wolrd, with Marc Almond of Soft Cell fronting. ELECTRIC EEL SHOCK
O2 ACADEMY, 19:00–23:00, £9
The Japan rockers make their return visit to the UK, out celenrating their 21st anniversary tour.
The 2014 British Blues Awards Young Artist of The Year Award heads out on tour.
Sun 21 Jun THE MOODY BLUES
LIVERPOOL PHILHARMONIC HALL, 20:00–22:30, FROM £41.50
English rock band formed in 1964 in Birmingham, now with 18 platinum discs under their belts. AFRICA OYÉ
SEFTON PARK, 12:30–21:30, FREE
Africa Oyé the UK's biggest festival of African music and culture, takes to Sefton Park for its 23rd year, showcasing an eclectic mix of artists and ramping up the vibes with workshops, a DJ tent, an active zone and delicious food from around the world.
Mon 22 Jun FOTHERINGAY
ST GEORGE’S HALL, 19:30–22:30, £22.50
The veteran folk four-piece return with their newest album Nothing More: The Collected Fotheringay.
THE SKINNY
Tue 23 Jun REBELUTION
ARTS CLUB, 19:00–23:00, £14
The group head to the UK with all eyes on plugging their new album Count Me In. PARRJAZZ (MOONLIGHT SAVINGS TIME)
FREDERIKS, 20:30–23:00, FREE
The weekly jazz showcase night pitches up in a new home on Hope Street.
Wed 24 Jun MARCOS VALLE
THE KAZIMIER, 19:30–23:00, FROM £10
The Brazilian bossa nova veteran comes to the Kazimier.
DEEP HEDONIA X A SMALL CINEMA (ROSEN + JC) LIVERPOOL SMALL CINEMA, 19:30–23:00, £5
Deep Hedonia and A Small Cinema celebrate the collaborations of filmmakers and musicians around the North West with a collection of music videos and shorts set to new compositions, plus performances by Rosen and JC.
Thu 25 Jun MARUTA
MAGUIRE’S PIZZA BAR, 20:00–23:00, £TBC
Punishing grindcore and death metal from the USA.
Fri 26 Jun
THE SONGBOOK SESSIONS (THE BALTIC STATES + COBOLT + SCAREDYCATS + SMILING RILEY + CHRIS THOMAS)
THE ZANZIBAR CLUB, 19:30–22:30, £4
A showcase event for new and upcoming songwriters in Liverpool and the surrounding areas. DEAD KENNEDYS
O2 ACADEMY, 19:00–23:00, £17.50
Caustic 70s punk rockers now with Ron Greer on vocal duties.
JUMP ON DEMAND (RIVER JUMPERS + REVERBED + FEET FIRST + PLEASE HEAD NORTH + MORE) MAGUIRE’S PIZZA BAR, 19:00–23:00, PRICES VARY
21 of the best upcoming pop punk and alternative artists who will take to the stage over three evenings. BIG COUNTRY
THE ATKINSON, 19:30–22:30, £20
Dunfermline-born 80s rockers formed when Stuart Adamson left The Skids in 1981 and recruited guitar partner Bruce Watson head out on a Best Of tour.
Sat 27 Jun
THE POLVELDTS (LEAP OF FAITH + DAEZ + THE CHAINS + HOUSE OF INDECTRA + ACCEPTING APRIL) THE ZANZIBAR CLUB, 19:15–22:30, £4
A host of local acts take to the Zanzibar Club stage.
TARUN BHATTACHARAYA + KOUSIC SEN
THE CAPSTONE, 13:00–15:00, FREE
The renowned santoor player is joined on the tabla by Kousic Sen.
JUMP ON DEMAND (PICNIC BASKET NOSEDIVE + WASTER + OH, PIONEER + RIVER CITY + MORE) MAGUIRE’S PIZZA BAR, 19:00–23:00, PRICES VARY
21 of the best upcoming pop punk and alternative artists who will take to the stage over three evenings.
Sun 28 Jun MAVIS STAPLES
LIVERPOOL PHILHARMONIC HALL, 19:30–22:30, FROM £22.50
The Rock and Roll Hall of Famer takes her full house of talent out on’t tour.
JUMP ON DEMAND (BIG NOTHING + NEVERMIND ME + DOWNERS + ASTERISKS + MORE) MAGUIRE’S PIZZA BAR, 19:00–23:00, PRICES VARY
21 of the best upcoming pop punk and alternative artists who will take to the stage over three evenings. MIDGE URE
THE ATKINSON, 19:30–22:30, £18
The former Ultravox bassist and Live Aid man revisits his back catalogue.
June 2015
Manchester Clubs FAC FRIDAY
Tue 02 Jun GOLD TEETH
THE DEAF INSTITUTE, 22:00–03:00, £4.50
Legendary weekly mixed-bag night, often invites use of the term ‘carnage’. TROUPE & BELOW THE SURFACE: JEREMY UNDERGROUND
SOUTH, 23:00–05:00, FROM £5
Troupe and Below The Surface join forces and return to South to host their summer paradise event on the mighty Void soundsystem. FRONTIN’ WORLD CARNIVAL SUMMER SPECIAL
JOSHUA BROOKS, 22:00–03:00, £4
Frontin’ return for the summer, with vibes stretching from the Caribbean to West London.
Wed 03 Jun ITCHY FEET
MINT LOUNGE, 22:00–03:00, £7
A unique blend of rock’n’roll, funk and swing, engineered to get feet moving. JUICY
JOSHUA BROOKS, 23:00–03:00, £1.50
All party, no bullshit night of everything from classic hip-hop to disco and funk. LORD OF THE TINGS (MELÉ )
FACTORY 251, 22:30–04:00, 99P BEFORE MIDNIGHT
Student Friday-nighter, with mashups in room one, indie, funk and Motown in room two, and electro house in room three. JACOB COID
BLACK DOG BALLROOM NWS, 23:00–04:00, FREE
Rebel Music's Jacob Coid supplies an unpredictable mix of his leftof-centre collection, featuring Dylan to Dre, the Strokes to Snoop Dogg, Bowie to the Beastie Boys and anything in between. STUART RICHARDS
BLACK DOG BALLROOM NQ, 22:00–04:00, FREE
High Jinx resident Stuart Richards brings his trademark style to the bar every Thursday, offering a night of disco, funk and house. TRIBAL SESSIONS (KIM ANN FOXMAN)
SANKEYS, 22:30–05:00, FROM £10
BLACK DOG BALLROOM NQ, 22:00–04:00, FREE BEFORE 11PM
STUART RICHARDS
High Jinx resident Stuart Richards brings his trademark style to the bar every Thursday, offering a night of disco, funk and house.
BLACK DOG BALLROOM NQ, 22:00–04:00, FREE BEFORE 11PM
BLACK DOG BALLROOM NWS, 23:00–04:00, FREE
TIM WRIGHT
Motown, hip hop, indie and some old skool classics thrown in for good measure.
THE RITZ, 22:30–03:30, £4
Fri 12 Jun
LIGHT BOXX
New residency from the guys that brought you Rehab, Pout and Dyslexic. JIMI SUAREZ
XOLO, 23:00–04:00, FREE (£3 AFTER MIDNIGHT)
1-800 DINOSAUR
Featuring James Blake, the 1-800 crew descend on Joshua Brooks for a special party.
STUART RICHARDS
High Jinx resident Stuart Richards brings his trademark style to the bar every Thursday, offering a night of disco, funk and house.
RHYTHM THEORY (NORMAN NODGE)
SOUP KITCHEN, 23:00–04:00, £8
The long-time Berghain resident headlines, boasting past work with MDR and OstGut Ton among others.
STUART RICHARDS
BLACK DOG BALLROOM NQ, 22:00–04:00, FREE BEFORE 11PM
EUPHONY (DANUKA)
KRAAK, 22:00–04:00, £5
So Flute resident Danuka heads to the ones and twos.
FIESTA BOMBARDA CROSSOVER (HACKNEY COLLIERY BAND + MUTANT VINYL + GALIVANTES + EUPHONY + MORE) ANTWERP MANSION, 21:30–03:00, £7
Fresh Creative bring the Liverpool Fiesta Bombarda vibe across to Manchester for a bright and colourful soiree.
Fri 05 Jun
NIGHT OF THE LIVING DREAD (SEROCEE + MIKEY D.O.N) BAND ON THE WALL, 23:00–03:00, £3 (£5 AFTER MIDNIGHT)
Manchester’s biggest and friendliest reggae party returns. MOGADISCO
SOUP KITCHEN, 23:00–04:00, £3 (£5 AFTER MIDNIGHT)
A night of African rhythms, spanning Afrobeat, Jùjú, Highlife, Disco and more. TOP OF THE POPS
MINT LOUNGE, 22:00–04:00, £3
Get your weekend off to a great start with this healthy mix of dancefloor fillers and guilty pleasures served up by residents and guest DJs.
HIGHER GROUND
BLACK DOG BALLROOM NQ, 22:00–04:00, FREE
Student Thursday-nighter, with resident DJs Steve Davies, Bill Murray’s Rock n Soul club, and Nicola Bear serving up anything from retro classics to electro mash ups across three rooms.
Motown, hip hop, indie and some old skool classics thrown in for good measure.
Student Friday-nighter, with mashups in room one, indie, funk and Motown in room two, and electro house in room three.
Rebel Music's Jacob Coid supplies an unpredictable mix of his leftof-centre collection, featuring Dylan to Dre, the Strokes to Snoop Dogg, Bowie to the Beastie Boys and anything in between.
FACTORY 251, 22:30–05:00, 99P BEFORE MIDNIGHT (£5 AFTER)
BLACK DOG BALLROOM NWS, 23:00–04:00, FREE
FACTORY 251, 22:30–04:00, 99P BEFORE MIDNIGHT
JACOB COID
F//CK
KEIRAN SHARPLES
FAC FRIDAY
BLACK DOG BALLROOM NWS, 23:00–04:00, FREE
Thu 04 Jun
MINT LOUNGE, 23:00–04:00, FROM £3
Get your weekend off to a great start with this healthy mix of dancefloor fillers and guilty pleasures served up by residents and guest DJs.
THE DEAF INSTITUTE, 23:00–03:00, £3
Holy cow, some of the biggest legends of 15 years ago comes together for a garage heavyweight contest. Re-e-wind.
The best in soul, funk and boogie.
TOP OF THE POPS
MINT LOUNGE, 22:00–04:00, £3
The sounds of the 60’s from Motown to rock ‘n’ roll.
ANTWERP MANSION, 22:00–04:00, £SOLD OUT
SOULJAM END OF TERM PARTY
KEIRAN SHARPLES
New Saturday resident bringing the dancefloor classics all night long.
ARTFUL DODGER VS DJ LUCK AND MC NEAT
High Jinx resident Stuart Richards brings his trademark style to the bar every Thursday, offering a night of disco, funk and house.
STUART RICHARDS
High Jinx resident Stuart Richards brings his trademark style to the bar every Thursday, offering a night of disco, funk and house.
JOSHUA BROOKS, 23:00–04:00, £5
Varied night of bass, garage, grime, hip hop and house, still with probably the best club night name in Manchester.
Having shared a wealth of music from Africa via his Awesome Tapes blog, Brian Shimkovitz brings his passion for the continent to a club setting.
BLACK DOG BALLROOM NWS, 23:00–04:00, FREE
FACTORY 251, 22:30–04:00, £2 BEFORE MIDNIGHT
THE DEAF INSTITUTE, 23:00–03:00, £3
Disco, funk, 80s and 90s.
FACTORY 251, 22:30–05:00, 99P BEFORE MIDNIGHT (£5 AFTER)
Three rooms of commercial dance, indie and deep house, powered by funktion one sound.
The very best in pop, hip hop, funk, disco and dance courtesy of resident Jimi Suarez.
SOUTH, 23:00–04:00, £SOLD OUT
BANANA HILL (AWESOME TAPES FROM AFRICA)
F//CK
Student Thursday-nighter, with resident DJs Steve Davies, Bill Murray’s Rock n Soul club, and Nicola Bear serving up anything from retro classics to electro mash ups across three rooms.
FACTORY SATURDAYS
The legendary Tribal Sessions finish up for the season, with NYC DJing favourite Foxman heading up the bill. FAM*
Thu 11 Jun
Sat 06 Jun
BEAVER CLUB NIGHT TRIBECA BAR, 22:00–02:00, £5
CLOSING PARTY – PART 1
SANKEYS, 22:30–07:00, FROM £12
THE RUBY LOUNGE, 23:00–04:00, £5 (£3)
The usual opportunity to make shapes to a fantastic and eclectic mix of music, this month with an added burlesque show.
Sankeys do their annual dossing off to Ibiza for the summer, but not before saying goodbye to Manchester in style.
PARKLIFE (DISCLOSURE + WU-TANG CLAN + JAMES BLAKE + BEN HOWARD + MORE)
Sun 07 Jun
Sat 13 Jun
REMAKE REMODEL
A night of alternative rock’n’roll shenanigans.
HEATON PARK, 12:00-23:00, PRICES VARY
Returning for its sixth year, the Parklife Weekender pitches up in Heaton Park for another two-day festival of jamz, inevitably resulting in a mass pilgrimage of the student population. GIRLS ON FILM
THE DEAF INSTITUTE, 23:00–03:00, £4.50
Pink lady cocktails, disco balls, glitz and glamour – a monthly club night where you’re free to let your inner 80s child loose. FUNKADEMIA
MINT LOUNGE, 22:30–04:00, £5
Mancunian nightclub institution, delivering a chronological history of soul on a weekly basis, courtesy of their DJ collective. CLINT BOON
SOUTH, 23:00–04:00, £5
Mixed-bag night from local DJ ledge Clint Boon. ZUTEKH (TREVINO)
SOUP KITCHEN, 23:00–04:00, FROM £8
Trevino, the alter-ego of Marcus Intalex, drops into Zutekh with a drop in tempo. AFTERLIFE
SANKEYS, 22:30–05:00, £15
Lock up your, well, everything. The Parklife revellers descend on Manchester for the after parties.
AFTERLIFE
SANKEYS, 22:00–04:00, £15
Lock up your, well, everything. The Parklife revellers descend on Manchester for the after parties. PARKLIFE (RUDIMENTAL + GEORGE EZRA + NAS + CARIBOU + MORE)
HEATON PARK, 12:00-23:00, PRICES VARY
Returning for its sixth year, the Parklife Weekender pitches up in Heaton Park for another two-day festival of jamz, inevitably resulting in a mass pilgrimage of the student population.
OBSCURE X UTTU (J HAUS + FOOLS + RUSHMORE + TRAX COUTURE + MORE) SOUP KITCHEN, 23:00–04:00, FROM £6
DJ Haus headlines a night of house, techno and UK garage.
AFTERLIFE: HIT & RUN (ICICLE + SKITTLES + CHIMPO + RICH REASON + MORE) MINT LOUNGE, 23:00–03:00, £7
Manchester’s finest D'n'B party people host one of the official Parklife Festival after parties featuring a line up of Manchester’s finest.
Tue 09 Jun GOLD TEETH
THE DEAF INSTITUTE, 22:00–03:00, £4.50
Legendary weekly mixed-bag night, often invites use of the term ‘carnage’.
SOUP KITCHEN, 22:00–04:00, £7
CLOSING PARTY – PART 2
SANKEYS, 22:30–07:00, FROM £15
Sankeys do their annual dossing off to Ibiza for the summer, but not before saying goodbye to Manchester in style. JIMI SUAREZ
XOLO, 23:00–04:00, FREE (£3 AFTER MIDNIGHT)
The very best in pop, hip hop, funk, disco and dance courtesy of resident Jimi Suarez. SUBTERAN
JOSHUA BROOKS, 23:00–04:00, £4
Subteran returns to Manchester for a second dose of anarchy manifest in techno and house.
Tue 16 Jun
FAC FRIDAY
JIMI SUAREZ
FACTORY 251, 22:30–04:00, 99P BEFORE MIDNIGHT
XOLO, 23:00–04:00, FREE (£3 AFTER MIDNIGHT)
Student Friday-nighter, with mashups in room one, indie, funk and Motown in room two, and electro house in room three. JACOB COID
BLACK DOG BALLROOM NWS, 23:00–04:00, FREE
Rebel Music's Jacob Coid supplies an unpredictable mix of his leftof-centre collection, featuring Dylan to Dre, the Strokes to Snoop Dogg, Bowie to the Beastie Boys and anything in between.
THE DEAF INSTITUTE, 22:00–03:00, £4.50
Legendary weekly mixed-bag night, often invites use of the term ‘carnage’.
Thu 18 Jun F//CK
FACTORY 251, 22:30–05:00, 99P BEFORE MIDNIGHT (£5 AFTER)
Student Thursday-nighter, with resident DJs Steve Davies, Bill Murray’s Rock n Soul club, and Nicola Bear serving up anything from retro classics to electro mash ups across three rooms. STUART RICHARDS
GESAMTKUNSTWERK14 (SCHMERZLABOR + MORE)
ISLINGTON MILL, 21:00–06:00, £7
The hard and heavy industrial techno-leaning night returns with another suitably skull crushing bill.
JAKK (SYNTHEK + STEFAN VINCENT)
JOSHUA BROOKS, 23:00–04:00, FROM £4
STUART RICHARDS
Italian-born Berlin-based DJ Synthek and Dutch techno master Stefan Vincent hit the decks.
BLACK DOG BALLROOM NQ, 22:00–04:00, FREE
Tue 23 Jun
High Jinx resident Stuart Richards brings his trademark style to the bar every Thursday, offering a night of disco, funk and house. EL DIABLOS SOCIAL CLUB (DEAN ‘SUNSHINE’ SMITH + JAMES HOLROYD) SOUP KITCHEN, 23:00–04:00, £3
GOLD TEETH
The very best in pop, hip hop, funk, disco and dance courtesy of resident Jimi Suarez.
The best in Adriatic boogie beats from the much-loved Manchester club staple.
GOLD TEETH
THE DEAF INSTITUTE, 22:00–03:00, £4.50
Legendary weekly mixed-bag night, often invites use of the term ‘carnage’.
Thu 25 Jun F//CK
FACTORY 251, 22:30–05:00, 99P BEFORE MIDNIGHT (£5 AFTER)
Serving up the best of the 60s, ranging from psych and ska to britpop and funk.
Student Thursday-nighter, with resident DJs Steve Davies, Bill Murray’s Rock n Soul club, and Nicola Bear serving up anything from retro classics to electro mash ups across three rooms.
SOUTH, 23:00–04:00, FROM £6
BLACK DOG BALLROOM NQ, 22:00–04:00, FREE BEFORE 11PM
ELECTRIC JUG
THE DEAF INSTITUTE, 23:00–03:00, £3
45 FILTERS PRESENT: JUBEI + SP:MC + ULTERIOR MOTIVE + PROLIX
Another huge varied line-up courtesy of the Filter 45 crew.
Sat 20 Jun FUNKADEMIA
MINT LOUNGE, 22:30–04:00, £5
STUART RICHARDS
High Jinx resident Stuart Richards brings his trademark style to the bar every Thursday, offering a night of disco, funk and house. KEIRAN SHARPLES
BLACK DOG BALLROOM NWS, 23:00–04:00, FREE
BLACK DOG BALLROOM NQ, 22:00–04:00, FREE BEFORE 11PM
Mancunian nightclub institution, delivering a chronological history of soul on a weekly basis, courtesy of their DJ collective.
Motown, hip hop, indie and some old skool classics thrown in for good measure.
SOUTH, 23:00–04:00, £5
Fri 26 Jun
KEIRAN SHARPLES
Mixed-bag night from local DJ ledge Clint Boon.
High Jinx resident Stuart Richards brings his trademark style to the bar every Thursday, offering a night of disco, funk and house. BLACK DOG BALLROOM NWS, 23:00–04:00, FREE
Motown, hip hop, indie and some old skool classics thrown in for good measure.
Fri 19 Jun
CLINT BOON
PUNX INNA JUNGLE (AUTONOMADS + CHINA SHOP BULL + NO CONTEST + LUVDUMP + MORE) ANTWERP MANSION, 20:00–03:00, £5 BEFORE 11PM (£7 AFTER)
Loud, live, underground music from the Punx Inna Jungle crew.
ULTIMATE POWER
THE RITZ, 22:30–03:30, £8
Club night sweeping the nation, offering up nothing but power ballads. It’s like one big communal karaoke night. BLACK BEE SOUL CLUB
KRAAK, 23:00–04:00, £3
Soul with a sting.
MR SCRUFF KEEP IT UNREAL
BAND ON THE WALL, 22:00–03:00, £12
DJ set from the musical mastermind, known for mixing a junkshop bag of sounds and bringing his beats to life with squiggly, scribbled animations.
UPTOWN
THE DEAF INSTITUTE, 23:00–03:00, £3
The best in disco, funk, boogie and party classics. TOP OF THE POPS
MINT LOUNGE, 22:00–04:00, £3
Get your weekend off to a great start with this healthy mix of dancefloor fillers and guilty pleasures served up by residents and guest DJs. FAC FRIDAY
FACTORY 251, 22:30–04:00, 99P BEFORE MIDNIGHT
Student Friday-nighter, with mashups in room one, indie, funk and Motown in room two, and electro house in room three. JACOB COID
BLACK DOG BALLROOM NWS, 23:00–04:00, FREE
THE DEAF INSTITUTE, 23:00–03:00, £4.50
Rebel Music's Jacob Coid supplies an unpredictable mix of his leftof-centre collection, featuring Dylan to Dre, the Strokes to Snoop Dogg, Bowie to the Beastie Boys and anything in between.
FUNKADEMIA
BLACK DOG BALLROOM NQ, 22:00–04:00, FREE
GOO
Monthly club night tribute to 90s indie – expect Pulp, Nirvana, Suede, Smashing Pumpkins, Pixies and more.
STUART RICHARDS
MINT LOUNGE, 22:30–04:00, £5
High Jinx resident Stuart Richards brings his trademark style to the bar every Thursday, offering a night of disco, funk and house.
Mancunian nightclub institution, delivering a chronological history of soul on a weekly basis, courtesy of their DJ collective.
Sat 27 Jun
CLINT BOON
POP
SOUTH, 23:00–04:00, £5
Mixed-bag night from local DJ ledge Clint Boon.
DICE.fm
FACTORY SATURDAYS
MINT LOUNGE, 22:30–04:00, £5
MEAT FREE (A. MORGAN + AKARAM + PAY WHAT YOU WANT)
BLACK DOG BALLROOM NWS, 23:00–04:00, FREE
The Meat Free crew return with a local talent in A. Morgan, signed to Dynamic Reflection.
Three rooms of commercial dance, indie and deep house, powered by funktion one sound.
MINT LOUNGE, 22:00–04:00, £3
BLACK DOG BALLROOM NWS, 23:00–04:00, FREE
High Jinx resident Stuart Richards brings his trademark style to the bar every Thursday, offering a night of disco, funk and house. TIM WRIGHT
BLACK DOG BALLROOM NQ, 22:00–04:00, FREE BEFORE 11PM
New Saturday resident bringing the dancefloor classics all night long.
The biggest hits from the last 40 years of popular music. FUNKADEMIA
FACTORY 251, 22:30–04:00, £2 BEFORE MIDNIGHT
Three rooms of commercial dance, indie and deep house, powered by funktion one sound. STUART RICHARDS
THE DEAF INSTITUTE, 23:00–03:00, £4.50
JOSHUA BROOKS, 23:00–04:00, FREE
TOP OF THE POPS
Get your weekend off to a great start with this healthy mix of dancefloor fillers and guilty pleasures served up by residents and guest DJs.
FACTORY SATURDAYS FACTORY 251, 22:30–04:00, £2 BEFORE MIDNIGHT
STUART RICHARDS
High Jinx resident Stuart Richards brings his trademark style to the bar every Thursday, offering a night of disco, funk and house. TIM WRIGHT
BLACK DOG BALLROOM NQ, 22:00–04:00, FREE BEFORE 11PM
New Saturday resident bringing the dancefloor classics all night long.
Mancunian nightclub institution, delivering a chronological history of soul on a weekly basis, courtesy of their DJ collective. CLINT BOON
SOUTH, 23:00–04:00, £5
Mixed-bag night from local DJ ledge Clint Boon. YOU DIG?
SOUP KITCHEN, 23:00–04:00, £3
Funky music for funky people. FACTORY SATURDAYS
FACTORY 251, 22:30–04:00, £2 BEFORE MIDNIGHT
Three rooms of commercial dance, indie and deep house, powered by funktion one sound.
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Manchester Liverpool Clubs Clubs STUART RICHARDS BLACK DOG BALLROOM NWS, 23:00–04:00, FREE
High Jinx resident Stuart Richards brings his trademark style to the bar every Thursday, offering a night of disco, funk and house. SOUL GARDEN (GILES THORPE + NORMAN ANTHONY + TINY G)
BAND ON THE WALL, 23:00–03:00, £8
New skool soul night playing modern soul and contemporary RnB with a splash of reggae and some soul classics too. TIM WRIGHT
BLACK DOG BALLROOM NQ, 22:00–04:00, FREE BEFORE 11PM
New Saturday resident bringing the dancefloor classics all night long. ABSOLUTE SH**E
THE RUBY LOUNGE, 23:00–04:00, £3
Proudly one of the worst nights in Manchester, expect some of the worst tunes known to humankind. JIMI SUAREZ
XOLO, 23:00–04:00, FREE (£3 AFTER MIDNIGHT)
The very best in pop, hip hop, funk, disco and dance courtesy of resident Jimi Suarez. DVBBS
VICTORIA WAREHOUSE, 22:00–06:00, £25
Sat 06 Jun RAGE
THE KRAZYHOUSE, 22:30–05:00, £3
Mixed-bag night spread out over all three floors, serving up indie, rock, alternative and dance tunes. CHAMELEON SATURDAYS
Thu 04 Jun ITCHY FEET
ARTS CLUB, 22:30–03:30, £8
A unique blend of rock’n’roll, funk and swing, engineered to get feet moving. SHOT THERAPY!
THE KRAZYHOUSE, 22:30–04:30, £5
Two floors of alt rock, pop-punk, stadium rock, metal and chart music. GOSSIP
GARLANDS, 22:00–04:00, £4
Student night with 5 rooms of music spread over 2 floors and occasional theme nights. VIBE THURSDAYS
CAMEL CLUB, 22:00–04:00, £TBC
R’n’b, hip-hop and urban floorfillers.
Fri 05 Jun
ABANDON SILENCE DIMENSIONS FESTIVAL LAUNCH PARTY
THE KAZIMIER, 22:00–04:00, FROM £5
A special collaboration line-up from Dimensions Festival and Abandon Silence to celebrate the end of the 2014/15 clubbing season.
SLIPPED DISCO (VICTOR SIMONELLI)
THE MAGNET , 23:30–07:00, FREE BEFORE 12.30AM (FROM £3 AFTER)
Cloud 9 and Solution man Victor Simonelli calls in from New York City. GIRLS AND BOYS
ARTS CLUB, 22:00–03:00, FREE
GARLANDS, 22:00–04:00, £10 (£5 AFTER 2AM)
Extravagant and flamboyant club night complete with resident entertainers, including Foxy Grunt and Barbie.
BALTIC GARDEN FESTIVAL (SUBMOTION ORCHESTRA + JONNY DUB + CHANNEL ONE SOUNDSYSTEM + MC KWASI + MORE) CONSTELLATIONS, 14:00–00:00, £14
A huge summer line-up sees promoters Hot Plate and Dot. come together to host a massive line-up. PURE SATURDAYS
GOSSIP
Everything from R ‘n’ B to old skool garage, hip-hop and deep house.
Listings
Sat 20 Jun RAGE
THE KRAZYHOUSE, 22:30–05:00, £3
CHAMELEON SATURDAYS
Chameleon’s host of guest and resident DJs drop a diverse selection of tunery. BEDLAM
GARLANDS, 22:00–04:00, £10 (£5 AFTER 2AM)
Extravagant and flamboyant club night complete with resident entertainers, including Foxy Grunt and Barbie.
CAMEL CLUB, 22:00–04:00, £TBC
CAMEL CLUB, 21:00–04:00, £TBC
GARLANDS, 22:00–04:00, £4
VIBE THURSDAYS
PURE SATURDAYS
Manchester Theatre Capitol Theatre PLAYHOUSE CREATURES
3–6 JUN, TIMES VARY, £8 (£5)
A play focusomg on five of the most famous to provide a moving and often comic account of the precarious lives of Restoration actresses.
Contact
MOVING DANCE FORWARD
11 -12 JUN, 8:00PM – 10:00PM, £10 (£6)
New contemporary dance and performance by four leading North West choreographers, including Joseph Lau, Christopher Owen, Bridget Fiske and Lisi Perry. EACH ONE TEACH ONE
13 JUN, 7:30PM – 9:30PM, FREE
A multi-media drama by Hercules Productions using telling the events from the last 60 years in Moss Side and Hulme. RE:CON : SENSORED
27 JUN, 3:00PM – 10:00PM, £9 (£5)
A one-day festival of art and performance that asks you to look, listen, touch, taste, smell and dance your way through a body of work that each omits a different sense.
Eagle Inn
THE MAD CAP LAUGHS
24 JUN, 28 JUN, 6:30PM – 10:00PM, £6.50
An extract piece from a brand new original work that examines the life and complexities of former Pink Floyd legend Syd Barrett. COUNTING SHEEP
24 JUN, 28 JUN, TIMES VARY, £4.50
Alan’s wife’s funeral is thrown into disarray when his brother returns from Australia unannounced. A comedy piece in development to be performed Script in Hand.
R’n’b, hip-hop and urban floorfillers.
Smoonth RnB and urban floor fillers.
Fri 12 Jun
Thu 25 Jun
ARTS CLUB, 22:00–03:00, FREE
THE KRAZYHOUSE, 22:30–04:30, £5
Frederick is a salesman but he doesn’t trade in watches or mobile phone covers, he sells memories.
GOSSIP
25 JUN, 28 JUN, TIMES VARY, £6.50
GIRLS AND BOYS
Britpop, northern soul, Motown, indie classics and more. CHAMELEON FRIDAYS
CHAMELEON BAR, 19:00–03:30, FREE
Get your weekend started with Chameleon’s host of resident and guest DJs. TREND FRIDAYS
CAMEL CLUB, 21:00–04:00, £2 (£3 AFTER 12:30AM)
SHOT THERAPY!
Two floors of alt rock, pop-punk, stadium rock, metal and chart music.
CAMEL CLUB, 22:00–04:00, £TBC
HOME
VIBE THURSDAYS
Sat 13 Jun
Fri 26 Jun
THE MAGNET , 22:00–04:00, £10
The latest Hustle fun sees the club promoters celebrate the summer with soulful house NYC legend Frankie Feliciano. FREEZE (TODD TERJE + GREG WILSON + GERD JANSON + PRINS THOMAS + JEMMY)
ST LUKE’S CHURCH (BOMBED OUT CHURCH), 14:00–03:00, £35
Freeze finish off their 10th Anniversary celebrations in style with Todd Terje headlining a formidable bill. RAGE
THE KRAZYHOUSE, 22:30–05:00, £3
CHAMELEON SATURDAYS
BEDLAM
Extravagant and flamboyant club night complete with resident entertainers, including Foxy Grunt and Barbie. POSITIVE VIBRATION VOL 3 (CUT CAPERS + BOLSHY + JERAMIAH FERRARI + SAMSARA + MORE)
CHAMELEON FRIDAYS
CHAMELEON BAR, 19:00–03:30, FREE
Get your weekend started with Chameleon’s host of resident and guest DJs. LATE NITE TUFF GUY
CONSTELLATIONS, 16:00–04:00, £SOLD OUT
Twelve hour party featuring nothing but acid soaked cosmic disco courtesy of the renowned producer. TREND FRIDAYS
CAMEL CLUB, 21:00–04:00, £2 (£3 AFTER 12:30AM)
Everything from R ‘n’ B to old skool garage, hip-hop and deep house.
Sat 27 Jun
HUSTLE X THE PEOPLE’S BALEARIC REPUBLIC (MARK SEVEN)
THE MAGNET , 22:00–07:00, FREE BEFORE MIDNIGHT (£5 AFTER)
Stockholm-based British-born disco lover Mark Seven brings his extensive crate digging knowledge from Europe and the USA to the decks. RAGE
THE KRAZYHOUSE, 22:30–05:00, £3
Mixed-bag night spread out over all three floors, serving up indie, rock, alternative and dance tunes. CHAMELEON SATURDAYS
CHAMELEON BAR, 19:00–03:30, FREE
CONSTELLATIONS, 14:00–02:00, £9
Chameleon’s host of guest and resident DJs drop a diverse selection of tunery.
PURE SATURDAYS
GARLANDS, 22:00–04:00, £10 (£5 AFTER 2AM)
A 12 hour celebration of Jamaican music, food, and culture. CAMEL CLUB, 21:00–04:00, £TBC
Smoonth RnB and urban floor fillers.
Thu 18 Jun SHOT THERAPY!
THE KRAZYHOUSE, 22:30–04:30, £5
ACCIDENT OF BIRTH
Intense two hand drama set in the confines of Broadmoor by Manchester playwright Trevor Suthers.
GARLANDS, 22:00–04:00, £4
R’n’b, hip-hop and urban floorfillers.
HUSTLE
PIECES OF LIGHT
25 JUN, 28 JUN, TIMES VARY, £6.50
Student night with 5 rooms of music spread over 2 floors and occasional theme nights.
Everything from R ‘n’ B to old skool garage, hip-hop and deep house.
Two floors of alt rock, pop-punk, stadium rock, metal and chart music.
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Everything from R ‘n’ B to old skool garage, hip-hop and deep house.
Student night with 5 rooms of music spread over 2 floors and occasional theme nights.
GARLANDS, 22:00–04:00, £10 (£5 AFTER 2AM)
TREND FRIDAYS
TREND FRIDAYS
CAMEL CLUB, 21:00–04:00, £2 (£3 AFTER 12:30AM)
CHAMELEON BAR, 19:00–03:30, FREE
GARLANDS, 22:00–04:00, £8
CAMEL CLUB, 21:00–04:00, £2 (£3 AFTER 12:30AM)
One man and a suitcase filled with the past, uncertainty, high heels, brokenness, African dancing shells and hope. He’s going to have to pay extra to fly with that.
Thu 11 Jun
Chameleon’s host of guest and resident DJs drop a diverse selection of tunery.
Statk welcome in the summer with a garden party at Constellations, Fernando Constantini joining them on the ones and twos.
NINE LIVES
Smoonth RnB and urban floor fillers.
Get your weekend started with Chameleon’s host of resident and guest DJs.
STATK GARDEN PARTY
CHAMELEON BAR, 19:00–03:30, FREE
Mixed-bag night spread out over all three floors, serving up indie, rock, alternative and dance tunes.
CAMEL CLUB, 21:00–04:00, £TBC
CHAMELEON BAR, 19:00–03:30, FREE
CONSTELLATIONS, 15:00–03:00, £8
CHAMELEON FRIDAYS
THE LANTERN THEATRE, 20:00–22:00, £8.50 (£5.50)
CHAMELEON BAR, 19:00–03:30, FREE
Cruddy hell! Basshunter! The Swedish auto-tune and bass addict twiddles some knobs for a couple of hours while everyone waits for him to drop his 2007 smash hits All I Ever Wanted and Now You’re Gone.
Fri 19 Jun
BEDLAM
Chameleon’s host of guest and resident DJs drop a diverse selection of tunery.
Mixed-bag night spread out over all three floors, serving up indie, rock, alternative and dance tunes.
BASSHUNTER
VIBE THURSDAYS
CAMEL CLUB, 22:00–04:00, £TBC
R’n’b, hip-hop and urban floorfillers.
Get your weekend started with Chameleon’s host of resident and guest DJs.
Britpop, northern soul, Motown, indie classics and more. CHAMELEON FRIDAYS
Student night with 5 rooms of music spread over 2 floors and occasional theme nights.
CHAMELEON BAR, 19:00–03:30, FREE
SHOT THERAPY! The chart topping duo and club THE KRAZYHOUSE, 22:30–04:30, £5 heavyweights headline the caverns Two floors of alt rock, pop-punk, of the Victoria Warehouse. stadium rock, metal and chart music.
Liverpool Clubs
GOSSIP GARLANDS, 22:00–04:00, £4
BEDLAM
Extravagant and flamboyant club night complete with resident entertainers, including Foxy Grunt and Barbie.
THE FUNFAIR
UNTIL 13 JUN, NOT SUNDAYS, 7:30PM – 10:00PM, FROM £10
Simon Stephens’ new play, making its debut in the HOME theatre. Matinees available. KAFKA’S MONKEY
17–27 JUN, NOT SUNDAYS, 7:30PM – 10:00PM, FROM £15
Based on A Report to an Academy by Franz Kafkahe, the 2009 production featuring Olivier Award winner Kathryn Hunter comes to HOME after a hit world tour focuses around an ape-man who fights to become a master of the ‘civilized world.’ Matinees available.
Joshua Brooks RAW
2–6 JUN, 7:30PM – 10:00PM, £9 (£7)
Troublehouse Theatre Company present Chris O’Connell’s play, a tense, grim drama about the ritualised violence of teenage gangs.
Octagon Theatre NOISES OFF
4 JUN – 4 JUL, NOT SUNDAYS, TIMES VARY, FROM £10
The Stephen Fry and RSC-backed comedy is brought to the stage, cramming in all the drama found backstage at an am-dram show - will the actors even manage to make it out by the time the curtain’s been drawn open? Matinees also available. BLOOD
9–13 JUN, NOT 10, TIMES VARY, PRICES VARY
21st century urban love story between Caneze and Sully, with neither of them bargaining on the lengths to which Caneze’s brother will go to keep them apart.
PURE SATURDAYS
CAMEL CLUB, 21:00–04:00, £TBC
Smoonth RnB and urban floor fillers.
THE SKINNY
Theatre Manchester
EARLY DOORS 4-7 JUN, 7:00PM – 9:30PM, FROM £10
Opera House LOVE ME TENDER
5–13 JUN, NOT SUNDAYS, 7:30PM – 10:00PM, FROM £20.90
From the producers of Hairspray, Midnight Tango, West Side Story and The Rocky Horror Show comes a feel-good musical featuring Elvis Presley’s greatest hits. Matinees also available. JALEO FLAMENCO
17 JUN, 7:30PM – 10:00PM, FROM £20.90
A cocktail of footwork, singing, guitar playing and percussive handclapping from southern Spain with some of flamenco’s finest award-winning artists.
Royal Exchange Theatre
GODS ARE FALLEN AND ALL SAFETY GONE
12–13 JUN, 7:30PM – 8:30PM, £12 (£10)
Thought-provoking investigation into what happens when we discover that our parents are flawed human beings, and that at some point – often sooner than we think – they won’t be around any more. THE GHOST TRAIN
UNTIL 20 JUN, NOT SUNDAYS, 7:30PM – 10:00PM, FROM £15
A group of passengers are left stranded at a remote railway station, facing the prospect of a night in the waiting room...but are they alone? Matinee performances also available.
Royal Northern College of Music TRUTHS AND LIES
4–5 JUN, 7:00PM – 10:00PM, £4
A re-imagining of Martin Scorsese’s film Shutter Island, newly devised for the live stage. OFFENBACH: TALES OF THE HOFFMAN
13 JUN, 2:00PM – 5:00PM, £18
The classic Offenbach opera is brought to life once again by artistic director Nigel Machin and music director Juan Ortuño.
The Dancehouse GAME OF SOULS
12 JUN, 6:45PM-9:30PM, £14.50 (£12)
After meeting in a lesser part of Hell, two demons decide to play a game of chess using humans as pieces, during which, they try to alter the course of each pieces’ destiny.
The King’s Arms HAMLET
3 JUN, 7:30PM – 10:00PM, £10 (£8)
Non-gender specific casting illuminates CattyWhamPuss’ representation of the Bard’s classic. WHAT’S IN A NAME
10–11 JUN, 7:00PM – 9:30PM, £6
A writer struggles to meet his deadline while all manner of craziness breaks forth around him. MARX IN SOHO
18 JUN, 7:30PM – 10:00PM, £9
Marx seeks to return to London Soho to face his sternest critics, only to wind up in Soho New York! He’s about to find out how tough being a Marxist in an advanced capitalist metropolis can really be. HALF A PERSON: MY LIFE AS TOLD BY THE SMITH
20 JUN, 8:00PM – 10:00PM, £10
William is the classic twentysomething Londoner in this coming-of age-tale about friendship and love, as told through The Smiths songs. Matinee available.
The Lowry Studio
EVERY BRILLIANT THING
12–13 JUN, 8:00PM – 10:00PM, FROM £10
A new play about depression and the lengths people will go to for those they love. The show involves members of the audience, making each performance unique.
June 2015
Not Too Tame invite you down their local boozer. Join the regulars at the Jinglin’ Geordie for tales of love, loss and laughter, with drunken dancing, and a pub quiz. Matinees available. UPRISING
3 JUN, 7:30PM – 9:30PM, £5
Four plays from Monkeywood Theatre’s collaboration with four new writers, Alison Carr, Becky Prestwich, Hannah Rodger and Francesca Waite. IDIOT-SYNCRASY
10–11 JUN, 8:00PM – 10:00PM, FROM £10
London-based dance duo with a belief in reclaiming the role of theatre as a place for assembly and catharsis.
SALFORD CITY COLLEGE SHOWCASE
15–16 JUN, 8:00PM – 10:30PM, £5
Salford City College students present Tennessee Williams’ epic Streetcar Named Desire. LIGHTSPEED
17-18 JUN, 8-10PM, £12
Organised Chaos present new work following the relationship of Emma and Charlie, falling into each others ideological fantasies and unrealistic realities. BEYOND CRAGPORTH ROCK
19 JUN, 8:00PM – 10:30PM, £12
A roller coaster of bleak laughs and horror in this black comedy about six sisters driven to a ramshackle cottage on an eroding cliff. SHADOW BOXING
20 JUN, 8:00PM – 10:00PM, £12
A physically intense monologue set in a boxing gym as Flynn works his way to becoming a successful fighter. FIVE FEET IN FRONT
25–26 JUN, 8:00PM – 10:00PM, £12
A tale about humanity and looking after people – because there’s nothing else left.
The Lowry: Lyric Theatre WICKED
VARIOUS DATES BETWEEN 3 JUN AND 25 JUL, 7:30PM – 10:30PM, FROM £16
Captivating, multi-award winning and oft-sold out musical, telling the story of how the two witches of Oz came to be known as good and bad, told through song ‘n’ all that. Matinee performances also available.
The Lowry: Quays Theatre BOOGIE NIGHTS
3-6 JUN, 7:15PM – 9:30PM, £18
Fun-styled night of retro classics for your general dancing pleasure. Matinees available. CONSTELLATIONS
9-13 JUN, 8:00PM – 9:30PM, FROM £17
A new play starring Louise Brealey and Joe Armstrong about free will and friendship. Matinees available. Matinees available. BALLET CENTRAL 2015
29 JUN, 7:00PM – 10:00PM, FROM £13
Ballet Central present a repertoire of newly commissioned works spanning ballet, contemporary, jazz and narrative dance, performed by the company’s young dancers.
The Plaza Stockport
PASHA KOVALEV: LIFE THROUGH DANCE
4 JUN, 7:30PM – 10:00PM, FROM £23.10
One of the stars of Strictly Come Dancing hits the road with his own show.
STOCKPORT SHOWCASE OF DANCE
26 JUN, 7:30PM – 10:00PM, FROM £5
Dancers from Stockport’s best secondary schools and colleges descend on The Plaza for a choreography showcase.
Waterside Arts Centre THE YOUTH OF TODAY
16 JUN, 8:00PM – 10:00PM, £3
The Rocket Youth Theatre present a series of scenes based around their own experiences of being young people in 2015.
Liverpool Theatre Epstein Theatre THE TOMMY COOPER SHOW
20 JUN, 6:30PM – 9:00PM, £14.50 (£12.50)
The homage to the legendary comic returns to Liverpool. TIMELESS
28 JUN, 5:30PM – 8:30PM, £9.50 (£8.50)
A showcase production by lipa 4:19 at the heath celebrating musical theatre, dance & song. BUNTY THE BOUNCER
26 JUN, 7:00PM – 10:00PM, £15 (£13)
Set in a Liverpool Nightclub this comedy tells the story of the hardest and probably only female bouncer in town, with Lynne Fitzgerald performing nine different roles.
Everyman Theatre THE SPALDING SUITE
2–6 JUN, TIMES VARY, FROM £12
New physical theatre inspired by basketball apparently, with new poetry meeting movement and choreography. Sat matinee available.
Liverpool Empire THE DREAMBOYS
11 JUN, 7:30PM – 10:00PM, PRICES VARY
MAM! I’M ‘ERE! 26 JUN – 1 AUG, NOT SUNDAYS, 8:00PM – 10:00PM, £13
Manchester
The Lantern Theatre
BARREL OF LAUGHS (PHIL ELLIS + TONY BURGESS + MORE)
NINE LIVES
19 JUN, 8:00PM – 10:00PM, £8.50 (£5.50)
One man and a suitcase filled with the past, uncertainty, high heels, brokenness, African dancing shells and hope. He’s going to have to pay extra to fly with that. LIGHTSPEED
27 JUN, 7:30PM-9:30PM, £12.50 (£10.50)
Organised Chaos present new work following the relationship of Emma and Charlie, falling into each others’ ideological fantasies and unrealistic realities. HEARTS DESIRE
5–6 JUN, 7:30PM – 9:30PM, £7.50 (£5.50)
Unity Theatre CLUB ORIENTALE
Students from the Sirocco Academy of Egyptian Dance present a kaleidoscopic performance of movement and colour. THE ART OF FALLING APART
The infamous trickster brings his latest psychological mind trip to Liverpool. JERSEY BOYS
As part of Unity Theatre’s Edinburgh preview shows, Big Wow present their sell-out show about being out-of-sorts and off-kilter. Matinee available.
23 JUN – 4 JUL, NOT SUNDAYS, 7:30PM – 10:00PM, FROM £10
10 JUN, 8:00PM – 10:00PM, £12 (£10)
New adaptation of the Broadway musical comedy (based on the Mel Brooks movie), starring Jason Manford as Leo Bloom and Ross Noble as Franz Liebkind. Matinee performances also available. THE JUDY GARLAND STORY
8-10 JUN, 7:30PM – 10:00PM, PRICES VARY
All the Judy Garland classics, from the hits of Meet Me In St. Louis to the Wizard of Oz. Matinees also available.
Liverpool Philharmonic Hall A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC
17-18 JUN, 7:30PM – 10:30PM, FROM £13
Broadway’s neglected masterpiece - Sondheim’s achingly beautiful A Little Night Music - deals with love in all its wondrous, humorous and ironic permutations.
THE BEST IN STAND UP (PETE JOHANSSON + JO CAULFIELD + CHRISTIAN REILLY + JARRED CHRISTMAS + MC IAN COPPINGER) THE COMEDY STORE, 20:00–22:00, £18 (£12)
Regular night of stand up with a line-up of five top circuit comedians.
LAUGH LOCAL (MICHAEL LEGGE + MICKEY D + JACK CARROLL + MC ALEX BOARDMAN)
Sat 06 Jun
WILLIAM JONES PREPARES
A short solo that explores glamor, movement, vulnerability, and the creature of the human.
25-27 JUN, 8:00PM – 10:00PM, £12 (£10)
VARIOUS DATES BETWEEN 1 JUN AND 20 JUN, 7:30PM – 10:00PM, FROM £10
Three top-notch comics, a sprinkling of Frog compere funnies and a late night disco courtesy of the resident DJ.
13 JUN, 7:30PM – 8:30PM, £5.50 (£3.50)
15–20 JUN, 7:30PM – 10:00PM, FROM £27.90
THE PRODUCERS
THE FROG AND BUCKET COMEDY CLUB, 19:00–22:30, £16 (£8)
Comedy comes to the suburbs as the folk behind Bop Local present an evening of comedy.
9 JUN, 8:00PM – 10:00PM, £10 (£8)
True life story of multiplebucketload selling group The Four Seasons, from their beginnings to their extended run along the hit parade. Matinee performances also available (Thu & Sat, 2.30pm).
Fri 05 Jun
A play by Caryl Churchill that explores the monotony of every day life, as a family wait for their daughter to return home after years in Australia.
Glamour show courtesy of loads of oiled-up blokes possessing the most chiselled abs since we last looked round The Skinny office. Ahem. DERREN BROWN
Comedy
The smash hit musical disco returns, with Sally on the search for her mum ahead of her big wedding day, having been left on a doorstep as a baby. Matinees available.
ANCIENT ROUTES
Arab, Kurd and Yazidi stories and music as part of the Liverpool Arab Arts Festival 2015. RED SKIES
11–13 JUN, 7:30PM – 10:00PM, £14 (£12)
The story of a family’s struggle for survival during the Liverpool blitz of World War II. Matinee available. BONNIE & CLYDE
17–20 JUN, 8:00PM – 10:00PM, FROM £8
A modern musical update on the famous tale of two small-town kids becoming public enemy number one in the Great Depression.
CHORLTON IRISH CLUB, 18:30–22:30, £12 (£10)
BARREL OF LAUGHS (PHIL ELLIS + TONY BURGESS + MORE)
THE FROG AND BUCKET COMEDY CLUB, 19:00–22:30, £17 (£10)
Three top-notch comics, a sprinkling of Frog compere funnies and a late night disco courtesy of the resident DJ.
THE BEST IN STAND UP (PETE JOHANSSON + JO CAULFIELD + CHRISTIAN REILLY + JARRED CHRISTMAS + MC IAN COPPINGER) THE COMEDY STORE, 19:00–21:00, £22 (£16)
Regular night of stand up with a line-up of five top circuit comedians.
THE BEST IN STAND UP (PETE JOHANSSON + JO CAULFIELD + CHRISTIAN REILLY + JARRED CHRISTMAS + MC IAN COPPINGER) THE COMEDY STORE, 21:30–23:30, £22 (£16)
Regular night of stand up with a line-up of five top circuit comedians. GROUP THERAPY (PAUL FOOT)
GORILLA BAR MANCHESTER, 19:00–22:00, £11 (£8)
Rant-heavy comedian from Bucks, with a Guild of Connoisseurs, rather than fans – as you do.
LIVE FROM THE AIRING CUPBOARD’S END OF THE PIER SPECIAL-O-RAMA (BARBARA NICE) THE DANCEHOUSE, 19:15–22:00, £8 (£6)
Manchester Comedy Tue 02 Jun
XS MALARKEY (NICK DOODY + ALLYSON JUNE SMITH + MC TOBY HADOKE)
PUB/ZOO, 19:00–22:00, £5 (£3)
The rather ace comedy night continues with the usual Tuesday night shenanigans with the Edinburgh Fringe on the horizon.
Wed 03 Jun COMEDY BALLOON
APE AND APPLE, 20:30–23:00, FREE
The Stockportian comedian housewife of Phoenix Nights fame, Barbara Nice headlines of sketch whimsy and tomfoolery. BEST OF BUZZ COMEDY (MARK SIMMONS)
WATERSIDE ARTS CENTRE, 20:00–22:30, £12 (£10)
The Waterside’s regular comedy night, featuring one of the UK comedy circuit’s up and coming stars. LET’S SEE WHAT HAPPENS
THE KING’S ARMS, 19:00–22:00, £3
Improv from the members of CszUK – using audience suggestions a comedian will tell a story based on this, followed by improvised sketches from a troupe of actors.
THE HUDSUCKER PROXY
Manchester’s oldest underground comedy club returns with a bang, continuing their quest to put fresh comedic talent in the spotlight.
3–27 JUN, NOT SUNDAYS, TIMES VARY, FROM £12
Thu 04 Jun
A night of stand-up from some fresh-faced comics trying to break on to the circuit – be nice.
THE FROG AND BUCKET COMEDY CLUB, 19:00–22:30, £10 (£7)
THE LOWRY: QUAYS THEATRE, 20:00–22:30, £11.50
Liverpool Playhouse
Based on the Warner Bros. film, a company on the stock exchange look for a proxy to step in for their boss, whose just thrown himself to his death. But will their stooge prove to be as stupid as he looks? Matinees available.
THURSDAY NIGHT LIVE (PHIL ELLIS + TONY BURGESS + CHE BURNLEY + MORE)
Royal Court Theatre
STAND UP THURSDAY (PETE JOHANSSON + IAN COPPINGER + MC JARRED CHRISTMAS)
NIGHT COLLAR
UNTIL 13 JUN, 8:00PM – 10:00PM, £12
Alan Stocks stars as a cabbie cruising the streets looking for the next paying punter to brighten his night and fill up his wallet. But this is Liverpool so he is guaranteed to get more than he bargained for. Matinees available.
Start your weekend early at the Frog and Bucket with a host of top notch comedians.
THE COMEDY STORE, 20:00–22:00, £12 (£8)
Cheat life and get that Friday feeling one day early with a night of comedic delight from some circuit funny folk. COMEDY AT THE KINGS (PETE OTWAY + MORE)
THE KING’S ARMS, 20:00–22:30, £3 (£2)
An evening of live stand up comedy and a cake raffle, what’s not to love?
THE HEATONS COMEDY EVENING (BEN NORRIS + MICHAEL LEGGE + DAN FREEMAN + MC JUSTIN MOORHOUSE) THE HEATON SPORTS CLUB, 19:15–22:00, £7.50
A triple bill of comedy with Justin Moorhouse the man guiding you through all the laughs. THE DIDSBURY COMEDY CLUB (MICHAEL LEGGE + BEN NORRIS + JACK CARROLL)
DIDSBURY CRICKET CLUB, 19:00–22:00, £7
A trio of local rib-ticklers drop into the leafy suburbs of Didsbury, ably assisted by MC Andrew Ryan.
Mon 08 Jun BEAT THE FROG
THE FROG AND BUCKET COMEDY CLUB, 19:00–22:30, £3
A ten-act long heckle-fest inviting a handful of amateurs to take to the stage and try to Beat the Frog, and the audience decides who stays – brutal!
Tue 09 Jun
XS MALARKEY (ALEX EDELMAN + ADAM HESS + JAKE LAMBERT + MC TOBY HADOKE) PUB/ZOO, 19:00–22:00, £5 (£3)
THE LOWRY STUDIO, 20:00–22:30, FROM £8
Phil Buckley’s never had a great idea, but it won’t stop him trying to teach you a thing or two.
THE BEST IN STAND UP (IAN STONE + STEVE HARRIS + JIMMY MCGHIE + STEPHEN GRANT + MC ALUN COCHRANE) THE COMEDY STORE, 19:00–21:00, £22 (£16)
Regular night of stand up with a line-up of five top circuit comedians.
THE BEST IN STAND UP (IAN STONE + STEVE HARRIS + JIMMY MCGHIE + STEPHEN GRANT + MC ALUN COCHRANE) THE COMEDY STORE, 21:30–23:30, £22 (£16)
Regular night of stand up with a line-up of five top circuit comedians. STEVE BUGEJA + CHRISTIAN TALBOT
THE DANCEHOUSE, 20:00–22:30, £8
Double-headlining comedy bill with a pair of up and coming comedians prepping for Edinburgh.
Sun 14 Jun
NEW STUFF (MC TOBY HADOKE)
THE COMEDY STORE, 19:30–22:00, £4 (£2)
THE KING’S ARMS, 20:00–22:00, FREE
Keeping expectations low with this night of open mic stand up, opening up the stage to anyone willing to give it go.
Wed 10 Jun COMEDY BALLOON
APE AND APPLE, 20:30–23:00, FREE
SPRINKLE OF GLITTER
Louise Pentland returns with her brand new live show LouiseLIVE, her online popularity soaring with more than two million subscribers to her Youtube channel. HAL CRUTTENDEN & JOHN HASTINGS
THE LOWRY STUDIO, 20:00–22:30, £14
Manchester’s oldest underground comedy club returns with a bang, continuing their quest to put fresh comedic talent in the spotlight.
Work in-progress show from the two acclaimed comedians.
Thu 11 Jun
THE FROG AND BUCKET COMEDY CLUB, 19:00–22:30, £3
THURSDAY NIGHT LIVE (CAIMH MCDONNELL + CHRISTIAN REILLY + FREDDIE FARRELL + MICKEY D + MORE) THE FROG AND BUCKET COMEDY CLUB, 19:00–22:30, £10 (£7)
Start your weekend early at the Frog and Bucket with a host of top notch comedians.
STAND UP THURSDAY (IAN STONE + STEVE HARRIS + MC ALUN COCHRANE)
THE COMEDY STORE, 20:00–22:00, £12 (£8)
Cheat life and get that Friday feeling one day early with a night of comedic delight from some circuit funny folk. LOL SHOW
THE DANCEHOUSE, 19:45–22:30, £25
The hugely popular urban stand up comedy show heads out on the road for another raucous tour.
Mon 15 Jun BEAT THE FROG
A ten-act long heckle-fest inviting a handful of amateurs to take to the stage and try to Beat the Frog, and the audience decides who stays – brutal!
Tue 16 Jun
XS MALARKEY (JAMES ACASTER + STEPHANIE LAING + JOHN LEBBON + MC TOBY HADOKE)
PUB/ZOO, 19:00–22:00, £5 (£3)
The rather ace comedy night continues with the usual Tuesday night shenanigans with the Edinburgh Fringe on the horizon.
Wed 17 Jun COMEDY BALLOON
APE AND APPLE, 20:30–23:00, FREE
Fri 12 Jun
Manchester’s oldest underground comedy club returns with a bang, continuing their quest to put fresh comedic talent in the spotlight.
THE FROG AND BUCKET COMEDY CLUB, 19:00–22:30, £16 (£8)
THURSDAY NIGHT LIVE (WAYNE DEAKIN + NINA SMITH + JARRED CHRISTMAS + MORE)
BARREL OF LAUGHS (CAIMH MCDONNELL + CHRIS CAIRNS + MORE)
Three top-notch comics, a sprinkling of Frog compere funnies and a late night disco courtesy of the resident DJ.
THE COMEDY STORE, 20:00–22:00, £18 (£12)
PHIL BUCKLEY
Three top-notch comics, a sprinkling of Frog compere funnies and a late night disco courtesy of the resident DJ.
THE LOWRY: QUAYS THEATRE, 15:00–17:00, FROM £23.50
THE WORST COMEDY NIGHT IN SALFORD
THE COMEDY STORE, 19:30–22:00, £6 (£4)
The follow-up to Omielan’s debut show What Would Beyonce Do? The sharp comic returns with the similarly snappy Am I Right Ladies?
THE FROG AND BUCKET COMEDY CLUB, 19:00–22:30, £17 (£10)
A night of stand-up from some fresh-faced comics trying to break on to the circuit – be nice.
THE BEST IN STAND UP (IAN STONE + STEVE HARRIS + JIMMY MCGHIE + STEPHEN GRANT + MC ALUN COCHRANE)
LUISE OMIELAN
BARREL OF LAUGHS (CAIMH MCDONNELL + CHRIS CAIRNS + MORE)
The rather ace XS Malarkey continue with their Tuesday night shenanigans with the Edinburgh Fringe on the horizon.
Sun 07 Jun KING GONG (MC JARRED CHRISTMAS)
Sat 13 Jun
Regular night of stand up with a line-up of five top circuit comedians.
SHAM BODIE (FALSE ADVERTISING + RANDOLPH TEMPEST + SOPHIE WILLAN) GULLIVERS, 20:00-22:30, £5
Sham Bodie returns with another rib-tickling evening of music and sketch show comedy.
Thu 18 Jun
THE FROG AND BUCKET COMEDY CLUB, 19:00–22:30, £10 (£7)
THE BEST IN STAND UP (ANDY ASKINS + NATHAN CATON + MARKUS BIRDMAN + JOHNNY AWSUM + MC JOHN FOTHERGILL) THE COMEDY STORE, 20:00–22:00, £18 (£12)
Regular night of stand up with a line-up of five top circuit comedians.
Sat 20 Jun
BARREL OF LAUGHS (WAYNE DEAKIN + MORE)
THE FROG AND BUCKET COMEDY CLUB, 19:00–22:30, £17 (£10)
Three top-notch comics, a sprinkling of Frog compere funnies and a late night disco courtesy of the resident DJ.
THE BEST IN STAND UP (ANDY ASKINS + NATHAN CATON + MARKUS BIRDMAN + ALUN COCHRANE + MC JOHN FOTHERGILL)
THE COMEDY STORE, 19:00–21:00, £22 (£16)
Regular night of stand up with a line-up of five top circuit comedians.
THE BEST IN STAND UP (ANDY ASKINS + NATHAN CATON + MARKUS BIRDMAN + ALUN COCHRANE + MC JOHN FOTHERGILL)
THE COMEDY STORE, 21:30–23:30, £22 (£16)
Regular night of stand up with a line-up of five top circuit comedians.
STEPHANIE LAING + MATT WINNING
THE DANCEHOUSE, 20:00–22:30, £8
Double-headlining comedy bill with a pair of up and coming comedians prepping for Edinburgh.
Sun 21 Jun
NEW COMEDIANS (MC ALEX BOARDMAN)
THE COMEDY STORE, 19:30–22:00, £4 (£2)
Up and comers trying out their stuff before hitting the circuit. MATT FORDE
THE LOWRY STUDIO, 20:00–22:00, £12
The political satirist returns with his timely routine to tie in neatly with the General Election. SITCOM TRIALS
THE KING’S ARMS, 19:30–21:30, £3
Brand new sitcoms go head to head and you the audience choose the best.
Mon 22 Jun BEAT THE FROG
THE FROG AND BUCKET COMEDY CLUB, 19:00–22:30, £3
A ten-act long heckle-fest inviting a handful of amateurs to take to the stage and try to Beat the Frog, and the audience decides who stays – brutal! JUSTIN MOORHOUSE + ALUN COCHRANE
THE KING’S ARMS, 19:30–22:00, £TBC
The two circuit veterans and TV-bothering comedians get their Edinburgh Fringe prep under way.
Tue 23 Jun
XS MALARKEY (BEASTS + ANDREW RYAN + JOHN TAYLOR + MC TOBY HADOKE) PUB/ZOO, 19:00–22:00, £5 (£3)
The rather ace XS Malarkey continue with their Tuesday night shenanigans with the Edinburgh Fringe on the horizon. THE WORST COMEDY NIGHT IN SALFORD
THE KING’S ARMS, 20:00–22:00, FREE
Start your weekend early at the Frog and Bucket with a host of top notch comedians.
Keeping expectations low with this night of open mic stand up, opening up the stage to anyone willing to give it go.
THE COMEDY STORE, 20:00–22:00, £12 (£8)
APE AND APPLE, 20:30–23:00, FREE
STAND UP THURSDAY (ANDY ASKINS + NATHAN CATON + MC JOHN FOTHERGILL)
Cheat life and get that Friday feeling one day early with a night of comedic delight from some circuit funny folk. THE HORNE SECTION
THE LOWRY: QUAYS THEATRE, 20:00–22:30, £16
Comedian Alex Horne marshals his talented band in a joyous, lifeaffirming combination of music and comedy.
Fri 19 Jun
BARREL OF LAUGHS (WAYNE DEAKIN + MORE)
THE FROG AND BUCKET COMEDY CLUB, 19:00–22:30, £16 (£8)
Three top-notch comics, a sprinkling of Frog compere funnies and a late night disco courtesy of the resident DJ.
Wed 24 Jun COMEDY BALLOON
Manchester’s oldest underground comedy club returns with a bang, continuing their quest to put fresh comedic talent in the spotlight.
Thu 25 Jun
THURSDAY NIGHT LIVE (DALISO CHAPONDA + MICK FERRY + MORE)
THE FROG AND BUCKET COMEDY CLUB, 19:00–22:30, £10 (£7)
Start your weekend early at the Frog and Bucket with a host of top notch comedians.
STAND UP THURSDAY (CAREY MARX + PIERRE HOLLINS + MC JOHN MOLONEY) THE COMEDY STORE, 20:00–22:00, £12 (£8)
Cheat life and get that Friday feeling one day early with a night of comedic delight from some circuit funny folk.
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Manchester Comedy Fri 26 Jun
BARREL OF LAUGHS (DALISO CHAPONDA + MICK FERRY + MORE)
THE FROG AND BUCKET COMEDY CLUB, 19:00–22:30, £16 (£8)
Three top-notch comics, a sprinkling of Frog compere funnies and a late night disco courtesy of the resident DJ. THE BEST IN STAND UP (CAREY MARX + PIERRE HOLLINS + ZOE LYONS + RICKY GROVER + MC JOHN MOLONEY)
THE COMEDY STORE, 20:00–22:00, £18 (£12)
Regular night of stand up with a line-up of five top circuit comedians.
Sat 27 Jun
BARREL OF LAUGHS (DALISO CHAPONDA + MICK FERRY + MORE)
THE FROG AND BUCKET COMEDY CLUB, 19:00–22:30, £17 (£10)
Three top-notch comics, a sprinkling of Frog compere funnies and a late night disco courtesy of the resident DJ. THE BEST IN STAND UP (CAREY MARX + PIERRE HOLLINS + ZOE LYONS + RICKY GROVER + MC JOHN MOLONEY)
THE COMEDY STORE, 19:00–21:00, £22 (£16)
Regular night of stand up with a line-up of five top circuit comedians.
THE BEST IN STAND UP (CAREY MARX + PIERRE HOLLINS + ZOE LYONS + RICKY GROVER + MC JOHN MOLONEY)
THE COMEDY STORE, 21:30–23:30, £22 (£16)
Regular night of stand up with a line-up of five top circuit comedians. JIMMY CARR
O2 APOLLO, 20:00–22:30, £25
The hardworking comic tours his latest solo show, packed with oneliners, stories and incisive musings on the human condition.
Mon 29 Jun BEAT THE FROG
THE FROG AND BUCKET COMEDY CLUB, 19:00–22:30, £3
A ten-act long heckle-fest inviting a handful of amateurs to take to the stage and try to Beat the Frog, and the audience decides who stays – brutal!
SIDEKICK COMEDY (KATE MCCABE + RIO BAUER + EIKE BENTLEY + GRAHAM MILTON + ALLYSON JUNE SMITH) VIA, 19:30–22:30, £2
Your friendly,monthly, neighbourhood comedy gig. All comedians are hero-approved. JUSTIN MOORHOUSE + ALUN COCHRANE
THE KING’S ARMS, 19:30–22:00, £TBC
The two circuit veterans and TV-bothering comedians get their Edinburgh Fringe prep under way.
Liverpool Comedy Tue 02 Jun BEC HILL
UNITY THEATRE, 19:00–20:00, £5
The Barry Performer’s Choice Award for Best Show at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe prepares for another assault up north. PHIL NICHOL
UNITY THEATRE, 21:00–22:00, £8
The award-winning performing prepares his new show for the Edinburgh Fringe. STEWART LEE
LIVERPOOL PHILHARMONIC HALL, 20:00–22:30, FROM £21
One of the country’s most respected comedians prepares new material for his new BBC2 series of Comedy Vehicle. SINK OR SWIM (MC PAUL SMITH)
HOT WATER COMEDY CLUB, 19:00–22:00, £3 (£2)
A host of local comedians test their wits against the crowd, hoping to complete their set before the gong rings.
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Listings
Comedy
Liverpool Wed 03 Jun
COLONIAL BAST**DS: ON CHARITY
UNITY THEATRE, 20:00–22:00, £8 (£7)
A hilarious attack on the Western approach to goodwill in a series of sketches. THE LAUGHTER FACTOR (MC PAUL SMITH)
THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE, 19:00–22:00, £5
A monthly event giving comics the chance to try out new material before the weekend shows – it helps if you think of yourself as a comedic guinea pig. STEWART LEE
LIVERPOOL PHILHARMONIC HALL, 20:00–22:30, FROM £21
One of the country’s most respected comedians prepares new material for his new BBC2 series of Comedy Vehicle.
Thu 04 Jun
COLONIAL BAST**DS: ON CHARITY
UNITY THEATRE, 20:00–22:00, £8 (£7)
A hilarious attack on the Western approach to goodwill in a series of sketches.
BENNY BOOT (CHRIS TURNER + TOM TAYLOR + MC ADAM ROWE )
COMEDY CENTRAL AT BABY BLUE, 18:00–22:00, £15
Triple-headlining bill set to test your funny bone. LUISA OMIELAN
THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE, 19:00–22:00, £12.50
The Edinburgh Fringe sensation follows up her debut tour with her new show Am I Right Ladies?!
Fri 05 Jun
MIS LES: A REVOLUTION IN ROLLERS
UNITY THEATRE, 20:00–22:00, £14 (£12)
Caz and Britney, stars of Scottie Road The Musical, take on Les Mis with rainbow flags hoisted high about their heads as they journey from the barricades to... who knows? BENNY BOOT (CHRIS TURNER + BRENNAN REECE + MC CAIMH MCDONNELL)
COMEDY CENTRAL AT BABY BLUE, 18:00–22:00, £15
Triple-headlining bill set to test your funny bone.
MATT RICHARDSON (STEVE HARRIS + STE PORTER + MC CHRIS CAIRNS) THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE, 19:00–22:00, £15
Triple headline show with a delightfully hilarious line-up of circuit funny-folk.
BOILING POINT (DANNY PENSIVE + CHRIS BROOKER + DUNCAN OAKLEY + MC PAUL SMITH) HOT WATER COMEDY CLUB, 19:00–22:00, £10 (£5)
New and established comics take to the stage (found upstairs at Holiday Inn, Lime Street), for an evening of chuckles with their resident compere leading the way.
Sat 06 Jun
MIS LES: A REVOLUTION IN ROLLERS
UNITY THEATRE, 20:00–22:00, £14 (£12)
Caz and Britney, stars of Scottie Road The Musical, take on Les Mis with rainbow flags hoisted high about their heads as they journey from the barricades to... who knows? SPRINKLE OF GLITTER
EPSTEIN THEATRE, 15:00–17:00, FROM £23
Louise Pentland returns with her brand new live show LouiseLIVE, her online popularity soaring with more than two million subscribers to her Youtube channel.
BENNY BOOT (JARRED CHRISTMAS + BRENNAN REECE + MC CAIMH MCDONNELL) COMEDY CENTRAL AT BABY BLUE, 18:00–22:00, £18
Triple-headlining bill set to test your funny bone.
STEVE HARRIS (STE PORTER + MATT RICHARDSON + MC CHRIS CAIRNS)
THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE, 19:00–22:00, £17.50
Triple headline show with a delightfully hilarious line-up of circuit funny-folk.
LAUGH OUT LOUD COMEDY CLUB (JAMIE SUTHERLAND + JOHN GORDILLO + JONNY PELHAM) THE ATKINSON, 20:00–22:30, £15
A triple-header of comedy descends on the Laugh Out Loud Comedy Club.
BOILING POINT (DANNY PENSIVE + DAPHNA BARAM + DUNCAN OAKLEY + MC PAUL SMITH) HOT WATER COMEDY CLUB, 19:00–22:00, £10 (£5)
New and established comics take to the stage (found upstairs at Holiday Inn, Lime Street), for an evening of chuckles with their resident compere leading the way.
Sun 07 Jun
HOT WATER COMEDY CLUB COMEDIAN OF THE YEAR (CHRIS SULLIVAN + CIARAN VARLEY + TOMAS MCCABE + MC PAUL SMITH)
HOT WATER COMEDY CLUB, 19:00–22:00, £3 (£1.50)
The Hotwater Comedy Club’s quest to find the funniest comedian of the year.
Thu 11 Jun
CHRISTIAN REILLY (MICKEY D + HAYLEY ELLIS + MC DAVID WARD)
COMEDY CENTRAL AT BABY BLUE, 18:00–22:00, £15
Triple-headlining bill set to test your funny bone.
Fri 12 Jun
CHRISTIAN REILLY (MICKEY D + IAN SMITH + MC DAVID WARD)
COMEDY CENTRAL AT BABY BLUE, 18:00–22:00, £15
Triple-headlining bill set to test your funny bone.
JARRED CHRISTMAS (RICH WILSON + KEITH CARTER AS NIGE + MC NEIL FITZMAURICE) THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE, 19:00–22:00, £15
Triple headline show with a delightfully hilarious line-up of circuit funny-folk.
BOILING POINT (CARLY SMALLMAN + LOST VOICE GUY + JAMIE SUTHERLAND + MC FREDDY QUINNE) HOT WATER COMEDY CLUB, 19:00–22:00, £10 (£5)
New and established comics take to the stage (found upstairs at Holiday Inn, Lime Street), for an evening of chuckles with their resident compere leading the way.
Sat 13 Jun DAVID SEDARIS
ECHO ARENA, 19:15–22:30, £26
The American novelist takes his hilarious self out on the road, delivering snippets and quips from his succession of critically acclaimed novels, including Me Talk Pretty One Day and When You Are Engulfed in Flames.
Thu 18 Jun
WAYNE DEAKIN (STEVE HARRIS + CHE BURNLEY + MC STE PORTER)
COMEDY CENTRAL AT BABY BLUE, 18:00–22:00, £15
Triple-headlining bill set to test your funny bone.
Fri 19 Jun
WAYNE DEAKIN (STEVE HARRIS + STE PORTER + MC LOU CONRAN)
COMEDY CENTRAL AT BABY BLUE, 18:00–22:00, £15
Triple-headlining bill set to test your funny bone.
CHRISTIAN SCHULTE-LOH (CHRIS MCCAUSLAND + CAIMH MCDONNELL + MC CHRIS CAIRNS) THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE, 19:00–22:00, £15
Triple headline show with a delightfully hilarious line-up of circuit funny-folk.
BOILING POINT (SAM GORE + MARTIN CROSER + STEFFAN PEDDIE + MC FREDDY QUINNE)
HOT WATER COMEDY CLUB, 19:00–22:00, £10 (£5)
New and established comics take to the stage (found upstairs at Holiday Inn, Lime Street), for an evening of chuckles with their resident compere leading the way.
Sat 20 Jun
WAYNE DEAKIN (STEVE HARRIS + STE PORTER + MC LOU CONRAN)
COMEDY CENTRAL AT BABY BLUE, 18:00–22:00, £18
Triple-headlining bill set to test your funny bone.
CHRIS MCCAUSLAND (CHRISTIAN SCHULTE-LOH + CAIMH MCDONNELL + MC CHRIS CAIRNS) THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE, 19:00–22:00, £17.50
Triple headline show with a delightfully hilarious line-up of circuit funny-folk.
BOILING POINT (SAM GORE + CARL JONES + STEFFAN PEDDIE + MC PAUL SMITH)
HOT WATER COMEDY CLUB, 19:00–22:00, £10 (£5)
New and established comics take to the stage (found upstairs at Holiday Inn, Lime Street), for an evening of chuckles with their resident compere leading the way.
Sun 21 Jun
HOT WATER COMEDY CLUB COMEDIAN OF THE YEAR (MIKE CARTER + ANDY BAINES + ROY BAKER + DAN HOBSON + MORE)
HOT WATER COMEDY CLUB, 19:00–22:00, £3 (£1.50)
The Hotwater Comedy Club’s quest to find the funniest comedian of the year.
Mon 22 Jun KEVIN BRIDGES
LIVERPOOL PHILHARMONIC HALL, 20:00–22:30, FROM £25
The Glaswegian funnyman makes the journey Liverpool-way as part of his new tour.
Sat 27 Jun
DALISO CHAPONDA (MICK FERRY + PENELLA MELLOR + MC DAVID LONGLEY) COMEDY CENTRAL AT BABY BLUE, 18:00–22:00, £18
Triple-headlining bill set to test your funny bone.
ROGER MONKHOUSE (PHIL CHAPMAN + PATRICK MONAHAN + MC NEIL FITZMAURICE) THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE, 19:00–22:00, £17.50
Triple headline show with a delightfully hilarious line-up of circuit funny-folk. BOILING POINT (ADAM ROWER + PHIL COOPER + SAM AVERY + MC PAUL SMITH)
HOT WATER COMEDY CLUB, 19:00–22:00, £10 (£5)
HOT WATER COMEDY CLUB, 19:00–22:00, £3 (£1.50)
Manchester Craft and Design Centre
The Hot Water Comedy Club’s quest to find the funniest comedian of the year.
Manchester Art Castlefield Gallery
Manchester Museum
VARIOUS DATES BETWEEN 12 JUN AND 2 AUG, 1:00PM – 6:00PM, FREE
UNTIL 31 DEC, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE
REAL PAINTING
An exhibition of new and existing work by ten artists working nationally and internationally including Turner Prize nominee Angela de la Cruz (2010) and John Moores Painting Prize winner’s Simon Callery (1992) and Alexis Harding (2004).
Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art CLEMENS WILHELM
UNTIL 6 JUN, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE
The visual artist’s video Simulacra which was shot in Chinese amusement park Window of the World and observes the actions of Chinese tourists. MURMURATION
10–13 JUN, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE
Contemporary Photography students from Stockport College present their annual end of year show.
UNTIL 26 JUL, TIMES VARY, FREE
BOILING POINT (CARLY SMALLMAN + LOST VOICE GUY + JAMIE SUTHERLAND + MC FREDDY QUINNE) HOT WATER COMEDY CLUB, 19:00–22:00, £10 (£5)
New and established comics take to the stage (found upstairs at Holiday Inn, Lime Street), for an evening of chuckles with their resident compere leading the way.
Sun 14 Jun
HOT WATER COMEDY CLUB COMEDIAN OF THE YEAR (TOP JOE + JJ HARRISON + JAMES DOYLE + MC PAUL SMITH)
HOT WATER COMEDY CLUB, 19:00–22:00, £3 (£1.50)
The Hotwater Comedy Club’s quest to find the funniest comedian of the year.
DALISO CHAPONDA (MATT REES + LEE KYLE + MC DAVID LONGLEY)
COMEDY CENTRAL AT BABY BLUE, 18:00–22:00, £15
Triple-headlining bill set to test your funny bone.
Fri 26 Jun
DALISO CHAPONDA (MICK FERRY + PENELLA MELLOR + MC DAVID LONGLEY) COMEDY CENTRAL AT BABY BLUE, 18:00–22:00, £15
Triple-headlining bill set to test your funny bone.
PATRICK MONAHAN (ROGER MONKHOUSE + PHIL CHAPMAN + MC NEIL FITZMAURICE)
THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE, 19:00–22:00, £15
Triple headline show with a delightfully hilarious line-up of circuit funny-folk.
BOILING POINT (ADAM ROWE + GABRIEL EBULUE + SAM AVERY + MC PAUL SMITH)
HOT WATER COMEDY CLUB, 19:00–22:00, £10 (£5)
New and established comics take to the stage (found upstairs at Holiday Inn, Lime Street), for an evening of chuckles with their resident compere leading the way.
MESMERISED
Mesmerising patterns take centre stage in this showcase of works in paper and aluminium by Rosie Booth, winner of Manchester Craft & Design Centre’s 9th annual MMU Graduate Solo Exhibition Award.
LIVERPOOL PHILHARMONIC HALL, 20:00–22:30, FROM £25
Triple headline show with a delightfully hilarious line-up of circuit funny-folk.
ARTISTS IN THE FRAME
UNTIL 31 AUG, TIMES VARY, FREE
UNTIL 29 AUG, NOT SUNDAYS, 10:00AM – 5:30PM, FREE
COMEDY CENTRAL AT BABY BLUE, 18:00–22:00, £18
Thu 25 Jun
UNTIL 12 JUL, TIMES VARY, FREE
Self-portraits by artists including Van Dyck, William Hogarth, Angelica Kauffman, Wyndham Lewis, Sarah Lucas, Julian Opie and Grayson Perry.
HOT WATER COMEDY CLUB COMEDIAN OF THE YEAR (MC PAUL SMITH)
HOME
THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE, 19:00–22:00, £17.50
NATURAL FORCES: ROMANTICISM & NATURE
Sun 28 Jun
KEVIN BRIDGES
KEITH CARTER AS NIGE (RICH WILSON + JARRED CHRISTMAS + MC NEIL FITZMAURICE)
COTTON COUTURE
UNTIL 31 AUG, TIMES VARY, FREE
A collection of designer dresses and suits donated by the Cotton Board, a Manchester-based organisation tasked with increasing the use of cotton in couture to bump up cotton exports.
A collection of early 1800s Romantic works focused on the idea of nature as a force.
Tue 23 Jun The Glaswegian funnyman makes the journey Liverpool-way as part of his new tour.
Manchester Art Gallery
Edmundson’s second solo exhibition sees the artist present an extension of his studio practice, exploring accepted binary themes of painting/ sculpture, object/subject, low culture/high culture, studio/gallery.
Manchester
New and established comics take to the stage (found upstairs at Holiday Inn, Lime Street), for an evening of chuckles with their resident compere leading the way.
CHRISTIAN REILLY (MICKEY D + IAN SMITH + MC DAVID WARD)
Triple-headlining bill set to test your funny bone.
Art
The International 3
THE HEART IS DECEITFUL ABOVE ALL THINGS
Inaugural HOME art exhibition, with a group show aiming to evoke feelings of love and loss in uncertain times.
HOME PROJECTS: MAGDA ARCHER #GIVEMEEVERYTHINGANDNOTHINGBABY
UNTIL 31 AUG, 10:00AM – 11:00PM, FREE
The much-loved Cornerhouse Projects becomes the HOME Projects, with print artist Magda Archer returning with a new show.
Imperial War Museum North WITHDRAW
UNTIL 8 SEP, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE
New works by leading reportage illustrator George Butler explore the impact of British and US armed forces leaving Afghanistan. Butler’s past work has featured in media outlets across the world.
MMU Special Collections
WE WANT PEOPLE WHO CAN DRAW: INSTRUCTION AND DISSENT IN THE BRITISH ART SCHOOL
UNTIL 31 JUL, NOT SUNDAYS, TIMES VARY, FREE
This exhibition brings together manifestos and other forms of subversive literature that explore aspects of the history of British art schools since the Second World War, including items relating to The Slade School of Fine Art Women’s Group and more.
DANCE OF THE BUTTERFLIES
New art work by one of Africa’s foremost contemporary artists Romuald Hazoumè. It features swarms of multicoloured ‘butterflies’ which will take over the Museum’s Living Worlds gallery.
Manchester Metropolitan University MMU: DEGREE SHOW 2015
13-24 JUN, TIMES VARY, FREE
End of year show celebrating the achievements of students in their final year at the Manchester School of Art, housed in the Benzie, Grosvenor and Chatham Buildings.
National Football Museum
THE GREATER GAME: FOOTBALL & THE FIRST WORLD WAR
UNTIL 6 SEP, TIMES VARY, £1
Exhibition revealing the extraordinary story of football and footballers during the conflict, bringing together personal mementoes and first-hand accounts from the players, alongside rare objects from the museum’s collections.
PAPER Gallery PAPER #22: TRACING PAPER
VARIOUS DATES BETWEEN 6 JUN AND 18 JUL, 11:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE
Following six months on the PAPER mentoring scheme, six artists present new work inspired by, you guessed it, paper.
Salford Museum and Art Gallery ONE NEEDS MORE THAN PAINT
UNTIL 5 JUL, TIMES VARY, FREE
A celebration of the life and works of Manchester-born artist Harry Ousey. THE NOW, THE NORTH
UNTIL 6 SEP, TIMES VARY, FREE
STUART EDMUNDSON
VARIOUS DATES BETWEEN 20 JUN AND 31 JUL, 12:00PM – 5:00PM, FREE
University of Salford CREATE SALFORD 2015
17-20 JUN, TIMES VARY, FREE
Final year students from the University of Salford's School of Arts and Media host a three day festival of events spanning music, art and comedy.
Whitworth Art Gallery SARAH LUCAS
UNTIL 19 JUL, TIMES VARY, FREE
British sculptor known for her provocative pieces which challenge and subvert attitudes towards the body, gender and sexuality. CAI GUO-QIANG
UNTIL 21 JUN, TIMES VARY, FREE
Artist best known for his fireworks displays as part of the Beijing Olympics opening and closing ceremonies, Guo-Qiang brings his experiments with gun powder to the Whitworth.
The John Lennon Art and Design Building LIVERPOOL SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN DEGREE SHOW
UNTIL 12 JUN, 10:00AM-6:00PM
Graduates from Liverpool John Moores University’s School of Art and Design present a two week exhibition of work from the areas of architecture, fashion, fine art, graphic design and illustration, interior design and popular music studies.
The Reader Gallery
SOUTH LIVERPOOL ARTS GROUP
22 JUN – 5 JUL, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE
Group exhibition courtesy of the 34 year-old collective.
THOMAS SCHÜTTE
26 JUN, 7:00PM – 9:00PM, FREE
Print installation and etchings from the German artist, promising provocative reactions to recent global events and social trends.
JAKE LAFFOLEY
Live performance art piece that looks into and explores the concept of labour and what defines it. RACHEL PURSGLOVE
12 JUN, 7:00PM – 9:00PM, FREE
Liverpool Art Arts Hub 47 CONTEMPLATIVE ART
UNTIL 14 JUN, NOT 1 JUN, 8 JUN, TIMES VARY, FREE
A new exhibition of abstract paintings focusing on the theme of contemplation and energy flow.
FACT
SODA_JERK
UNTIL 6 JUL, TIMES VARY, FREE
Two-person art collective Soda_Jerk come to FACT as part of the European Media Artist Residency Exchange, working with sampled material to construct rogue histories and counter-mythologies. BUILD YOUR OWN
4 JUN – 31 AUG, TIMES VARY, FREE
An exploration into how digital technologies come together with traditional processes of production to create new ways of working, sharing and collaborating.
Lady Lever Art Gallery PICTURING VENICE
UNTIL 27 SEP, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE
Featuring work by Turner, Sickert and Brangwyn, this exhibition explores the stylistic developments of European art between the mid 17th century and 20th century through representations of the Italian city.
Open Eye Gallery OPEN 1
UNTIL 23 AUG, 10:30AM – 5:30PM, FREE
Artists Billy MacRae, Deborah Kelly, Helen Marshall, Louis Quail, Richard Ross and Sonal Kantaria are the first to be featured in the Open Eye Gallery’s first of three open-call exhibitions taking place over the next year.
Soup Kitchen
Capturing the life and times of Liverpool in the mid-70s.
Turning art into a live spectator sport, painting gets all competitive as some of the city’s most talented artists create a masterpiece in only 30 minutes – and you decide who stays for the grand final.
LOST INDUSTRY
UNTIL 14 JUN, 10:00AM – 6:00PM, FREE
Carmel College students respond to Nitrate, exploring the theme of lost industry and its relationship with Merseyside.
UNTIL 19 JUL, TIMES VARY, FREE
The Bluecoat
5 JUN, 7:00PM – 10:30PM, £10
The first major solo exhibition in the UK by Barcelona-born photographer Xavier Ribas, which charts the history of nitrate extraction in the Chilean Atacama Desert.
The Royal Standard
A selection of the artist Hugh Winterbottom’s interpretations of regional cities and towns, from Manchester to Stockport. ART BATTLE
XAVIER RIBAS: NITRATE UNTIL 5 JUL, 10:00AM – 6:00PM, FREE
TRICIA PORTER: LIVERPOOL PHOTOGRAPHS 1972-74
UNTIL 5 JUL, 10:00AM – 6:00PM, FREE
TABITHA JUSSA: MEMORANDUM OF UNDERSTANDING
UNTIL 5 JUL, 10:00AM – 6:00PM, FREE
The winner of the seventh annual Liverpool Art Prize presents her latest exhibition.
A live performance of Pursglove’s video work, The Struggle, which is a performance rooted in loneliness and deals with the many challenges of creativity as well as serving as a metaphor for the many challenges of life.
Victoria Gallery and Museum
NORTH WEST AND BEYOND: JAMES HAMILTON HAY
UNTIL 29 AUG, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE
An exhibition of drypoint prints by 19th century Merseyside etcher and painter, James Hamilton Hay, documenting his travels throughout the UK with his striking landscape prints. THE AUDOBON GALLERY
UNTIL 19 DEC, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE
Permanent gallery of wildlife artist and naturalist John James Audubon. BRITISH ART
UNTIL 30 JUN, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE
Permanent collection including work by Joseph Wright of Derby. GYPSY PORTRAITS
UNTIL 26 SEP, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE
A series of Fred Shaw’s photographic depictions of the gypsy community during his lifetime. I LOVE YOU DAUCUS CAROTA
UNTIL 26 SEP, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE
Flower heads and arrangements by artist Helen Sear.
REBELLIOUS POETICS: A FRIEND TO LIBERTY, AN ENEMY TO OPPRESSION
UNTIL 1 AUG, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE
An exhibition celebrating the work of 18th century human rights campaigner Edward Rushton. RETROSPECTIVE
UNTIL 31 OCT, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE
An exhibition celebrating the career of Liverpool fine artist Peter Corbett.
Walker Art Gallery ONLY IN ENGLAND
UNTIL 7 JUN, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE
An exhibition exploring the lasting influence of the British photographer Tony Ray-Jones on the development of British photography from the 1970s to the present day. NICOLAS POUSSIN’S ‘EXTREME UNCTION’
UNTIL 7 JUN, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE
An opportunity to see a masterpiece by one of the prominent French painters of the 17th century.
THE SKINNY
coming june 2015 88 hope st, liverpool mooseandmoonshine.co June 2015
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