Full disclosure: I did not arrive at the Apollo with my critical gears in neutral. I am a Floyd-fan…  my controls were already set for the heart of the sun… they already had me at hello. Origin story: In the early 1980s, an errant uncle appeared from Australia, took me to a London record store and bought me an album – Dark Side of the Moon – and changed my life. A black vinyl slice of popular culture, a prism bouncing fractured light that I found both fascinating and bewildering as an early teenager. I’ve seen various variations of Floyd live since then, including at Live 8, when they ‘got the band back together’. And in 2022 I co-edited the Routledge Handbook of Pink Floyd, spending years immersed in their music. So this could never be an impartial review. But at least I’ve laid my cards out on the table.

Pink Floyd, as an entity, have been through many phases and this latter incarnation –Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets – is a strange contraption built, it seems, in his garden shed from bits of other bands and junkyard metal and old electronics and good intentions; all powered, at the flick of a switch, from some elemental electrical source. Here’s one example of this strangeness: After deaths and departures, the Floyd drummer could claim to be the only continuous element in that shape-shifting band. And yet look up the set-list for tonight’s gig and you’ll see it’s all credited as Floyd ‘covers’, as though he had nothing to do with it. Meanwhile, self-appointed frontman of Pink Floyd – Roger Waters – is long gone and, in fact, the bassist who replaced him in Floyd, and who also plays tonight – Guy Pratt – could claim to be part of Pink Floyd for longer than Waters. And how to then further explain the presence in this already peculiar band of the songwriter who drove Spandau Ballet – Gary Kemp – these days not so much a new romantic as an old romantic. How to explain?  Maybe the point is not to even try… perhaps it shouldn’t work… but it just does. So true. Funny how it seems.

The cosmic ontology of this particular band is to play the early stuff – the wonderful Syd Barrett-era Floyd I discovered much later than Dark Side, unearthing weird and wonderful sonic treasure, magic lyrical potions – but also through to early David Gilmour-period Floyd (up to Dark Side, I guess). Here, the more whimsical, fairytale, psychedelic edges of 60’s Floyd were smoothed off by Gilmour’s honey vocals and precision guitar bends… and a planet of somnambulant, supine stoners found their soundtrack.

So earlier on in the evening we tend to get the more trippy stuff. Barrett was a visionary – even before any further chemical acceleration and alteration – and tracks like ‘Remember A Day’ and ‘Lucifer Sam’ sound bright and important, coming up to 60 years after their birth. I love Barrett’s rich imagination; I love the crazy (before the crazy, maybe, became the problem). Although not played tonight, my kids grew up thinking the utterly bonkers ‘Bike’ was a twisted nursery rhyme, as I played it so much. But the first two singles – ‘Arnold Layne’ and ‘See Emily Play’ – are dusted down tonight, appearing very early in the set. This is niche Floyd but there is no sense of over-complicating – this is already a tribute band to someone who was there; no need to bend this post-modern conundrum further out of shape. For the Gilmour period, we get tracks including ‘Obscured by Clouds; ‘One of these Days’ and a complete rendition of ‘Echoes’, the extended piece that is the whole second side of 1971 album Meddle. Lee Harris (previously with the Blockheads) is credited by Nick Mason for putting the whole project together and he does indeed provide a very faithful impression of Gilmour’s guitar work. Kemp and Pratt share vocals, with Kemp a more accomplished guitarist than many might credit, based on the vainglorious pop pomp of his Spandau past.

Between songs, the band members swap stories and share amusing anecdotes. Mason is not beyond a couple of digs at his erstwhile band ‘leader’, Waters, and also ‘remembers the day’ – the first time Floyd played Manchester, as part of a Jimi Hendrix tour. Pratt says it’s his favourite city (with apologies, in this review, to residents of those closer to the home of this website). The Manchester crowd is a mass, grey-haired flashback creature in aging T-shirts largely held together by good vibes, and with the median age of a morgue. And that’s not to be pejorative… because I’m not helping that demographic. Psychedelic swirls of colour on the backdrop screen mimic the oil projections of early Floyd gigs at clubs like UFO. The band dig out an old beat track ‘Remember Me’, with Barrett’s vocals separated so that this band can play along with him once again as old childhood photos of Syd, donated by his nephew, are played on the screen. It’s a special moment … and whatever the Frankenstein nature of this band – you are just happy that someone flicked the switch and brought it into life, neck bolts and all.

And behind it is Mason, forging it all from his memories and his drums, double bass drums mic’d up so that beat is always robust and chunky, the ground underneath it all. One can only imagine what it is like for Mason to still be behind the drums, playing that first Floyd music now far into the 21^st century; remembering the band mates who have fallen, now only hinted at, behind the grass in English fields, in footage played out during the track ‘Scarecrow’. From the earth to the stars, Pink Floyd have, then, been through these many phases –as many phases, in fact, as the moon. And as we leave the Apollo and head to a nearby hostelry to debrief, we turn back to see, high above the venue, that there is indeed a bright moon, almost full, in a crepuscular sky.

Our moon, as we know, has a dark side. But that is for another time, another review, and another band, entirely.

Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets was at O2 Apollo on 19 June 2024.

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If we’re still none the wiser, then you will just have to get down to Aviva Studios and have a look for yourself.

The ‘you’ was indeed a Daisy, the ‘me’ was your Quays Life critic, and the ‘balloons’ were the collected inflatables of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, whose funky fun aesthetic runs right through this exhibition, the centre piece of the (sort-of) open Aviva Studios and this year’s Manchester International Festival. And it really is fabulous. Deliciously destabilising. I recall – when this was Granada Studios – there was a room of supersized props around the spot where the new Aviva Studios now stands. That was already belittling – our own Gulliver’s Travels – but these engorged inflatables make us feel even more Lilliputian.

The procession through the exhibition is really well handled. We enter through one room of yellow tentacles, entwined around one another… and we, who walk amongst them. This is an experiential exhibition and the temptation… indeed the desire on the part of the artist… is for us all to get amongst it, to get involved. Into the next room and we see the giant inflatables from up high, as if observing a strange new world. And then, once you have your spurs, you walk down and immerse yourself in that world, strolling through the sculptures, peering into some of them, even getting into one, to engender different sensory experiences. On whatever scale, each piece exhibits intricate design and assembly; patches seemingly hand sewn, before the final piece is inflated.

The story of Kusama herself is fascinating. Now 94, she was charged with making parachutes for the Japanese forces in WWII and was only 16 when America dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That was when her battles with her own mental health began, and from these two fixed points we can perhaps start to trace the genesis of these supersized inspired artworks. After time living in Europe and the States, Kusama returned to Japan in 1973, checked into a hospital facility for the mentally unwell in 1977, and has lived there ever since. From such a fecund source of confusion and creativity come these magical inflatables of one cosmic imagination. Suspended animation; suspended clouds. Moments in a magical wonderland. Kusama herself says her influences are “subconscious and psychosomatic” and it’s hard to argue against that, especially when you watch Kusama herself sing about her own experiences in the video projection Song of a Manhattan Suicide Addict.

We are in the clouds but also feel on the water at times. The end of the exhibition is Bouquet of Love I saw in the Universe – 11 metres of pink tentacles that make us feel as though there is a monster just beneath the surface. So there are indeed the polka dot clouds of children’s imaginations, but also a sense, perhaps, of more sinister forces, under the surface. But that is a sense, only, because overall the feeling is of playfulness… of a huge, but gentle, world of freestyle fun. Into this world enters everyone from children to pensioners, all delighting in the different perspectives available, including lying down on float-y waterbed ‘clouds’ to look up at the sculptures above. (If anything, I felt there should have perhaps been a little more going on directly above the beds).

Disorienting and delightful, this is where psychedelia meets pop art; where Ivor Cutler meets Jeff Koons. So if you fancy being elevated to somewhere entirely ‘other’, get down to the Factory, keep a tight grip on reality, and hold on for some itsy bitsy, teenie weenie, yellow polka dot balloon-y.

Yayoi Kusama: You, Me and the Balloons is at Aviva Studios as part of Manchester International Festival from 19 July to 28 August 2023.

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And whatever you might think… it’s open. Tonight’s show from the Beninese singer Angélique Ferrer is, as she herself tells the audience, the first ever show in this brand new 1… 2… 2.10… oh let’s stop counting… million pound investment in arts and culture in Manchester. It must be built. It is ours. And in a climate of frankly awful all-out attacks on the arts and humanities from a government with little of either, let’s celebrate a counter-attack from these cultured leftfield flanks. I am Team Factory. So it was built. Well, almost. The actual full opening is now October, so while the venue is open… ish… there is still quite an amount of snagging still to do. But the bar is certainly serving suitably expensive drinks (no red wine inside the gig space though … not the first time I have been banned from taking red wine places), with an open plan bar area accommodating what were, bizarrely, once the railway arches from Coronation Street (we are after all, amongst the ghosts of Granada). The Festival Square space outside is busy and bouncing and I am, for the first time, in a place I already know will become important. Not that I want to compare anything to my own hometown, but I am getting South Bank vibes from the place, and that’s good tingles. A new part of town opens up for us all.

And what a way to launch. Angélique Kidjo is arguably Africa’s greatest diva. Over four decades, and taking in four Grammys, she has cooked up a gorgeous, rich stew of sounds. When you ask what might be in African music, you might equally ask what came out of it… elements of jazz, funk, reggae, r&b and ska all feature in this mix. But whatever the track – from the opener ‘Crosseyed and Painless’ through tracks like ‘The Great Curve’ and ‘Choose Love’ – the one signature ingredient is that irresistible, infectious rhythm… and groove.

Like the start of any party, the crowd is a little tentative at the beginning of this Factory party. But with only a little encouragement from Kidjo we are all on our feet, dancing and singing and celebrating the night and this place… somewhere new to engage with art and music and culture in our city. Kidjo, in flowing Africa dress and headwear, dances across the stage as though it were her own personal dancefloor. She exudes positivity, and it’s infectious, her dancing almost redolent of (if more rhythmic than) Ian Curtis, which has its own Factory echoes. A couple of tracks in, the headwear comes off… and then we’re all off… over a musical waterfall, carried on a raft of happiness.

The band are tight, precise – drums, percussion, keys and bass – keeping the rhythm rolling the good vibes flowing. Kidjo sings in a variety of languages, including one of her own design, and guides us through sing-a-longs and vocal exercises like Freddie Mercury in his own regal pomp. We join in the ridiculously catchy chorus of ‘Meant For Me’. And even when the sound cuts during a bass solo, bar the monitors (let’s put that down to opening night teething problems… it’s not the final system the hall will ultimately use), the band carries on and the audience, wrapped warmly in a cloak of positivity, get back to their feet and fill in the gaps. A meteor strike couldn’t stop this party.

There is a space in the set for Kidjo’s cover of ‘Once in a Lifetime’ by Talking Heads, given an Africa jus. She also opens the stage to three guests at separate times during the set – local rapper LayFullstop, Ellen Beth Abdi (who sings a beautiful song using a looper pedal to layer the vocals) and One Da, Kidjo arguing that if she wanted to keep music for herself, she would just sing in the shower. All artists share the stage for encore tracks ‘Afirika’ and ‘Pata Pata’, before Angélique Kidjo closes the show with ‘Batonga’.

Judging from tonight’s opening of the Fac… OK, you win… Aviva Studios… if this is how Manchester feels about the place, we’re all good. A great way to kick off the first of what, I am sure, will be many great nights. Joyous.

Angélique Kidjo and Guests was at The Hall, Aviva Studios on 4 July 2023 as part of Manchester International Festival.

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Ryuichi Sakamoto was a founder member of proto-electronic Japanese outfit Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO) and latterly composer of music such as the soundtrack for the movie Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, in which he also acted, along with David Bowie. I say “was” because Sakamoto died in March of this year, a huge lost to world music. However, before he died, the mixed reality artist Todd Eckert worked with the composer to create the performance show Kagami. Sakamoto was filmed playing a final performance of some of his best-known compositions, using technology that then brings him back to life in holographic form, enabling him to perform his music to future audiences, notwithstanding the small matter of no longer being alive.

The technology for doing this is only slightly more complex than finding the building where the event is actually taking place. Next year the Manchester International Festival will have its permanent home at the Factory – or rather, Aviva Studios (but let’s not get diverted into that discussion). At the moment, along with the bits of Factory that are open, the Festival is taking places in various settings, including Versa Studios, a Granada ghost in Goods Yard Street, which I only find by getting lost and eventually bumping into a very nice lady from the Festival, who walks us over. Give yourself plenty of time.

Kagami is that joyful intersection of culture and technology. In terms of the set-up, you first enter a reception area with large projections of stills from various stages of Sakamoto’s life, along with videos of the composer at work, finding sounds. It’s here where you are fitted with your glasses, and bespectacled punters such as myself can have their lenses tested and adapted glasses arranged. But it’s in the actual performance area where tech turns transformative, where the mundane becomes magical.

We sit in a circle of about 80, as though in a ceremony or some kind of addictions meeting. Put on the glasses and a red cube slowly spins in the centre area. It is this area, marked off merely by lines on the floor, that Ryuichi Sakamoto then appears, in a smart dark suit and tortoiseshell glasses, sat at a grand piano. The performance begins, with ‘Before Long’ – a beautiful, elegant sweep of piano – and if it’s not enough to watch someone play from beyond life’s low notes, fog then swirls around us and moves towards Sakamoto, to envelop him. The brief recorded intro informs the audience that they can move around Sakamoto, as long as we keep out of the marked off area. No-one dares… at first… and then one, two, three and then more of us leave our seats and move. Some sit at his feet, watching him work the piano’s keys and pedals. Others move around, divining different angles. Someone even dances, slowly, to his precise notes, his crafted melodies. Still sat down, I wonder how I am going to see the performance, with everyone moving around and then the strangest thing happens… whenever someone walks in front of me… I see through them, through their bodies, now outlines only… to the man at the piano, beyond.

And then I, too, get up and circuit slowly around, marvelling at the way Sakamoto’s grey fringe moves gently in a breeze. (What breeze? A breeze from somewhere other). The music moves through important sonic moments from his career – his Japanese number one (he tells us, in useful spoken interludes), ‘Energy Flow’ – and the more recent ‘Andata’. Between each track the hologram disappears, only to reappear, piano and all, for the next performance. Were only life and death so easily navigable. Each performance is accompanied by a different visual experience – rain falling in ‘Aqua’, snowflakes dancing – and projections of historical images from Japan. When Sakamoto plays ‘Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence’, his collaboration with David Sylvian (of the band Japan, rather than the nation), a root system develops beneath our feet, which turns into the constellations of stars and galaxies that totally transports me, and connects us all, to something altogether larger. The performance ends with the composition ‘The Last Emperor’ from the film of the same name and then a track titled ‘BB’, which Sakamoto explains is for the director of that film, Barnardo Bertolucci. He wrote it as soon as he heard of Bertolucci’s passing, which is by turns both gracious and beautiful, when you consider Sakamoto knew his words would also be received, like this music itself, when he was no longer here.

And then the performance is over. At least… this particular performance. As I step back into reality I have the strangest sensation, for a while, of seeing through people, as I did within the performance. And the music is still playing in my head. As Sakamoto himself writes, “This virtual me will not age, and will continue to play the piano for years, decades, centuries’, proving there is life beyond life, and melodies beyond the bounds of the piano. An eternal, recurring, encore.

Kagami is at Versa Manchester Studios, as part of the Manchester International Festival, from 29 June to 9 July 2023. Age Guidance: 14+, under 16s to be accompanied by an adult aged 18+

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Echo & The Bunnymen enjoyed great success throughout the 1980s, with albums like Porcupine (1983) and Ocean Rain (1984). Ian McCulloch left in 1987 and the band didn’t really come back together for a decade but the love is there… the echo remains. I have seen the likes of James and The Happy Mondays in recent months (in that all too short sweet spot that seemed to stand between the end of the zombie apocalypse, but before WWIII) and these bands of my youth are still vibrant and viable. And while my love – as a once cockney-now-many-years-Manc gent – will always veer to our city’s bands, I have witnessed first-hand the persistent power of Echo & The Bunnymen. I am involved with the Louder Than Words festival of music and literature and in November 2021 the festival brought Echo guitarist Will Sergeant to Manchester, now the only early member in the band, along with McCulloch. He was reading from his own memoir – Bunnyman – and the room was so busy you couldn’t even get in.

And it is McCulloch and Sergeant who are out stage front tonight, the newer members of the band – second guitar, bass, drums and keys – to the darker recesses of the rear of the stage. The band are tight as a Tory Chancellor but really, of course, it’s about the two old(er) timers in front. Sergeant – his hair still thick and dark, his body now sturdy and darkly-clothed, goes through a succession of gorgeous looking Fender Jaguar and what looks like Vox guitars, those shimmering arpeggios and jangling chords still beautiful over the top of the music. I’m not enough of a Bunnyman to really hop to lesser known (to me) tracks like the openers ‘Going Up’, ‘Show of Strength’ and ‘All The Jazz’, but as an emergent teenager in the early 80s, for me the night comes to life with ‘Bring on the Dancing Horses’, McCulloch leaving it for the packed Albert Hall crowd to sing the choruses. And McCulloch himself is as iconic as ever. No Julian Cope mic gymnastics for him – the long black overcoat and dark sunglasses are the only requisite apparel, his movements restricted to his singing, or alternatively turning back to the band, or to Sergeant, a smile to the band in acknowledgement of a job well done; to Sergeant more, one imagines, at the fact that it’s good to be back on stage together, with a crowd like tonight.

Elements of tracks such as Bowie’s ‘Jean Genie’ and Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ creep into Echo tracks, while crowd favourites flow out towards the warm cuddle of the room, with your reviewer positioned at the end of one arm of that embrace: ‘Seven Seas’, their early hits ‘The Cutter’ and ‘Ocean Rain’ and the gorgeous ‘Lips Like Sugar’, its soaring chorus again sending the adoring crowd into Scouse raptures. And for me, it all comes together with the dark, haunting and mysterious ‘The Killing Moon’, as part of the first of two encores.

There was always something a little wonderfully wonky about Echo & The Bunnymen, that slightly unnerving, unhinged aesthetic that made ‘The Killing Moon’ such a perfect track for Donnie Darko, the bunny altogether more menacing in that movie. But beyond the dark of McCulloch’s sunglasses, tonight they bring only light back through the beautiful stained glass windows of The Albert Hall.

Echo & The Bunnymen were reviewed at Albert Hall, Manchester on 25 February 2022.

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But let’s backtrack and rewind a little as audience… not unlike our actors. It all starts traditionally enough: The first glass of Malbec very welcome, as we sit in the foyer of the ever-comfy Lowry, my companion making the perhaps startling admission that, in his early 40s, he has never set foot in the theatre before. However, he did grow up in the wilds of the deepest South-West, so I am angling on him helping us navigate these moors. Amongst our fellow theatre goers are audience members sporting deerstalkers, fully immersing themselves in the spirit of it all and imbibing the evening with something of that Rocky Horror Picture Show participatory spirit. In the smaller Quays Theatre space within the Lowry, the stage is grey and bare, set in the grounds of a distant manor house, home to Sir Henry Baskerville. And the stage – playing the moor itself – is home to a creature even more menacing than Sir Henry and his fine upper-class whiskers. And the creature is on the prowl…

OK… so far so Sherlock. And I start my own journey to the moors with an aesthetic drawn from my first experience of the story – the 1939 movie starring Basil Rathbone (everyone from Peter Cushing to Peter Cook have since played Holmes in varied iterations of this story). But this current version, from the Original Theatre Company, takes that source material, injects a full syringe of pantomime farce in a place where that might be considered impolite, and then ramps the whole thing up to eleventy-stoopid. For there the tonal similarities with the source material get as lost as a man in the fog… which is, in fact, how the story starts. The fog closes in (from both stage left and stage right)… and then! Awoooooooooooo! What’s that? An animal? Some creature escaped from the very depths of Hades? (Well, the title of the play rather gives it away).

We’re off… And it’s a whole heap of fun. The entire cast – including Hound faves Dr Mortimer, the Stapleton siblings, butler Barrymore and escaped convict Selden – are covered (in amusingly swift costume changes) by just the three actors – Ferretti himself (alumnus of the National Theatre as well as TV from Corrie to The Other Boleyn Girl); Niall Ransome, who plays Watson et al (an actor with extensive theatre credentials) and Serena Manteghi, anchor to the one woman show How to Build a Rocket, now shoving a rocket up the posterior of Sir Henry Baskerville, in her portrayal. All actors play their varied roles with great energy and accomplished gusto. Brave and confident is the only way to go in these circumstances. Ferretti’s performance, for instance, has something of the priapic thrust of Rik Mayall about it… and I can offer no greater compliment. Manteghi is particularly successful in her performances, but in truth there is no weak link.

With a view to the fourth wall promptly coming down, and never going back up, the actors and audience share fully and willingly in the tomfoolery and humour of the show. Always moving at frenetic pace, an office desk swiftly becomes the double seat on a train, and we don’t do a double take… or Holmes’ London office might become Dartmoor with only the cunning use of a doorframe and some dry ice. The production is expertly controlled. Only adapted in 2007 by Steven Canny and John Nicholson, the play was chosen to form the first production for the reopening of the Bolton Octagon in July 2021. Directed creatively and cunningly by Lotte Wakeham, and now a touring production of the Original Theatre Company, for an evening of thoroughly daft escapism, it’s thoroughly recommended.

Conan Doyle may well be turning in his grave… but only from discomfort from laughing.

The Hound of the Baskervilles is at The Lowry from 1-5 February 2022 and touring until 26 February.

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Boris Johnson.

It doesn’t take much in wardrobe to recreate our Prime Minister. Pull a mop head from its stick and place it casually on the head of a passing actor and you’re good to go. The resulting boos are both ubiquitous, delightful and welcome.

Pantomime is such a quintessentially English tradition. Sanctioned only within the Christmas period that is already silly season (fueled on office parties and your nan’s Baileys), it is almost impossible to define and describe it for, say, an American friend. (Oh no it isn’t… oh yes it is etc. etc.). Daft frocks, cross dressing, familiar and awful jokes and audience participation, the Panto is one-part timeless tradition and one-part contemporary topicality… with a healthy glug of cooking Sherry. So yes, while we are ostensibly in the 15th Century, after the year we’ve all had we also willingly suspend disbelief (in fact, all disbelief is handed in willingly at the cloakroom) and accept that we are in a world where the Prime Minister might appear. Otherwise… we wouldn’t get the chance to boo him. So in-jokes about his parties, and indeed a doomed ship named the Corona, share stage time with old favourites about bodily functions, bad cooking, and parts of the anatomy that might share a name with the shortened version of ‘Richard’.

We possibly know the story of Dick Whittington, the impoverished everyman who travels from – in this case, Wythenshawe – to seek his fortune in the capital, where the streets are paved with gold. (Now I was in London the weekend before the show, and I can confirm for all my Mancunian and Salfordian friends that it mostly certainly is not). That is the last thing you are likely to errantly tred in. But back to the plot. In London, Dick finds not his fortune… but love (something also difficult to negotiate in the capital without Tinder). So much for the tradition, however this performance also gives it something of a modern twist, with a talking, breakdancing cat (and no… simmer down at the back… cooking Sherry was not consumed by this reviewer before the performance) and modern songs to funk it up some Indeed, Bruno Mars’ ‘Uptown Funk’ was a notable highlight.

In terms of the production, the scenery was understandably basic, although gave enough of the cartoon aesthetic to place us firmly in this wonky world, which moved from countryside to city to bakery to ship to underwater realm (yep, the Corona is indeed doomed to perish which, I imagine, we all wish it would). The production made good use of projections and, for a fairly intimate theatre and production, the music was live, from a band, who supplied occasional sound effects up to live versions of rave tunes that had this old raver’s foot tapping.

The cast is solid enough, although the nature of Panto means that even fluffed lines become points of improvised hilarity. Certainly Dick himself, played by Marquelle Ward, gives a solid and expressive professional performance, befitting someone who has trodden the Corrie cobbles as well as the stage. There was also hints of Mighty Boosh to one or two performances, with Adam Urey’s King Rat (the villain, along with Boris) coming across a little like the Noel Fielding character The Hitcher and Scratch the Cat, played by Anton Phung also sounding like the more laconic of Boosh characters. Urey’s portrayal of the villain must have been on the money because his first appearance was met with one child, suitably spooked, bursting out into floods of tears. However special note must be given to the dancers, through to older more professional ones right down to little kids, whose wonderful energy almost stole the show.

Very early in the cycle for Pantos, the venue was perhaps two-thirds full, predominantly, of course, of families. But the energy between audience and cast – so crucial for Panto – was certainly tangible, although the cast really need to do some work on their throwing technique, with a pack of crisps barely making it off the stage. Most families had children younger than mine, perhaps under 10, whereas my two are 11 and 13. I encouraged my own kids to engage, to make some noise but, to be honest, I was just glad at the opportunity to get out, and get them away from screens.

So the final verdict, really, needs to go to my kids, as target audience, rather than me, as world weary parent. So I asked them both for their reviews after the performance and…. they both loved it. So let’s bade farewell to the good ship Corona and hope… just hope… that after the year we’ve had, we can all join in with a rowdy, rousing final chorus of “It’s behind you!”

Dick Whittington and his Amazing Cat is at Contact, Manchester 11 December 2021 – 3 January 2022.

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            The festival pivots on the notion of debuting new material and tonight’s show is built partly around Albarn’s new solo album The Nearer The Fountain, More Pure The Stream Flows, due to be released in November. As the band steps onto the stage, together, with seemingly with no priority of order, Albarn asks for the lights to be dimmed as the opening track of his set, is also the opening of this new album, and is set before dawn. November’s release was originally designed to be an orchestral collection inspired by the Icelandic landscape, where Albarn has a home and a small share in a Reykjavik bar where I once managed to find myself. Indeed the first three tracks of the set – ‘The Nearer the Fountain’, ‘The Cormorant’ and ‘Royal Morning Blue’ are the first three tracks from that new album. Albarn’s second solo release, after 2014’s Everyday Robots, then supplies the next track, ‘Lonely Press Play’, the only track from that album to get an airing tonight.

            What’s interesting about Damon Albarn as a solo proposition is that after the indie-pop buzz of Blur, the upbeat funk energy of Gorillaz and even the strange fairground folksiness of The Good, The Bad and The Queen, on his own he really is a melancholy soul, with a slow-tempo, almost maudlin reflective feel to much of the music. That’s not to dispute its beauty, in places… more that, left to his own devices, thoughts – perhaps inevitably – turn inwards. That is certainly true of the new music, reflecting – as Albarn himself admits – his own dark journey in making the album, in the context of the time we have all had. The early stages of the performance, then, seem to come from that experience – eerie, jarring unsettling, discordant, fractured. Certainly towards the beginning of the set everyone is seated, including Albarn and the guitarist, the grooving left to the standing bass player, his bass low slung in the style of Peter Hook. Of course this may also be down to the world we are still in, a world that has asked Albarn not to “incite standing up”, the industrial bat-cave aesthetics of Manchester Central particularly cavernous tonight. At one point Albarn comments that if they only could lower the roof, it would be just like the Blackpool North Pier Theatre.

An issue with debuting new music is that, by its very nature, it has not yet had a chance to settle in the public consciousness. But as the set warms up, the music sparks into life in this live context – Albarn on keyboards (adorned with Pac Man stickers), backed by a full band, including a four piece string section and a keyboard player who also doubles up on sax. Now with a cornucopia of material to choose from, Albarn works through Blur tracks like ‘Good Song’, ‘Ghost Ship’ and ‘Out of Time’ with Gorillaz songs ‘El Manana’, ‘Hong Kong’ and ‘On Melancholy Hill’, with cuts from both The Good, The Bad and The Queen albums, including ‘The Poison Tree’ and ‘Three Changes’. Not many artists can claim to draw material from four different iterations of production.          

As we move through the evening, Albarn becomes more animated, swapping positions seated at the keyboards and standing stage front, at times playing the melodica, at others roaming and romancing the stage, engaging with the seated crowd as much as is possible, his glasses sometimes on, sometimes off, depending (as he admits) on whether it’s a new one, or an old one that might require some nudging. His rather disturbing mullet is also a thing of the past, it seems, and while he praises the sartorial efforts of the Mancunian crowd, he still looks in decent nick: bearded, in a short sleeve shirt and baggy slacks. At one point he holds his hips, like Morrissey, at another he almost looks on the verge of a Blur-style pogo dance.

There are indie and soul influences through the set – sometimes within the same track – with sax, strings and the wah wah guitars playing off against a taut percussion section. “It’s G-Mex,” says Albarn, “but we see it as a jazz club,” suggesting his band might be a lounge band on a cruise ship, as she sits on the stage to tell stories of working with Elton John. And then he’s back up, shaking his fists in the air, in a “we’re winning” gesture. “What a joy to be back,” he says, adding, on the Euros final the previous evening, “last night was problematic if you were doing your first gig in two years the next day.” He makes some comments about the deplorable racist attacks that followed England’s defeat, linking it squarely to Brexit, a preoccupation of the second TGTBATQ album Merrie Land.

            The eclectic and ubiquitous nature of Damon Albarn’s productions is perfectly encapsulated in the encore… Gorillaz into Blur into The Good, The Bad and The Queen, into a track from the new album. For the final track, however, Albarn digs back into the Blur back catalogue, and the gorgeous ‘This Is A Low’. A perhaps ironic note, on which to end a high spirited evening.

Set List:

The Nearer The Fountain

The Cormorant

Royal Morning Blue

Lonely Press Play

Good Song

Ghost Ship

Go Back

1917

Saturday Come Slow

The Great Fire

The Tower of Montevideo

The Poison Tree

El Manana

Hong Kong

3 Changes

Darkness to Light

On Melancholy Hill

Out of Time

Nature Springs

Polaris

This is a Low

Damon Albarn was at Manchester Central on 12 July as part of the Manchester International Festival 2021.

Read Simon’s review of Arlo Parks at MIF

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There are various reasons for this choice, and not only that it was one of the final things I heard last night, when Parks performed the first of two nights at Manchester Central for the Manchester International Festival. The main reason, though, that this song is on high rotation in the whirling Wurlitzer in my mind, is because it’s absolutely gorgeous. Arlo Parks, a recent addition both to the landscape of British singer-songwriters, and to my own cognisance, has made an immediate impression on both, garnering critical plaudits and commercial sales of her first and only album, Collapsed in Sunbeams. (It’s hard to accuse her of slacking when she has done all that and is still only 20). But anyway… about last night:

The lights dim in Manchester Central and I am, not surprisingly, forced to think back to a time, a time ‘before’. I was in almost this same spot on this floor of what was G-Mex, around Easter of 1990, only then I was in a body scrum of people, my uni girlfriend on my shoulders, watching The Happy Mondays debut their new song ‘Step On’. Now… now I am sat down alone, with no one in the seats around me, as though I am persona non grata, the rows of seats spaced out luxuriously, so you can stretch out your legs with business class flight elan. This is not to be pejorative of course. We all know why we are here, and why we are like this. But.. we are, at least, here. We made it, and to be together, listening to live music again is enough, a point that Parks makes herself. The rest can come later.

The band come on stage in stages… the bass kicks in, drums, keys, guitar combining to create that lush, warm deep young soul sound… then Parks herself, low-slung and vibey as she adds vocals for the opener ‘Hurt’, moving straight into ‘Cola’, then digging into Collapsed in Sunbeams for ‘Just Go’. The songs are elegant, unhurried, soulful cuts of contemporary young British experience. And they all just groooooove… bouncing like a Riva hitting a wake, or rolling like a beaten-up old car, top down, cruising streets late at night. These songs tell eternal stories of young life – love, loss, relationships… relationships going wrong, anxiety and doubt. Hey, why let the young have all the fun… these are eternal topics, right? Concerns we have to deal with all through our lives. Take ‘Black Dog’, which Parks introduces as a “pandemic song” about the black dog of depression that hunts, and haunts, many of us. But let’s keep things in the light. We’re still here, still sharing music, and as Parks puts it, “we survived… we’re in a room full of people!”

Parks performed her first ever live gig only back in May 2019. She is that box-fresh. She started a European tour in February 2020… and then. And then. She tells us this is her first gig in 19 months, her first live show of her 20s (another will follow on the 9 July) and that she is nervous. She doesn’t look it, gliding round the stage as though it were a dancefloor, between the fauna and flora that stand in pots on the stage, as though part of the band. Also a poet (she says poetry is incredibly important to her), she slips effortlessly into spoken word during her songs, and also stops to recite the poem ‘Collapsed in Sunbeams’ that opens the album. Her lyrics are well constructed. Take the opening couplet from ‘Black Dog’: “I’d lick the grief right off your lips / You do your eyes like Robert Smith”. Brilliant.

The set continues, at times at the same pace as the album – ‘For Violet’ into ‘Eugene’ for instance. And the crowd behave – most grooving contained in the shoulders, and head, as the two guitars swap licks and arpeggios (one guitarist in a beret that means serious business), and the fabulous female two-piece horn section take solos in instrumental breaks and groove-dance more than anyone.

For the second half of the set, the band are joined by a three part strings section from the RNCM, and those lush strings just lift the music even higher, right into the comfy curved roof of this erstwhile train station. Some tracks are formed of just Parks and guitar; at times there’s an interplay of pizzicato from the cello, and guitar; then others have the whole band involved. Overall, the slightly more jazzy improv interpretations of the tracks, when played live, really adds something.

“It feels so good to play these songs,” says Parks, adding: “You are the first people who have heard these songs live.” It’s a privilege. The set is just over an hour, another consequence of an artist at the beginning of her trajectory. A trajectory that will, inevitably, be “up”. There’s an encore formed, suitably, of the track ‘Hope’, with its chorus “you’re not alone” because that’s what we always had… and that’s because we never were. Parks concedes she’s never done an encore before, admitting that backstage she’d asked a bandmate “what if they just don’t want another one?” But we do. And could do more. Tonight and the next morning, when the neon lights of my inner Wurlitzer will snap on.

Arlo Parks was reviewed at Manchester Central on 8 July 2021 as part of the Manchester International Festival 2021.

All of This Unreal Time: Review MIF 2021

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Now double-jabbed and ready for reality’s return, I am therefore not entirely sure having those foundations shaken once again is quite what the doctor ordered.

So if you need your nerves calmed, may I suggest something like Peter Rabbit 2. Because the function and motivation of Dark Days Luminous Nights is indeed to destabalise, to unsettle.  And that starts from the moment you arrive at the White Hotel, located in an industrial Salford backlot in the shadow of Strangeways. A white hotel this is not… rather a mechanic’s garage now more usually deployed for club nights, and until June 10 for this Manchester Collective event. Produced entirely during our delightful pandemic, Dark Days Luminous Nights is billed as “an immersive audio-visual experience for uncertain times.”

Times are indeed uncertain. And of that, at least, I am certain. We wait outside for a few minutes and my slightly frayed nerves are not eased by the site of what looks like a chair chainsawed in half. With such events it’s sometimes hard to find where reality’s line ends, and the show starts.

Shown into the first area by a genial host, I am reassured by the rather more solid appearance of a bar (which until recently was located in the sunken mechanic’s pit), with a neon sign behind, carrying the name of the event. I am on surer ground.

Reinforced by a large Malbec, we are then lead into the exhibition space, featuring several images by Simon Buckley. The images are of my city… but not as I know it. Buckley eschews natural light and instead moves around the city in those crepuscular moments when nature dims, and the city is illuminated artificially – street lamps, the light behind curtains merely suggesting the presence of people in their homes. Certainly there is no-one on the streets. In the distance we see the new Manchester rising – the Manchester of shiny new build apartment blocks – but in the foreground of these images is the Manchester and Salford of old – graffitied red brick mills, desolate canals, decaying housing estates.

The key theme seems to be light. Or perhaps the lack of it, suggesting that in a reverse of normality, our days have been dark, our nights somehow safer, curfewed and cocooned as we have been in our little illuminated holes. And that speaks to me, as I did the whole of Lockdown in a one room studio apartment, mostly just trying to keep out of my own way; 23 hours a day in one room, with an hour out for Boris-sanctioned exercise. I can almost empathise with those currently nearby, within Strangeway’s walls.

Here, the processed images are themselves illuminated by spotlights, whose brightness ebbs and flows so that the images almost throb. The locations feel recognizable but disconcerting; normalised but strange – dark, menacing, devoid of the presence, and the company of human beings, the one key driver in making this last year so tough. There is a little of the Edward Hopper in that… that we are denied the light that baths the Nighthawks. The people are all inside, and together, while we are alone and on the outside, a voyeur, lurking besides run-down shops, forgotten cheap housing and decaying mills not yet touched by the hand of gentrification.

But there is a hand coming. Once seated at one of the (of course socially-distanced) tables, Simon Buckley’s film starts. We see the same scenes again – the River Irk, Angel Meadows (where 40,000 bodies are buried), tunnels where shadows play like Nosferatu on the walls – but now these scenes come to some kind of after-dark, moving life. And now there is a threat: the performance artist, Blackhaine, placed ominously into these scenes, the light in his hand almost a weapon that he uses to carve into the air, contorting awkwardly, violently, in pursuit of people and perhaps the city itself. (At one point Blackhaine stretches out his arms, to gather the entire city in what might be a violent embrace). His light is red and menacing, the pursed seeking comfort in the artificial white light of the city.

To say anymore is to move into the realms of plot spoilers, and let’s leave that to Peter Rabbit 2. (I’ve not seen it, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s probably awful). Unlike Mr McGregor’s vegetable patch, the soundtrack to these streets assists the oppressive atmosphere – music from the likes of Bartók recorded by Manchester Collective – and the coda of Ewan MacColl’s ‘Dirty Old Town’ is almost a sonic sorbet to cleanse the soul. Until you leave the building through a different entrance and realise something rather unsettling…

Dark Days, Luminous Nights is at The White Hotel, Salford from 3-10 June 2021. Visit manchestercollective.co.uk for details.

Manchester Collective’s Adam Szabo talks about creating art to shock us out of our pandemic rut.

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