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The Herald Scotland
19 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Brilliant Bruce Springsteen documentary but why the snub to Scotland?
**** Tony wasn't happy. 'Where the **** have you been? You're late.' 'Highway was jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive,' said Christopher. 'Aw you're gonna get ****ing cute now?' It's a measure of Springsteen's fame that he needs no introduction, whether he's being quoted in The Sopranos, earning Trump's ire on social media ('This dried-out prune of a rocker ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT'), or having a night devoted to him on BBC2, of which this documentary was the highlight. Springsteen's first visit to Britain, or 'the land of our gods and saviours' as the Beatles/Stones/Animals worshipper put it, was in 1975 to play the Hammersmith Odeon. The audience loved him but Springsteen thought he had been terrible. 'I had PTSD from it,' he joked. He couldn't bear to watch the film (shown as part of the night) for 30 years. After that it was all gravy for Springsteen, and the documentary in general, as we heard from the man himself, plus friend and bandmate Steven Van Zandt, fans (celebrity and otherwise) and journalists. Among the celebrities, Rob Brydon's devotion was writ large in a teenage scrapbook. Growing up near Port Talbot, Springsteen said more to him than The Jam singing about the Tube. Sting described his mate Bruce as 'a whirling dervish of benevolent male energy'. Tony Parsons said Britain needed Bruce as an antidote to the New Romantics. The 'ordinary' fans shone brightest, including Hazel Wilkinson, who danced with Bruce onstage at the Manchester Apollo; the striking miners' wives handed a cheque for £20,000 in Newcastle; and the nine-year-old lad who sang Hungry Heart with the Boss in Coventry. And what of the gigs in Scotland? We saw a ticket stub from the Edinburgh stop on the 1980-81 River tour, and Ravenscraig appeared in a miners' strike montage, but that seemed to be it. What, no Hampden, no Murrayfield? No excerpts from the glowing reviews in The Herald and other papers, or interviews with those who were there? Even the briefest of searches would have struck research gold. It was the same for Wales and Northern Ireland. Springsteen and young fan at Hampden. Colin Mearns (Image: Colin Mearns/The Herald) Now, it is possible footage or stills from the Scottish gigs were featured, but were not captioned as such in the preview version I saw. Perhaps stuff hit the cutting room floor. Every concert can't be shown and maybe it was enough for some viewers to run a caption saying 'over 60' shows have been played in Britain since Bruce and The E Street Band got back together. Plus fans, Scottish or otherwise, go where they can get tickets. My two cents: if you make a film titled When Bruce Springsteen Came to Britain - part of a series that includes Bob Marley, Blondie and ABBA - it seems only right to cover all parts of Britain. It was an odd omission in an otherwise terrific hour that left no doubt about Springsteen's love for his UK fans and vice versa. He didn't need a fellowship of the Ivors Academy to prove he's always welcome here, but great that he got it, and from a Beatle as well. Now about that honorary knighthood …
Spectator
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
A lovely album: Saint Leonard's The Golden Hour reviewed
Grade: A+ The kids with their synths and hip producers, dragging the 1980s back: I wish they would stop. It was, in the main, an awful decade for music, the bands trite yet portentous, the stupid burbling bass guitars, hubris-stricken vocals and tinny drums. The kids retread all the dross. Yet if you were actually around and sentient in that avaricious decade, as was Saint Leonard, you could find a certain chill beauty in hidden corners. Not the New Romantics, not Japan, not SAW. Just small niches here and there of inventiveness and clever pop. Saint Leonard – Kieran Leonard to his mum – draws down all that was good about the cool side of the early 1980s: the motorik beats, the synths that were only three steps above a theremin, the primitive stuttered drums appropriated from Germany. You can find Cabaret Voltaire, Berlin-era Bowie and very early Ultravox within here. And the later part of the decade? David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti's lush, minimalist, collaboration with Julee Cruise. Maybe a little debauched Gina X. The good stuff, in other words. It helps, of course, that Saint Leonard can write a tune – both 'Martini Symphony' and 'Threshold' are simply great pop songs – but also has the confidence in his melodies to allow room for them to breathe, such as the Sprechgesang on the beautiful 'The Florist'. This is a lovely album, but it is too clever, too sincere, too knowing in its musical pedigree to grab the attention of the radio programmers. Which is, I think, a great shame. Because bad though the 1980s were for music, they were always better than naive retreads of Depeche bloody Mode and the scarifying Kylie.
Metro
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Metro
Billy Bragg: 'An audience can generate a sense of of social solidarity'
When he was starting out as a young singer-songwriter and rabble-rouser, Billy Bragg used to pride himself on nicking other people's audiences. A spot at a talent competition at the famous Bridgehouse pub in Canning Town, east London, in the early 1980s – one of his first appearances playing solo in front of an audience – had caught the attention of someone at the Tunnel Club in Greenwich. Billy's 'angry poet with an electric guitar' style might have only won him second place in the contest, but it went down well in the venue at the south end of the Blackhall Tunnel. His job was warming up the crowd before the main act, a role he sometimes performed a bit too well. 'If I came off and almost got an encore, the headliners were looking at cranky at me – they were gonna follow what I just done – I was always thought that was brilliant,' he told Metro. 'I mean, I wouldn't get much money for it, but I was learning my craft. I was learning how to grow, you know, sort of grab an audience.' The picture he paints of the music scene in London at that point is vibrant: the New Romantics may have been starting to swallow up the mainstream, but this diverse city had a culture to match. 'One night would be a ska band. Another night might be a traditional rock band,' Billy said. 'There was a band called True Life Confessions who had a couple of strippers with them, that was a bit weird. 'And there was a heavy metal band that I remember – during my brief sound check, they were taking thunderflashes to the front of the stage, which I thought was a bit over-the-top for a pub in east London.' The Tunnel Club doubled as a comedy club at the time, giving Billy more licence to try out his patter on the crowd. A video jukebox was usually kept running during the musical performances, so he would mimic the 'strange, jerky' dance moves of the Tears for Fears boys to the delight of the pubgoers. He said: 'I didn't really have much style, as you've probably noticed if you've looked at any photographs throughout my career, but I did have a lot of content, and part of that content was talking to the audience. 'I don't think you can learn that if you haven't gone out there and played those kind of small venues. You have to engage with people.' On a recent trip to London, Billy walked south along Tottenham Court Road which links Euston with Trafalgar Square. Starting at the north end, near Warren Street Tube station, he could see the building that once housed the Embassy Rooms venue. Then there was the old Roebuck pub, where his mum first saw him perform: 'The NME was there and wanted to talk to her as well. And she told them, you know, he doesn't normally talk like that.' Walking further down, he passed the Dominion, where he once opened for the Style Council. The Astoria, the Borderline – all venues where he had once taken to the stage, all now closed. 'So it's kind of saddened me a bit,' he said. 'Because it's those venues that give people a chance to try out their stuff and find out – you know, how do you find out if your songs were any good, if you only even played them to your girlfriend or your mum or your bedroom mirror? 'You got to get out in front of people. You got to take those first steps, those first tentative steps. More Trending 'You know, I've always believed that the hardest thing to do in rock and roll is make that step between leaving your day job and making a living doing gigs, and you're never going to get there, you know, nobody just suddenly arrives.' London still has almost 180 precious grassroots music venues that still give performers the opportunity to play to a crowd – an opportunity that could change their life, or just make life feel a little better. 'An audience can generate a sense of of social solidarity. It's not a political thing, because you're in a room with paper and they're all focusing on one thing, and they're all cheering one thing, and they're all enjoying one thing, Billy said. 'You as a member of the audience, you feel sort of part of something bigger, you know – I mean, I'm into this cool thing, and everyone else thinks it's cool, therefore, maybe I'm cool too.' Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@ For more stories like this, check our news page. MORE: 'Skunk Anansie wouldn't exist without Grassroot venues' MORE: Metro launches London Grassroots Music Tube Map to spotlight city's top venues MORE: When is Eurovision 2025 final? Date, location and latest odds revealed
Euronews
22-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Euronews
King of Clubs: Leigh Bowery exhibitions Shine A Light On Creativity That Thrives After Dark
Forty years ago in London, the flamboyant New Romantics subculture was coming to an end and the rave scene had yet to begin, but one underground club was about to become bolder and louder. At Leigh Bowery's club, Taboo, Hi-NRG dance music throbbed from the speakers, polysexual identities were celebrated, and outrageous, colourful, sculptural fashion was on display in every direction. Bowery's work as a performance artist, fashion designer and nightclub promoter is back in the spotlight thanks to two exhibitions in the city he came to call home. 'Leigh Bowery!' opens at the Tate Modern on 27 February, celebrating a 'dynamic creative world that blurred the lines between art and life', while the Fashion & Textile Museum is hosting 'Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80s London' until 9 March, which examines the world around Taboo. Bowery grew up in a quiet suburb near Melbourne, Australia and moved to London aged 19 desperate to be a part of the New Romantic movement where people like Boy George, Princess Julia and Steve Strange fused glam rock with 18th and 19th century romantic fashion. He quickly immersed himself in the nightlife scene frequented by Central Saint Martins art school students and emerging musicians, artists and designers. Many of these infamous club nights didn't last very long. Their makeshift energy was as easily disassembled as it was haphazardly thrown together and the New Romantic wave had reached its peak. Bowery saw a gap for a new nightclub, one that would push the Club Scene to new extremes and opened Taboo in Covent Garden in 1985. It arguably became the most influential nightclub in British culture. NJ Stevenson, co-curator of 'Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80s London', explains why Bowery has such a notable legacy among the many names that emerged at this time: 'He was the biggest. He was not just the biggest in stature. He was the biggest in energy, the biggest in character, the biggest in ideas. He was the person who drove everything for a moment. And it was just a moment, but it was a really important moment in club history, and that's why he's remembered.' Martin Green, who co-curated the exhibition with Stevenson, agrees: 'He became the king of the scene, but he set out to do it.' This boom in the UK creative scene was made possible by squatting culture, so artists could live cheaply, and government grants that supported more people into college, including on art courses, and with entrepreneurship funds. However, it was also in response to an era of hardship for many young people, explains Jess Baxter, assistant curator of 'Leigh Bowery!' at the Tate Modern: 'The 1980s in Britain was a time of mass unemployment, increasingly conservative values, and rising homophobia further incited by the AIDS epidemic. Consequently, people were looking for more and more creative ways to express themselves, escape from everyday life, have sex and be queer with whoever they wanted to be with – more often than not, on the dancefloor, in pubs, clubs and gay bars.' Bowery turned himself into a walking piece of art: painting his face, exposing and covering his skin in unusual ways and draping himself in outlandish garbs. To be on the guestlist for Taboo, you had to show your devotion to experimenting wildly with identity and expression. 'The way he used his body, skin, gestures, his very personality was a kind of living painting and sculpture that pushed costume beyond 'fashion' to something truly experimental and outrageous,' says Baxter. Bowery's body of work often engaged in shock factors from the amount of sex and drugs freely available at his nightclubs, to bodily fluids used in his art. Ironically, nothing was taboo. Though Taboo closed only a year later, Bowery had made a name for himself. He went on to design costumes for dancer and choreographer Michael Clark, put on performance art exhibitions (most notoriously his show in which he 'birthed' his creative collaborator Nicola Bateman), posed for artist Lucian Freud and formed the band Minty. In 1994, at the age of just 33, Bowery died of an AIDS-related illness. A young Lee McQueen was present at Bowery's final performance before his death, just one of the famous names his work inspired. 'Bowery's work provides a form of inspiration for many artists to create art on their own terms, such as Sin Wai Kin, Jeffrey Gibson, Prem Sahib to name just a few. Outside of the global art scene, his influence is particularly alive in the work of Alexander McQueen,' says Baxter. Lady Gaga, John Galliano and the Scissor Sisters have all cited Bowery as a source of inspiration. More than 30 years since his death, Baxter believes his legacy is as prevalent amongst the creative sphere today: 'Now more than ever are we seeing Leigh Bowery's influence – from major fashion houses like Rick Owens and Charles Jeffrey LOVERBOY, to body-distorting alternative drag, to queer nightlife around the globe,' she says. Green and Stevenson say that the exhibition at the Fashion & Textile Museum has been hugely popular with students and young people who feel an affinity with this period in London's history. 'When lockdown eased up, I saw a lot of young people really dressing up, because they'd been indoors for quite a long time, maybe finding things on eBay or whatever, and really dressing up again. A lot of people really dress up to come to the exhibition,' says Green. It also comes at a time when the nightlife industry in the UK is facing a steep decline, with the number of nightclubs plummeting to 787 in 2024, compared with 1,700 in 2013. LGBTQ+ venues are particularly at risk of closure and these exhibitions are inspiring young people to take things into their own hands. Stevenson says: 'There has been lots of conversations about venues having to close and struggling post-COVID because areas are being developed and people can't afford the rents anymore. But having said that, there is still that kind of way of [young people] wanting to do things for themselves and setting up in really inexpensive spaces under railway arches, or slightly derelict spaces, which is exactly the same way that it used to happen. So, I think that story is really quite prevalent. This exhibition has really been picked up by young people. They're completely fascinated with this story.' Bowery's legacy serves as a reminder that nightlife is worth protecting. It can be more than just a way to pass the weekend, but the places where we're most free to be our true selves, to rebel against societal confines and nurture the communities that shape our culture.
The Guardian
19-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Face Magazine: Culture Shift review – rebellious fashion photography with a raucous sense of fun
SPEED SEX GORE AGGRO promised a 1998 cover of the Face. The cover star was Alexander McQueen, looking like a revenant with blanched white skin and blood-red eyes. 'He wanted to express the idea of the burning rage felt by Joan of Arc being burned at the stake,' the photographer Nick Knight recalls. In its initial run between 1980 and 2004, the cult style magazine served this kind of madness every month to its avid young readers. The Face even managed to make David Beckham dirty, with soy sauce and coffee dribbling down his abs. This exhibition is suitably splashy, and with more than 200 photographs by 80 photographers it convincingly demonstrates the publication's influence and audacity. It is a riotous romp through two decades of British fashion, from New Romantics to Gothic Romantics, by way of grunge and a bit of medieval fantasy. Some of this, of course, now looks outrageously dated. But the Face's raucous sense of fun never wanes, enhanced by incisive wall texts that jettison art jargon in favour of anecdotes from photographers and stylists. In one portrait shot from below, an open-mouthed Norman Anderson, AKA broadcaster Normski, engulfs the entire frame. The picture, taken in December 1992, comes alive with photographer Jake Chessum's insight: 'He talks fast and continuously at the top of his voice. So I got in close and had him let rip.' This fast and furious energy also seems to stem from the fact that most of these photographers (many, like founder Nick Logan, from working-class backgrounds) were just starting out, and shared the same work-hard, play-hard mindset as the nascent magazine. Glen Luchford reminds us of Margaret Thatcher's now incredible-sounding youth opportunity programme: raise £1,000 and the government would match that amount, give you £27 a week and pay most of your rent. The photographer writes: 'Everyone I knew who was working at the Face in the beginning was on that scheme.' The 1990s was the Face's most successful era, and the photographs from then exemplify the moods and movements that marked that decade, from rave to Britpop, hedonism to neoliberalism. The more interesting moments are the less obviously iconic ones (like Kate Moss shot by Juergen Teller), overlooked moments of originality and pure panache. A fashion image shot by Norbert Schoerner and styled by Greg Fay and Justin Laurie sees the chiseled model Rufus Jordan in a sharp suit and cufflinks, with a Tesco bag over his head. 'The styling was our commentary on British society,' Fay notes. 'The cufflinks came from a man who drank in my Dad's pub.' Unorthodox approaches were encouraged – in one shoot, Nigel Shafran cycled around London with a bag of fake Louis Vuitton clothes and asked people in the street to put them on. This exhibition demonstrates that the magazine influenced two big changes in fashion photography. The first was the shift away from location shoots to studios, where the photographer and subject could build their own world and be more experimental; shoots for the Face could be demanding and take all day. The second was the closer collaborations it fostered between photographers and stylists: explosive creative couplings like the late Judy Blame and Jean-Baptiste Mondino; Melanie Ward and Corinne Day; Isabella Blow and Sean Ellis. The Face was loud, left-field, and unabashedly British. Its fervour could also be a little bombastic and, at times, this nostalgia-soaked exhibition starts to navel gaze – especially in the section dedicated to the present day (the magazine relaunched in 2019). But there's no denying the energy in the rooms, soundtracked to hits by Neneh Cherry, Elastica and Daft Punk that play out from a montage film at the exhibition's entrance. The Face had achieved mythological status before it folded in 2004. And by then, the youth were in thrall to a new thing: the internet. The Face Magazine: Culture Shift is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, from 20 February to 18 May
