Latest news with #PetShopBoys
New York Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
15 Surprising Show-Tune Covers for Broadway's Big Night
By Scott Heller Dear listeners, This is Scott Heller, the former theater editor (now I'm on The New York Times Book Review). With the Tony Awards this Sunday, I'm serving up show tunes to Amplifier readers — but not the usual fare. There are no deathless standards here, like Judy Collins singing 'Send in the Clowns' or anything from Barbra Streisand's 'Broadway Album.' And if you're the kind of person who saves your Playbills, you've already listened to the Pet Shop Boys version of 'Losing My Mind' — a lot. Rather, I'm hoping this edition of The Amplifier is full of surprising covers, and covers of show tunes you may not know as theater songs in the first place. I've mostly stayed away from pop albums designed to market the shows themselves, though I couldn't resist opening with one, from well before 'Hamilton' got into that game. And, alas, one of my favorites — Jill Sobule's 'Sunrise, Sunset,' recorded for the 'Fiddler' tribute compilation 'Knitting on the Roof' — doesn't seem to be streamable. But you can find it on her website. Laden with happiness and tears, Scott Who knew? This delightful curiosity comes from a 1968 Motown album on which the trio performed 11 songs from 'Funny Girl,' a tie-in released just as the movie version reached theaters. Take away the ugly duckling story line and the Brooklynese and it doesn't exactly add up. But who cares when greeted with brash horns, sunny vocals and a group cheer after the unforgettable rhyme, 'When a girl's incidentals / are no bigger than two lentils.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Daily Mirror
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
BBC Radio 2 in the Park location announced and DJ Rylan Clark is delighted
The event, which last year saw performances from the likes of Sting, Pet Shop Boys and Snow Patrol in Preston's Moor Park, will take place in the Essex city's Hylands Park from Friday, September 5, to Sunday, September 7 The 2025 edition of the BBC Radio 2 In The Park festival is to be held in Chelmsford. The event, which last year saw performances from the likes of Sting, Pet Shop Boys and Snow Patrol in Preston's Moor Park, will take place in the Essex city's Hylands Park from Friday, September 5, to Sunday, September 7. Announcing the location on Radio 2, presenter Rylan Clark said: 'I can't wait to welcome my Radio 2 family to Chelmsford and have this year's Radio 2 In The Park right on my doorstep. 'If there's one thing I know for certain, it's that an Essex crowd know how to party. See you all in Hylands Park.' The festival was then welcomed to Essex by Chelmsford town crier Tony Appleton, with the festival line-up set to be announced live on air on the Scott Mills Breakfast Show on Tuesday, with tickets to go on sale on Wednesday. Helen Thomas, head of Radio 2, said: 'Radio 2 In The Park is our biggest party of the year, and we're delighted to be bringing a three-day music extravaganza to Chelmsford. 'We've been busy booking some of the world 's most loved artists to perform to thousands of revellers in Hylands Park, as well as to millions of listeners and viewers at home or on the move. We can't wait to bring our family of Radio 2 presenters to Essex.' The event will see a number of Radio 2 presenters relocate to the city for the weekend, and there will be a Friday night DJ party to start the festival after it debuted at last year's event. Councillor Stephen Robinson, leader of Chelmsford City Council, said: 'Hylands Park is no stranger to music festivals, and we're thrilled to add another renowned music event to the list in 2025. ' BBC Radio 2 In The Park is a fantastic opportunity for Chelmsford – one that will lift our local economy and boost the city's position as a top events destination. 'We're looking forward to welcoming world-famous music acts and thousands of Radio 2 fans from across the UK to our brilliant city this summer for this unrivalled three-day celebration of music. 'Our teams have years of experience and expertise in facilitating major music festivals at Hylands Park, so I'm confident that this latest partnership with the BBC will present a smooth-running and highly enjoyable weekend for all involved.'
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Butt-naked Milton and a spot of fellatio: why William Blake became a queer icon
William Blake may be known for seeing angels up in trees, for writing the alternative national anthem Jerusalem, and for his emblematic poem The Tyger. But his story is far more subversive and far queerer than cosy fables allow. It's why Oscar Wilde hung a Blake nude on his college room wall. It's why Blake became a lyric in a Pet Shop Boys song. And it's why David Hockney is showing a Blake-inspired painting at his current exhibition in Paris. When I lived in the East End of London, I'd walk over Blake's grave in Bunhill Fields every day. It felt sort of disrespectful. Perhaps that's why he has haunted me ever since. Years later, while trying to write a book about another artist, I got ill and very low. Suddenly, echoing one of his own visions, Blake came to me and said: 'Well, how about it?' I felt I had to make amends for treading on his dreams. I've met many artists – Andy Warhol, Lucian Freud, Derek Jarman – but it is Blake whose hand I would love to have held and whose magical spirit I summon up in my new book. He even gave me my title: William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love. (A friend has since pointed out that the title sounds suspiciously like a 1970s album by a certain starman from Mars). I was writing about a man who had died a long time ago, yet who still seems alive and among us. Born in 1757, dying in 1827, Blake had perfect timing: not to be confined by Victorian mores, but to live in a looser, revolutionary age. He only ever sold 61 copies of his revolutionary 'illuminated books' – which, for the first time, placed images and words together. Each would be worth £1m now. Blake might have died in poverty and obscurity, but that is exactly where his potential resides – as an unexploded but benevolent device. His posthumous influence lives on in flash-lit scenes – as if his afterlife were a movie being screened in front of us. Cut to the 1820s and Blake's young fans, called the Ancients, are led by Samuel Palmer, who bends to kiss the doorbell of their master's lodgings as he passes by. They enact their Blakean cult in the Kentish countryside, swimming naked in a river and growing their hair long. Jump forward to Manhattan in 1967 and Blake's new disciples, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, are reading his poetry to each other every night in their poverty. They're obsessed. Mapplethorpe gets a job in an antiquarian bookstore and when a copy of Blake's revolutionary America: A Prophecy comes in, he tears a page out and stuffs it down his trousers. Then, freaking out that he might be discovered, he goes to the toilet, rips it up and flushes it away. That evening, he confesses his sin to Smith, who celebrates his act, seeing it as a fabulous infection of the sewers of New York with their hero's subversion. Five years later, on the rocky coast of Dorset, Derek Jarman, deeply under Blake's influence, recreates a Blakean scene for his first narrative Super 8 film. In flickering, saturated 70s colour, Andrew Logan poses as a sea god in the deconstructed dress he'd worn for his first Alternative Miss World that year. A half-naked young sailor floats in a rock pool. A young woman, wearing only a fishing net, plays the siren who lured him to his doom. That night, the crew meet Iris Murdoch in a nearby country house. She takes them up a hill to dance around a megalith in the moonlight. Murdoch cites Blake in a half a dozen of her queer-friendly novels, and discusses him with her lover, the gay liberation hero Brigid Brophy. Flashback to Paris, 1958: Allen Ginsberg, citing Blake in his outrageously queer poem Howl, emulates his hero by reciting it in the nude outside Shakespeare and Company, the famous bookshop on the Left Bank. He's accompanied by a besuited William S Burroughs, whose cut-up writing technique is heavily influenced by Blake's proto-surrealist texts. In 1975, in the New Mexico desert, David Bowie will play a queer alien, singing and speaking Blake's words, in the Nicolas Roeg film The Man Who Fell to Earth. Like Shakespeare's Prospero or Doctor Who, Blake has the power to appear anywhere, any time, rewriting his own fate through his art. That's why one of Oscar Wilde's young lovers, W Graham Robertson, was so inspired by Blake's sensuality that he became his greatest champion, using a multimillion-pound fortune to buy up every work by Blake he could. Presenting them to the Tate 40 years later, Robertson saves Blake for the nation. Yet Blake remains a secret, hiding in plain sight. In Milton, his astoundingly beautiful and prophetic book of 1804, he creates two images of male fellatio and a butt-naked Milton. They wouldn't look out of place in a Mapplethorpe photograph. One reason Blake published his own work was to escape the censoring eye of the printer. It is this same transgression that powers James Joyce in 1920s Paris, as he deploys Blake's queerness like a grenade in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Joyce's Leopold Bloom changes sex in a lucid dream sequence, while British grenadiers drop their trousers to bugger each other as an emblem of the anti-imperialism Joyce and Blake shared. In 1970s London, in their house that is as old as Blake, the artists Gilbert & George claim him as their saint. Like them, Blake would today be seen as one artist in two people. Misogynistic history has written his wife Catherine out of the story – but she shared his visions, printing and colouring them in. Then they'd spend the afternoon sitting naked in their backyard. 'Come on in,' they'd tell visitors. 'It's only Adam and Eve, you know.' Their neighbour is the Chevalier D'Eon, a former army officer who now performs fencing demonstrations in a black silk dress. D'Eon duly appears as Mr Femality in a witty salon skit written by Blake that today reads like a Joe Orton farce. Blake declared gender a mere earthly construction and agreed with Milton: 'Spirits when they please / Can either Sex assume or both.' Faced with this fantastical cast, I can only wonder at Blake's alchemical effect. His large colour prints – such as a nude Isaac Newton with Michelangelo thighs sitting at the bottom of the sea – have a 3D texture that still defies explanation. He was trying to make reproducible paintings. Like Andy Warhol and Albrecht Dürer, Blake trained as commercial artist. He believed in the egalitarian power of art. He even proposed a 100ft tall image of a naked 'Nelson Guiding Leviathan' to be set over the road to London like a Regency Angel of the North. Shockingly modern, Blake burned with a fire that can't be put out. His new Jerusalem was an achievable utopia, if only we shook off our 'mind-forg'd manacles' – our prejudices about gender, sex, race and class. His art still inspires us as he shoots his arrows of desire from his bow of burning gold, standing there naked, bursting out of a rainbow. Blake's new world is the one we long for, where we will all be gloriously free to love whoever and however we like. William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love is published by 4th Estate
The Guardian
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The worst gig-goers aren't phone-wielding teens. It's creepy blokes zooming in on female musicians
Kylie Minogue's current Tension tour is a glorious spectacle. Dancers prowl around geometric staircases in weird hats, which feels delightfully Pet Shop Boys. There is a disco ball big enough to permanently dazzle every audience member. One visual shows a noirish film of Ms Minogue as a sort of heartbreak-vanquishing detective; a billboard in her rainy street scene incorporates the location of each tour date to ask: 'Feeling lonely in Sheffield? Call Kylie …' And there she is in the middle of it all, resplendent in blue PVC; a spangly red jumpsuit; a kaftan-ish thing sewn together from what looks like neon police tape, emblazoned with the classic jagged Kylie heartbeat monitor logo. Kylie is one of our most generous performers: not above adding The Loco-Motion to the setlist following audience demand, its youthful silliness contrasted with Dancing, a gorgeous disco-country song about mortality. The expansiveness of the show made it all the more galling to be forced to partially witness it through the digital camera of the man sitting next to me, who spent the entire gig – and I mean every single second of it – training his priapic lens on Kylie through wobbly 10x zoom. Everyone has their phone out at gigs now, particularly big pop shows: it's an unavoidable fact of live music. To look down from our side-stalls seats at any point during the show was to see a glittering of little rectangles, and that's fine. Teenagers often get the blame for this, but Kylie's is a fairly middle-aged crowd. I'm not immune either – I usually limit myself to a single gig pic, just so the event lives in my camera roll, but I took maybe a dozen of all the exciting set pieces. But there is something profoundly creepy about Digital Camera Guy, a fixture of most gigs that feature a female performer. I've stood next to this – always middle-aged or older – man dozens of times, watching him maintain a shakily tight focus on the women on stage with his ancient silver Olympus, and wondering what on earth he's going to do with those photos and footage later. Whether his intentions are sleazy or simply trainspottery, his ceaseless scrutiny feels unsettling for female and gender-nonconforming audience members and musicians. As performers in a paid-for, public setting, they're obviously there to be looked at, but there's a difference between a reciprocal exchange with an understanding and respectful audience, and feeling monitored. The inference is that women only exist here to be surveilled, perceived as visual stimuli at best, sex objects at worst. It's bad enough realising that someone is staring at you creepily in public – behaviour that has been prohibited on London's public transport network since 2022 – let alone, I imagine, noticing yourself being watched so intently when you're trying to stage a show on your own terms. In this dynamic, it's the performer who generally commands the room, but the perpetually invasive lens undermines that power, reminding them that they're nothing but an object to be captured. I've spoken to plenty of female performers, some of them distressingly young, who hate the sight of DCG but feel they can't speak out about him for fear of alienating paying fans or being perceived as ungrateful, uppity bitches. I've also spoken to several of my own male friends in their 40s and 50s who worry about being tarred with the same brush, who fear going to gigs alone or standing anywhere near the front in case they're perceived as pervs who haven't come to listen to the music. In case you think I'm overstating this, one of those friends texted me saying he'd stood next to a DCG at Wet Leg in London this weekend, and watched in horror as the man kept unabashedly zooming in on the band's legs and bums. I'm sure most DCGs are not taking photos to get off to later (you'd have a job, through all the pixels). But either way, the lack of self-awareness makes so many other people in the crowd profoundly uncomfortable, leading them to question their entirely equal place in this environment. I felt icky every time I accidentally brushed the guy sitting next to me on Friday. I've had Kylie's rapturous encore closer Love at First Sight as an earworm since then, but that feeling of unease is the thing I really can't get out of my head. DCG: I beg you, stop it.
The Guardian
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Kylie Minogue review – house, techno… doom metal? This is a thrilling reinvention of a pop deity
The lights go down in Glasgow, and Kylie Minogue ascends from underneath the stage like a pop deity: head-to-toe in electric blue PVC, sitting in the centre of a giant neon diamond. After acclaimed runs in Australia and the US, she's kicking off the UK leg of her Tension tour, celebrating an era that started two years ago with lead single Padam Padam – a phenomenon everywhere from gay clubs to TikTok – and continued with her equally hook-filled albums Tension and Tension II. In contrast to some recent over-complicated arena tour concepts from the likes of Katy Perry, the Tension show is admirably straightforward after Kylie's big entrance, allowing her to remain the focus at all times. She races through hits – some condensed into medleys – at an astonishing pace; from 1991's What Do I Have To Do, to Good As Gone from Tension II. For Better the Devil You Know, she changes into a red sequin jumpsuit and matching mic, leading a troupe of highlighter-coloured dancers in front of a minimalist, impressionistic backdrop. There's something of the Pet Shop Boys' art-pop flair in the show's considered design choices, and in Kylie's inherent – rather than costume-driven – flamboyance. The primary aesthetic is the bright electropop of both Tension albums, but there's frequent reminders of the kaleidoscope of genres in Kylie's back catalogue. The country-inflected single Dancing would fit perfectly among the current wave of stetson-clad pop. After briefly missing a lyric – the only break in her consummate professionalism – Kylie invites a backing dancer to join in with her. This relaxed mood continues as she moves to the B-stage, where she sings a cappella snippets of fan requests: early single Never Too Late, Nick Cave duet Where the Wild Roses Grow, even Spinning Around B-side Paper Dolls. A sweet acoustic sing-along of 2020 single Say Something harks back to its lockdown-era genesis (its parent album Disco was 'finished in my kitchen' during the pandemic) kicking in to full party mode before we think too much of real-world worries, past or present. It's not the only song to get a refreshing revamp. Many of Kylie's best known hits are dolled up to suit the clubby vibes of her current era: the tropical noir of On a Night Like This is transformed into a near-future techno odyssey; The Locomotion ('from a far away place … called the 80s!') gets a clubby sheen while retaining its kitsch charm; and Spinning Around has a new piano house mix, a reinvention worthy of this ultimate comeback anthem. The finest rework comes towards the end, as Kylie takes the stage in a gold and black cape for the penultimate act. Shrouded in dry ice, and bolstered by heavy, propulsive drums, she performs cult 1994 single Confide In Me as a drama-laden doom metal ballad, upping the already high stakes of the original to stratospheric levels. It's also a fine showcase for her vocals, allowing her to stretch and reach for big sustained notes. It's a six-star moment in a five-star show: someone get her in the studio with Stephen O'Malley. After this emotional high, there's just enough time to collect ourselves for the final run: taking us from the moody swagger of 2003's Slow to the open-hearted emotion of All the Lovers, to a high energy encore of Padam Padam and Love at First Sight. At the show's end, Kylie seems endearingly overwhelmed by the raucous audience response, but this belies supreme confidence: she knows she doesn't need extraneous bells and whistles to carry this bravura show.
