Latest news with #Smiths'
The Guardian
16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Salty Brine review – daring diva mashup with hella pizzazz
On his last London visit, Salty Brine mashed up the Smiths' album The Queen Is Dead, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and episodes from his own life into a pretty extraordinary show. But not a unique one – Brine has made 21 such confections as part of his Living Record Collection project, which now brings These Are the Contents of My Head (The Annie Lennox Show) to Soho. If I found this one less remarkable an achievement, the feeling was offset by admiration that Brine's Smiths show was clearly no fluke; that he's created a striking and confident collage-cabaret genre all of his own. Maybe that last one worked so well because Frankenstein described the form as well as the content. The fit is less neat here, as our drag-queen host splices Annie Lennox's album Diva, a recording of Judy Garland at Carnegie Hall, Kate Chopin's feminist novel The Awakening and (I'm almost done …) tales from his own mother's failed marriage. In this telling, both the novel's heroine and Brine's mum are women struggling to free themselves from marriage and societal convention. Tripping in and out of song, family anecdote and scenes from Chopin's southern gothic, with additional characters played by scene-stealing pianist Ben Langhorst, Brine's gumbo doesn't stint on rich ingredients. The results can feel overcooked, the individual flavours hard to distinguish. In a show that trucks exclusively in big emotion, Brine's mother's experience (and his own, navigating his parents' divorce and coming out) is rendered every bit as melodramatic as Edna Pontellier's. The songs of Lennox and Garland sometimes illuminate those stories, and sometimes don't. But they're always delivered with limpid loveliness by our host, or with hella pizzazz should the moment require. That roof-raising voice of his, not to mention the sexual frankness, as Brine drapes himself over this audience member or that, may not be the perfect match for Chopin's tale of clipped and frustrated womanhood. But why quibble, when it's easier to be swept along by the bravura of the enterprise, a lush hymn to dreams of freedom and a feat of idiosyncratic connection-making to put Adam Curtis in the shade. Salty Brine: These Are The Contents of My Head (The Annie Lennox Show) is at Soho theatre, London, until 26 April
The Guardian
29-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Maybe I'm Amazed by John Harris review – a father and his autistic son bond through music
One of my favourite books growing up was my dad's copy of The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics. I spent hours flicking through images of an eyeless, trombone-mouthed golden man swallowing naked bodies, and a full-page, black-and-white comic strip by legendary psychedelic artist Rick Griffin. It didn't matter that I hadn't yet listened to most of the songs – the surreal visual riffs felt like dispatches from an undiscovered country. Later, the Beatles became my favourite band. I chain-listened to the albums, read endless books, watched the movies and recited Beatles' lore to anyone within earshot. 'Oh dear,' said my mum one morning, as I reeled off an account of how a 40-piece orchestra improvised the rising crescendo in A Day in the Life, 'you've become a Beatles bore.' Maybe I'm Amazed opens with John Harris's 15-year-old son, James, ecstatically absorbed in a live performance by Paul McCartney, 'so held in the moment that he is almost in an altered state'. Harris then loops back to before James's birth, and tells the story of his son's arrival, his preschool diagnosis of autism, and how his differences manifest as he grows up. James loves music – the Beatles chief among a rich buffet of bands and tracks he listens to, over and over – and so Harris divides the book into 10 chapters named after songs, each with a particular resonance. Harris writes about music with wit, clarity and a welcome lack of pretension. One chapter takes its cue from Funkadelic's 'weird … incongruous' track Fish, Chips and Sweat – about a carnal encounter that takes as its backdrop 'the least sexy meal imaginable'. Another from Nick Drake's Northern Sky, a song whose lyrics evoke 'a sudden euphoria that leaves you silent, and still'. Harris even bravely attempts a rehabilitation of Baker Street, 'a masterclass in the arts of arrangement and production', so hackneyed from familiarity we might miss the complicated stories implied by its 'sparse, carefully chosen words'. Threaded throughout this are he and his wife Ginny's struggles and anxieties around parenthood, and James's emerging strengths and challenges. He demonstrates absolute pitch – the ability to instantly identify individual notes – and can name the keys of random songs played to him on Spotify. 'Imagine having as instinctive and vivid a connection with music as this,' muses Harris. 'From time to time, James speaks to me using songs,' he writes, recounting a moment when, after refusing to go to school, James commands Alexa to play the Smiths' The Headmaster Ritual, with its lyrics 'Give up education as a bad mistake'. As a parent, I recognise the all‑consuming worry described here. Harris and his wife quickly find that support for children with special educational needs is callously absent – they spend their savings paying for early, intensive therapy for James, and preparing the legal case for the support he'll need in school (local authorities routinely force parents to pursue them through the courts for the care they are legally obliged to offer, calculating that most will lack the resources to do so). But, as an autistic person, I sometimes found it hard reading about behaviours and tendencies I've exhibited all my life viewed through the lens of neurotypicality. Harris is left 'flummoxed and sad' when, on a trip to Chester zoo, James ignores the penguins and plays with the wood chips covering the path, picking them up and dropping them. 'I get the sense if he was left to his own devices, he might repeat the cycle indefinitely.' James is absorbed by the wrong thing – wood chips' splendid tactile diversity, and the miracle of gravity. I don't wish to punish Harris's honesty. Like all parents, his journey involves plenty of learning on the job. He writes powerfully about 'almost Victorian levels of cruelty' inflicted on autistic people in care, and how, through his and James's shared love of music, his initial doomy grief gives way to a constellation of admiration, fear, humour, awe and, of course, love. I wept several times, and the book wouldn't have that power without the author's willingness to be real and vulnerable. As he observes, autistic traits appear throughout humankind. You might say we're like everyone else – only more so. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Maybe I'm Amazed: A Story of Love and Connection in Ten Songs by John Harris is published by John Murray (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
