Why do all the good ones go before their time? Amy Winehouse, a beautiful voice and a musical tour de force, shall be dearly missed. This short life saw a troubled superstar that fought hard against her addictions to drugs and to alcohol, that all ended in tragedy on July 23^rd. Winehouse’s death from alcohol poisoning, makes her, like Kurt Cobain or Jimi Hendrix, a member of the 27 club.

Winehouse’s music is widely acclaimed as being poignant and emotionally raw. Lioness: Hidden Treasures, her posthumous album, compiled by long-time musical collaborators Salaam Remi and Mark Ronson, is no exception. This is the follow-up to 2007’s Back to Black, the multi-Grammy winning, multi-platinum international powerhouse. Some of the proceeds from this posthumous album will go to the Amy Winehouse Foundation set up in her name by her father Mitch to help youth orientated charities around the world.

The twelve tracks of the album are essentially an assortment of alternate takes of existing classics, previously unreleased tracks in addition to several new compositions by Winehouse. The album begins on a happy, coherent note, ‘We’ll have everything/We’ll share the joy falling in love can bring.’ This is Winehouse’s reggae-tinged jaunty, sassy rendition of Ruby & the Romantic’s 1963 classic ‘Our Day Will Come’ recorded in 2002, right at the start of Winehouse’s music career. The track is bursting with romanticism and hope.

The album also features a bracing attempt at Carole King’s ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow’. I felt that the militant drumbeats in Winehouse’s version are rather out of place, and somewhat mar the track. Winehouse’s previous version of this track is featured in Bridget Jones Diary: The Edge of Reason, and is to my mind subtler. The Zutons’ ‘Valerie’ is another reworked track: this incarnation is delightfully playful and perhaps even better than the original. Alternate renditions of ‘Tears Dry’ and ‘Wake Up Alone’ also make it onto the album: the former set as a ballad, while the latter is significantly more pared back than the original. This allows her powerful vocals to shine, accompanied only by the acoustic guitar and laid-back beats. Winehouse’s last ever recording was made with iconic crooner Tony Bennett on a version of ‘Body & Soul’. This is a more traditional piece that works very well.

Other standout tracks include ‘Halftime’ and ‘Like Smoke,’ both new compositions. ‘Halftime’ is exquisite, a languid, 70s sounding track that oozes soul.  In contrast, ‘Like Smoke’ features Nas’ succinct raps that complements Winehouse’s brutally honest lyricism ‘I never wanted you to be my man/ I just wanted some company.’
The heart-breaking album ends with her impassioned cover of the legendary Donny Hathaway’s  ‘A Song For You.’ Winehouse’s emotional version of this classic tune is heart-wrenching and haunting.

This compilation album is yet more proof of Winehouse’s tremendous talent and what immense potential she could have achieved. Fans of Winehouse will no doubt miss this girl’s unique vocals and her gift for songwriting. However, this final album may provide some slight consolation, only a few months after we said goodbye to this sublime singer/songwriter.  Let’s be frank, her legacy will continue to live on.  

Charles Dickens’ is A Christmas Carol that continues to resound to this day. The Victorian Dickens may well have given us the Ghosts of Christmas Present and Future, but our Christmas culture is one completely and continuously haunted by the presence of the past. 2011 might have brought us a John Lewis advert that made more middle-aged mothers melt to their knees in weepy warmth than any card, present or display of selfless love than their actual child could ever give, and a Christmastide return by Kate Bush, that makes one want to burst back onto those wiley, windy moors again (albeit in the cosy comfort of a Santa Claus hat and snow boots), but our contemporary Christmas culture is one almost entirely constructed by Victorian artistry – more specifically, by Victorian literature.

Believe it or not,  it was upright, stalwart social polemicist Charles Dickens who taught us that Christmas should be spent slobbing out with the family. The pre-Victorian Christmas was one of waning popularity, having been disdained and banned during the puritanical Commonwealth as a Catholic indulgence, and understood ever since as a collective spiritual observance, rather than  as a familial feast.  Dickens was inspired by fellow nineteenth-century author Washington Irving’s own revival of the American Christmastide tradition after its rebuke as a trapping of English Imperialism, through his Christmas writings in “The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon”, which describe the harmonious warm-hearted English Christmas festivities Irving experienced while staying at Aston Hall, Birmingham. It was Dickens’ images of the rosy-cheeked Fezziwig’s parties, the resplendent, indulgent Ghost of Christmas Present and the close-knit Cratchits that popularised the image of Christmas as a celebration of the home, as much as any religious rite.  Perhaps it is the perfect example of Dickensian irony, then – or else simply Christmassy karma – that today our homes are haunted by the unmercifully unending train of adaptations of this yuletide tale – from the muppets version, to the Barbie version, to the version in which each part is played by a different breed of dog.

The indulgent idea of Santa Claus as a man of material worth, with his primary function as toy-dispenser, is another creation of the nineteenth century literati. Whilst the ideas of Father Christmas as a personification of “Christmas spirit”, and St Nicholas as Christmastide spiritual presence had originated centuries before, it wasn’t until Clement Clarke Moore’s 1823 poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” that these two were amalgamated into a more lucrative figure. The famous poem, known more commonly as “The night before Christmas”, establishes Santa as “chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,” and for the first time acknowledges how he brings “a sleigh full of toys” with which to fill “stockings.” Moore also gives us the image of “a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny rein-deer” that “mount to the sky” with the infamous roll-call; ‘Now! Dasher, now! Dancer, now! Prancer and Vixen, / ‘On! Comet, on! Cupid, on! Donder and Blitzen”. To add another layer or literary elaboration, this idea of a magical sleigh had been pulled from a preceding poem, “Old Sancteclaus”, an anonymous work featuring in the 1821 work, “A New-year’s present, to the little ones from five to twelve”.

Victorian poets even thought to establish Santa’s other half. Mrs Claus was invented by James Rees, in his 1849 work, “Mysteries of City Life; or, Leaves from the World’s Book”, and popularised by Katherine Lee Bates’ poem of 1889, “Goody  Santa Claus on a Sleigh Ride.” Bates introduces the figure of “Goody Claus” – a character, who demands of her glorified husband, “Why should you have all the glory of the joyous Christmas story, / And poor little Goody Santa Claus have nothing but the work?”

It’s not only in the secular sphere that Victorian writers continue to haunt our cultural consciousness either – even church carol services are underscored with a distinctly Victorian pen. Carol collections began to be printed in the early nineteenth century, such as Davies Gilbert‘s Some Ancient Christmas Carols (1822), William B. Sandys‘s Selection of Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern (1833), and Thomas K. Hervey‘s The Book of Christmas (1837). The ever-popular yet oddly eerie and melancholy “In the Bleak Midwinter” comes from everybody’s favourite maudlin Victorian, Christina Rossetti.

So whilst it may be a common, and increasingly popular notion that Christmas, year on year, becomes more materialistic, more and more skewed from its origins, we must remember that we are in fact following centuries-old stipulations for the perfect Christmas, adhering to a textual tradition before which there was hardly any sense of celebration at all. If these complainers wish to take on the wisdom and words of Dickens, I wish them the best of luck, but I think I may be too busy indulging in the brand new transformers-themed adaptation of “A Christmas Carol” to contest. 

I’m writing as the wax is spinning. Nuel’s new experimental slab, Trance Mutation, has been on heavy rotation since the kind postman delivered it. This intensely emotive album is the product of Manuel Fogliata’s imagination run wild, creating a series of melodic and percussive gems that initially demand your attention and then make all attention redundant. The Seattle based Further Records has been going from strength-to-strength over the past couple of years: Donato Dozzy’s K was easily my favourite record of 2010, and since then we’ve been treated to fantastic live recordings courtesy of Ekoplekz and Conrad Schnitzler (who sadly passed away the day I picked up his Live ’72 doublepack), as well as o1o’s twisted Futurespective EP.

The only link I can see between Further and Nuel is his production partner’s (Dozzy’s) prior appearance. Further’s ideology is worlds away from the sound that Nuel has been pushing on his Aquaplano imprint: relentless deep, dubby techno for dark rooms filled with dark souls. I know, I’ve been one of those souls. To show just how dark, Mike Parker has even released on Aquaplano.

Nuel takes a trip away from his normal production style resulting in a package that is altogether at home on Further. The seven tracks are far from techno, but they are trance-like. Not Goa, Hard, or Vocal; but meditative, hypnotic scapes with heavy emphasis on tabla rhythms and plucked guitar. That’s where the Mutation comes in. Fogliata is responsible for all the instrumentation, overdubbing his live performances with more live performances. A track per day; a week of creativity. Nuel, like Lerosa and Dozzy before him, has once again shown the world that the Italians are untouchable. Be quick, there aren’t many copies, and now there’s one less.

Stream, or buy the album.

Five Stars *****

Still recovering from the deep mental scars carved during several horrific experiences of family pantomimes over the last couple of years, I thought that it was about time I branched out into festive theatre going that would actually prove amusing. Whilst, of course, Richard Bean’s modernisation of Carlo Goldoni’s 18th-century Italian commedia dell’ arte piece, The Servant of Two Masters, does not seem the most festive of choices, this superb production filled myself, and the rest of the audience, with so much cheer that we soon forgot about the lack of transforming vegetables and dark caves with shiny lamps.

The plot for a start, with its constant twisting and turning, is sheer delightful madness.  Bean has relocated the action to Brighton, 1963 and the narrative follows Francis Henshall, a failed skiffle player who, in order to fund his eating, drinking and sexual antics, finds himself simultaneously employed by two ‘guvnors’. One, a female, Rachel Crabbe, is disguised as her dead twin and the other, Stanley Stubbers, is not only responsible for the death of Rachel’s brother but is also her secret lover. The production has been shortened by twenty minutes from it’s National Theatre days, but has lost none of its zeal.

James Corden as Francis is outstanding. From the chewing of letters to the dragging of supposedly heavy suitcases across the stage, he demonstrates not only farce at its very best, but also, through constantly interacting with his audience as if we had known him for years, gives a master class in audience manipulation. Yet, under the spell of Corden mania, other equally strong performances are all too easily forgotten. Whilst he may simply be playing a stereotype a particular highlight for me is Oliver Chris as the toffish Stanley, delivering his brilliantly caricatured lines-“Buzz-wam! Wrap his nuts in bacon and send him to the Nurse”-with unending pazazz and variety.

There simply is too much praise for this production to fit into one review. The glorious painted facades of the moving set are so wonderfully Carry On-esque I thought that I was watching Boxing Day television, the Sixties skiffle band, with added musicians as different cast members demonstrate their musical finesse on instruments ranging from the steel drum to squeeze horns, beautifully smooth over the scene changes, and the last scene of the first half is perhaps the single funniest that I have seen in my theatre going history, during which I laughed so hard, it felt like I had eaten three Christmas dinners.

In short, you would be a fool to miss it, so make sure you grab your ticket before it heads to Broadway in April 2012.