Ed Ruscha describes his paintings as ‘information age art’: a label that seems fitting the moment you walk into this retrospective. The first room is full of paintings of single words blown up against a block-colour background. The words are mostly taken from commonplace, transient sources like adverts or comic strips. Such intense focus on the words of pop culture out of context (the 1962 ‘OOF’ Acanvas, for example) makes them seem comically removed from language, to the extent that they become purely visual objects. In ‘The Back of Hollywood’ (1977), Ruscha continues the idea of words-as-objects using a real life example. By painting the iconic Hollywood sign from an unexpected angle, he confronts us with its dual existence as a word and a material thing, and the consequent absurdity of placing a huge word in a physical landscape.

This painting also marks a transition in Ruscha’s work from the brashness of the early word-images, stencilled on in full Technicolor, to the complexity of urban landscapes centred on LA, Ruscha’s home. These later compositions retain the bold approach and large scale of his earlier work; gas stations, museum complexes, cinema screens are sliced up by dramatic and razor-sharp diagonal lines which seem at times parodically grandiose. There is a challengingly American sensibility to all of this; the large areas of block colour suggest huge areas of flat space, wide vistas interrupted only occasionally by buildings or signage.

But Ruscha’s images do not convey contentment with this vast expanse of the American West. He interrupts the geometric rigidity of compositions like ‘Standard Gas Station’ (1966) with unexpected elements like fire; the clean division of building against sky is interrupted by vicious-looking flames. The buildings he depicts seem antagonistic both to their natural landscape and to the humans implicit in their construction. In fact, people are pretty scarce in these compositions. Walking around the exhibition is actually a rather bleak experience; Ruscha’s information age is too swept up in its own arch-urbanity to have time for human beings.

This frustration of his with modernized America remains a central preoccupation of the Hayward’s vast and comprehensively curated exhibition. Perhaps the most nuanced expression of this is found right at the end, in the pair of monumental canvases ‘Azteca’ and ‘Azteca in Decline’ (2007). The former is an exact replica of a colourful street mural the artist found in New Mexico, complete with cracks in the concrete wall and some graffiti. The second painting suggests the continued effects of time on this mural, but includes trompe l’oeil to a surreal extent; the mural image has been torn and folded, crumpling from its grey background. Ruscha emphasizes on a monumental scale that even the grandest image is not infallible, and that any record, verbal or pictorial, will eventually be eroded. Even if our age is saturated with information, we can’t be fooled into thinking that any of its records are permanent.

Three stars

‘Ed Ruscha – Fifty Years of Painting’ is on at the Hayward Gallery, London until 10th January.

Admission for students is £6. Full-price tickets are £10. There is a 2-for-1 offer on tickets on Fridays. See Hayward Gallery website for further details. 

When a filmmaker starts talking about a new way of depicting a well-loved literary figure there will always be a few who consider such talk alone tantamount to blasphemy. I don’t count myself among them, though admittedly the thought of Guy Ritchie, best-known for his gangster films, directing two Hollywood A-listers in the leading roles of a new adaptation of Sherlock Holmes was a mix that didn’t look too promising at first. Thankfully, this very mix has produced one of the most entertaining films of the year.

There’s not a deerstalker in sight as Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson try to solve the mystery of a serial killer who has apparently risen from the dead and a secret society that is trying to take over the world. Okay, I’ll admit that the basic plot doesn’t sound all that good on paper and with good reason, as my rather apathetic synopsis suggests the plot simply isn’t particularly interesting. Yet this is scarcely a problem because this film is less about the mystery and more about the men who solve it. Where the script fails in producing an engrossing story line, it excels in its reworking of the two leading characters.

Although the plot may not deserve an extensive description, the characters certainly do. Instead of what some had feared; a case of Hollywood massacring a piece of literary history, what has actually taken place is a very well thought-out and even surprisingly subtle reimagining of the leading characters. Far from being a total overhaul of Holmes,

Robert Downey Jr’s portrayal of a troubled genius does not stray all that far from the original, save perhaps for a slightly greater emphasis on the ‘troubled’ part. He craves occupation, either intellectually, or physically, enjoying both a fight in pursuit of criminals or simply for fun (and perhaps some money) in his spare time. The audience is shown a man with a brilliant mind able to solve any crime with which he is presented, yet who is incapable of taking care of himself. Left to his own devices, his craving for intellectual stimulation sees him become increasingly destructive both to the furniture and himself. Here we see a truly flawed genius, one that despite the changes from the books is perhaps closer to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original than one might think.

Whilst Holmes may be lacking some social skills, Jude Law’s Watson is every bit the charismatic Victorian gentleman, who manages to engage his own not insignificant intellect in more constructive and organised pursuits. This is certainly not the bumbling sidekick we’ve seen in previous screen adaptations.

It is the relationship between Holmes and Watson that is the film’s most interesting feature, one which is explored in surprising depth for an action-comedy film. Holmes is in many ways dependent on his good friend Watson to pull him out of his destructive phases. At times Holmes appears almost childish compared to Watson who must play the part of both a friend and at times a guardian. This is only reinforced when Sherlock learns that his friend is moving out to live with his fiancé. Yet this dependence is somewhat reciprocal. Whilst Watson might want to appear reluctant to help out his friend in solving a case, he still yearns for adventure, perhaps seeking to re-live his past, one which we are led to believe may not be as unblemished as it seems.

Having spent so long on the characters I have almost forgotten to praise the two leads for their superb performances in creating them. This is not to say that the supporting cast was poor, far from it, but they were all very much a sideshow compared to the heroes of the piece. The same goes for pretty much everything else, even the wonderful recreation of Victorian London and Guy Ritchie’s distinctive style of directing took a back seat role, letting the two leading actors carry the film. This may suffice as a one-off, but when it comes to the inevitable sequel my concern is that this won’t be enough and a more arresting plot will be necessary. But setting those concerns for the future aside, whilst Sherlock Holmes contains much that is below par, these problems are easily countered by the excellent characterisation and acting to make this a thoroughly enjoyable couple of hours.

4/5 stars

10) Demon Days – Gorillaz  (May 2005 – Parlaphone)

Surprisingly enough, Demon Days is the only album in the top ten to be the product of a cartoon band.  The concept? that Gorillaz is a group of four animated characters who create and perform music. Of course 2D, Noodle and their cronies are not really creators, but the brainchild of one half of the Gorillaz project, artist Jamie Hewlett.  Hewlett’s creative partner is former Blur front man Damon Albarn, and it is he who is responsible for the majestic sounds of Demon Days. 

Throughout the record, Albarn displays his abilities as one of his generation’s greatest tunesmiths, with his folk-inspired melodies enhanced by his fifty-a-day vocals.  The songs amalgamate a series of influences, from dub-reggae to hip-hop to trip-hop to be-bop, fashioning a quirky and energetic sound world. The record features a host of guest appearances including De la Soul, Ike Turner and Shaun Ryder, yet this plethora of genres and artists doesn’t detract from the album’s focus and cohesion.  A nod must go to wunderkind producer Dangermouse who beautifully fractures the sonic texture with vinyl crackle and analogue hiss, helping to make this Albarn’s finest work to date. 

9) Since I left You – The Avalanches  (November 2000 – Modular)

The Australian band’s two members worked separately when creating Since I left You.  In two identical studios, Robbie Chater and Darren Seltmann used mainly Yamaha Promix 01 and Akai S2000 samplers (relatively rudimentary equipment) and ferreted through their expansive record collections looking for sample-able sound bites with little concern for copyright.  Once an idea was spawned it was sent to the other half of the band to expand, and all the time the central concept was developed: ‘the international search for love from country to country’.  The first master copy, made up entirely of audio snippets from other sources, had within it around 3500 samples none of which had been approved by its author.  And so began the task of seeking licence, and due to legal difficulties the album was stripped back significantly before its official release.  Such audio absence is unnoticeable however, and the record, which is as uplifting an album as you’ll hear, remains, sadly, the band’s only full-length release. 

8) Up the Bracket – The Libertines  (October 2002 – Rough Trade)

What with Pete Doherty’s increasingly boring excursions into drugs, tabloids and the law, it’s easy to dismiss his musical output as insignificant.  It’s not, and this album proves it.  Up the Bracket, whose title alludes to a phrase from 1950s radio comedy Hancock’s Half Hour, triggered a new era in guitar-driven indie music with its counter-culture lyrics, disorganised we-won’t-pretend-to-be-good-at-guitar performances and under-produced finish.  Even if Doherty’s subsequent work doesn’t cut the mustard, his first offering is definitely worth a listen.

7) The Black Album – Jay Z  (November 2003 – Roc-A-Fella Records)

With production contributions from the likes of Timbaland, The Neptunes and Kanye West, The Black Album, which at the time of creation was to be Jay Z’s last, was never going to be anything other than a hip hop classic.  As one of the genre’s cardinal albums, Jay Z’s eighth is sometimes credited with the propulsion of hip-hop further into the mainstream.  It was perhaps here that hip-hop ceased to be the domain of just the American hood; middle class kids in suburban bedrooms now had an equal share in the genre that a few years later would attract the masses at Glastonbury Festival.  As you’d expect, Jay Z’s lyrics are sublime on this offering, one of the greatest in the hip-hop canon. 

6) Arular – MIA  (March 2005 – XL Records)

It has been said that ‘anything with a beat’ influenced MIA’s debut album – a dance album that failed to perform commer

cially but left critics hungry for more. Perhaps the biggest influence on the album is MIA’s father Mathangi Arulpragasam, a Tamil activist with the codename Arular.  His revolutionary ideals informed the thematic basis of the record, the product of MIA’s objective to create a dance album ‘that addressed important issues.’  The opus features appearances from the likes of Diplo and Switch, helping to retain the relentless energy that emits throughout.

5) Takk – Sigur Ros  (September 2005 – EMI)

The Icelandic band’s fourth album brought with it a new accessible sound; this is as close to bubble-gum pop that Sigur Ros is likely to get.  Granted, this band’s ‘pop’ is always going to be more Squarepusher than Coldplay, but the band’s adoption of the visceral to counterbalance the cerebral is plain for all to hear.  The album combines the macro with the micro; expansive guitar-walls juxtapose beautifully with intimate string quartet minimalism, achieving a euphoric aesthetic which is more familiar to the masses than the masses would think. Much of the music has been used by the BBC: as well as underpinning Planet Earth’s trailers, various tracks have become ubiquitous on Top Gear.  Fortunately, not even the image of Clarkson, Hammond and May kicking back to a bit of Sigur Ros is enough to put us off the record, the band’s magnum opus. 

4) The Love Below/Speakerboxxx – Outkast  (September 2003 – LaFace Records)

This quirky double album from the enigmatic duo Andre 3000 and Big Boi contains a bit of something for everyone.  In fact, it’s a safe(ish) bet that everyone is capable of singing a verse from the duo’s fifth studio album: it is, of course, the work that brought us pop classics ‘Hey Ya’ and ‘Roses’.  There is no typical track on this album – a coalescence of Outkast’s two halves’ solo projects – as influences vary from straight jazz to geeky Aphex Twin-style electronica.  Moreover, it is the diversity that such influences bring that defines the album.  Not many records from the last decade juxtapose a short play starring American rapper Fonzworth Bentley, a prayer to God in which the protagonist asks for a ‘sweet bitch’, and a breakneck improvisation based on ‘My Favourite Things’.  Despite the constant change of mood, both halves of the record feel like song cycles from which you could remove nothing without damaging the framework.  This was the first Parental Advisory labelled album to win an album-of-the-year Grammy.  After one listen, we can tell why. 

3) You Forgot It in People – Broken Social Scene  (October 2002 – Arts & Crafts)

‘You Forgot It in People’ isn’t the album most would expect a band of nineteen people to make.  Rather than an hour-long cacophony with a bunch of guitars giving it some, the record presents us with an intricate sonic experience.   The songs, which are glossed with a chaotic production, juxtapose traditional structures with adventurous instrumentation; sudden shifts in texture and boy-girl vocals add to the freshness of this work, the brilliance of which cannot be overstated.  The highlight of the album is fan-favourite ‘Anthems For A Seventeen-Year-Old Girl’ which encapsulates BSS’ creativity with its digitally modified vocals over-pinning layers of simple but effective instrumental lines.  There is no weak track on the record – even the instrumentals that bookend the work sound relevant. Baroque-pop at its best.

2) From Here We Go Sublime – The Field  (April 2007 – Kompakt)

Despite being one of the lesser-known albums in the top ten, From Here We Go Sublime is one of the most justified. A product of prestigious German label Kompakt, the record was ubiquitous on ‘best of’ lists at the end of 2007, and was noted for its reluctance to conform to the pervasive techno trends of the time.

‘The Field’ is the moniker of Swede Axel Willner, who, for this album produced music which falls somewhere between minimal techno and trance.  Despite its dance aesthetic, the music is not such that would be heard in club; the record feels more natural through headphones or a bedroom hi-fi – this adding to its unique charm.  With its simple structures, the pieces borrow from Reich-like minimalism: small cells of sound (samples from the likes of Lionel Richie and The Four Tops constitute the bed of the record) repeat and repeat, gradually undergoing Willner’s subtle transformations.  With a sense of propulsion supplied by glitchy, softsynth beats, the music surges and retracts resulting in one of the most hypnotic aural experiences we could hope to experience. 

1) Kid A – Radiohead  (October 2000 – Parlaphone)

In the aftermath of the band’s previous release, Radiohead seemingly abandoned their previous influences.  No longer listening to Nivarna and REM, the quintet instead devoured the electronica of Warp Records’ back catalogue, immersed itself in contemporary classical music and developed an academic interest in Jazz; these influences combined to create an ethereal sound world on Kid A.   The opening track ‘Everything in its Right Place’, utilises solely synthetic instrumental forces, with Yorke’s mutated voice more another layer in the tapestry than a centre-piece.  ‘Idioteque’ samples one of the earliest ever pieces of electronic music, creating a beat driven lament on modern society.  The record’s standout track ‘The National Anthem’ spawns out of a short bass riff that permeates throughout, underpinning a Charles Mingus-like brass section constructed to sound ‘like a traffic jam’.

Now, the opus is unanimously seen as a classic, but at the time of release, the fans’ and critics’ reactions were luke-warm.  Furthermore, at the time of recording, not even all the band members were in favour of the change of direction. The camp was split into two factions during the sessions in a wintry Copenhagen: those who wanted three minute pop songs and those who wanted anything but.

Unlike the band’s previous works, Kid A didn’t provoke a superfluity of cheap imitations.  Even the most ambitious of plagiarists recognised the methods of construction used were too complex, the sphere of influence too expansive and the overarching vision too unique to warrant an attempt at emulating the sound.  No other band could have made this record: the decade’s finest.

Let’s get this established straight off: there is not that much wrong with Wolf Hall. Indeed, its success can only be a good thing: in a bestsellers chart containing Dan Brown’s latest thrilling ride through the Microsoft Word thesaurus, another dose of mawkishness from Audrey Niffenegger and a pararomance by some American woman called Stephanie Meyer, Mantel is about the only literary author holding her own. This book deserves its commercial pulling power.

We follow the rise and rise of Henry VIII’s adviser Thomas Cromwell, later the Earl of Essex, from a position literally face-down in the Putney dirt to the very top of the greasy pole of the Tudor court. Mantel strolls through sixteenth-century England like a master-gardener through an arboretum, breathing life everywhere she steps: Wolf Hall teems with richness and curiosity like a lovingly-tended period garden. Cromwell’s own character is robust and irresistibly likeable, and by his side we meet some skillfully drawn background figures, most notably a stormy Henry Tudor and a Thomas More who has received a total overhaul since A Man for All Seasons and reappears as a cruel, manipulative and yet oddly sympathetic player in the great game. There are fun cameos, too, from the the likes of the poet Thomas Wyatt and the painter Hans Holbein. The subtle clockwork mechanisms of court politics click and whirr around brilliant components, and the conversation alternately crackles with static energy or purrs with smoothness. Mantel has fine-tuned her machine beautifully.

This same niceness and vivacity run throughout the storytelling. There is no grandstanding here: when Cromwell’s young family is obliterated by the sweating-sickness, the pathos is of a variety so delicate as to be almost mundane. The tale progresses like music, with an adroit mastery of tone – sadness bleeding into bittersweet humour fluttering into menace – and of focus, as the intensely personal suddenly jerks into the greater scheme of the nation before slipping back to a small child again. This is all told in a prose style that will admit no commonplaces: Mantel can be blunt, she can be poetic, she can be complex, but she is always elegant and entertaining.

And yet – and yet. If you are just looking for a good read, you should probably stop reading this review now and go and buy the book. Still reading? Then hear me out, because, for all its many virtues – and you’ve heard me sing ’em tunefully enough – Wolf Hall just doesn’t quite satisfy. This is for two reasons. The first is that if Mantel does not write commonplaces, she thinks commonplaces: you’ll learn nothing new here. Wolf Hall makes no intellectual demands on the reader, and so offers no intellectual profit. Mantel has written a modern book about the sixteenth century that casts little light on the the Tudors or on us. The book is not “meticulously researched,” as one reviewer raves, but merely adequately researched. Mantel catches the social moment well enough – as we would expect from the author who spent nigh on twenty years preparing her French Revolution novel A Place of Greater Safety – but passes the Renaissance by. The correspondence between More and Erasmus, the Italy of Pacioli and da Vinci, even the theological fulminations of Luther: all are so much ambient background, and no more. Wolf Hall doesn’t feel like its period. To judge by the way the characters think, speak and act, they are twenty-first century men under sixteenth-century constraints – Cromwell himself is anachronistically liberal in his personal outlook.

Is Mantel, then, holding up what another reviewer calls “a dark mirror…to our own world”? Not really, unless you mean that she is being brutally honest about realpolitik and, yes, that realpolitik happens nowadays too. Even then, the unflappably humane Cromwell bears more resemblance to Merlin than to Malcolm Tucker; Wolf Hall is hardly a satire on contemporary politics or society. It professes to depict a world in which homo homini lupus, man is a wolf to man – hence the title – a world of “inveterate scrappers. Wolves snapping over a carcase. Lions fighting over Christians”, and yet these wolves are tame even in comparison to a Frank Herbert novel. Mantel isn’t trying to say anything significant; rather, she is simply fascinated by her characters and her story.

The second reason why Wolf Hall grates is its construction. Frankly, it has no plot to speak of, just an endless succession of problems and solutions. Can Cromwell fix it? Yes, once again, he can. Cardinal Wolsey’s slide from grace at the start of the novel seems to augur tragedy on the most massive scale – as does the opening quote from Vitruvius, drawing the distinction between tragedy, comedy and the satyr play – but we finish in 1534, six years short of Cromwell’s execution, with his star firmly in the ascendant. Cromwell, moreover, has no real defects, and only develops in the most superficial fashion. The first two hundred pages are gripping, but I was really quite pleased with myself for making it through the next four hundred. Word has it that Mantel is planning a sequel to cover the latter half of Cromwell’s career, but if this book is read alone – and it was as a standalone book that it was awarded the super-duper-prestigious Booker Prize – it’s a bit uneventful, to be quite candid.

So take it as you will. If you want something undemanding to read on the train or between classes or whatever that will whisk you away to another world, Wolf Hall is a sterling piece of narrative written with impeccable good taste. Yet this good taste is all that stops it from being just another thriller: the difference between Mantel and, say, John Grisham is quality of writing, not quality of thought. The book deserves to be a commercial success, but perhaps not a succes d’estime. You might want to think of it as a really good biography instead. Measured against the best modern historical novels, however – works with a real sense of the dynamic between now and then, like Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose or Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain – Wolf Hall lacks muscle and bite, for all its sleek grace.