L.A. synth-pop outfit Metro Station have just landed in London. In a little under a week they’ll be taking to the stage at the O2 Arena to open up for Miley Cyrus, a.k.a. Disney sensation Hannah Montana – a.k.a. little sister of Trace Cyrus, front man of Metro Station. Personally I’d find the situation rather embarrassing if I were in the band. Hmmmm… I think a lot of people might.

But not these guys! At least, if they do, they don’t show it. Perhaps they’ve been forced not to by their record company, or their promoters, or perhaps by some unquenchable thirst for fame and fortune, irresistible to them even if it has to come courtesy of hockey mums, Hollywood and eight-year old kids. In desperate search of some answers, I caught up with the drummer, 33 year-old Anthony Improgu.

He explained the band’s take on it: ‘It’s a blessing for us; you know, we’re lucky to be on this tour.’ It’s an unsurprising statement, in light of the band’s overarching aim: ‘We just want to be as big as possible’, he went on to say. But I was puzzled – what are Hannah Montana fans likely to make of a band whose tour partners so far have typically been the likes of emo/punk acts Good Charlotte, Panic at the Disco, and Fall Out Boy?

Improgu has no concerns: ‘Miley’s older now; so her crowd’s getting a little bit older. I mean, we’re a bit more edgy than her but I think it’s actually fine because it’ll be a really pop crowd and the kids are young but, you know, they pretty much love 80s music, and that’s what we bring to the table.’

He acknowledges that, ‘playing to eight year-olds and stuff’, they’ll have to alter their live show – ‘because of the parents and stuff’ – but ultimately he feels that ‘a lot of bands would die for an opportunity like this’.

When he speaks along these lines I begin to wonder whether Improgu and I are on the same planet as each other. Of course, a lot of bands would die for an opportunity like this – bands like Bob the Builder and the Wiggles – not, I’d have thought, bands with front men who sport sleeve tattoos and have symmetrical lip piercings.

This said, he was keen to stress that Metro Station have no pretensions of being a rock band: ‘We’re definitely a pop band’, he asserted, before going on to clarify: ‘What we mean by pop is timeless melodies. The lyric content is not necessarily happy, but it’s hinted with a happy note – it could be rock, it could be hip-hop, whatever – that’s pop.’

Hmmmm… good definition, cleverly vindicating commercially desirable business move… possibly spoon-fed by savvy press agent?

Just kidding. I can honestly say that nothing in my conversation with Improgu led me to suspect that in going on tour with Miley Cyrus the band might be doing something contrary to any artistic principles of theirs. I do believe Improgu when he makes out that he and the rest of the band

are entirely happy – delighted – with the way things are going for them.

Unashamedly seeking to become ‘as big as possible’ whatever the cost, Metro Station occupy a different realm from that in which bands obsess about image and artistic integrity and profess to hold sacrosanct such fickle ideals. The more realistic of the two is surely theirs. Miley Cyrus’ nine-date UK tour is mostly sold out. The few tickets that are still available from online agencies range from £175 to £475. As Bobbi Flekman observes in Spinal Tap: ‘Money talks, and bullshit walks.’

Metro Station’s eponymous debut album was released earlier this year on Columbia Records.

The winners of the OUDS New Writing Festival were announced today.

A yearly competition for budding playwrights, the Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS) New Writing Festival (NWF) is a highlight of Oxford’s dramatic calendar. Entrants are invited to submit a new play they have written. The winning scripts are produced and performed for an audience that includes celebrated professional writers and literary agents. This year’s competition saw thirty-seven entries reduced to a final group of four winning scripts, after three gruelling rounds of judging.

The OUDS Committee selected a ‘long list’ of fifteen outstanding contenders. Helen Eastman, literary associate of Soho Theatre, made a final shortlist of six for Tony Award-winning playwright Michael Frayn. Frayn chose four winners:  The Fireflies by David Shackleton, Instead of Beauty by Richard O’Brien, Revival by Carla Neuss and Toffee by Charlotte Geater.

The four plays will be performed in the Burton Taylor Studio in Seventh Week next term. NWF producer Chloe Courtney remarked on the variety among the winning entries. ‘We have a massive range of scripts, from character-driven coming-of-age drama to an absurdist piece which channels Beckett,’ she said.

Over twenty directors applied to bring these scripts to life. Sarah Perry, a fresher who won acclaim for Oriel’s Cuppers entry, The Lover, will direct Revival. She described her feelings about directing this script. ‘Revival uses quite stylised, playful language in a naturalistic setting. I’m excited to see what comes out of that physically,’ she said.

Meg Bartlett of Merton, director of Best of Cuppers nominee A Real Summer and Rimika Solloway of St Peter’s, assistant director of A State Affair, take on Toffee and The Fireflies respectively. Christchurch English student Abhishek Bhattacharyya, originally from Delhi, directs Instead of Beauty.

Roland Singer-Kingsmith, President of OUDS, has high hopes for the event. He says he is ‘extremely excited about the invigorating transformation from page to stage of four of the best new plays in Oxford.’ There is certainly much to look forward to, and maybe a few surprises. Michael Frayn called one of the plays ‘whimsical and bold’ and commented that he liked the ‘self-opening filing cabinets’ in another. He has selected an overall winner from the final four, but its identity remains a closely guarded secret – at least for now.

As a filmmaker, Michel Haneke has been synonymous for well over a decade with cinema that is uncompromising in the way that it coldly, even cruelly, scrutinises the world we live in. His latest work ‘The White Ribbon’, arriving in British cinemas preceded by critical praise and the title of winner of the Palme D’Or at this year’s Cannes film festival, shares many of the thematic concerns of his previous projects: the violence that we tolerate to thrive amongst us, and the everyday evils that may lurk behind our neighbours’ closed doors.

However, unlike ‘Hidden’, Haneke’s previous master-class in this surgical brand of cinema, which raised a magnifying glass to the cracks and fissures that riddle the modern French suburban household, ‘Ribbon’ travels back to a tiny pocket of the past to expose underlying malice in the mundane. The film details the peculiar and unsettling events that occur over the course of one year in a small German village just prior to the outbreak of the First World War. From the very beginning it is clear that the unassuming puritanical community, with its cast of barons, pastors, doctors and cherubic children, hides dark secrets, not least of which is the identity of the perpetrator of a series of brutal crimes that throw the village into discord and paranoia. The suspense and unease that Haneke manages to sustain throughout is highly impressive, especially considering that he never needs to resort to gratuitous violence or risible twists to unnerve the audience. It is all done by the power of suggestion: the things left unsaid and the acts left unseen in the elliptical narrative powerfully convey a sense of impending horror, and of repressed trauma that must eventually explode in clandestine acts of violence. To make things even more portentous, the narrator invites the audience to interpret the unfolding events onscreen as somehow anticipating the rise of Nazism in the 1930s. Look again – suddenly the children, blond-haired and uncannily organised, seem less cherubic and more like future members of Hitler’s ‘master-race’.

Yet despite the brooding and malignant atmosphere, stylistically one might accuse Haneke of going soft. There are welcome oases of comedy amongst the bleak landscape, and even a genuinely warm, if amusingly chaste, romantic sub-plot between the village teacher and a local nanny. Haneke’s addition of these lighter shades to his dark palette do not detract from the overall seriousness of the story itself, however. In fact, by the contrast they offer they heighten our awareness of the seething resentment, sexual, economic and religious, that is choking the village. Without them, moreover, the film might have been too overwhelming in its depiction of communal sickness.

‘The White Ribbon’ is a challenging film because of this focus, but it is also rarely ever less than compelling. Aside from the me

ticulously paced script, the performances are uniformly superb, convincing enough to make one forget that the film was only made last year and that the actors probably had their mobiles out between takes. The cinematography is also deserving of a mention, capturing the seasonal beauty of the German countryside with its seas of rippling corn and thick snow, whilst simultaneously managing to cultivate a hazy, dreamlike quality that perfectly suits the eeriness of the subject matter. In fact, there is very little to fault the film on, as every element of every frame seems finely polished by a filmmaker who clearly takes his art seriously. With its considerable length, disturbing content and formidable intelligence, ‘The White Ribbon’ might be a film that seems to dare you to test yourself against it, but if you’re feeling up to the task it’s a match well worth seeking out.

5/5 stars

On Tuesday 1st December the Oxford University Sinfonietta gave their end-of-term concert in the Wesley Memorial Church.

The programme ranged from Mozart and his lesser-known contemporary Wanhal, to Schnittke and John Williams. According to the conductor, James Longstaffe, the choice of repertoire was designed to ‘showcase some of the bright young soloists of Oxford nd hear some Williams that isn’t Star Wars!’

As the respectably-sized audience trickled in, fragments of conversation hinted at the anticipation that almost always precedes OU Sinfonietta concerts. As the repertoire is less-than-familiar to most of the listeners, murmurings of scepticism usually emerge at the idea of an ensemble playing pieces without hummable themes. This concert was no exception, but proved more than able to answer those apprehensions.

The short Mozart overture (Der Schauspieldirektor) that opened the concert was – despite occasional tuning problems – a lively start, and the ensemble was generally well-controlled. Unfortunately the delay in staging arrangements afterwards led to this brief piece feeling slightly isolated, a false start in a programme of much larger works.

However this was soon forgotten in the midst of a magnificent performance of Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso No.1. Violinists Amy Tress and Isla Mundell-Perkins (Oxford University Orchestra leaders past and present) relished the technical demands of this work, and were sensitively supported by Daisy Fancourt on Harpsichord and Prepared Piano.

Wanhal’s Symphony in G Minor followed the interval, and, although probably a weaker point of the evening, was a rare chance to hear some underrated and underperformed music.

After this an enormous wind band crammed themselves into the always-tight performance space of the Wesley Memorial Church for a fine rendition of Williams’ Sinfonietta for Wind Ensemble. While this was for me a rather inaccessible piece, it served to indicate the wealth of talented wind players in Oxford at the moment.

Throughout the performance, Longstaffe’s conducting exemplified the clarity and reliability for which his instructor Peter Stark is so acclaimed, especially in the more challenging twentieth-century works.

Perhaps unusually for Sinfonietta concerts, the modern pieces were the more successful; the Concert Grosso in particular was a triumph. The savage energy of the violinists created in the “deranged-tennis match” cadenza was immediately absorbed by the harpsichord at the beginning of the rondo, leading to a moment of genuine, fragile beauty in a work full of parody and angst.

The almost theatrical power relations and the tension of the manic mood-swings underscored the raison d’être of the OU Sinfonietta. Such a gripping work cannot really be experienced through recordings, where none of the dynamism – or sheer physicality – of the playing is captured. The remit of the Sinfonietta is to perform works from before 1750 and after 1900, works that often fall outside of the realms of standard listening material, but this concert showed why: without performances of these works, they will never be understood or appreciated.