It would be fair to say that live albums either work or they don’t. Generally they don’t. They can frequently end up as self-indulgent, commercially-orientated attempts to capture the minds and money of a dedicated few; the sub-standard live offerings of Bowie and Led Zeppelin spring readily to mind.

Of course, Belle & Sebastian are not just any old band. For a start they are purportedly Scotland’s greatest – they were named as such in ‘The List’ magazine, yet have reached semi-cult status without sacrificing their distinctive baroque-pop sound for commercial success. And regardless, this is not just any old live album.

Taken from BBC sessions spanning a twelve-year career, this is effectively a greatest hits album without the commercial intent and with much more interest for new and old fans alike, with new tracks and surprising takes on old favourites. The opener, “The State I Am In,” is taken from their debut and introduces Murdoch’s tender lilting voice that fires through unexpectedly cutting lyrics. And that’s just for starters.

Experimenting in spoken word, the laid back “Shoot the Sexual Athlete” is one of four previously unreleased tracks that add another layer of intrigue to the harmonies that characterises all B & S work.

The alternative version of ‘Lazy Line Painter Jane’ is a more subdued and less polished offering than the previously released track, but even more personal, the recording sound quality dragging the listener into their beautiful world.

Elsewhere, Isobel Campbell’s haunting vocals on “Nothing in the Silence” seem a fitting way to mark her exit from the band in 2001.

The entire record is one of harmony, the intimate sound of the sessions stripping back songs that offers an opportunity to appreciate what Belle & Sebastian do best – write fantastic songs and play them magically.

Four stars

It’s 1.07 in the morning, in Farringdon, North London. Caspa’s remix of “Where’s my money?” rips through Room 3 at Fabriclive, the floor becomes a sea of limbs and bouncing “nu era” caps. If you could hear yourself think you might wonder at how anything got so big so quickly.

Seven years ago the creators of Dubstep could not have anticipated the wide-ranging affects of their innovations. The genre started in the South London suburbs where young DJs remixed garage tracks for the b-sides of their white label releases, incorporating their dark mood and strung-out beat, mixing in a minor key. Producers like Skream and Oris Jay resented the high-speed bass that dominated garage, so, taking influences from the Brixton Dub scene, they slowed the bass to 69 bpm and kept the kickdrum syncopated.

This created the perfect foundation for the brooding bass drops that define Dubstep’s grimy style. In 2001 Forward>> held the first Dubstep nights at the Velvet Rooms Club in Soho, while DMZ records was founded in 2003 by Digital Mystikz and soon hosted a night at Mass Club in Brixton with Benga (pictured left), Kode 9, Hijack and Skream, heralding the development of Dub in areas away from South London estates.

These clubs are essential to Dubstep’s development because a pair of laptop speakers cannot express what the genre has to offer; namely, deep, deep bass. Combined with clashing harmonies and a relentless beat, it is hypnotic, dirty, incredible music.

Dubstep is best heard in a club with a speaker system that will ‘make your chest cavity shudder’, where the sweaty, euphoric crowd add their style to the mix.

Recently Benga and Skream released the CD albums Diary of an Afro Warrior and Skream respectively. While the two albums are at first glance very different, they both contain accessible tracks that have stayed true to Dubstep’s roots. This release, marking the South London style’s entrance into mainstream music, now appears in CD shops and clubs across the country.
However, there has been a backlash against this new-found credibility. Skream’s track ‘Midnight Request Line’ is often dropped at commercial club nights, due to complaints from hardcore fans, who believe the genre has sold out.

They are right to stand up for their individuality; while similar artists Pendulum’s Hold Your Colour album was a drum n’ bass masterpiece, its commercial success encouraged a splurge of generic imitation tracks that stagnated the creative side of drum n’ bass music.

Thankfully, the emergence of Japanese and American Dubstep has kept the music fresh. The internet has turned Dubstep into a global phenomenon; fans can hear the newest tracks for free on music blogs and Dubstep forums, although nothing can compare to the grime and bass of a real night.

For new, innovative artists try the up-and-coming labels ‘Hench’ and ‘Tectonic.’ Otherwise give yourself a break from the indie norm and get to a Dubstep night.

Folk is sexy again.

At least, that’s true according to one excited female Bellowhead enthusiast I met at the Carling Academy tonight. It’s safe to say that, although I can’t remember a time when folk was sexy, the majority of the crowd at tonight’s concert probably can. A significant minority may well remember a time when the ‘old’ songs performed tonight were just songs.

There are bald heads and beards aplenty; it’s a night when those of us who wear our hair on top of our heads are in the minority. Nonetheless, Bellowhead do have broad appeal, and their ‘sexy’ brand of traditional English folk music has seduced a diverse and passionate audience.

Bellowhead are very adept at capturing the imagination of the listener. Their lyrics are integral to this; rarely will you see a performance where the vocalist’s words rise so clearly from the stage.

Many of the songs are rich in macabre stories and grotesque imagery, and the band believe that this attracts an audience tired of the staid lyrical content of today’s mainstream pop-songs. “There’s enough songs about love and birds singing in trees that we need songs about zombie soldiers” asserts John Spiers, a founding member of the band.

Certainly songs like ‘Widow’s Curse’ the tale of a woman giving herself an abortion by drinking boiling hot wine, provide a refreshing change from many of today’s pop songs, and, according to Paul Sartin, fiddler and oboist with the band, tap into a very human fascination. “It’s the same thing that appeals to people who read the News of the World, a fascination with the dark-side.”

Whatever the nature of their appeal, Bellowhead’s rise has been rapid. They were awarded Best Live Act at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards after playing just four gigs together, and earlier this summer played to a crowd of 40,000 at the Proms in the Park, an event which clearly left an impression on the band, despite the indignity of playing below the ABBA tribute band Bjorn Again on the event’s bill.

Fiddler and bagpiper Sam Sweeney admits to feeling overwhelmed at the sea of faces that met him at the biggest gig of his life. Tonight’s crowd, though significantly less than 40,000 strong, makes its presence felt in an impressively raucous fashion.

The gig opens with ‘Jordan’, whose anthemic refrain rouses the already boisterous crowd into a confused mess of sweat, facial hair and naked scalp. It also sets the tone for a night of songs delivered as enthusiastically as they are received.

The band had proudly recalled a recent gig during which the floor of the venue had been broken by the collective stamping feet of their crowd, and it is clear immediately that the integrity of the floor must be a concern for venue-owners across the country when Bellowhead tour.

Every time a band-member introduces a song its name is greeted by a chorus of cheers, and the words of each song from new album Matachin are echoed back to the stage by the crowd.

Theatrical stage-craft is an important part of the Bellowhead experience, and band members dance about the stage, singing, stamping feet, and generally inciting a riotous response from their crowd. They are a band that aim to please, and that are clearly enjoying their popularity. Bellowhead are proud of the heritage of their music, and of its rejection of the obsession with modernity which characterises the contemporary music scene.

“The idea that everything has to be new and a rebellion against music that’s gone before it is really immediate, it’s nice not to be doing that. It’s the natural thing to make something that’s been popular for 700 years popular again.”

Bellowhead do much to update the songs they resurrect. Each song is given a sonic overhaul, as Spiers says: ‘We’ll take one sea-shanty and make it sound like a disco track, and one sea-shanty and make it swing’.

All the band’s songs explode into life during their live-set, as the impressive musicianship of each performer is showcased in a performance which demonstrates the skill with which the band harness the romantic imagery of the songs they adapt, forging their own unique pop-rock-disco-folk anthems.

In their own words, the band aim to ‘make folk music attractive’ and if the rapture of tonight’s crowd is anything to go by, they are succeeding. However, judging by this audience, Bellowhead have a long way to go yet to truly make folk sexy again.

W is pronounced ‘Dubya’. We know this, not least, because Oliver Stone opens his film with a discourse on nicknames. George ‘W’ Bush is shown, first in a White House meeting dolling out crude monikers: turd blossom (Rove), balloon foot (Powell), guru (Rice), and rummy (Rumsfeld).

We are then shown a teenage W’s fraternity pledge during which he is able to remember the entire fraternity by their nicknames (the ironic result is that the young W avoids having more whisky poured down his throat).

Stone’s counter-intuitive commentary does not stretch to his central thesis. He claims that W’s decision to invade Iraq arose from his relationship with his father. After depicting the many disappointments W causes his father (W can’t play baseball or hold down a job, and leaves his girlfriend pregnant) the Freudian tension culminates when father and son have a real tussle, and later when W dreams about fighting him in the Oval Office.

W’s own doubts about his ability to play baseball (and to win his father’s love) are played out in stadium dream sequences, in the last of which (the closing scene of the film) he drops a catch he had earlier made.

The run-up to the invasion of Iraq monopolises the depiction of W’s presidency but does not ring true and will be cringe worthy for those who enjoy the work of Aaron Sorkin. This is in part because of the intense exposition in these scenes, but also because of clunky (but not necessarily inaccurate) scripting and the caricaturing of Condoleezza Rice (as a simpering yes-woman) and Karl Rove.

An incident in which Cheney points at a cartoon-like map representing threats in the Middle East was so reminiscent of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s puppet movie Team America that one half-expected one of the principals to cry out ‘my god, that would be 9/11 times a thousand.’ In using phrases like ‘I’m the decider’ (W tells Cheney not to challenge him when others are in the room) and ‘fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, won’t get fooled again’, meanwhile, Oliver Stone tries to provide more realism by transposing public utterances into private White House conversations.

Earlier scenes in W’s life are interwoven with the contemporary in the style Stone perfected in Nixon. These earlier scenes are an attempt to provide the Freudian thesis with its backing. They are well paced, and give some genuine insight into the character of the 43rd president.

The first meeting with Laura (in which W continuously talks with his mouth full of barbeque food), is endearing, although Laura (Elizabeth Banks) never seems to age through the rest of the film. Most significant is a scene in which W, after debating an opponent in his first and unsuccessful congressional race, drives his car into the garage door in frustration.

The resulting promise W makes is to ‘out-Christian and out-Texas Texas’. However, from that moment on the viewer is led unquestioningly through scenes in which W professes his religion and claims to have been called by God to run for the presidency.

The same straight bat treatment is given to W’s drying out following his 40th birthday. Stone suggests W himself decided to give up drinking after nothing more than a dizzy spell during a run and under no duress from his family. In scenes showing W’s shrewd work on his father’s campaign in 1988 and his courting of religious conservatives, Stone is on safer ground, and is making important biographical points which again push against common prejudices about W.

In the sanctification of W’s father (James Cromwell) Stone fares less well. Cromwell dominates the screen both through the lines given and his acting. In scenes including the depiction of the first Gulf War the viewer is given to believe Bush 41’s only failing is his inability to relate to his son.

If this is the reason why W invades Iraq, as Stone is suggesting, he is led on by his friends. Cheney is painted in a familiar and sinister light (circumventing CIA director George Tenet to legitimise evidence that Iraq had attempted to acquire yellowcake from Niger).

Stone portrays W as innocent and unsophisticated, never asking enough questions (displayed at the climax of the film in W’s anger that no weapons of mass destruction are discovered following the invasion), but as having been in the room when the case was made (by Cheney and his map) in terms of both oil and regional power.

The film makes scant reference to 9/11 and the effect this had on W, leaving the case for war horribly out of context. What Stone delivers is interesting and entertaining, but not much more than fictional psychobabble.

Today once again brings the master of controversial political filmmaking back onto the silver screen as the three time Academy Award winning director and screenwriter Oliver Stone releases his new biopic on the life, thus far, of one of the least popular Presidents in American history, simply entitled W. (pronounced, of course, “dub-ya”).

Stone is not a man who shies from political cinema: his past works have split opinion at every juncture. Take for instance his semi-autobiographical masterpiece, Platoon, documenting life in the Vietnam War.

This film’s overt criticism of the nature of this war and the actions of the American troops in Vietnam, written and filmed in response to John Wayne’s patriotic disaster, The Green Berets, courted great criticism and also great admiration for its realistic portrayal of life in war.

Stone did not stop there. His conspiracy-packed thriller JFK (presumably the beginning of his obsession with Presidential initials) presented a widely attacked view on the events surrounding Kennedy’s death in 1963.

From here to Nixon, where Stone, aided by a mesmerising and chameleon-like turn from the great Anthony Hopkins, arguably gave Nixon a more human face than he has often been afforded in popular culture before or since. Stone is not a man to toe the line and once again his foray into murky political waters with his biopic, surely the first of its kind, that of an incumbent President, makes us question whether this brand of highly political film-making has its place in cinema.

Political filmmaking has undoubtedly been at the forefront of cinema since its creation, and some of its greatest and most powerful works have undoubtedly come with serious political points to make. Some of our most political writers have indeed graced the screen with their scripts.

Take for instance Arthur Miller, a man who famously refused to give evidence to the House of Un-American Activities who sought to blacklist “communists” in the world of entertainment. It was he, after all, who scripted Elia Kazan’s On The Waterfront, a film not just famous for the brooding looks of a young (not yet clinically obese and socially reclusive) Marlon Brando, but also a film that showed the power of one man against the oppression of authority power. Can we possibly see the hint of a political allegory there?

In more recent years the filmmaking world has continued to be swayed by the political situation and represent this in its output. Take the intense political distrust and cynicism that overflowed from the Watergate crisis, creating a set of political thrillers in the mid-1970s portraying a society who had lost faith in the establishment, high amongst these two classic political thrillers All the President’s Men and Three Days of the Condor.

Both films attacked a society where the immorality of highly placed individuals had seen the abuse of power and lost the respect of those whom they had been entrusted to represent. So too in the present day burning political issues make their way into cinema, from Michael Moore to Team America, and now to Oliver Stone’s new biopic which puts the Bush administration in the line of fire.

Cinema is one of our most accessible art forms and beyond its purpose to entertain lies a chance to make a point. In a world caught in the grips of political intrigue over an American election, it is only right that film should have its say about that which influences its viewers so much.

Cinema is not escapism, it is a means of expression such as any other art form. Politics is truly alive in film, not least in Stone’s new project.

The only reason I’m not giving this film five stars, asides from a slight bias against mainstream cinema, is Jessica Biel. I’ve never found her particularly versatile as an actress; my notes inform me that she told the director she’d need help, since she “doesn’t have a sense of bitterness or cynicism in her”.

It’s called acting dear… And she just lacks the imperative classic 20s style.
Now for the facts. Easy Virtue can only be described as a fucking fabulous film. It is sensational, sensual, classic, decadent, deliciously funny underpinned by a sense of darkness. Noel Cowardian humour drips from every line, as the dialogue begins with chilling British reserve versus joyous wry sarcasm and descends into a veritable war-zone of sharp-tongued shrapnel, dead lap dogs have never been so funny. The soundtrack is crucial, and there is an almost orgasmic moment when a dirty, gritty, 20s jazz sounding version of Sex Bomb overwhelms the senses. You just have to love a movie that climaxes on a tempestuous tango!

The story follows two newly-weds, young Englishman John Whittaker and his spur of the moment American bride Larita when they arrive at John’s country manor home, reminiscent of a Samuel Beckett space in its deadly stuffed-animal stillness. Sparks fly between Larita and John’s family as their equally shady pasts and stubborn presents collide. The characters are delicious in their quirks and symmetry, from the drunk butler to the clinging mother. Ben Barnes does a brilliant job at depicting the young John, who dissolves from a sensuous young man into a bewildered little boy; Kristin Scott Thomas is her usual exquisite self, acting the “villain” of the piece. But Colin Firth is the true star of the show. There is the distinct feeling that he has finally been given a role to really get his teeth into; he’s beautiful, wonderfully funny and desperately dark.

The film ends just the way you secretly hoped it would, without cliché or predictability, and you find yourself starry eyed, hands clasped, laughing in sheer pleasure as the credits kick in. Go see it; trust me, you haven’t had this much fun in far too long!

4 Stars

Like printing, it’s hard to believe that it took so long for someone to think of telescopes-how was it possible that people used spectacles for three hundred years before someone tried using two lenses and a bit of tubing to bring far objects close and create an advantage over an enemy any general would drool over? But despite a few shadowy claims, the earliest certain reference to them is a patent application from 1608, and it’s the four hundredth anniversary of this the exhibition celebrates, even though the earliest telescopes it has are from around the 1670s (no major loss).

The information on the walls (there’s no guidebook) is limited but to-the-point, and gives a good sense of a time when science was a respectable hobby for gentlemen, even if supplying their optical demands was a cut-throat business with trade secrets and patent lawsuits: many telescopes are decorated with fishskin, painted designs and elaborately turned baroque endpieces, though functionality moves in towards the end of the exhibition (rather wisely: telescope tubes in Newton’s time were made of cardboard). It’s amazing to think of the meticulousness of the astronomers of the time, grinding mirrors so meticulously one had his sister on hand to feed him so he could work without pause, with no more self-interested a purpose than cataloguing the stars.

It’s also fascinating to look at the technological dead ends, like telescopes where the end you hold is the bigger one (easier to hold, before new technology allowed telescopes to shrink). The same feeling of looking at different ways the present could have gone goes throughout the museum, an amazing toyshop of technology, some strangely unlike modern equivalents (T.E. Lawrence’s camera, for example, with detachable lenses clearly based on microscope design) and some strangely familiar (a Zeiss microscope from about 1910 with white lettering and black enamel looking, if not utterly modern, at least like it could have rolled out of Jena in the ‘seventies). This is in no way a must-see exhibition, but it’s still interesting, and if you haven’t been to the museum already it makes now a good time to see what you’ve been walking past.

Three stars