Like Mike Hodges’ best-known film, the 1971 thriller Get
Carter, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead’s central premise
sees a man out to avenge his brother’s death. Unfortunately
thirty years have passed since Get Carterwas made, and the
majority of the filmic conceits that Hodges transfers to his more
recent film have passed into parody. The noirish touches –
the cornball title, the opening credits (black lettering caught
in a lamplight glare) – recall postmodern pastiches such as
Stephen Frears’ Gumshoe. And the portentous dialogue, which
might have rung out like urban poetry in a pulp fable such as
Polanski’s Chinatown, sounds plain clumsy when filtered
through Cockney dialects as thick as toffee. Worst of all is the film’s protagonist, Will Graham.
Clive Owen, arguably one of Britain’s most charismatic
leading men, does his best with the role, but even the most
nuanced performance fails to save this walking cliché. When Will
snarls, dead-pan, “I’m always on the move. I trust
nothing, no-one”, it serves only to inspire a kind-of
collective eyeroll in the audience. Even if this kind of speech
had not been given by Pee-wee Herman (in Peewee’s Big
Adventurehe warns: “You don’t want to get mixed up with
a guy like me. I’m a loner. A rebel.”) it would deserve
to be mocked, along with any narcissistic would-be touch nut who
feels the need to describe himself to anyone who will listen. And in fact, the film’s potential strength lies in its
undermining of such bravado. The inclusion of a male rape, serves
to shake the macho blockades erected, if you’ll pardon the
pun, by the film’s innumerable hard men, causing them to
question their own masculinity as well as the victim’s. On
hearing about the rape from Will, Davey’s friend Mickser
splutters, “Davey was… He was not bent! Fuck you!”
The choice of profanity is certainly revealing of the close
proximity between sex and violence in male culture. But such subtleties are overshadowed by over-explicit
explanations and heavy-handed imagery, such as the rested inserts
of the gun that, in an image of Freudian clarity, Mickser stows
in his glove compartment. Preston seems to have taken whatever
research he did on male rape and cut and pasted it into the
middle of the movie. Two encounters, one with a coroner, the other with a
councillor, abandon dialogue almost entirely, halting the
narrative for a extended seminar on the psychology of rape. So
while Hodges’ intentions may be honourable, the
disappointing result is that I’ll Sleep When I’m
Deadends up looking suspiciously like a certain late-night
edition of Hollyoaks.ARCHIVE: 6th week TT 2004 

The charm of Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s Bon Voyageis that it
doesn’t take itself too seriously. For many years now,
French filmmakers have been drawn to the troubled years of French
occupation in World War II. But while the majority of these films
are a somewhat painful experience for audiences and filmmakers,
probing the raw wounds of recent history, Rappeneau’s film
about wartime France is refreshingly free of the kind of moral
dilemmas we have come to expect of the genre. The downside of this freedom from convention is that Rappeneau
doesn’t seem to quite know what kind of film he wants this
to be. Bon Voyage is a real conundrum – a wartime melodrama
played at the tempo of farce, with a bit of suspense thrown in
for good measure. Set in June 1940, the film shows France in
chaos as the German invasion reaches Paris. Fleeing south to
Bordeaux, a disparate group of French people become involved in
what appears in a comedy of chance encounters, sudden reversals
and romantic liaisons. The cast is stellar and Rappeneau has
gathered the cream of French talent to play a motley collection
of camp stereotypes, including the pouting screen diva (Isabelle
Adjani), the plucky girl-friday (Virginie Ledoyen), the feckless
politician (Gerard Depardieu) and the sleazy German spy (Peter
Coyote). Our protagonist is the befuddled young writer (Grégroi
Derangère), framed for murder and at the mercy of anyone who has
an agenda. But Derangère is by far the weakest in an excellent
cast who ham it up for high comedy. There are few ambiguities
here: the good guys are good, the baddies are horrid. The plot is
a subtly-rendered take on the classic love story, in which naïve
young writer Frederic realises he is being taken for a ride by
the spendidly vapid object of his affections. Clichéd? Yes. But
if the viewer, like Rappeneau, takes the film with a pinch of
salt, then it’s an enjoyable two hours of escapism, its
beauty lying in its simplicity.ARCHIVE: 6th week TT 2004 

The Datsuns Outta Sight/Outta Mind
The brazen simplicity of The Datsuns’ self-titled first album (2002) seemed cleverly-timed. Not being modish, knowing or subtle made them attractive to rock fans seeking spanking riffs without an overdose of thought. And after two years of touring, their second studio album reveals that The Datsuns really weren’t joking – they just like rock music.
Outta Sight/Outta Mind begins with ‘Blacken My Thumb.’ With a relentless tempo and throwaway riffing, it’s a good summary of what they do. As you listen to the eleven subsequent tracks on the album, it becomes clear that they don’t do much else. Bossy vocals and riffdriven arrangements will certainly be enough to satisfy those listeners looking for a return to the days when a rock and roll attitude was nothing to be ashamed of. But they seem to be taking their influences more seriously this time. They have ex-Led Zeppelin band member John Paul Jones producing. Despite this promising collaboration, their take on classic rock has regressed from their early-career highlight ‘Harmonic Generator.’ They also claim to offer a more considered attitude to songwriting. Lead singer Dolf de Datsun (real name Rudolph de Borst) describes Outta Sight/Outta Mind as “an album of stories.” But lyrics are not as carefully constructed as this might suggest; instead, they sing loudly about some things that have happened to them. He is even honest about their flightiness, describing the band as “constantly running from one drama or another.” Light relief can be found in ‘Girls Best Friend’. This song and “What I’ve lost” distinguish themselves by offering some lyrical depth. Dolf has commented, “I really love the idea that albums can be time capsules, that when you listen to that album you hear where the band were at, at that point in time.” Anyone digging up Outta Sight/Outta Mindsome time in the future would struggle to discover much at all about where The Datsuns were ‘at’. As Dolf reminds us in ‘Messin’ Around,’ “If it’s pure and it’s simple, doesn’t make it right.” A variation on a theme is fine but the Datsuns fail to provide enough interest to make their high-intensity guitar sound worthwhile over the course of an album.ARCHIVE: 6th week TT 2004 

Ash are back, and they arrived in style. Tim Wheeler appeared
on stage brandishing his flaming ‘flying V’ in front of
a sold-out Oxford Brookes. After the crowd stood through the
support bands ‘The Crimea’ and ‘Saves The
Day’, they were finally given what they were waiting for.
The frenzy that followed could hardly be compared to the
reception of the support bands. This is simply because Ash are still as exciting as they ever
were and show no signs of stopping. Ash fans were rewarded with a
highly diverse set, which not only consisted of new tracks, but
treats such as their first single ‘Jack names the
planets’ and early offerings ‘Goldfinger’ and
‘Kung-Fu’, sounding as good as ever. The focus was on
new album, Meltdown with 10 of the 11 tracks played from it.
Standout tracks included the sinister ‘Evil Eye’ and
the medieval ’Clones’. The beautiful forthcoming single
‘Star Crossed‘ sounded much better live than in the
studio. Apart from Wheeler’s flaming entrance, the set
wasn’t very visually exciting, and the band were static
throughout. The quality of the music more than made up for it,
and despite Brooke’s ‘pit-policy’ of 3 strikes and
you’re out, the crowd were soon whipped up into a frenzied
state. Ash played a lengthy set delivering quality as well as
quantity, and by the end those fans crammed into the mosh pit
were drenched in sweat, and water that Brookes staff had to throw
onto them to keep them cool. The crowd got what they paid for; a
bloody amazing Meltdown.ARCHIVE: 6th week TT 2004  

The seventh long player from P J Harvey is a return to form.
The follow up to Stories from the City, Stories from the Seasees
Harvey returning to a much more acoustic sound, very different to
the lush production of Stories. At first, Harvey seems to have
calmed down; the cover shows her looking composed, passive even,
and the initial track ‘Badmouth’ is a melodic refrain
revolving around the repetition of “wash it, wash it
out.” But judging by ‘Who the Fuck’ (a track
which, if we are to take it literally is a story of a bad
haircut) Harvey is as angry as ever. The overall impression of Uh
Huh Her is not one of anger; rather the album gives a clear sense
of Harvey’s particular brand of humor. From the minute-long interlude of seagull’s squawking to
the lyrics of ‘Who the Fuck,’ “I’m not like
your’ girls, you can’t straighten my curls,”
against a background of screaming guitars Harvey seems to be
resisting taking herself too seriously. Because of its less polished sound, Uh Huh Her sounds more
emotionally raw and encompasses Harvey’s entire vocal range,
from the shrieking ‘Radio Oh Oh,’ to the hushed and
melancholic ‘No Child of Mine.’ The album gets quieter
towards the end, which allows Harvey’s lyrical poignancy to
come to the fore. On first hearing, Uh Huh Herappears to
vacillate from one end of the emotional spectrum to another, but
on closer inspection it presents a coherent depiction of love in
the Twentyfirst Century.ARCHIVE: 6th week TT 2004 

The pumping beats and synthetic effects of the first track on
Chikinki’s latest album signal what has been heralded as an
‘electronic dawn,’ with an audacious blend of sounds to
create genre-defying music. Not quite rock, not quite electrobeat, the album’s
inventive sound has won the five-piece band a reputation as being
a breeding ground for electronic innovation. The music revolves
around a synthesizer, yet its abrasive quality soon settles into
the background, mixing with drums and guitars to produce an
explosive sonic boom. One band member describes the album as having a ‘broad
mix’ of sounds, and its diversity is striking, proving that
the band can do so much more than mess about with fabricated
music. Which is just as well, really, since the bizarre sound of
the opening track has a tendency to grate on the expectant
listener. I have always thought that you can tell a lot about an
album from its opening track, but Chikinki have defiantly proved
me wrong. The musical quality of the album improves significantly if the
listener can break through the blippy beginning, and those
patient enough to do so will be rewarded. The vocals are hardly
dazzling but they serve their purpose well, and the original
sound more than compensates for what the vocals lack. Chikinki
present their listeners with catchy, sing-along choruses, giving
most of their tracks an underlying pop feel, although this is far
from the overall style that the album aims for. Try it and see,
and don’t let the words ‘synthesizer’ and
‘electrobeat’ put you off.ARCHIVE: 6th week TT 2004 

For those seeking relaxing classical music outside the
wearisome confines of Classic FM, solace comes in the form of
Vista Musicale. Their album, From Innocence to Age, is jointly
composed by homegrown music talent Charlie Mauleverer (St
Peter’s College), and performed by some of Britain’s
best young musicians (including BBC Chorister of the Year 2001)
from Winchester College. Harmoniously using string, piano flute and voice, it seems
inspired from the past in its form. Yet there is an undeniably
contemporary air about it. The choral elements rise above
sometimes banal verse to achieve sublimely romantic effects. The pieces glide seamlessly into each other whilst works like
‘Enigma’ and the ‘String Quartets’ add life
to the soothing experience. Some of the tracks leave the listener
with the sense they should have been allowed to develop their
themes more fully. Overall though, this is a solid debut and not just a cure for
examstress. It’s an enjoyable experience in its own right
and with a high standard of composition and performance the album
could be ‘Music to watch clouds by’. The CD can be purchased from www.vistamusicale.comARCHIVE: 6th week TT 2004 

The acknowledgment of Islamic culture’s contribution to
Western civilisation remains, for the most part, restricted to
the margins of public knowledge in the West. In similar fashion,
much of the Islamic world remains unaware of its rich medieval
past, its scientific and philosophical dialogues with classical
antiquity and medieval Christian Europe. The figure of the cleric
played, and still plays, a blocking role in the interpretation of
history. The image of the terrorising “heathen Turk” in
sermons of Pope Urban II and St Bernard of Clairvaux proved a
comforting notion to the Crusader imagination. It was not just a
mere war, but became a Christian jihad. Despite this perception
of Islam, many denizens of medieval Christian West believed
otherwise. The Englishman Adelard of Bath (died 1142) was the
first significant populariser of the achievement of Islamic
learning. In these achievements, Adelard saw the apotheosis of
human knowledge. The Bodleian Library’s new exhibition, ‘Medieval
Views of the Cosmos’, centres on the Bodleian’s newly
acquired medieval Arabic treatise, the Book of Curiosities,
containing diagrams of the heavens and maps of the earth, many of
which are without parallels. It dispels the miasma around this
period of history and charts an eclectic history of medieval
Islamic and Christian cartography, lodging the Book in its
various cultural contexts. The reception of Greek, Arab, Persian
and Indian influences aided the creativity of Islamic celestial
and terrestrial cartography. One such treatise, The Book of the
Constellations of the Fixed Stars demonstrates the cultural
diversity of Islamic civilisation. The teastained hues of the
folios display drawings of each of 48 classical constellations
overlapped by the pre-Islamic categorisation of stars called
“lunar mansions”. The representation of Orion as a
long-sleeved warrior armed with a celestial dagger, formed by
red-dotted marks, marries the potency of the visual imagination
with the human desire to make sense of one’s surroundings. Indeed, the spirit of human exploration lurks within maps of
five river systems in the Book of Curiosities; the Nile, the
Oxus, the Euphrates, the Tigris and the Indus. The serpentine
quality of the Nile, as it endlessly meanders from one end of the
manuscript to another, marked by small tributaries, is
remarkable. Furthermore, legends and myths come to form an aspect
of the tradition of Islamic cartography with the waqwaq tree, a
frightening component of the spirit of exploration. The depiction
of brown bodies sprouting out of green vegetation, hanging from
the branches, connected by voluminous capillaries of blood wavers
between grotesque and grand-guignol.ARCHIVE: 6th week TT 2004 

The world of literature boasts a vast and varied landscape. The compulsive reader may wander through dense forests of almost impenetrable prose translated from the original Russian, concerning an hour in the life of a bus conductor and lasting for six volumes. But eventually, the traveller’s heart cries out for a book which will be a genuine pleasure to read. In such time of need, the weary reader would be wise to head for Cold Comfort Farm.
The heroine, Flora Poste, is an educated, civilised girl of the city. Orphaned at 19, she accepts an offer to live with her cousins, a farming family deep in rural England. The Starkadders are a living encyclopaedia of rural stereotype, a collection of hardships and repressed passions. Cold Comfortis primarily a satire on the over-written, stereotyped romantic fiction of the Nineteenth Century, but manages to transcend the genre it imitates to emerge as a fully-rounded work in its own right. The satire never becomes mechanical or repetitive, and never tires; the targets are too varied, and the characters too entertaining in themselves.
While the genre of pastoral melodrama may have long since faded away, the targets of the satire remain fresh, and often disturbingly prescient. Amos, the religious fanatic, preacher to the Quivering Brethren, is as relevant today as ever. In the vacant, upper-class Richard Hawk-Monitor, the tediously modern Mr Mybug and the naïve Elfine, who writes bad poetry and quotes it at length, the reader might be forgiven for recognising her own tutorial partners. Mockery of bad writing, needless to say, is timeless.
The Farm is not perfect. First published in 1932, it contains a few strangely anachronistic details such as videophones and private aircraft which sit oddly with its otherwise archaic world. Critics often claim, furthermore, that the characters are more like types than real, multidimensional people. To a more sensitive reader, however, this is an integral part of the charm of the book. Gibbons parades the stereotypes of romantic literature, but then introduces unexpected and interesting traits into each character to draw out the empathy of the reader. The result is a warm, witty and illuminating analysis of the nature of people, as accurate today as sixty years ago – a priceless antidote to an overdose of Dostoevsky.ARCHIVE: 6th week TT 2004 

On the evidence of Midnight Cab, James Nichol, established as one of Canada’s prominent playwrights, has made a perfectly seamless transition from acts to chapters. This, his first novel, however, is drenched in an intensity of atmosphere and emotion that have long been his stock in trade.
The story itself is enrapturing and demands to be read uninterrupted, such is the intrigue surrounding its central character, Walter Devereux, who is abandoned, aged three, by hismother at a roadside, with no clue as to his identity except a photograph of two girls and an adolescent letter.
Just who are his parents, and why would they abandon him? These are the burning questions that torment Walker and provoke him to undertake a relentless search for his own identity, uncovering, in the process, a series of chilling family secrets.
The trail leads Walker, accompanied by Krista, his invalid lover and work colleague at A.P. Cabs, from Toronto to Jamaica, and eventually into the murderous clutches of Bobby, a sadistic sociopath.
Bobby, it transpires, is Walker’s uncle and was also neglected as a child, by a father who thought military camp would make a man of his mentally deficient son; this only worked, however, to develop Bobby’s psychological dislocation into a clean break from all sense of social propriety.
While such a plot might seem concerningly reminiscent of a Sunset Beach episode, Nichol transports the reader into the mind of a madman and leaves him breathless and disturbed, as Bobby’s trail of ritualistic murder is conveyed in hypnotic, fastpaced prose.
With his mother and father already disposed of, Bobby targets Walter, in an insatiable pursuit of slaughter. By this point in the novel, the intrepid reader, having been ruthlessly harnessed by the gathering momentum of Nichol’s narrative, is rapt to discover whether Walker can break the chain of destruction, or whether the problems of nurture can never be overcome by one’s nature.ARCHIVE: 6th week TT 2004