Ever since the untimely break up of Skunk Anansie, time has shown that their material has aged very well. Some would say not at all. Skin’s debut solo album is an absolute treat, for really unexpected reasons. Fleshwounds is a scaled down, simplified vocal treat. There’s still the odd hint of Skunk Anansie poetics, with lines such as “can’t see you through your blinding words”. But that really is all that remains for Skunk Anansie fans. ‘The Trouble With Me’ could easily be a Mel C song, except that Mel C could never come up with something so good. For someone who once sang “yes it’s fucking political, everything’s political”, “the trouble with me is my troubles with you” sounds like Lisa Stansfield, but in a good way. ‘I’ll Try’ is David Gray done well. Fleshwounds is a trip through everything that’s acceptable about modern pop. ‘You’ve Made Your Bed’ is so straight-up that it’s actually quite moving. Perhaps it’s the lack of a gargantuan guitar riff à la Stoosh that makes you take her seriously. Nothing ever kicks in, and you’re left with a line as simple as “You can’t keep turning to me, when she ain’t coming home” hitting home simply because it doesn’t turn into a mosh-fest. Towards the end Fleshwounds becomes more adventurous, both with it’s pace and it’s mix of styles. Just when it seemed like amps had been banned from the studio, ‘As Long As That’s True’ provides one verse where Skin nearly lets fly, but as soon as your head has begun to nod, it’s over. This really is a seriously well-judged, modest album. The final track ‘Till Morning Comes’ is a top-drawer jazz vocal piece. It actually made me think of the way Lou Reed ended Transformer. I don’t know where the fuck she pulled this one from but it forces you to take someone called ‘Skin’, seriously. Quite an achievement. If all pop albums were this well measured and made with this degree of subtlety, the world would be a better place. David Gray would be out of a job, and The Stereophonics would be hanging from a gibbet. Out June 2
ARCHIVE: 4th week TT 2003

Seeing Mogwai is an experience. Those who turn up with ear plugs have the wrong idea. The Sk8r Bois who came along because they thought it’d be a cool mosh-fest retire to the back when they realise that Mogwai would tear Good Charlotte to pieces, and still have time to give NOFX a lesson in non-conformity. They open with ‘Helicon 1’, still looking like a group of Glaswegian reprobates who have somehow discovered the secret of music. The sound is something bigger than the band. They’re up there thrashing their guitars and going deaf, but there’s a sense that they’re not actually five musicians, they’re servants of a sound more beautiful and terrible than the sea. New material is slipped in amongst old favourites, the gentle melodies of Rock Action have not been recanted for their forthcoming album Happy Songs for Happy People. But it’s the segue from one of their new songs into ‘Mogwai Fear Satan’, almost unnoticed by the crowd until two or three minutes of the Young Team anthem has elapsed, that was undoubtedly the highlight. At times Stewart Braithwaite’s lead lines were swamped by the bass, but more often than not this was rectified at exactly the right moment. Patience is the key word with Mogwai. The encore seems to sum up the band. Starting with the beautiful ‘2 Wrongs Make 1 Right’ and then sweeping into the inevitable, but shortened rendition of ‘My Father My King’, Mogwai show that they can still make your ears bleed.
ARCHIVE: 4th week TT 2003

CLUBBING TWISTED NUCLEUZ TOUR THE ZODIAC SUNDAY 25TH MAY Ed real, Ryan H and James lawson feature in a bank holiday break-beat hot-house tin-trance rave down. GIGGING BRITISH SEA POWER THE ZODIAC FRIDAY 23RD MAY Routh Trade debutantes dubbed the “lunatics” from Brighton will no doubt be peddling their particular brand of lunacy.
ARCHIVE: 4th week TT 2003

As with everything Depeche Mode, Paper Monsters is a bit hit-and-miss. The spooky, hallucinogenic paranoia of the thick strings in ‘A Little Piece’ is undermined by execrable Hawaiian guitars in ‘Hold On’, and Gahan always seems intent on having one Marilyn Manson-esque pulsing industrial number as in ‘Bottle Living’. ‘Black and Blue Again’ is perhaps the most challenging song, an unpromising start builds slowly to a noisy climax of Reznor proportions with the nicely understated vocals proclaiming “I’m not very nice”. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if Gahan is hoping to get some of this stringbased material on a future David Lynch sountrack; some tracks are similar to the work of Angelo Badalamenti. Out come the corny 808 drum sounds for ‘I Need You’. Was that really necessary? Out June 2
ARCHIVE: 4th week TT 2003

NYC Man is Lou Reed’s first self selected greatest hits and it certainly does a good job of representing a career which has spanned some thirty albums. This double album gets the balance between the songs you do know, and the ones you should know, just right. There are only four original VU tracks, but Reed’s solo versions of ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ and ‘Heroin’ are must have renditions. There are the usual Transformer suspects, and unsurprisingly Reed takes the opportunity to plug his most recent release: the opening track is ‘Who Am I’ from The Raven. This selection is a great first step towards discovering one of the true geniuses of rock music. Out Now
ARCHIVE: 4th week TT 2003

Noel Coward’s bisexual ménage a trois has lost none of its audacity in the seventy years since it was first performed on Broadway. This week Anomie Productions, the team behind the Talented Mr Ripley at the BT in Michaelmas, stage Coward’s resonant tale of the love triangle between a playwright, painter and an interior decorator and the development of their relationship in London, Paris and New York over a number of years. Director Hugh Montgomery remains faithful to Coward’s original concerns. This was a very personal play for Coward, based on his own experiences, and performed in New York to avoid the sanctimonious outrage the play would have raised in London. Montgomery resists the temptation to vamp the production up to compensate for the blasé attitude an audience of undergraduates will have towards the polysexuality of the piece compared with Coward’s audience. Montgomery’s is a confident production that doesn’t need to sensationalise to express the moral torpor and emotional immaturity of the characters. The heart of this play is of course the tripolar relationship between Otto, Gilda and Leo. And while John Walton is his usual dazzling self as Leo and Katherine Gray fills the role of the amoral Gilda beautifully, the threesome is compromised by Australian KA barman Richard Cornally’s Otto. While the dynamic between Walton and Gray at the start of the play gives off a sense of champagne- flute ennui and cosmopolitan decadence, Otto comes on like a Home and Away character mad as hell to find his sheila copping off with his best mate. Throughout the production Walton ponces, Gray wafts and Cornally fails to fit in. With his thick Aussie accent, his skinhead and ear stud, it’s like Romper Stomper meets The Importance of Being Earnest. Cornally is a perfectly good actor and is certainly telanted enough for such a large role in an OFS play, but is almost fatally miscast in the role of Otto. What saves the play is the command that Montgomery and his team have over the script. The excellent Coward set-pieces are handled perfectly. Gilda’s husband Ernest (Daniel Cooper)’s reaction when he comes home to find two gay men in his pyjamas demanding his wife is spot-on. What really impressive is how sympathetic this production is to the moral ambiguities of the script and the astute observation of the loss of authenticity the characters experience in their desperate craving to fill the holes in their lives with sex, success and stability. As the play progresses and the characters find themselves being subsumed by their public roles, the set decoration washes out from vibrant colours in the opening scenes of idealism and passion to washedout costumes and diluted furniture drapes towards to the end of the play. Anomie productions have shown guts by refusing to put on an unthreatening anyone-for-tennis? Coward play you’d expect in late May on the Oxford stage. It’s not Ibsen, but this adaptation of Design for Living reveals a pleasantly surprising maturity in the playwright and production team that should make for a rewarding emotional challenge before we begin idling our evenings away in front of indulgent lawns plays.
ARCHIVE: 4th week TT 2003

What do you get when you blend together some black comedy with a dash of theatre of the absurd, and add a sprinkling of political satire on the top? Accidental Death of an Anarchist by Dario Fo is as acerbic and darkly raucous as it sounds, and the Wadham Moser production teeters on the brink between slapstick and in-your-face propaganda. This political farce, based upon the mysterious death of Giuseppe Pinelli, an anarchist railwayman, traces Inspector Bertozzo’s (played by Sam Lyon) increasingly desperate attempts to solve the enigma of Pinelli’s death. He is tormented all the while by the maniac (John Jenkins), who knows far more than he claims, and enjoys wielding this power over the sweaty detectives, who are kitted out appropriately in tacky police uniforms, complete with obligatory underarm sweat stains. Jenkins’ performance is lively and spirited, and he brings a wry edginess to the infuriatingly knowing maniac, who claims insanity but is savvy enough to know the precise psychological terms to describe his madness. However, he sometimes fails to be an endearingly ironic antihero, tending too much towards being irritatingly smarmy to the audience as well as to the hapless Bertozzo. He interacts well with Lyon, however, and their admirably choreographed tussles are pleasingly chaotic. Lyon’s portrayal of Bertozzo’s madness is somewhat heavyhanded, but he brings a feisty edge to the play’s dynamics. The Wadham Moser production has prudently veered away from the typical faux pas of staging Accidental Death of an Anarchist, ensuring that the political element does not drown in the sea of hyper-ironic self-reference, acerbic witticisms and slapstick comedy. This production uses projections of the protest rallies and state brutality, the most recent images being of the Genoa riots, as a reminder of the dark undercurrent of the play, the reality of violence and corruption at the core of the justice system. Another clever device is the Big Brother-style twist to this production, the play being imbued with the sense of being a documentary, certain scenes being replayed at intervals to express the plurality of perspectives in Fo’s theatrical landscape, which enhances the theme of deception and disguise that comes to the fore later in the play. Dario Fo maintains his wryly cynical stance throughout, and we cannot hope to satisfactorily solve the mystery of the anarchist’s ‘accidental’ death; in fact, the play raises more questions in our minds through the subtle nudges Fo gives us towards distrust in political and judicial authority. The Wadham Moser production may lack some subtlety of nuance and slightly hamfisted acting, but the innovative devices of which it makes use and its swift choreography make it a worthy production sure to push all the right buttons and leave the audience with a wry smile on their faces.
ARCHIVE: 4th week TT 2003

It’s a worrying sign if highbrow newspapers such as The Guardian have referred to Abi Morgan’s Splendour as the most “baffling” play of the Edinburgh Fringe, where it premièred in 2000. Think of how many “baffling” plays there are each year at the Edinburgh Festival; now imagine how abstract Splendour must be if it’s on top of the pile. To get the gist of Splendour, think: Virginia Woolf ’s wonderfully poetic novel The Waves transformed into a modern play. But comparing Splendour with anything else demeans its extraordinary achievement: Abi Morgan manages to subvert and reinvent the concept of theatre as we know it. On the surface it is a seemingly trivial snapshot of the lives of four women in an Eastern European city. Beneath this banal façade is an extraordinarily complicated texture of stream-of-consciousness monologue mixed seamlessly with fragmented dialogue. Micheleine is the wife of a dictator, and whilst waiting for him to arrive home she entertains three guests in her mansion, one of whom is a photographer waiting to take a picture of her husband. Micheleine appears to be the quintessential self-assured hostess with ample poise, yet there is something distinctly malevolent and quietly hysterical in her: the “hostess’ disease”, she calls it, and though this type of role has been performed countless times before, Pia Fitzgerald revives the exhausted stereotype. Helen Prichard’s controlled performance of the bitter photographer, Katheryn, brings sharply into focus the startling difference between the dark nature of our interior monologues and the contrived civility of the censored words that we actually communicate to one another. The impressiveness with which all four actresses master the fluidity between these intricate speech patterns is truly stunning. As one character narrates, another simultaneously interprets her speech, whilst someone else drifts into a nostalgic reverie. However, the result is sometimes too fluid: it leaves the audience uncertain as to what is actually being spoken, directly addressing another character; and what is actually thought out loud. This, according to director Luke Sandler, is intentional, but occasionally its complexity borders precariously on the pretentious. But fortunately it never stays in this exasperating territory for too long: under the competant and skilful direction of Luke Sandler, Collapsible Theatre Company succeed in transforming what could potentially be utterly mundane, incomprehensible ramblings into profound and insightful observations. They make the abstract seem tenderly natural, which is a feat rarely achieved with any reasonable degree of success. Splendour is one of the most beautifully innovative plays I’ve ever seen.
ARCHIVE: 4th week TT 2003