Watchification » music

Arena: Cool

antimega — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 20:12:46 +0000

A masterful Arena, exploring cool jazz – but rather than taking the normal route of talking heads, here the music tells the story, with occasional narration, on-screen quotes from the musicians, clips from all sorts of places, even a brief Allen Ginsberg reading. There’s also wonderful original incidental music by George Taylor. Worth watching, even if you think you don’t like jazz.

Buzzcocks

roo — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 23:49:27 +0000

Controversy? What controversy?

Simon Amstell, the cheeky-faced tousle-haired youth who chairs Never Mind the Buzzcocks recently appeared on Russell Brand’s last radio programme where he seemed to enjoy baiting the Daily Mail. Who would have guessed he’d have felt nervous after that? Despite playing at being extra careful here, he is as dry and funny as ever.

A welcome return to the screen for Alexi Sayle too.

Arena – The Agony And The Ecstasy Of Phil Spector

Steve Bowbrick — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 15:09:29 +0000

We’d be unhappy if pop culture didn’t regularly throw up Shakespearian figures like Phil Spector, flawed and brilliant (and in Spector’s case downright dangerous). Imagine if they were all like Cliff. This really lovely Arena takes the form of an extended interview conducted by director Vikram Jayanti (the BBC’s press release says that Jayanti’s “hallmark is empathic explorations of genius” and I don’t doubt it) with some additional forensic analysis of the songs themselves. Tracks from the producer’s long career are played in full as the action proceeds and mini-critical essays by journalist Mick Brown pop up on screen as we watch.

Here’s an interesting interview with Jayanti.

Vladimir Ashkenazy: The Vital Juices are Russian

Steve Bowbrick — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 15:07:19 +0000

No question about it: the best programme classified ‘music’ on iPlayer at the moment: a lovely 1968 documentary about pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy. The young Ashkenazy’s evidently not your stereotypical classical soloist: not wild-eyed, tempestuous or mercurial and not an egomaniac, despite his international fame. He’s modest, curious, humane, passionate. The kind of person you’d like to meet and get to know. There are many spine-tingling moments in the programme: not least a rehearsal for Stravinsky’s arrangement for four hands of his Rite of Spring with Daniel Barenboim at the (brand new) Queen Elizabeth Hall. Inspiring.

Never mind the global systemic catastrophe

Steve Bowbrick — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 23:10:51 +0000

Look, I probably ought to put up something about Credit Default Swaps or LIBOR or something but, honestly, I just can’t. So—by way of light relief—here’s this week’s Never Mind the Buzzcocks. Laugh? You’ll probably find yourself unwinding your long-term leverage or increasing your tier 1 capital. Sarcastic grammar school charmer Simon Amstell is outstanding: a major primetime find for BBC2. He’ll be presenting Newsnight before the year is out. Guest captain Stephen Fry is clueless and magnificent. Jupitus weary and witty. I laughed like a drain—like an accelerating market collapse in fact. The funniest thing on the telly this week by about 85 basis points or $700B, whichever is the greater…

Factory: Manchester from Joy Division to Happy Mondays

Steve Bowbrick — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 23:43:53 +0000

It’s easy to tell how old the people running British TV are these days: they’re all my age. I know this because they keep commissioning programmes about the music and culture of their formative years, which are my formative years. Here’s a great big (seriously: it’s an hour-and-a-half long) piece of Manchester mythography: a documentary feature about Manchester’s maddening but unassailably brilliant Factory Records, a record label that dreamed of being a cultural force, a remaker of its home city, something we’d never forget. I was trying to think of other super-influential record labels and innevitably settled on Motown but then I remembered that Motown actually left Detroit. Factory would never have left Manchester (the show first went out last year).

Maestro: Baton Camp

Steve Bowbrick — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 00:12:39 +0000

Peter Bazalgette, who runs one of the biggest producers of reality TV in Britain, said not long ago that whinging about reality TV is pointless: “it’s just one of the ways we do things now”. Here’s a good example: a really excellent slice of Reithian factual telly delivered as a gameshow using a reality format. It’s a competition: celebrities compete to conduct one of the BBC’s orchestras at a real concert later this Summer.

What’s really lovely about the show is the way the celebrities’ reactions to the process help us to understand what’s actually going on when the conductor waves that little stick. They’re all evidently in awe of the power and responsibility orchestral conductors own and also of the competence and passion of the musicians they guide. If you’ve ever sat behind a conductor—even a famous one with his name above the title—sort of vaguely wondering what he actually does, this series is really going to help.

Listening to the BBC Concert Orchestra bumping and grinding along hilariously under the baton of cheerful-but-hopeless Peter Snow is all you’ll need to convince you of the centrality of the conductor to the orchestral experience. Very good value. I’m going to watch the whole series. There’s a lot of extra stuff at the Maestro web site and here’s a story about it from the BBC press office.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

Steve Bowbrick — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:10:38 +0000

Here he is, like a priapic Max Wall. Fascinating and dark and sexy in a sort of seedy Edwardian way. You wouldn’t want him in the house, though, would you? He might pee on the carpet or drink all the sherry and expose himself. Or maybe he’s as straight as a tax inspector. I don’t know. In this concert he plays a few tracks from his genuinely awesome new album Dig Lazarus Dig and some old stuff for the ladies (there are some in the front row who should probably nip out for a cold shower). And the Bad Seeds are a force of nature, really.

Eurovision Song Contest 2008

Steve Bowbrick — Mon, 26 May 2008 01:37:13 +0000

I didn’t want to put this one up. I was pretty sure one of the others would. And it’s quite difficult to express why it’s so interesting. I mean, it’s bloody Eurovision, right? A shocking, irrelevant Euro-pudding from the wrong end of the Seventies. How could it possibly be interesting?

And then when you try to list the factors that really do make it interesting it all gets very confusing. There’s the music, which is basically transatlantic pop filtered through… well, you know… all the stuff that’s been happening in the former Soviet bloc and in the Balkans for the last twenty years.

Then there’s the geopolitics, which is like, fucked up. Fringe moves to centre, centre to fringe. The economic and pop powers of the North are obviously finished. Or at least irrelevant. We can still produce the Ting Tings and tax credits and the Wombats. We may have Glastonbury and the world’s fourth largest economy but that’s all so much hermetic bourgeois bullshit when compared with the top-drawer weirdness coming from Georgia and Azerbaijan and Bosnia.

Anyway, this year’s is—if you ask me—the best yet. Really marvelous other-worldly entertainment. Ecstatic musical lunacy.

Made in England by Seth Lakeman

Steve Bowbrick — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:12:40 +0000

Entirely satisfactory clash-of-cultures music doc from Devon folkie Seth Lakeman and Brummie hip-hop crew Moorish Delta 7 (MD7). Creativity and curiosity on both sides make for a thoroughly convincing ‘mash-up’ (I think that’s what the young people call this sort of thing). Heartwarming.
(Sorry, only two days to go on this one. Thought it was worth posting anyway).