Arnaud Despelchin’s My Golden Days is a strange beast; it is both a sequel and prequel to the gloriously titled 1996 film My Sex Life…or How I Got into an Argument. Yet it tells its own story in the life of Paul Dédalus (Mathieu Amalric).
Lisa Halliday’s striking debut novel consists of three parts. The first follows the blooming relationship between Alice and Ezra (respectively an Assistant Editor and a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer) in New York; the middle section comprises a series of reflections narrated by Amar, an American-Iraqi while he is held in detention at Heathrow en route to see his brother in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Tonya Harding and the kneecapping of Nancy Kerrigan – what a story it was, back in 1994. Even if you knew nothing about figure skating, you followed the tale of Tonya, the red-neck, white-trash Olympic hopeful from Oregon, her more elegant rival Nancy and the clumsy plot, hatched by Tonya’s estranged husband and other bozos, and perhaps Tonya herself, to ruin Kerrigan’s chances in the Winter Olympics.
This was an evening of silence and shadow, a chill, moonlit meditation, where each sound demanded forensic attention. Enter the world of Luigi Nono and his admirers.
When first announced, Derry Girls seemed a strange prospect. Derry during The Troubles wasn’t an obvious choice for a sitcom; neither was writer Lisa McGee, whose only previous comedy outing London Irish was slammed for negative stereotyping.
The critic Simon Reynolds characterised Butterfly Child’s debut album Onomatopoeia as the sound of “vitrified everglades in J.G. Ballard’s The Illuminated Man, where some kind of entropy has slowed down time, so that living creatures are literally petrified, encrusted and crystal.”
Liam Gallagher is a great rock star. However, he often comes across as not a likeable person. He’s called himself “a cunt” on more than one occasion. But he bleeds inarticulate insouciance and arrogant rage. He doesn’t raise even half a smile throughout this whole gig. He carries himself with a chin-jutting, I-dare-you posture that adds up to charisma. And he can sneer-sing the hell out of a song. All that stuff used to be what we wanted from our singers before the post-Travis era of fleece-wearing, kindly, average-guy-next-door rockers.
He comes on, parka zipped to the top, just like his audience. All Gallagher’s male fans button up to the top, zipped up, and they strut, as does he. The crowd is 70-80% male but, despite the streets of Brighton being overrun with a mass of braggadocio, the gig is less tensely masculine than anticipated. Instead it’s a celebration. He opens with Oasis, “Rock’n’Roll Star” followed by “Morning Glory”, the latter’s great opening line still sinewy – “All my dreams are made/Chained to the mirror and the razor blade”. It works a treat. Half his set is Oasis, but intermingled with new material in a way that’s persuasive. There’s a boozy party spirit here tonight. A sense that it’s Christmas and let’s not over-analyse.
Gallagher’s comeback this year, his ostensibly semi-accidental solo career in the wake of his post-Oasis band Beady Eye’s demise, has been spectacular. In As You Were he has the fastest selling album of the year, and one of its best-selling (also the biggest UK vinyl album sales in two decades!). This seasonal tour of Britain is, then, a triumphant round, a return to the limelight to match the ongoing success of his brother’s High Flying Birds. His album contains a few juicy cuts and some of them match past glories this evening. “Paper Crown” channels Noel Gallagher’s way with strummed emotiveness, the single “For What It’s Worth” has the crowd bellowing along, for “Universal Gleam” he brings on a female cellist to good effect, and “You Better Run” has admirable punk energy.
With his five-piece band and three-piece brass section, Gallagher essays his back catalogue with aplomb. Between songs the crowd chant “Liam! Liam!” as if he were a football team. His relentlessly belligerent, heavy-lidded face stares from two black and white screens either side of the stage. For the latter half of the set he's trackie-hooded like a casual Emperor Palpatine. And he’s not one for chat, the only notable asides being remarks about how Brighton & Hove Albion “didn’t do [Manchester] City”, asking “are there any hippies in the house?”, and telling us the crowd affection is appreciated. With much of it, it’s possible to see an introverted man covering his social awkwardness with bluster.
Brit-pop was the smug invention of London media sorts who basically didn’t like or appreciate rave culture swamping the country. It was the idea of a retrogressive minority, the ones who missed Sixties-style pop stars, so they invented them in a pub in Camden. Oasis, however, were the exception, a real socio-musical explosion in their own right, a Happy Mondays vibe matched with acerbic John Lennon-meets-Status Quo rock, all bullishly retro. They understood 1990s chemical hedonism better than their twee poseur peers. And the best of their songs still have potency.
So it proves with “Supersonic” which is a ballistic, wonderful rock song; with “Live Forever”, the lyrics of which are trite and silly yet human, raw and touching, sung so loudly and passionately by Gallagher and the crowd (“Maybe you're the same as me/We see things they'll never see/ You and I are gonna live forever”). We let so many left-field bands get away with meaningless abstract lyrical bollocks, after all. Then, for the first encore, “Wonderwall” achieves national anthem status, 4,500 beered-up souls bellowing along.
That’s where he should have left it but, ever perverse, as we’re all shuffling out, and post-gig music is playing (Sid Vicious’s “My Way”), he reappears to do an unnecessary version of Bob Marley’s “Natural Mystic”. It’s not reggae, happily, and not too bad either, just unnecessary. But it was also of no consequence. Liam Gallagher has already given his people what they were after and it proved a tonic. This writer left smiling to a seafront full of swaying, singing people.
Overleaf: Watch the Shane Meadows-directed video for "Come Back to Me" by Liam Gallagher
Marilyn Manson, the man and the band, have maintained impressive global success for over two decades. Their albums – this is the band’s 10th - continue to shift by the bucket-load, and they can still sell out a worldwide stadium tour. Partly, their appeal is tribal. In the age of the beige hoodie and jeans, they don’t kowtow but continue to offer a studded, debauched black-splatter of Hollywoodised punk-goth kitsch. In recent years they’ve also undergone something of a musical renaissance. This continues on Heaven Upside Down.
As with 2015’s The Pale Emperor, film composer Tyler Bates is co-producer. Bates’s sense of drama and the epic, honed on Zack Snyder’s films and the Guardians of the Galaxy series, fits well with Marilyn Manson’s OTT sensibilities. This time round, though, after the bluesy theatre of their previous album, the band return to the attack of earlier works, but with the wannabe-Nine Inch Nails traits polished into something slicker and larger.
It doesn’t always work but there’s plenty to enjoy for both fans and newbies. “WE KNOW WHERE YOU FUCKING LIVE” has a doom-funk pulse that propels its hammy punk fury along, “Saturnalia” contains guitar work that truly sneers, as well as a cracking chorus, and the closing slow-stomper “Threats of Romance” sounds like something The Sweet might have written for a musical, which turns out to be no bad thing.
The band’s eponymous singer-lyricist still has a way with words, ever-ready to kick up a stink, notably with the catchy “KILL4ME” and its chorus “Would you kill, kill, kill for me?”. However satirically this is intended, it’s bound to cause raised eyebrows, appearing so soon after the Las Vegas massacre. Manson has, after all, been blamed by tabloid fools for gun atrocities before. More entertaining are the opening lines of “JE$U$ CRI$IS” where he claims he writes songs to fuck and fight to, then offers the listener out for both.
Entertaining is the word. Marilyn Manson still deliver on the promise of their look and attitude. Heaven Upside Down is not quite in the league of its surprise swamp-rockin’ predecessor, but the best of it belts out of the traps with a pop-industrial panache that’s unarguable.
Overleaf: Watch the video for Marilyn Manson "WE KNOW WHERE YOU FUCKING LIVE"
Sweet isn’t the right word; in Mike Leigh’s 1990 film, life is unfair, frustrating and confusing by turns. Though, despite the darkness, Life Is Sweet exudes positivity and remains one of Leigh’s funniest, most quotable features.
Liam Scarlett must be worked off his feet. Just at the Royal Ballet, he made a full-length work, Frankenstein, last year and is currently working on a new Swan Lake; and now last night he has premiered a new abstract work, Symphonic Dances at the Royal Opera House.