Reissue CDs Weekly: Blur, Blancmange, The Smashing Pumpkins, Strange Passion
A Blur overload, jittery Eighties synth pop, Corgan's back pages and Irish post punk
Blur: 21
Bruce Dessau
Reissue CDs Weekly: The Searchers, This Ain't Chicago, The Spinners, Bronski Beat/Communards
Overdue tribute to Liverpool innovators, Britain’s response to acid house, Motown gold and Jimmy Somerville’s early days
Extract: The Stone Roses - War and Peace
Simon Spence's new biography recalls the Manchester band's legendary 1990 concert at Spike Island
There is film footage of those opening magical, transformative moments: of Brown intoning, “The time, the time is now. Do it now, do it now.” Film, however, could not capture the effect the band’s arrival had on the mood of the crowd; it was a jaw-dropping biblical reaction, of relief, amazement, worship and unadulterated joy. “It was like a massive pilgrimage to witness,” said Roddy McKenna, the man who had been instrumental in signing the band to Jive/Zomba.
The Pitchfork Disney, Arcola Theatre
This overdue revival of Philip Ridley’s 1991 classic is both thrilling and disturbing
Critics can also be historians. In my opinion, the great new wave of 1990s British theatre starts not with Sarah Kane’s Blasted in 1995, nor with Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking a year later, but with polymath Philip Ridley’s amazing debut, The Pitchfork Disney, in 1991. Now, with this long overdue revival which opened last night, we get another chance to sample a powerful and imaginative drama in all its glittering and eerie strangeness.
CD of the Year: Rustie - Glass Swords
Virtuoso psychedelic hyperstimulation from the young Glaswegian
If 2011 was the year when dance music's natural tendency to fragmentation was taken to extremes, this album was the one that bound those fragments together into one demented but scintillating vision. Russell Whyte – Rustie – comes from a very particularly Scottish club scene that is the perfect antidote to the idea that musical connoisseurship means nerdiness.