“Tschernobyl… Harrisburg... Sellafield… Fukushima” reads the display above the four figures standing impassively below like toys, suddenly turning these harbingers of the computer age into proselytisers for an anti-nuclear energy policy.
Childlike wonder is a rare emotion at a gig, so gasps of delight are doubly jolting as the first images appear to float out of the mammoth screen behind the stage and float over our heads. These are notes of musical notation that cascade from a car radio at the moment when the dial shifts in "Autobahn", the track where Kraftwerk’s concepts first properly coalesced and that gave their breakthrough album its title. The German electronica pioneers are to play 1974’s Autobahn in full as they begin an eight-night residency revisiting much of their back catalogue in order.
It is probably not unreasonable to argue that all of the original Monty Python's Flying Circus team – including lovely Michael Palin – were, and are, a complex bunch. But none were as complex as the late Graham Chapman. Gay, alcoholic and partial to smoking a pipe and playing authority figures such as army officers, there is more than enough meat there for a colourful film about his life.
Biffy Clyro's sixth album certainly wins in the value for money stakes. Opposites is a double album clocking in at 78 minutes which finds the Kilmarnock trio developing their big, expansive sound and getting to grips, both lyrically and musically, with their arena-bestriding status. It is bold, brash and exciting in places, but it also feels as if it is continuing the process of smoothing over the rough edges which made the band so interesting when they first emerged in the early noughties.
Although there was no shortage of interview clips with Glen Campbell [who has died at the age of 81] in this fine overview of his career, the tragedy was that archives were so heavily drawn on. Tragic because pop-country stylist Campbell has Alzheimer’s and is limited in what he can contribute. Less tragic, but equally noteworthy, was that British TV has taken so long to get around to seriously appraising the singer of classics like “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”, “Wichita Lineman”, “Galveston” and “Rhinestone Cowboy”.
The movie version of the hardboiled, trenchcoated private eye, who, being “being neither tarnished nor afraid,” puts honour before personal gain in California’s 1940s noir cityscapes, was never as enduring as his literary original.
It’s hard to work out why the Royal Ballet has not indulged in more Jerome Robbins, so eminently suited does it seem for their taste for emotional understatement. In the Night had a few outings in the 1970s, and has only now been revived, possibly after seeing the audience response to the Mariinsky’s immaculate performance of the same in London a year ago.
