CD: Mogwai – A Wrenched Virile Lore
Post-rock experimental fiends do it in the remix
The remix album is an ungainly beast. The worst feel like a sign of creative bankruptcy while even the best feel like a shameless cash-in on a successful project. Hopelessly devoted fans might still call it a win-win situation, but to outside ears it doesn't matter how hot the hotshot producers are, the lingering echo of a remix album is often the sound of a product being milked dry.
Reissue CDs Weekly: The Jam, Ray Stinnett, Sandy Denny, The Servants
Weller and co's swansong, lost American singer-songwriter, unreleased Sandy Denny on a budget and rediscovered quirky Nineties' indie
The Jam: The Gift
Thomas H Green
Reissue CDs Weekly: Bill Withers, Massive Attack, Django Reinhardt, Diablos Del Ritmo
Well-packaged soulfulness, an all-time great bedroom album, gypsy-jazz vitality and an immersive journey to Colombia
Reissue CDs Weekly: Ennio Morricone, Rites of Spring, Hotlegs, Cults Percussion Ensemble
Italian soundtrack bonanza, unearthed US hardcore and the back pages of 10cc and Evelyn Glennie
CD: Madness – Oui, Oui, Si, Si, Ja, Ja, Da, Da
Veteran pop combo return older, wiser and as witty as ever
Pop is a cruel mistress. Watching numerous BBC4 rockumentaries, such as the recent one on Squeeze, a pattern emerges. You make it, go through an imperial phase when you can do no wrong, then the honeymoon ends. The records are still great but the parade has moved on. This struck me again listening to the 10th studio album from Madness, which comes complete with a classy Peter Blake sleeve design.
Leopold Trio, BBCSO, Wigglesworth, Barbican Hall
Phantasmagorical Tippett and brilliance against the odds in a one-hour orchestral distillation of Wagner's Ring
The prospect of adventuring from one unpredictable day to the next in the course of Michael Tippett’s Triple Concerto, and from dawn to twilight in just over an hour’s orchestral music from Wagner’s Ring, seemed very much weighted in the English composer’s favour. Frankly, had Mark Wigglesworth only conducted Siegfried’s Funeral March in this concert’s second half, he would have consolidated an already glowing reputation as a top-notch Wagnerian.
This House, National Theatre
James Graham travels back to the 1970s for a political docu-drama that’s low on drama
Over the past few years, the 1970s have made a cultural comeback. On television, there’s been Life on Mars and White Heat, in the bookshops tomes by Dominic Sandbrook, in the theatre revivals of plays such as Abigail’s Party, all to the soundtrack of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
Wonderland: I Was Once a Beauty Queen, BBC Two
Beauty queens of the 1970s and 80s on life after their respective reigns
Even now, as revelation after revelation about what really went on backstage at Television Centre in the 1970s play out in the tabloids, there seems something almost wholesome about the heyday of the televised beauty pageant. Compared to the daily barrage of heavily sexualised images we are bombarded with from the moment we wake as consumers of contemporary culture - bare arses before the watershed, fake orgasms selling shampoo, Kate Middleton’s tits on the evening news - the swimsuits the contenders paraded up and down in looked positively demure.
Reissue CDs Weekly: A.R. Kane, Crime and the City Solution, ABBA, Demis Roussos
Late Eighties enigmas, Berlin-birthed darkness, an audio-visual feast of Scandi pop and the early adventures of a Greek megastar
A.R. Kane: Complete Singles Collection
Joe Muggs