CD: John Grant – Love Is Magic

The singer-songwriter is on fine form on an immensely rewarding fourth album

There are people who do and say awful things in the name of honesty. It can be used as a cover for rigorous appeasement of our own worst impulses, or as a thin veil to disguise needless personal attacks on those around us. With singer-sonwriter John Grant, however, it’s impossible to see it as anything other than a colossal strength. 

Throughout his career (Love Is Magic is his fourth album) Grant has marked himself out as one of the foremost lyricists of his generation. His literate approach, peppered with laugh-out-loud humour and a predilection for the dark underbelly of human emotion – and its myriad contradictions. 

So, yes, love is magic – but with considerable caveats. On one hand we have the gorgeous, elegantly evocative ode “Is He Strange” with a simple, piano-led form that mirrors the beautiful fragility of the lyrical sentiment: “He was just standing there/He was on an island/In the North Atlantic Ocean/Just minding his own/He was just doing his thing/And in that moment/Everything changed.” The other hand, however, is raised as if to slap a face in “Diet Gum”, an electronically thrumming track in which Grant acts out one side of a lover’s tiff. 

Musically, this is the most coherently electronic offering that Grant has yet given us, and quite possibly the funnest and funniest. “He’s Got His Mother’s Hips” is a case in point, “I think Colonel Mustard did it in the billiard room/They say his salsa workshops/Are a harbinger of doom” may well be the best opening to pretty much anything I’ll hear all year. 

Never afraid of a good, old-fashioned swear to grab the listener’s attention and convey huge emotion in just a few words, Grant’s crowning achievement comes in the song “Smug Cunt”, which addresses the classless, grandiose ambition of arseholes. “And now you’re just a smug cunt/Who doesn’t even do his own stunts.” How’s that for economy of words? 

Only opener “Metamorphosis” sits oddly, but even then, its jarring sense of dislocation could also be taken as the perfect way to introduce a collection of songs so accurately depicting the schizophrenic nature of love – passion’s two sides. Love Is Magic is an album full of questions like this and it takes more than a cursory listen to grasp the answers. Thankfully, it’s research that is hugely rewarding.

@jahshabby 

Overleaf for the video to "His Mother's Hips"

DVD: Mary Shelley

★ DVD: MARY SHELLEY A remarkable life told with remarkable lack of originality

Quill pens and poetry voice-over: a remarkable life told with remarkable lack of originality

This should have been the perfect match. Saudi-born director Haifaa al-Mansour earned real acclaim for her 2012 debut film Wadjda, whose 12-year-old central character had to break the conventions of a restrictive society to realise her dream – owning her own bicycle. The challenges facing the eponymous heroine of al-Mansour’s new film may have been of a somewhat different order – to live as an independent woman in her early 19th century literary world, along with the right to publish her masterpiece, Frankenstein, written when she was just 18, under her own name. But the two stories share a sense of characters struggling towards self-assertion, against an environment that would much rather they stuck to their allotted positions.  

Which makes it all the more disappointing that Mary Shelley has lost the sheer freshness that made Wadjda so memorable, and that this move into the English language is so distinctly formulaic. It isn’t really a variant on that old chestnut, foreign-language filmmaker seduced by the new perspectives of Hollywood, either: al-Mansour was educated in the US and her linguistic fluency seems perfect, while this production originated from Dublin rather than Los Angeles. But the sense of moving from a world known and conveyed in the tiniest detail into one in which the finished work is almost an agglomerate that could have been crafted by practically anyone is palpable.

Which audience is it aiming for – square-and-solid BBC Sunday nights, or the wilder shores of teenage hipsterdom?

In this case, initial resemblances are closest to period drama of the sort that the BBC does so well, but Mary Shelley doesn’t even reach the higher echelons of that esteemed form. That covers roughly the opening half of the film, in which al-Mansour shows her protagonist’s early London world, from growing up in the household of her father, the radical William Godwin (and daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, deceased), her first encounters with partner-to-be Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the ménage à trois – uneasily shared with her stepsister, Claire Clairmont – in which Mary lived after eloping with the revolutionary poet.

That world shifts with the appearance of a virtually Blackadderish Lord Byron in their midst (Clairmont throws herself at him, along with the challenge: “Do you think you are the only one who can attract a poet?”). From there it’s a short hop and skip to Byron’s Geneva residence, where the disintegrating quartet spends tumultuous days, complete with Byron’s physician Polydory and the celebrated ghost-story competition that gave rise to Mary’s novel.

It’s remarkable that this is the first biopic of Mary Shelley, given the determination with which she obviously lived her life. The famous Geneva sojourn has received rather more attention, not least in Howard Brenton’s Bloody Poetry (would Brenton recognise any of thge posturings here?), and the tone there moves relentlessly into crazy society life that, in their extras on this release, practically everyone involved compares (repeatedly) to the rock-star glamour of the Swinging Sixties. (Pictured below, from left, Bel Powley, Elle Fanning, Douglas Booth, Tom Sturridge)Mary ShelleyThe best that can be said about Mary Shelley is that its youthful cast has a certain chemistry, and that Elle Fanning in the title role grows as the film goes on. Until then it’s Mary being pouty and Shelley (Douglas Booth) being swanky – which works quite well as characterisation actually, in a short-attention-span sort of way, though both are upstaged shamelessly by Tom Sturridge’s Byron – caught up in  a script that's consistently lunky and a score unrelentingly soupy (its ever-advancing piano-string combos practically constitute a threat to life).

In a production that sets its sights so low, we get that consistent bane of the most slip-shod films about writers – quill pens and poetry in relentless voice-over. You remain uncertain whether to blame al-Mansour or her producers for a piece that never seems to know which audience it’s aiming for – square-and-solid BBC Sunday nights, or the wilder shores of teenage hipsterdom. “Find your own voice,” is the advice that Godwin (a weary Stephen Dillane) gives his daughter as she sets out to write: it should be addressed, rather more urgently, to al-Mansour herself.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Mary Shelley

DVD: Al Berto

★★★★ DVD: AL BERTO A poet emerges in the sensuous aftermath of Portugal's 1975 revolution

A poet emerges in the sensuous aftermath of Portugal's 1975 revolution

There are plenty of reasons to be apprehensive about biopics of poets. The activity of writing is most often, after all, anything but cinematic, unless its moments of creativity are forced, while the “myth” of the poet all too easily becomes stereotypical.

Proms at...Cadogan Hall 4, Connolly, Middleton review - perfect partnering in the unfamiliar

★★★★★ SARAH CONNOLLY AT THE PROMS Songs about sleep keep audience wide awake

Songs about sleep keep the audience wide awake

“It has a music of its own. It produces vibrations.” Oscar Wilde was being ironic when he had Gwendolen contemplate the sound of her beloved’s drab name in The Importance of Being Earnest, but he had a point when it comes to composers and poetry. With their own “vibrations”, great poems rarely warrant musical interference; bad poetry, meanwhile, can resist even the finest scoring.

The Last Poets, Brighton Festival review - black power sets the night alight

★★★★ THE LAST POETS, BRIGHTON FESTIVAL Black power sets the night alight

After a slow start the progenitors of hip hop explode into life

The venom with which Abiodun Oyewole spits “America is a terrorist”, the key repeated line to “Rain of Terror”, has startling power. The piece is an unashamed diatribe against his nation. Beside him his partner Umar Bin Hassan rhythmically hisses the word “terrorist” again and again while, behind, percussionist Donn Babatunde provides minimal backing on a set of three congas. “Take a black woman, a pregnant black woman, cut her belly open and let the foetus fall out, stomp the baby in the ground.”  Oyewole is raging and it feels good.

IOU Rear View, Brighton Festival review - imaginative odyssey around town

Mind-massaging travelogue of theatre, poetry and site-specific visual experience

Yorkshire theatre company IOU have a tool in their armoury that most of their peers do not. It’s an open-topped bus with tiered seating, as pictured above, built in Halifax and the only one of its type, replete with headphone sets for every seat. It is at the heart of Rear View, their show which takes to the streets of Brighton and puts the participant right at the blurred connecting point between art and reality. It’s a unique experience.

Rear View starts at a barge venue in Brighton Marina. The Marina is a gaudy, ugly place of clunky, mismatched modern buildings and tacky, American-style restaurants and bars. It 100% confirms the prejudices of anyone who thinks money can’t buy taste. Today, however, this large, Dutch houseboat-style barge is a funny little oasis of artiness amidst the plastic, high money tat. Our group, is herded into a life-drawing class, which gradually, via means it would be spoilsport-ish to reveal, leads to the main event.

Aboard the bus, we strap in and put on our headphones, which play a soundtrack of ambient piano seguing into chilled, occasionally spooked electronica. The form the event takes is a 40 drive around west Brighton, stopping every now and then so that the show’s solo performer, playing a 65 year old woman looking back on her life in poetically wrought stanzas, pops up somewhere on the roadside and talks directly to our headsets. At one point she continues narrating as she's driven along behind us in a blue Fiat. Mostly, though, she finishes then disappears. The mind cannot help but wonder at the logistics of whipping her around ahead of us so efficiently.

The show is co-written by Jemima Foxtrot and Cecilia Knapp who take turns giving the performances. It is the turn of Foxtrot when theartsdesk attends. Clad in a plain burlap-style cotton dress, she has a precise northern enunciation, a touch of the child about her voice which suits the story she weaves. It’s impressionist prose-poetry that touches on a tattoo, a song, a lost love, letters and events of long ago, emanating nostalgia and wistfulness.

In itself, in a small venue, it might pall quickly, but the way it blends with everything going on around, as Foxtrot stands at a bus shelter, in a café and so on, brings it to life. At one point she delivers a monologue right next to a very active motorbike workshop with amused geezers looking on, occasionally revving their machines very loudly (possibly on purpose!), drinking tea and chatting in the lush afternoon sun. The din adds to what Foxtrot is doing, as it’s supposed to, making the viewer genuinely start thinking about the nature of the planned experience versus the random in art, bringing to mind the ideas of Tristan Tzara, John Cage and other restless creatives who've pondered the matter.

Greater than the performed show itself is the experience of moving around, backwards, the world receding before our eyes all the time, cut off from the noise around in our soundtrack bubble (background sound is only audible during the acted sequences). The busy bank holiday streets are filled with people pointing at us, seated in rows in our bulky headphones. They wave. They take camera photos. We are on view. We are part of the experience. It is a flash of narcissism, there we are and then gone, a happening, with the lovely weather only adding to it all somehow.

Everything the eye takes in, with that soundtrack playing and the constant movement, becomes akin to a dream sequence in a film. It really does. That, for me, is the best bit about IOU Rear View. It’s a trip, in the best sense, and one well worth taking.

Overleaf: Watch the trailer for IOU Rear View

Lisa Halliday: Asymmetry review - unconventional and brilliant

Compelling debut novel takes us down the rabbit hole of different people's lives

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.

CD: Young Echo - Young Echo

Bristol's deep and strange roots throw up gnarled new shoots

Young Echo is a sprawling Bristolian collective, comprised of individual musicians Jabu, Vessel, Kahn, Neek, Ishan Sound, Ossia, Manonmars, Bogues, Rider Shafique, chester giles [sic] and Jasmine, who combine and re-combine in various permutations like Bandulu, FuckPunk, O$VMV$M, Gorgon Sound and ASDA. But here, for the second time in album format, they've put everything together under the one name and allowed it to blur together into something that is, frankly, very, very Bristol indeed.

CD: Baxter Dury - Prince of Tears

Idiosyncratic songwriter's debut for Heavenly Records has a moody potency

As son of the famous Blockheads frontman, Baxter Dury has always had big (new) boots to fill. Over the last 15 years though, he’s become distinguishable in his own right for his Chiswick accent and roughened-up pastoral music. Both are just as present in Prince of Tears as they have been on his previous albums, but with friends Madeleine Hart, Jason Williamson (Sleaford Mods) and Rose Elinor Dougall (The Pipettes) providing guest vocals, it’s an album that engages with a wrenching variety of humanity's different sides, often more shade than light, rather than being just about the music.

Single “Miami” starts the album in a pleasantly plodding way, sounding not unlike a slowed-down Hercules & Love Affair. Dury makes full use of the orchestra on hand as he recorded the album, with the multiple string parts giving the song (and world inhabited by the grim narrator, Miami itself) an edge of tragedy. “Porcelain” is unsurprisingly equally as fragile, the raindrop-like piano opening giving way to Rose Elinor Dougall’s sinisterly deadpan vocals, keeping the mood tense throughout. 

That’s not to say Prince of Tears is relentlessly depressing by any stretch. “Oi” has all the fun of the "fairground" side of Blur’s Parklife, with its spiralling Wurlitzer and steady beat bouncing the song along. “Letter Bomb” also manages to blast its way through several slow psychedelic choruses and old-skool punk refrains in under two minutes. This simplicity readily lends itself to Dury’s style of music.

The strongest song on the album, by far, is the title track. Dury and Hart take turns to lament the “Prince of Tears”, a man who seems to be the result of all the heartbreak found in the other songs. The pained guitar mirrors the grief of the singers, helping to send a resounding final message: Dury’s getting gloomier.

Overleaf: watch the video for "Miami"

Subscribe to poetry