The most famous face in musical history, and perhaps the instigator of modern culture as we know it; he truly was the King. But for a documentary focused on such an icon, The King touches very little on Elvis Presley the man.
Forget about dark alleys, deserted parks and slippery slopes: the most dangerous place in the world is likely to be your family. That’s where the traps are, the minefields and the surprise betrayals. As its title suggests, Torben Betts’s new comedy is all about failing marriages and imploding families.
Lily Allen has long been an unlikely inhabitant of the tabloid sphere. She was born into it and her pop career sealed the deal, rendering her a recalcitrant victim of paparazzi fishbowl idiocy, ugly magazines and online sidebars. She is, however, one of the few to undermine this process, offering gritty, poetic response in song. “The Fear”, for instance, was a huge hit that also 100 percent nailed vapid celeb aspiration. Her fourth album is, at its best, her rawest and most revealing.
Allen’s last outing, 2014’s Sheezus, saw her less focused. Lyrically sharp as ever, it was hampered by lesser music and a sense that the singer was drifting along uncharted. On the aptly titled No Shame – or at least its first two thirds - she is on piercing form, excoriating herself, going through the psychological mangler over her collapsed marriage, which she places firmly at her own door. At times it recalls Beyoncé's approach on Lemonade.
“I’m a bad mother/I’m a bad wife/You saw it on the socials/You saw it online,” runs a line in opener “Come On Then” over spaced out drum & bass. And there follow songs about loss, guilt, jealousy, selfishness, and crushing loneliness. The calypso-tinted “Lost My Mind”, for instance, juxtaposes an upbeat tropical house feel with forlorn feelings of abandonment, while “Family Man” is a gigantic, piano-led, Elton-goes-trip-hop ballad, desolate but ever clear-eyed (“I don’t like most people but I’m scared not evil”), and “Apples” mourns that she may be doomed to repeat the relationship mistakes of her parents.
These and others are the songs that make the album. Eventually things cheer up and, unfortunately, slacken off. Her co-songwriter throughout the album’s initial conception was Fryers’ Ben Garrett, who gives it a contemporary pop sheen dipped in woozy downtempo electronica. The last few numbers simply don’t have the same impact, although “Pushing Up the Daisies” has a certain cute charm. The creation of No Shame involved many, from producer Mark Ronson to Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig to various guest vocalists, but it’s Lily Allen’s sweet, vulnerable voice that owns the record, alongside her finely tuned, wounded, and ruthless way with a scalpel-sharp pop couplet.
Annual lists of the richest, the most powerful, the movers and shakers, have an awful fascination: like gossip, we like to look and comment while feeling slightly morally compromised. But they also have a function as a snapshot of where we are at. This time it’s the turn of the art world’s most influential figures, as chosen by the magazine ArtReview, which each year creates a talking point for itself replete with embargoes and PR.
The most popular exhibition of a living artist ever held at the Tate was David Hockney’s recent retrospective, which attracted 478,082 visitors.
The procedure of introductions in Louis Theroux: Savile seemed somehow more elaborate than usual. Knocking on the door of those he was about to talk to for what might have been dubbed “Savile Revisited”, Louis Theroux was unusually careful about his greeting ritual: “I’m Louis”, “Can I come in?”, “Should I take off my shoes?” That last one was perhaps the fairest question here, because he was bringing all sorts of past horrors and dirty deceits into these clean and tidy homes.
It is an inspired pairing: iconic images by the American photographer Richard Avedon (1923-2004) and the painter, printmaker and filmmaker Andy Warhol (1928-1987), almost all of whose mature work was based on the photographic image. They are together in a large exhibition at Gagosian, Britannia Street, itself one of the largest and most elegant commercial art spaces in London, designed by that cultural architectural duo Caruso St John.
Nearly 20 years ago the West End was in a lather of excitement about a show called Voyeurz. A "musical revue" set in a nightclub on Manhattan, it was all about a young girl venturing into the uncharted caverns of her own sexuality, and it was opportunistically crammed with hot sapphic action. It tanked. Its producer and co-director was Michael White, known to his legion of chums as Chalky.
Stop press: our rampant celebrity culture might not be wholly positive! If you’ve already been apprised of that fact some time in the past century, go ahead and skip actor Daniel Dingsdale’s debut play, which – along with Steve Thompson’s similarly outmoded Roaring Trade in the main house – stifles the often creatively programmed Park Theatre’s claim to relevance.
Someone more unlike Louis XIV than David Bintley is hard to imagine. The latter comes across on TV as the most pleasant, unthreatening, mild-mannered of Everymen; unthinkable that he would order the massacre of Protestants or proclaim, “l’État, c’est moi.” Yet the quiet poise with which he glides down the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles at the beginning of The King Who Invented Ballet reveals what Bintley has in common with the legendary absolute monarch: he’s a classically trained ballet dancer.