Rumer has an amazingly pure voice which doesn’t just channel Karen Carpenter but seemingly reincarnates her. Debut album Seasons Of My Soul went straight into the top 3 last week, thanks partly to the support of Smooth FM (hosting tonight’s competition winners show), Radio 2 and hip music journals like Uncut. Her classy TV performance of Leon Russell’s ‘Masquerade’ at Elton John’s Electric Proms brought her to an even wider audience. I suspect the album’s Bacharachesque ballads will stay in the top ten for some time. Tonight, the question is whether she can sing as well live as she does on record. She does, in spades, with a relaxed stage manner and a crack band. Rumer’s more soulful than The Carpenters ever were, occasionally nearer…
As part of the British Art Show in Nottingham, Christian Marclay’s masterpiece The Clock is showing at the New Art Exchange. This Hyson Green Gallery is right by the Forest Park And Ride, so it’s easy to pop in for a few minutes while going somewhere else, pick up my partner on the way back from work or, as we increasingly do, just go for an extended visit whenever we feel like it. Yesterday was our anniversary. We’ve been together for 27 years. So what better way to spend it than at a movie that celebrates both cinema and time itself? We first dropped in to take a look the day after it opened. When we sat down, we knew nothing about the film. After…
Hard to believe that Joni Mitchell is 67 today. My friend Mike and I were huge Joni Mitchell fans from the age of 16 on. Funny thing is, a kind of retrospective wisdom has evolved that girls from that period were desperate to meet boys who liked Joni Mitchell (see the recent, very fine movie The Kids Are All Right for instance). But all the Joni freaks I knew were male. My partner often professes herself to be thoroughly fed up of having too much Joni played to her by blokes (this since I met her, twenty odd years ago). Professing my love for Joni never got me anywhere with women. There’s no need for me to bang on about Joni’s brilliance as a singer…
Nearly a month away from blogging and there are load of things I’d like to write about. John Lucas’s poetry festival, of course, which was a great success, full of magical moments. The Nottingham opening of the British Art Show. The Hockley Hustle. A great gig by Lloyd Cole on Friday night. The terrific movie we went to see last night, The Kids Are All Right. But I’m on research leave from my university job and have three months to write the first draft of my next novel for adults, so I’m not going to indulge myself by blogging when I could be writing fiction. It’ll be mostly music on Sundays from now on. Yesterday turned out to be Elton John and Leon Russell day.…
Sue and I helped John Lucas (pictured above) to organise the first Beeston International Poetry Festival, which finished last night with a terrific, packed reading by Matthew Welton and Roy Fisher. John also runs Shoestring Press and the Flying Goose Poetry Reading series. I’ve set up a public ( you don’t have to join facebook) facebook group, which currently has 92 members and features photos and single poem videos from most of the readings (two from Roy!), forming a permanent archive. There are currently 18 videos on there, each taken with a hand held Flip video camera. Many thanks to all of the poets who performed and everybody who came. I’m sure you’ll agree that it was a very enjoyable, unique series of readings. I…