Kid Congo & The Pink Monkey Birds – Gorilla Rose - May 2011 May 22nd, 2011

Kid Congo was a guitarist for hire for Nick Cave, The Gun Club and The Cramps, teaching rock and roll licks to punks who were too cool for school. His latest album skews a solid foundation of rockabilly rhythms and twangsome strings with strange, echoing, repetitive vocal phrases and surging high end noise, like Kraftwerk…

Amongst the Crowd - May 2011 Amongst the Crowd - By mattlocke - May 20th, 2011

Most of the discussion around social media and TV focuses on the technologies being invented, or the potential business models (or lack of them) emerging. But we don’t often talk about what it means for the writers, directors and other talent involved in making TV. This Guardian article shows a mixed picture, with Iain Morris,…

Cultural Life: Jez Butterworth, playwright - May 2011 The Independent - By Morgan Durno - May 20th, 2011

Theatre: Having been in New York, I just saw Punchdrunk’s ‘Sleep No More’, an adaptation of ‘Macbeth’, where the set is an entire building in NYC’s Chelsea district. With six floors, it’s fantastically designed so you can walk around freely putting together the pieces of the play yourself; it’s the most amazing, fully-immersive experience. In…

Comedy Vehicle - May 2011 waituntilnextyear.com - By Steve - May 18th, 2011

Most of the television I watch has some sort of soporific purpose, or at the very least is kind of there for passive enjoyment, to help me unwind, to offer mild escapism etc etc. And this is not necessarily a slight on the majority of what I watch. We’re not huge TV-watchers in my household,…

Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle - May 2011 This Is Matt Barber.co.uk - By Matt Barber - May 16th, 2011

Hmmm… writing about stand-up comedy when you’re not a stand-up comedian is tricky… Like writing about sausage production when you aren’t involved in the production of sausages – what you end up with is a piece that probably puts you off the product whatever you say. Lee is a comedian who frequently requires perseverance (a…

Various Artists – Doug Shipton presents Dedicated Swallower Of Fashion - May 2011 May 16th, 2011

Doug Shipton roots resolutely through second hand shops worldwide, scoring impossible obscurities for the Finders Keepers label, which offloads Hungarian Seventies funk, Turkish Sixties psychedelia, Australian biker movie soundtracks, Czech prog, and Iranian acid-folk onto jaded hipsters. Diggers like Shipton seem drawn, almost morbidly, to the vainglorious attempts by artists far from the perceived epicentres…