White Chalk by Halls

There’s going to be a fair few column inches devoted to 21-year old South Londoner Sam Howard, aka Halls, over the coming weeks prior to the release of his debut album Ark (released October 15 on No Pain in Pop). In a nutshell, Howard makes cavernous, minimal, song-driven electronica, with deeply brooding, religious undertones (a signifier of his sonic ambitions rather than any firmly-held spiritual beliefs, by all accounts). It’s all rather stunning. Download album-taster White Chalk below.

Who is Boris Johnson?

Who is Boris Johnson? It is a question that is puzzling journalists and voters alike.
 
“Boris has twice won elections in Labour-leaning London, proving his Tory credentials” claimed one confused hack recently.
 
“Revered by the Tory party base who believe him to be a proper Conservative… he appeals to a raft of voters who would never usually contemplate voting Conservative” claimed another.
 
So which is it? Is he a ‘proper Conservative’ with true blue values or a committed centrist with broad appeal?
 
The beauty of the conundrum is that both sides of the argument can find examples to bolster their case.
 
Look for evidence of Boris’s Tory credentials and you can find many examples of him criticising immigration, backing bankers, and calling for lower government spending.
 
But look again and you can find just as many examples of him backing immigration, attacking bankers and calling for even bigger government spending.
 
The public are similarly confused.
 
Asked in a recent poll whether Boris would make a better Tory leader than David Cameron, just 30% thought he would as opposed to 33% who thought he wouldn’t. 

Similarly just 36% thought he would make a suitable Prime Minister as opposed to 46% who thought he wouldn’t.
 
The gap amongst Tory voters was even greater with 90% thinking Cameron was a suitable PM as opposed to just 61% who thought Boris could do the job.
 
So that’s pretty clear. The voters don’t want Boris to replace Dave and Tories don’t back him over Cameron.
 
And yet when asked how they would vote if the party leaders were Boris, Miliband and Clegg, as opposed to Cameron, Miliband and Clegg, six per cent more switched to the Tories.
 
So does Boris have a broader appeal than Cameron or a narrower one? Would he win over more voters than Cameron or fewer? You pick your poll and you take your choice.
 
Of course these are not questions that are likely to bother Boris too much.
 
In recent months it has become increasingly clear that he wants to take over from Cameron, with every speech, column, and policy position designed to help him in that task.
 
The commentariat are similarly convinced with acres of print being expended on the subject.
 
Boris’s leadership campaign has become a huge Westminster village story, despite there being no contest, or even a threat of a contest any time soon.
 
And Boris is being increasingly touted as a future Prime Minister of Great Britain despite the fact that most of the country has only ever seen him waving a flag and hanging helplessly from a zip wire.
 
So who is the real Boris and what would he do if he got the job? Well even as somebody who has followed his every utterance and policy decision in the past four years, I am still unclear as to what if any political agenda he has, beyond keeping himself in power.
 
Strip away the gags, and the high-wire act and there really is very little of substance left underneath.
 
He is a blank canvas onto which people project their own political convictions. A supposedly libertarian Tory whose first act in power was an alcohol ban and an apparently low-spending Conservative who wants to spend up to £70 billion on a new island airport.
 
The truth is that Boris has all the steely ideological resolve of an Edward Heath or a Mitt Romney. He is a committed flip flopper. A devout ditherer.
 
He can write a column attacking political correctness in the morning and then play host to the ‘International Union of Sex Workers’ in the afternoon.
 
He is as Will Self described him ‘an enigma wrapped inside a whoopee cushion.’ Or to put it another way, he is whatever people want him to be. 

London agenda for Thursday 16 August 2012

1. Take a new view of the bloody origins of cinema at the Old Peanut Factory with Little Triggers [Le Cool]

2. Experience all the classic New York clichés in this part art installation, part bar, part adventure playground for adults, For One Night Only [Run Riot]

3. Hear The Sugarlow Boys at the Dalston Superstore [Don’t Panic]

4. Listen to The Quantum Exodus: Jewish Fugitives, the Atomic Bomb, and the Holocaust [Ian Visits]

5. See Ben’s boat [Tired of London]

6. See a free show at Birthdays, Electricity in Our Homes [London In Stereo]

Fringe Reviews

Self Criticism
“The world has a lot of existentialism, but not much existence.”

A plain woman is trapped in a room a beautiful, vibrant, sexual, reckless woman, and they are two halves of the same woman. Both are waiting for a man. One wants to be The One, the true love of this man, this man who already has a girlfriend, who occasionally swans in to pout seductively or strum a guitar. The other wants to be The Other, the mistress who never has to bear the burden of a relationship. While these roles never change much in Self Criticism there is a power shift as the meek victim slowly realises a way to defeat her imperious sexuality and escape her prison of dependence. It’s not the smart one. Just getting over the guy would be better, but there you go. Men are not entirely the problem.

The performances manage to tread a fine line between stylised and arch. Even when the show descends to Gothic horror it still somehow holds itself together simply through the quality of the actors spilling their terrifying psyches onto the stage. (After the show the cast looked utterly drained.) The ideas being explored are fascinating (if not always coherent) and with the intensity of the characters, the graceful direction, this is one of the more interesting dramas at the Fringe.

Self Criticism will be playing in Edinburgh 21-27 August at The Vault (Annexe)

Four By Four
Four short plays that KUDOS theatre can presumably arrange as they please to present two of an evening. On offer the night I saw it: Marcel Duchamp buys a a urinal and some hicks evade a tornado by hunkering in a cellar with a kidnapped English stormchaser.

In the first play the dadaists, centred around Duchamp, are organising the 1917 Society of Independent Artists exhibition and facing controversy over the now famous urinal signed ‘R. Mutt’. Besides battling their accents and a script smothered in exposition and art jargon, the actors individually come across as believable- and occasionally quite droll- but somehow never gel as a group. There is the same problem in the second play about escaping a storm. While the acting is uneven in quality I think my real problem lies with the director. Sorry, director. You’ve thrown so much potential humour away presenting Duchamp as an unsociable stiff. The man was hilarious! He exhibited a toilet signed by “R Mutt” and a moustachioed Mona Lisa under a title which punned in French as “She Has a Hot Ass.” C’mon!

Several excellent performances but overall some bad choices made in the shaping of the two shows I saw. Still, that means there’s a 50/50 chance another night is better, and the thing about art is that it’s all in the eye of the beholder.

Keep Your Pecker Up!
Ellie Powell is a singer infatuated with the songs of the 40s and 50s. In Keep Your Pecker Up she assumes the identity of her nan who worked at the coat check of the Fox Club in Mayfair. There’s no real plot, just a series of memories and songs, all bundled together with Powell’s bubbly enthusiasm and encylcopedic knowledge of wartime catchphrases and mannerisms. I’m not sure if Powell is an actor who sings or a singer giving acting a go because she really wants to tell these stories. Her version of a woman from that era seems drawn directly from film clips. On the other hand, people must have been like that, or they wouldn’t have come across that way on film. People from a not-so-distant-yet-now-alien time.

Powell is boisterous fun and never stops moving. She has a beautiful voice, a perky demeanour and carries an extremely thin production well. Whether this show would appeal to a younger crowd is academic. Powell would be perfectly happy to perform Keep Your Pecker for every nan who wants to sing along, doling out biscuits and winks for the grandads.

Love and Death and That
Three northern lasses read poetry short stories, sing songs and generally ruminate on how much they love the north, but not so much as not actually having to live there anymore. This was Not The Bronte’s first public performance and they asked the audience to be nice. But they needn’t have. Many of the poems were lovely, and delivered in such an easy, conversational style that it felt more like you were just having a chat. In an oven. The Camden Head needs to strategically place buckets of ice around that sauna.

Apparently Yorkshirites (Yorkshorians? Yorkshorepersons?) still carry a huge bloody chip on their hunched, coal-dusted shoulders over the War of the Roses. And the Catholic Church still sustains and crushes every soul eking a mouthful from the grim moors. Which is probably why folks up there manage to be so miserable and yet so incredibly funny. My favourite part of the show was a short story, written and read by Polly Penter, called A Good Funeral. A horrible, vindictive battleaxe of an aunt has died and passed all her belongings on to the church. Said church is very delighted and tints Father Pete’s elegy the rosiest of pink, much to the bemusement of the family who actually knew her. This was one of the funniest short stories I’ve ever heard, and if Not The Brontes have any sense they’ll rework it and pitch it as a drama to the BBC.

Alt-J - Breezeblocks (Born Blonde remix)

Here West Londoners Born Blonde twist Alt-J’s murderous Breezeblocks into something of a primal, desert-psych stomp. Catch the former at Ginglik, Shepherd’s Bush, August 24.

London agenda for 15 August 2012

1. Listen to WALL launch her new album at the Sebright Arms [Le Cool]

2. Envision the worlds of 2061 at the Marylebone Pleasure Gardens [Run Riot]

3. Heat Strip Steve at the Nest [Don’t Panic]

4. Tour the Sambrook Brewery in Battersea [Ian Visits]

5. Learn about Kingsley Hall [Tired of London]

6. Com Truise // Jape // Labyrinth Ear at the Corsica Studios [London In Stereo]

Fringe Batch #... Where are we at?

Divinely Bette
The Divine Miss M struts, shimmies, belts out torches and ruminates on the subject of big tits. The ideal recipe for a Fringe show! Creator Kim Sheard certainly loves her subject (though apparently had to come round to it) and not only bears a striking resemblance but has the bubbly balance of ego and self deprecation down pat. Sheard is a superb comedienne and nails Midler’s comedy routines and cheap gags of lovely filth. Yet somehow the energy and pathos of Midler is allowed only a few moments to truly shine. It isn’t until halfway through, with the joyous murder romp of Madam is Unable to Dine Today that divinity graces the stage. It isn’t until the end, with Wind Beneath My Wings, that her emotional rawness seeps through.

With a slightly bigger budget for a couple costume changes and and a few more breakout routines like Madam or Otto Titzling (based on the spoof history by Wallace Reyburn), or perhaps more on the life of Bette Midler and this show might do justice to its iconic hero. As is it falls just short of heavenly.

My Life on Television
On a recent Dispatches, a journalist went undercover with a hidden camera to expose an online ticket tout agency posing as a Fan2Fan site. Tickets bought in bulk clandestinely were being jacked up many times in value, but leaving dozens of seats empty on the night. Meanwhile, the staff of the touting agency were paid so little they could barely afford sandwiches for lunch. Yet in the bouncy musical My Life On Television our villain is the nasty, conniving, underhanded, greedy journalist. The British love of the scrappy little guy on the make, the wide boy, the Del Trotters of the world means our heroes here are the folks doing the ripping off. And the hapless love-schmuck of an intern who blabbered everything through a blurred face.

Maybe it’s because I’m not a Londoner, (or maybe because I’m part of the media empire) but this seems an odd moral. Perhaps I misunderstood, but Dispatches seemed to reveal that a ticket for three nights of shows at the Albert Hall was being sold for £1590. This is okay, I guess (?) because the show organisers got a sold-out house and if people want to pay a fortune it’s their right. But is the reporter so awful for getting paid to do her job exposing a lie? Should the public not be allowed to know this is happening? On the other hand, the songs are excellent, the singing mostly brilliant and the lyrics generally very funny. There is a hint of amateurishness to My Life on Television, the sense of a bunch of talented friends throwing together a show, but it all works so very well. It’s only a shame the show is so short (And started late). Hopefully it will be expanded upon and mounted somewhere else. The ethics may seem screwy to me but the quality of the show is straightforward.

10 Days Earlier
Zombies are inevitable. We’re halfway there already. Just the other day I saw somebody on the tube absentmindedly gnawing another passenger’s head before sheepishly admitting they hadn’t been sleeping lately and aren’t brains an ignored source of protein? I might have imagined the whole thing. I woke from dozing at the end of the line with several hairs in my teeth, so maybe it was all a dream. But, zombies are definitely coming.

In 10 Days Earlier, Harold Grimhold has used his scientific mind to deduce not only that the apocalypse is coming but the exact date: Ten days from whenever you happen to see the show. And because his mind is so huge and scientifically tasty, he fears he will be breakfast on the last day. So he has made a video document explaining how to survive for future survivors to watch. 10 Days has many great gags, but it is really about the unraveling of Harold, who was never too stable in the first place. The problem is that while his frantic demeanour is central to the premise it is also irritating, distracting, kills jokes faster than an outbreak of Rage at a Boxing Day sale, weakens the narrative and thins the darkness at the show’s heart. Speaking afterwards with writer/director Lizzie Milton from Sheffield Comedy Revue there is a radioplay sequel planned with an even stronger idea behind it. But this show needs to be reworked first.

Chris O’Neil: Lifetime Achievement
Chris O’Neil, who resembles a queer Donald Pleasance in stylish glasses, gives a work-in-progress rough draft of life since a break-up from his true love a year ago. It’s an occasionally plodding build-up to comical reflections on suicide, with plenty of name-dropping (O’Neil is best known for his appearances on Radio 4’s Just a Minute). Then suddenly the show notches up several gears into a hilarious expose of Battersea Dogs Home, and his sexual rediscovery as a ‘bear’. And like so many comics O’Neil is funnier improvising with the audience. Obviously new material needs to be tried out. Routines need to be built up and the only way this can be done is in front of a like audience. However, it’s hard to see, from what’s presented in Lifetime Achievement, how he will eventually marry his wit to his misery to create a show which is marbled light and dark and not split into two halves.

(I Know It Smells Like the Inside of Dead People But) Will You Hold My Hand?
Tim Goose, basically a giant nine year-old with a beard, pumped full of chocolate cake and let loose to run about squealing joyously, and his comedy partner/exhausted babysitter Richard Blackbeard attempt to expose the dubious side of an 18th century hero of medical science, Dr. John Hunter. Hunter is one of the fathers of modern surgery, but also the inspiration for the Robert Louis Stevenson’s Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I say attempt because Goose can only concentrate for several seconds at a time before his brain wanders off to chase butterflies and pick their legs off in the inflatable vivisection chamber of his mind. Following one particular song about fisting himself he interrupted Blackbeard to express his satisfaction in seeing his dainty French mother sat in the audience singing along. That’s a cool family!

Full of gorgeous tunes- We Are Goose specialise in Folk Metal- and gleefully dispensed ‘facts’. Will You Hold My Hand is exuberant, loud, stupidly brilliant, and surprisingly tuneful. They’re off next to Edinburgh, so if you’re up that way you’d be well advised to catch their show.

Snipe Likes: Euros Childs

Summery pop perfection, from Euros Childs of Gorky’s fame. If this fails to charm you, you’re officially dead inside. Childs’ new solo LP, Summer Special, his fourth in three years, is released August 27 on his own National Elf imprint.