Category Archives: Music

Sweeney Todd

Music, Theatre, , , , , ,

BY VIV WILBY

I said when it came out that Tim Burton’s film of Stephen Sondheim’s musical Sweeney Todd was his best for a long time. Maybe I got carried away in the moment. A couple of years on, I’m coming round to the view that most of what impressed me was down to Sondheim and not Burton.

I didn’t know the show at all before I saw the Burton film and I’d always been somewhat prejudiced against the whole Sweeney Todd thing. I was scarred by my experience of a dreadful schools’ musical version of the tale (I’m Sweeney Todd the bar-ber, An evil soul I har-bour, I run a little business cutting hair and other things) with which we occupied a couple of ‘music’ lessons in the third year. The few songs that I’d heard sounded difficult and discordant, full of tricky rhythms and rhymes. ‘The Worst Pies in London’ is not a song that makes a whole lot of sense shorn of context and live performance. Continue reading Sweeney Todd →

Mostly Pop March 2012

Mostly Pop, Music

by MrMoth and anise

MIA

This is a sort of ‘behind the curtain’ version of Mostly Pop this month; every time I’m called upon to write this column, I sit down a few days before with YouTube, a laptop and a sparring partner – my wife. Over the course of the next few hours we watch, with increasing horror, the videos for the latest pop releases (or not that latest, thanks to the On Air, On Sale policy which totally screws with my timetables). The following is not a transcript (because I am usually struck dumb during these sessions and can only communicate through eye gestures and screams – that doesn’t make good reading), but it is sort of how the process goes.

Continue reading Mostly Pop March 2012 →

Mostly Pop – February 2012

Mostly Pop, Music

by Mr Moth

I last wrote Mostly Pop back in September 2011. It’s 2012 now – how things have changed! We have jetpacks and robot servants, I’m writing this while tucking into a bowl of food in pill form (mmm… roast chicken and yorkshire pudding pills!), the NHS is finally going to be destroyed (at last, eh?) and the pop scene has moved on to an unrecog… oh, wait, it’s One Direction again.

One Direction – One Thing

So, the band with the biggest hair in the world, what do you have for us? A video packed with studied wackiness. Marvel!  As we follow the boys around in their open-top bus for some impromptu, heavily-rehearsed, zany goofing around. Look at them jump! Bounce bounce bounce! They’re such fun! They do that walk like the Monkees do! Wow, they must be as fun as the Monkees*! Look at how they’re dressed! Well, ok, I guess it’s an improvement on their former look. I can imagine the meeting with the stylist now: ‘You! You’re dressing like Doctor Who! You! You’re dressing like one of those blokes from that Richmond sausages advert! You! You’re also Doctor Who, but the other one! You! You’re… you… I… er, DOCTOR WHO!’.

Continue reading Mostly Pop – February 2012 →

‘People Do Not Sing When They Are Feeling Sensible.’

Music, Theatre

Scene from ROH production of Wagners's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg

Lissy Lovett:  I go to the theatre quite a bit, maybe once or twice a week on average.  I’m lucky enough to see a lot of different kinds of things, Big West End musicals, straight plays in the subsidised sector, fringe productions, but I have only ever been to the opera twice.  Once was to see some modern thing that I didn’t understand one bit at the Coliseum a few years ago, and then I went to see La Traviata at the Royal Opera House at the end of last year.

The first thing that struck me about the whole experience, is that in venues of that massive size, I’m used to see lights & speakers everywhere.  We were sitting in the Amphitheatre right at the top, and if I squinted a bit I could almost believe that it looked exactly as it would have done in 1858.  The proscenium arch was completely clear of lighting bars & speaker stacks.  Which meant, I guess, that the orchestra & singers aren’t amplified at all?  Is that the case?  Because if so that’s really amazing.  I’m not used to seeing singers who can sing that loudly!  In your average West End musical everyone will have their own radio mic. I guess thinking about it that must be a modern-ish innovation, but it’s completely standard in theatre now.  I’m finding it still quite hard to get my head around one voice being able to fill a space that large.

Continue reading ‘People Do Not Sing When They Are Feeling Sensible.’ →

MostlyChristmas: The Grinch Who Stole Christmas Number One

Music

by MrMoth

What’s your favourite Christmas Number One? Regular viewers of BBC4’s excellent comedy drama Top of the Pops 1976 will soon be treated to a Christmas Number One very dear to my heart – Johnny Mathis’s When a Child Is Born. Dear to my heart in that it was number one when I, much like Jesus, was born.

Although that is sentimentally valuable, I do think my actual favourite might be Mistletoe & Wine, because no matter what you think of Cliff, that is a fucking tune. A complete one-off, it sounds like Christmas: a carol caught in pop’s prism, both devotional and lightweight. And he almost, so very nearly, pulls off my favourite music video gimmick: doing it in one-take (the cut when he hits the gong is so bloody arbitrary, like it is there just to spite me). He couldn’t repeat the trick on Saviour’s Day, though the country duly put it to number one through a combination of dazed loyalty to Mistletoe & Wine and a general feeling that Cliff in some way should be number one at Christmas[1]. We have some funny ideas about that sort of thing in this country, and I’m unshakeably of the belief that the Christmas Number One is one of our greatest modern traditions.

Continue reading MostlyChristmas: The Grinch Who Stole Christmas Number One →

MostlyFilm’s Best of 2011 – The Book of Mormon

Best of 2011, Music, Theatre

by Spank the Monkey

Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s animated TV series, South Park, first hit our screens in 1997, about the same time as domestic internet access was beginning to take off. It was the first TV show I can remember being widely, let’s say, distributed across the web, a factor that probably contributed towards its rapid worldwide success. (It certainly didn’t hurt that in those days of 28k modems, a South Park episode looked so rough already that it could be brutally squished into 30-odd Mb of Real Video without any visible degradation.)

Parker and Stone apparently appeared out of nowhere, but the technology of the web also gave fans like me a method of tracking down their earlier work. There were a couple of crude South Park prototypes, Jesus v Frosty and The Spirit Of Christmas: a curious in-house short for Universal called Your Studio And You: and further back than those was their first proper film, the unholy marriage of Rodgers and Hammerstein with Lucio Fulci that was Cannibal! The Musical.

Cannibal! was made in 1993, which means that Trey and Matt have been getting away with this shit for nearly two decades now. And their 2011 smash hit Broadway musical, The Book Of Mormon, is the perfect synthesis of everything they’ve done over those two decades.
Continue reading MostlyFilm’s Best of 2011 – The Book of Mormon →

MOSTLYFILM’S BEST OF 2011 – Mostly Records

Best of 2011, Music

by Jim Eaton-Terry

tUnE-yArDs - a typographical error waiting to happen.

Having spent most of 2011 trying, with varying degrees of success, to listen only to music released this year, the albums I’ve loved the most have invariably been odd and angular takes on pop.  They’ve also mostly been fronted by women

Whether  I think about Tune-Yard’s dazzling, incomparable, almost indescribable WHOKILL – without doubt my album of the year, the first record I’ve ever heard to be as exciting as The Pop Group and still work as pop music – or Let England Shake, with PJ Harvey stepping further away from straightforward rock than she’s ever been and, in the process, producing her best album since 4-Track Demos, most of the year has been spent listening to music by women taking music places it’s never quite been before.

Despite that, the song I keep coming back to, find myself listening to, humming, and boring my children with more than anything else I’ve come across this year is straightforward to the point of minimalism.  It’s also sung by a man.
Continue reading MOSTLYFILM’S BEST OF 2011 – Mostly Records →

Mostly Records – November 2011

Music

by Jim Eaton-Terry

Loutallica – they know where Jim lives

This month we have new records from two of the most interesting big names in pop,  what the editor tells me is sludge-metal from Mastodon and some laughable overreaching from Florence Welch.  Because I don’t actually get paid for this, I haven’t subjected myself to more than 30 seconds of Loutallica, but I have listened to David Lynch’s album…

Continue reading Mostly Records – November 2011 →

Mostly Records – September 2011

Music

by Jim Eaton-Terry

After a summer of not listening to much, going back over the year and and realising I was wrong about some things (James Blake gets better and better) and right about others (PJ FTW!) we’re back to business this month

St Vincent – Strange Mercy


The record of the month, without a doubt, is St Vincent’s Strange Mercy. I first discovered her through this brutal, dazzling live version of Big Black’s “Kerosene” earlier this year. The album – her third – is absolutely astonishing. There are a lot of singer-songwriters around who can put a neat song together and deliver it prettily – I rather like the Laura Marling album – and there are a lot of producers who can construct intricate soundscapes. No-one I can think of puts the two things together as beautifully as St Vincent does here. Continue reading Mostly Records – September 2011 →

Mostly Pop – September 2011

Mostly Pop, Music

Mr Moth, dispirited but unbowed, does his last Mostly Pop for the time being

Woo woo! All aboard the One Direction Bus!
The One Direction tourbus, yesterday.

One Direction – What Makes You Beautiful

I’m no fan of Grease. Really not. But I can appreciate an irresistible tune when I hear one, and so can whoever put this crap together. Whoever they are, they have appropriated the riff of Summer Nights in order to try and make this sound in some way fun or exciting and they have failed dismally. The song’s lyrics are just as unwelcome, with the central message boiling down to “There’s nothing hotter to me than a girl with self-esteem issues”. Continue reading Mostly Pop – September 2011 →