Lost in translation - May 2006 The Guardian - By Stewart Lee - May 23rd, 2006

In 1873 the British scholar and traveller Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain visited Japan. He recorded his views of the nation’s music in his subsequent book, Japanese Things: Being Notes On Various Subjects Connected With Japan. “Music,” he wrote, “if that beautiful word must be allowed to fall so low as to denote the strummings and…

Pogue In A Hole - April 2006 The Sunday Times - April 9th, 2006

The musician and artist Jem Finer arrives in the car park of Kings Wood, near the village of Challock in Kent, on a wet Sunday afternoon in late May. Deep inside the forest, on the side of a hill, is a seven metre deep concrete shaft, constructed at Finer’s behest, after he won a commission…

What Is A Bad Movie? - April 2006 The Guardian - April 2nd, 2006

By a strange quirk of fate, in September 1995, I found myself waiting to meet a friend in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel, Hollywood, California, as the cast and creative team of Paul Verhoeven’s subsequently much-derided Showgirls arrived from the film’s first screening. Advance word on the softcore Las Vegas fable had reached…

Damned, funny and deadly serious; Opinion - March 2006 The Times - March 31st, 2006

Richard Thomas’s Jerry Springer The Opera, which I directed, is finally on tour. Last spring, it was closed down indefinitely by the Religious Right. Threats from the gay-hate group Christian Voice convinced Sainsbury’s to withdraw the show’s DVD from sale in its shops and prompted a cancer charity to reject proceeds from a benefit performance.…

The War Of The Worlds - March 2006 The Sunday Times - March 12th, 2006

Three decades after its initial release, the former advertising jingle writer Jeff Wayne wants to take his era-defining concept album adaptation of HG Wells’ The War Of The Worlds on the road. The live version of the thirteen-million selling 1978 classic is to be a mixture of stadium rock show and musical theatre, two simplistic…

A Primer To The Fall - March 2006 The Wire Magazine - March 1st, 2006

The Fall made their first appearance on vinyl in October 1977, on a 10” EP of recordings from their local Manchester punk venue, entitled Short Circuit: Live At The Electric Circus (Virgin VCL5003/CDVCL5003). The two spindly songs included, “Stepping Out” and “Last Orders”, gave no indication that, nearly three decades and 27 studio albums later,…