Category Archive: Modern Music
Fleetwood Mac
(Billboard magazine, 1977)
[Adelaide, 28 October 2015] The Varnished Culture saw Fleetwood Mac last night, at Hindmarsh Stadium aka Cooper’s Stadium*. These ancient rockers sound magnificent and look marvellous, although the ravages of time, travel, art and their relationships show, especially if you are lucky enough, as we were, to have tickets that get you stalker-close to the stage. The by-play between them, borne of decades of love, hate, and indifference, gave joy to the dedicated audience, some of whom have been party to these shenanigans for their whole lives. We had seen the group a few years ago but this was our first time with the original line-up,…
Continue Reading →Peter Allen – Not the Boy Next Door
A match made in Heaven
The final stages of this TV two-parter are a salutary reminder of that dreadful scourge of the homosexual world in the 1980s – the music of Peter Allen. Oh yes and that AIDS was, in those days, suddenly rampant and absolutely untreatable. This is a paint-by-numbers production. But that doesn’t mean it is bad – just mediocre, glitzy, watchable and non-threatening. Like Allen himself. The audience is told what to think at every stage, from the obligatory hard-scrabble childhood (cleaning Dad’s brains off a wall), to fame, fortune and an opportunistic marriage to American music royalty. Sigrid Thornton looks surprisingly like Judy Garland but is stretched by a script which…
Continue Reading →Long Live the King
"And it's the damage that we do and never know, It's the words that we don't say that scare me so..."
Elvis Costello (Declan MacManus) (b. 25 August 1954) He was at first, with the approval of management, tagged an “angry young rebel” as a result of more than a few brash words and deeds, and the coming of the New Wave in 1976. Add the reaction to him taking the sacred first name of Mr Presley, who would slide off his toilet to immortality just as his namesake was in the first flush of fame. Yet the label hardly stuck because Costello, though personally scratchy at times, is a dogged craftsman, a superb lyricist, a consummate performer and a lover of music in its many forms (witness, for example,…
Continue Reading →Elvis and the Brummies
Birmingham Symphony Hall 31 May 2013 Yes, believe it or not, TVC stalked Elvis Costello to Birmingham to see his spectacular spinning songbook concert. First, a morning stroll to sneak a peek at roadies setting up the wheel (which turns out to be somewhat incidental during the show) and then to while away some pleasant hours at the Art Gallery in the square – some very good pre-Raphaelites as well as post renaissance art, including an installation featuring a sheep alarmingly bearing human teeth; St Paul’s embarkation by Lorrain; an excellent portrait of Prince Faisal by Augustus John; a bust…
Continue Reading →The Richard Wagner Society
Wagner laughing at himself
14 April 2014 The Richard Wagner Society of SA presented Timothy Sexton, Artistic Director of State Opera SA, to present the inaugural Brian Coghlan Lecture in honour of its Past President. Sexton, who presented the Glass Trilogy in August 2014, was given the difficult brief of proving a link between Wagner and Glass, which he heroically did in an erudite and entertaining way, enlivened by musical examples. Although TVC‘s response to the lecture’s sub text “Was Richard Wagner the first experimental minimalist composer?” is a resounding “No”, we are now prepared to water down that ‘narrow-minded’ position a tad. Wagnerites…
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