Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party occupies a fond place in British popular culture not usually reserved for either plays or pieces of cultural criticism. Which is exactly what it is, a play which critiques both the pretensions to culture and the dismissal of the examined life by the emerging middle classes in 1970’s Britain. Designer Janet…
Arts, Venue
UEA literary festival
UEA literary festival 2016 kicked off with ardent literary humourist, interpreter of the academy and longtime friend of the festival, David Lodge. Now in his 80th decade, Lodge showed no physical signs of deterioration as he graced the stage to discuss the release of a trilogy of books spanning his career in more respects than…
Arts, Venue
Anselm Kiefer: Artist Provocateur and Architect of Memory
Born in Donaueschingen, a medieval town where a confluence between two points of the Danube meets in Southwest Germany, Anselm Kiefer was born into a world best by fear, silence and rubble. History often frames an individual’s development of artistic themes, and being born in a small German town almost completely destroyed during the year…
Music
New album releases
Bastille – Wild World Despite opening with catchy guitar riffs, Bastille’s latest offering merely delivers an uninspiring indie-pop album filled with songs simply designed to be played on the dancefloor. The highly anticipated follow up to 2013 debut Bad Blood blends smooth electro beats with the lyrical talent of Dan Smith, but fails to deliver…
Featured Posts, Music
Live Review: Easy Star All Stars play Radiodread
Reggae collective East Star All Stars played Norwich’s Waterfront venue on the 2nd of July. Westley Barnes headed down to the show. Reggae often gets a dirty name amongst hipsters, who claim repetition and lack of inventiveness make for uninspired listening. What makes New York’s Easy Star All Star collective, who played Norwich’s storied Waterfront…
Music, OldVenue
Album Reviews – Sia, DIIV and Foxes
Sia – This Is Acting Exploding into the mainstream music scene in 2014 with 1000 Forms of Fear, after simultaneously performing and writing songs for years, Sia has become an unstoppable force in the industry. Penning several successful tracks for other artists including Rihanna and Beyoncé, Sia made the transition from behind the scenes to…
Uncategorized
Album Review: Bowie – Blackstar
It was classic David Bowie: releasing an indecipherably cryptic final album, only for its true meaning to be made all too obvious a mere two days later. As flippant as it might sound, death was the ultimate Bowie act; watching the clip for ‘Lazarus’ and listening to Blackstar is the final evidence that he remained…
Music, OldVenue
Top 35 Albums of 2015
2015. The year Benjamin Clementine scooped the Mercury Prize, we all became ‘Beliebers’ and, most importantly, the year in which the album format proved it won’t go the way of the Dodo as so many predicted at the start of the digital age. Adele smashed sales records, the vinyl revival goes from strength to strength…
Features, Gaming, OldVenue
Review – Sonocent Audio Notetaker
The gathering up of research information is often a daunting time-consuming task for students; one that seemingly never simplifies, nor accelerates. Undergraduates prone to leaving secondary sourcing to the final hours before an essay hand-up, postgraduates with figurative years of archive fever to process into something cohesive-note-taking and its writing up are battles which never…
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