On Saturday 28th October, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club ride through Birmingham – coming to the O2 Academy as part of their nine date UK tour (plus one in Dublin).
Doors open at 7pm, with tickets priced at £28.65 (including booking fee) – as presented by SJM Concerts/Gigs and Tours. For direct gig info, including venue details and online tickets sales, click here.
Responsible for one of the best debut albums ever… yep, I went there… Black Rebel Motorcycle Club have been tearing up the asphalt on both sides of the pond (and beyond) since 1998. Some call them ‘shoegaze’, some all them ‘grunge’, some call them ‘garage rock’, but Black Rebel Motorcycle Club have a distinctive twisted metal sound that they can comfortable call their own. ‘Fucking awesome’ is where I personally land, but with well over 200,000 words in the English language I’m sure you can come up with a more erudite description. Or you could just listen.
Globetrotting with a new album in the wings, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club are coming to Birmingham to push their impending new album – Wrong Creatures, which will, apparently, possibly, be with us just after Christmas.
But having waited half a decade since their last LP, the 12 track monster that is Specter at the Feast, a few months here or there won’t bite down too hard. At least I’ll have something to spend those iTunes vouchers on, that will no doubt appear in some relative’s Hallmark hug this December (…other online music downloads are available).
Having recorded and released on their own imprint since 2008 (starting with the download only The Effects of 333) Black Rebel Motorcycle Club have been able to reinvent and reiterate all the cogs in their machine, drifting from the Native American rhythms of ‘Beat the Devil’s Tattoo’, passing through the dark rock heart of ‘War Machine’ and ‘Teenage Disease’, to stand still at the morbid curiosity of ‘Fire Walker’. Awesome. Relentless. Lots of other words; 24rs spent ploughing through this band’s back catalogue would not be a day wasted. Even if you’re wasted.
Now there’s another album in the offing too, and whilst we don’t know much about Wrong Creatures here’s a little taste of what’s to come… and yeah, that’ll do. The rest we’ll get to see/hear coming off stage at the O2 Academy on Say 28th October.
‘Little Thing Gone Wild’ – Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
Doors open at 3pm each day, with music running constantly until the ‘licensing committee says no’. Weekend tickets are prices at £28, with individual day passes priced at £28 – both subject to the standard booking fee.
N.B. At the time of writing, all weekend tickets have sold out but you can still get you mitts on individual day tickets – although these too will be popping like the proverbial hot chestnuts, so you might want to move fast.
This Is Tmrw are, now, a well known and decade strong promotions company – bringing a strata of cutting edge cool to the city’s music venues, from the Hare & Hounds to the O2 Institute. They’re grafters too, starting out in Solihull and booking bands that weren’t the easiest sell but probably more worth the ticket money than your mainstream line ups.
All Years Leaving, which held its debut festival weekender in 2013, is This Is Tmrw‘s annual showcase – celebrating the local line ups they have helped promote, whilst bringing back some of the great, good and garrulous from the more respectable fringes of today’s live circuit. There’s a fair few from across the pond this year too, which is somewhat of an endorsement in terms of bolstering Birmingham on the UK tour circuit – something our glorious Land of Osbourne really needs to sort out for itself. But that’s another feature…
I could run through a list of names that represent the This Is Tmrw roster, but a better indication of their approach is quite simply the line up on the All Years Leaving 2017 poster – but to save you some time here’s our Graham with a quick reminder… and some hyperlinks, if your typing fingers are tired:
So, yeah… Seriously, somebody give This Is Tmrw a greenfield site and some healthy commercial sponsorship. Marketing Birmingham should probably throw them a bone too.
But enough sycophantic back slapping, the event may have sold out completely by the time you’ve finished reading this article. So I’ll shut up, you get your credit card, and we’ll meet back up again at the Hare & Hounds this weekend.
This Is Tmrw present All Years Leaving 2017 at the Hare & Hounds, running from 3pm on both Saturday 21st and Sunday 22nd October at the Hare & Hounds (Kings Heath). For direct event info, including venue detail and online ticket sales, click here for Saturday and click here for Sunday.
Despite starting stand up aged thirteen, Simon Amstell is perhaps best known for his presenting roles – interviewing musicians and pop stars on Nickleoden, Popworld and Never Mind the Buzzcocks, where his challenging curiosity and acerbic wit would lead to both a growing fanbase and twitching in the control room.
Indeed, eight years after Amstell left his presenting role on Never Mind the Buzzcocks, his tenure on the BBC 2 quiz show still makes for solid You Tube fodder – from questioning why Jermaine Jackson “looks nothing like Michael” to exasperating Preston from the Ordinary Boys to such an extent that he walked off set and got replaced by a member of the audience.
Buzzcocks had been a natural next step for a presenter who first came to public consciousness on the Channel 4 show Popworld, a show Simon Amstell co-presented with Miquita Oliver. Likewise, watching Popworld clips on YouTube today you can’t believe the ridiculous things Amstell and the equally wonderful Oliver would ask bland pop stars to try and get them to say something entertaining. To Britney Spears, thrown in the middle of a fairly innocuous interview, Amstell asked “Whose chin would you like?” to which Spears replied, without hesitation, “Halle Berry’s. I think she’s beautiful.”
Simon Amstell doesn’t interview pop stars any more. In fact, the last time he was on our TV screens for any length of time was in his beguiling BBC sitcom Grandma’s House back in 2012, which he co-wrote with Dan Swimmer. Since then, Amstell has been concentrating on more personally focused projects – including a mockumentary about veganism called Carnage, and a ‘hilarious and heartbreaking’ book about Amstell’s ‘ongoing compulsion to reveal his entire self on stage’ titled Help.
Simon Amstell has also performed on stage repeatedly as a comedian, with What is This? being his fifth UK comedy tour. And whilst his output across art forms is dependably solid, stand-up arguably distills the Amstell experience into its purest form.
What is This? reportedly explores Amstell’s romantic stability, his new found contentment, his relationship with his father, and possibly ayahuasca – in a show that ‘promises to be a deeply personal, funny exploration of beauty, intimacy, freedom, sex and love.’
It’s comedy as therapy – confessional, neurotic, with no subject too personal to be off limits. And crucially, it’s all bitingly funny. Unless you’re Preston from the Ordinary Boys.
Simon Amstell performs What is This? at the Town Hall in Birmingham on Sunday 15th October. For direct info, including venue details and online ticket sales, visit www.thsh.co.uk/event/simon-amstell-what-is-this
Daphne was screened in Birmingham as part of the Flatpack: Assemble project, bringing industry showcases to the city. Daphne will be further screened to the general public at mac from Friday 13th to Thursday 19th October – for direct information, including showtimes, venue details and online ticket sales, click here.
The amorphous structure of Peter Mackie Burns’ feature-length directorial debut perhaps owes something to its origins in a 2013 11-minute short, Happy Birthday to Me. But there’s something oddly compelling about Daphne’s resistance to following cinematic convention, as though, much like its title character, it refuses to be pinned down and made to stick to a single, clearly defined course.
Cinematography by Adam Scarth feels as restless and detached as its subject, both moving passively from one scene to the next, apparently without much sense of where they’re going. And though some inevitably will, viewers aren’t asked to sit in judgement on the character or her story but merely to observe it.
Self-obsessed, single and spiraling steadily out of control, the misanthropic Daphne is almost as unlikely a ‘hero’ as you could imagine. Though she makes a show of independence, her spikiness is little more than a mask for her unwillingness or inability to take control of the life through which she drifts, instinctively ducking out of any encounter where she detects a whiff of change or serious commitment. Because she hasn’t thought of anything better to do yet, Daphne continues to meet up with old school friends she doesn’t really like, stumbles around in a drunken, drug-fueled haze, lives off takeaways she’s forgotten that she ordered and occasionally hooks up with strange men in whom she has no interest.
But when she witnesses a stabbing in a corner shop and stays to save the victim’s life, well… not much changes, actually. After the event, she takes up the offer of counselling, but not because she’s feeling particularly traumatised by what she’s witnessed. In fact, it’s the complete lack of an impact the incident has on her that makes her acknowledge that perhaps there’s something up. As she says to the therapist in a moment of uncharacteristic honesty, “I haven’t felt alive in a long time.”
In conversations around the film, there’s been a lot of emphasis on Daphne’s gender, whether in the form of comparisons with BBC Three’s Fleabag or in accusations of misogyny levelled at critics passing comment on her ‘likeability’. But while Daphne might be part of a new wave of women in film depicted with more unflinching honesty than we’re accustomed to, she’s certainly not the sort of character who’d see herself as any sort of feminist trailblazer. In fact, she largely fails to see herself as anything very much at all.
Arguably it’s this that makes her seem so resonantly real, but perhaps also is at the root of her sometimes being such uneasy company. Though Daphne’s dialogue is often cutting and she is someone who manifestly refuses to give a shit what anyone else things of her, it’s not so much anything she actively says or does that makes her difficult as it is her total inertia. It’s hard to decide what to make of someone who so clearly doesn’t know what to make of herself. This fragmented sense of self is visually indicated from the off, with a striking image of her descending an escalator beside a wall of mirrored strips that dramatically shatter her shifting reflection. That said, Daphne is so far from being unloveable that a bouncer who kicks her out of a club where she’s been misbehaving is enamoured enough to chase her down, ask her out and then decline her knee-jerk offer of casual sex in favour of pursuing something more meaningful. We see, too, that her friends and family are willing – determined even – to put up with her and remain in her life despite her self-destructive attempts to push them all away.
But quite apart from how her fellow characters respond to her, if you’re intellectually smug enough to laugh at her declaring Slavoj Žižek a “doughnut” as she chucks aside a book that she’s been reading just for fun; or at her revelation that she always thinks of Freud when doing coke, (and let’s face it, if you’re watching this film, you probably are) it’s almost difficult not to find her rather charming, spikiness et al. Then there are her magnificent, enviably spontaneous put-downs. “You, sir, are a fabulous cunt,” she says to bouncer David as she staggers away from him.
Daphne also breaks the mould of the gritty, social realist style of cinema it adopts. Rather than focusing on the disenfranchised working class such films are usually designed to champion, Mackie Burns singles out a member of the expanding modern-day precariat as his protagonist. As a well-educated and possibly once fairly well-off 31-year-old (when she remembers), she could serve as a sort of cipher for the instability and disillusionment of the millennial generation, promised a seat at the feast but fast discovering she’s been left with only table scraps.
At the same time, there are hints that she’s merely treading water above a darker underbelly of urban life, which threatens to flood into her world at any moment. For one thing, there’s the homeless man on the corner she knows by name, and for whom she makes up sandwiches at work. Then of course, there’s the lad who panics and stabs the owner of the shop he’s trying to rob in front of her. He tries to rob Daphne too, but tellingly she’s got nothing on her person he deems worth stealing.
Daphne doesn’t give us any easy answers, but the clues to the residual sense of self the title character still possesses are there to hunt for, littered through the story like a trail of breadcrumbs or scrapped leftovers from whatever concoction she’s been devising in the kitchen. On one level, the film might be considered a dark romantic comedy that comes in too late to fully flesh out one affair, and finishes too early to allow the next to blossom. But perhaps surprisingly, Daphne isn’t entirely without ambition: at the restaurant where she works, she asks chef Joe to make her his sous, only to be dismissed completely out of hand (“It’ll ruin your life”) and not for the first time, it seems. She’s clearly interested enough in the idea to spend her free-time testing recipes at home, admittedly only to wrinkle her nose and bin the lot, but the drive is still there. That she doesn’t press the matter further is mostly due to her complicated relationship with the chef himself, a married man with whom she’s clearly mutually in love.
Unsure how to deal with those feelings, she seeks solace in meaningless sex, while holding potential boyfriend David at arms length. Her view of love, as a deluded human attempt to impose meaning on a random universe, is reiterated often enough to sound as though she’s trying to convince herself, and when David calls her bluff on it he unexpectedly exposes real vulnerability – Daphne suddenly flees the scene like a frightened rabbit. Blink and you might miss it, but it’s also her serious decision to quit the job after Joe ‘fesses up his feelings that heralds the beginning of possible change on the horizon.
Meanwhile, she’s also determined to alienate herself from the one reliable figure in her life; having refused chemotherapy for an aggressive cancer, her mum has instead discovered faith and mindfulness, something which naturally frustrates her daughter. Then there’s the fear and self-doubt Daphne is contending with – in particular, her anxiety over not feeling enough about the man she saved to go and visit him. It takes her therapist to suggest that perhaps just doing something is sufficient, and enough of a feeling might well follow after.
Emily Beecham’s skill is in being able to subtly convey all this, without really saying a great deal that’s to the point. Scriptwriter Nico Mensinga’s razor sharp, bone dry dialogue is hilarious but also constantly evasive – it’s down to Beecham to present the character’s pain without ever soliciting our pity. The performance is at once distant and intimate, cold and moving, laugh-out-loud funny and rather tragic. Daphne lives and breathes through Beecham, lingering on in the mind long after the credits finish rolling, so much that you almost expect to meet up with her in your local pub, or maybe on the train back home.
Emily Beecham is backed up by a strong supporting cast as well, with Geraldine James as her surprisingly vivacious, terminally ill mum, Nathaniel Martello-White as a cheerily optimistic David, and Tom Vaughan-Lawlor as Daphne’s jaded boss and soulmate Joe, who similarly can’t quite work out how his life has ended up like this.
The unsung fifth main character in the film is London itself – a suitably messy and complex companion for Daphne, one vividly captured by Scarth. At times, the camera hones in on the squalor of poverty in England’s capital; at others, it hovers in a sky filled with gleaming clouds and glistening skyscrapers reaching out for something more. The film showcases the rich diversity of London with all its teeming masses, as well as the profound loneliness and anonymity of living there. One particularly striking, slightly hazy birdseye view has the cold, unsympathetic eye of CCTV surveillance, with Daphne staggering past faceless crowds and traffic blurs to create a dizzying, disorienting effect.
Refreshingly then, Daphne is a film that actively resists the conventional cinematic trope of turning points and inciting incidents that change a character’s life for good, instead preferring to just let stuff happen. In real life, epiphanies are generally a long time coming, even if we tend to remember them otherwise after the fact.
Like Daphne herself, the audience is required to sift through the mundane paraphernalia of everyday existence to find the meaning underneath, if indeed there is any. It might not fall in line with standard storytelling techniques, but Daphne is a skillfully drawn character study that provides plenty enough meat to chew on for its full 90 minutes, and long thereafter.
Daphne – a film by Peter Mackie Burns
Daphne will be screened at mac on from Friday 13th to Thursday 19th October. For direct information, including showtimes, venue details and online ticket sales, click here.
Adam has been a stand-up comedian for less than a year, performing her first show in October 2016 shortly after graduating from university. While she may not have spent years plying her trade on the toilet circuit, she has very quickly started to create a stir in the comedy world. Sometimes, if you’re good, you’re good.
This all culminated with arguably the biggest night of Maisie Adam’s career to date. At the start of August, at the Edinburgh Fringe, she won So You Think You’re Funny, the UK’s most famous competition for young comedians. Past winners include David O’Doherty, Dylan Moran and Peter Kay, so SYTYF certainly isn’t a bad barometer of talent.
Adam has been described as a more eccentric version of Peter Kay and likened to Victoria Wood. Based on this, it’s fair to assume that her show will be observational, good-natured, and well, northern. Entitled Living on the Edge it’s a portrayal of life on the edge of adulthood, featuring stories about the politics of the playground and the British abroad.
With an award win, festival performances and comparisons to comedy greats under her belt, Maisie Adam has a lot to live up to. And whilst she may not be the finished article, yet, this could well be a first look at someone who will be popping up all over TV and radio in the years ahead.
So You Think You’re Funny? (2017 Grand Final) – Maisie Adam
Simon Amstell
