On Friday 23 February, Dublin’s post punk noise rockers (with a techno twist) Gilla Band will be headlining at The Castle and Falcon – Balsall Heath’s bustling live music venue, bang on the No. 50 bus route if you want to sink a few shandies.
Doors open for the show at 7:30pm with the evening scheduled to finish by 11pm. Minimum age of entry is 18 years old, with tickets priced at £16.50 (including booking fee).
Born in 2012, Gilla Band (nee Girl Band) have knocked out three studio albums since signing the Rough Trade: Holding Hands with Jamie (2015), The Talkies (2019), Most Normal (2022)
Winning critical acclaim from the get go for both their fresh production approaches – throwing anarchic f*ck you rock and punk sensibilities into a Detroit techno infused blender – and their storming live shows, Gilla Band are a firm fixture on the ‘but-you-have-to-actually-see-them’ list of contemporary bands.
Once described as “genuinely dangerous, like one last rave before the apocalypse”, Gilla Band are renowned for their raw and energetic sets, with frontman Dara Kiely heralded for his fearless on-stage persona and both witty and seemingly abstract lyrics. There’s a pretty good example of this a few lines below too (with a video you can get more than a little lost in).
Gilla Band’s latest and twelve track LP, Most Normal, released on 7 October 2022, saw ‘Backwash’ and ‘Eight Fivers’ championed by mainstream press like The Guardian, whilst music magazine Pitchfork cited ‘Post Ryan’ as “one of their most unnervingly even-keeled examples to date”.
Coming to The Castle and Falcon before heading out across the UK, Gilla Band also have some mainland Europe dates in the dairy – with a smattering of festival appearances as spring turns to summer.
Us lucky Brummies don’t have to travel to The Netherlands to catch them though, but be warned tickets are selling out quickly for The Castle and Falcon show.
And if you need a bit more of a nudge in the right direction, and an audio/visual example of some of the hyperbole above, check out the video for ‘Eight Fivers’ below:
‘Eight Fivers’ – Gilla Band
Gilla Band will be playing at The Castle and Falcon on Friday 23 February. For more information direct from the venue and links to online ticket sales visit: www.castleandfalcon.com/events/gilla-band
Hosted via Independent Venue Week, the black country quartet Chartreuse came home to the Hare and Hounds on Thursday, 1 February before heading to the USA on tour in March.
Showcasing their newest material from debut album Morning Ritual, Chartreuse’s unique blend of folk, jazz, and flickers of soul permeated through the sold-out Kings Heath crowd, a perfect introduction to the brighter, warmer days on the horizon.
Opener Wildforms (Dan Cippico) takes on a shape of their own with their handcrafted electronic sounds plucked straight from nature. Inside a web of wires, he takes what he’s foraged from his walks; creaking trees, swallow calls and underwater beetle chirps, and bends and shapes them into complex layers that build up a beautiful scenery.
Visuals from Guri Bosh show shoes warping into the grass similar to Midsommar and foxes backtrack away from the camera – the latter shot in Cippico’s back garden: “I set it up because I thought someone was coming into my garden, but it was a load of foxes and badgers. I gave some of it to Guri Bosh… the visuals were improvised off a previous set.”
Throughout the set Wildforms impressively commands the unpredictability of nature, flitting between one instrument to the next instinctively as the set morphs from whimsical, woodwind-led electronic to a scurry of drum and bass beats at the set’s climax.
This busyness is a translation of what’s going on inside his head: “As a teenager, the outdoors was always an escape – I had a really bad stammer and I wanted to get out and away from people, I didn’t feel judged by nature. With Wildforms, I was thinking: how can I translate what’s going on in my busy head and combine it all into one thing?”
The namesake of their debut album, Morning Ritual, is the first song that ushers in Chartreuse, a song that pours over the anxiety of not being good enough for a lover. The slightly spoken word track is the perfect introduction to the band’s glowing performance, with the popular ‘Switch It On Switch It Off’ following, which feels like the nostalgia and comfort from the low hum of the late summer.
Founding members Mike Wagstaff and Harriet Wilson’s folk beginnings are ghostly present in the band’s latest material, expanding into jazz and soul thanks to the addition of Mike’s brother Rory on drums and Perry Lovering on bass and keys.
Not much for talking, but with no need to explain, intimate lyrics shared between Wagstaff and Wilson occupy the room and linger between the more tender musical moments in ‘Whippet’ and ‘Swedish Water’. The brisker ‘Backstroke’ is a reminder of Radiohead’s lyrical rhythm on ‘In Rainbows’, while crowd favourites ‘Deep Fat’ and ‘Keep Checking Up On Me’ ache with loneliness and a despondent feeling for small town living.
The penultimate track ‘All Seeing All The Time’ swells with a sense of paranoia as drums keep pace, a mirror opposite to the last song ‘Sorcerer’s Eyes’, which calmly closes the show with a reflection on the ever-changing pace of life.
Throughout their five-year discography, Chartreuse have always been masters at capturing emotion from within the most unassuming places. Feeling listless in a new home and small town, the longing that stretches the span of both distance and time between lovers, and seeing the joy in a child’s small book on a train.
They take these small instances and construct something from the soul that breathes with life when performed live, serendipitous as this set feels like the perfect way to welcome in pinker skies from lighter days and the warmer months coming.
Out on the road with her latest album, Approaching Singularity: Music For The End Of Time, Mary Ocher will be playing the clubs, venues, and “safe spaces to be weird” of Europe until near enough the end of March.
A 14 track journey through the dark corners of society and back out into the light, with an accompanying essay, Ocher’s 2023 LP sees collaboration with avant-garde luminaries including Italian composer Roberto Cacciapaglia to Mogwai’s Barry Burns.
There are also two tracks with percussion duo Your Government, who feature heavily across May Ocher’s back catalogue and co-released the titular LP Mary Ocher + Your Government in 2016.
Coming through Birmingham on one of her eight UK dates, with another two in the Republic of Ireland, Mary Ocher headlined an evening at Digbeth’s Centrala on Friday 26 January – with local support from Rosie Tee and Steckdose, and her French play pal for the evening Hassan K.
Emily Doyle was there to snap happy for a special PHOTO GALLERY for Birmingham Review, viddy below my droogs.
Mary Ocher + Rosie Tee, Hassan K, Steckdose @ Centrala 26.01.24 / Emily Doyle
Written for the stage by Simon Beaufoy, the UK screenwriter who penned the Oscar nominated 1997 film (that made over £160m from a production budget of only £3m), The Full Monty opened at The Alexandra Theatre in Birmingham on Tuesday 30 January – directed by Michael Gyngell.
Running at The Alex until Saturday 3 February, the show will go on to eight more cities across the UK, before heading back to Canterbury its final run in April at The Marlow.
A immensely popular film, the title of this well established narrative describes the ultimate show all our six struggling protagonists have ultimately committed to – after realising without six packs and washboard stomachs they’ll need to bring a bit more to the table if they want to cash in Chippendales style.
But like the expression itself, The Full Monty is not a story about taking your clothes off. It’s about the desperation so many in Sheffield and other cities felt in the nineties as the legacy of successive Thatcher governments ravaged the widespread provider that was Sheffield’s steel industry – leaving broken unions and communities scrabbling in the shadows.
The play opens as Gaz (Danny Hatchard) and Dave (Neil Hurst) are breaking into their once workplace to “liberate” some steel girders for £40 a pop. With them is Gaz’s son, Nathan, played brilliantly on the Birmingham opening night by Rowan Poulton – a young actor from South Yorkshire who outshone several of the adults around him.
Gaz is behind on his child maintenance payments, to the point he is about to lose access to Nathan, and not wanting to take a job “stacking shelves in Morrisons” or working night shifts as a security guard they embark on their own ‘steel industry’ – plundering the abandoned warehouses that used to be the bread and butter for many families, including their own.
But crime doesn’t pay, apparently, and after seeing male strippers pack out their local working men’s club they decide that sex is probably a better pitch.
So, led by Gaz, played well by Hatchard but who Beaufoy’s script leaves a little difficult to feel overly sorry for, they start recruiting other men to perform a one night only strip that could earn them some much needed quick cash.
Enter Lumper (Nicholas Prasad) a security guard literally at the end of his rope, the ironically named Horse (Ben Onwukwe), and the beauty next to the beasts, Guy (Jake Quickenden).
And along the way, with each character shinning their own individual light into the increasingly dark corners, the play addresses issues around sexual inequality and inadequacy, male suicide, body dysmorphia, and homophobia – although often with a light touch and language that is certainly ‘of its time’.
Jumping from warehouses to working men’s clubs, from side streets to jobcentres, Jasmine Swan’s mailable stage gets twisted, turned, separated, and stuck back together to represent all locations – looking superb throughout, and a little reminiscent of the Les Misérables barricades that came before it.
The cast all bring their characters to life, working well together, and allow each other enough room to show their true skin – figuratively and literally. And at the other end of the chronological rainbow to the young Nathan/Poulton, Gerald (Bill Ward) represents the challenges facing older men who lost their livelihoods with a superb balance.
The second half brings the narrative firmly together, including a wonderful recreation of ‘the job centre queue scene’ where the subconscious steps being practiced by the central cast come out as ‘Hot Stuff’ is played whilst they wait to sign on.
And, despite the very early calls to “GET YOU KIT OFF, ALL OFF” from some tensely sexually aggressive audience members, the grand finale is genuinely fun and heartfelt.
Laugh out loud funny from start to finish, with poignant moments and a fantastic soundtrack throughout, The Full Monty is a great night out. One that will make some laugh, some wince, a few dance, and with a message still pertinent nearly three decades later.
Words by Jimmy Dougan (follow him on Letterboxd here) / Press images courtesy of A24
The relationship between aesthetics and ethics is a slippery one at best. But there are no ethics without emotions, and the most striking thing about The Zone of Interest, the new work from visionary Jonathan Glazer, is that it depicts a complete void; of empathy, of colour – figuratively and to a certain extent literally – and of basic humanity.
It is a vanitas for our age of bleak cruelty, in which horror is normalised to the extent that images of unfathomable suffering perforate our screens and collective consciousness so that it’s all too easy to feel nothing at all.
It’s an artwork that drags us back to the evils of the Holocaust to force us, frankly and subjectively, to examine the ways in which we are complicit with the very systems of cruelty which recur throughout history like tumours; and, crucially, those who perpetuate them.
Speaking of, when we first see Rudolf and Hedwig Höss (Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller) it’s in a scene of bucolic bliss. The birds sing and children toddle in a clear stream. Later, for his birthday, Rudolf is presented with a canoe and the paint stains their baby’s bottom green. You’d be forgiven for failing to notice the guard tower and barracks peering over the walls of their garden.
Höss was the real-life commandant of Auschwitz: each morning he kisses the children goodbye and strolls next door to oversee the unthinkable. Hedwig tends to the roses in her immaculate garden. Is a flower still beautiful if it’s on the same soil as Auschwitz? Glazer, in one sequence of close-ups, forces us to contemplate an answer.
Höss ran Auschwitz as a factory for torture and murder in which the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum estimate 1.1 million men, women and children were killed. Yet most striking about the film is in Glazer’s staunch refusal to literally depict the horrors of the camp.
Save for one horrific low-angle shot of Höss with plumes of black smoke billowing from behind his head, Glazer is far more interested in showing the luxurious comforts that Höss and Hedwig were afforded by their proximity to atrocity.
Hüller plays Hedwig like a curled python: in one scene she tries on a fur coat pillaged from a new arrival to the camp and excitedly finds a lipstick in the pocket, in another she threatens to have a servant’s ashes scattered in the fields of Babice for mislaying the table.
The extremes of Hedwig’s personality contrast with Höss’, who appears happy to do the job and be content in his belief that he’s doing the right thing. We see him stop to pet a dog and you’d be forgiven for forgetting that this was the man who, on multiple occasions, condemned random prisoners to death by starvation over the escape of one inmate. A man of contrasts, then, in a film bursting with them.
Lee, who runs Mockingbird Cinema, is keen to stress before the screening that the projector isn’t broken; after a brief credits over foggy whiteness, we sit in blackness for at least a minute while Mica Levi’s expressionistic score belches and whines like some infernal machine. Evil has no banal middle-ground, Glazer stresses. It’s black and white. You’re complicit or you aren’t.
There is a pall of rot seeped into the very images we see. Glazer and cinematographer Łukasz Żal shoot entirely in natural light, which renders the image as sickeningly muted and pale.
Some of the characters, like Hedwig’s mother Linna (Imogen Kogge), retch and splutter incessantly. Perhaps it’s a side-effect of living downwind from a furnace. Or maybe it’s just an alignment of body and soul.
The dissonance between ignorance and complicity is evoked too by Johnny Burn’s superlative sound design which through-scores the entire film with the sounds of the unthinkable. The constant screaming, the barking of dogs, the chugging of furnaces. Set against constant depictions of domestic comfort it’s legitimately nauseating.
A glimmer of hope is found in a young Polish girl inhabiting the titular Zone – an area surrounding Auschwitz that was still closely monitored by the Nazis – who sneaks into the camp under the cover of night to hide apples for the prisoners.
Glazer and Żal shoot these scenes in monochrome infrared and perhaps lay it on a bit thick, ostensibly suggesting that the act of hiding food in Auschwitz is so kind that it breaks the colour spectrum.
But when placed alongside Glazer’s climactic coup de cinema, which quietly pulls us into the present, it suggests that the good of humanity will only prevail if its evils are preserved for all to reckon with. How will we know ourselves otherwise?
This is punishingly forceful filmmaking from one of our most vital cinematic artists. The dissonance between what we see and hear in The Zone of Interest plunges us into an abyss of torture and picnics, of lilacs and drownings.
It slices through the noise of contemporary debate like a scalpel along flesh; the evil of Glazer’s vision of Auschwitz is not banal or ignorant, it is willing and glad. I can think of no artwork so horrendously necessary for our species to witness.
The Zone of Interest – official trailer
The Zone of Interest releases in cinemas on 2 February with preview screenings at Mockingbird Cinema on 27 and 28 January. For Birmingham screenings follow the below links:
