Just back from London, where we visited friends with a new baby and saw two excellent plays: Howard Brenton’s vastly entertaining ‘Anne Boleyn‘, revived from last year at The Globe, with a superb central performance by Miranda Raison and the terrific production of ‘Betrayal’ at the Comedy Theatre, starring Kristen Scott Thomas, Douglas Henshall and Ben Miles. Like many men my age, I’ve had a bit of a crush on Kristen since seeing her in the dreadful Prince movie, ‘Under The Cherry Moon’ and it was a joy to see her acting her socks off, becoming youngier and sexier as the play progresses (the story has a reverse chronology, which was nicked for the famous Seinfeld episode of the same name). Henshall is excellent as…
Late blog this week as we just spent 27 hours in Manchester, where we saw the opening of 11 Rooms, the group show at Manchester Art Gallery, where Marina Abramović’s naked crucified woman was the final and most memorable room we saw. In the first, a guy tried to exchange my hat for a stale croissant. I think the swap shop concept needs a bit more work before it becomes a work of art, or he ends up with anything decent at the end of the day. At the Whitworth, we happened up Atom Egoyan’s amazing installation, which appears in hardly any of the publicity and is accompanied by his 2002 film of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. 35mm film spools out of a side…
Suffering with a bad back, so not inclined to type a blog post, but I’d better be recovered by this time next week, as I’ll be standing in a small hall in Manchester, waiting for Bjork to come on stage. The image above is from her new show. I’m resisting reading the reviews as I like to be surprised, but they appear to be raves. Here’s a track that previews her new album, Biophilia. Bjork – Crystalline
This month sees the re-publication of my second Royston Blake novel, Fags and Lager, under the new title of BOOZE AND BURN. I guess I will always think of it as Fags and Lager, but I don’t mind the new name. Especially since the word “fag” is now filtered out of work email and search engines all over the world, meaning I would miss out on a few mentions. Mind you, **** and Lager looks OK, doesn’t it? The first book in the series was called Deadfolk, and in that I wanted to depict a slightly delusional bouncer in his backwater stamping ground of Mangel… and no more than that. But when I started writing a sequel I knew that things had to change, just…
I’m appearing on the free Saturday at this year’s Lowdham Book Festival, the twelfth and second since they lost Arts Council funding. Despite the reduced funds they have a terrific line up. My only complaint is that all my mates are on at the same time. For, while I’m in a marquee with Karen Campbell and Danuta Reah, talking crime you could also be watching John Lucas talk about his brilliant 50’s memoir, John Clark discussing his wonderful graphic novel Depresso (which I wrote about last year), or poet Greg Woods launching his new collection. I won’t be in the least offended if you don’t come and see me. Before that, on Monday, in St Mary’s Church, there’s the first ever East Midlands Book…