MONTH END PROCESSING FOR MAY 2025
Comedy: In a couple of months time we'll hit the tenth anniversary of Everybody In The House Of Love, the post in which I announced my departure from Walthamstow after living there for just over thirty years. Scroll down to picture number two on that page, and you'll see a charmingly faded photo of Walthamstow's cinema, the Granada. Read the paragraphs around that picture and you'll see a short history of the building, from cinema to dereliction, culminating in it being purchased in 2014. As I said back in 2015, "it's now in the hands of a bizarre alliance between Antic Pub Collective and Soho Theatre, with a lot of uncertainty about how they propose to manage the split between entertainment and drinking. That probably won't be settled for another couple of years yet." Well, it's 2025 now, and Soho Theatre Walthamstow finally opened this month. I only ever knew it as a slightly untidy triplexed cinema: they've ripped out the small screens to make it one big room again, and decorated it to the nines so that it looks, as I've said elsewhere, niiiiiiice. No disrespect to Red Imp Comedy Club down the road, but it's good that the area now has a comedy club that can put on full shows by big names off the telly, not just their tiny work-in-progress jobs. We were there for the last ever performance of Ahir Shah: Ends, which we'd somehow missed during its two years of Edinburgh and touring. And yes, it's very much the sort of show that wins Edinburgh awards: carefully dripfeeding its more serious elements throughout the hour rather than relying on a crunching gear change at the forty minute mark, but still remembering to keep the jokes coming. More of this sort of thing here, please.
Music: Another Spotify playlist backed up with individual YouTube links, partly made up of returning favourites, partly made up of new people I've discovered through the 45 minutes of 6Music I listen to every morning. (Although it has to be said that two of those tracks - 1 and 6 - have no business being played on the radio at 7am.)
- Maruja - filthy rock noise enhanced by even filthier saxophone noise.
- Falle Nioke - it's that time of year when a bit of African-styled pop is always welcome.
- Kate Miller-Heidke - one of this month's highlights was seeing her first London gig in over a decade. And yes, I know you've spotted this also turned up on the February 2017 playlist, and I don't care.
- Emma-Jean Thackray - for an album that was apparently born out of depression and bereavement, it's surprisingly full of absolute bangers.
- Rebecca Vasmant & Emilie Boyd - that thing I said last time about Vasmant making vibes rather than tunes still applies, but now we have a full album of them to enjoy.
- Chuck D & Daddy-O - remember how utterly alien Public Enemy records sounded when they first came out? Well, they sound pretty conventional now: meanwhile, Chuck D is still making records that sound utterly alien now.
- Nouvelle Vague - they've kept their one joke going for twenty years now, and somehow it still seems to be working for them. Quick sidebar: imagine how good it would have been if they'd given The Associates a Bond theme to write.
- Saint Etienne - Boo! They're splitting up, just because they think 35 years is long enough for a band to have existed. Hooray! They appear to be going out in spectacular fashion.
- David Bridie - thanks to this one-link-per-entry format I've carelessly built these playlists around, you'll have to do your own research to find out the astonishing story of the album this comes from, On Karen's Piano.
- Self Esteem - if you only watch one video out of the ten, this is probably the one.
Theatre: I guess we should be getting irritated at the way people keep trying to convert movies into plays, lazily falling back on name recognition rather than writing interesting new stuff. Still, people like me keep on going to see those plays, like the adaptation of David Mamet's House Of Games that's playing at Hampstead Theatre until June 7th. Richard Bean's stage reworking isn't new - apparently it debuted fifteen years ago at the Almeida, where I somehow missed it. I remember thinking at the time that the film was a bit stagey, but seeing it actually being staged makes you appreciate how good a screenwriter Mamet is: it feels like it's all talk talk talk, but all the crucial inflection points of the story are visual. You need that closeup of the gun: you need to see the Western Union con being performed on someone we don't know, rather than being explained by people we do: you need the reaction shot to the line "a small price to pay." Doing all that verbally just feels a bit clunky. Bean's approach to the story is also somewhat lighter than Mamet's, with a few extra jokes and a couple of tweaks to the plot that may annoy fans of the film. But take it as a separate thing in its own right, and it's an entertaining enough night out.