The King's Speech: How Colin Firth Struggled With His Words

Colin Firth’s career-defining mid-90s moment in Pride and Prejudice, emerging from a pond with a wringing wet frilly shirt clinging to his manly torso, might have shunted him to the top of any top romantic totty poll going but it didn’t do him many favours as a serious actor, and neither did his subsequent role in pretty much every British romcom. He may have put on a passable turn each time as a handsome chap (and his posh-boys-fighting scene in Bridget Jones is properly funny slapstick) but none of it seemed much of a stretch, acting-wise.
His thespian breakthrough may have come with Tom Ford's A Single Man, but I have been as guilty as anyone of thinking of Firth as a good-looking lightweight, certainly no great shakes as a serious actor. At least, not until I saw a little of what went into his lauded appearance as George V1, or Bertie, in Tom Hooper’s Oscar-tipped The King’s Speech. I was there, on what must have been the coldest day of last year, when the key scene – when Bertie delivers an excruciating speech at the British Empire Exhibition in 1925, and his stammer is revealed to the British public - was filmed at Elland Road football stadium in Leeds. It irrevocably changed my opinion – and that of anyone else who has seen him as the tortured Bertie, crippled and humiliated by his stammer.
I was one of the hundreds of extras who packed out the stands in their 1920s costumes, standing up and sitting down interminably on each take as the royal party entered, and trying to look mortified at Bertie’s speech, during the long day’s filming. It was hard enough for us – so freezing that the crew handed out hand-warmers – and just as hard for the principals; the on-set rumour was that Derek Jacobi had been provided with a hot water bottle to tuck underneath his Archbishop of Canterbury’s robes. It was a demanding and fascinating day, and the most impressive thing of all was to see how hard Firth worked. During take after take, he never flagged, but determinedly gave everything he could to the hard task of delivering a public oration from a man strangulated by a terrible speech defect. It was, as it was supposed to be, painful and difficult to hear, and see. On each of the many takes, Firth stepped up, in more ways than one. He worked his socks off in a part that cannot have been easy to play, and succeeded brilliantly . That freezing cold day, I watched Colin Firth memorably transform himself not just into a role, which is what any actor is supposed to do, but into a great actor. I can't wait to see the rest of the film, but on the evidence of that one day's work, if Firth gets the mooted Oscar for playing Bertie, he will have earned it, and the right to never have to appear as a drip in a romcom, ever again.
Watch the official trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAm7gRXFiRo

A Genteel Lady Lunatic

‘Ah,’ said the director. ‘You’re the unfortunates.’
I didn’t feel particularly unfortunate at that point. True, I was wearing the most hideous costume possible, but I’d had a lovely lunch, passed most of the afternoon in entertaining banter with good-natured people, and the hardest thing I’d had to do was stand up.
Dressed in my awful outfit – a stained, shapeless cotton frock the colour of dishwater, and a hideous brown cardigan - I was playing the resident of a mental institution in the 1930s for the BBC’s forthcoming, Andrew Davies-penned adaptation of Winifred Holtby’s1930s novel South Riding. ‘Ooh you do look poorly,’ said the head of wardrobe – before I had been attended to by hair and makeup. When it’s screened, I will be, if visible at all, glimpsed on the edge of a shot, sitting in a basket chair overlooking the beautiful grounds of a stately home, clutching my blanket and yes, rocking backwards and forwards, as instructed.
South Riding is a novel about local government and a Yorkshire community struggling with the depression of the 1930s. One of its strands is a social-realist version of Jane Eyre: Sarah Burton, the heroine, is the bright, feisty schoolteacher deeply attracted to Robert Carne, a brooding, devastating landowner who made an unsuitable marriage to a highly-strung aristocrat who has gone insane. There having been significant advances in psychiatric care between the 1860s and the 1930s, unlike Bertha Rochester, the madwoman incarcerated in the attic, Muriel Carne is the resident of a genteel nursing home in Harrogate.
Winifred Holtby’s novel insists on the care devoted to her, and having been written before 1938, when electro-convulsive therapy was first used on human subjects, it is entirely possible that the kind of care Muriel would have experienced, in her expensive nursing home, would have been more enlightened and humane than the treatment received by Bertha, locked away out of sight. I’m not saying that conditions for the mentally ill poor would have been better then, or that there weren’t terrible instances of women being incarcerated on slim pretexts, or that the 1930s were a golden age for the treatment of psychiatric illness. But South Riding, for all its rich understanding of human flaws, is a novel written with a certain idealistic hopefulness about the potential for human goodness. The way my character was treated in make-up reflected this: ‘the nurses would have done it for her,’ they said, as my hair was pinned into a bun.
The attention to detail on a production like this is astounding. Two pairs of shoes for me, which would never be seen, were rejected: one for being too nice, the other because their buckles were too shiny. I was asked to remove my very tiny earrings, which were not even visible beneath my hair. A great deal of care is taken over everything, even on an ‘unfortunate.’ And although the word could evidently be intended disparagingly as well as meant kindly, there is something about the term ‘unfortunates,’ which suggests compassion, of a kind.

For One Night Only - Taraf and Marko

The Hackney Empire hosted royalty – Romany royalty - last night. The beautifully ornate Victorian theatre, so shabbily splendid that you could imagine Angela Carter’s Fevvers flying above the heads of the assembled revellers, was the perfect setting for an incredible line-up of two of the brightest jewels in Roma music’s spangled crown: Taraf de Haidouks, supported by Boban I Marko Markovic Orkestar.
Boban wasn’t able to perform for personal reasons, but Marko, the stellar Serbian trumpeter’s son, proved himself worthy of the title of anointed heir, leading the Orkestar through a set of jazzy, oriental coceks that proved that a band of portly, hoodlum-looking young men with tubas and trumpets can teach the world a thing or two about rocking out, and rocking hard. Oozing testosterone, swagger, swank and gypsy flash, they parped out snakey, insistent sounds that induced a collective sweat-soaked delirium. This was music so upbeat and infectious that not moving to it wasn’t an option: it was heady, glorious stuff.
Marko and his band of tuba-toting troubadours took no prisoners in forcing the audience to live in the moment, but the fabled Taraf de Haidouks transported them to an older, stranger place. Apparently timeless, the virtuoso Romanian band of lautari play music so deep and wild that as you hear it and are drawn into their world, you somehow understand that you are hearing stories – strange, terrible and beautiful - that are elemental, or universal, and completely entrancing.
Taraf have survived the deaths of two of their members, the legendary violinist Nicolae Neacsu and singer and cimbalon player Cacurica, and their shifting line-up makes it feel as if the music they are channelling is of more significance than any one member of the band, no matter how vast his contribution may have been. Onstage, it looks shambolic as veteran Taraf members come and go, but with each tune they cast a spell that is powerfully potent. In particular, singer Ilie Iorga raises hairs on the backs of necks with the Cind Eram La, a chronicle of a peasant uprising; to call it haunting is an understatement. Razor-thin flautist Falcaru blows thrilling, trilling notes from his instrument like a demented Pied Piper; his solo in Flight Of The Bumblebee is so fast and so fluid that it seems impossible for a human being to produce such shimmering, quicksilver sound. An hour and a half passes as if in a dream, and having been transported by the Taraf into what felt like another world, afterwards it seemed as if they were only onstage for a few brief, magical minutes.

The man who shares a house with Edith Piaf

Yesterday I met a man who knew Edith Piaf. Bernard Marchois, who runs the Edith Piaf museum tucked down a sidestreet in Menilmontant, first saw her perform when he was 16. Today, nearly 40 years after her death, his life is utterly entwined with that of the dead singer. The former teddy boy is a tall, elderly, elegant gentleman with a deep tan and a very slight stoop, courteous and world-weary, who welcomes Piaf’s disciples to the two rooms in Menilmontant that comprise the extraordinary Edith Piaf Museum: a place so intimate that it feels as if it’s her home.
In fact, it’s his home, although he told me that once, for a short while, in 1933, it was also hers. Four flights up, the two rooms packed with Piaf’s worldly goods are part of his flat. You have to make a private appointment to visit; Marchois speaks personally to each would-be worshipper at the Piaf shrine; allocates them a time and gives them the door codes necessary to gain entrance to the building.
Inside, every inch of the two small rooms is pervaded by Piaf’s forcible presence. A life-sized lack-and-white cut-out of her rather spookily dominates the room despite her tiny size; I’m 5’5” and the top of her head was level with my bra. But, as a recorded version of La Vie En Rose drifts shamelessly through the air, it is obvious why the Little Sparrow has such a hold on French hearts, and those of other romantics, wherever they might be born.
The rooms are full of paintings, photographs and hand-written tributes, but the most fascinating items are the things she might have worn, touched, or loved. Her tiny shoes are there, as are two of the black dresses she famously wore when she performed – both enveloped in plastic, and once tucked behind a door - and the accompanying crucifixes. There’s the limited edition perfume La Mome; her great love Marcel Cerdan’s boxing gloves; an enormous plush bear given to her by last husband Theo, and incongruously, a housecoat in rich, warm red velvet. But then, Marchois says that, in person, she was different from how this icon of heartbreak and defiant survival appeared when she sang: in life, he says, she was funny, and loved to laugh.
She certainly knew how to inspire love. Marchois has written two books about her and devoted his life to tending her flame and welcoming her devotees to his apartment. You can almost feel Piaf in the room, and if you were to believe in ghosts, you might feel hers was hovering, just about to make an entrance.

Dandy, Now In The Underworld

Sebastian Horsley, who died this week of a suspected heroin overdose, might have deliberately made himself into a ridiculous, posturing figure, but he was enormously good value for money. His autobiography, Dandy In The Underworld, is as entertaining an account as it's possible to imagine of a life gone wilfully not just to the dogs, but to the hounds of hell. Foppish, narcissistic, excessive and ludicrous, his antics included having himself crucified as an art project and squandering his vast inheritance on drugs, prostitutes and outrageous tailored garments. Telling his tall tales with a wit that teetered between grandiosity and self-deprecation, Dandy is a devilishly good read from someone who, self-styled pervert and wastrel though he may have been, also went to great lengths to avoid being boring. He was British eccentric in the high gothic style, with The Hellfire Club, Lord Byron and Aleister Crowley competing as influences with the show-off instincts and urges towards decadence of those 1980s clubbers who really did believe in revolting into style. Horsley being Horsley, he doubtless made it a mission to take the concept of ‘revolting’ as far as possible – which in his case, was a very long way indeed.
Whatever he might have done by way of transcending the everyday tedium of a life on earth, this particular Dandy should be at home in the Underworld. Let’s hope he is, and that they’re stoking the fires high and having an enormous party where he’s welcomed as a guest of honour.

Animal Rights? Or Wrongs?

I went to see Circus Mondao's new show Gypsy last night, in a tent next to a football stadium in Doncaster. Formed in 2006, it’s a relatively new touring circus far removed from the dazzling big-top thrills of the likes of Moscow State Circus. In a way, it’s a throwback to the traditional circuses of yesteryear: small-scale set ups, touring an amiable show to a family crowd. Bippo the clown is a young, bouncing August; juggler Ben Coles makes up in charm for some cack-handed moments and the only performer whose skills are of the kind that put your heart in your mouth is Miss Carolina, on slow trapeze and corde lisse. The Mondao people come from old-school circus families, work damned hard, and even if it’s the kind of circus where people sometimes drop things, it offers a night of slightly shambolic sawdust and sparkle that means you leave with a twinkle in your eye.
For all its sweetness, Mondao is also old-fashioned in a way that causes controversy: it is one of seven touring circuses in the UK to use animals in their acts. On the opening night, when we visited, a small crowd of nicely-spoken, well-meaning activists from The Captive Animals’ Protection Society were very courteously asking people to boycott the show. According to Circus Mondao, they hadn’t been inside and had a look at the animals and the conditions in which they’re kept. This is a shame: the CAPS people might have found their prejudices challenged.
Rather than needing protection from their owners, Mondao’s animals shine with health and contentment. In the ring, beyond some formation dressage the most taxing thing any of them is asked to do is put their front legs on a lightly raised platform. They’re fed nibbles and petted throughout: in fact, the whole set up is more like a petting zoo than a display of tricks. Mondao’s way is to proudly parade its menagerie – which includes llamas, zebras and a Bactrian camel – and beyond that, the circus demands very little of them. After the show, the audience is invited to visit the animals and their trainers in their quarters. The RSCPA is also invited, although the animal rights organisation has no legal right to inspect circus animals. From yesterday’s evidence, you’d think they’d be hard-pressed to find anything to object to.
The circus would not have come into being if it weren’t for performing animals. Philip Astley, who founded what was to become the circus in the late 18th century, was an ex-army stunt rider whose tented displays of daredevil horsemanship became the UK’s first circus show. In The Circus Book (a fascinating 1940s compendium of snippets of British circus history), there are many testimonies from both circus folk and observers not just of the love of the performers for their beasts, but to the way the animals were treated as they deserved to be: as the stars of the show. There are also many references to the fact that cowing and terrifying animals doesn’t succeed in training them to show off for a crowd. More recently, Nell Gifford’s Josser – an account of her life working with horses in British touring circuses – makes plain the bond between the showmen and women and the animals they work with.
Circus has irrevocably altered thanks to the changing attitudes of audiences towards performing animals. The days when a parade of elephants would trumpet the arrival of a circus into town are gone forever. Now, the emphasis is on the skill of the human acts, and for many people that is as it should be. Cruelty to animals is unarguably abhorrent and unacceptable. But perhaps it is unfair to see cruelty to animals where it doesn’t exist – and without looking at what is actually happening before making emotional judgements. The animal activists are well-intentioned but Circus Mondao is one place where their concern looks as if it’s misplaced.

Wandering Stars

Eugene Hutz currently resides in Rio, but his spiritual home is on the road. Hundreds of years ago, Hutz would have been an itinerant musician, pitching up with his band of musicians with equal ease at campfires and palaces, because wherever he was, he’d have brought the party with him.
Today it’s different only in scale. Gogol Bordello are global stars, playing to thousands, but the essential quality is the same. New album Trans-Continental Hustle shows Hutz and Gogol Bordello firing on all cylinders, picking up influences from wherever they happen to be and in the way gypsy musicians have always done, infusing them with their own spirit and making them their own.
Produced by Rick Rubin, Trans-Continental Hustle marries Gogol’s inimitable incendiary gypsy-punk to the sounds and rhythms of Latin America. Tunes are infused with a mariachi vibe, heightening the impression that in this incarnation, the band have marched out of a spaghetti western to deliver their rebel songs. The best parts, though, are when Hutz’s desperado vocals are matched to the wild, virtuoso violin of Sergey Ryabtsev or Yuri Lemeshev’s atmospheric accordion.
The songs tell stories: some infused with plangent melancholia (When Universes Collide); or irrepressible lust for life (lead track Pala Tute). Hutz fits into the company of the Joe Strummers, Manu Chaos and Rachid Tahas of this world, voice fraught with conviction and with raggedy eloquence making personal music from global injustice as well as his own adventures.
He and Gogol may be firmly established in the rock‘n’roll hierarchy but, in contrast to many of the polite players on today’s scene, they make music for the underdogs of this world and the people who have no choice but to find themselves on the wrong side of the tracks. It may not be where a lot of people would want to live, but it’s where the best parties are: the places where living in the moment and giving yourself over to the music and dancing are a defiant, glorious act of resistance.

Circus Tricks (Part 3)

A far better alternative to sitting on the sofa snarfing chocolate eggs this Easter was being offered them – and quails’ eggs, and wine – in Leeds' deconsecrated Holy Trinity Church, as part of Urban Angels’ installation A Wing And A Prayer.
In preparation for the performance, the grimly splendid baroque church was littered with egg shells, copper coins and feathers. A magical glass ball on the altar showed aerialist Deborah Sanderson, ice-bound, skating in on ice in a costume of bleached linen that made her look part bird, part-sprite – but you had to wear 3-D glasses before her tiny figure came into focus.
The performance itself was mesmerising: spooked, strange and oddly gorgeous. Angela Carter would have approved of Sanderson’s rag-clad figure in its birds-nest hairdo and a frock-coat that trailed, like a bridal train or peacock’s feathers. Sanderson twisted herself round the pillars before progressing slowly through the church, tightrope-walking along the tops of pews. Then she handed her white boots to an entranced audience member and climbed up the lengths of white fabric attached to the hoop of her trapeze. There, suspended over the church without a safety net, she was an unlikely, astonishing spectacle, part-bird, part-angel, fearlessly turning herself this way and that with thrilling grace and strength.
You can only hope that such an otherworldly being sleeps in a nest made from rags and feathers. It was noted that when Sanderson re-appeared after her performance, she may have been in civilian clothes, but her vast, speckled feathery eyelashes were still in place.

Circus Tricks, Parts 1 & 2

On Friday night I saw some of the best circus acts from all over the globe put on the most fantastic show: Cirque Du Soliel’s Varekai.
Cirque present circus as a breathtaking spectacle on a lavish, extravagant scale, and in doing so, their shows are so polished that the nearest thing to a sense of carny grit on Friday night came from the fact that their vast Grand Chapiteau tent had been erected in the car park of Manchester’s Trafford Centre.
Varekai, then, is tent circus on a vast scale, but despite the glorious set and fancifully grand linking story – a forest into which an Icarus-like winged creature falls – the focus is on the extraordinary acts, split-second timing and sheer sense of wonder generated by human beings whose bodies are capable of extraordinary feats: this is everything circus should be, and in this case, probably the best circus in the world. The astonishing artistry concentrated into each short routine is what makes Cirque’s world of enchantment so convincing that the audience is transported into an enthralling otherworld. Sitting close to the stage, the experience of watching Varekai was more intimate than you’d imagine from the size of the space: this was a truly magical show.
How extraordinary was brought home to me on Sunday, when I took part in a trapeze workshop at Yorkshire Dance led by Deborah Sanderson of Urban Angels. Perfecting a new aerial routine of my own invention known as The Sack Of Spuds, I struggled to heave my feet onto the bar, then wobbled to find a sense of balance as I teetered a mere few feet above an enormous crash mat, helped and encouraged by the endlessly patient, supportive Sanderson, who demonstrated moves, which seem impossible when it occurs to you that you’re about to try them, with a strength and grace that showed that she was as much at ease in the air as she was on the floor. It is, though, the most exhilarating feeling on earth to find that you are, even in an ungainly fashion, poised on a bar above the rest of the world, and that even the most unpractised body can be persuaded into positions – upside-down, inside-out – that seem to defy the limits of what your body can do (see pic), until someone like Sanderson shows you how. It would take a long time to feel weightless; I didn’t fly through the air with the greatest of ease, and I certainly wasn’t magnificent on my static trapeze, but it was an inspiring experience.
Deborah Sanderson will be doing a solo, site-specific aerial performance in Holy Trinity Church on Boar Lane in Leeds on April 1 at 7pm. Go, and wonder.

Better Start Wearing Purple..

Balkan beats, bellydancers, swishy skirts, stompy feet, fortune tellers and the whole three-ringed hoopla...the Disko Partizani circus is coming to Leeds tomorrow. Well worth crawling into work like a dirty old and useless clown the following morning.
PULSE, LUU, 9 til late.

Pasha And Bayadere

It would be lovely to think, particularly if you were a dance historian, that Roger Fenton’s 1958 photograph Pasha And Bayadere – currently newsworthy because the rare image is subject to a temporary export ban in the hope that the money can be raised to keep it in the UK – was a record of a Turkish dancing girl, costumed in the apparel of a dancer and using moves similar to those in modern bellydance.
Instead, Fenton’s image, which was inspired by his travels to the Crimea, is entirely staged, though who is to say that it might not have been his attempt to recreate a memorable scene from his expedition? The picture was taken in Fenton’s London studio. Fenton himself is the Pasha; the musician and the dancer are hired models. Perhaps most interestingly of all, because of the length of time required to take a photograph in the pioneering days of the art, the model’s arms are held up in the air with string in order for her to hold her pose.
The photograph is important in the history of orientalist art, and it is important to know that the characters in it are dressed up as other than what they actually are. When Pasha And Bayadere was first exhibited, its Victorian audience widely believed it to be an authentic record of the East, when it is actually an authentic record of the dreams, visions and representations of the orient - exotic, alluring and very strange - as seen through foreign eyes at a time when very few people ever left the country they were born in.
Orientalism has had, in post-colonial history, much to answer for in terms of generating reductive clichés of complex countries and people. And yet it would be fair to argue that, at least in terms of the history of art and photography, orientalist images are less exotic stereotypes, more the response of an Alice to an alluring Wonderland where everything was different, strange and – apparently – fantastic. It is not the fault of the 19th century orientalists that their work became seem in terms of stereotypes of veiled women and unbelievable luxury: they conjured what was to them a dream. If they failed to see everything around them, it is because their works, no matter how sumptuous, were the equivalent of holiday snaps: far from the big picture, but a memory of something unbelievable to be treasured, and kept.

Ion Barladeanu: Art From The Scrapheap

Ion Barladeanu and the art works he made whilst living as a homeless tramp on a dump in Bucharest are, in a very real sense, outsider art, which is one of the reasons why the Romanian artist’s story is so captivating. The other is a sense that in some way, the exposure recently given to his works equals a form of social justice. Barladeanu used his collages to create refusenik Dadaist cinematic visions in the hyperreal brights of mazagine cut-outs of the life under Ceaucescu that he had, as far as possible, opted out of. For more than 30 years he refused to participate as a citizen under Ceaucescu, and lived in the garbage room of a block of flats, scrapping together a living doing odd jobs. Untrained as an artist, he collected scraps of newspapers and magazines and assembled them into a collection of more than 800 collages: politicised, irreverent, savage, satirical. Whilst he was in Romania, his art was unseen because if attention had been drawn to it, its content would have put him at risk. He has described Ceaucescu as ‘my greatest fear.’
IN 2007 he showed his work to another artist, Dan Popescu, whom he had met by chance. Popescu is a gallery owner and within a few months, Barladeanu had been given a show, and found a flat. More shows followed, and recognition of his significance as a contemporary artist. With an exhibition opening at the Anne De Villepoint gallery in Paris this week, Barladeanu has literally gone from rags to the riches, and perhaps more vitally, from being hidden to finding exposure for his work.

The Dickens Of A Good Play

Max Stafford-Clark has overcome a series of strokes that only seem to have intensified his work as a director, and his theatre company Out Of Joint – unmissable when they’re touring - consistently delivers theatre that excites and intrigues. Andersen’s English, written by Sebastian Barry and directed by Stafford-Clark, is the company’s newest production, and although apparently much more sedate than, for instance, their rambunctious version of The Convict’s Opera or their confrontational Macbeth, is gently, wonderfully, intriguing and disquieting.
It’s all the more brilliantly bizarre for being based on a true episode in the life of Charles Dickens, when the Danish writer Hans Christian Anderson, who penned the most existentially bleak fairy tales imaginable, paid a visit to the Dickens household at a time when the great writer was on the brink of his life’s most shocking and shameful episode: when he put aside his wife, Catherine, and denied her access to their many children.
Haunting and funny, Andersen’s English is a play about misunderstanding and the raw truths that hide behind manners and language. Danny Sapani’s immensely sympathetic Andersen, apparently gauche and kindly, is struggling with the English language as well as various physical discomforts. He seems to suffer from a version of Tourette’s, blurting out words and phrases that are accidentally distorted into monstrous social gaffes. Unable to read the Dickens family correctly because of his lack of language, he sees only the best in them, and his visit is seen through spectacles coloured by rose-tinted romanticism.
By contrast extraordinarily eloquent, Dickens (David Rintoul) is able to express the tortures of life within the bosom of his large Victorian family, but is so wrapped up in his own pain that he finds it impossible to see any viewpoint other than his own, or act in a way that is not destructive to his wife or the son he’s about to send to a soldier’s death in India. Niamh Cusack is heartbreaking as Catherine, apparently held together by her carapace of a mid-nineteenth-century costume but beneath it, a beaten, broken being damaged in mind and body by bearing child after child and unable to understand what she has done to deserve being banished from her husband’s heart and life.
Barry has done an astonishing job of turning the meeting of the two men into an odd, intriguing look at their lives that starts off as a strange collision between two worlds and expands into an intelligent, touching and troubling vision of lives in crisis. There are whole worlds of passion, pain and loss that may get lost in translation in Andersen’s English, but which are heartbreakingly apparently to the audience of this marvellous piece of theatre.

Whole Lotta Bacon Goin' On

Elvis fan + local newspaper + pigs = reasons to be cheerful that it really can be grim up north

Hairy and Scary

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Gogol A-Go-Go

Gogol Bordello are living out the title of their forthcoming Rick Rubin-produced album Transcontinental Hustle, taking their ragbag of gypsy music, punk attitude, global grooves and raggle-taggle rollicking on the road this spring, including four shows in the UK.
Live From Axis Mundi, last autumn’s live CD and DVD, encapsulates the marvellous mayhem of a Gogol performance: Gypsy Rose should know, as she’s shimmied herself into the giddiest of kippers on every UK tour since 2005’s Steve Albini-produced Gypsy Punks. Insane energy isn’t the half of it: not since The Pogues has there been such a gloriously raucous knees-up.
Eugene Hutz, the ringmaster for this motley crew based in NYC but hailing from the four corners of the globe, is up there with Iggy Pop, Lux Interior and Nick Cave when it comes to throwing himself into a performance. Gogol’s delirious sweat-soaked nights of intoxication are in the true spirit of Eastern European gypsy music: just when you think it’s as fiery and impassioned as it’s possible for music to be, the band turn up the heat. This is the kind of travelling circus you dream of running away with: check www.gogolbordello.com to see when the caravan parks up near you.

A fond farewell to The Foundry

Some years ago, I was one of a group of people who, as we worked next door and it was the nearest bar, used regularly to drop into – and fall out of – The Foundry, an alternative arts space near Old Street.
Last night Hackney council approved plans for The Foundry to be pulled down, and in its place, the site’s owners plan to build an 18-storey hotel.
The Foundry is a ramshackle dive of a place, with furniture that looks as if it came out of skips and a floor that sticks to feet. Every surface is covered in art: some good; much falling into either the graffiti or found object categories; some of it apparently constructed by trolls on strong hallucinogenics. It’s a hybrid space, somewhere between bar, art gallery and performance area – many of its clientele are art exhibits all by themselves, although The Foundry hosts all sorts of events. For all that it’s lacking in detergent, it is to be treasured: an authentic, eccentrically boho gin palace that celebrates all sorts of creativity and gives a platform to new and emerging artists. It is a place for oddballs and misfits: our lot felt right at home.
Places like The Foundry are more than just watering holes: they are breeding grounds for work by people whose conversations spark new developments and directions. Hot Chip formed in there, Pete Doherty read poetry and artists including Banksy and Gavin Turk have propped up its bar and scrawled on its walls. It looks like a mucky hole and maybe because of that, there’s more teeming life in it than in a thousand clean, efficient, modular, sanitised, corporate spaces.
I am glad of the time I lost in The Foundry – it was all too easy to loose time in there. I haven’t been for years, but its demolition will be a great loss, and a small tragedy. Hoxton lost its guts a long time ago, and a bit more of its soul will go when The Foundry does.

Haunting tales

In ghost stories, a large, atmospheric home in some state of romantic dereliction sets the stage for creepy goings-on. In two of last autumn’s more beguiling books – Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger and Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry - the house in question was tantamount to a character in itself: in Waters’ case, the run-down home of a decaying family, and in Niffenegger’s the key ingredient in a plot that brought two identical American twins to live next door to Highgate cemetery.
In Jon McGregor’s wonderful new novel Even The Dogs, the ghosts that haunt its pages are of people for whom home is a troubled, temporary situation at best. They are the street people whose tales, in real life, are rarely told and barely heard.
McGregor’s first two novels have already proved that he excels in writing about the tiny, seemingly unremarkable details in the lives of apparently unmemorable characters. In Even The Dogs, he describes the life of a group of people who, having fallen though the cracks in life and seemed to disappear from mainstream existence, are ignored in real life. Even The Dogs is populated by a cast of drug users and homeless people who congregate in the home of Robert Radcliffe, a middle-aged alcoholic whose body is removed from his wrecked flat in the early pages of the book. In the wake of his death, the spooked, shadowy voices voices of his one-time companions keep a vigil, telling their own fragmented, layered derelict’s tales. Alive, they inhabit a parallel world where they’re invisible or at least unseen; in death it’s pretty much the same story.
Even The Dogs is set apart by the uncondescending compassion with which McGregor, without ever denying the squalid reality of his characters’ lives and the tunnelling despair of their addictions, transcends underclass clichés to evoke characters more often seen as symbols of social failure than as human beings who are broken. Their voices, and stories, are heartbreaking: this is a supernatural story that feels more real than a documentary report. McGregor’s ghosts may have been forgotten in their lifetimes but in their deaths, each one of them is insistently haunting.

Weird and very wonderful

Pavel Buchler won the Northern Art Prize last night, but Manchester's Rachel Goodyear’s work insinuated its work most hauntingly into this viewer’s imagination. One of the most interesting new artists, she doesn’t shy away from excursions into the weird and warped, but gives them an uneasy beauty. Her delicate, unsettling works depicting humans and animals put me in mind of illustrations in fairy tale books of the moment when things get so dark that only magic can banish the curse. Goodyear’s subjects, resolutely contemporary, remind us that these tales are not confined to old books. Meticulously drawn and painted in pencil interrupted by blood red watercolour detail, the girl sewing together her feet with red thread, the family sitting with their heads and bodies embedded in a mass of darkness and the girl whose back is circled by a vast, scratching bat linger in the mind and ask you to construct the stories that led up to each trauma. Quietly and undemonstratively, they highlight strangeness, discomfort and fragility, and the terror that can ensue when things that are familiar shift context and become sinister.

Heaven - and hell on earth

There are only a few days left in which to see The Sacred Made Real, The National Gallery’s extraordinary show of Spanish religious paintings and sculpture. Faith is brought to compelling life – and death – here. If you can, go and see this profoundly strange, gory –a head of the decapitated John the Baptist features gruesome severed arteries – and fascinating collection. As you look, bear in mind that these 17th century statues are still taken in candlelit processions through Spanish streets, accompanied by penitents in pointed hoods and cloaks to the tune of sinister, sonorous drum beats, and borne on the backs of men who believe undergoing the physical pain of bearing their weight is a spiritual penance.
These works, lit as if by candles in an otherwise sepulchral darkness, are meant as realistic depictions of agony, spiritual passion, ascetic ecstasy, torment and death. Macabre to us, they reinforce the idea that the holy figures were actual, suffering humans in torment or – equally disturbing – self-inflicted extremis. Gregorio Fernandez’s Dead Christ is a cadaver who has been tortured, complete with flagellated flesh, gaping wounds and fingernails made of real horn. His glass eyes are rolling back in his head; his defeated open mouth reveals ivory teeth. Pedro De Mena’s Saint Francis In Ecstasy is equally intense. To understand why this small statue of a skeletal monk whose glass eyes appear to be looking into something more full of dread and wonder than any earthly experience, you need to know that St Francis was supposed to have been discovered in his tomb, 200 years after his death, and instead of being a decomposed corpse, was standing upright, looking heavenwards – as does this statue – and still bleeding from his stigmata: the wounds that manifest themselves on the hands of the faithful, as if by a miracle, that mimic the bleeding wounds inflicted on Jesus before his crucifixion.
At the other end of The National Gallery, equally realistic human figures are used in a context that is the profane opposite to The Sacred Made Real. The Hoerengracht, by Ed and Nancy Kienholz, is a walk-though installation that recreates Amsterdam’s red light district. The bodies of the women are modelled on real people, and topped by mannequin heads. Reminding the viewer that these figures are part of a long tradition of representing prostitutes, their tiny, shabby rooms are decorated with reminders of the visual traditions of painting fallen women; meanwhile, the way the women who inhabit these rooms have been, and continue to be, objectivised, is emphasised by the face of each being surrounded by a frame. As the figures of the saints and martyrs are intended to be as lifelike as possible in their agony, the garish prostitute women in The Hoerengracht are deliberately made into objects to be desired and consumed, whether as flesh or as art.

Fashion Flop

Was any other snow-bound house-troll, reduced to watching more telly than is good for them, disappointed by the clothes in Material Girl, BBC 1’s new fashion rom-com, last night?
Now, this may be prime-time televisual chick-lit but honestly. The paucity of imagination demonstrated by the costume team – presumably reflecting, they imagine, the middle-of-the-road tastes of its Grazia-reading target audience – left Gypsy Rose feeling sad. In particular, designer Ali’s supposedly most fabulous creation – the one that sparks catfights amongst warring fashionistas - was a bland column dress in black spangles that looked as if it could have graced an unadventurous matron with ambitions to sing on a cruise ship. At a pinch, it might have adorned a mature bellydancer in a Cairo nightspot, and although these ladies are glamorous beyond belief and have more moves in their little fingers than a whole floorshow of writhing lapdancers, their outfits unashamedly come from the tacky end of the wardrobe spectrum.
Isn’t it sad that the frock that we’re all meant to drool over looks like something from the ‘special occasion’ section of a high street department store, not something astonishing by Westwood or Galliano that transports its wearer into a world of dreams and the imagination? Something that takes the viewer’s breath away, and makes everyone who sees it turn green? The dress in question is meant to have been inspired by lightening striking the ocean: how they managed to come up with something that conventional and dreary is deeply puzzling. The dressing up boxes of fabulous girls should always contain wonders and make us feel as if every outfit can turn a day into an occasion. Material Girl’s offending garment, which looks as if it should be accessorised with helmet hair and fake tan, might just about do for us to wear doing the housework.

Quiet and mean

BBC2’s Nurse Jackie is a great character. ‘Quiet and mean. Those are my people,’ she tells awkward junior nurse Zoe. Under the guise of quietness and meanness, and for all her caning of prescription medication and extra-marital sex with the hospital pharmacist, Jackie is unfailingly efficient, dryly witty and carries out so many acts of kindness and mercy – and retribution, that might be seen as divine, such as when she flushed the ear of a sadist who had tortured a woman down the lavatory - that AA Gill wrote in last weekend’s Sunday Times that she could be seen as a very contemporary kind of saint.
Now, surely, competence and humanity are what we expect from the medical profession, not solely the attributes of saintliness? But Jackie, who doesn’t have to make nice to be nice, is less urban Mother Teresa and more like a fairy tale character who waves a magic stethoscope and transforms the lives of those who are fortunate enough to come under her care. Florence Nightingale, who was famously forthright, would undoubtedly approve of the way her profession is being represented in the modern media, though she might wish there were enough money to provide properly for all the overstretched and underpaid true-life Jackies doing their best on the frontline of the NHS. Jackie is make-believe: a wish come true; a fairy godmother in scrubs at a time when in real hospitals in real places, pensioners are left in corridors to die on trolleys.

Reasons to be cheerful

Rock music has always had a problem with artifice, which is why it was so rail-roaded when punk came along. The orthodoxy was that rock was about something tedious called authenticity: freak-out dancing and smelly armpits anyone? Punk, on the other hand, was about dressing up, showing off and living in the moment: what working class Brits have always done on a Friday night. And above all, it was a direct descendent of music hall: rude, raucous, crude, comic, short and sweet. It was low-rent, high art performance, with the street as a theatre full of grotesque clowns.
Matt Whitecross’s Ian Dury biopic Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll – out yesterday - understands this perfectly. The first frames of Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll show Serkis, in white-face and bowler, silhouetted on a deserted stage in a derelict music hall. From there we see him pulling scarves from the mouth of a saxophone and handkerchiefs from thin air, all the time cranking out lewd knees-up ditties with irresistible rhythms. It’s a cracking performance, in all senses of the word.
More than any other performer of his time, Dury was about music hall: the dark inheritor of George Formby’s crown, a sharp-tongued tricky dicky. He was a one-off but his look and his wilfully unpretty delivery were plundered wholesale. Johnny Rotten, he claimed, burgled not just his razorblade earring, but his whole style – gurningly ugly, deliberately freakish, pure carny.
Rock history, uncomfortable associating itself with anything so purely entertaining as music hall, has often downplayed Dury’s influence. It loves Sid Vicious, and choses to overlook the fact that he added a piece of Grand Guignol to the Sex Pistols’ theatre. The distaste of those who prefer instruments that are made of wood for music hall goes on: more recently, when Carl Barat and Pete Doherty proclaimed their love of Chas And Dave, muso-squirming reached epidemic proportions.
To say Serkis makes the role of Dury his own is an understatement. He’s wriggled into his character’s twisted persona – physically crippled by polio; warped because Dury oozed rancour – as if he’s insinuated himself inside the man’s skin. His Dury puts on the performance of his life all the time: when there’s an audience, it’s spellbinding, and when there isn’t, much of the time it’s such a car crash that you can’t stop rubbernecking. But like music hall itself, once the curtain rises, the tawdry bits and pieces that make up a life become transformed into something unforgettable.
Conversely,for all the appearance of artifice, Dury was utterly, entirely authentic. He was a larger-thank-life maverick with a way with words. The film has been criticised became Serkis’ performance overwhelms the other characters. Well, that’s exactly what it must have been like for all those, in Dury’s life, who were below him on the bill. He was the star of the show, and Serkis shines brighter than anyone else in his. In both cases, we have reasons to be cheerful.

Fairy Tales, Not Just Of New York

Our culture is so currently in thrall to the enchantment of Park Avenue Princesses and their tooth-pick-thin, WASPY, uptown ilk, that it seems to have forgotten that the real princesses in fairy tales were usually not primped, pink-clad dollies with cascading blonde curls. Cinderella? Slept in the dirt. Rapunzel? Grew up in a turnip patch. The Sarah Jessica Parkers of this world would shudder in their Manolos at the prospect of getting their manicured hands dirty.
So Disney's first African-American princess, the appealing, Anika Noni-Rose-voiced Tiana, is a savvy specimen of fairy tale princess. Her ethnic identity has been the subject of much media coverage, but with the stately Michelle Obama effectively queen of the new USA, Tiana's princess appeal couldn't be more timely; the only sad thing about her is that she wasn't conjured up a long time ago.
Princesses come in all manner of shapes, colours and sizes. Kate Moss, with her elfin Arthur Rackham face, has fairy tale qualities that make her the perfect Cinderella for the modern world; she even looks as if she’s still a bit covered in smuts. Poor Eugenie and Beatrice, royal by birth but seemingly untouched by any magic wand, are very unprincesslike in comparison, though they do seem to end up at a lot of the same parties.
What gives Tiana particular appeal is that she's not desperate to snag a handsome prince. Like many beauties, she's both a pragmatist, and fond of food, and her ambition is to open a restaurant. When her prince arrives, he's the missing ingredient, rather than the recipe for the rest of her life. As a role model, Tiana has a lot going for her.
If nothing else, Tiana might act as a useful reminder that princess doesn’t have to mean “stroppy little madam,’ and isn’t a euphemism for ‘spoilt.’ Our idea of what a princess should do and be has shifted from the idea of magical transformation – from rags to riches, abandonment to love, ignorance to wisdom – to the image of someone over-privileged with too much sense of personal entitlement falling out of a nightclub in something that cost more than a year’s Josbseekers Allowance.