And behind door number 22... a guide to some music of the more traditional kind
Catherine Munn and Jacob Martin list their Top 5 programmes to watch over the festive period.
And behind door number nine... some dazzling musical delights
The complete arts guide, for week 9
For starters: it's a fantastic week for live music! Kate Nash is coming to our very own Fibbers tomorrow (Tuesday) night, and she hasn't sold out yet! Too many people seem to have been put off by Lily Allen proclaiming her to be the "next big thing", and not taken the time to listen to her literally brilliant songs. "Merry Happy" and "Birds" are two particularly wonderful examples of her completely unpretentious and pretty singer-songwriter-pop, and the current single "Foundations" is about as good as it gets. Grab those tickets before everyone else realises how great she is.
As if that's not enough, there's a double bill of upcoming Northern talent at the Bad Sneakers club night in The Faversham in Leeds at the end of the week, The Answering Machine, a fresh-faced threesome with a lady bass player and a drum machine named Mustafa Beat, and The Maple State, Manchester's answer to Death Cab, fresh from supporting everyone's favourite band that used to be called Blink 182, +44. If you haven't made it there yet, the Fav is a brilliant venue, and the Bad Sneakers DJs will ensure that you won't want to leave when the bands finish.
F-f-f-finally: Top-of-his-game-pop-star/producer Calvin Harris is rocking up to Leeds Cockpit next Wednesday. If you like your electro a little bit cheeky and a little bit English then this is the way forward. "The Girls", a new release this week, is an end-of-the-pier pop song with swirling synths and a dancefloor bassline that you may recognise from the endless promotion of "T4 On The Beach".
Also out this week is the second single from Unklejam, the bastard love-children of Outkast and Prince... imagine... (Careful, The Yorker lawyers) Personally, I wasn't sold on their first single, the dreary and slightly try-hard "Love Ya", and this isn't much better. They're wading straight into a genre that has been defined by exhilaratingly inventive American artists without taking the time to make sure they're doing something new. This is clearly beyond their record label, however, as Virgin seem to be throwing buckets of cash into their promotion. This means that we have a terribly pretty video to look at, but some appalling content. Maybe you could just mute it and put on NERD over the top.
That was godawful, wasn't it? Fortunately there is another release this week that has its roots in black American music, but manages to outgrow them completely; Dizzee Rascal has dropped his third album "Maths and English", which is, by all accounts, awesome. It's a really good feeling when someone that has evolved so obviously throughout their career really hits their stride, and this album sees Dizzee shake off the 'is he grime?' question that dogged his sophomore release to become the superstar he always had inside... Or something similarly saccharine.
To transfer tenuously between arts items, another third installment is released this week, Ocean's 13 comes out on Friday in the probably-not-final installment of the Danny Ocean saga. I've made my feelings on trilogies clear before, but this looks as if it's going to be a series, like a funnier American James Bond who has left the secret service and enlisted a few friends to do over some casinos. Can the plot be stretched to cover a third film? The shaky basis of Ocean's 12 would suggest not, but Clooney is just cool, and so are Brad Pitt and Don Cheadle. This one has even got Al Pacino in it. "Al Pacino!" And he's a baddy! So if you want an evening of slick entertainment and you aren't overly concerned about testing your brain cells, its probably a good bet. Here's the trailer anyway. Slicker than an Steve McQueen beaching an oil tanker on a massive effigy of Cary Grant's hair.
However, if you are looking for something slightly more intellectual, City Screen is showing the democracy-defending Blair-bashing "Taking Liberties" on Tuesday. The documentary equivalent of the person in a shawl you meet outside the library who, although they seem vaguely annoying when they start to talk about the erosion of civil liberties, you develop a nagging feeling that they might be right. And the trailer has Tony Benn and Boris Johnson in it, so it looks like the fun sort of politics where people get angry, rather than the bits on the news where they either look fairly disinterested or completely confused as they are grilled about the latest change to the pay and pension package of a public sector worker. Stand up for your rights! Than sit down. The people behind can't see properly.
And, as if that wasn't enough popular intellectualism for one day, there's only a bloody lecture about The Beatles on! Organised by the Department of Sociology, this is the first of three lectures using the high profile 40th anniversary of the release of "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" to explore the amount of influence four lads from Liverpool managed to have on the Western world. Taking place in P/L/001 this should give you some idea of the combination of fun and political struggle that the flower-power generation created. Let this be a guide for the revolution that "Taking Liberties" will fuel. Grow your hair! Make your parents angry! Or, if you have nice left-wing parents who did all this kind of stuff in their youth anyway, and still nip outside for a craft joint on occasion, cut your hair and revolt in secret. Hide your beat poetry inside John Major's autobiography, don a suit, and overthrow the government from the suburbs.
Other notable happenings:
