Up Against It

If you’ve been waiting for the electro-pop album that speaks to the darkness of our current age, wait no longer.

On Monday, Pet Shop Boys released their 9th studio album, Fundamental, reuniting them with their frequent collaborator, Art of Noise/Frankie Goes To Hollywood/Seal producer, Trevor Horn (who worked with the boys on one of my favourite PSB singles, Left To My Own Devices). It’s a corker.

Highlights include the current UK Top 10 single, I’m With Stupid, reportedly about Tony Blair’s relationship with George Bush, Jr.; a surprisingly effective Diane Warren-penned ballad Numb (grandly arranged) that more or less sums up how most thinking and feeling people have felt since, oh, about November 2000; and the lovely, sublime, emotionally withheld (of course) I Made My Excuses and Left about a man Read the rest of this entry »

The first of Andrew Davies’ three-part adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst’s 2004 Booker Prize-winning novel, The Line of Beauty, premiered on BBC2 last night. Thus far, all of the sex scenes–in typical Hollinghurst fashion–have been same sex, mixed race and out of doors. Ah, the world of Hollinghurst’s prose, where gay sex is as plentiful as the air we breathe and can happen anywhere, anytime. (Which is probably why we never hear the over-50 Hollinghurst or the 40-something, equally amorous Jake Arnott, joining the ranks of other over-40 British queer media types like the pathetic and undignified Graham Norton and Simon Fanshawe, who complain in their recent tellie doc, The Trouble With Gay Men, that no one will date them and they can’t get laid.) So Hollinghurst it is.

The series is a very faithful adaptation of the novel which traces the coming of age of a young Oxford don who rises through the heights of London’s social and political classes when he becomes the lodger of Read the rest of this entry »

Observer columnist, Mary Riddell, loses her head in today’s edition over Paul Greengrass’s United 93 which has seen its UK release date moved up from the 1st of September to the 2nd of June.

In a commentary entitled, “For the sake of humanity, I urge you to see United 93″ (she can thank the subbies for that), Riddell gushes in the kind of full-blooded hard sell to which even PR flaks at Universal Pictures have yet to stoop (though maybe they egged her on, bought her dinner, sent her flowers, that sort of thing). Riddell buys the heroic myth of United 93 as if it were the actual result of an independent investigation and attempts to make the case that seeing this film will somehow stop the war drums from beating for Iran.

I’m not so sure. Since I grew up in a family that more or less took Cecil B. DeMille’s version of The Ten Commandments as gospel Read the rest of this entry »

Even though I receive several “kulture vulture” e-newsletters a week, read the essential London weekly listings magazine (the original Time Out), The Guide supplement that comes with The Guardian on Saturday in addition to regular exposure to the media through daily newspapers and television…it seems I should be looking more closely because I’m not sure how I missed out on this.

Fine, crowds aren’t exactly my thing but I do love theatrical events such as The Sultan’s Elephant, just one part of a weekend of street art by the French theatre company Royal du Luxe, which by all accounts brought London to a standstill last Friday afternoon. Thanks is due to The Mayor of London, Ken Livingston, and The Arts Council for bringing this fantastic cultural spectacle to London, even if I somehow managed to miss it completely while I was just streets away on Tottenham Court Road and in Covent Garden shopping for my partner’s birthday presents.

Still, it’s nice to read about. A full account can be had from Emma Brockes in Saturday’s Guardian (”Elephant In The City: Is it an advertisement? Is it a bomb? No, it’s French street art”).

This was the one that nearly killed us.

Somewhere between Episodes 2 & 3, our heads swelled and our minds effortlessly filled with creative flights of fancy as we felt our one true calling was to create a show of heretofore unheard of epic proportions…

It clocked in at 3 hours, 59 minutes and 12 seconds–no, no, technically, it’s not quite four hours (though we will admit it was over an hour and fifteen minutes longer than the previous episode). And we weren’t exactly teaching people to speak foreign languages. Had we no shame? Well, we did. Plenty of it and it nearly brought us to our knees. This episode would separate devoted fans Read the rest of this entry »

Listen Now:

 The Sean O'Neil Show, Episode 3 [239:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup