consummate

If the trenchant US rapper Noname had her fondest wish, this show wouldn’t be just another gig in a corporate rock venue, but a free block party. There would be food trucks, stalls for activist groups and Black-owned businesses, plus free legal weed and somewhere for attenders to donate transformational books written by people of colour to those in jail. This is what happened in Fatimah Warner’s home town of Chicago last year, to celebrate the release of her incendiary and highly personal third album, Sundial, which…

There has always been an emotional vulnerability to the music of Lucinda Williams. Roots, blues, country, Americana, call it what you will – above all, hers are songs that find the tender parts: the taste of sweat, the scent of persimmons, the long drive thinking of a lover.Tonight at the Barbican, that fragility feels amplified. A little over two years ago, Williams suffered a stroke, in the wake of which it seemed unlikely she would return to performing. But this evening she stands on stage, in blue jeans and…

It’s easy enough to forget that Joe Pesci once starred in movies – he’s more or less retired from film acting, giving a total of three on-screen performances in the past 24 years.Following his exemplary 1990, when he appeared in one of the most acclaimed movies of the year – Goodfellas, for which he later won an academy award – and in the highest-grossing film of the year – Home Alone – Pesci booked a number of top-billed roles, often capitalizing on his facility with slapstick comedy, his Scorsese-bred gangster attitude,…

“‘My name is Yip Tolroy & I am mute. I have made not a sound since the day of my birth, October 2nd, 1815.” So begins Paddy Crewe’s ambitious, cinematic debut novel set during Georgia’s gold rush in a semi-mythic American south that recalls both Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses and Faulkner’s Light in August. Purporting to be the written account of Yip’s adventures narrated from the comfort of later life, it explores a society in flux, one about to turn its back on religion and embrace greed and individualism.…