As silence descends, soft and haunting sounds begin to drift
from the stage, echoes delicately produced by a glass slide on electric guitar strings,
which usher us into an almost trance-like state.
Ahead of the release of his sixth album, Home Part 2, later this month, the award-winning
singer-songwriter Scott Matthews has returned to Telford’s Warehouse in Chester to
give us a spellbinding solo performance like no other.
As ever, it is truly remarkable how Scott’s
voice seems to transform itself and resonate with the quality of a cello as he sings. The
effortless fluidity of his vocal range and his graceful vibrato never fail to send shivers running up and down the spine.
Playing around with the songs we know so well is a habit of
his, and, every time he begins, we never quite know which one will suddenly
emerge from each meandering intro. As well as favourites like ‘City Headache’, ‘Eyes Wider than Before’,
‘Sunlight’, and ‘Virginia’, we’re treated to a handful of songs from his
upcoming album and the first from his new label, Shedio Records – created by
Scott himself.
With greater creative freedom than ever before, he has been
able to put together a piece of work that meaningfully reflects on his
evolution as an artist.
“Sonically, I wanted to create a very broad canvas this time
around,” he reveals. “Home Part 2
bears similarities to my debut album, Passing Stranger, in the sense that there
has been a desire to return to the roots where my musical seeds were planted.
Almost like a need to rekindle a relationship with the artist I was ten years
ago, but joining forces with the artist I am today.”
Local folk trio, Mountainface (Sam Rowlands Photography)
Scott will be heading on the road with
his band, immediately after his solo tour, to play at venues across the UK before heading to tour in Europe. Also promised later
this year is a special edition LP of Passing
Stranger to mark the anniversary of its release ten years ago. 2016 has
proven to be an exciting and busy year for the artist, something which his
dedicated fan base is no doubt thankful for.
Supporting Scott before his Telford’s gig were the boys from
local folk trio, Mountainface, featuring the particularly skilled mandolin
playing from Matthew Youds, rhythm guitar and reedlike lead vocals from David Weir, and lead
guitar and backing vocals from Tom Winch. The group’s passion for their music
is clearly visible as they perform, and marries with their undeniable energy.
Scott Matthews’s single, ‘The Lantern Flower’, is available
now; His album, Home part 2, is released
19th September, 2016 and is available for pre-order here (including a free download of new single 'Drifter')
After three years in the making, the wait is almost over for fans of the inimitable music icon, Amy Winehouse, as the much talked about new docufilm of her lifehits screens this Friday.
Created by the team that brought us the multiple award-winning 2011 film, Senna, this new insight rejects the more more common “talking heads” format. Using archival footage almost exclusively, including an abundance of unseen home video recordings, Amy presents new audio recordings of interviews with the starlet's friends, family and colleagues, and also features fascinating glimpses of her sing notes, and previously unreleased tracks. What this mesmerising film reveals to us is the woman behind the name and beyond the tabloids.
Last night, a live screening of the film’s London gala premiere was aired at over 300 cinemas across the UK, along with a Q&A session featuring Director, Asif Kapadia, the film’s Producer, James Gay-Rees, and Nick Shymanksy, Amy’s first manager and close friend.
“When they think of Amy, a lot of people only seem to think of her in that latter period,” Kapadia tells us before the film begins, “and I wanted to readdress that. […] I wanted a positive image to come up, a young, healthy, beautiful image, not a negative one; a film that shows the real Amy - someone that was really funny, intelligent, amazing, a brilliant writer, a brilliant singer.”
Yet, Amy’s release has not been without opposition from within. Although the artist’s father, Mitch Winehouse, was initially keen for Kapadia to direct the film after seeing his previous work, he was unhappy with the final cut and threatened legal action unless further editing took place. Although some alterations were made, Mitch remains angered with the portrayal, believing it makes him out to be an uncaring father and a villain: “there’s too much at stake. There’s Amy’s reputation. There’s my reputation”, he said in an interview recently.
Shortly after Amy’s death, her father set up the Amy Winehouse Foundation, an organisation which works to help prevent the effects of drug and alcohol misuse on young people. Mitch describes the film as being “misleading and contains some basic untruths”, airing concerns that “if this hurts the Foundation, which it potentially could do, you’re talking about damaging thousands of kids.” However, it appears that what this film does in fact give us is an unflinching look at the harrowing consequences of Amy’s addictions and the traumatic effect on those close to her. In stark contrast to her father’s opinion, it is clear Kapadia’s film instead highlights these issues and so can only serve to aid the foundation’s cause.
As the director admits, he is not associated with the music industry nor had ever met anyone linked to her, so had almost no knowledge of Amy as a person whatsoever before approaching the film, doing so without any kind of prejudice or agenda. He at first gained the trust of her close friend, Nicky Shymanksy, who then put him in touch with her other friends and associates, and slowly, over the course of three years, he interviewed around one hundred people to try and fit together her story like a puzzle, build her timeline, and get a complete picture of Amy: “It’s a mosaic, it’s never perfect, “says Kapadia, “it’s fragments, you’ve got memories, you’ve got little pieces here and there and you’ve got to play with them as much as you can to try and plug holes.” With this in mind, surely this film then is an arguably rare example of artistic impartiality that gives us the most truthful, balanced portrait of Amy yet, in all possible lights?
Sore spots, it seems, have only developed where the archival content that has arisen isn’t always kind to those involved. Mitch admits he began an affair with another woman when Amy was just a little over a year old which carried on in secret for eight years before her parents finally divorced, affecting her incredibly deeply. So, when we hear audio of Amy herself describing how her father was never there for the “important bits” when she was growing up, it goes to reason that what Mitch is more likely fearful of is a brutally honest depiction of himself over which he has no control and which doesn’t gloss over any of his influences on Amy’s life, both good or bad.
Of course, Amy couldn’t escape documenting the turbulent relationship with ex-husband Blake Fielder-Civil, one of the more notorious aspects of the troubled artist’s life. It was clear that Amy was madly in love with bad boy Fielder-Civil, but it becomes quickly clear that her emotional overreliance on him was dangerous, and their marriage was continually intense, volatile and toxic. Her introduction to crack cocaine and heroin by her husband, combined with ongoing bulimia issues and her later alcohol abuse, was to send her into a destructive downward spiral and cause the irreparable health problems which ultimately lead to her death.
Of course, the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle of the talented star attracted the attentions of the press, and paparazzi swarmed about her house day and night, adding to the stress and pressure of her everyday life. But it was never fame that Amy wanted; the only thing she craved was to make music. The night before she died, Amy’s bodyguard, Andrew Morris, recalls how she was watching videos of her performances with him. “’Boy, I can really sing!’ she said. “But do you know what? I’d hand all of it back right now, just to be able to walk down the street again.”
However, the film doesn’t necessarily lay the guilt for Amy’s death on any single individual. Instead, it honestly presents the various failures, small and large, of a number of individuals - amongst them the singer herself - to say enough is enough and put Amy first.
Nevertheless, asked during the live Q&A if he is of the belief that you can’t help someone who doesn’t want to help themselves, Shymanksy disagrees, saying “You can try.” “But everyone did try, didn’t they”, says the interviewer, to which he insinuatingly replies, “well, I don’t know about that. I think there’re levels of statements you make, positions you take. You can’t say to someone ‘I don’t believe you should be doing that, but I’m going to go along with you while you do it.’” It’s quite obvious he is referring to what he sees as the often complicit attitude of Amy’s father in regards to her destructive behaviour, as well as his seemingly skewed paternal priorities, alluded to by many of those close to Amy in the film including her oldest and closest friends, when it came to putting his daughter’s wellbeing before her musical career.
Amy loved her father deeply, and constantly sought affirmation from him. It does appear that, in many ways, he rejected numerous vital opportunities to intervene which could have, to some degree, helped save Amy’s life further down the line. One striking example is even painfully immortalised in her hit song, “Rehab”: “I ain’t got the time and if my daddy thinks I’m fine - they tried to make me go to rehab and I said ‘no, no, no.’” When concerned friends suggested rehab after finding her in a drug-fuelled haze amid squalid living conditions following her first devastating break up with Blake, her father admits in an interview that he told her there was no need. Naturally then, she chose to decline the help she desperately needed.
Had she decided differently, the album “Back to Black” may well never have come into existence, but it’s also possible Amy could have been prevented from travelling any further down the dark path she was unwittingly on, nipping her addiction issues in the bud and saving her life. That the single representing her fatal decision also had a part to play in leading her to international fame (as well as infamy) and eventually to her premature death is a horrible irony.
Amy’s lyrics themselves are of such significance to her story that Kapadia makes the bold decision to present them to us visually on screen at several points, since they alone can best express her perspectives, her loves, and her struggles, without external prejudice. Although there was no definitive expert on Amy to whom the director could talk, the most revealing insights to what was going on in Amy’s mind at different stages of her life, as one observant audience member at the Q&A session noted, lay unquestionably in her songs. “Her lyrics are the map”, Kapadia remarks.
Amy gives us the full picture that was always missing, and is a deeply moving and powerful work of cinema. We see the warm, intelligent, outspoken girl grow and enter into womanhood, with all her faults and strengths in tow, as she begins the iconic career which was our blessing and, perhaps, her curse. An immense talent, charismatic, passionate and wise beyond her years, Amy Winehouse is quite simply the voice that affected a generation.
Amy is released nationwide on the 3rd July.
Images (in order) from Wikipedia, unkown source, decorandstyle.co.uk, topnew,in, and The Guardian
This is the third time I have been
irrestibly drawn to watch the Ivor Novello Award-winning acoustic folk artist perform live
now, and I would do so a thousand times more for such an incredible talent. Scott’s desperately beautiful songs are
nothing less than bewitching: his fingers dance effortlessly over the strings
and a voice floats suddenly toward you as if from a dream, holding the thronged
audience of Telford’s Warehouse, Chester, in hushed awe.
What I find
most striking about Scott’s performances is that if you were to close your eyes,
you could be forgiven for thinking you were actually listening to hymns being sung
to you by some unearthly cello and not a man, so distinctly like the sound of swelling
strings is the tone of his voice.
He is taking this tour, he explains, to get
the songs out of his system and learn their personal meanings before recording
them in the coming months for what will be his fourth album after Passing Stranger, Elsewhere, and What theNight Delivers.
Afterwards, he
seems genuinely humbled and grateful that people appreciate his work, and is eager
to make to time to chat warmly with his fans, without rushing.
Scott’s talent
puts to shame the likes of artists such as Damien Rice and recent flavour of
the month Ed Sheeran, and though he has a large following and is very much a respected
“musician’s musician”, quite why his household acclaim isn’t greater than it is
at present is utterly baffling. Regardless,
Scott’s fourth album will hopefully be released at some point later this year,
and I simply cannot wait.
'[...]his gifts and his sole ambition were restricted to a domain that leaves no traces in history: to the fleeting realm of scent.'
Süskind's novel is one you'll be glad you stuck your nose into.
Written in 1985, Perfume:The Story of a Murderer(or Das Parfum as it appears in its original German) tells the story of 18th century man gifted from birth with the finest nose in the world. With it, he can detect, and distinguish between, every smell under the sun.
Relishing in the thousands of odours he encounters and stores up like ghostly memories in his black heart, he soon becomes obsessed with creating a perfume like no other on earth: a perfume made up of the collected fragrances of beautiful, young woman. Its crowning glory will be the most intoxicating and elusive female scent he has ever encountered; and he will stop at nothing to possess it...
Split into lots of short chapters and with eloquent and very pretty prose that are satisfyingly easy to read, it is the ideal book for dipping in and out of; though, perhaps because of this, you may well find yourself lured into sniffing out "just one more chapter..." after another. It is a very pensive novel, and challenges our notions of beauty, self, and social order, yet all in a manner that refuses to be heavy going or patronising to the reader.
Due to the fact that much of the book's most poignant moments involve the experiencing of certain aromas and the internal reflections and revelations they incur, it is certainly a difficult book to adapt onto screen. However, despite a certain necessary trimming-down of time periods, Tom Tywker's 2006 film adaption (see trailer above) is largely successful in its portrayal of such a seemingly impossible novel to film; all thanks to a clever use of 'blooming' light effects, camera shots and angles, and (the usual favourite of mine) a superb soundtrack (see right) which manages to beautifully imitate the detection and elusiveness of scents and the veritable ecstasy Grenouille feels in encountering them (best identified in the tracks 'Streets of Paris' (1:51) and 'Meeting Laura' (27:09)).
Without wishing to ruin the end of either the book or film, the director manages to portray, in a very artistic and tasteful manner, an especially difficult scene from the end of the story (to those of you in the know I need merely say the 'town square' scene) which could potentially have seemed vulgar and ridiculous. It is a film I would very much recommend.
Rachel Hurd-Wood as the intoxicating Laura Richis (Left) and Ben Wishaw as Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Right), murderous Perfumer with an extraordinary gift, in Perfume: The Story of Murderer (2006).
Without any further gilding the lily, it remains only for me to say that Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is an intriguing and satisfying book that brings in to question a whole host of ideas of identity and of the finite nature of life.
I've always had a thing for a good film score. You can have the most well directed film you like, but if its score is lacklustre, the whole thing suffers. Vice versa, a beautiful soundtrack can do much for a film that is itself relatively mediocre.
Call me mad, but I can happily sit in my room and listen to some of my favourite film score composers for hours on end. One of my absolute favourites has to be the Italian genius that is Dario Marianelli. He's written original scores for a whole host of films; some of his most recent and no doubt most famous works being Pride and Prejudice (Oscar-nominated for Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures, and Original Score) and Atonement (which won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for Best Original Score), both of which truly are amazing.
An OST (original soundtrack) of Marianelli's which, to my horror, seems to have slipped through the net however, is Jane Eyre (2010), the most recent adaption of Charlotte Brontë's classic. I find it outrageous how overlooked it seems to have been, when, in reality, it is, in my opinion, one of his finest compositions of all. It features the musical talents of Classical Brit Award-winning violinist Jack Liebeck, whose doleful and rustic fiddle pieces evoke so much of the orphaned, governess protagonist's pent up passions; her sorrow and ecstasy alike. I find, too, the repeated use of a riff that one presumes to be an eerie distortion of a melody to some once happy love song from Mr Rochester's past (he is briefly seen playing it on an out of tune piano as he dwells on dark thoughts) incredibly tantalizing and ingenious. It can be heard in the opening of track one (below), 'Wandering Jane':
The following is a medley of several other tracks from the OST. Particular favourites of mine featured in it are 'Awaken' (opening) and the sinister and heart-rending 'An Insuperable Impediment' (3:49).
