When Richard O' Brien put Dr. Frank' N' Furter into fishnets just over 20 years ago, few could have predicted the cult that would grow up around the Rocky Horror Show. Fay Wolftree genderbenders her way through a history of Transylvanian transvestism.
In all, YES! is an unexpected joy, a heady, discombobulating cocktail of rock opera, obstinate punk and feel-good dance vibes. Ignore, if you will, the fact that Do Me Bad Things were ‘discovered’ by the same people that ‘discovered’ The Darkness. For all its calorific riffing and Rocky Horror-esque psychedelia, the true beauty of this record is its newness (as opposed to the novelty) factor. ‘Liv Ullman On Drums’ (featuring, bizarrely, Tom Shotton on drums) is an incredible ragout of ‘70s cop show theme music with hair metal, while ‘Time For Deliverance’ is a spine-tingling AC/DC inspired-Broadway musical number.
It’s easy to scoff at one-trick ponies, but what happens when the one trick is particularly nifty? Consider Louis XIV, who hark back to the days of T-Rex and Bowie.
WELL. It’s here again. The shopping, the stamp-licking, the mad social whirl, the parties, the receptions, the reunions, the idiotic games, the enforced cheerfulness . . .
He’s spent years trying to live down his bubble-gum pop days but, two decades after the event, former hearthrob Jason Donovan is finally going back to his roots.
The extravagantly monikered Chit Chat Von Loopin Stab of Oz crazies Machine Gun Fellatio assures Colm O’Hare that they’re a bit more Las Vegas than the Virgin Prunes
BEING OUT of the country on holidays means I have yet to see the latest interpretation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (Gate Theatre) but one fellow journalist did describe it as "a menopausal sex fantasy".
Angeline Ball tells Joe Jackson why she s delighted to get away from her image as that bimbo from The Commitments , with her role in The Plough And The Stars.
Daring Hot Press correspondent Danielle Brigham tells in her own words how she dodged knives, nibbled coat-hangers, fire-limboed – well, crawled – and pulled the world’s stretchiest man, all in the course of a day with the fun-loving freaks of the Circus Of Horrors. photos Liam Sweeney
One of Hot Press' very favourite festivals, Castle Palooza returns this August Bank Holiday with acts including David Kitt, R.S.A.G and Dark Room Notes.
EMINEM s Marshall Mathers LP has gone 12 times platinum in Ireland. He s been voted Time magazine s Man Of The Year. And, having broken through into the mainstream with the remarkable Stan , he s just been nominated for four Grammys. So why is the world suddenly falling at the feet of a venomous bottle-blonde rapper who s penned some of the most repugnant, hate-filled lyrics since the invention of the gramophone record? Peter Murphy tells one of pop music s most extraordinary stories ever
Assuming they haven’t all grown up by now, Manson fans will adore every dark, juvenile flourish. For the rest of us, The High End Of Low serves as a cautionary tale of artistic regression.
If The Royal Society artefact were composed of paint rather than sound, it’d be an acid-dipped Joe Coleman print. Yes, there are elements of psychedelia, but The Disaster seem far more interested in comedown psychosis than the trip itself.
Thus far reviewers have been foaming at the mouth trying to describe what an ungainly and unprecedented enterprise is The Raven, but Reed has always been at his best when there’s a thread to his threnodies, from New York to Berlin.
Would you be faithful to someone for the rest of your life? This is a question that’s been plaguing me lately. It does seem like a nice idea, but I’ve always been a bit of a sceptic.
Of all the films in all the theatres in all the world, Casablanca is the single biggest fluke of the lot; a shining testimonial to William Goldman’s supposition that, in movies, nobody knows anything
