Film: The World’s End, Cornerhouse, Opens Friday 19 July
What could possibly go wrong? Five mates reuniting in their hometown of Newton Haven, a painfully normal market-town down in the Home Counties, to complete a fabled pub crawl of their youth. 12 pubs, 12 pints, finishing at The World’s End boozer. Easy. Well, all until the lads find out a horde of killer robots from another galaxy has taken over the town. It’s just like an episode of Last of the Summer Wine.
This is the third part in the Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s so-called ‘Cornetto trilogy’ (Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz – they buy Cornettos in each film. Simple as that.), and a fair few critics reckon it’s the best one yet. If it’s better than Shaun then it should be a belter.
Blues: Beer'n'Blues Weekend featuring Mud Morganfield, Band on the Wall, Friday 19 July, 7.30pm
Opening this hugely popular Blues event will be Mud Morganfield, the eldest son of Blues legend and ‘Father of the Chicago Blues’, McKinley ‘Muddy Waters’ Morganfield. The Blues runs in this family like Gin runs in a Mississippi Mule. Muddy Waters had the Blues, Mud Morganfield has the Blues, his son Mud Pie will probably have the Blues, as will his son, Muddle.
But this Beer'n'Blues Weekend isn’t solely about those Mudders. Saturday afternoon sees Ian Parker bring his blend of rock, blues, roots, soul, gospel, and funk to the venue, while Saturday night will see Chantel McGregor perform, ‘one of the most exciting rock/blues guitarists the UK has ever produced.’ While on the final day of the weekend, James Kelly and Rick Warren will perform free live sets in the Picturehouse Café Bar.
There’s also a fair amount of ale to be had. Which is reason alone.
Tickets from £4-£25 (weekend passes). 20% off for CAMRA and Band Pass members.
Ok who rubbed chilli on the end of my mic?
Talk: MIF: In Conversation: Dave Haslam with Rob da Bank and Kevin Cummins, Pavilion Theatre, Albert Square, Friday 19 July, 12.30pm
You could say that if you want to hear three blokes talking about Manchester music then you’d just go down to the Dog and Bollock pub and listen to Fat Gary, Tattoo Stan and Bald Rick recall tales of how they once went dandelion picking with Morrissey and did so many disco biscuits at the Hacienda that they ended up in bed with Bez and a Peregrine Falcon.
Well these three blokes are less likely to be full of utter tosh. We hope. Dave ‘the man with the golden ears’ Haslam (sounds like a crap Bond villain) is a writer, broadcaster and DJ who played over 450 times at the Hacienda. He’ll be chatting with acclaimed BBC Radio 1 DJ and MIF jockey in residence, Rob da Bank (who’s never actually robbed a bank – weird) and Manchester-born music photographer Kevin Cummins, who’s portfolio includes the Stone Roses, Joy Division, Oasis and… Courtney Love?
Well they’re all going to be sitting down and having a nice chin-wag. Maybe a custard cream or two. Naww
£6 + booking fee. Tickets and information here.
Dave, Rob and Kev
Theatre: The Alligator Club: Pages From My Songbook, The Studio, Royal Exchange Theatre, Friday 19 July 7.30pm and Saturday 20 July at 8pm
A mix tape of theatrical production by a group of professional playwrights based in the North West. The Royal Exchange’s Studio will be transformed into a showcase blurring the lines between theatrical event and festival with eighteen short plays, all the length of a song (the same length as a piece of string). They'll will use live music and story to explore love, life, loneliness and lager.
Curators Ella Carmen Greenhill, Kim Wiltshire and Director Holly Race Roughan will team up with fellow playwrights Miriam Battye, Becky Prestwich, Lee Thompson, Jennifer Tuckett and musicians Alice Kirwan, Irfan Rainy, Vidar Norhei and more names you’ve probably never heard of to create this theatrical performance with a twist.
£12. Tickets for Pages From My Songbook available here.
Royal Exchange Theatre
Music: MIF: Mogwai: Performing live to Zidane, A C21 Portrait, Albert Hall, Friday 19 and Saturday 20 July, 8pm
Back in 2005, Turner Prize winning Scottish artist Douglas Gordon and French artist and filmmaker Phillippe Parreno turned their hands to directing a football film like no other with Zidane: A C21 Portrait. Seventeen cameras were set up around the pitch to follow the Real Madrid ‘galactico’ and one of the world’s greatest footballers (and headbutters) through an average Spanish La Liga match. Focussing on the player, not the match, the result is the purest possible depiction of football and a quite overwhelming study of time and motion in portraiture.
The film’s soundtrack was composed by Glasgow quintet Mogwai, who will be performing it live alongside a screening of the movie for the first time. Unfortunately, Zidane will not be there, although rumour has it that he’s quite the talented and unique drummer - he beats those drums like an irksome Italian's chest… with his forehead.
£30. £12 for GM residents. Tickets for Mogwai available here.
What did that purple light say about my sister?
Festival: Water Fools by Ilotopie, Dock between The Lowry and MediaCityUK, Salford Quays, Saturday 20 July, 9.30pm
Synonymous with the city’s industrial past, the Manchester Ship Canal will transform into a mystic parallel world courtesy of internationally celebrated French theatre company Ilotopie.
The story is rooted in the fanatical as a surreal world explodes out of a man’s head, transporting him from the rigmarole of his everyday existence to a landscape populated with mythical creatures and inexplicable magic, while all spectacularly taking place on the water’s surface.
Choreographed by French artist Bruno Schnebelin the routine will chain breath-taking visuals, punctuated by pyrotechnics with engrossing theatre while fellow countryman Phil Spectrum’s composes an original score to make the show spectacular in all aspects.
FREE.
Water Fools at The Quays
Run: The Colour Run, The Etihad Campus, Sunday 21 July, 2.30pm
Quite a strange one this, art fun run, part Indian Holi colour festival. The Colour Run is an un-timed and non-competitive 5km run/jog/walk/bumble in which thousands of participants are doused from head to toe in splashes of multi-coloured powered at each kilometre. There’s only three rules:
- All are welcome, slow, fast, thin, fat, young and old.
- White shirt dress code at the start line.
- Complete colour coverage by the finish line. If not you have to do it again. Sprinting. Carrying Alex Salmond. In flip-flops.
Since the first event in the US in January 2012, the Colour Run has begun to spread across the globe, touching down in the UK (London, Brighton and Belfast) and all the way over to Australia. They were going to do a North Korean Colour Run but unfortunately, colours aren’t allowed.
Entry is now closed but spectators welcome. Wouldn’t wear your Sunday best.
All proceeds go to Cancer Research UK’s Stand Up To Cancer. Info here.
Classical: Katherine Jenkins, Tatton Park Picnic Concerts, Knutsford, Sunday 21 July, 5pm
Classical songstress and superstar Katherine ‘I certainly did not have an affair with David Beckham’ Jenkins will be taking to the stage with the National Symphony Orchestra to perform a series of much-loved Last Night of the Proms faves such as Jerusalem, Rule Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory. Jenkins will also perform a few of her favourite pieces including Les Filles de Cadiz and I Could Have Danced All Night.
And if a Welsh blonde bombshell and a sunny picnic in the sprawling grounds of Tatton Park aren’t enough to tempt you, then 80s electro outfit The Human League will also be performing on the Saturday, "You were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar, when I met yooooou…"
From £35. Weekend £62. Tickets for Tatton Park Picnic Concerts available here.
It was a pretty impressive ornamental pond
Theatre: MIF: The Machine, Campfield Market Hall, Castlefield, Until Sunday 21 July, varying times
We humans tend to possess an innate distrust of machines, computers, robots, parking meters, printers and the like.
So in 1997 when Deep Blue, a computer built by tech giant IBM and Taiwenese inventor Dr Feng-Hsiung Hsu beat Garry Kasparov, the world’s greatest chess player, many envisioned that we were done for. It was only a matter of time before Skynet, or iRobots, or HAL 9000 enslaved the human race beneath a tyrannical regime overseen by destructive sentient machines.
Director Josie Rourke and playwright Matt Charman deal with this concept of Man vs Machine and the human drama at its core with The Machine. A gripping, often humorous and troubling tale that tells the story of when the machine, arguably became more powerful than the human mind.
Our review here. Fri 19 July 7.30pm, Saturday 20 July and Sunday 21 July 2.30pm and 7.30pm
£35, £25, £12. All information and tickets for MIF available here.
The Machine in Campfield Market
Ballet: Don Quixote: The Sofia National Ballet, The Palace Theatre, Monday 22 July, 7.30pm
Taken from the famous novel Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes, this ballet is an enchanting story of an eccentric yet noble gentleman, Don Quixote. Having read his fair share of tales of knights and romances, the Don intends to set off as a knight-errant in search of adventure and the beautiful ‘lady of his dreams’, Dulcinea.
Part one of a ballet trilogy brought to the Palace by Bulgaria’s much lauded Sofia National Ballet, the company of 90 performers including an acclaimed corps de ballet and a full orchestra will also perform Giselle on Tuesday night, and on Wednesday night the most romantic ballet of them all, Swan Lake. Speaking of ballet and swans, did anyone see Black Swan? Yeeeeah you know...
£15-£37. Tickets for all of these shows available here.
Little Red Riding Hood had pulled
Music: The Noisy Frame: Lives of clothmakers in song and testimony 1780-1840, Jabez Clegg building, Dover Street, University of Manchester iCHSTM conference, 9pm – 10.30pm
Do you love folk music? Hold a deep mistrust of mechanisation? Sympathise with the Luddites (who hilariously have a blog here – it’s a funny old world you know)? Enjoy the musical stylings of the Jew’s harp? And let’s be honest, who doesn’t enjoy a toot on the Jew’s harp (except Mel Gibson), well then this performance is the one for you.
The programme explores the tumultuous changes and conflicts of the early industrial revolution as they affected cloth makers in the north of England. The good times of the late C18, the slump in trade after the Napoleonic wars, the violent reaction of Luddism to attempted mechanisation, and the beginnings of the factory system are illustrated in songs, narratives and pictorial evidence all dating from the time.
FREE.
She loved it when he played with his organ
Art: Chagall, Soutine and the School of Paris, Manchester Jewish Museum, Until November
This exhibition will showcase twenty works of art by seventeen of the most prominent Jewish artists in history, including pieces by Marc Chagall, Chaim Soutine and the famed artist collective known as ‘The School of Paris’. The exhibition will include Soutine’s La Soubrette (1933) and one of Chagall’s most important pieces of work, Apocalypse en Lilas, Capriccio (1945-1947), produced in response to the horrors of the Holocaust.
Fleeing persecution and poverty from Russia in 1920s, these artists settled in Paris where they had the freedom to pursue their artistic careers. Together they had a profound and enduring influence on C20 figurative art.
More information on the exhibition here.
Marc Chagall: Jewish Superman
Film: Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer, Cornerhouse, Wednesday 24 July, 4pm
Back in February 2012, a Russian feminist punk rock group and protest collective called Pussy Riot, staged a raucous (and a bit silly) 40 second anti-Putin demonstration inside Moscow’s hugely conservative Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Three of the group were arrested for breaching the peace and ‘blasphemy’, although no such charge existed in the statute book. They were sentenced to three years in jail.
The fate of the band highlighted Russia’s tendency to quell free speech and its shady dealings over human rights. This documentary by Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin suggests that the trio suffered an ‘old-fashioned Soviet show trial’ and exposes Putin’s tight grip on Russian society, politics and his pure contempt for multi-coloured balaclavas.
Tickets for Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer available here.
Music: Mike Joyce: Stop. Look. Listen, The Drawing Room, West Didsbury, Every Thursday, 9pm
The musician, DJ, broadcaster and ex-Smiths drummer Mike Joyce is hosting a new weekly music night every Thursday in the intimate surroundings of The Drawing Room on Burton Road in West Didsbury.
Mike’s music knowledge is vast, so expect lost classics, new music, not-so-new-music, breakthrough artists and exclusive session tracks recorded for his radio show The Blueprint Sessions, including tracks from The Fall, Metronomy, Alt J and Everything Everything.
He may even play a bit of Sinead O'Connor with whom he joined on a world tour post-Smiths breakup - But let's hope not ay.
FREE. Every Thursday 9pm till late.
Mike Joyce
Thing To Not Do This Week: Wear a duffle-coat
