Music: Walk Off The Earth, The Ritz, Fri 25 April, 6.30pm
Over the past few years this Canadian collective have gone from amassing seven squadillion (that’s Youtube for money) online hits to sold out tours worldwide. Why? Because they pinch other peoples chart hits and make them folksy and sickly and happy. Eurgh. Do they write their own stuff? Probably not. When you’re stacking up nearly 200 million hits for a cover and making a truck of dough, why bother?
Tickets £17, But be quick, there are very few left.
Theatre: Hunger For Trade, Royal Exchange theatre, Opens Thurs 24 April
According to the World Food Programme, nearly 900 million people in the world do not eat enough to be healthy.
The Royal Exchange Theatre are staging four new plays as part of Hunger For Trade – an international performing arts response to the global food crisis and to explore the commodification of our food.
Hunger For Trade
DJ: Psych Friday with Richard Norris and Erol Alkan, Chorlton Irish Club, Fri 25 April, 8pm-1am
DJ Richard Norris has played Ibiza, Glastonbury festival, London, Tokyo and New York, but there’s always been something missing, a great void in his lengthy career. He’s never played Chorlton.
Well, as part of the weekend-long Chorlton Big Green Happening, Norris, one half of Beyond the Wizard’s Sleeve with Erol Alkan, another half of the Grid and two-halves of the Time & Space Machine, will make a rare trip to the North West to spin a mix of new and old psychedelic music in the 300 capacity club.
Richard Norris
Fashion: Love Fashion, Old Granada Studios, Sat 26 April, 11am-5pm
Fashion. It’s a funny old game. One minute Soul Train flares are in, the next you’re wearing a Golden Snub-Nosed Monkey as a hat. You’ll probably find neither here.
Love Fashion’s latest pop-up fashion festival takes to the Old Granada studios for the first time this weekend, with a monthly residency at the city’s new cultural events space set for the closing Saturday of each month. They’ll be 25 stalls selling threads from emerging talents, two catwalk shows, DJs, and even a couple of model scouts casing the crowd. We doubt there’ll be burgers at this one, mind.
FREE. @LoveFashionMCR
Soul Train flares - back in
Food: The Lawn Club, Spinningfields Lawns, Now Open
This Spinningfields clubhouse has been given a good going over. It's longer, it's brighter and it's tastier. Fluid Bars, operators behind the Dock Bar at MediaCityUK and The Lawn Club’s predecessors, InBloom and Hibernate, have scored a huge coup by securing one of the city's finest chefs, David Gale. Gale has created a selection of light British-inspired small plates and sharing platters. Lovely they are too. We know, we've scoffed them all.
They mean business
Art: Un-Rest Festival: Drawn To The Beat, Victoria Baths, Sat 26 April, 6pm-9pm
A live drawing performance by Naomi Kendrick, who's attempting to fill a 75ft scroll to deck out the pool for the Un-Rest Festival. Visitors are invited to join in, because, let's be honest, 1. She's never going to fill that on her own, and 2. Who wants to pay £5 to watch somebody drawing for three hours.
£5. More here.
Sport: Kettlebell Championships, Train Gym, Castlefield, Sat 26 April
Firstly, kettlebells are those gym things that look like a shot put with a handle. The ones you don’t bother with. Yeah them.
One of the more obscure Manchester Championships to have been chucked across our desk. But then we like anything odd. And a sport that involves both a jerk and some snatch has our attention (something to do with lifting). Manchester Kettlebell Club will be hosting the GSU English Kettlebell Championships at Train Gym on Arundel Street in Castlefield, welcoming over 100 athletes from across the world to battle it out to find the biggest jerk and the best snatch of all.
Kettlebell Champions 1903
Museum: Launch of Pi, MOSI, Sat 26 April, 10.30am-3.30pm
We remember launching a Pi too, Gordo was furious.
Pi, or the Platform for Investigation, is the pop-up home of the museum’s new monthly contemporary science programme showcasing live experiments, cutting edge research and art/science collaborations using high-tech audiovisuals, light displays and technology that allow scientists and artists to bring their work to life. And show off, naturally.
This launch will see 24 Design, the team behind Pi, demonstrate the platform’s capacity. More showing off.
FREE. More here.
Pi
Classic: Manchester Camerata Rework Carmen, Albert Hall, Sun 27 April, 3pm (pre-concert talk at 2pm)
Two of the city’s cultural gems coming together for the first time to make sweet, sweet music.
Manchester’s leading chamber ensemble, captained by magnetic Music Director Gábor Takács-Nagy, will become the first classical orchestra to perform at the Grade II former Methodist Chapel on Peter Street. Rodion Shchedrin’s memorable work for strings and five percussionists is a reworking of Bizet’s Carmen – think all Bizet’s tunes with a different hat on.
There’ll also be Norway’s finest pianist and Lithuania’s Got Talent winner (seems they’ve got TVs now), virtuoso accordionist Martynas Levickis. Only in the Baltic states.
Tickets £10, £19 and £26. Contact venue on 0844 858 8521.
Fair: Judy’s Affordable Vintage Fair: The Social, Victoria Warehouse Hotel, Sun 27 April, 11am-4pm
It’s widely accepted that once Countryfile is over, so is the weekend. Still, chin-up Grumpy Gertrude because Judy is determined to make the whole of Sunday ‘the best day of the week’ and get you looking sharper. And as Blur once said: ‘Sunday, Sunday, here again in tidy attire’. Exactly.
Started nearly a decade ago in Leeds, Judy’s Affordable Vintage Fairs are the largest of their kind and serve over 30 cities from London to Edinburgh and Newcastle to Bristol. Now, with a new home in the Victoria Warehouse Hotel, they’re returning to Manchester with around fifty vintage stalls, a cinema, a relax area, food and booze.
£2 entry. More here.
Judy's Vintage Fair
Film: Rebel Without A Cause (1955), Cornerhouse, Sun 27 (midday) and Wed 30 (1.30pm) April
Hailed as James Dean's finest performance, the film opened a month after its 24-year-old star died in a car crash, cementing Dean's place in Hollywood folklore and lending the whole picture an eerie ambience. Dean plays Jim, an edgy young middle-class man that falls in with the wrong crowd.
Hugely influential at the time, Rebel was the birth of a new breed of restless youngster and an exploration of America’s latest moral panic, the juvenile delinquent.
Tickets here (Wednesdays screening will be followed by a discussion)
Theatre: See How They Run, Opera House, Tues 29 April - Sat 3 May
Warwick Davis (Star Wars, Harry Potter, Idiot Abroad) stars in the Reduced Height Theatre Company’s war-time farce.
The cast, all under four feet, play out this classic British comedy from Philip King, premiered in London at the close of the 2WW to cheer everybody up a bit. Merton-cum-Middlewick plays host to this farce, as Lionel Toop, the village vicar, and his wife Penelope (a feisty ex-actress), a parish spinster, a Bishop, a Cockney maid and a German detainee get caught up in mistaken identity, comic situations and, being a farce, a Benny Hill chase scene.
See How They Run
Film: Back To The Future, Screenfields, Spinningfields Lawns, Thurs 1 May, 7pm
Long has it been a tradition (two years) in Spinningfields that on a Thursday evening, as soon as they roll the deck chairs out for Screenfields, the Spinningfields Lawns infamous two hour monsoon season begins.
Still, we’ve been promised a Spring heatwave so everything should be dandy (bollocks). The first Screenfields of the season kicks off with Back To The Future, an 80s' classic that everyone has seen at least thrice so I’m not going to bore you with the details. McFly. Mad scientist. Libyan Nationalists. Time machine. DeLorean. Bully gets it.
Tickets £3. More here.
Screenfields
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