The Star's critics ANDY HEDGECOCK, MARTIN HALL, MICHAL BONCZA, ANGUS REID reviews Holy Cow, One to One: John and Yoko, King of Kings, Panda Bear in Africa
Latest editorial
Marxist Notes on Music: January 2, 2023
Tone-deaf budget embarrasses and insults in equal measure
dance
PATRICK JONES recommends a vital anthology from Afghan and Iranian poets where the political and personal fuse into witness-bearing and manifesto-making
WILL STONE is impressed by Hania Rani who is already making a name for herself in the male-dominated world of modern classical music
MIK SABIERS enjoys the theatrical feminist six piece who have a lot of fun that the audience feeds off as the set rolls on
New releases from Ibex Band, Lucy Dacus, and Various Artists
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by characters so un-nuanced as to be unreal, a stereotypical plot and a conceptual vampire
WILL STONE appreciates an artist who can swerve from industrial noise to clubby trance pop without missing a step
DECEMBER 15 2022 saw the Scottish government announce its budget for 2023-24 and though not as damning as what is on offer from the Tories in Westminster, as Roz Foyer of the STUC said “we needed strides, not steps.”
Despite the wonderful PR and public image — bold is not one of their strengths in this circumstance, and realistically the STUC proposed alternatives weren’t really radical either — it just demanded enough of a spine to carry them out.
However, as the Marxist Notes on Music columnist, I’ll focus primarily on yet another attack on culture. The main cultural body funded directly by the Scottish government, Creative Scotland, had their fund cut by £7 million, 10 per cent down on their 2022 funding. Depending on how you measure inflation, this means Creative Scotland would have been £4-10m short even if its budget remained unaltered.
More from this author
BEN LUNN draws attention to the way cultural expressions of solidarity with Palestinians in the UK are being censored by Israeli-sponsored lawfare
BEN LUNN reports from a new music festival in New York, and singles out a breathtaking composition that protests directly against femicide in Mexico
The centenary of his birth is a chance to assess the remarkable combination of Marxism, activism and modernism in the works of Luigi Nono
As the debate around voluntary euthanasia returns, we now have some seriously disturbing evidence from those places where it has become recently legalised to convince us that Britain is not ready, argues BEN LUNN