CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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2021 Round-up with ANDY HEDGECOCK
From poets John Cooper Clarke and Mike Garry to Jackson Browne, the magnificent Paula Rego the nail-biting, futuristic Kevin Core radio drama: Welcome to MedPatch and The American Way anthology, edited by Orsola Casagrande and Ra Page, which tackles 20 examples of US belligerence
REMARKABLE: (L to R) The Dance (1988); The Policeman's Daughter (1987)
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
POETRY in Performance: John Cooper Clarke/Mike Garry. I’ve been hooked on Cooper Clarke’s acerbic, melodic and riotously funny poetry since my teens, when he battled a hostile and baffled audience as the support act for Be Bop Deluxe.
Forty-three years later, his performance was as brilliantly shambolic as ever, peppered with jokes blending compassion and comic cruelty with the same energy and panache as his poems.
His obsessions are pop culture, urban decay and the absurdities of the human condition; his influences are rap, the American beats and the wordplay of Roger McGough.
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