Skyfall (James Bond) -exclusive review

It's rather good, isn't it?

The Machine, Florence and I

Not too many contemporary artists have grabbed my attention, as of late. I've long since been out of touch with current chart music, and most of my listening seems to be cramming the forty years of music that was around before I was born.

But I have found a soft spot for Florence + the Machine. They're one of those bands who I had heard a track somewhere (probably on an advert - they're used all the time, on the BBC especially), perhaps before they had hit the big time. And then, lately, I discovered their other work...

The songs are very catchy - honestly, the only reason I got the likes of Cosmic Love out of my head was because Drumming Song replaced it. And whilst they don't all claim to be outright musical classics, the sort-of arty rocky style with nice vocals fits in with some of my other likes.

Lungs - the first album - rather feels like a collection of singles created at various stages of the band's development. The style ranges from almost acoustic, to the more typical big numbers with lots of choirs and string and drums. (ooh, get me for being technical!) As I said earlier, many of these are catchy - and those that aren't are memorable for their introspective, offbeat tone.

At the time Ceremonials was released, I was only just getting into Lungs. I listened to a couple - and apart  from the leading (and best) track No Light, No Light, they didn't really catch with me as much as the previous album. A few months down the line, though, I went back and listened to the whole album.

You can kinda see why I didn't immediately warm to it. The tone is more consistent, more grown-up - and thereby less fun, and less flashy. It's definitely an album rather than having five or six wildly divergent singles (although plenty of singles have been released - so maybe that's just me). And on first listen, they probably all sound very similar indeed.

All music is subjective, and every song, after the second or third listen, becomes a form of nostalgia and memory. Once you've listened to a track twenty times, it's hard to gauge whether you liked it in the first place. But perhaps the most important thing is that you're not bored with it - that's great! And you won't get bored with Ceremonials - it's very deep.

Most of the songs seem to either be about failed relationships, or just enjoying yourself (shot through a particularly strange prism, of course) - or an oft-quoted time when Florence Welch was underwater (see What the Water Gave Me, Blinding, Swimming, Drumming Song...). Nonetheless, there's plenty of diversity here. As to my favourites, No Light, No Light always makes something inside me do somersaults with its dynamics and drumming; and the likes of Seven Devils, Rabbit Heart, My Boy Builds Coffins and Howl are pretty odd and dark lyrically, but great to listen to. Plenty of songs stick in the mind. And particularly good are Heavy in your Arms and Strangeness and Charm from the Between Two Lungs bonus tracks - although there's some rather out of place 'remixes' on there, which seem at odds with the genre being explored in the original songs.

I haven't seen them live - but oh, I'd like to, actually. With the next album being a year or so off, whatever happens with it, whatever the style they choose to take, you can be sure it'll be personal.

That said, Kiss with a Fist leaves me cold. As a song, it's simple, fast, and a bit catchy, an early piece. But the subject material - domestic violence, basically - isn't so suitable.

(As an afterthought... another one of those bands that 'hit the big time' after I've heard a track or two would be Mumford & Sons... but I've never quite got into them. And they definitely have a repeated style! Maybe I'm lacking in love for folk music)

Five Quite Boring Things I've Started Doing Recently

For the most part, third year university life for me is much the same as second year university life was. Lectures, bus trips, problem sheets, filling mind-numbing gaps in the day... (but not, unfortunately, an offered job supervising first-years - shame.) But I did think of a few changes that I've started getting used to:

1. Drinking tea.
   
   Yes, for preposterous reasons, I'd never tried tea until a few months back. Obviously this was letting the side down for Britain, especially given my taste for coffee. But it's actually rather nice at four o'clock, as a mild, hot, cosy beverage. Even if I don't go quite as far as putting lemon with it.
   
   
   
2.  Fresh bread.
   
   Okay, so whilst I live with other people, I shop and cook predominantly for myself. And buy food for myself. For the first two years, I bought a loaf of bread a week. Now, I'm finding myself buying two smaller loaves, and fresh ones at that. It always tastes pretty good, especially the crusts, and it doesn't work out much more expensive. And in theory, this means I can get round the problem of having stale bread left at the end of the week! Result. (Tip: take packed lunches! It's so much cheaper!)
   
   
   
   
3.  Warming up last night's dinner
   
   There's plenty of advice out there, in our days of extra convenience, with the inventions of microwaves and freezers. Why not cook a great big batch of food, so you don't have to bother to cook it tomorrow? Yeah - but what if I actually like cooking? Or, if I try something new (heaven forbid!) and mess it up the first time around?
   Cooking for one is always going to be harder - although you don't hear so many complaints. (You should try cooking for six, in my first year! But at least then I only had to cook once a week!) In the past, yeah, I've cooked double and saved the other half for the next day. But then we come to days I have to stay at Uni late - far too late to postpone dinner. And I'm a three-square-meals-a-day man. Before, I used to just take another sandwich... which sounds a bit odd now I mention it. But this year, I've been using the (slightly dodgy) microwave on campus, and using a bit of forward thinking, heating up last night's pasta! Result! Even if it takes about half an hour to eat it with plastic cutlery.
   
   
   
   
4. Putting my hand up in lectures
   
   Because, obviously, I wouldn't be rude enough to call out. It's a tough thing to do when you're surrounded by a hundred (if not two hundred) other students, all watching a lecturer who's far more skilled and knowledgeable than you are. Hopefully. And who's, again hopefully, done the course before. And who rarely allows you to put a word in edgeways inbetween everybody copying things down. Normally you can tell a mistake has been made because people look puzzled, turn to the person next to them, ask whether that's a lambda, and then corrects it privately.
   You always have one mad individual in a year who asks the oddest but intelligent questions, which go far beyond the course... and I'm not them. For starters I'm too shy, and secondly, for me it's just pointing out possible mistakes in handwriting.
   But I do like to question things. Excessively and annoyingly, sometimes. I think it started in A Level - where I was conscious that I was one of the only ones asking for help. Not necessarily because I don't understand it, but often to clarify things too. My first inkling seems to be to ask daft things, rather than think it over when I have a spare minute. This carried on into tutorials - small groups of twenty people going over the homework, with the tutor talking about the work, and the rest of the group being in complete silence. Apart from me. (Tip: if you call out an answer though, try to actually have completed or attempted or even looked at the homework that week. Otherwise you may become very infuriating.)
   I'd like to think that, in a similarly sized lecture room, faced with a slightly incomprehensible but kind-hearted lecturer, I'm doing everybody else a favour by getting him to clarify a particular point. Even if there's still complete silence. Because if you don't understand something, chances are other people don't either.
   
   
   
5.  This blog
   
   Well, it's more expressive than Twitter. And I hope it's readable!

'Wolfblood' (CBBC)

I have to say, I didn't have particularly high expectations when I heard about the latest drama offering on the CBBC channel. That's not to say the quality across the board is bad - quite the reverse! Recently you've got offerings as diverse as Young Dracula, The Sparticle Mystery, Leonardo and The Sarah Jane Adventures. But a drama with werewolves? Hasn't that been done before? And how's that going to work for a children's - well, family - show?

Actually, the line 'a drama with werewolves' sums up the show nicely - it's a drama first, werewolves second. These are just ordinary kids - our hero Maddy, loyal Tom, geeky Shannon, and new boy, outsider Rhydian - at an ordinary school, albeit in a very picturesque location, dealing with ordinary problems. But then that's wrong... because they're not werewolves, they're Wolfbloods.

Ohh yeah, I'm a fan! It was a speedy conversion; from the first episode I knew that this was a good show. Looking at the series as a whole, despite the complex nature of the wolves, it's greatest strength is how true it is. Not only does it accurately portray school life, and not shying away from having unlikeable (but ultimately harmless) classmates, but it doesn't patronise the viewer, or insult our intelligence. Like life, it's got heart and humour as well as sensitive issues. A key plotline to the show is Shannon's passion about sightings of a wild beast on the moors. And the show tackles this head on, with Maddy coming ever nearer to having her secret found out. It reaches a head surprisingly early on in the series, and as a result really feels like the character's personal struggle, rather than a weekly plotline. These characters don't forget the previous episodes. Every week they grow and develop - as do the Wolfblood side of things.

There's plenty in this series to love. All the leads are excellent finds, and make the show seem effortless. Maddy's parents are both likeable and realistic, and are deservedly main characters. The CGI - for a CBBC show, especially - is phenomenal. In fact, the show's got a real feel to it - something I initially was worried about. Children running through wild woods, backed by wonderful folky music, is its mission statement (you'll never get the theme song out of your head!) - although there are plenty of ventures into the urban setting of human life.

Above all, it's a very satisfying series - including that finale - and it certainly wouldn't be out of place in my Nineties childhood, and that's probably the highest compliment. And it has been quickly, and rightfully, recommissioned! More Wolfblood? Yes please!

Agatha Christie's "Absent in the Spring"

Another Mary Westmacott - so I thought I'd blog about it. (I could make a habit of this!)

As ever, it's an emotionally engaging book - the contemporary review on the back compared it to Brief Encounter! - and, surprisingly considering the last one I read, fairly short.

Absent in the Spring was written in 1944 - ten years since her last book published under the name Mary Westmacott. It's a sizeable gap in a long career - inbetween she's done stage plays and many novels, including classics like The ABC Murders, Death on the Nile and the sublime And Then There Were None.

And she's also worked on her writing style. The book is written in a third-person narrative, but centred around a single main character and her reminiscences. A 'thoughts-and-all' approach, you could say. It's uncommon, but not unique - it brings to mind similar passages of a woman in the dock in Sad Cypress (1940) and perhaps Endless Night (1967 - although that's in the first person).

But perhaps it links in nicely with a lot of her novels, particularly the later ones - it focuses on memory. When Joan, a fifty-ish year old woman, gets stranded when travelling back from Baghdad (a place Christie was fond of - having based at least three of her novels around Iraq, some with an archeological flavour), she finds herself all alone, with little to do but to think about her life and to find her character.

The book is, basically, a character study - something Christie's very good at when she gets it right. And she does here. It's easy to relate and to imagine the middle-class wife and mother Joan, blind to her selfishness and her overprotective nature with regards to her children and her husband, the lawyer Rodney. (Personally, I "cast" in my mind Penelope Keith, and Paul Eddington in The Good Life - the comparison is quite a good one, and shows how familiar the characters seem!)

The stranded-in-the-East setting is, for the most part, merely window dressing, the icing on a surprisingly moreish cake. It's quite a readable and engaging book - what could seem like a very meandering, random series of flashbacks builds up into a jigsaw puzzle of the woman's life. Each character has a lot of room to grow, despite many never truly appearing - her grown-up children, the placated husband, a schoolfriend who's lived a completely different life. And just when you get tired of the format, there's a change - and she starts to see the bigger picture. All the scenes we've seen, with half-heard or ambigious lines - some of the more obvious than others - she finally gets what people see in her. It's a character study, but one coming from the outside world, and one sketched from qualities that she lacks, more than those she has.

Agatha Christie may be good at characters, but she's also good at plotting, and giving clues. Despite no crime being involved here, there's a lot of clues - the whole thing is, considering what little we know when both we and Joan start this journey. But a coherent plot? Luckily, Christie rescues it in an all-too-brief coda, as she finally gets home to see her family. But given what she now knows about herself, will she change for the better? It's a satisfying ending for a novel that, yes, is actually quite emotionally affecting.

The author's said that this novel felt satisfying to write - in three days hurried typing apparently! - but also written sincerely. As a reader and a reviewer, I can only agree.

Agatha Christie - 'Giant's Bread'

As you may or may not know, over the past three or four years, I've been reading the works of Agatha Christie. What started with dipping my toe into detective fiction, by reading the likes of 'Roger Akroyd', 'Death of the Nile' and 'Murder on the Orient Express', became the voracious task of trying to read all 80 odd of her works.

So now, after finally completing that task (well, nearly - I've still got a book of short stories to track down), I'm tackling some of her wider work; namely, the books written under the name of 'Mary Westmacott'.

They're often clubbed together - despite her having written them over the course of about thirty years, and with no common characters. And they're often dubbed 'romantic fiction' - despite there being few happy endings, even without the grisly murders...

So - 'Giant's Bread'. This was her first non-Crime novel, published in 1930, and it's quite an epic, being about double the word length of your standard Christie.

Perhaps unfortunately, I've read her second book, 'Unfinished Portrait', before this one - so I'm picking up on the apparent similarities of the two. But both, bar framing devices at the start, deal with the life and loves of their central character - in this case, Vernon Deyre.

We first meet him as a child, but quickly he grows up into a young man. Too quickly, you could say - as it's this child's perspective that Christie does rather well, dealing with imaginary friends and childhood games, but also topics like adultery, class, and deaths in the family, through a child's eyes. Yet still keeping the characters in focus - this is the rather selfish, troubled Vernon Deyre, not an idealised childhood.
She rightly uses it much more in 'Unfinished Portrait' - in which we see the girl, Celia, go from a young child, having governesses, moving abroad, going to finishing school... Here, there's a sudden jump from between the ages of about ten and twenty - missing out Vernon's schooling in Eton and Cambridge. Similarly later in the book, little is said about fighting in the (albeit fairly recent in the memory) Great War - instead, we're given the full scoop on the everyday life of VAD work. Well, they say write about what you know...

It's easy to see Agatha Christie's mark on these stories - even this one. Anyone who's read her early short stories will know her love of the opera. Here, Vernon is a musical genius, and although he struggles with his art, the composer of avante garde operas. One might say this reflects her own struggles with coming up with new novels (despite this being the start of a particularly fruitful era for her). Despite one or two laboured points - being scared of pianos gets a little bit forced - the musical side of things is done with conviction.

Whilst there's a particularly open ended prologue which doesn't give too much away, sadly the blurb - and many write-ups, do. It's a flaw of the novel that the plot point oft mentioned (being killed in the war, and his wife remarrying) only turns up in the final third of the book. That's not to say it's not good to read - it's mostly a breeze, despite me taking a couple of weeks with it - and not that there's unexpected moments. You're kept guessing at who Vernon will choose to marry - and for what reasons. Will it be his meek cousin Enid? The charmingly pretty Nell? Or the temptress singer Jane? Even though, from Vernon's point of view, it's not about love (or sex - which hardly gets a mention, discreet or otherwise) but about the music.

In terms of characters, you've also got his arty, rebellious cousin (almost sister) Joe, and neighbour-turned-best-friend, the Jewish wealthy Sebastian (who's surely the best choice for Vernon, no?). It's with him that Christie treads a fine line, from a modern perspective. On the one hand, having a main character who's Jewish - one of the strongest and most forefront in her books - is perhaps mould-breaking and championing. But on the other, he's a stereotype, down to the descriptions of yellow faces and loving of money, and a host of anti-Semetic remarks from other characters. But in the end, he's a stereotype with a heart, and a proper character of his own, so maybe it is a success.

Overall, it's a long meandering book, but as readable as most Christies happily are. There's some memorable characters, and a quite pessimistic tone - and whilst the ending isn't quite as fulfilling given the rest of the book, it's a good 'first' novel from the enigmatic Ms Westmacott.