To rescue Kahlo from the clutches of the corporate art market, we need to acknowledge the overt and covert political dimensions of the work, demands GAVIN O’TOOLE
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Album reviews with Tony Burke: August 7, 2023
Reviews of Starvation Box, A Raven For A Dove and Shake That Thing - The Blues In Britain 1963 - 1973
If you can see past the relentless commodification you will be rewarded by enormously powerful work, suggests JENNY MITCHELL
CHRIS SEARLE revels in the one-off collaboration between an American polymath and a British Muslim, and detects the presence of their revolutionary forebear
GORDON PARSONS revels in an ebullient production of Shakespeare’s magical comedy
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a thoughtful analysis of the Erdogan regime, viewed through the evolving history of a neighbourhood in Istanbul
GORDON PARSONS regrets the price, but is dazzled by an outstandingly ambitious study of the way art restoration in particular, and culture in general was weaponised by the Nazis
Starvation Box
Dale Watson
(Cleopatra Records)
★★★★
THIS stripped-down set from Dale Watson is named after the description Lead Belly’s father gave to his son’s 12 string guitar — a dire warning that playing it would only bring abject poverty.
Watson said: “Living in Marshall, Texas, where Lead Belly lived, led me to a 1957 Stella 12-string guitar just like Lead Belly had. I knew I had to write the song as an ode to him.”
Among the excellent songs are an opus to Elvis’s mechanic Billy Strawn (an honest man who returned a $100 bill dropped by Elvis, with the result that Strawn became Elvis’s full-time car mechanic), a gospel pew burner Ain’t Nobody Everybody Loved, a country duet with Celine Lee on Two Peas In A Pod and a cover of blues singer Percy Mayfield’s Stranger In My Home Town.
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