Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 205

A Postcard From: Lisbon

Ah, the steep hills and winding gardens, the trolley-buses, the great spanning bridge, the earthquake. I must be in Lisbon. I could have added ‘the Fado’ and given the game away – that mellifluous, doom-laden guitar is never far from any street corner. But the first thing you notice is how Lisbon glitters. Its streets […]

Why You Can’t Bugger Up Hamlet

How many ways can you perform it? And why does it periodically take such a grip on Britain? The furore over Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet grew to fever pitch this summer, ‘To Be Or Not To Be’ shunted to the front of the play, then back, and tickets changing hands for absurd amounts. ‘Cumberbitches’, for God’s […]

English Peculiar: Mr Pastry

While I was staying in a very English cottage Kent last weekend, I noticed that the guest book pointed out other former residents, including Mr Pastry. This one is as peculiar as it gets, so stay with me. Britain was once awash in novelty acts, from the man who sang ‘Mule Train’ while bashing himself […]

The Tin Pan Alley Horror

Get ready to say goodbye to parts of Denmark Street, London’s Tin Pan Alley, where everyone from the Rolling Stones to the Sex Pistols tried out their guitars in the shops and studios. The demolition squads are heading for the street and its alleyways, including Denmark Place, a row of battered terraced houses off Charing […]

How I Decide What To Post

To anyone stumbling across this site the selection of subjects must seem random in the extreme. Actually it’s quite deliberately planned. I don’t carry advertising, and I don’t write much about politics or religion because I’m a confused liberal atheist who has watched the arrival and departure of a thousand political candidates with bemusement ever […]

New Heights Of Vulgarity

Just when it seems that London’s bling-property economy may be faltering (as reported in the press this week), the ‘developers’ of the new FutureSlums (sorry, ‘Luxury Loft Lifestyle’ Apartment Buildings) at South London’s Nine Elms are planning to bring to our fair city, or at least 1% of 1% of London, this hilarious Six Senses-style […]

The Bond Track Nobody Heard

While we’re talking about quirky soundtracks (oh, sorry, weren’t we?) the late sixties produced a lot of soundtracks with sung title themes, many of them extremely memorable and catchy earworms. First, here’s an audio Q&A of a song featuring Peter Sellars and The Hollies (does anyone remember them?) from the comedy caper ‘After The Fox’, […]

A New Theatre But Where’s The Fringe?

So there’s going to be a spiffy new 900-seat theatre beside Tower Bridge from Nicholas Hytner and Nick Starr, who oversaw 12 years of artistic and commercial success at the National,running the show. It’ll be the flagship home for the London Theatre Company and will operate entirely on a commercial basis with no subsidies or […]

Win The First Personalised Signed Copy Of ‘The Sand Men’

Here’s the pitch: In Dubai there’s a new world of high-end, high-luxury resorts emerging for the super-rich – but at what price to everyone else?Lea, Roy and their 15 year-old daughter Cara live in a gated community reserved for foreign workers. Roy has been hired to deal with teething problems at Dream World, a futuristic […]

The End Of The World Keeps Changing

In 1954 Richard Matheson wrote a science fiction novel called ‘I Am Legend’, about the only man on earth not afflicted with a kind of vampirism.In 1964, AIP made a cheap film version starring Vincent Price, acknowledged as the template for all ‘living dead’ movies that followed. In 1968 ‘The Omega Man’ was the second […]