Tribune – Comment, news and reviews from Britain's democratic left

Jazz In The City
Jazz FM

Living World
Radio 4

In the face of overwhelming populist adoration, I feel inadequate sometimes, because I loathe much of the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper album, I recoil at the hyperbole layered onto the lives and works of Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley, I have developed a serious suspicion of marketing manipulation to canonise musicians and performers and, particularly, in the context of this review, I just don’t get Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue album – a somewhat sacred recording to aficionados, but as dull as dull can be in patches. I remember getting involved in a major argument with a jazz fan who summarised that I was just being deaf, blind and stupid. In his own rebellious, non-politically-correct way, he may be right. Even cool jazz fans are prone to anger, man.

Pitt the Elder: Man of War by Edward Pearce
Bodley Head, £25

William Pitt the Elder, subject of this biography, was the grandson of Thomas Pitt, member of a sound Dorset family, who was an independent trader, merchant and chancer in Bengal at the close of the 17th century and who sank his profits into purchasing a large diamond, the size of an egg. After cutting and polishing, it was sold in 1717 to adorn the crown of Louis XV and fetched £135,000, yielding a profit of 450 per cent. He became known as Diamond Pitt, founder of the family’s fortunes. And so we come to William Pitt the Elder, the Great Commoner, Lord Chatham, immortal imperialist. I knew him well from my boyhood cigarette card collection, in a series of 50, with a stick-in album, called Builders of Empire.

Inside Out by Peter Watt
Biteback, £16.99

The Labour Party has had some highly distinguished and effective general secretaries. Peter Watt was not one of them. I remember the first press conference given by Larry Whitty when he took over that post at an impossibly difficult time and being impressed by his quiet efficiency. Then there was Tom Sawyer, brought in by Tony Blair to prepare the party for the 1997 general election, to be followed by Margaret McDonagh, who managed to achieve an even better result.

The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis
Jonathan Cape, £18.99

Martin Amis attracts criticism – hostile, usually, and condemnatory rather than constructive – like a searingly bright flame attracts a moth. Maybe it’s because he’s clever – the congratulatory first in English at Exeter College, Oxford – although one of the headmasters at one of the longish list of secondary schools he attended famously described him as “unusually unpromising”. Maybe it’s because his father was a successful man of letters, although Sir Kingsley famously showed little interest in his son’s work. “I can point out the exact place where he stopped and sent Money twirling through the air; that’s where the character named Martin Amis comes in”, Martin told the New York Times. “Breaking the rules, buggering about with the reader, drawing attention to himself”, was his father’s damning verdict on the book. Maybe it’s the early success. His first novel, The Rachel Papers, published in 1973 when he was 24, won the Somerset Maugham Award and at 27 he was editing the books pages of the New Statesman. He arrived in the literary world fully formed and, as William Wordsworth put it in Intimations of Immortality, trailing clouds of glory.

Percy Jackson & The Lightning Thief
Director: Chris Columbus

Holy Water
Director: Tom Reeve

Stealing the thunder from the forthcoming remake of Clash of the Titans is the Greek mythology-inspired Percy Jackson & The Lightning Thief, adapted – and then some – from the first of a series of books by Rick Riordan. In it, the titular teenager (Logan Lerman) who does not know his real dad – sound familiar? – discovers that he has magic powers that allow him to control water. Percy is in fact a demi-god, the son of Poseidon (Kevin McKidd). Brother gods Zeus (Sean Bean), Hades (Steve Coogan) and any number of creatures want him for a crime he did not commit, namely, the theft of a lightning bolt, the source of Zeus’ power.

Sculpture since 1960
Tate Britain, London

Something fundamental happened to sculpture in the early 1960s. In line with other radical changes of that memorable decade, sculpture was not immune to a fundamental revolution. Among other things, artists abandoned the traditional plinth that isolated and elevated sculpture in favour of placing it directly on the ground, objects that rejected the formal convention in favour of a more relaxed, more accessible approach. This move sparked a more experimental attitude to the making and understanding of what sculpture could be, causing a rupture from earlier modernist traditions. Sweeping changes were the use of everyday objects – be they as diverse as rope, glass bottles or old mattresses – and the abandonment of any straightforward representation of the figure in favour of more abstract work.

The Whisky Taster
Bush Theatre, London

Advertising has always had a bad press. I mean, isn’t it the role of adverts to sell goods to people who don’t want them, have never even heard of them and certainly can’t afford them? Still, someone has to work in advertising and the main characters in James Graham’s empathetic and engaging new play, The Whisky Taster, are certainly more appealing than the admen of legend.