The Streets, Royal Festival Hall review: Mike Skinner goes high culture

Had it come to this? One of UK garage's most celebrated auteurs orchestrating visual prompts to get his usually rave-ready audience on their feet? As someone this reviewer last saw lobbing his shoes into the Ally Pally audience and then crowd-surfing out to retrieve them, Skinner was always going to feel hemmed in by the seated austerity of the Southbank's "Brutalist utopia" (although the description fits most of his beats too). He emerged to the sirens, emergency lights, operatic wails and synth-goth strings of Turn the Page in chatty but warily reverent mood: 'I imagine this is what it's like being in Hamilton,' he said as the theatrical setting hit home, 'we should be watching a classical concert.' As days in the life of geezers go, this was a proud but imposing one.

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

Evening Standard

13-06-2025

• Evening Standard

The Streets, Royal Festival Hall review: Mike Skinner goes high culture

Had it come to this? One of UK garage's most celebrated auteurs orchestrating visual prompts to get his usually rave-ready audience on their feet? As someone this reviewer last saw lobbing his shoes into the Ally Pally audience and then crowd-surfing out to retrieve them, Skinner was always going to feel hemmed in by the seated austerity of the Southbank's "Brutalist utopia" (although the description fits most of his beats too). He emerged to the sirens, emergency lights, operatic wails and synth-goth strings of Turn the Page in chatty but warily reverent mood: 'I imagine this is what it's like being in Hamilton,' he said as the theatrical setting hit home, 'we should be watching a classical concert.' As days in the life of geezers go, this was a proud but imposing one.

Telegraph

29-05-2025

• Telegraph

Iggy Pop: 78 years old and still shirtless, still sensational

An upended coffin stood ominously stage left, as Iggy Pop (now 78), who notoriously cheated death with his hard-drugs habits well into middle age, slunk onstage and tore off his skimpy leather waistcoat to perform, as ever, topless. While his excellent younger band blasted forth a headlong TV Eye, a menacing grind that Iggy first created with his chaotic first band The Stooges in 1970, later to influence punk rockers of every stripe, the wrinkly-torso'd singer slipped his cordless microphone suggestively inside the waist of his black slacks. As he lolloped around up there, in what proved a terrific and explicitly life-affirming show, it was hard to forget his incorrigible antics as a performer over the years: as recently as the mid-2010s, Iggy, né James Newell Osterberg, was nightly defying doctor's orders by hurling himself repeatedly into the crowd, exacerbating his spinal scoliosis, and necessitating hip replacements. For six decades now, he has been reliably deranged in his commitment to performative shock and awe, a consistency, through all the craziness, that has made him one of rock's most enduring live attractions. Certainly, I'd place at least five or six Iggy shows in the Top Ten rock gigs I ever attended. But now that the stagediving has stopped and Stooges reunions are no longer possible, I did wonder beforehand how this incandescent stage presence can keep going deeper into his pensionable years. Inside Ally Pally's cavernous 10,000-capacity Great Hall, such doubts were quickly blown aside. As his two guitarists, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Nick Zinner, and Cuban-Argentinian femme-punk from Miami Ale Campos, joyfully clanged forth another iconic proto-punk riff, from 1973's Raw Power, brutally accented by a two-piece brass section, a pattern formed of Iggy's outright bangers ringing out in high-intensity performances, which plainly galvanised the man himself. Following a massed singalong of The Passenger's la-la-la chorus, he told the audience, 'F---ing bless you!', and his propulsive rhythm section then thumped forth the robust beat to Lust For Life, also from his mid-'70s Berlin period alongside David Bowie. Make no mistake, these were electrifying versions of Iggy's classics: in the here and now, at full pelt, with our diminutive hero by turns purring adorably like a benign monarch, and, on a feral, wailing-brass I Wanna Be Your Dog, yowling like a teenage delinquent. And just to remind us how lucky we all were to experience this, there was that coffin looming as a signifier of Iggy's survival after lifelong self-destruction. 'This is what it was like to be young in 1970', he announced before The Stooges' 1970, and as its heedless lyrics, 'Out of my mind on Saturday night/ I feel alright, I feel alright', resounded, it felt mighty good in 2025, too – the most fun this writer has had in many months. After two hours onstage, Iggy toyed with the coffin door, and finally, during his familiar cover of the early rock'n'roll standard Real Wild Child (Wild One), he hopped inside, snaking out an arm to wave comically. He then jumped out and, to huge applause, gestured that he wasn't ready to accept that fate any time soon.

The Review Geek

27-05-2025

• The Review Geek

Lazarus Episode 9 Preview: Release Date, Time & Where To Watch

Lazarus Lazarus takes place in the utopian year of 2052. A genius neuroscientist by the name of Dr. Skinner has discovered a miracle analgesic drug known as Hapna, completely relieving the user of any pain. After inexplicably disappearing, we cut forward three years later, where Dr Skinner resurfaces to the public in an online video. He announce that the drug has a three-year half-life and soon everyone who has taken it will die. As a result of this, a task force of five agents is assembled to locate Skinner and create a vaccine. Its name? Lazarus. If you've been following this anime, you may be curious to find out when the next episode will be released. Well, wonder no more! Here is everything you need to know about episode 9 of Lazarus, including the release date, time, and where you can watch this. Where Can I Watch Lazarus? Lazarus is airing in Japan on TXN (TV Tokyo) and Animax. It is also available to stream on Adultswim and HBO Max for those in the US and other territories, along with airing for free on Channel 4 for those in the UK! Lazarus Episode 9 Release Date Lazarus Episode 9 will debut on Sunday 1st June at approximately 9pm (ET)/ 12am (ET) and 5am (GMT). Episodes will then drop every week at the same time each week. Of course, it's really dependent on how quickly the platform uploads new episodes. Expect this to be pretty close to the release time though. Lazarus is airing in the West with a pretty strange licencing agreement here. Warner Bros. Discovery have decided that the series will first premiere in English on Adult Swim, with a next-day upload on Max. Then, the Japanese with English subtitle version of the anime will debut in the United States on Adult Swim and Max 30 days after the English-language premiere. It's likely the same thing will occur in the UK too. How Many Episodes Will Lazarus Have? It has been announced that Lazarus will have 13 episodes in total, with one episode releasing a week. With all of that in mind, we have 4 more episodes left of this one! Is There A Trailer For Lazarus? Yes! You can find a trailer for Lazarus below. What do you hope to see as the series progresses? What's been your favorite moment of Lazarus so far? Let us know in the comments below!