On my culture radar this month July 2025.

Music, Theatre.

We’ve been to lots of shows this month, mainly big outdoors ones, which I love for their sense of occasion and collective joy. I am not sure that there’s a huge amount of point in me telling you about things that have already happened, so suffice to say I loved LCD Soundsystem who have never sounded so good, as well as Massive Attack, Fontaines DC, Kneecap.

I saw The Royal Shakespeare Company’s Hamlet/Hail to the Thief which mixes the Bard’s tragedy with Radiohead’s frenetic (underrated) masterpiece with unbelievably successful results.

This is part play, part musical/dance, part art piece. It has finished at Stratford, but someone told me that it will be transferring to London, so keep an eye out.

I will go again.

Talking of transfers, the play Stereophonic has arrived in London. We saw it in New York and really enjoyed it. It’s a sort of imagined Fleetwood Mac story with music by one of the members of Arcade Fire.

There’s an interesting new version of The Cure’s latest album called Mixes of a Lost World which includes mixes by Orbital, Daniel Avery and most notably Four Tet.

The original album is terrific, but I found it almost too dark and so it’s good to hear some slightly fresher and more colourful versions of these exceptional songs, even if many of the mixes fall a little flat.

And there is a new song by Hot Chip, in anticipation of their greatest hits which comes out in September.

Next month I’ll write about Kevin Rowland’s (of Dexys) memoir, which blew my mind open, but for which I don’t have time here, though I have been listening to some of his masterful music recently.

All of this and more is on my playlist.

Oh, I almost forgot, David Byrne is touring a new show next year. His last, American Utopia, was so extraordinary that I urge you to consider this. There seem to be a few tickets left as I write.

Books.

Highly Recommended.

Geoff Dyer. Homework.

This is a wonderful memoir by one of our greatest living essayists (if you haven’t read Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered then do so, the chapter about getting stoned in Amsterdam is the funniest thing I have ever read).

Dyer was born in 1958 and so a childhood memoir like this will inevitably appeal to those of us who grew up in the 1970s and ‘80s but it has much wider appeal than that, and I have bought a copy for our youngest, Felix (mid 20s).

Funny, honest, tender, wise, with wider reflections on what the author sees as the decline of England itself, this is a masterpiece and shares much with Don Patterson’s Toy Fights which I raved about here recently.

Highly Recommended.

Elizabeth O’Connor. Whale Fall.

This is a short, poetic and deeply atmospheric story set on an island off the Welsh Coast in 1938 and following the life of a young girl and her family as a whale is stranded on the beach and two strange, manipulative anthropologists arrive to ‘study’ the island.

It’s great!

Proceed with Caution.

Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser.

Sometimes I don’t think I am clever enough for certain books or perhaps I would understand what was going on if I had read English at university. This is always being tempered by the sense that perhaps a particularly clever book is in fact a bit Emperor’s New Clothes. This is one such book and I mention this here as a qualified recommendation.

It’s an experimental novel, so don’t expect anything conventional, and if the words ‘experimental’ and ‘novel’ don’t sit comfortably together for you then avoid it.

It starts out as a straight-seeming story and then abruptly stops and becomes a sort of fictionalised autobiography set against some actual, true-life happenings.

Now I write this it sounds unbearably pretentious; a sort of deconstructed novel, but the author is widely admired and there are some very interesting things here, so have a look if this appeals.

Audiobooks.

Cecil Beaton by Hugo Vickers.

Listen Here.

This is mammoth (nearly 30 hours long) but also masterful and I found it way more palatable than the book which I have never managed to get the whole way through.

As you may know, I have been building an exhibition on Beaton this year* and this is incredibly helpful; eloquent, shocking, funny, detail-obsessed, objective, subjective, thorough and very entertaining. I recommend it highly.

*Find out more about the exhibition below.

I enjoyed The Optimist and The Believer by David Coggins which are about his global travels as a fly fisherman. They’re part travel journal, part investigation of obsession and part a sort of modern gentleman’s manifesto for living, and they make for terrific and very easy listening.

Caveat.

I then listened to same author’s Men and Style which I do not recommend. Enough said.

Essential.

Finally, don’t forget The Summer Exhibition at The Royal Academy, which runs until 17 August and is as wonderful as ever.

Over and out.

Charlie x