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Reviews

Fame Academy – Mercury

Like everyone else, if I crave the society of other adults, I'll have to pretend this is abhorrent. (Really, it's just so-so). Yet, if the Beeb had had the balls to spotlight the rebels in the camp instead of pushing the show into a karaoke niche none of the kids fancied, it could've been more grotesquely compelling than Big Brother's Jade in her porcine pomp. Ainslie, for one, had it in him to be an irritating iconoclast of some pluck, and even the toothsome David was drunkenly bitching like a trouper till he twigged he was actually going to win the thing and played safe.

John Coltrane

A sax supreme

Various Artists – At Least You Can Die With A Smile On Your Face

Twenty-two-track sampler from eclectic art-rock label

Their first two EPs on CD, at last

Satellite Of Love

Soderbergh does sci-fi; Clooney does soul-searching

The Prisoner 35th Anniversary Companion

On this "Special Edition" DVD you get a wealth of biographical information and visual material, as well as a Renault 21 TV ad based on this legendary Cold War-era feast for late-'60s conspiracy theorists. The holy grail for Prisoner fanatics, however, is a rough-cut, alternative version of episode one, "Arrival", never officially available before, featuring different intro music.

Lovely And Amazing

Touted as 'Sex & The City: The Movie', as Nicole Holofcener often directs the series, this nervy comedy's actually closer in neurotic spirit to her earlier, excellent Walking And Talking. Catherine Keener stars, but Brenda Blethyn's mugging threatens to upset the work of Jake Gyllenhaal and Emily Mortimer. Women on the verge.

The Hound Of The Baskervilles

Awful slapstick version of Conan Doyle's tale from 1978, with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore (as Holmes and Watson) recycling old sketches badly as they head up a cast of vintage British comic talent (Kenneth Williams, Irene Handl, Max Wall). It's basically 'Carry On Sherlock', and it does the memory of all concerned no favours. DVD EXTRAS: Trailer, biographies, interview with director Paul Morrissey. Rating Star

Grand Mal – Bad Timing

NYC fivesome get their rocks off. Dave Fridmann produces

Pleasure And Pane

With Mushroom having left the band and Daddy G taking a sabbatical from the studio to concentrate on family life, it falls to Robert Del Naja (3D) to carry forward Massive Attack into the beyond, in collaboration with Neil Davidge, the producer of their third album Mezzanine (1998). Without Mezzanine's layers of guitar, which left some Massive Attack lovers narrowing their eyes doubtfully, 100 Windows seems at first subdued. Much as shapes only gradually reveal themselves in an initially pitch black room, so it is with this album, which takes a few listens to become accustomed to.
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