We’ve all had one of those nights, maybe in Wahoo, or Parkend or even for those of you with more questionable standards, next to a kebab van, where you make an acquaintance, have a predictable (often slurred) conversation and maybe even swap numbers. But what if you wrote your number down? And what if the piece of paper you wrote it on was worth £72 million? 

This is one of the many dilemmas which Rose, Alan, Becky, Mandy and Tom have to face in the first instalment of BBC One’s The Syndicate. Kay Mellor’s creation has returned for a second series with a brand new syndicate comprising staff from St. Anthony’s Hospital. This isn’t just any old syndicate though, with the likes of Alison Steadman (Gavin and Stacey, Fat Friends), Mark Addy (Game of Thrones, The Full Monty) and Siobhan Finneran (aka O’Brien from Downton Abbey) making this a quality cast with clout. 

As usual, Mellor doesn’t scrimp on character development and the first episode of this series plunges us into the lives of the lucky five, hinting all the while that things are not quite as rosy as they look. Alan is a weed-growing, ex-alcoholic, Becky has a young daughter and too many expenses, and Becky’s mum Mandy, whilst the happiest NHS worker on record, has an abusive husband making her marriage miserable. 

What sets The Syndicate apart from other BBC drama is quite simply the writing. Mellor’s ability to take everyday people, make them convincing, make them interesting, and spin them together in such a way that within the space of an hour the audience are repeatedly and alternately laughing and crying is what really makes this programme the fantastic watch that it is. Don’t be fooled, this isn’t just a snapshot of everyday life. Everyone knows someone like ‘Fat Freda’ who works in the shop, and a laugh will be secured every time, but beyond this there are real questions being asked, like how much would your life really change? Is it fair to give bitter Helen a share in the winnings even though she left the syndicate? Would you still turn up for work the next day? And this is just the first episode!

In a similar way to the last series of The Syndicate, each week focuses on an individual from the group, with the second episode centring around Tom Bedford, who despite winning the lottery has still not got what he desires most: a baby. To complicate matters, Tom doesn’t know the whereabouts of his real father, who walked out on his mother and him when he was ten, and to make things worse, Tom’s closest friends get an attack of the green-eyed monster which reaches boiling point in the local pub. Amongst all of this, some of the gaps start to get filled in from the first episode, with scenes which will question any previous sympathy we might have had for bitter Helen and contain more hints of the extent of Mandy’s violent marriage to Steve. 

At just two episodes in, if you’re not already following The Syndicate it’s well worth catching up. The stage is set but there’s a lot more to come from Mellor’s latest set of winners for whom money certainly isn’t solving everything. I know I won’t be missing a minute…

The Syndicate is on BBC One, Tuesdays, 9pm.

A few months ago, Nathan Williams of Wavves uploaded an image onto Instagram with the caption ‘nu album cover’. It was a parody of the cover of KoЯn’s 1999 album, Issues, and its name was cribbed from TLC’s Crazy Sexy Cool. NME didn’t realise that it was a joke and ran a story on Wavves’ nu-metal and R&B influences. It was very funny, and everybody laughed, Nathan Williams most of all.

Wavves have come a long way from writing the lo-fi, no-bass, garage-rock-that-was-literally-recorded-in-a-garage of 2009’s Wavvves. Just a year later King of the Beach was produced by Dennis Herring, having worked for giants such as Modest Mouse, Costello and Counting Crows (he also worked for The Hives but I’m not sure they count as a ‘giant’). Wavves’ newest LP, however, Afraid of Heights, saw supervision from none other than John Hill. He’s worked with Rihanna. But despite the big boys in the studio watching over their shoulders, I think that Wavves essentially have the same attitude they did in 2009. The fuzz might have cleared up, but as twitter has showed us, Williams has no clear intentions of growing up too quickly, and bassist Stephen Pope still has some of the most teenager-y hair I’ve ever seen on a man (it’s spectacular, by the way). Sony’s just given them a lot of money to do what they do, and we all know what everyone spends their money on in California.  Pope, with his flowing locks, told MTV that the band would regularly drink with producer Hill till 2 or 3 in the morning, possibly explaining why the album took a year to record. They’re still writing songs about dropping out, growing up and getting fucked up, now it’s just from the position of established musicians.

The opening song, ‘Sail to the Sun’, whilst being about weed, is about more than just dank nugs, with Nathan William’s plaintive cry doing an excellent job of articulating some of the angst that goes along with acting out – “I don’t wanna get left behind… I’m gonna pick you up in my arms, give you all my love / First we gotta get high / And sail to the sun…” Their noisy brand of pop punk is book ended by sweet twinkly pitched percussion and dissonant guitar noise, before giving us the second single of the album, ‘Demon to Lean On’. The song itself is catchy as shit, we’d expect nothing less, and again the chorus delivers some adorable confessional lyrics, “Holding a gun to my head / So send me an angel / Or bury me deeply instead / with demons to lean on.” It’s pretty emo. But it’s earnest, just like the instrumentation. Now it’s not like anyone’s grandmother will be getting into Wavves, but there is something deeply endearing about their melodic garage, more careless than carefree, that crops up again in the album’s title track: “I think I’m dying / Maybe I’m thirsty / I think I must be drunk. / Woke up and found Jesus / I think I must be drunk.” Nathan Williams takes us through emotional territory, check out ‘Beat Me Up’ for a brilliant narrative on submissiveness in relationships that is, according to MTV, founded on his own encounters with some “Jersey Shore Armenian dudes”.

Afraid of Heights has its downers, with ‘Everything Is My Fault’ and ‘I Can’t Dream’ providing the Good Riddance relief to the Basket Case of the rest of the record, and whilst there’s enough variety to keep me from changing the music, there wasn’t exactly enough to keep me from tuning out from time to time. 2009’s Wavvves managed to do that through sheer coercion, along with how fun it made booze and bud sound. Don’t get me wrong, I think Afraid of Heights is a great album. It’s just not THAT great, y’know?  It’s nothing to write home about, unless by that you mean a wall post to your younger brother. But it’s not exactly like Nathan Williams set out a manifesto to reinvent the wheel. Or black metal. Or anything, for that matter.  It’s still a great record, and I doubt Wavves give a shit if I zone out whilst listening to it. It’s confessional, it’s catchy, and it’s made by stoners. What else was I expecting?

Preditah – 21 Seconds

The Brummy producer Preditah has kindly, er, “re-produced” this So Solid Crew jam, and I think this particular comment on SoundCloud sums the whole thing up: “for all those middle class salior (sic) shoe softies who rip da piss outa 21 seconds… Go and raid yer grannies shop…”

Word of advice – I wouldn’t listen to this on a laptop – it’s quite sparse without the lows. I think Preditah has the only aural watermark (at 1:12) that actually improves the songs he produces, and if for some god-forsaken reason he’s reading this, I’d just like to ask him to please use this for his next tape’s cover.

Demdike Stare – Collision

This track proves to be a something of a new direction for Demdike Stare, who have spent the most of their career sitting in a puddle of last.fm tags like ‘ambient’, ‘drone’, ‘dark ambient’, ‘dub’ and ‘experimental’. Needless to say this 8 minute monster delivers all of those, er, ‘qualities’, before punching you in the face 4 minutes in with a whole mess of breaks leaving them sounding like a slightly more restrained, yet much more relevant version of Venetian Snares.

Shlohmo – Bo Peep (Do U Right) feat. Jeremih

We have Adidas Originals and something called Yours Truly to thank for this one. I’m not quite sure what or who Yours Truly are, but it’s probably worth checking them out for putting Jeremih & Shlohmo in a room together. And as for the song, well, they did it again, and it’s just as good as the other one (which you should listen to now if you don’t know what I’m talking about). I’ll leave it at that, cos these tunes kinda speak for themselves.

L-Vis 1990 – Ballads EP (teaser)

This one isn’t exactly a song, it’s 3 clips from L-Vis 1990’s new EP, ‘Ballads’, forthcoming on his own label, Night Slugs on 2nd April. There’s a lot of nostalgia here. The first track sounds like how that Benga & Coki video looks, the second track reminds me of playing video games in school uniform, and the third track sounds like what would happen if Skinny Puppy managed to invent grime in the early 90s. It’s really good, isn’t it?

Phoenix – Entertainment (Blood Orange remix)

Um. This one’s absurd. This remix consists of Dev Hynes (Blood Orange) doing his mental ‘tumblr-era Prince’ thing, which generally involves making that French band sound a million times better than they are and having a, er, guitar solo that somehow sounds great in an R&B song that was made in 2013. Oh yeah, and it’s got Sugababes in it too.

Federico García Lorca referred to Yerma as a “tragic poem”.  In this recent translation from Ursula Rani Sarma, RADA brings us a moving and harrowing depiction of a woman’s slow descent into murderous insanity, propelled by her inability to conceive.  I expected great things from the final year acting students of one of the world’s best-known drama schools, and was not disappointed.  

Ella Prince’s performance as the eponymous protagonist was exceptionally poignant, coming into its own in the latter half of the play as the character’s composure slowly unravels. Yet even from the beginning, as a newlywed, happily picking flowers and delivering her husband’s lunch, Prince remarkably manages to convey a hint of the darkness that builds towards the play’s dramatic finale. Prince is supported by an equally impressive cast; other stand-out performances come from Heather Long as Maria, Naeem Hayat as Juan, and Cassie Layton as the old wise woman.  The chorus of local, gossiping townsfolk is powerful in conveying the social pressures faced by an infertile woman in 1930s Spain. 

Yerma translates as ‘barren’; a theme which permeates this production in content, set and sound. The infertility of the protagonist renders her a failure as a woman, in the eyes of both herself and those around her.  Her physicality is defined in terms of absence; “I feel two blows of a hammer here instead of my baby’s mouth”, she cries as she thumps her chest. The scenery is a further consolidation of Yerma’s fruitlessness; a simple set of staggered steps, covered in red, desert-like earth and with minimal props.  The music, performed alone by the impressive James Lascelles, is notably lacking in instrumental accompaniment. 

For the author Lorca, a man killed for his anti-fascist politics, his homosexuality, and his suspicion of religion, the play ostensibly lacks progressive solutions.  We are not led to challenge the view that the role of women is to produce children. The only character who forgives Yerma’s implied shortcoming is her irritating and unlikeable husband.  However, this failure to accord their childlessness its due importance, in Yerma’s eyes, is its very cause.  Rather than choosing to present us with an alternative, a strong woman who rejects the oppressive patriarchy, Lorca characteristically opts for a pessimistic presentation of society in its grim reality. 

Director Burt Caesar refers to the play as an “essentially apolitical work” in his production notes.  Whilst it is true that the pre-Spanish Civil war tensions are notably absent from this work, important social questions, which are deeply political, are raised through the script.  The play is more than just a “tragic poem”; examining tensions between religion and secularity, the role of women, and the oppressive nature of peasant society during that period. 

Overall, a powerful performance on all accounts.  Sadly, this run has now finished, but you can catch the same bunch in London in their summer productions of Love for Love, When She Danced and Phaedra’s Love; head to RADA’s website for more details. 

★★★★☆


Four Stars

Rae Morris’ press release assures me that the Blackpudlian songstress is “following her incredible year touring the UK and Europe in 2012” with visits to major cities across the country. The venues she is to play are named with the gravity and urgency of a Royal Navy recruitment advert: Hebden Bridge, Newcastle, Glasgow, You Live, You Move, You Grow, You Fight. Rae Morris, I am assured, is making significant movements.

It is a shame, then, that From Above, the title track of her debut EP, seems to eschew any signs of progress or meaningful development. Doleful piano chords, lifted wholesale from a tearful X Factor montage, do little to illuminate Morris’ moon-eyed emotional sloganeering, redolent of a less quirky – less quirky – Ellie Goulding. Despite repeatedly noting a need to “open up her heart“, Morris gives us nothing arresting, nothing rousing, and really, nothing at all. The song’s lack of discernible structure, rather than giving it freedom, renders it hopelessly one-paced; feeble drum breaks and spidery, irritating riffs, too, are tangibly inorganic.

This single is not so much flat-out awful as uninspiring, and Rae Morris might yet move on to better things. The road is long.