“Why do you wanna listen what I got to say?” asks Seasick Steve on this album’s title track. The former hobo pensioner, embraced for his colourful backstory as much as his music, asks a good question. Songs about riding the freights, roaming the States, doing time and casual labour veer dangerously close to hollow self-parody, but when he sings of the present – driving about on his vintage John Deere tractor, and his wife and anchor, Elisabeth, we get the raw emotion he is famed for. Best of all is “The Banjo Song”, a mournful soliloquy on his wandering spirit as death moves ever closer.

This piece first appeared in Observer Review

It is the late 18th century and Mary Eleanor Bowes, great-great-great grandmother of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, future wife of George VI, is about to embark on her second marriage. But like a modern-day celebrity millionaire, Bowes is hostage to her vast fortune. Tricked by some elaborate play acting, she finds herself married into a relentless eight-year sentence of violence and mental torture. Wedlock is meticulously researched and Moore, mistress of suspense, writes in the gripping language of a thriller so the pages flash past. This book has it all – the blackest of villains, the strongest friendship, kidnap, abortions, riches and all completely true. Ripe for film adaptation.

This piece first appeared in Observer Review

Agnes Denes: Wheatfield – A Confrontation, 1982 Two acres of wheat planted and harvested in Battery Park landfill, downtown Manhattan. Commissioned by Public Art Fund, New York City. Photograph: © Agnes Denes. Courtesy the artist

Mounting an exhibition about the environment in one of the most built up, densely populated areas of one of the most built up, densely populated cities in the world may seem a provocative decision.  But this overdue survey of environmental art featuring 25 artists or collectives, from the big hitters of the Land Art movement to idealists and environmental crusaders is a perfect fit for London’s Barbican centre.

Built 27 years ago, and blown in on the same optimistic wind of Sixties idealism that gave birth to Land Art, the Barbican, all mass concrete and architectural ‘brutalism’ provides an oasis of calm amidst the urban sprawl; a contrasting backdrop against which to consider our relationship with nature.

Providing the centre-point of the exhibition is the work of Richard Buckminster Fuller, presented as the unlikely grandfather of the Land Art movement. Inside a wooden geodesic dome plays Modelling Universe (1976), a beautifully shot 15-minute interview in which the architect explains his philosophies and life’s work. Sharing his joy and wonder in nature and the universe Fuller explains; ‘I’m not trying to imitate nature, I’m trying to discover and employ the principles she’s using’. Baffled by the human penchant for building with cubes, Fuller examined the tessellated shapes and complex patterns found in nature, and invented a geodesic dome made of triangles; ‘the most stable shape in the universe’. Notable exceptions to the human cube fixation can of course be found among cultures living closest to nature: the yurts of the Central Asian nomads and the tipis of the Native American Indians, or the often rounded dwellings built by utopian communities in the Sixties and Seventies.

The latter are the inspiration for I Am So Sorry. Goodbye (2008) created outside in the Barbican courtyard by the British partnership Heather and Ivan Morison. The wooden structure consists of two interconnecting domes constructed from tessellated triangles, roughly clad with split logs and built using the same principles as Fuller’s dome. Inside there are tables and stools fashioned from logs and an invigilator serving hibiscus tea in little white china beakers. Nine of the triangles are left open, offering peepholes on to the lake and plants beyond. Designed as a ‘tea house’ this is the perfect hideaway to sit and chat or read to the sound of nearby rushing water as sunlight reflects off the water and ripples across the inside walls.

If some artists in this exhibition explore the serendipity found when humans understand and work with nature, others refer to what happens when we don’t. American artist Mark Dion’s Mobile Wilderness Unit – Wolf (2006) is a comment on our dangerous detachment from nature and the arrogance of believing we can treat it as a commodity. An artist interested in taxonomy and classification, Dion displays a stuffed wolf on a small open trailer; shiny silver, clean and utterly man made. The wolf stands on fake grass, moss and shrubbery – a pathetic recreation of its natural habitat. With no glass case surrounding the work, the viewer can stand millimetres away from the wolf and stare deep into its eyes. The effect is frightening and humbling; a reminder that nature isn’t a part-time leisure pursuit featuring Hunter wellies, tea lights and plastic garden chairs.

Similarly Simon Starling’s Island For Weeds (2003) highlights the human capability for foolishness when it comes to nature. Imported into the UK as an ornamental beauty in the late eighteenth century, rhododendrons have become so invasive in Scotland that they are now seen as a weed. Starling presents a floating island, offering ‘space for the rejected plant to grow freely’. The rhododendrons rest in their own personal flowerbed – a metal tray with floats ready to be pushed out into a lake and anchored with chain weights and oil drums.

Meter (2009) sees Scottish artist Anya Gallaccio bring an entire tree into the gallery – cut into sections, then reassembled and held in place with wire tethers, screws brutally rammed into the bark. Swedish artist Henrik Hakansson goes one step further and uproots an entire section of tropical rain forest. His Fallen Forest (2006) is tipped over so the trees appear to grow horizontally rather than vertically.

Bringing nature into an art gallery in this wholesale manner is certainly striking, but perhaps not the most enduring demonstration of the human appetite for environmental destruction. Expressing this with far more power is LA based collective The Center For Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), founded in 1994. The group exist to research and disseminate information about land through databases, lectures, bus tours, photographs and publications. Shown as part of Radical Nature, is The Trans Alaska Pipeline (2008) – 38 minutes of beautiful still images and brief text accompanied by an undulating cacophony of piano and strings. The group travelled the length of the 800-mile oil pipe taking photos from start to finish. Much like films such as Our Daily Bread, which shows various food processes from ground to plate, this documents a process key to human existence that most of us can only ever imagine.

The pipeline attracted much controversy when it was built in the early Seventies from environmental campaigners and native Alaskans, concerned both about wildlife and land rights. The film reveals that the public are not allowed access to the sea because of the oil drilling, while graffiti on the pipeline reads ‘You went too far north’. Although the text contains only bare facts about the pipeline, such as how many people work there and what shifts they do, the film grips and mesmerises with what seems like secret information, forcing us to question whether this is what’s best for the Alaskan wilderness.

The exhibition also contains examples of artists who play with nature, where the environmental agenda is often more understated. Interventions and interactions include remnants of the Joseph Beuys piece Honeypump In The Workplace (1977), in which he pumped honey through plastic tubes using a motor lubricated by margarine. The transformative, energy giving properties of these materials attracted Beuys in much the same way that the texture and temporality of rocks attracted perhaps one of the most revered Land Art practitioners; Robert Smithson. Film documentation of his Spiral Jetty (1970), the huge 15 foot wide now salt encrusted rock coil he created in the Great Salt Lake, Utah, is shown here alongside Yucatan Mirror Displacement (1969) – fragments of mirror photographed against the diverse colours and textures found in the forest of Yucatan, Mexico.

Also included is the early, less political work of the seminal German artist Hans Haacke; evolving pieces using liquids, seeds and animals. His mound of turf, Grass Grows (1969), is recreated here alongside photo documentation of work such as Ten Turtles Set Free (1970), in which he released endangered pet shop turtles back into the wild, Chickens Hatching (1969) and his Rhine Water Purification Plant (1972), which transformed the polluted water of the Rhine into water clean enough for goldfish to swim in.

Danish artist Tue Greenfort is perhaps the most playful practitioner exhibited here and the only one to investigate what happens when the tables turn and nature becomes dependant on the urban environment. His set of animal ‘self-portraits’, DaimlerstraBe 38 (2001), in which a frankfurter is planted as bait to lure a fox into detonating a hidden camera are a humorous delight.

Adding a political dimension to artistic interventions in nature are R&Sie (n), Paris based architects who take their cue from artists like Haacke and Smithson to create structures that grow and evolve. Symbiosishood (2009) is a proposal to cover a former minefield on the border of North and South Korea with an invasive plant, so that the site of such destruction becomes invisible and boundaries are blurred. Shown here are drawings, a three dimensional digital animation and a scale model of the site.

Human obsession with land owning and the prohibitive nature of planning permission is something that has increasingly concerned utopian groups and artists since the Sixties, with many who try to live at one with nature, such as the residents of Wales’s Teepee Valley and Tinker’s Bottom in Somerset being obstructed by the very governments who urge us to consume less and be more ecological.

The Ant Farm collective, active in San Francisco between 1968 and 1978 and most famous for their line of Cadillacs half buried in the desert, imagined alternative extra-territorial structures, such as their floating Dolphin Embassy (1974-8). The artists promoted their idea of interspecies communication to both humans and dolphins. Documentation, including drawings of the structure, promotional booklets, clothing, pin badges and business cards are all on display, alongside photographs of their efforts. In one Jim Nollman and Nancy Caldewood float on a raft in the sea of Cortez, Mexico, 1977, playing instruments to the dolphins. In another Doug Michels explains the idea with the use of a sketchpad to a dolphin in a tank. If their ultimate aim for humans and dolphins to communicate through ‘psychic methods’ seems faintly laughable and rooted in the outdated hippy ideals of their era, thirty years on their basic notion of human harmony with nature is undeniably mainstream.

Argentinean Tomas Saraceno also seeks to transcend borders and the concept of a nation state through his visions of alternative, often floating, utopias. 3 x 12 MW (2007/9) is part of his ‘airport city’ concept, a conjoined network of cells that use solar energy to float. With no border restrictions Saraceno imagines a world where synergy is encouraged between people and nations. The giant floating bubbles, crossed with ropes and weighed down with other bubbles filled with water, hover deliciously against the massive concrete pillars running through the gallery space.

Ideas about reclaiming land and taking on big business are nowhere better demonstrated than in Agnes Denes utterly breathtaking Wheatfield – A Confrontation (1982). The Hungarian artist planted and harvested two acres of wheat in New York, on land worth $4.5 bn, in the shadow of the city’s imposing financial district. Shown here are amazing photographs of the golden wheat juxtaposed against the statue of liberty and skyscrapers, including the twin towers. There are also beautiful conical ink drawings showing a fir forest planted by the artist in Finland – Tree Mountain (1992-96), but it is the astonishing image of Denes standing in the middle of her wheat field, staff in hand, the iconic New York skyline as her backdrop, which burns into the retina long after leaving the exhibition. The piece was recreated for this exhibition on wasteland in Dalston, east London.

Operating in New York at the same time as Denes was Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Her manifesto to celebrate and explore everyday processes led her to shake hands with every one of the city’s ‘sanmen’ and thank them personally for their work dealing with the city’s sewage, in her famous piece Touch Sanitation (1970-80). Exhibited here is her letter to the workers. ‘Thank you for keeping New York city alive!’ she writes, and invites the public to join her in thanking the workers by waving whenever they see them.

The ideas of Denes and Laderman Ukeles are brought up to date with the work of Lara Almarcegui and Luke Fowler. Spanish Almarcegui offers a slideshow and pamphlet detailing the wastelands of the Lea Valley, currently being redeveloped for the 2012 Olympics, while Glaswegian Fowler exhibits Bogman Palmjaguar (2007) a 30 minute film of interviews with a man diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic who passionately campaigns on behalf of the now drying out Flow country peat bog in the far north of Scotland.

The legacy of this exhibition is the work of Newton Harrison and Helen Mayer Harrison – a recreation of their 1972 piece Full Farm. As part of their commitment to only make work that benefits ecosystems, Full Farm is an installation of the crops needed to maintain a balanced diet. In raised wooden beds, tomatoes, beans, raspberries, courgettes, celeriac, beetroots and chard grow in orderly rows, whilst outside on the balcony a wild meadow has been planted for animals to feed on. In order to show the work, the Barbican had to agree to donate the garden to a local school after the exhibition closes. The piece is just one of the deeply moving, often joyful moments that radiate throughout the gallery.

While it may be short on ‘solutions’, by being open to the relationship between art and nature in all its forms the Barbican has triumphed. Radical Nature conveys not an angry, whining plea to recycle and grow your own, but rather a sense of hope that the rural and urban can be happy bedfellows, as long as we respect and understand that ultimately nature is top dog. A concept that’s not really so radical after all. As Fuller advised; ‘To continue on this planet, humans must comprehend the way nature works.’

This piece first appeared on artcornwall.org

They whipped up a storm with their haircuts, celebrity girlfriends and thrilling live performances, now the Dickensian undertaker lookalikes have changed their tune and embraced melody. The sparse, trashy garage rock of their debut has opened into a lighter, brighter experiment in new wave and distorted electronica. Chris Cunningham and Portishead’s Geoff Barrow produce, the influence of the latter heard most distinctly on seven-minute keyboard soundscape “Sea Within a Sea”. Faris Badwan presides majestically over this album of two halves, segueing from the pulsing discord of opener Mirror’s Image to the soaring grandeur of “Do You Remember?”

This piece first appeared in Observer Review

Scream Queen, by Hew Locke. Photograph: Courtesy of the Stephen Lawrence Gallery

This small but powerful survey of British art brings together work created over the past six years by nine artists based in the UK who all have at least one parent born outside Britain. Creating a perfect discourse between work and surroundings, the show explores British multiculturalism amid the buildings of Greenwich’s Old Naval College, with their long heritage of maritime and monarchy.

Beneath Wren’s dome in the imposing King William courtyard hang two of Chris Ofili’s Union Black flags, reimagined in red, green and black to represent black skin and African blood spilt over green land. Small yet defiant, they make a powerful political statement in a part of London steeped in slavery and black history.

In the only remaining part of the palace where Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and Mary I of Scotland were born, Seamus Harahan’s video splices footage of train journeys between Dublin and Belfast to question the notion of borders and a split Irish identity torn apart by religion.

Appearing throughout the work, the union flag provides a common link, with much of the work standing as an angry reaction against it and the British establishment. There is a Tracey Emin neon, Red, White and Fucking Blue, and two of Hew Locke’s menacing, acid-hued watercolours of the Queen’s head. Cai Yuan and Xi Juan Jun, the two artists who in 1999 famously jumped into Emin’s unmade bed, now exhibit alongside her, their photographic diptych proposing that the only way to be accepted as a citizen is to die fighting for Britain.

The mood is sombre, evoking the powerlessness of the oppressed against the might of British rule and rules. Unsurprisingly, there is little consensus to be had here about the multicultural British experience, nor is a new unified British identity proposed. Yet in challenging what it is to be British, these artists make the template less rigid for us all.

Being British, The Stephen Lawrence Gallery, London SE10

Starts 18 March Until 17 April Details: 020-8331 8260

This piece first appeared in the Observer Review

When she died at the age of 77 in 1982, Irmgard Keun left behind no memoirs. What she did leave, alongside a clutch of brilliant novels, was this delightful, harrowing account of her life between 1936 and 1940, in exile as an “immoral, anti-German” writer.

Keun’s masterstroke is to tell her story from the perspective of a nine-year-old girl. A headstrong, defiant child, Kully might not attend school, but she knows all about visas and passports and has an ever-expanding repertoire of languages.

While her father, the alcoholic and unreliable writer Peter (widely regarded as a portrait of Keun’s sometimes lover, the Austrian-Jewish novelist Joseph Roth) bluffs advances from publishers, pawns their belongings and begs from the rich, Kully and her sad, put-upon mother Annie camp out in hotel rooms, running up bills and hiding from the staff.

The trio are on an enforced grand tour of Europe rendered nightmarish by near-starvation, constantly expiring visas and the shadow of war. But in order to keep the credit coming, they must perpetuate the illusion of wealth by staying in the best hotels, eating in the finest restaurants and only ever travelling first class.

Keun captures Kully with such clarity that her words skip off the page. “It annoys me when people don’t hand over their money when we need it”, she says. “Money isn’t something that becomes unhappy or starts crying if you leave it.”

Written during Keun’s own exile, this is at once a historical record of prewar Europe and a glimpse into the chaotic life of an alcoholic. But the novel’s real power comes in capturing the freefalling anxiety of the displaced person, who cannot be homesick because home no longer exists.

This piece first appeared in the Observer Review

Dr Mellor is the Roma Gill fellow in English at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge; he specialises in modernism and Second World War literature. He teaches for several papers across the BA course and supervises dissertations on 19th- and 20th-century topics.

7am Wake up to the Today programme. Go to the gym, followed by breakfast with my girlfriend, a theatre director and translator.

8.45am Walk to college, which takes about 45 minutes.

10am Give a 50-minute lecture. I do about two a week, at the moment it’s literature and the Second World War.

11am Have an hour-long “supervision”, a one-to-one (or two) tutorial with students about their essays. I do about 12 a week.

1.15pm Eat with the 60 other fellows of the college at high table. It’s a really good way to bond as a unit.

2.30pm Give a weekly seminar, on modernism and the short story.

4pm More supervisions and endless emailing, mostly with the 30 English students I’m responsible for, but also arranging library visits, organising symposiums and contacting the editor of a book I am writing on London’s bomb sites and the literature of wartime London. I also set entrance exams and interview prospective students in December and January.

5pm Work on my book – it’s my first. I try to clear one full day a week, but the reality is that the three eight-week terms pass in an intense, exciting blur, and holidays are for research and writing, preparing reading lists, lectures and seminars.

7pm Sometimes I eat in college, work late in my office and then catch last orders in the pub and debate with friends. If not, I walk home listening to my Welsh-language podcasts practising my vocab. My mother is Welsh but I grew up in Brighton, so I only speak a little.

8pm Prepare for tomorrow’s supervisions, reading all the essays I will be discussing. Practise lectures on my cat Tolly.

8.30pm Cook dinner. I enjoy cooking as a way of relaxing.

9.30pm More preparation. Then I’ll read in bed until I fall asleep at about midnight. I have countless books on the go at once. I like to read articles and journals around my subject, but also completely off-topic as well. As a child, I just wanted to read books and I’ve fallen into a career where I get paid to do that. Some days, I can’t quite believe it. 

This piece first appeared in the Observer Review

Like his celebrated label boss, Sufjan Stevens, David Stith is very much a man in thrall to God. The product of a musical, Christian family, along with the biblical imagery – all rising up, ghosts and devils, David and Isaac – there is something undeniably religious about his sound. Stith plays his fragile voice like an instrument – pouring forth praise or gospel-like narration to an orchestra of claps, drips, twangs, ghostly wails and celestial piano. Notes clash and jar, rhythms hammer and crash off kilter, but somehow it all creates an uplifting, beautifully addictive cacophony like nothing you’ve heard before.

This piece first appeared in The Observer Review.

Aiming to revive “unjustly neglected and little known works” of great authors, Hesperus has gathered for the first time five of Mary Shelley’s short stories published between 1829 and 1837. As Kamila Shamsie notes in her affectionate foreword, the tragic details of Shelley’s life are never far from her work, and this collection is held together with the theme of loss.

Mary Shelley suffered the death of her two eldest children, followed by the loss of her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley. From anyone else, such descriptions of grief and pain as: “My brain and heart seemed on fire, whilst my blood froze in my veins” would seem melodramatic. Here, they are weighted by experience.

But it is to the father-daughter relationship that Shelley returns time and again. She described her attachment to her father William Godwin as “excessive and romantic”, a bond fired by the death of her mother Mary Wollstonecraft days after her birth. All but one of these stories centre on a woman torn between father and lover, a position Shelley found herself in when Godwin was outraged at her attachment to his protege. This terrible choice is most dramatically played out in The Dream, in which Constance de Villeneuve seeks St Catherine’s counsel on whether to embrace the lover who fought against her dead father.

Shelley might be best known for her visionary Frankenstein, but this collection is no less powerful, marrying thought-provoking storytelling with a fascinating glimpses into the mind of a woman whose life was uncommonly marked by grief.

This piece first appeared in The Observer Review.

Her moniker comes from a 40s Disney cartoon, and with her cutesy, dreamy voice and a flurry of tambourines, bells and xylophones you could be forgiven for thinking a five-year-old had raided the school music box. Yet London-based Chicagoan Kathryn Bint’s brilliantly catchy folk-pop songs are far from twee, carrying a raw account of love, loss and rejection on her sweet sounds. ‘Sunshine Kid’ is the highlight, with Bint cooing her bouncy refrain to a simple, thudding guitar riff impossible to resist. Produced by Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden, this is an unassuming yet perfectly formed debut.

This piece first appeared in The Observer Review.