Our pick of this week’s arts, design, film and music events from across Liverpool and beyond…

Monday – Exhibition Continues: Haunted Paper @ Dorothy, Baltic Triangle, Liverpool – FREE

Hot on the heels of author Jeff Young’s winning of the TLS Ackerley Prize for memoir, Wild Twin, comes this exhibition of collage and notebooks made during and to inspire its writing. Very much artworks in their own right, Young sees them as: “An archive of fleeting moments captured before they fade away.” They’re every bit as poetic and evocative as that sounds.

Further Reading: Sacred & Profane: Jeff Young’s Haunted Paper

Continuing: Liverpool Biennial 2025: BEDROCK – FREE

The 13th edition of Liverpool Biennial continues across the city and the public realm. There is the usual rich mix of institutional and ‘found’ spaces, with the city-wide arts festival a celebration of discovery as much as anything else. This iteration’s subtitle, BEDROCK, suggests nothing if not a solid foundation from which to build. Curator Marie-Anne McQuay and an array of international artists’ excavations of and responses to the city await. Check individual venues for opening days/times.

Further Reading: My Life in the Biennial with Ghosts; Liverpool Biennial: BEDROCK Review

Continuing: Independents Biennial 2025 – FREE

Running in parallel to BEDROCK is the well-established Independents Biennial which, this year, feels as ambitious as ever. Taking place in an astonishing 120 locations, expect degree show first-timers to the likes of Rebecca Chesney, Johnny Vegas, and Brigitte Jurack.

Further Reading: Another Dimension – On Contemporary Drawing; Caroline Gorick: After Hours – Reviewed

Tuesday – Brigitte Jurack: Rising Darkness, Floor Mosaic Workshops 1pm @ the Victoria Gallery & Museum –  FREE

During Rising Darkness, an exhibition exploring current affairs, literature, landscape and history, artist Brigitte Jurack has been leading workshops in making a co-created mosaic. Inspired by a floor found in a Roman villa, and updated to address some of the exhibition’s themes, this is the second-to-last opportunity to have a hand in the new work.

Wednesday – Exhibition Opening: The CASS Artists in Residence & Exhibition –  FREE

Accessible on foot from West Kirby, Hilbre Island has something of the magical, even folkloric, about it. As such, it is a seductive setting for art, artists and the wider public. This new group exhibition (which runs until Sunday) highlights the work of the CASS Centre for Art, Science, Sustainability, which foregrounds collaboration and exploration around the locale.

Thursday – Liverpool Biennial 2025: Drop-in Weekly Tea and Talk Tours 2pm @ 20 Jordan Street – FREE

This does what it says on the tin tour offers a way to ease yourself in to the Biennial if all those sites, artists and the theme itself prove a bit overwhelming – it can be a lot to take in. If our experience of this edition’s Biennial volunteers is anything to go by, you’ll be in safe, informative, hands.

Friday – The French Connection 8.30pm @ FACT, Liverpool — £9.35

William Friedkin’s classic, a winner of five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Actor, sees Gene Hackman as NY detective Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle steal the show. He and his partner, Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider), are on narcotics detail, tailing heroin smugglers Sal Boca (Tony Lo Bianco) and his wife, Angie (Arlene Faber). Grimy realism, superb acting and a knock-out, high speed car chase combine to keep this in some ways of its time thriller feeling fresh.

Saturday – Bidston Observatory Open Days 1/2/3pm @ Bidston Observatory, Birkenhead – £5/£2

Built in 1866, in-part, to establish the ‘exact time,’ today the wonderful Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre operates as a ‘self-organising study site for research, communality and experimentation’. Whether interested in its history, as an affordable place to contemplate and conduct your own research, or both, take a look around this weekend for free.

Further Reading: Field Trip: Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre – Bringing Forth Other Worlds

Last Chance to See: REITERATIONS: The Royal Standard Studio Members Exhibition / The Royal Standard Studio Open Day –  FREE

Your last chance to see this group exhibition considering 19 years of The Royal Standard, reflecting on the practice, process – and sustainability – of such spaces. While you’re there, you can check out more of what’s going on at the artist-led studios’ open day.

Further Reading: Back in 2016, C. James Fagan considered a decade of The Royal Standard, considering the many challenges and far-reaching achievements of the artist-led studios and gallery 

Sunday – Lynchspirations: Experiment in Terror 5pm @ FACT Liverpool – £9.35

Continuing the year-long exploration and celebration of director, David Lynch (who died in January), this 1962 neo-noir directed by Blake Edwards sees Ross Martin’s sadistic crim, Garland “Red” Lynch, terrorise Lee Remick’s bank teller Kelly Sherwood. Glenn Ford’s FBI man, John “Rip” Ripley, is on the case.

Mike Pinnington

Images/media, from top: Experiment in Terror trailer; Jeff Young film still, courtesy Matt Bell; Brigitte Jurack, install photography, VGM; The French Connection trailer; Bidston Observatory, courtesy Mathilde Grandjean; Northern Lights, situated in Cains Brewery Village, Liverpool. Image courtesy Pete Carr, 2018

Our pick of this week’s arts, design, film and music events from across Liverpool and beyond…

Monday – Mars Express 5.40pm @ FACT Liverpool – £9.84

Ostensibly the tale of a notorious hacker and a missing person on 23rd century Mars, with a plot exploring, among other things, brain farms, Jérémie Périn’s sci-fi noir is frequently described as France’s answer to Ghost in the Shell.

Continuing: Liverpool Biennial 2025: BEDROCK – FREE

The 13th edition of Liverpool Biennial continues across the city and the public realm. There is the usual rich mix of institutional and ‘found’ spaces, with the city-wide arts festival a celebration of discovery as much as anything else. This iteration’s subtitle, BEDROCK, suggests nothing if not a solid foundation from which to build. Curator Marie-Anne McQuay and an array of international artists’ excavations of and responses to the city await. Check individual venues for opening days/times.

Further Reading: My Life in the Biennial with Ghosts; Liverpool Biennial: BEDROCK Review

Continuing: Independents Biennial 2025 – FREE

Running in parallel to BEDROCK is the well-established Independents Biennial which, this year, feels as ambitious as ever. Taking place in an astonishing 120 locations across Liverpool, Wirral, Sefton, Knowsley and St. Helens, it boasts 22 new commissions of its 64 exhibiting artists. From degree show first-timers to the likes of Rebecca Chesney, Johnny Vegas, and Brigitte Jurack, there’s much to look forward to from this year’s showcase of grassroots art and artists. Check individual venues for opening days/times.

Guitar Wolf 7.30pm @ Future Yard, Birkenhead – £19.60

Elemental rock ‘n’ roll from Japanese icons of the genre. See: Fujiyama Attack!

Tuesday – Hearts of Darkness 5.40 (and Wednesday at 4.45) @ FACT Liverpool– £9.35

Documentary, Hearts of Darkness, chronicles director Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now on- and off-set travails.

Wednesday – Artist Tour: Amartey Golding 6pm @ FACT Liverpool – FREE

Amartey Golding’s work addresses masculinity, nationhood, vulnerability and violence; themes, he has, for the last two years, explored with men at Fazakerley’s HMP Altcourse. Together, they created Silent Knight, a suit of armour that is the latest piece in the artist’s Chainmail series. Both reflection on the tools men use to navigate life and, created over hundreds of hours, time spent that can never be reclaimed, join Golding today for a guided tour.

Pavements 7.30pm @ FACT Liverpool – £14.85

So-called as it presents the Pavement we think we know alongside one played by a cast of actors (including Stranger Things’ Joe Keery), director Alex Ross Perry’s film, Pavements, has its cake and eats it in this meta, atypical look at the band of their generation.

Read Our Review   

Thursday – Liverpool Biennial 2025: Drop-in Weekly Tea and Talk Tours 2pm @ 20 Jordan Street – FREE

This does what it says on the tin tour offers a way to ease yourself in to the Biennial if all those sites, artists and the theme itself prove a bit overwhelming – it can be a lot to take in. If our experience of this edition’s Biennial volunteers is anything to go by, you’ll be in safe, informative, hands.

Exhibition Opening: Drawing (Paper) Show 2025 5.30pm @ The Bridewell Studios & Gallery – FREE

Drawing – so often erroneously seen as the preliminary step before getting down to making the ‘real’ art – is, quite rightly, celebrated in and of itself here. Featuring more than 50 artists from around the world, this latest iteration of the Drawing (Paper) Show  – as it frequently has in the past  – will no doubt challenge our expectations of the medium. As previously, artists in the exhibition (including familiar names Caroline Gorick, Penny Davenport and Tomo) will also appear in Drawing Paper, marking the publication’s 10th edition. See you there.

Friday – Opening: LAAF @ Various Venues – £Various

The crucial and always brilliantly programmed Liverpool Arab Arts Fest returns this week, running until 20 July. Including performance, art, music, community events, literature and workshops, this year’s iteration of the UK’s longest-running annual Arab arts and culture festival addresses the thorny topic of nostalgia.

Funny Games 8.45pm @ FACT Liverpool – £9.35

Michael Haneke’s 1997 home invasion horror to rule them all, this genuinely unsettling look at what happens when social mores are out of whack with expectations more than retains the power to shock.

Saturday – Limbs of the Lunar Disc: Break the Clocks 1pm @ World Museum, Liverpool – FREE

Performance lecture from LAAF artist, Sarah al Sarraj, whose new, time-collapsing work, Limbs of the Lunar Disc: Isthmus Ancient River, can be seen at the museum until 20 July.

Sunday – Videodrome 2.30pm @ FACT Liverpool – £9.35

A sexy sci-fi cult classic from David Cronenberg (The Fly, History of Violence, Naked Lunch), prepare to be grossed out as sleazy TV exec Max Renn (played with glee by James Woods) commissions a new type of programme: Videodrome. As the violence, torture and hallucinations get more and more extreme, the signal’s source is finally revealed…

Mike Pinnington

Images/media, from top: Mars Express trailer; Amber Akaunu, Still from ‘Dear Othermother’, 2024. Courtesy of the Artist; Guitar Wolf/Fujiyama Attack; Amartey Golding, Chainmail 4: Silent Knight (2025). Installation view at FACT Liverpool. Photography by Rob Battersby; Drawing (Paper) Show (drawing by M. Lohrum; Funny Games trailer

“City as shadow, spectre, crucible.” With Ripped Backsides, author Richard Cabut invites us on a free-wheeling trip through noir cities, finds Mike Pinnington…

In Richard Cabut’s Ripped Backsides – aptly named for Iggy Pop’s The Passenger – the author takes us on a free-wheeling trip through what he describes as the ‘ruined maps of the noir cities’. An evocative six words that. Fortunately, what follows – organised geographically from Amsterdam to Warsaw –  delivers on the poetic imagery Cabut summons in this turn of phrase.

This is a book as time-travel and encounters with parallel universes that, today perhaps, seem more out of reach than ever – even if they can still be glimpsed, even visited. Cabut’s dispatches from invisible cities offer a balm to those (all of us, I suspect, whether we realise it or not) fatigued by contemporary encounters with urban spaces, often largely dictated to us by wayfinding apps.

This is no typical travelogue or city guide (though it masquerades – occasionally is – both). There is, for one thing, a cut-up feel to some of the despatches here; memory and thought coalesce, organised by fragment. Which works better than that might sound. In his foreword, fellow traveller Jeff Young tells us that Ripped Backsides ‘inhabits a space between anxiety and uncertainty,’ that it is situated somewhere in the ‘territory of notebook and dream diary’. Cabut himself tells us in his intro that, among other things, we should expect ‘a literary mosaic/montage… a hauntological drift… a wild catalogue of snapshots…’

These, then, are deep topography transmissions received, scratchy static in-tow, through the ether. Because, while Cabut’s epistles include reportage – from London, Manchester, New York, etc. – what we have here is something of a City and the City scenario; we are reading versions of places that once existed, or exist only to those that can properly intuit and access them, or perhaps lie dormant and will exist once more at some unspecified moment in the future. As Cabut says, they are ‘fucked up visions’ from ‘beneath the streets’.

That isn’t to say there aren’t truths here, or usable information with which to navigate the world – you just wouldn’t necessarily find them in a Lonely Planet Guide (nor would you necessarily want to!). In Amsterdam: ‘People read Malraux at the tram stop for secrets of human soul. Spoiler – people are even more unhappy than anyone thinks.’ And, later in the Dutch capital: ’People masturbate to texts of revolutionary politics. The money shot is Hollywood redemption.’

What about in the sunnier climes of Barcelona, Valencia and Madrid? We segue from high art to pop culture and criticism by way of wry observation by the hoi polloi at the drop of a hat – or turn of the page. In Catalunya, we’re given a vista of the storied football clubs’ Camp Nou stadium, then marshalled by messrs Messi, Suarez and Neymar: halcyon days of recent memory for the Culés. Simultaneously, this is ‘City as movie. The belief in directors to choose from the maelstrom of everything only those details that comprise certain significance. Do people buy into those meanings?’ And, a few entries later: ‘Art happens in high heel shoes. Senselessly. Fassbinder is aware.’

At times, it is reportage as cinematic endeavour – you can practically hear the projector, see the motes of life caught in its glare. Everywhere there seems there is an inciting incident, a drama about to unfold. A city about to awaken, drift into eternal sleep, or reinvent itself, fashioning something from the ruins of the past. In Berlin, Cabut observes, ‘We inhabit the Trümmerfilm, or the rubble aesthetic. Remake and rerun.’ While, in New York, a ‘Passer-by says: American nightmare is unforgiving. Stating the obvious is greatest transgression in poetry, film, city.’ And: ‘City as unspooling film: Narrative device – dramatis personae put in difficult predicament/Escape/But only to even more punishing predicaments/Again and again/The end.’

Ripped Backsides is city as shadow, spectre, crucible. From Derrida to Fisher, Brecht to Baudrillard – they’re all here, join the party, Cabut seems to say. But late stage capitalism, try as it might, has not yet stripped us of such thought and thinking, of ways to better navigate space and life, of manoeuvres dictated by more than mere commerce and lunch hours and life admin.

Cities aren’t, as they increasingly appear on the surface, simply sanitised spaces with stop-offs for high-street coffee and Instagrammable moments. Well-disguised they may be, but what they are, as ever, is alive. They are characters in their own movie – our own movie – not merely places to be gamified or hacked. A dérive through the demi-monde, this little miracle of a book – which should be tucked snugly in the back pocket of any budding flaneur/flaneuse out there – is a timely, energising reminder.

Mike Pinnington      

Richard Cabut’s Ripped Backsides, published by Far West Press, is out now     

Images © Richard Cabut/Far West Press

Askance tales of a storied city, New York 1995–1996 is photographer Stephen Clarke’s record of a “brief moment” that nevertheless offers up a multi-lens cultural reckoning…

It’s the city that never sleeps; the place where you can take a walk on the wild side.

One of the world’s most filmed cities, it has been endlessly mediated; through cinema, but also song, TV, theatre, art and more. We all think we know it, can picture it, hear it, even; and can imagine scenes playing out on its streets (that aren’t, funnily enough, paved with gold), in loft apartments, and atop eminently recognisable buildings.

When a nameless, almost silhouette of a figure waves down a taxi-cab, just out of shot, you think you hear a strangled, exasperated: “I’m walkin’ here! I’m walkin here!” Meanwhile, shuttered shop-fronts jostle, incongruously, with huge, aspirational billboard ads for DKNY: star of this particular scene the Statue of Liberty might be, but grime and grit is rarely too far from view.

Rooftops. They hum with and foreshadow the still to come parkour-style police chases, in which a crook thumbs his nose at authority, screaming “made it ma! Top of the world!”, only seconds later to trip on his own hubris, falling, so that he clings on by his fingernails to the building’s edge, before plunging to his death.

At the end of the block, nestled alongside those trademark yellow taxi-cabs, we can take our pick of fast-food from Pizza, Big Wok, and Khyber Kabab. This, after all, is the city home to the most languages spoken per head of population anywhere in the world – New York was, and continues to be, built on immigration.

Landing on another image from Stephen Clarke’s New York 1995–1996 (a new photobook from the prolific Café Royal Books), we’re confronted with a haunting by architecture, in the shape of the Twin Towers of One World Trade Center and Two World Trade Center. They’re not front and centre, however, as many a photographer would choose to stage a picture of them. Instead, shot from (presumably) across the Hudson River, they somehow loiter in the background, uncertain. Knowing what we know today, they have acquired a ghostly, not quite present, transparent quality.

The Empire State Building is given similar treatment by Clarke (top). It has been edged out of the foreground, one populated by a vertiginous architectural hotch-potch of indeterminate provenance. Still, its status as cultural signifier means that its mere presence recalls – cannot help but recall – countless moments from cinema history (frequently from the third act). It has been climbed by a doomed King Kong, played host to perhaps the ultimate tear-jerking proposal in An Affair to Remember, and the pastiche/homage paid to it by Sleepless in Seattle. And, for eight hours and five minutes, it is the subject of Andy Warhol’s Empire.

Inadvertently conjuring tributes, laments and everything in-between, New York 1995–1996 is photographer Clarke’s record of what he describes as but a “brief moment” in the city’s history. The photographs evoke, he says, “a time when I became a New Yorker for one week.” The ‘moment’ the pictures capture punctuate a tumultuous period: from the AIDS crisis and the deaths of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, to the outset of Rudi Giuliani’s term as mayor and the relative naivete (even if it didn’t seem so at the time) of a world which would, from 11 September, 2001, be forever changed.

Dualities abound: this is at once a time of sitcoms Seinfeld (below), and Friends, but also of the nihilistic casual sex and psychopathy of Larry Clark’s Kids. NYC is a city haunted by addiction (Abel Ferrara, The Addiction) and Patrick Bateman poseurs, yet it is a place whose streets people of course continue to flock to, streets, versions of them anyway, captured and continuously presented to us in a flood of simulacra.

From our current vantage point, then, these are photographs offering a multiple-lens reckoning, even as they look askance at the city and its icons of the built environment. Tourist snaps they aren’t. Such is New York’s cultural heft and baggage, however, that the blurring of the line between reality and otherwise is irresistible. Contained within each and every one of these images is a veritable tsunami of involuntary cultural recall.

Slippage between the layers, the real and hyperreal, is at this point unavoidable. In a chapter dedicated to New York in Ripped Backsides, his book ‘tracing ruined maps of the noir cities’, Richard Cabut writes: “Man says city isn’t a place or a movie or a painting, it’s a play about the rehearsal of a play. Like in that film we once saw.”

The film in question is likely Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, in which Philip Seymour Hoffman’s theatre director, Caden Cotard, sets about making a massive production, the lines between fiction and reality indistinct. “There are millions of people in the world,” says Cotard, “and none of those people is an extra.” In another fragment from Ripped Backsides, Cabut, aptly, regards New York as a “City of unspooling film.”

New York, New York: a city so great they named it twice. City as filmic entity, an idea – or, more accurately, a palimpsest of ideas, each inseparable from the next. This is city as proliferation, a symphony of meaning, learned and transmitted via the screen, projecting at 24 frames per second – even within the bounds of a single photograph.

Mike Pinnington

New York 1995–1996 by Stephen Clarke is available now through Café Royal Books

All images © Stephen Clarke

Our pick of this week’s arts, design, film and music events from across Liverpool and beyond…

Monday – Continuing: Liverpool Biennial 2025: BEDROCK – FREE

The 13th edition of Liverpool Biennial eases into its first full week across the city and the public realm. There is the usual rich mix of institutional and ‘found’ spaces, with the city-wide arts festival a celebration of discovery as much as anything else. This iteration’s subtitle, BEDROCK, suggests nothing if not a solid foundation from which to build. Curator Marie-Anne McQuay and an array of international artists’ excavations of and responses to the city await. Check individual venues for opening times.

Further Reading: My Life in the Biennial with Ghosts

Continuing: Independents Biennial 2025 – FREE

Running in parallel to BEDROCK is the just-as-well established Independents Biennial which, this year, feels as ambitious as it ever has done. Taking place in an astonishing 120 locations across Liverpool, Wirral, Sefton, Knowsley and St. Helens, it boasts 22 new commissions of its 64 exhibiting artists. From degree show first-timers to the likes of Rebecca Chesney, Johnny Vegas, and Brigitte Jurack, there’s much to look forward to from this year’s showcase of grassroots art and artists. Check individual venues for opening times.

Tuesday – Last Chance to See: Fractured Familiar @ 50MV, Crosby, Liverpool – FREE

Bringing together paintings and sculpture by Roxy Topia & Paddy Gould, Jeffrey Knopf, Jamie Kirk and Luke Skiffington, Fractured Familiar includes: 1970s cgi, medical models, signage, photography and 3D scans. Introducing glitches and uncertainty into such ordinarily typical territory, ‘truth and fiction,’ goes the exhibition blurb, ‘become blurred, forgotten and then reimagined’.

Wednesday – Sink Presents: Ben Vince 7pm @ Lost Art, Liverpool – £10 (no one turned away for lack of funds)

Saxophonist, producer and collaborator with, among others, Mica Levi, Ben Vince rocks up in the Baltic Triangle’s Lost Art, showcasing new works ahead of the release of his latest record. In a packed midweek line-up, Vince is supported by Grey Streak & ELIJAH RIGHT?, Ria Bagley, and Kepla.

Bound 8.10pm @ FACT Liverpool – £9.35

Before The Matrix, siblings Lana and Lilly Wachowski made their directorial debut with this hard-bitten, sexy, 90s updating of the film noir. Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon star as Violet and Corky, who simmer as they plot the former’s escape from her mobster boyfriend, and find love amid a scheme to relieve the mafia of $2million.

Thursday – Exhibition Opening: Caroline Gorick: After Hours 6pm @ The Bridewell Studios & Gallery, Liverpool – FREE

At the intersection of abstraction and figuration, artist Caroline Gorick (above) presents new paintings inspired, she says, by “subjects found in my camera roll.” Part of the Independents Biennial, the exhibition – with themes including fear, memory, and fragility – runs until 18 June.

Friday – Semay Wu & Branton/Kelly 7.30pm @ Metal Liverpool, Edge Hill Station – £7/£5

An evening of atmospheric, innovative composition awaits at Edge Hill train station-based Metal Liverpool this Friday. With electroacoustic composer, improviser and cellist Semay Wu joined by experimentalist duo Nick Branton (reeds) and David Kelly (drums), expect the unexpected.

Friday the 13th 8pm @ FACT Liverpool – £9.35

An absolute no-brainer of programming, check in with Jason et al at Crystal Lake for a stone-cold genre classic, this Friday the 13th…

Saturday – The Lord of the Rings Trilogy: Extended Editions 11am @ FACT Liverpool – £25.85

With a combined running time of 727 minutes, this special screening of Peter Jackson’s TLotR trilogy (the extended versions, no less) practically approaches a durational art happening in its scope. Marking the 20th anniversary of The Return of the King, make a day of it with Mr. Frodo, Gandalf and pals.

From the Archive: Nik Glover takes an in-depth look at on-screen fantasy

Liverpool Biennial Guided Tour – FREE

Don’t know where to start with this year’s Biennial? Each week, guided tours will take place from 2pm. Check the Biennial website for details.

Sunday – The Night of the Hunter 4.30pm @ FACT Liverpool – £9.84

Writing about the film in 2014, George Jepson called Charles Laughton’s 1955 film The Night of the Hunter (starring Robert Mitchum as so-called preacher Harry Powell) “a twisted amalgam of Southern Gothic, a terrifying fairy-tale and vaudevillian slapstick comedy.” Adapted from a 1953 novel of the same name, it follows Mitchum’s psychopathically cruel ex-convict weedling his way into the unfortunate lives of a former cellmate’s family, in the name of hidden loot.

Further reading: Adam Scovell on The Night of the Hunter

Orchestra Baobab 7.30pm @ Liverpool Philharmonic Hall – £31/£26

I had one of those sit up and take notice of what’s on the radio moments recently, when Cerys Matthews played Senegalese dance troupe, Orchestra Baobab, on her 6music show (the song that grabbed my attention was Ray M’bele). Formed in the 1970s, they’re currently touring their winning blend of Afro-Cuban, pop and Griot (a West African oral tradition of music and storytelling) in venues across Europe. This Liverpool date is programmed in partnership with festival supremos, Africa Oyé.

Mike Pinnington

Images/media, from top: The Night of the Hunter still; Independents Biennial, The Old Fire Station; Ben Vince, Don’t Give Your Life; Cast, 2025, by Caroline Gorick: Friday the 13th trailer; Orchestra Baobab poster, Toucan Tango

Our pick of this week’s arts, design, film and music events from across Liverpool and beyond…

Tuesday – The Third Man 1.30pm (and 5pm Wednesday) @ FACT Liverpool £9.35

Sitting in joint 63rd in the 2022 Sight and Sound Great Films of All Time poll, few would question The Third Man’s inclusion; in fact, I was surprised it wasn’t higher. Written by Graham Greene, Carol Reed’s noirish thriller starring Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton playing cat and mouse in a crumbling post-war Vienna remains peak cinema; great, then, that it is back on the big screen. I can practically hear the zither of Harry Lime’s theme now…

Wednesday – Exhibition Continues: Amartey Golding @ FACT Liverpool – FREE

Artist Amartey Golding’s work addresses themes of masculinity, nationhood, vulnerability and violence; themes he has, for the last two years, explored with men at Fazakerley’s HMP Altcourse. Together, they have created Silent Knight, a suit of armour that is the latest piece in Golding’s Chainmail series. It is both reflection on the tools men use to navigate life and, created over hundreds of hours, time spent that can never be reclaimed. Accompanied by a soundtrack and with pew-like seating, Silent Knight is both installation and space for contemplation.

Alan Sparhawk 7pm @ Arts Club, Liverpool – £26.72

2024 saw the release of Alan Sparhawk’s first new material since the death in 2022 of his fellow co-founder of Low, and wife, Mimi Parker. Loss, of course, looms large on White Roses, My God, but also experimentation (Sparhawk made the record having bought and played around with a synth and voice pitch changer). “I found myself secretly stabbing around at possibilities with the unfamiliar tools, improvising, turning knobs until something would hit and a song would form,” he’s said, concluding: “I can see now that it must have been what needed to come out of me.”

Thursday – The Resilience of Refaat: Honouring a Voice of Gaza 7pm @ The Black-E, Liverpool – £6.13/£11.55

Israeli imposed reporting restrictions have meant that rarely are Palestinian casualties properly identified in the news. Among the now more than 54,000 who have lost their lives, however, one name cut through the fog of the media clampdown: that of writer, editor, professor and poet, Refaat Alareer. His final poem, If I Must Die, has by now been read by millions. This event, with Gaza-based writer, translator, and editor of If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose, Yousef Aljamal; writer, translator, and fellow lecturer at the Islamic University in Gaza, Ahmed Nehad; and translator and editor of Palestine +100 and Palestine -1, Basma Ghalayini, remembers and reflects on his legacy.

Interview with the Vampire 7.30pm @ FACT Liverpool – £9.35

The last great elegant vampire about town to come out of Hollywood, Tom Cruise is perfect as the cruelly seductive Lestat. His performance even satisfied author of the source material, Anne Rice, who had initially baulked at the prospect of seeing Cruise in the role. He is joined (in leaden manner) by Brad Pitt as Louis – reluctant to embrace all vampirism requires – and a twelve-year-old Kirsten Dunst as Claudia, completing a strange family unit. A visual feast, Interview with the Vampire delivers, remarks doyen of the undead, Christopher Frayling, “a surprising amount of transgression”.

Friday – Dr. John Cooper Clarke 7.30pm @ Liverpool Everyman Theatre – £16

The Bard of Salford once again graces Liverpool with his socio-political punk poetry. Ground breaking, sardonic, and comfortably in the realms of poetry’s equivalent of rock star royalty.

Saturday – Last Chance to See: Ding Yi: Between Prediction and Retrospection; Vanessa da Silva: Roda Viva @ Mostyn Gallery, Llandudno – FREE

Llandudno’s Mostyn Gallery boasts a rich and varied programme to rival many a bigger, louder, institution. Their latest exhibitions, which close this weekend, continue that pattern. Brazilian artist, Vanessa da Silva, signs off this afternoon with a live performance. Read our reviews of Ding Yi: Between Prediction and Retrospection, and da Silva’s Roda Viva.

Last Chance to See: JMW Turner & his contemporaries @ Victoria Gallery & Museum – FREE

2025 has so far been a big year for fans of Turner. Marking the 250th anniversary of the painter’s birth, the milestone is being appropriately commemorated with multiple celebratory exhibitions. It allows for a variety of different takes and perspectives on Turner – his art, influences and legacy. This soon-to-close show at VGM looks at his work in the context of peers, including Thomas Girtin, John Sell Cotman, David Cox Snr, Samuel Prout and others.

Wax + Gears ft. Stealing Sheep 2-11pm @ Future Yard, Birkenhead – £16.80

An off-grid, one-day festival in which power is provided by dynamo-fitted bikes, Wax + Gears has its sights set firmly on sustainable practice in the music industry. Liverpool darlings Stealing Sheep headline, joined by the unconventional pop of Ruby Duff, alt rock from Clockwork Gibbons and more.

Exhibition Opening: Fractured Familiar 5pm @ 50MV, Crosby, Liverpool – FREE

Bringing together paintings and sculpture by Roxy Topia & Paddy Gould, Jeffrey Knopf, Jamie Kirk and Luke Skiffington, Fractured Familiar includes: 1970s cgi, medical models, signage, photography and 3D scans. Introducing glitches and uncertainty into such ordinarily typical territory, ‘truth and fiction,’ goes the exhibition blurb, ‘become blurred, forgotten and then reimagined’.

Camera Obscura 7pm @ Arts Club Liverpool – £25

Glaswegian indie-pop stars Camera Obscura return following an extended hiatus in the wake of the 2015 death of band member, Carey Lander. Their return, alongside last year’s critically acclaimed Look to the East, Look to the West, is cause for celebration.

Mike Pinnington

Images/media, from top: The Third Man trailer; Amartey Golding, Chainmail 4: Silent Knight (2025). Installation view at FACT Liverpool. Photography by Rob Battersby; Interview with the Vampire trailer;  Vanessa da Silva: Roda Viva, Mostyn Gallery installation © Rob Battersby; Fractured Familiar exhibition ident   

Our pick of this week’s arts, design, film and music events from across Liverpool and beyond…

Monday –  In The Wake 7.15pm @ FACT Liverpool – £8.99

Beginning last month to little fanfare at its host venue, the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme has, each year (since 2004), selected a range of cinema – including contemporary, classics and anime – rarely otherwise shown in the UK. Tonight’s screening, 2021 murder mystery In The Wake, finds investigator Tomashino on the case in Sendai, a decade after 2011′s earthquake and tsunami ravaged the city.

Tuesday – DaDaFest Continues @ various venues – Many Events FREE

2025 sees DaDaFest, the always excellent deaf and disability arts festival, celebrating its 40th anniversary. With Rage its theme this year – “something many disabled artists and individuals within our community feel” – expect a slew of film, visual arts, theatre, spoken word and more addressing the key issues that, says the organisation, have seen “the gaps in society widening”.

Ghost Stories 7.30pm @ Liverpool Playhouse  – £12-£47

Horror has never been in danger of going out of fashion, of course, but the genre is currently enjoying something of an extended moment. Whether the podcast and subsequent runaway TV success of Danny Robins’ Uncanny, or the return of Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s Rage Virus in the forthcoming 28 Years Later, things that go bump in the night have rarely been so popular. It is with perfect timing, then, that Ghost Stories (by Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson) arrives this week, with plenty of scares in store as arch sceptic Professor Goodman sets about debunking a trio of hauntings. What could possibly go wrong?

Wednesday –  Art Plays Games: Digital Residency Artists @ 2pm FACT Liverpool – FREE

Since September last year, FACT has showcased a revolving line-up of games created by artists and indie developers both, demonstrating the innovation and rich potential of the form. This week’s new line-up reveal, open from today, includes a quartet of early career artists emerging from the venue’s digital residency (in partnership with DaDa and Lucid Games). The foursome of Matt Allen, Gavin Gayagoy, James McColl and Livi Wilmore are on hand this afternoon to provide insights into their residencies and, of course, the games presented.

Thursday – Anna Erhard 7pm @ Arts Club Loft, Liverpool – £18.12

Swiss-born Berliner Anna Erhard’s Botanical Garden, released in September 2024, has been on pretty regular rotation since I came across it early this year. It’s an album of wry observations and anecdotes drawing on the absurdities, pettiness and microaggressions we face daily in this frequently less than wonderful world. An indie-pop artist capable of weaving vivid vignettes of the day-to-day, catch Erhard tonight.

Read our full preview

Mercury Rev 7.30pm @ Arts Club, Liverpool – £37.81

Longevity; mythology; songs like hazy psychedelic fairy tales with the off-kilter mood to match, Mercury Rev came to attention with their 1998 breakthrough record, Deserter’s Songs, an ethereal album of stark beauty that set them apart from contemporaries. By that time, the band had already lived at least one life, and seen a change of line-up and tone along the way. Formed around the beginning of the 90s to make songs for members’ movie projects, all these years later, Mercury Rev retain a flair for the cinematic. See for yourself this evening as they tour Born Horse, their first new material in getting on for a decade.

Mulholland Drive 8pm @ FACT Liverpool – £8.50

David Lynch’s death in January at the age of 78 was, understandably, keenly felt. But in the immediate aftermath of the news came a celebration of his life and intertwined career. For many, the pinnacle is his 1999 film, Mulholland Drive, the story of a naive young actress, a failed actress, a casting call, a waitress and a beautiful amnesiac. It is a tale set in a noirish vision of tinsel town, where all roads lead to the street lending the film its title, on which, said Lynch, one can feel “the history of Hollywood”.

Friday – Seven 8pm @ FACT Liverpool – £8.50

It’s a barely believable 30 years since the then hot young director David Fincher’s Seven (or Se7en if you prefer) delivered scenes so memorable they have since become pop culture shorthand. The film stars Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman as a pair of cops on the trail of a serial killer whose murders are inspired by, you guessed it, the sins of gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, pride, lust and envy.

Saturday – Milap: Music for the Mind & Soul: Jonathan Mayer and Kousic Sen 8pm @ More Music, Morecambe – £14

Another highly thought of Liverpool-based festival, Milap, the UK’s leading Indian arts and culture company, celebrates its 40th anniversary. It does so with a host of acclaimed Hindustani and Carnatic musicians playing across the Liverpool City Region this spring. This weekend sees Jonathan Mayer and Kousic Sen pair up on sitar and tabla for an evening of Indian classical music. Sunday, meanwhile, finds the renowned Rakesh Chaurasia joined by Shahbaz Hussain; together they bring classical melodic ragas to the contemporary setting of Liverpool’s Tung Auditorium.

Sunday – Last Chance to See: Abi Palmer: Slime Mother @ the Bluecoat, Liverpool – FREE

The Bluecoat’s short-but-sweet season of gallery screenings comes to a close today with a final opportunity to see Abi Palmer’s Slime Mother. A kind of creative non-fiction homage to the ‘slug-god world’, in it we find Palmer (via disembodied narrator) confessing to a childhood spent pouring salt on, and flicking as far away as possible, the hated slugs she’d encounter in the garden. Now, however, Slime Mother posits a fresh perspective – one of coexistence, and even worship.

Mike Pinnington

Images/media, from top: Painting in Light/Nothing About Us, Zoe Partington, DaDaFest (across various venues); Ghost Stories trailer; Anna Erhard, Botanical Garden; Mulholland Drive still

Our pick of this week’s arts, design, film and music events from across Liverpool and beyond…

Monday – The Parallax View 7.50pm @ FACT Liverpool – £8

A paranoid conspiracy thriller for paranoid times, Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax view stars Warren Beatty in a breathless, post-Watergate thriller. The director also made Klute, and All the President’s Men in this period, with the trio of films coming to be known as Pakula’s paranoia trilogy, as 1970s Hollywood turned its attention to a politics of distrust.

Tuesday – Exhibition Opening: Reclama @ St. George’s Hall, Liverpool – FREE

La Feria 2024 festival, a celebration of music, dance, theatre and street arts from across the Latin American continent, gets underway today with Reclama, an exhibition documenting the heritage of Afro-descendant and Black women. The festival runs for just a week and at various venues, so check out the full programme lest you miss anything.

Ride 7pm @ Camp & Furnace – £33.25

Shoegaze survivors Ride formed in 1988 and were in the vanguard of a scene they helped pioneer, before calling it a day in 1996. They reformed in 2014 and, unlike many a heritage act, have continued to release new material (gleaning a largely favourable critical reception). Currently touring their latest, Interplay, it is the third such album since getting the band back together.

Wednesday – The Third Man 5.30pm @ FACT Liverpool – £8

Sitting in joint 63rd in the 2022 Sight and Sound Great Films of All Time poll, few would question The Third Man’s inclusion; in fact, I was surprised it wasn’t higher. Written by Graham Greene, Carol Reed’s noirish thriller starring Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton playing cat and mouse in a crumbling post-war Vienna remains peak cinema; great, then, that it is back on the big screen to mark its 75th anniversary. I can practically hear the zither of Harry Lime’s theme now…

Thursday – Exhibition Opening: The Flowers Still Grow 6pm @ Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool – FREE

One of the outputs of a multi-project collab between photographers, creative writers, and communities in Anfield and Garston, exhibition The Flowers Still Grow foregrounds the concerns, experiences, and aspirations of those communities in an exploration of local – yet in many ways, universal – issues.

Friday – Exhibition Opening: Tomo – Frutopia 6pm @ Future Yard, Birkenhead – FREE

An early TDN Artist of the Month, tonight sees street artist Tomo take over Future Yard’s gallery space until 15 October, with Frutopia!, an exhibition of (presumably fruit-related) recent print and illustration works.

Last Chance to See: Into the Wyld – Nature @ Williamson Art Gallery & Museum, Birkenhead – FREE 

The first leg of Into the Wyld – a major artistic exploration of the medieval poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in which the Knight of the title does battle with assorted beasts, nature and the elements in the ‘Wilderness of Wirral’ – comes to a close this week. Catch this interrogation of nature (curated by Patric Rogers), before legs dedicated to chivalry (19 September – 25 October) and spirituality (7 November – 21 December) follow.

Saturday – Exhibition Continues: Lee Miller – Friends at Farleys @ Victoria Gallery & Museum – FREE

With a biopic of Lee Miller’s life as a war correspondent about to hit cinemas, it’s well worth visiting VGM exhibition, Friends at Farleys (on display until 30 November). There we find the photographer relishing her position behind the camera, with husband (English Surrealist painter), Roland Penrose, entertaining a who’s who of modernists, including Picasso, Man Ray, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning.

Bidston Observatory Open Days 12pm @ Bidston Observatory, Birkenhead – FREE

Built in 1866, in-part, to establish the ‘exact time,’ today the wonderful Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre operates as a ‘self-organising study site for research, communality and experimentation’. Whether interested in its history, as an affordable place to contemplate and conduct your own research, or both, take a look around this weekend for free.

Further Reading: Field Trip: Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre – Bringing Forth Other Worlds

Sunday – Last Chance to See: Anish Kapoor: Monadic Singularity @ Liverpool Cathedral – FREE

Last seen in a major show in the city more than 40 years ago, Anish Kapoor’s Monadic Singularity is something of a coup for Liverpool Cathedral. Timed to commemorate the centenary of its 1924 consecration, architect Sir Giles Gilbert Scott surely could never have anticipated seeing his imposing neo-Gothic building in conversation with anything quite like this. Curator Elisa Nocente said: “As one of the leading figures in contemporary art, [Kapoor's is] a unique visual language that embraces painting, sculpture, and architectural forms.” If you haven’t yet visited the exhibition, we’d urge you to do so.

Fantastic Planet (La Planète Sauvage) 2.30pm @ the Bluecoat, Liverpool – £10.50

Part of Bluecoat’s Weird Futures season, René Laloux’s 1973 surrealistic allegorical Sci-Fi, Fantastic Planet, sees the animation’s small human-like Oms subjugated by their much larger oppressors, the Draags. Largely thought to be a reflection on the then occupation of Czechoslovakia by Soviet forces, today it could equally stand for any number of contemporary power imbalances that continue unabated.

Mike Pinnington

Images/media, from top: The Parallax View trailer; The Third Man trailer; Frutopia! flyer; Material Matters/Into the Wyld; Anish Kapoor, Sectional Body Preparing for Monadic Singularity, 2015

Our pick of this week’s arts, design, film and music events from across Liverpool and beyond…

Monday – Exhibition Continues: Infinite Encounters @ Liverpool Cathedral – FREE

Group exhibition Infinite Encounters has been curated with the senses in mind. Actively engage with conceptual artist Rasheed Araeen’s ever-changing sculpture, Zero to Infinity, and breathe in the sweet fragrances of Frances Disley’s Holodeck Program 106. Myriam Thyes’ video work Mutable Worlds presents the viewer with an interactive journey, while Neringa Naujokaite’s Horizon considers the urban environment through sound. From the Archive: The Big Interview: Rasheed Araeen

The Banned Book Club: Taking a Stand Against Book Bans 7pm, Online – £3

This year’s Writing on the Wall Festival, inspired by Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (and subtitled Fahrenheit 2024) leans into its timely and urgent theme here, as this online talk addresses access to – and it’s a sign of how far to the right we’ve swung in recent times that I say this – banned books. Dr. Torsten Reimer, University Librarian and Dean of the University Library, and Laura Sill, Head of Acquisitions, at the University of Chicago discuss an initiative that ensures readers access to free eBooks of banned titles.

Fargo 8.50pm @ FACT Liverpool – £8.20

“This is a true story” a title card tells audiences at the beginning of the Coen Brothers’ Fargo, their 1996 film about frustration, small town plotting, kidnap and murder. It’s a simple conceit and an intriguing beginning to a great neo-noir film, back in cinemas as part of Picturehouse’s look back at the brothers’ oeuvre.

Tuesday – Cola 7.15pm @ Future Yard, Birkenhead – £13

Emerging from the ashes of Ought – whose barnstorming debut More Than Any Other Day recently turned 10 (!) – Cola are that band’s Ben Stidworthy and Tim Darcy, with Evan Cartwright (US Girls/The Weather Station) joining on drums. Named for the sugary addictive soft drink synonymous with rotten teeth and the so-called American Dream, their moniker also stands for Cost of Living Adjustment – an indication that these are people in touch with the world. New record, The Gloss, is out next month.

Wednesday – Shallow Grave 30th Anniversary Screening 8.45pm @ FACT Liverpool – £8

30 years? How did that happen? Director Danny Boyle’s Shallow Grave’s trio of flatmates (baby Ewan McGregor, Kerry Fox and Christopher Eccleston) come into an unexpected windfall – and come face to face with the consequences of greed and betrayal.

Thursday – Exhibition Opening: Would You Land an Airplane There? Susan Leask: New Sculptures 6pm @ Bridewell Studios & Gallery, Liverpool – FREE

Sculptor Susan Leask, who repurposes found materials and unconventional material such as polystyrene packaging, introduces new works that “hint at stories, thoughts and places” at the Bridewell. Read Jon Barraclough’s new profile of the artist.

Friday – Wolfgang Flür 7.30pm @ Future Yard, Birkenhead – £24

Kraftwerk’s drummer between 1973 and 1986, Wolfgang Flür’s performance MUSIK SOLDAT – including videos and images from shows past and present and, of course, electro – arrives in Birkenhead.

Saturday – Casey Orr Artist Talk and SEPN NW Meet-Up 2pm @ Open Eye Gallery – FREE (RSVP)

For more than a decade, Casey Orr has travelled the country with her pop-up studio, photographing young people on Saturday afternoons. An exploration of fashion, culture, identity and the ritualised nature of weekends out with your mates, here, Orr discusses the first retrospective exhibition of her work (currently on display at Open Eye Gallery) with the Socially Engaged Photography Network’s North West coordinator, Liz Wewiora.

Sunday – Last Chance To See: Lāsma Poiša: I became a mother @ Warrington Museum & Art Gallery – FREE

Winner of the Warrington Contemporary Arts Festival Prize in 2022 and shortlisted for 2023′s BJP Portrait of Britain 2023, photographer Lāsma Poiša describes her candid series I became a mother as “a personal journey into a universal female experience of metamorphosis, evolution, and recovery.” Catch the exhibition, which closes today, while you can.

Mike Pinnington

Images/media, from top: Rasheed Araeen, Zero to Infinity, installation shot; Fargo trailer; Cola/The Gloss; Susan Leask (sculpture detail); Casey Orr

Our pick of this week’s arts, design, film and music events from across Liverpool and beyond…

Monday – Ratcatcher 8.30pm @ FACT Liverpool – £8.20

25th anniversary screening of Lynne Ramsay’s mid-70s, Glasgow-set debut feature, Ratcatcher.

Tuesday – Exhibition Opening & Book: In Concert: John Johnson, Slater Street, Liverpool – FREE/£25

Photographer John Johnson debuts an exhibition and photo book capturing a decade of drinking, dancing and dressing up in and around Liverpool’s rite of passage bars that make up Concert Square. The exhibition is made up of 20 photographs on billboards on the corner of Slater Street and Parr Street, while Johnson’s book, which features 70 colour images, can be found here.

Dreaming of DIY Publishing 6pm @ Static Gallery, Liverpool – FREE

What might a DIY publishing and open-source printing press look like for Liverpool and Merseyside? Dreaming of DIY Publishing calls on interested parties – artists, makers, facilitators and more – to get involved in a pooling of resources and skills to plot out some answers and, perhaps, a pathway to the beginnings of something very special indeed.

Wednesday – Frankenstein 7.30pm @ the Playhouse, Liverpool – £11-£26

Innovative production company imitating the dog turn their considerable experience to updating and restaging Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as psychological thriller asking, as ever, what is it to be human?

Thursday – Exhibition Opening: Ain Bailey 6pm @ FACT Liverpool – FREE

Working with prisoners and their families, artist Ain Bailey has explored how sound can be a vehicle for the facilitation of collective experience and personal connection, to consider how art might affect attitudes and decision making within the justice system. Immersive installation, FOUR – part of FACT Liverpool’s ongoing project, Resolution – is the result.

Friday – Exhibition Opening: Reshaping the Past 6pm @ Elevator Studios, Baltic Triangle, Liverpool – FREE

Across painting, sculpture and print, artists Catherine Harrison, Sufea Mohamad Noor and Wendy Williams foreground found objects to speculate on their stories and imagined pasts to imbue them with new life.

Saturday – Jane Weaver 7.30pm @ Arts Club Loft, Liverpool – £20.75

Jane Weaver’s has been a slow-burn career. First coming into the cultural consciousness via her band Kill Laura in the mid-90s, a couple of decades or so on, now clearly defined as successful solo artist, Weaver continues to scale new heights.

Exhibition Opening: Another View: Landscapes by Women Artists @ Lady Lever Art Gallery, Wirral – FREE

An exhibition of women artists reframing British landscape art, including works by Vanessa Bell, Ingrid Pollard and more.

Exhibition Opening: RA Walden: Object Transformations Through the Coordinate of Time @ Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool – FREE

Artist RA Walden’s work includes sculpture, installation, video and print, to centre a queer, disabled perspective on the fragility of the body. In Object Transformations Through the Coordinate of Time, they consider ‘quantum physics, the ecological crisis, ancient timekeeping and the life cycle of worms’ to mark and measure the passage of time – normative and otherwise. Read: How Soon is Now: The Strange Case of RA Walden’s Ghost Clock

Liverpool Print Fair from 11am @ Bluecoat, Liverpool – FREE

An opportunity to browse and buy directly from the makers – of prints, zines, textile works, and more. Runs Saturday and Sunday.

Sunday – Blood Simple 5pm @ FACT Liverpool – £8

40th anniversary screening of Joel and Ethan Coen’s debut feature, Blood Simple, which tells the tale of a small-town Texas bartender’s ill-fated affair. The hard-boiled neo-noir is notable also for the appearance of Frances McDormand in her first film role.

Mike Pinnington

Images, media from top: In Concert © John Johnson; Another View trailer; Frankenstein trailer; Jane Weaver; RA Walden