Because you can never attend enough international film festivals, here's STEPHEN DALTON's report from this year's VIENNA FILM FESTIVAL.
Tanks and armoured cars rumble ominously through the centre of Vienna. The streets are eerily empty, as all civilian traffic has been removed from the city’s main inner ring road. It looks like a military coup is underway.
Sometime last week, we had some kind of half-assed straw poll in the office about our best gigs of 2007. You can probably guess a lot of the stuff that came up: The White Stripes, The Hold Steady, Arctic Monkeys, Dylan, Wilco, Lou Reed’s "Berlin". Good gigs. I held off submitting any suggestions, though, not least because I suspected I’d see my favourite gig of the year on Friday night.
Kaiser Chiefs are a strange beast. Starting off as a welcome return to the light-hearted melodicism and sheer pop power of Britpop and the likes of XTC, over-familiarity and their careerist second album have left them slightly unpalatable. At the risk of sounding condescending, sure, ‘the people’ have got into them – the same tabloid-reading masses they rail against on ‘The Angry Mob’ – but the discerning music lover (ahem) has perhaps been left a little cold by their eagerness to please.
