L-R: Ed Harcourt, Baby Gramps, Sandy Dillon, Gavin Friday When Hal Willner takes the stage dressed as a pirate to introduce wily mountain man Baby Gramps, the show ahead is guaranteed to be out of the ordinary. After the third or fourth performer, the artists got tired of calling "ahoy!" and growling "arrrrgh," but it made the evening no less nautical. Running nearly four hours with no interval, the show was something of a test......

Enjoy a night of pirate-themed revelry without the risk of scurvy. On Monday, 28 July, the Barbican will be hosting Rogue's Gallery -- Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs and Chanteys as part of their Only Connect series. The evening will feature songs from the two disc compilation of the same name, the brainchild of Johnny Depp and Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski and produced by Hal Willner. Some songs maintain a more traditional,......

Our weekly roundup of film reviews returns, courtesy of James Bryan… As we wallow in the truly miserable news that Aliens Vs Predator made more money at the box office last week than No Country for Old Men, we sigh and turn our attentions to this week’s offerings. The three biggest releases this week are all stamped with Oscar. We’ve got Johnny Depp singing in Cockney and slicing throats in Sweeney Todd, Tommy Lee......

It's finally here! The Sweeney Todd movie opens today. We were so excited yesterday, though, that we took to the city streets with the fabulous free Sweeney Todd Soundmap in our ears. This movie themed walk starts at Temple tube and wends its way through the back alleys cutting across Fleet Street and leading you, of course, to the site of Mrs Lovett's pie shop, Sweeney's barbaric barber shop, St Dunstan's in the West,......

Call us starry-eyed saps, but when we learned today that J.M. Barrie’s former home is up for sale, we couldn’t help that we were filled with whimsical visions of left-behind shadows, fanciful fantasies of flights to Neverland, and an urge to occupy the place immediately. With the friendly ghost of Barrie and an inexhaustible supply of fairy dust, we’re pretty sure we’d crank out seventeen Londonist posts a day. Write our first novels. Never......

London’s councils have agreed to fund more green projects. An awfully large black market DVD ring has been busted in South London. Patients of the Epsom and St. Helier NHS Trust are undoubtedly seeing red today – theirs is officially the meanest hospital in Britain. The boys in blue have come up with a grand idea in Bermondsey – lure troublesome teens off the streets with free Xbox/Playstation access. Golden Globes in the offing......

It’s Christmas Eve already? How did that happen? Surely you’re all done your shopping now, so time to reward yourself with a few nice things to watch on TV. On TV, Londonist likes: Jamie at Home Christmas Special (Channel 4, 17:10-18:15) Say what you will about Jamie Oliver, he puts on an entertaining cooking show. And we’re guessing this Christmas episode will be chock full of amazing dishes that will look incredibly simple and......

Richmond council are hitting 4x4 drivers hard. Seamus Heaney has won the 2006 TS Eliot Prize with his District and Circle collection. A London poker club owner has been convicted of violating gambling laws. Michael Mann and Johnny Depp are having a beef over a film version of Alexander Litvinenko's demise. And this ridiculously written article tells the story of a woman chucked off a bus for being too tall. Photo taken from pfig's......

Have you always thought you were destined for greater things? Are your kids so thick and boring that you can't even live your life vicariously through them? Still want that shot at the big time? Well, have you ever thought of pushing your pets into the limelight? Right now Disney are on the hunt for the next big feathered thing in the shape of a pirate parrot (and the auditions are in Hammersmith, not......

Heart warming animal story of the week: A dove that became extinct in the wild more than 30 years ago has been successfully bred at London Zoo. Planning on going to the 2012 Olympics? Then you will be expected to use public transport. Oh joy. Michael Jackson is coming to town to make a 'rare public appearance' next month for the World Music Awards. Looks like the Profumo affair may be turned into a......

Childrens' literature is big business at the moment and currently, everyone has a reading age of about 12. But while Harry Potter, Alex Ryder, the Series of Unfortunate Events and His Dark Materials are seeing us through long train journeys and creating amusing scenarios in bookshops as adults rampage and pillage the childrens' section, the Grandfather of childrens' literature who got us all started on this reading lark is not forgotten. Most will remember......

This week - A swashbuckling adventure sequel (Pirates of the Caribbean 2 : Dead Man's Chest), a futuristic crime movie featuring 'le parkour' (District 13) and a Beastie Boys concert film with a hilarious title (Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That!) First up, Pirates of the Caribbean 2 : Dead Man's Chest. The Guardian, Times and Independent all award it three stars. It is individual performances that lift this film. Of course, the wonderful Johnny......

What we do is war! Jean Louis insisted during practice, and I passed that off as him just being French and dramatic and paranoid. But in a way, isn't he right? We are waging war on perceptions of reality, with our physical Socratic method. We are losing money, health, safety all that to give the gift of confusion to thirty or forty people a night. In confusion, all the pieces of what you think......

There's a slideshow with accompanying talk tonight at the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton. Which is hardly pant-wetting stuff when described like that but this is Andy Kirkpatrick's version of the slideshow - it won't be an evening of slides showing interesting bratwurst he ate while on a weekend break in Dusseldorf. Andy Kirkpatrick is a writer, photographer, film maker and one of the UK’s most accomplished mountaineers and ‘big wall’ climbers (big walls are......

After the great time we had in the presence of greatness this week it really saddened us to hear that the Tate has lost the chance to keep a unique set of Blake's artwork together: Experts have criticised the splitting up of a unique set of long-lost watercolours by the English artist and poet William Blake which are to be sold separately by Sotheby's for up to £10 million. The 19 illustrations for Robert......

Back in December of last year we reported on the nominations for the London Film Critic Awards and even went as far as to provide a few predictions as to who might win some of the gongs. Well last night the awards were handed out, so it's time to see just how we did (and gauge whether it's worth having a punt on Oscar night or just saving our money for an extra large......

Hmmm did we miss the heavenly firework display that covered the Earth's atmosphere a few weeks ago? Should we be worried even now that the shuffling noise coming from the corridor is not just Will dragging his sack of fan mail into the office, but actually a carnivorous plant intent on giving us a good tongue lashing? A Day of The Triffids style light show is the only way we can rationalise that David......

The nominations for the London Film Critic Awards (as voted for by the Critics Circle, who else?) were announced today. So here's a quick rundown of who's up for what. Pride and Prejudice (which we have to admit, we didn't go and see) has got the most nominations with eight, including best actor for Matthew MacFadyen, best director for Joe Wright, best actress for Keira Knightley, and best supporting actress for both Brenda Blethyn......

‘Chain restaurant’, ‘Soho’ and ‘Over £30 per head’ – phrases that hardly dance off the page and make your heart/tastebuds/wallet sing. So it was with some trepidation that TOF wended its way through Soho last month for a midweek curry of the Thai persuasion. We were greeted with efficient pleasure, despite a rather fascist warning when booking that tables would be foregone should you be more than fifteen minutes late. The Londonist can only......

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is quite obviously the big release of the week, only this time round it's all dark and scary stuff as our hero makes the journey into adolescence and... God help us, haven't we had all this stuff already with Spiderman and Star Wars? Oh well, let's see what the broadsheets make of it. In fact the broadsheet reviews are just as predictable and middle-of-the-road as the Potter......

If you leave for work early enough and stay until after 5 there's a good chance you're not seeing much of the sun at the moment so we'd like to take your mind off all that by suggesting you watch a film set almost entirely within a small dark cramped cell. Malefique is an overlooked little shocker from France that has been saved from obscurity by our friends over at Frightfest. We had no......

When we read the headline 'Orgies and battles' promised at Paul McCarthy's pirate theme park in today's G2 we misread the artist's name as Paul McCartney and immediately re-examined our judgment of the Beatilic one - imagining the ghost of John Lennon made animatronic and Yoko One made apologetic thanks to a long walk along a short plank. Then our eyes came into focus again and we shoved McCartney back into the file marked......

There's a lot of pressure ridign on Depp, Burton and their adaptation of Charlie & the Chocolate Factory. After all it's a remake of a pretty good film based on a near-legendary book by the greatest (?) children's writer of all time (none of that Rowling nonsense here please!). What's great though is that the film seems to have surpassed all expectations, at least it has for the broadhsheet critics. It's four stars from......

We can't seem to turn round without bumping into a film festival at the moment, so we thought it might be useful to go through a quick rundown of what's on offer out there. The Italian Film Festival at the Riverside Studios started on the 8th and runs until the end of this week. Highlights include After Midnight and On Any Street, along with a couple of extensive shorts programmes. The Johnny Depp season......

Sometime on Sunday evening Hunter S Thompson took his own life with a gunshot to the head at his fortified compound in Woody Creek, Colorado. That's as far away from London as you can imagine but we feel that we would be lacking as writers if we failed to mention the good doctor's passing. Through our formative years Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas provided a unique window on America and later we began......

The Sun newspaper has the first photograph of Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka, from the set of Tim Burton's Charlie And The Chocolate Factory. Currently being filmed over at Pinewood Studios, Depp is starring alongside Helena Bonham-Carter, David Hyde and Christopher Lee in what Burton promises will be a faithful adapatation of the Roald Dahl story. Under the headline Johnny Depp's a Wonka, The Sun has a grainy black and white shot of Depp in......