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An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
2012
Theatre
The show has suddenly become quite wonderful, and the galvanising factor is the terrific stage debut of Melanie C
Blood Brothers
Music
The British pop music industry may be eating itself but if Muse are the pick of what it can offer the world in 2010 then British music is in rude health indeed
Muse
I was smitten by both Gilberts enormous luxuriant moustache and the intelligence and nuance of this highly entertaining play
I totally recommend Babbo to anyone who is looking for really good and traditional Italian food
Always been a fan but never seen them live. I was ecstatic to be part of this epic event. WOW!
London,
Nick Hackworth's rating
Reader rating
Description: Artistic activity in the UK between the upheaval of punk and the advent of the YBAs.
Phone: 0207930 3647
Website: www.ica.org.uk
Trains: Tube: Charing Cross 
Wolfgang Tillmans's Eighties photograph of Princess Julia and Vaughan Toulouse at The Fridge
As its subtitle, The Last Days of the British Underground, suggests, this is a show with an agenda.
Bringing together a slew of artists, performers, dancers, nudists, video-makers, designers and other miscellaneous creatives who flourished between 1978-1988, it celebrates what the curators contend was "the last period in British culture before the rise of the consumer environment and the flattening of subcultural manifestations and creative industries into a single, pasteurised range of commodified styles".
Gallery: See more pictures from the exhibition here
This statement is swiftly followed in the catalogue with a dig at the commercialism of the Young British Artist phenomenon - commonly deemed to have begun with the 1988 show Freeze.
So this, apparently, is what art and culture was like before Thatcher's children grew up and ruthlessly colonised art: messy, angry, occasionally nude, mostly shot amateurishly on video and just as likely to sprout in nightclubs as in galleries.
There are compelling works here: the sharp, punky collages of Linder (who did the Orgasm Addict cover for The Buzzcocks), some funny videos of a group of Neo-Naturists and a room-sized installation by Richard Hamilton, in which the patient can look forward to being brainwashed by Margaret Thatcher, terrifyingly present on a TV screen.
A video of a four-day act by the legendary performance artist Leigh Bowery is genuinely amazing, while an installation by Marc Camille Chaimowicz, including among other things a strobe and a DIY koi carp pool, is strangely evocative.
However, the rhetoric of the show isn't remotely justified by the substance of the work, which while sporadically interesting doesn't smack of historical uniqueness. To present this as the last gasp of "underground" culture is historically inaccurate.
It's a romantic oversimplification, redolent of the cruder forms of anti-capitalist thought that fondly dreams that the people were free and culture was pure before the rise of McDonald's and Starbucks.
Economies and cultures do change, but most human behaviours adapt and survive. Myriad subcultures flourish today, many facilitated by the globalising force of technology. Nor are they all "pasteurised" into a uniform cultural product. Which happily means we need not be as mournful as this show would have us be.
• Until 6 May (020 7930 3647)
Read the latest reviews from Nick Hackworth in the Evening Standard
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
