Reading:
Cornwell’s
most celebrated character, Richard Sharpe, a British rifleman who has risen
from the ranks of the British army to become a ruthlessly competent officer
during the Napoleonic Wars, is caught up in the French invasion of Portugal in
the European summer of 1809, cut off from retreating British forces.
Havoc is the seventh (chronologically speaking) of
Cornwell’s Sharpe novels, and one of the most recent penned. During the
panicked evacuation, Lieutenant Sharpe and his riflemen, including Irish
Sergeant Harper, is detailed by spymaster Major Hogan to rescue a British girl
named Kate Savage, and he comes into contact with a shadowy figure from the
British Foreign Office, Colonel Christopher, who has his own designs on Ms.
Savage and is in the midst of a scheme that has him playing both sides.
Not
surprisingly, Sharpe is caught up in Christopher’s treachery, but when Sir
Arthur Wellesley (soon to become the Duke of Wellington) arrives, Sharpe is
given a chance to extract revenge on Christopher.
Sharpe
novels are a little formulaic, dealing with the main character’s tortured
attempts to find true love, often in the midst of being betrayed by officers
from England’s gentry who don’t trust the gutter-born Sharpe, or by foreign
enemies – or sometimes by both – interspersed with huge battles, but they’re
fantastically entertaining, and Cornwell’s battlefield descriptions are second
to none.
Watching:
The
spin-off to Chicago Fire, from Emmy-award winning producer Dick Wolf (the
mastermind behind the ever-expanding Law and Order franchise) is obviously set
in the same universe as Fire, and features crossover characters, but aside from
that, there’s little similar about the two shows. Where Fire is more focused on
personal relationships – the actual fires and other emergency call-outs, seem
injected into the storylines to separate various personal entanglements.
In Chicago
PD, the personal issues of the characters take a back seat to the oft-violent
cases they must solve. There’s beheadings, drug use, shootouts with gangs,
undercover jobs and sadistic killers, all of which must be solved by the
Intelligence Unit from District 21, headed by the ruthless the gravelly-voiced
Jason Beghe as Sergeant Hank Voight – last revealed as a dirty cop, with a shady
past in a Chicago Fire story arc – who may or may not still be working both
sides of the law.
There’s a
great cast of characters around Voight, particularly the grizzled undercover
veteran Alvin Olinsky (Elias Koteas) who forms an unsteady partnership with
Adam Ruzek (Patrick John Flueger) who is plucked from the academy in the show’s
pilot episode, and Erin Lindsay (Sophia Bush) formerly one of Voight’s informants,
whose partner ex-Marine Jay Halstead (Jesse Lee Soffer) has vendettas of his
own to settle.
The fact
that you’re never quite certain about where Voight’s allegiances lie – and
various occurrences tend to shift your view of him back and forth – is one of
the show’s great strengths, and gives it an edge that most other cop dramas
just don’t have. Regardless of whether he’s dirty or not, Voight’s certainly
not afraid to step perilously close to a line, and sometimes over it, when
dealing with the dregs of society. Beghe is suitably menacing, and his Voight
is definitely a guy with whom you wouldn’t want to mess.
Intriguing
first season of fifteen episodes, including a solid crossover with Chicago PD,
ends with a great cliff-hanger, and sets up a full season for it’s second
go-around, starting in just a few weeks.
Listening To:
It’s the
mark of a Jimmy Barnes’ talent and longevity that so many great musicians – Keith Urban, Bernard Fanning, Journey, The
Living End, Ian Moss and Little Steven Van Zandt amongst them – actually lined
up to help Barnesy breathe new life into some of his classic songs. The result
is a bunch of songs that could be released today by other artists and probably
be hits.
The first
disc of a special edition package released to celebrate Barnesy’s thirtieth
year as a solo artist features great new versions of some of the songs that’ve
been a part of Australian rock lore for
a long time. The Living End’s take on “Lay Down Your Guns” is perhaps the best
of all, a searing re-imagination of a song that was epic to begin with.
It’s hard
to pinpoint a better track than the album’s lead single, though there are
certainly some killers: Urban nicely fills the shoes of the late, great INXS
frontman Michael Hutchence on the raucous “Good Times” which was made famous by
great Aussie rockers, The Easybeats. Noiseworks frontman Jon Stevens is pretty
good on “I’d Rather Be Blind” and Fanning’s “I’m Still On Your Side” helps
Barnesy show that, aside from singing throw-down rockers, he can still make a
ballad sound awesome.
Of course,
Jimmy’s incredibly talented family appears, as well, including Mahalia Barnes,
whose voice leaves you in no doubt as to who her father is, and David Campbell,
and the family choir, as they’re called, appear as one powerful unit on one of
my Barnesy favourites, “No Second Prize”
30:30
Hindsight went straight to the top of the ARIA charts in it’s first week, and
it’s no wonder, because this is as good as Aussie music gets.
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