Next Gen News

Of a non-Pixies gig Mesopotamian ziggurat to remember their greatest moment Guardian critic of inspiration in their respective fields

To enter this year 's competition

Pop: Alexis Petridis

Can you see any gig as a critic always match the ones you saw as a teenager? Oddly, going to a concert when I was 17 to work harder than writing reviews has ever been. It was not only always to London, but lie to my parents about where I went was to my friend 's parents about where my parents thought I would, bunking off school, and then convincing someone of the 18 watching the bar go in my name.

But none of that counted the night I saw the Pixies supported by My Bloody Valentine, in September 1988. It 's not every night you will see probably the two most important guitar bands of the era on the same stage at the height of its power: The Pixies had just released their incredible second album, Surfer Rosa, while My Bloody Valentine, the released had amazing single You Made Me Realise.

I must have about 20 books about Goya now, including the tiny paperback I bought at the time. It's a useless book – pictures too small, colours all wrong – but I kept it. Another book is Goya's Last Portrait, a play by the critic John Berger. A few years ago, Berger and I had a long talk about that dog Goya painted, the one that could be drowning in quicksand or might just be sticking his nose up over a hill to sniff the sky.

I remember wondering why Goya's paintings meant so much to me when I knew nothing about art and had never been anywhere, least of all to Madrid. Maybe that show only became important later, because of things that happened in my life. Many roads lead back to a kid looking at Goya and understanding nothing.

In my time as a critic, there have been many films that have made me want to punch the air with joy (and a few that made me want to punch a brick wall). But the film that I come back to, over and over, is Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love, a beautiful, sad, sexy, mysterious movie that came out in 2000, when I'd been in this job for less than a year.

I know I've got some things wrong. At one point engages Hirst (Richardson) into a lengthy reminiscence with Spooner (Gielgud). I took it as real rather than a parodic fantasy. But I intuitively that the game is a mirror image of Pinter 's had their own fears: cut off that Spooner, the seedy little poet, was the man, he could have been, and Hirst, the literary celebrity of life, was the figure was he afraid of becoming.

What I remember is language, especially the crackling comic vitality and sombre poetry of Pinter 's. In the mouth of Richardson, who was all Spring-Heeled exuberance, and Gielgud, who, like some dodgy downmarket, WH Auden saw, bounced Pinter 's records from the walls like a ball in a squash court. In the play 's stunning final moments, there was a sense of Hirst starts to crawl unburdened his death. Or at least what Pinter aptly calls it a no man's land 's Country ", which never moves, which never changes, which will never be older, but which remains forever, icy and silent". This struck me as a theatrical poetry at its best: distilled, precise, yet infinitely mysterious.

Trying to pin down a Pinter play at first sight was exhilarating, like stepping into a ring with a champion boxer: one ran the risk of being knocked out.

Dance: Judith Mackrell

It was a Royal Ballet matinee in April 2001, and the hair started tingling on the neck, I realized I was witnessing the launch of a great career. Alina Cojocaru was just 19 and carrying her first Giselle, a role that challenges even the most experienced dancers. In act, she a naive country girl who broke her heart by playing the aristocratic love rat Albrecht, in act two, she's a ghost, her dancing as transparent as air. Cojocaru has more than dance both roles with fascinating beauty: they made you believe, they had performed Giselle in some other, earlier life.

I have seen more technically brilliant performances (though in act two, was Cojocaru 's so incredibly exquisite dancing, her feet seemed to barely touch the ground), but I've never seen a dancer living the role with such intensity. In the mad scene, Giselle \ leads' s death, Cojocaru 's body was so broken with pain that you weren' t sure that they are acting.