Features
sue.steward
"The way I keep in touch with the world… is very gingerly… because the world touches too hard." That honest and hugely poignant statement by the musician, composer, songwriter, painter and full-on eccentric Captain Beefheart comes from a documentary film by Anton Corbijn titled Don van Vliet: Some Yo Yo Stuff (1994). His staccato delivery is a clue to the terrible toll of sharing his life for decades with multiple sclerosis, but it also feels like a comment on those who just didn’t "get" his music, his performances and his shimmeringly surreal conversations. It carries extra meaning now that Read more ...
carole.woddis
Seems we’re living through a silly season. There are rumours afoot that our PM’s Big Society is nothing other than a fig leaf for a chaos theory of how to run society, ie let the devil take the hindmost. And in the arts we’ve got theatre’s esteemed trade paper declaring, in a much-publicised puff - organised through a star-studded panel of the Great and the Good and “hundreds of readers voting from a list of 10 actors” - that Dame Judi Dench is The Greatest Stage Actor of all time.Well, good on The Stage. Nothing like stirring up debate to draw attention to yourself, and heaven knows Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Breton capital Rennes is an attractive city. Move north from the train station, pass through a covered market with tripe and saucisse sellers, cross a canal and there's a series of Italianate squares and arcades. Further along is the quaint Place St Anne and a warren of medieval streets lined with half-timbered buildings. It’s an inspiring cityscape. But for three days every December, the city is crammed with revellers and dogs on string who couldn't give a fig about the medieval cathedral. They're here for the Trans Musicales de Rennes, the annual musical jamboree. Just short of 100 acts Read more ...
theartsdesk
With the lightning speed of online delivery, there is still masses of time to select the best and most enjoyable presents for Christmas, thanks to the taste and wisdom of theartsdesk's pack of writers. With battered guitars, Belgian cartoons, Pacino's Shylock on Broadway, Australian festivals, Ballets Russes scarves, boomboxes, special edition CDs, advance booking on next year's hot shows, a subscription to The New Yorker and commissioning a portrait by a top artist among the cornucopia of suggested desirables, there really is something for everyone and for every purse. Kieron Tyler Read more ...
theartsdesk
And so we reached the climax of Series 7, long awaited by cognoscenti but greeted with mounting apathy by non-believers. Though some had held out hopes for boy - infant? - band One Direction, it was live poll favourite Matt Cardle who ultimately romped home to victory.It was hard to tell why - Cardle has the charisma of an apprentice photocopier salesman, and his performance on the night barely breached the frontiers of insipid. Hysterical supporters of Rebecca Ferguson, urged onwards by Coleen Rooney, thronged the streets of Liverpool to urge their girl on, but Rebecca's identikit soul-diva Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
It’s 6.20 on a chilly Monday evening. The doors at the venerable Bitter End club in Greenwich Village don’t open till seven but already the line for the open-mic Moth StorySLAM is snaking down the block, way past the corner of Bleeker Street into La Guardia Place. It’s a chatty, hyper crowd, mainly in their twenties and thirties, some nervously eager to take the stage for five minutes and tell their stories, some, like me, there just to listen. We know there may be agents in the audience, scouting for talent. Tonight the topic is Disaster, very suitable for post-Thanksgiving.Interesting Read more ...
james.woodall
December 1980 "Our life is so precious together/ We have grown - we have grown/ Although our love is still special/Let’s take a chance and fly away somewhere alone".The first words of "(Just Like) Starting Over" weren't bad but they weren't that good either; a bit mawkish, a bit sentimental, but plain, honest, unambiguous. They were a very long way from Lennon's anguished recollection, in an interview shortly before 8 December 1980, of how things had been when he and Yoko had first got together:"I couldn’t understand why people wanted to throw rocks at her or punish me for being in love Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Roman Polanski’s The Ghost won five of the seven European Film Awards it was nominated for last night. It was a display of the sort of sentimental herd mentality familiar from the Oscars which the European Film Academy’s voters like to feel they are better than. Polanski himself loomed from the big screen via Skype, kept from the ceremony in Estonia’s capital by the US arrest warrant which was surely the reason for the Academy’s largesse. The director looked down on the spectacle from his book-lined study with an unlined, unmoving face, detached by more than geography, a man who had Read more ...
james.woodall
The couples profiled in the series included the likes of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, Sartre and de Beauvoir, Monroe and Miller, and remoter figures from the German 19th century. Pop hadn’t made it onto the list, though I learnt, once embarked on the commission, that Lennon-Ono had been considered but no author found. In 1996, I happened to be in the right place (Berlin) at the right time.John Lennon und Yoko Ono - zwei Rebellen, eine Poplegende (the last four words mean “two rebels, one pop legend”: the publisher's, not my, subtitle) went on to be one of the series’ bestselling books. My Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In England you may joke about having Siberian weather with minus 7 degrees. This is really what Siberian winter looks like - at minus 26 degrees. The river is gushing steam, a hellishly peculiar sight. After travelling for 16 hours and through seven time zones to get to Krasnoyarsk at six in the morning, I am not sure I’m seeing what I’m seeing.Krasnoyarsk is plumb above Mongolia, and nearly the last stop east on the Trans-Siberian railway before you enter the empty white taiga, where almost no one can live. It is 4,000 kilometres back west to get to Moscow - and that’s only halfway back to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Luxembourg's musical landscape has few claims to represent the Grand Duchy itself. Most of Luxembourg's Eurovision entries weren't actually from the Duchy, as there was little local music to draw on. So Belgium's cod punk-gone-blando Plastic Bertrand became 1987's entry (with “Amour, Amour”). In 1965 Luxembourg won Eurovision with France's France Gall's “Poupée de Cire, Poupée de Son”, a song written by her countryman Serge Gainsbourg. Radio Luxembourg began broadcasting to the outside world in the 1930s and went on to define the Swinging Sixties until the BBC woke up to what was going on. Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The designer of a fairytale ballet is far, far more important than the choreographer. It's those visions that lodge themselves in children's heads, in adults' memories, embedded with the music. And at no time more potently than Christmas when it's time for The Nutcracker and Cinderella. When people think of ballet design they may think of John Macfarlane, the genius of Birmingham Royal Ballet's Nutcracker and the Royal Ballet's Giselle, and Peter Farmer, the confectioner of Birmingham's Coppelia and the Royal Ballet's latest Sleeping Beauty. Both men are stepping up to the plate again this Read more ...