Interviews
David Nice
He’s the most haunting, at times terrifying Wozzeck I’ve seen, in Richard Jones's Welsh National Opera baked-bean-factory production, and the funniest Falstaff. When we met in his dressing room at the Zurich Opera House, Christopher Purves was about to perform the central role of bitter and twisted Alberich in Wagner’s Das Rheingold, and in a week’s time you can hear him singing Handel again, another speciality at the other end of the spectrum.I guess it also has to be mentioned, if only once here, that he went on from life as a choral scholar at King’s College Cambridge to being a member of Read more ...
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
“Is she at a pivotal point in her life but unable to pivot…?” Eve, the young heroine of Chloë Ashby’s dazzling debut novel, Wet Paint, asks this question standing in front of Édouard Manet’s painting "A Bar at the Folies-Bergère" (1882). Yet she could easily be asking herself the same question.Unable to “pivot” in life, but at a pivotal stage, Eve goes from job to job, is thrown out of her flat, becomes increasingly reckless and then spirals downwards in an effort to stave off the memories of the past. Initially, art – the viewing and co-creation of it – keeps her afloat, but past traumas Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
Soft Cell, the duo consisting of Marc Almond and Dave Ball, announced they were calling it quits in 2018. The two sold out shows at the 02 in London were supposed to be their swan song, waving goodbye to their Soft Cell days. But as their eponymous Eighties single hinted, waving goodbye is often paired with a hello. In 2020 they embarked on a nationwide tour, playing their classic 1981 album Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret in its entirety. This wasn’t just a nostalgia tour though. Brand new songs made it onto the setlist as well, like “Bruises On My Illusions”, “Heart Like Chernobyl “and “Nostalgia Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Jarboe is a singer and musician who first rose to prominence as a member of Swans from 1985 to 1997. During this time, she and her then partner and fellow Swan, Michael Gira, also released three albums as Skin (known as World of Skin in the USA). The first of these, Blood Women Roses, a disc of gothic torch songs, jazz and electronic experimentation, has been remastered and is to be rereleased as skin blood women roses on 23 April 2022 for Record Store Day by Belgian label Consoling Sounds, under her own name.GUY ODDY: It is really exciting to hear a new take on your first Skin album with the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
No actor had a classier time of it in the Eighties than William Hurt, who has died at the age of 71. Ramrod tall, blue-eyed and aquiline, with a high forehead swept clear of thin fair hair, he was a brash decade's intelligent male lead. Those years in the sun began promptly in 1980 with Altered States, continued with the steamy noir thriller Body Heat (1981), then steered him into ensemble comedy in The Big Chill and Soviet sleuthing in Gorky Park (both 1983). Hurt won an Oscar for the prison drama Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985). Broadcast News (1987) and The Accidental Tourist (1988) Read more ...
Ismene Brown
To the international world of ballet, Clement Crisp was the British critic to fear for half a century. Crisp's dance reviews for the Financial Times – "the pink 'un" – from 1970 until 2020 were legendary for their passionate fastidiousness about ballerinas and high style, their acuity about rising talents and the difficulties of creativity, and – often – their ferocity, when he saw something he thought a blight.They were written with an unstoppable effervescence and expressiveness in language that sent readers hunting down their dictionaries for words like "borborygm Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The prolific actor Romola Garai first demonstrated her ability as a filmmaker with Scrubber, a gripping 20-minute feminist drama about a young middle-class mum and homemaker (Amanda Hale) who escapes her deadly routine through bouts of anonymous countryside sex; thematically, it anticipated the current critical favorite The Lost Daughter by nine years.Amulet, Garai's first feature as writer-director, builds substantially on that promise. A neo-Gothic horror film, it tells the story of an educated European refugee Tomaz (Alec Secăreanu), who’s surviving in London by taking dangerous Read more ...
India Lewis
Perhaps appropriately, when I called Pete Tong for his 10 questions I was hungover, on the phone in a park after a night at a very good party. It’s a sign of the times that things are appearing to return to a relative normal, despite the threat of Omnicron and a precipitant winter lockdown.Pete is on the cusp of releasing his new eight-track EP, to be accompanied by a live show on December 3. These live shows with the Heritage Orchestra were the genesis of the series of four releases, of which Pete Tong + Friends: Ibiza Classics is the latest. Tentatively, the nights are opening up again just Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Miles Davis stole Charles Lloyd’s band, and much else. It was Lloyd’s classic quartet with Keith Jarrett on piano, drummer Jack DeJohnette and bassist Cecil McBee, not Miles, who were the first jazz act to play San Francisco’s Fillmore and gain an avid rock audience; their album Forest Flower: Live In Monterey (1967) sold a million, making Lloyd, with his Afro and hippie threads and exploratory, spiritually balmy sound a star. Playing acoustically, he built jazz’s bridge to rock, only for Miles to lure Jarrett and DeJohnette away, and Lloyd himself to seemingly vanish into the Californian Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After its mid-September release Low’s 13th studio album Hey What hit 23 on the UK’s Official Charts, their highest ranking to date. Back in early 2001, Things We Lost in the Fire topped out at number 81. Despite the increasing profile, Mimi Parker and Alan Sparhawk remain largely autonomous. There’s the odd change of bass player, label or producer, but their work together as Low is self-determined. They do what they want, and they define Low.They live in Duluth, Minnesota – where Bob Dylan was born – are married, have children and are Mormons. During the pandemic, they opened the door to Read more ...
Jessica Baldwin
It’s been a turbulent week for British artist Kate Daudy. Am I My Brother’s Keeper, her refugee tent (main picture), the art installation and seminal work that propelled her to international fame is gone, thrown out with the trash."A nun destroyed the tent," Daudy explains. The work, a UNHCR tent embroidered with words and pictures, was being stored at a convent in Spain where it was unintentionally thrown into a skip. It’s a big loss.Working on the project, meeting Syrian refugees in Jordan and hearing their stories, Daudy says, changed her life. The refugees’ own words adorned the Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Sebastião Salgado has carved out his career by documenting the unimaginable. He takes areas of life all too often ignored by wealthy westerners and reveals them in mesmerising, teeming detail.To look at one of his photographs is to experience the world not just through the eyes but through the mind of a man for whom everything is interconnected. Whether it’s a Mumbai commuter or a Brazilian gold-digger, a giant tortoise in the Galapagos or a worker covered in oil in Kuwait, each subject is revealed as a vital part of a planet that’s as turbulent as it is miraculous.He was in his twenties Read more ...