Interviews
joe.muggs
Oliver Coates is the very model of a modern musical generalist – able to jump, or ignore, the boundaries between musical categories yet retaining deep understanding of the nuances of each category or genre. He has feet firmly in both the concert hall and the artier side of the electronica world, and has collaborated broadly over recent years – though is only now emerging as a solo artist.In the classical world, his cello has taken the lead in concerto performances with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the Britten Sinfonietta, performed Music for 18 Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Autumn is a season of tumbling leaves, dark afternoons and of course fatuous memoirs from people off the telly. But every so often the world is taken by surprise, less by autumn itself than by the arrival of an autobiography by a genuine star that contrives to stand aside from the hideous commercialism of the bestseller lists. Such a book is Through It All I’ve Always Laughed. Or so its author would no doubt claim.Count Arthur Strong is not in fact a count. He’s an old-school variety entertainer of uncertain vintage (his actual age is supplied neither by him nor by Google). He popped up on Read more ...
joe.muggs
Richie Hawtin (b 1970) is no stranger to the art world, nor to working on a monumental scale. The British-born Canadian techno producer/DJ did, after all, collaborate with Jeff Koons, Jean-Luc Godard, LaMonte Young and Anish Kapoor for the French millenium celebrations. But his Dior-sponsored show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York this week may carry an even greater weight of expectations than that; techno and electronic dance music (“EDM” as its commercial form has come to be known in America) have never been bigger, and rather than a collaboration, this will be all his (well, and his Read more ...
graeme.thomson
In February 2010 I spoke to Lou Reed about his return to Metal Machine Music, a typically incongruous endeavour. Not content with touring his "difficult" 1973 suicide-song-cycle Berlin in 2008, he had decided to re-release his notorious 1975 "guitar symphony" and take his Metal Machine Trio on the road to perform entirely improvised instrumental music inspired by the spirit of the original album.Metal Machine Music was the moment when it was widely agreed that Reed lost the thread of an already meandering plot. Four sides of treated, vari-speeded guitar feedback recorded in his apartment, he Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Phil Campbell (b 1961) has been guitarist with Motörhead since 1983. That’s four fifths of the band’s 38 year existence. His have been the dirty great riffs at the core of classics such as “Killed by Death”, “Flying to Brazil”, “Eat the Rich", “Stone Deaf in the USA”, “Rock’n’Roll” and multiple others. He has appeared on 15 of their 21 studio albums, including Aftershock, their latest, which initially comes cover-mounted on a special edition of Classic Rock magazine, but receives a full release in late November.First turned onto the guitar by listening to Jimi Hendrix, Campbell grew up in Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Linda Thompson, one of Britain's great living singers, has just released her third solo album since her return to recording with 2001's Fashionably Late.Talking in her London home before travelling to the US, she opens up about her latest record, It Won't Be Long Now, working with ex-husband Richard and her children Teddy, Kami and Muna, coping with the dysphonia that has afflicted her voice since 1973, and her enduring love for traditional music and the work of Martin Carthy, Dave Swarbrick and other old friends. Also today, exclusive to theartsdesk, she runs through her top 10 all-time Read more ...
Nick Hasted
In their new, semi-fantastical concert movie Metallica: Through the Never, the gas-masked marauder who hunts the band’s fictional roadie, Trip, through a nightmare landscape, pictured below, is less cinematically memorable than Metallica themselves. Director Nimrod Antal gets his cameras up amongst them on-stage, as their muscles and eyes bulge and mouths gape, revving up the fans with how much they get off on this music, too.Metallica have been metal’s most important and respected band for much of their 32 years. Debut Kill ‘Em All (1983) combined speeding guitar athleticism and pummelling Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This week Channel 4 embarks on a season of programmes about sex. Real sex, it claims, in real British bedrooms. A new series called Masters of Sex dramatises the story of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, who from 1957 pioneered research into sexual response. And then there is Sex Box, in which couples will perform the eponymous activity in the eponymous container and then come out and discuss it in front of Mariella Frostrup and a live audience. Would such a thing have been imaginable without Shere Hite?To hyperbolise only a little, Shere Hite is generally credited with the discovery of Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The careers of writer Hanif Kureishi and director Roger Michell are indelibly linked, with a collaboration that has now lasted 20 years. In 1993 Michell, then an accomplished theatre director who was relatively new to the camera, directed Kureishi’s adaptation of his novel The Buddha of Suburbia for the BBC, with great success. After a nine-year gap – and Michell’s phenomenal hit with Notting Hill – they rekindled their relationship for the big screen, with Michell directing Kureishi’s original screenplays for The Mother (2003), Venus (2006) and now, their third film together, Le Week- Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Normally we introduce these interviews with a few biographical details about the subject. With Yoko Ono, however, there hardly seems any point: she’s as much a part of late 20th-century history as an musician. But if the whole world knows who she is, her work is a different matter. John Lennon memorably described her as “the world's most famous unknown artist”. And despite recent critical success and an album out this week (Take Me to the Land of Hell), her reputation is still for being obscurely arty. Memorably, The Simpsons once affectionately sent her up as a woman who goes into Mo’s Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There’s a song in the musical version of Legally Blonde, in which peroxide ditz Elle celebrates her impending good fortune. “Oh my god, oh my god, you guys,” she sings exultantly as she prepares to accept her beau’s proposal of marriage. Since leaving the role at the start of 2011, Sheridan Smith has continued hollering the words more or less non-stop. Oh my god Trevor Nunn just texted to offer her a part. Oh my god Dustin Hoffman just left a voicemail. Oh my god look who’s been cast as Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Michael Grandage.Smith can make the rare claim to have won Olivier Read more ...
David Nice
This summer, the Royal Albert Hall became the centre of the Wagnerian universe. No one was going to ignore Bayreuth, where Frank Castorf‘s new Ring gave plenty of fuel for column inches; but somehow the singers and the orchestra seem to have got lost there among all the apparently uninterpretable stage paraphernalia. Here there was a unique context for the personenregie, the crucial relationships highlighted in Wagner’s many one-to-ones, as memorable as the spotlight on the music.Sir John Tomlinson, whose thoughts specifically about the Prom Parsifal in which he sang the role of Gurnemanz Read more ...