Interviews
graeme.thomson
One of Britain’s most esteemed and influential folk artists, Martin Carthy (b 1941) celebrates his 70th birthday on 21 May. The occasion is being marked by the release of a two-disc career overview, Martin Carthy Essential, and next weekend's celebratory concert at the Southbank Centre, London. Much as he obviously appreciates the gesture, there's an unmistakable sense that this self-effacing man would be just as happy spending the night crammed into a howff, eyeballing his audience from a distance of no more than 10 paces. “A concert like this is the jam on the bread and butter,” he says. “ Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The Foundling Museum in Bloomsbury preserves the story of the Foundling Hospital, established in 1739 by Thomas Coram, the artist Hogarth and the composer Handel. At the end of April, American country singer Mary Gauthier performed The Foundling, a concept album telling of her birth and adoption in 1962 and the attempted reunion with her birth mother some 45 years later. Spiky-haired, in a black tee, waistcoat and black jeans, and sporting Lennon-style tinted specs, Gauthier cut a striking figure amidst the Rococo splendour of the Museum’s Picture Gallery, the lean, indomitable singer armed Read more ...
hilary.whitney
Christopher Eccleston’s performances have a raw-boned, visceral quality which makes him a sometimes unsettling - but always compelling - actor to watch. Since his big break in the harrowing Let Him Have It (1991), playing Derek Bentley who at 19 was the last man to be hanged in Britain, Eccleston has played Hamlet at the West Yorkshire Playhouse and worked alongside some of Hollywood’s biggest names including Kate Winslet (Jude, 1996), Cate Blanchett (Elizabeth, 1998) and Nicole Kidman (The Others, 2001).However, his best work has undoubtedly been reserved for the small screen. He is, of Read more ...
theartsdesk
Comedy writer John Sullivan has died aged 64, writes Adam Sweeting, after spending six weeks in intensive care battling viral pneumonia. The creator of several hit comedy series for the BBC, Sullivan is guaranteed immortality for his masterpiece, Only Fools and Horses, which ran from 1981 to 2002. Featuring the escapades of the wide-boy south-London brothers, Rodney and Del Boy Trotter (Nicholas Lyndhurst and David Jason), it became one of the best-loved British comedies ever screened, and also gained a substantial international following. A 2004 poll named Only Fools... as the best Read more ...
David Nice
We’re talking in Berlin for two reasons: Andrew Litton has just renewed his contract with the Bergen Philharmonic – he’ll see out at least 12 years as the Norwegian orchestra’s principal conductor – and they’ve now reached the holiest of holies on their European tour, the Philharmonie. The long-term relationship is rare enough, given the musical chairs of today’s higher-paid international conductors, though not unique. Yet it seems to me that what they have together probably is - and I can say, hand on heart, that the Bergen/Litton Berlin concert knocked spots off the one time I heard the Read more ...
james.woodall
Wim Wenders (b 1945) is one of the great travellers of contemporary cinema. Multi-disciplinary and theme-driven, his work often asks questions about memory and identity, and pulsates with the strong spirit of very particular places. The worldwide success of Paris, Texas (1984), winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, made him a bankable director in the transatlantic movie business, but he’s always remained very European, if not necessarily in topic and location, then certainly in sensibility: sombre, quite slow, metaphysical on occasion – the latter displayed no better than in his famous portrait Read more ...
joe.muggs
The music of Hype Williams is the definition of an acquired taste. It sounds ramshackle, thrown together, deliberately awkward – either deeply contrarian or the work of very, very messed-up people just playing around with archaic home recording equipment. But immersion in it reveals all kinds of layers of strangeness, and particularly a rich and emotionally resonant sense of melody that weaves through all the clashing rhythms and crackly recordings. Even the arrangements, it becomes apparent, are not random, but show real complexity – although what is deliberate and what not is hard to pick Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Ninety-nine years ago, there were sights and stars seen upon the ballet stage as had never been dreamed of. A young genius of 32 was the driving engine of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes - the choreographer Mikhail Fokine, who created fantasies of radiant Blue Gods, of murderous and erotic goddesses, and tapestries that came to life and sucked dreamers into them. His stars were to become immortals: Anna Pavlova, Vaslav Nijinsky, Tamara Karsavina, Ida Rubinstein… the most beautiful divinities of the stage, their names living on.For Nijinsky’s vehicle, Le dieu bleu, the ultimate stage colourist Leon Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Omid Djalili is a funny man with a funny provenance. There are not many stand-ups about who speak the languages of Presidents Havel and Ahmedinejad, who have played both Muslims and Jews without being either one or the other, whose CV includes stints performing Berkoff in Slovak and playing Whoopi Goldberg’s sidekick on NBC. In fact none. Djalili is by his own admission an accidental comedian. Though born (in 1965) in the United Kingdom, his Iranian roots made him an intriguing curiosity when he ditched acting for telling jokes. Then the War on Terror turned his comedy into a timely window on Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Human League are one of the brightest lights in the history of electro-pop. They have had many incarnations over the years but since late 1980 the core of the group has been frontman Philip Oakey (b 1955) and singers Joanne Catherall (b 1962) and Susan Sulley (b 1963).The Human League bloomed out of Sheffield’s electronic underground in the mid-Seventies, releasing the seminal electro-pop single “Being Boiled” in 1978. They signed to Virgin but success was not quick in coming and by 1980, with two albums under their belt, they split. Synthesizer wizards Martin Ware and Ian Craig Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Born in Venezuela 48 years ago, de Frutos has never been the fairytale type, at least not overtly. His 20-year career of choreography has been a career of unstoppable fecundity, violent flamboyance, extreme, even grotesque exhibition, outrageous passion. To many he’s a shock jock of contemporary dance. To me he’s one of the two choreographers in Britain to whom I most look forward, pinned uneasily to the edge of my seat, waiting to be discomforted, disconcerted, left in turmoil and not sure what I believe any more.I thought Eternal Damnation to Sancho and Sanchez a grotesquely funny satire Read more ...
graeme.thomson
"I’m very hard to categorise,” says John Byrne (b 1940), tugging at his magnificent moustache. A restless, defiant, shape-shifting polymath who was an exponent of multimedia long before computers ruled the world, Byrne's singular career is perhaps doomed to gentle underappreciation simply because he can do so much so well. “If you’re hard to categorise they don’t like that." He peers into his coffee as though looking for something. "Whoever 'they' are.”Raised in the “Dickensian” gloom of Paisley’s Ferguslie Park estate in a family shaped by his mother’s severe mental illness, Byrne graduated Read more ...