Interviews
hilary.whitney
Peter Blake (b 1932) seems to have gone seamlessly from a groovy Sixties mover and shaker – he would probably dispute that but, after all, he did hang out with The Beatles – to National Treasure. His new one-man exhibition, Homage 10 x 5 – Blake’s Artists, is a tribute to 10 of the artists who have excited and interested him over the past 50 years. “These are my nod of appreciation,” he says. “A way of saying thank you to the artists I like.”Trained at Gravesend School of Art and the Royal College of Art, Blake quickly decided to paint the subjects that had enthralled him since his teens - Read more ...
hilary.whitney
Mick Rock (b 1948) captured some of rock's most provocative and memorable images: David Bowie at the height of his Ziggy Stardust androgyny; Debbie Harry looking every inch the Marilyn Monroe of punk; Lou Reed sweating beneath his Kabuki make-up - indeed, The Faces of Rock'n'Roll, as a new book surveying four decades of his photographs is titled.Rock’s skill as a photographer and his extraordinary sense of timing - in more ways than one - is indisputable but what makes his pictures particularly striking is that Rock was no mere observer: he wasn’t just part of the scene, he helped to launch Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Glaswegian James Dillon (b 1950) is one Britain's most critically acclaimed living composers. Early detours as a drunken and drug-taking wastrel gave way to what he calls "musical terrorism". By which he means his blistering career as one of the most intoxicating and uncompromising of the New Complexity school of composers. His music has won awards (an unprecedented three from the Royal Philharmonic Society) but few British establishment friends or commissions, which has forced him into almost permanent exile. Now, for his 60th birthday, he makes a rare return to Glasgow for one of the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Tonight the company dedicated to the greatest radical of modern dance, Merce Cunningham, opens its farewell tour to London, a valedictory odyssey that will end next year. Last year Cunningham died, aged 90. He had just premiered a work called Nearly Ninety, and this is fittingly the last thing we will see of his company as it blazes one final circuit before closing down in December 2011. With work as exacting as his, it is inconceivable for his dancers to continue to operate as a full-time company without him, and so the grave decision was taken to carry out a final two-year tour around the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Andy McCluskey (b 1959) is singer and frontman of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, one of the most successful groups of the late Seventies and early Eighties electro-pop boom. They reformed five years ago but have been in no rush to dive into things, finally releasing a new album, History of Modern, this autumn.The other person at the heart of OMD is McCluskey's creative partner Paul Humphries, and the classic line-up also contains multi-instrumentalist Martin Cooper and drummer Malcolm Holmes.The group began in earnest in 1978, signing their debut single "Electricity" to Tony Wilson's Read more ...
james.woodall
Since December 2007, the question has been: will they or won’t they? For Led Zeppelin fans everywhere, the one-off “reunion” concert at London’s O2 arena has stoked one rocketing demand: that the three survivors, guitarist Jimmy Page, singer Robert Plant and bassist John Paul Jones, joined by the son of their dead drummer John Bonham, Jason, not only reunite but record again and tour the planet, and perhaps resurrect some of the magic intensity that made Zeppelin by a very long way the most successful rock act of the 1970s and, some might claim, of all time.The band’s founder, Page, has, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Ten years ago Ben Elton (b 1959) would have needed no introduction. When still very young he became the mouth of a bolshy new generation of alternative comedians, as they were then known. Saturday Live - later Friday Night Live - was consciously modelled on the American template, and seemed very cutting edge. In fact all its alumni soon migrated to the mainstream: Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, freshly down from Cambridge, played Jeeves and Wooster. Harry Enfield became the face of BBC One sketch comedy. And what of Elton? His career went centrifugal.He co-wrote two game-changing sitcoms - The Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Simon Callow is on the phone when I arrive at his five-star digs, booming his apparently considerable misgivings vis-a-vis appearing in some reality TV exercise in which he will be asked to tutor disadvantaged kids in the mysterious arts of Shakespeare. “They keep saying it will be great”, he rumbles, “but it will only be great if it’s great.” And Amen to that.All voice, gesture and bustle, Callow (b 1949) couldn’t really be anything other than a certain kind of actor. Indeed, if you could bottle the quite extraordinary way in which he wraps lips, tongue and molars around the phrase “post hoc Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin has long been damned faintly by two facts - that he is the husband of the Bolshoi prima ballerina Maya Plisetskaya and that he was for a long time the president of the Russian Composers' Union in the USSR. These two things were plenty enough to remove discussion of him from the musical arena to the seething forum of politics where every Soviet composer's actions were given intense non-musical scrutiny both inside and outside the USSR.Recently, however, Shchedrin - now 78 and long hardly heard in Russian and European concert halls coming to terms with Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Either it’s a bizarre accident. Or there’s something in the water. Port Talbot, the unlovely steel town in Wales where smoke stacks belch fumes into the cloudy coastal sky, has been sending its sons to work in Hollywood for decades now. Richard Burton was the first to put his glowering blue eyes and golden larynx at the service of Tinseltown. Anthony Hopkins, for all his American passport, has never shed the native tinge from his accent. And in recent years there has been Michael Sheen (b. 1969).Right from the start it was clear that Sheen was more suited to playing oddballs and misfits than Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Richard Thomas wrote Jerry Springer, The Opera, as everyone knows - and he is soon to unveil Anna Nicole, the opera. Can this be the same Richard Thomas who’s written a dance show at Sadler’s Wells, with a cheesy poster, called Shoes? It hardly seems likely. Flames, expletives, scabrous lines, suppurating satire - that’s what makes a Richard Thomas show, not (surely) tap-dancing in platforms and ballet-dancing in flip-flops?The critics will start telling you tomorrow what to think about it after tonight’s press night, but, according to Thomas himself, no one has to tell anyone what they think Read more ...
hilary.whitney
For the past five years British stage designer Es Devlin has been creating extraordinarily ambitious and imaginative sets for some of the biggest crowd-pullers in the music industry, from Take That to Lady Gaga. But this week she returns to her theatrical roots with a new play, Pieces of Vincent, by David Watson at the small but prestigious Arcola Theatre in London.Devlin, who is 38, was brought up in Kent and is the second of four children. Her first professional job, on the strength of winning the Linbury Prize for Stage Design, was Edward II at the Bolton Octagon after which her career Read more ...