Interviews
Sebastian Scotney
Ivor Cutler: A Life Outside the Sitting Room by Bruce Lindsay, is the first full-length biography of the Glasgow-born poet, author, performer and songwriter. The book will be published on the centenary of Cutler’s birth, 15 January 2023. Cutler performed on the opening night of BBC Two, recorded more John Peel sessions than any other act except The Fall, played Buster Bloodvessel in The Beatles’ A Magical Mystery Tour and was, according to Peel, the first performer to appear on Radios 1, 2, 3 and 4. He released numerous albums and wrote over 30 books, including a collection of his best- Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Belgian brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne have made their home region of Liège the site of excruciating moral crises and crushing injustice. Their 12 masterful, double Palme d'Or-winning films act as parables for the embattled human soul.The latest, Tori and Lokita, sees two paperless child migrants, 12-year-old Tori (Pablo Schils) and 16-year-old Lokita (Joely Mbundu), form a familial bond in the face of ruthless criminals and oppressive bureaucracy. There is furious energy as Tori pumps his bike down neon city streets on a drugs run, and stygian despair when Lokita is walled away in a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Wilko Johnson, who has died aged 75, enjoyed an astonishing afterlife while he was still alive. After Julien Temple’s Dr. Feelgood film Oil City Confidential (2009) restored his crucial former band's profile, a terminal cancer diagnosis in 2013 perversely flooded Wilko with the wonder of life, leaving this melancholy soul content for perhaps the first time.Renewed, surreal popularity climaxed when Wilko played Chuck Berry’s “Bye Bye Johnny” for surely the last, tear-soaked time at Camden Koko that March. And yet, a doctor's suspicion of his continued vitality revealed a less Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Holidaying in Europe with his wife Lisa and friends in August 1938, David Kurtz of Flatbush, Brooklyn, whose family left Poland in 1892 when he was four, returned to his hometown of Nasielsk (population 7,000), 33 miles north-west of Warsaw. There, as an amateur cameraman, he unwittingly made a brief away-from-home movie that would prove to have unimaginable emotional power.With his new 16mm Ciné-Kodak camera, Kurtz recorded three minutes of footage in his old Jewish community around the Nasielsk town square. People poured outdoors or lingered where they were to be filmed. Many of them were Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Leslie Phillips would have known for half a century that at his death, which was announced yesterday, the obituaries would lead with one thing only. However much serious work he did in the theatre and on screen, he is forever handcuffed to the skirt-chaser he gave us in sundry Carry Ons and Doctor films and London bus movies. Although he was to reach the age of 98, he already felt very senior when I met him at his home in his mid-seventies. He was very keen to stress that his abilities stretched beyond delivering a famous catchphrase and luring girls into an open-top sports car.Those famous Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The fictional world is our world, but at the same time it’s another place. We want our writers to invent interesting characters, gripping plots and to take us to unexpected places. We want them to delight us, and sometimes to fright us. We want to immerse ourselves in their inventions, lose ourselves in their fictions, and explore their newly created worlds. But are writers allowed to say anything they want? Is there a limit in our progressive and increasingly sensitive society on what they can invent? Would any theatre in Britain stage a play about young black women which was written by a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Hilary Mantel, who has died at the age of 70, was a maker of literary history. Wolf Hall, an action-packed 650-page brick of a book about the rise and rise of Thomas Cromwell, won the Man Booker Prize in 2009. Three years later its successor, Bring Up the Bodies, became the first sequel ever to win the prize in its 44-year history. Then came the RSC's stage adaptation of both novels, while the BBC adapted Wolf Hall, with Mark Rylance (pictured below) in the title role. Finally, after a long wait for her fans, came The Mirror & the Light, which followed its predecessors into the Read more ...
Tim Cumming
South-African cellist Abel Selaocoe is about to begin his third major concert in London in under a year. As the support artist for kora player Ballake Sissoko and cellist Vincent Segal at the Roundhouse in January, he received a lengthy ovation for his 30 minute set, having demonstrated an uncanny ability to play the audience as dexterously as he plays his cello.A few months later, he appeared with the Manchester Collective at the Southbank Centre, performing some of the pieces that make up his debut album on Warner Classics, Where is Home, alongside works by Stravinsky, Vivaldi and Read more ...
graham.rickson
Berlin Philharmonic Horn player Sarah Willis’s Mozart y Mambo caused a stir in 2020, its mixture of Mozart and traditional Cuban music making it a bestselling crossover disc.Two years on and the second volume has just been released, the sessions held in Havana in January and April this year. As with the first album, a percentage of the proceeds will go towards raising money for new instruments for the Havana Lyceum Orchestra. We discussed the project over Zoom in August.What prompted you to record a second CD?Second albums are notoriously difficult! The mixture of Mozart and mambo proved Read more ...
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 ...