Interviews
Adam Sweeting
After leaving school at 14, Tom Davis spent 10 years working as a scaffolder on building sites, while always harbouring what he thought was the impossible dream of getting into comedy. Hailing from Sutton in south London, he had a go at standup and for a time found himself in drag, singing Disney songs. His luck changed when his childhood friend James De Frond got a job on Leigh Francis’s sketch show Bo’ Selecta. The two of them shot some of their own sketches, and impressed Francis enough to prompt him to invite Davis to appear on the show.He progressed through spots on series such as Bad Read more ...
Izzy Smith
Mieko Kawakami sits firmly amongst the Japanese literati for her sharp and pensive depictions of life in contemporary Japan. Since the translation of Breasts and Eggs (2020), she has also become somewhat of an indie fiction icon in the UK, with her books receiving praise from Naoise Dolan, An Yu and Olivia Sudjic.
Her latest novel, Heaven (2021), translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd, follows a 14-year-old student who is subjected to relentless bullying. He resigns himself to the severe and twisted forms of abuse inflicted by his classmates, only finding solace in the company of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Bobby Gillespie (b 1962) is best known as the lead singer and driving force of rock band Primal Scream. He was born and raised in Glasgow and met future Creation Records boss Alan McGee at school. The pair would later move to London and, after a brief period drumming for The Jesus & Mary Chain (he played on their influential Psychocandy album), Gillespie signed Primal Scream to the nascent Creation in 1985. After various different stylistic incarnations, Primal Scream captured the zeitgeist and hit gold in 1991 with their MDMA-electronic-dance opus Screamadelica.Primal Scream have Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Having won recognition for his streetdance routines on American TV’s So You Think You Can Dance, choreographer Christopher Scott was asked to help bring Lin-Manuel Miranda’s pre-Hamilton stage hit to the big screen. In The Heights was shot entirely on location on the streets of Washington Heights, a largely Dominican neighbourhood in New York. He tells theartsdesk's Jenny Gilbert how he went about creating the film's explosive dance scenes, and why he thinks the movie-musical is having a major resurgence.CHRISTOPHER SCOTT: I came to this film through commercial Read more ...
Liz Thomson
If American music has a royal family, it’s surely the Seeger clan. Charles, the patriarch, the composer, musicologist and teacher who could be said to have invented ethnomusicology, married first to Constance de Clyver Edson, a violinist and teacher. That union gave us Pete Seeger, known to generations the world over for the songs “If I Had a Hammer” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone”. Charles's second family, with pianist and modernist composer Ruth Crawford Seeger, included Mike and Peggy, singers and multi-instrumentalists who, like Pete, made vast contributions to the great urban folk Read more ...
Owen Richards
Sound of Metal has been a long time coming. Director and writer Darius Marder faced years of delays ranging from casting changes to the whole world shutting down. Was it worth the wait? Well, six Academy Award nominations including Best Film certainly suggest it was.The film follows Riz Ahmed and Olivia Cooke as Ruben and Lou, band members and lovers living the ideal rock'n'roll lifestyle. But when Ruben starts to suffer major hearing loss, it's clear their co-dependent relationship is built on shaky foundations. To avoid falling back into addiction, Ruben must isolate himself in an AA Read more ...
CP Hunter
Sam Mills’s writing includes the wondrously weird novel The Quiddity of Will Self, the semi-memoir Fragments of My Father, and Chauvo-Feminism (The Indigo Press), which was released in February 2021. Chauvo-Feminism is a non-fiction long-form essay in which Mills delves into the phenomenon of men who create a feminist public persona which does not translate into their private lives. Her own experiences are interspersed with the story of the #MeToo movement and other women’s publicly-shared stories in a way that amplifies the multitude of untold stories that unfold every day. Avoiding the neat Read more ...
David Nice
Let the facts – and the music-making you can see and hear online – speak for themselves first. Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä became the Oslo Philharmonic’s chief conductor last September, at the age of 24; he takes up the same post with the Orchestre de Paris in September 2022, and is artistic advisor with both orchestras. In conversation, as on the podium, he is engaging, courteous, mature of thinking and willing to have a real conversation, as he so obviously does with his players. When we spoke last autumn, he was grateful to be working every week, and to be conducting in front of live Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This week marks a major step in the songwriting collaboration between British/Italian singer-songwriter Georgia Mancio and Alan Broadbent, the Grammy-winning jazz pianist who has played with Woody Herman and Charlie Haden’s Quartet West. Having first started working together eight years ago, they are launching not just their second album of jointly written songs, Quiet Is the Star, but also, The Songs of Alan Broadbent & Georgia Mancio an illustrated book containing 32 songs.Their first album together, Songbook, for quartet, was launched in 2017 at Ronnie Scott’s in London (where Mancio Read more ...
Owen Richards
Writing something people want to stream one billion times is inconceivable for most of us. But then, most of us aren't Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Daryl Hall. Alongside John Oates, he is behind some of the greatest pop songs of all time: "Maneater"; "She's Gone; "Out of Touch"; "Rich Girl"; "I Can't Go For That (No Can Do)"; and of course, the billion-stream masterpiece that is "You Make My Dreams".Over 50 years after forming, the band are still finding new audiences. They've become a favourite for film soundtrackers and samplers. But they don't rest on former glories - Live from Daryl's Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
In her 15-year career, Plaistow-born Andi Osho has worked in theatre, TV and stand-up, and is the only contestant to have won Celebrity Mastermind twice. Highlights of her astonishingly varied CV include appearances in Casualty, Waking the Dead, EastEnders and Death in Paradise, and she played therapist Carrie in Michaela Coel’s acclaimed I May Destroy You. She co-hosted Channel 4’s Tonightly, was a regular on Stand Up for the Week, and was a presenter on Supershoppers. Now 48, Osho has just published her debut novel, romantic comedy Asking For A Friend. Her new podcast, Creative Read more ...
Jessica Payn
Amina Cain is a writer of near-naked spaces and roomy characters. Her debut collection of short fiction, I Go To Some Hollow (Les Figues, 2009), located itself in the potential strangeness of everyday thoughts and experience. Her second, Creature (Dorothy, 2013), was likewise interested in the weirdness of being in the world. Indelicacy is her first novel: a slim, lucidly imagined account of a cleaner who is captivated by the paintings at the art museum where she works, and by the idea of writing about herself looking at them. In an undefined past and place, Vitória’s lot changes Read more ...