More than anywhere else, the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music has been the place where I have gone annually for most of the last 20 years to retune my ears, to find inspiration and connections, and to discover new international music. For fans, it was always more than a mere music festival; there was a visionary, idealistic element. The founder, Faouzi Skali, is a Sufi who started the festival as a response to the first Gulf war and invited musicians, thinkers and practitioners from all religious persuasions as a counterpoint to extremism and intolerance elsewhere. That mission’s importance Read more ...

Reggie Watts has a few things to say about Norway. In Bergen to play Natjazz, the annual jazz festival, he’s concerned about the local predilection for fish soup. Be careful, he warns, it can be dangerously hot. Then there are trolls and the Norwegian crispbread knekkebrød, which is especially impressive as it can keep fillings dry. Sandwiches can be eaten in the rain – and it rains in Bergen. A lot. Watts is fascinated by the countryside cabins Norwegians take off to in the summer. Most of all though, the word Norway distracts him. It’s this close to “no way.” Don’t worry about your country’ Read more ...

Dresden is slowly opening up to the world. All but destroyed by British bombing in the Second World War, locked away inside Communist East Germany for 40 years, it is now becoming a tourist honeypot. On a warm day in May, you can see the snap-happy groups of Japanese and Germans trailing behind their guides, marvelling at the imposing Baroque buildings in the Old Town. You see them queuing patiently for the extraordinary museums and poring over the the restaurant menus in the city’s huge squares. One of the local specialities is potato soup, but then nothing’s perfect.There are buskers on Read more ...

There’s no doubt SPOT is Europe’s tidiest music festival. In hosting SPOT, Denmark’s second-city Aarhus turns the expectation of what a festival can be around. There’s no mud, no one takes a stage late and the sound is always immaculate. Underworked stewards collect what little debris there is. The two main venues are so spotlessly non-rock they force the focus towards the music.The Aarhus Musikhuset is an airy, early-Eighties complex with a glass-walled façade reminiscent of London’s Royal Festival Hall. Inside, cool wood panelling and designer light fittings set the tone. SPOT has seven Read more ...

Thanks to its international festival and a thriving catalogue of fringe events, May brings a great deal of noise to Brighton. Putting artwork into this saturated landscape can never be easy. But Nathan Coley has managed to inject some critical thinking and reflectivity.HIs best-known works, quotations in illuminated text, blazon themselves on the mind. They occupy a tidy niche and reproduce well in books, magazines and social media updates. So when you first see his work here on the south coast, in an 11th-century church no less, you might for a moment get a sense that, were this not a cosy Read more ...

Shami Chakrabarti (b. 1969) is the director of the civil liberties organisation Liberty, a position she famously and, some would say, fortuitously took up the day before 9/11. Raised in suburban north-west London, she became a barrister for the Home Office in the mid-Nineties. Regularly voicing her opinions on a multiplicity of current affairs programmes, notably Newsnight, she has spoken out on a huge number of issues, especially taking a stance against Britain’s “anti-terror” legislations. Such views caused her to be labelled by The Sun newspaper “the most dangerous woman in Britain” ( Read more ...

Andrew Comben, CEO of the Brighton Festival, chooses ten locations that have resonance with the annual event. He talks about their past and future but, most particularly, what will be happening this May“Brighton Festival is all about the spaces and people of the city,” he explains, “Some of these spaces are especially evocative. They make artists think about doing things in different ways and make audiences respond accordingly. We have to strategise, sometimes taking over places that are used for other things most of the time. It’s always an adventure.”Comben, 40, became the Festival's Read more ...

Prize-winning author and Brighton Festival Guest Director Ali Smith can barely keep still. She wriggles about in her seat before an audience of journalists at Brighton’s Dome Studio Theatre, gesturing around with unabashed enthusiasm. Sat beside her is Festival CEO Andrew Comben whose job it is to bring this supposedly self-effacing writer out of herself. Today she doesn’t need much coaxing. When asked if it was exciting putting the programme together she breathlessly announces, “I’m still reeling,” as gleeful as a child let loose in a toyshop.A yellow bird silhouetted on a map of Brighton Read more ...

It’s the kind of care-worn venue that’s obviously seen some history. The walls are plastered with handbills for uncompromising bands like Billy Childish’s The Headcoats and America’s God Bullies. Some nosing reveals that it opened in 1983 and Green Day played here in 1993 while paving the way to conquering the world. 1000FRYD – “tusanfrid” if you’re Danish – is low-ceilinged, narrow, tiny and has a stage which would struggle to hold a band with more than five members.In Britain, 1000FRYD would be considered a “toilet venue” with all the downsides that brings but here in Denmark, despite the Read more ...

The Glasgow International Comedy Festival was launched last night (the day after Burns Night) at the Leicester Square Theatre in London, with Stewart Lee, Rob Deering, Simon Munnery, Janey Godley and others giving a taster of what's to come in Scotland's second city 12-29 March.The festival – the biggest of its kind in Europe – is now in its 13th year and goes from strength to strength; this year there are 400 shows in 46 venues over 18 days. The strong line-up features both big names in comedy as well as those starting out in their careers; of the former, Jimmy Carr, Dylan Moran, Frankie Read more ...

Norway’s celebrated jazz colossus Jan Garbarek hadn’t played the north Norwegian city of Bodø for 15 years. Moreover, he and his group took the stage of the spanking new Stormen concert house as the openers of Bodø Jazz Open, the city’s four-day festival of all that is and isn’t strictly jazz. If there was any pressure, it didn’t show. Resolutely composed during his hour and three-quarters on stage, Garbarek also said nothing. Given his stature, the waves of power intermittently surfacing in the music and the nature of the event, there was only one possible outcome – a standing ovation. And Read more ...

A slim 69-year-old man in a rumpled sports jacket looking like a gone-to-seed history lecturer with the colour-clash dress sense of Michael Portillo is gripping a microphone so hard it’s a wonder it hasn’t been crushed. He is barking lyrics in Icelandic so gruffly that this could be any Celtic or Nordic language.This is Megas – born Magnús Þór Jónsson – the Icelandic poet, singer and cultural icon who has been ploughing this particular and peculiar furrow since the early Seventies and, in 1977, helped kick-start Icelandic punk. In Iceland, he is an enduring presence.Here, at the 1920’s cinema Read more ...