In a fair few bars around the world tonight, bands will be playing “That’s The Way (I Like It)”, “Give It Up” and so many more of KC and the Sunshine Band’s bangers. They’ve filled dancefloors for half a century and Harry Wayne Casey (KC to you and me) has a claim to having written the first ever disco hit with George McCrae’s “Rock Your Baby” – Benny and Bjorn’s inspiration for “Dancing Queen” no less!He’s a significant figure in the much undervalued history of pop music. His songbook is a strong foundation for a musical. All you need to add are great singers, great costumes and a great Read more ...

I’ve never thought of myself as a political artist. I write about love. The tender bits, the messy bits, the heartbreak that rearranges a life. That’s where songwriting usually finds me. “TIEF”, from my forthcoming album Sunshine Music, arrived differently. It’s built around an interpolation of “Slave” by the legendary calypsonian singer Mighty Sparrow. Calypso, a music that has lived in my bones for as long as I can remember. “Slave” proposed a question I sought to answer. “If there were a contemporary Part Two to such a statement song, what would mine say?” What does reparation look Read more ...

In this strangely dreary recreation of 11th century history, it’s not just grim oop north, it’s grim everywhere. King & Conqueror purports to be the story of how the Norman monarch William (the titular Conqueror) and England’s King Harold found themselves locked in a battle to the death at Hastings, each having negotiated a fearsome labyrinth of plots, treachery, ambition and murder in order to become top dog on either side of the English Channel.But somehow, despite its rather distinguished cast, the drama obstinately refuses to catch fire. Where The Last Kingdom brilliantly evoked the Read more ...

Alexandre Dumas’ novel has been filmed an immeasurable number of times (there was a new French version only last year) and televised even more frequently (a Mexican incarnation materialised in 2023). Yet the world still can’t get enough, so here’s another one, this time a French/Italian production with a polyglot Euro-cast.Apparently much of it was shot in Malta, where the golden Mediterranean light illuminating antique stone towers and ramparts stands in very picturesquely for Dumas’ Marseille. The original novel clocks in at about 1200 pages in most versions – I tried reading it on a Kindle Read more ...

What am I, a philosophical if not political Marxist whose hero is Antonio Gramsci, doing in Harvey Nichols buying Comme des Garçons linen jackets, Church brogues and Mulberry shades? It’s 1987 and I do wear it well though…Chiara Atik’s comedy crosses the Atlantic bearing prizes and venom and could hardly have fetched up anywhere more suited than leafy Richmond’s Orange Tree Theatre. A once Lib-Dem / Conservative marginal seat has swung decisively to the former and seems unlikely to swing back rightwards any time soon. In the programme, the playwright says she wants “to challenge us… to take a Read more ...

The National Health Service was established 77 years ago this month. Resident doctors are about to strike for more pay, long waiting lists for hospital treatment and the scarcity of GP appointments continue to dog political conversation, while the need for reform of the system provides a constant background hum. The idea for a national health service free at the point of need was always ambitious and remains challenging, but the NHS has become a cross between a religion and a beloved – if problematic – family. And it still deserves to be celebrated as it is here, even ending with Read more ...

Botanical forms, lurid and bright, now tower above a footpath on a moor otherwise famed for darkness and frankly terrible weather. But the trio of 5m-high contemporary sculptures grow in place here, drawing life from limestone soil. These metallic buds, blooms and supersize tubers reflect a deep, tropical past that predates the very English landscape we now associate with this part of the world.So artist Vanessa da Silva invites you to reconnect with 300 million years of history by sitting here a while. When the sun is out, as it was on the opening weekend of Bradford 2025, you might reflect Read more ...

“It is so disgraceful, what happened there,” says Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, in a comment that is the understatement of the century. She is referring to the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis in concentration camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was held prisoner.Six million Jews were murdered in the camps, but Lasker-Wallfisch survived because she was a musician. She describes the “welcoming” ceremony in which arrivals were “stripped of every vestige of human dignity”. Stark naked, they had their heads shaved and a number tattooed on their arms.But the woman conducting this identity- Read more ...

A traditional Korean house has appeared at Tate Modern. And with its neat brickwork, beautifully carved roof beams and lattice work screens, this charming dwelling looks decidedly out of place, and somewhat ghostly. Go closer and you realise that, improbably, the full-sized building is made of paper. It’s the work of South Korean artist Do Ho Suh (main picture).In 2013, he covered his childhood home in mulberry paper and painstakingly made a rubbing of every single nook and cranny of the exterior. He left the paper in situ for nine months until the drawing had weathered to resemble an old Read more ...

Russia Starts Here: Real Lives in the Ruin of Empire, the journalist Howard Amos’ first book, is a prescient and fascinating examination of the borderlands of a bellicose nation. Focusing on the Pskov region, which juts out into eastern Europe, his account sympathetically – but honestly – describes the lives of its remaining inhabitants; the area has steadily depopulated since the end of serfdom and the end of the Soviet period.A place that once offered employment and opportunity has become a backwater, not much more than a lonely borderland that supplies troops to the contentious Ukrainian Read more ...

Henry Gee’s previous book, A Brief History of Life on Earth, made an interestingly downbeat read for a title that won the UK’s science book prize. He emphasised that a constant feature of that history is extinction. Disappearing is simply what species do. A few endure for an exceptionally long time (hello, horseshoe crabs), but all suffer the same fate in the end. Some at least go down as ancestors of succeeding species. Many more just vanish. Evolution permits gradual development of more complex forms. That’s how we got here. But the way it works – by reproduction with variation, then Read more ...

“Don’t put your co-artistic director on the stage, Mrs Harvey,” as Noel Coward once (almost) sang. Tamara Harvey took no heed and Edward II sees her RSC compadre, Daniel Evans (pictured below, kneeling centre), back on stage after 14 years and in the title role to boot. In Daniel Raggett’s stripped back, helter-skelter, 100 minutes version of Christopher Marlowe’s sex, power and violence fest, Evans has certainly jumped in at the deep end (literally so at one point, which you won’t miss!). The noblemen of England disapprove of the king’s flamboyant "friend", Gaveston (Eloka Ivo, blessed Read more ...