Features
Tim Cumming
October Gallery first mounted a show of William Burroughs’ paintings in 1988, soon after the writer had published The Western Lands, the last novel in his final trilogy. More books would come – on lemurs, pirates, Madagascar, cats, dreams – but no further fiction. And with the death in 1986 of Brion Gysin, his friend and collaborator in Cut-Ups, films, arcana and performance art, Burroughs became a painter, exchanging brushes for firearms, and hung his first exhibition of shot gun art in New York and then London.Some of them are here, and they dominate the show with visceral impact. His Read more ...
David Nice
Never mind the huge interpretative challenges; Mahler’s Eighth, dubbed the "Symphony of a Thousand" owing to the gargantuan forces the composer marshalled as conductor of its 1910 Munich premiere, needs an even greater mastery of logistics. Markus Stenz (b 1965), who has been chief conductor of Cologne’s 500-year old Gürzenich Orchestra since 2003 in addition to major posts at the Hallé and Hilversum's Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, had so far wielded a Mahler cycle of terrific impetus and fresh approach to detail. How would he get 600 or so singers and players to move forward with an equal Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
What would Sigmund Freud say to newcomers infiltrating his priceless collection of Greek, Chinese and Egyptian antiquities? His study on the ground floor of 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead, where Freud and his family lived after fleeing the Nazis in 1938 (he loved the house, saying it was “incomparably better” than his flat in Vienna, but only lived in it for a year before he died in 1939) has always been filled with his Egyptian gods and goddesses, bodhisattvas and buddhas, Eros figures, mummy masks and Greek vases. He was “like a curator in a museum”, said the American poet Hilda Read more ...
kate.bassett
When I first mentioned to a colleague that I was embarking on a biography of the doctor/director Jonathan Miller, he instantly yelped, “My God, your work’s cut out! The man must have met half the famous names in the twentieth century!"My subsequent conversations with Miller provided a cornucopia of highly entertaining anecdotes. These included his brushes with Princess Margaret (who was very taken with his comic turns in the 1950s); Bobby Kennedy (who told him to shut up, shortly before being shot); Bridget Riley (who nearly sued); and Kevin Spacey (who got his big break by stalking Miller Read more ...
graeme.thomson
In 2009 I interviewed Jamie Cullum about Dave Brubeck, who has died today just a day before his 92nd birthday. What follows are Cullum's recollections of falling in love with Brubeck's music, and later knowing and working with a jazz legend."My parents weren’t into jazz at all, but my dad did have a tape of Dave Brubeck and, as most people did, loved "Take Five". I heard that in the car long before my jazz awakening through Herbie Hancock and the Headhunters and In A Silent Way - swampy, odd music. Dave was on my radar long before that.I’m very fond of playing those stabbing, sharp notes, and Read more ...
fisun.guner
Unusually for a Turner Prize, or for contemporary art generally for that matter, it was the year that film outshone other media. Paul Noble may have initially been the popular, and the bookies' favourite, but as technically impressive as his panoramic drawings are they are also quite lifeless, made inert by the process of their meticulous execution.Neither was it to be the year for performance art, for although performance has received a tremendous boost with the opening of Tate Modern’s The Tanks, as well as the recent high profile appearances of veteran practitioner Marina Abramoviç, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Michael Haneke’s Amour was the big winner last night in the European Film Awards’ silver jubilee year. As well as Best Film, Haneke won Best Director, as he did for his previous two films The White Ribbon (2009) and Hidden (2005), while his veteran stars Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant were named Best Actress and Actor. It showed both the Oscars-style pack mentality of the European Film Academy voters for their favourite auteurs (shown most alarmingly with Polanski’s blanket wins for his mediocre The Ghost in 2010), and a genuine conviction that Haneke is a master European director Read more ...
Louise Gray
“I am always fascinated by how much is in a voice, by their textures and qualities,” says composer Jocelyn Pook. “They’re like aural photographs of a person and you recognise them instantly.” We are in her studio in north London and Pook flicks through audio-files in her computer to prove the point. Some of the voices she was chosen for their inherent musicality – voices on answerphones rise upwards as questions are asked and intervals are sounded for multi-syllabic words. Pook, an award-winning musician who often uses voices and vocal rhythms – real, sampled and digitally pitchshifted – in Read more ...
Peter Nichols
It was in Singapore in 1947 that my real education began. For the first time I read Lawrence, Forster, Virginia Woolf, Melville, Graham Greene and Bernard Shaw’s political works, becoming a lifelong Leftie. When Stanley Baxter explained Existentialism in our billet block, we nodded intelligently. When Kenneth Williams spoke Parlyaree, we were in advance of the rest of the nation who wouldn’t hear of it till Beyond Our Ken.Our post-war National Service was spent defending our far-flung (and about to be abandoned) empire. Twelve of us were in a revue called At Your Service. In the opening Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The return of The Rolling Stones to the world stage is headline news, but the man who put them there in the first place has decided to reveal the tricks of being an impresario, the hustler that can make or break a band. In this poignant, exclusive extract from Stone Free, their former manager Andrew Loog Oldham contemplates Phil Spector, one of his inspirations with whom he was reunited in the wake of the death of Lana Clarkson, the woman Spector was convicted of murdering in 2009.Stone Free is Oldham’s third book, following Stoned and 2Stoned. Unlike its predecessors, it isn’t an oral Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was the Seventies/Eighties supersoap Dallas which made Larry Hagman a household name, and his portrayal of the amoral, unscrupulous oil baron JR Ewing became a benchmark character in TV history. Hagman's performance also helped to make Dallas one of the highest-rated shows of all time, and the question "Who shot JR?" (which somebody did at the end of series three) became the focus of intense global speculation. An updated version of Dallas was recently launched by the TNT network in the States, and Hagman stoically returned to the set despite his steadily worsening health.Though he'll Read more ...
Tamsin Oglesby
I read and loved The Mouse and His Child as a child. Apparently. I was reminded of this by the inscription in the copy I gave to my god-daughter 15 years ago. And again, when I read it to my own daughter 10 years later. It’s such an extraordinarily original, moving, funny, story, I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten it.But I think it’s less a case of senility and more to do with the fact that the things you absorb at an early age enter your bones, and like bones, you take for granted the fact that they’re there, even though they shape you. I grew up with a foreign mother who constantly referred Read more ...