Interviews
Jasper Rees
What is it about Toby Jones? A decade ago he had a stroke of luck when a film producer spotted his physical similarity to Truman Capote and cast him as the lead in Infamous. The luck wasn’t unadulterated. Philip Seymour Hoffman played the same role in a different film and won an Oscar. While Infamous was overshadowed, Jones wasn't. The latest advance in his career finds him playing a medieval king in a film from the director of Gomorrah, the ultra-violent portrait of organised crime in Naples.Matteo Garrone's Tale of Tales adapts three of the many fairy stories anthologised by 16th-century Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Perhaps as a hopeful harbinger for Paul Simon's new album Stranger to Stranger, Disturbed recently topped Billboard's Mainstream Rock Songs chart with their flabbergasting version of Simon's 1965 song "The Sound of Silence". However, while vocalist David Draiman could launch a career as a new kind of Wagnerian baritone on the strength of his extraordinary performance, Simon himself is headed in a less stentorian direction. Stranger to Stranger is his 13th solo studio album, finds him reuniting yet again with his old production buddy Roy Halee, and successfully manages to blend together Read more ...
Thembi Mutch
Tanya Habjouqa, winner of the World Press Photo Award 2014, is a founding member of the all-female Middle Eastern photography collective Rawiya (meaning “she who tells a story”) which focuses on raising the visibility of female Arab photographers as well as presenting an insider’s view of the region, and defying Western stereotypes of the Middle East.Of Texan-Jordanian ancestry, Habjouqa’s work has been exhibited worldwide and is in the collections of MFA Boston, Institut du Monde Arab, and the Carnegie Museum of Art. Now based in Jerusalem, her latest project is Occupied Pleasures, a book Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was in the long-ago year of 1982 that Martin Fry and ABC released The Lexicon of Love, a feast of addictively lush pop-soul swathed in Anne Dudley's orchestrations and producer Trevor Horn's sparkling electronic innovations. Fry bestrode it like a knowing nouveau-glam mastermind, treading in the ironic footsteps of Bryan Ferry and David Bowie as he effortlessly juggled camp, kitsch and sardonic wit. The album's multi-million-selling success was underpinned by vintage songs like "Poison Arrow", "The Look of Love" and "All of My Heart".Yet all things must pass, and Fry spent much of the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Tinchy Stryder (b. 1986) has had a successful pop career since 2009, including two chart-topping singles (“Number 1” and “Never Leave You”). Born Kwasi Danquah in Ghana, his family moved to London’s East End when he was nine and, in the early years of the new millennium, he established himself as a rising talent of the grime scene and member of the Roll Deep Collective. He was one of the first grime artists to make a successful transition to mainstream pop and has worked with artists ranging from Calvin Harris to Pixie Lott to Taio Cruz.Tinchy Stryder has also pushed entrepreneurial interests Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Galloping technological change, collapsing incomes and a climate of violence facilitated by anonymity are just a few of the challenges facing creative artists in today's digitally driven world. What can be done to put all this right? The man to ask is Francis Gurry, director general of the World Intellectual Property Organisation.In April, Gurry, an Australian lawyer who has been head of WIPO since 2008, convened an international conference to explore the challenges and pitfalls of the current global digital content models, and seek possible solutions for the future. Not least, he says, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Joe Penhall first thwacked his way to the attention of British theatregoers more than 20 years ago with a series of plays about schizos and psychos and wackos. An iconoclastic laureate of lithium, his early hit Some Voices (1994), about a care-in-the-community schizophrenic, went on to be filmed starring Daniel Craig. In 2000 he returned to the subject in Blue/Orange.The play was first performed at the National’s Cottesloe Theatre and introduced Chiwetel Ejiofor as Christopher, a young man from a White City estate who has been sectioned under the Mental Health Act. He's about to be discharged Read more ...
David Nice
Unquestionably one of the greats as a performer, Danish-Israeli violinist and conductor Nikolaj Znaider divides opinion over his forthright views in interview: either honourable and refreshingly candid, or troublingly indiscreet. After an hour and a half with him between the two finals of the Carl Nielsen International Violin Competition in Odense, I plump fervently for the former. Meanwhile, an online scandal sheet jumped to conclusions and labelled the whole event as a "shambles" by misrepresenting what Znaider said about a competitor who didn't make it to the finals and about the three who Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In his last minutes as the artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, Dominic Dromgoole took to the stage to reflect on his years at the helm. Behind him was the cast of Hamlet, home after two years on the road playing to audiences from every country on the planet. He acknowledged his predecessor Mark Rylance, who waved a hat from the throng of groundlings, and then pointed up to the circle where his successor Emma Rice was greeted with gales of welcoming applause.Rice has made clear her intention to stir things up. Her opening production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream recasts Helena as Helenus Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This May the Hallé is celebrating Dvořák. The orchestra’s music director Sir Mark Elder has previously mounted a festival of the Czech composer’s work in Chicago, but now brings him home to Manchester. Nature, Life and Love features seven concerts in under three weeks, and will obviously feature an outing for the big symphonies, nos 7, 8 and 9, and the hugely popular cello concerto. But it’s not just about the headlines of Dvořák’s music.Among other sweetmeats – three Overtures, some Slavonic Dances, the Moravian Duets – the programme includes more arcane pleasures: an early-evening look at Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Debashish Bhattacharya (b 1963) is India’s leading lap steel guitar player. Equally happy in the worlds of Indian classical and West-leaning fusion music, it’s no exaggeration to say he changed the way his instrument is regarded, at home and abroad. Born in Kolkata (AKA Calcutta) to parents who were both classical singers in the gwailor tradition, he embraced both sitar and western guitar as a young child, then spent most of his twenties studying with Pandit Brij Bhushan Kabra, a master of raga slide guitar. His career since has seen him push raga slide into whole new areas, including Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Beth Orton (b 1970) is a singer-songwriter who first came to prominence via her collaborations with the Chemical Brothers, at the start of both their careers. She recorded an album with the producer William Orbit in 1993 but it was her 1995 album, Trailer Park, a canny amalgamation of folk and electronica, that really put her on the map as a solo artist. Since then, spending increasing amounts of time in the US, she has recorded a series of critically acclaimed albums, the latest of which, Kidsticks, her seventh, appears in May. She will be performing two special concerts at the Brighton Read more ...