Interviews
Jasper Rees
There has always been a keen air of propulsion to the career of James McAvoy. He made his name on television in State of Play and Shameless, while early film roles in Starter for 10 and Inside I’m Dancing swiftly promoted him up the leading man’s ladder to appear in The Last King of Scotland, Atonement, The Last Station, X-Men: First Class and, as of this month, Welcome to the Punch.Equally comfortable playing romantic leads and action heroes, he has never been quite a force in theatre. This is partly a matter of choice. He has prioritised screen roles over stage opportunities. The last time Read more ...
Nick Hasted
When Matteo Garrone’s sixth film Gomorrah won the 2008 Grand Prix at Cannes, it announced Italian cinema’s resurrection to the world. When his follow-up, Reality, won the 2012 Grand Prix, opinion was more divided. Where Gomorrah rigorously exposed the inescapable impact of the Camorra gangs on Naples and the surrounding region, giving a grimly compelling tour of a hidden world, Reality is the more slippery tale of Luciano (Aniello Arena), an amiable, amusing Naples fishmonger pushed by his family to enter a heat for Italy’s Big Brother, Grande Fratello. The possibility of appearing on TV Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Is Steptoe and Son the platonic ideal of the British sitcom? Two men trapped in eternal stasis, imprisoned by class and bound together by family ties as if by hoops of steel, never to escape: it’s what half-hour comedy should be. Posterity would seem to agree, because since the sitcom ended in 1974 the two rag and bone men have never been out of work, appearing in the cinema, on stage and radio. For 30 years they made and reran the show on Swedish television, underpinning the widely held theory that Steptoe is but a step from Strindberg.Half a century after its creation, last summer Steptoe Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"We know we belong to the land, and the land we belong to is grand!" as they sang in the title song of Rodgers & Hammerstein's Oklahoma! Singer-songwriter John Fullbright is no less enthusiastic about his home state, but he views it more from the direction of hobo balladeer Woody Guthrie than from the tradition of the Broadway musical.The 24-year-old Fullbright happens to come from Guthrie's home town of Okemah, and while his songs don't inhabit the same folk-protest territory as Guthrie's, they're steeped in the music of the American south and west. Blues and country, gospel and hymns Read more ...
joe.muggs
Croydon-born Coki – Dean Harris – is without question one of the most important musicians of modern times, but unless you are a close follower of underground club scenes it is unlikely you would have heard of him. He has never been interviewed at any length, and though over the last decade his records have been pivotal in at least two musical revolutions – the birth of dubstep itself, then its subsequent transformation into a fiercer and more belligerent version which has become a global phenomenon – he never sought adulation or took to the DJ lifestyle, instead working a 9-5 office job until Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A Chorus Line is one of the great American musicals. It opened off Broadway in 1975, rapidly barged a path to a larger Broadway house and proceeded to run for over 6,000 performances, breaking records along the way. Chicago, which opened in the same season, failed to seize the city's imagination in the same way, and had to wait till the 1990s to find an audience prepared to devour it. At the Tony Awards the musical about the foot soldiers of showbiz, the faceless dancers high-kicking in line, went on to win nine gongs, and then picked up a Pulitzer Prize. A Chorus Line soon transferred to the Read more ...
theartsdesk
Mick Rock was the court photographer of glam. Among the (un)usual suspects found in his lens were Lou Reed, David Bowie and Freddie Mercury. But no one played up for his camera quite like Iggy Pop.The proof is in the six images released today as limited-edition art prints to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Raw Power. Each of the editions is overlaid with handwritten lyrics from "Raw Power" and "Death Trip", and are individually hand signed by both Rock and Pop.Jasper Rees on Mick RockThe photographs capture the feral intensity of Iggy as shaman showman. But from this distance they also Read more ...
peter.quinn
Born in London in 1978 to a Barbadian father and British-Jamaican mother, Soweto Kinch is one of the most exciting and versatile young musicians to hit the British jazz and hip hop scenes in recent years. Following a degree in modern history at Hertford College, Oxford, Kinch has carved out a music career that has so far led to two Mobo wins for best jazz act (2003 and 2007) and a Mercury Prize nomination for album of the year in 2003. As well as recording and touring, Kinch curates The Flyover Show, an annual music and arts festival in Birmingham which he has recently started to produce Read more ...
mark.hudson
Richard Wentworth is the eminence not-so-grise of British contemporary art. The perpetually youthful sculptor’s activities span an extraordinary range of eras and ideas: serving as a teenage assistant to Henry Moore in the Sixties; building sets for Roxy Music in the Seventies; kick-starting the New British Sculpture movement in the Eighties with Tony Cragg and Richard Deacon; masterminding the now legendary "Goldsmiths Course" which launched the YBA generation, alongside Jon Thompson and Michael Craig-Martin.Beyond all this, Wentworth is a tireless social and intellectual catalyst, a man who Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The bristling chest, the suggestive swell under the feathered crotch, the leering lipsticked mouth, the size 12 pink pointe shoes. Even the name of the troupe tickles the ribs, so serious yet so ridiculous. What's a camp word like Trockadero doing in the middle of a legendary Russian ballet company name?It's time to raise a scented handkerchief in respect to the male comics known as the Trocks, visiting Britain on their 40th anniversary tour. The beefy ballerinas with their fragile Russian nerves have been dying on stage before us for decades and show no sign of stopping, so much do audiences Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Richard Thompson has been stretching boundaries and defying expectations for almost half a century. An unassuming 63-year-old with a neat beard whose sole concession to showbiz is his jaunty black beret, though nominally a folk artist Thompson remains doggedly unaffiliated to any scene, trend or ethos.While still a teenager, with Fairport Convention Thompson was instrumental in concocting an organic blend of folk and rock. With his first wife, Linda, he plumbed the emotional depths of confessional singer-songwriting while also writing rude songs about licking lollipops. He has since scored Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Sir Simon Rattle (b. 1955) and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (est. 1986) have been together from the beginning. Founded by period-instrument musicians eager to run their own affairs rather than play obediently for conductor-managers like Christopher Hogwood and John Eliot Gardiner, the OAE invited Rattle to conduct a concert performance of Idomeneo in that first year. Of the orchestra’s several other guest conductors, including Iván Fischer and, until his death, Sir Charles Mackerras, none has had a stronger or longer link.There have since been many highlights in the relationship Read more ...