Interviews
graeme.thomson
Lady Gaga arrives in the UK this weekend to play two huge shows at Twickenham Stadium, before moving on to Manchester. Today, she is the biggest pop star in the world. Three years ago she was in the final stages of a highly orchestrated campaign intended to claim that position. What follows is an interview with her in Israel in the autumn of 2009, right around the time the world went Gaga gaga. Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Ian Hunter’s new album, When I’m President, is an almost obscenely vibrant piece of work for a man who – despite that impossibly golden mop of hair – is now 73 years old. But then Hunter has always been a rock'n'roll survivor. Born in Shropshire in 1939, he was a 30-something industry veteran by the time his band Mott The Hoople, four albums into a career that had failed to scale even the nursery slopes of fame and fortune, scored their breakthrough hit in 1972 with David Bowie’s glam anthem “All the Young Dudes”.After enjoying three years of superstardom with Mott, whose run of irrepressible Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Pet Shop Boys are the kind of national treasure that make the English so inscrutable. For 30 years they have made pop music that is sophisticated, camp and deadpan, an unlikely formula which has shifted over 100 million records, making them the most successful pop duo ever. Their 11th studio album, Elysium, will be released on 10 September. Recorded in Los Angeles, it is a slower, more sumptuous work than their fans have become used to. Could it be the time has come for a change?The pair have always projected a strong public image, part act and part their own eccentric selves, but when I meet Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Described variously in the press as "virile", an "Aryan hunk" and a "great blond bear" of a man, Stuart Skelton may be the physical embodiment of machismo, but there's nothing of the beefcake about his singing. A Heldentenor of rare beauty and lyricism, Skelton's rise to operatic fame may have come young, but his is a voice and a career that looks set to stay the course.Skelton has come a long way since his singing career started at age eight, as a treble in St Andrew's Cathedral Choir, Sydney. His journey from the music of the Anglican choral tradition to international success in the big Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Marvin Hamlisch’s three Oscars all came in 1974. "I think now we can talk to each other as friends," he said as he accepted his third award of the night. He composed the winning song "The Way We Were" (and the film's score) for Barbara Streisand, having started out on Broadway as rehearsal pianist in Funny Girl. A wizened sage warned Hamlisch that it didn't do to win so much so young, but he paid no notice and a year later went and wrote the music for A Chorus Line, his Broadway debut. When the inevitable Tony followed, Hamlisch had achieved every target he'd set for himself by the age of 31. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Nik Kershaw (b 1958) is best known for a run of hits in the mid-Eighties, songs such as “Wouldn’t It Be Good”, “I Won’t Let The Sun Go Down on Me”, “The Riddle” and “Wide Boy”. He achieved international success and played Live Aid in 1985. Raised in Ipswich, he had a background in local bands before his breakthrough came with 1984’s Human Racing album. His look from the era, all mullet, snood and casual suit, has become definitive Eighties imagery.Kershaw spent much of the Nineties working with and writing for others. As well as playing with Elton John, he wrote hits including Chesney Hawkes Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Simon Stephens (b 1971) is the most prolific British playwright of his generation. Born and brought up in Stockport, he began writing as a student in York University and had produced seven plays before his Bluebird was produced at the Royal Court in 1998. In due course along came angry, searching, passionate statements about society and belonging with punchy titles like Motortown (2006), Pornography (2007) and Punk Rock (2009) (pictured below right). The productivity has not let up, least of all in a summer which sees three new plays from his pen: Morning at the Traverse in Edinburgh, a fresh Read more ...
joe.muggs
The 21st-century British summer would be a very different thing were it not for Rob Da Bank. With the Bestival brand, Rob – originally Robert Gorham – and his wife Josie have, over the past decade, redefined the weekend music festival, setting the stage for the current massive proliferation of boutique events. The Bestival itself, still on the Isle of Wight site where it began in 2004, has grown to 10 times its original size, remained strong through the recession, and birthed the family-friendly Camp Bestival spin-off which takes place this coming weekend.Bestival's party ethos has its roots Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
When he joined up with John Oates, Daryl Hall became half of one of the most successful duos in pop history, which has sold upwards of 60 million albums. From the mid-Seventies to the late Eighties, the pair notched six platinum albums and posted a remarkable streak of hit singles. Six of them were American chart-toppers, including "Kiss On My List", "Rich Girl", "Private Eyes" and "Out of Touch", while even the ones which didn't reach Number One became pop standards anyway, including "Sara Smile" and "Family Man".Born in Pottstown, Pennsylvania in October 1946, Hall majored in music at Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Tracing a career arc which has taken him from stand-up comic to actor, writer and film director, it's not too fanciful to describe Bobcat Goldthwait as an anarchic, indie, low budget version of Woody Allen. The 50-year-old New Yorker started out in the clubs of Boston before heading west to Hollywood in the 1980s, where he cultivated a shrill-voiced, nervy, confrontational comic persona to considerable success. Increasingly, he became infamous for the somewhat contrived controversies he unleashed on the US chat show circuit; in 1994 he set fire to a chair on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Thirty years ago the British were coming. So cried Colin Welland rallyingly from the stage of the Academy Awards, having just accepted an Oscar for best screenplay. And now Chariots of Fire is coming again, twice. An energetic stage reincarnation has sprinted round the block at Hampstead Theatre and now jogs along to the Gielgud, where it will continue to leave barely a dry eye in the house. And then there is the film itself, out shortly for another turn on the red carpet in this Olympic season.Hugh Hudson (b 1936), debut director of the film, wizened producer of the play, has another Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
At his studio near White City in West London (he did say it was Notting Hill) Ilan Eshkeri’s is adding a scratchy cello to a key moment in Ralph Fiennes film of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. It’s the moment the inhabitants of Rome realise that Coriolanus, an exile, is about to attack them. It is, he says of the suitably ominous sound, “bent out of tune, weird – I’m getting into the sounds of breathing, I like a lot of dirt.” In the studio is his producer Steve McLaughlin, and there are a couple of assistants bustling around.Although not (yet, anyway) a household name, it’s a fair bet that you Read more ...