Interviews
Thomas H. Green
Joe Walsh is one of classic American rock’s guitar heroes. For the solo at the end of The Eagles' “Hotel California” alone, he earned his place in those ranks, but he’s done a whole lot more in the 44 years he’s been a professional musician.Born in Kansas in 1947 and raised in Ohio and New York, Walsh first gained profile in the heavy rock trio the James Gang before moving on to his own band Barnstorm then going solo. His combination of technical skill, tight riffs and wry lyrics garnered US appeal and when he joined The Eagles in 1975, he gave their sound a steroid edge, co-writing “Life in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
At the Royal Albert Hall one summer evening in 2007, a teeming ensemble of young South Americans served up a BBC Prom that is the most YouTubed classical concert this side of the Three Tenors. Under the baton of the compelling Gustavo Dudamel, an all-dancing, all-shouting account of “Mambo” from West Side Story has become the roof-raising sign-off of the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, who last year dropped the word Youth from their name.Still a mere 32, with the hair of a poet and the grin of a chipmunk, their conductor seems to be few critics’ idea of the finished Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
From playing a blood-weeping Bond villain in 2006’s Casino Royale to his repeated collaborations with directors such as Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive) and Susanne Bier (After The Wedding), Danish-born actor Mads Mikkelsen has carved out a respected niche on both sides of the pond. He can come out of questionable blockbuster material unscathed – as his recent turns in Clash of the Titans and The Three Musketeers demonstrate – and elevate good material with his relentlessly compelling, peculiarly intense screen presence.He’s recently been confirmed to play a villain in the follow-up to Kenneth Read more ...
peter.quinn
Django Bates ascribes the variety of musical influences at play in his work to his childhood - growing up listening to his father's remarkably eclectic record collection. In the first part of my conversation with Django, he talks about Loose Tubes, StoRMChaser and his new post at Bern University of the Arts. In this second part of our conversation, he talks about craftsmanship, confounding expectations and why strumming one chord all day can be time well spent.PETER QUINN: Your father’s record collection included Romanian folk music, African music, jazz. I’m intrigued to know how that music Read more ...
peter.quinn
Born in Beckenham, Kent, in 1960, Django Bates is a self-taught composer and founder member of the seminal big band Loose Tubes (1983-1990). As well as leading his own groups, Human Chain and Delightful Precipice, he has composed works for the Brodsky Quartet, Joanna MacGregor, Evelyn Glennie, the Britten Sinfonia and the Dutch Metropole Orchestra, amongst others. In 1997, Bates was awarded the prestigious Jazzpar prize, known as the 'Nobel Prize of Jazz' (previous recipients include Lee Konitz, Roy Haynes and Geri Allen). He currently teaches at Bern University of the Arts and the Read more ...
Nick Levine
Neneh Cherry has never been conventional. The singer and rapper's latest album is a collaboration with The Thing, a Swedish free jazz trio who have previously tackled songs by PJ Harvey and The White Stripes. If anything, the presence of Cherry has made them braver: The Cherry Thing features reworkings of The Stooges' "Dirt", Suicide's "Dream Baby Dream" and MF Doom's "Accordion". It's gutsy stuff, but it works. The album already sounds like a contender for the end of year lists.At first, this project seems like an unlikely comeback vehicle for Cherry, but on closer inspection it could be Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Rumer has recently returned to public life. Her new album, Boys Don’t Cry, is a collection of songs from the Seventies by male singers such as Townes Van Zandt, Leon Russell, Tim Hardin and Jimmy Webb. Her interpretations, as with her 2010 debut album of original material, Seasons of my Soul, are coated in the icing of classic easy listening – the smoothness of The Carpenters or Carole King springs to mind – yet there’s the kernel of something pointed, heartfelt, even painful, at its core.
Seasons of my Soul sold well – over 500,000 copies – and Rumer was taken to the bosom of the Jools Read more ...
james.woodall
Carlos Saura is 80, though he looks 60. With a lived-in face and straggly grey hair, he resembles a rebel professor on a 1970s campus. He’s garrulous and speaks a rolling, recklessly elided Spanish. He’s had seven children by four women, one of them Geraldine Chaplin, the actor-clown’s fourth child. This old man from Aragon—he was born in Huesca—has a self-evident lust for life.Saura made his first feature film, Los golfos, about delinquency in Madrid’s badlands, in 1959. Over 40 works have followed since, including Ana y los lobos (“Ana and the Wolves”) in 1972, with Ms Chaplin (they were Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Gary Numan (born Gary Webb, 1958) was born in Hammersmith and raised in the western outskirts of London, the son of a bus driver. By the latter half of the Seventies he was fronting punk band Tubeway Army but his fortunes changed dramatically when he added synthesizers to the formula and became, with the album Replicas and songs such as “Down in the Park” and “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?”, one of electro-pop’s great innovators. His coldly catchy music, sci-fi imagery, adenoidal voice and air of robotic isolation was hugely influential. He sealed his repute with the globally successful single “ Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Spoek Mathambo is one the year's brightest new hopes. From Johannesburg but based in Sweden, Spoek (real name Nthato Mokgata) plays with genres like few others. He makes radical, sometimes disjointed music, some of which - like his new single “Let Them Talk” from his recently released album Father Creeper - you can actually dance to.Spoek got a lot of attention last year with his cover of Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control", but I began by asking him about Die Antwoord, the hilarious and brilliant white rap group who created a lot of waves in 2010. He and his band are currently on tour in the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A boy alone in his vast white bedroom has a recurrent haunting dream, frightening yet somehow comforting - a swan invades his mind, simultaneously menacing him with its power and wildness, and yet wrapping its great wings around him to shield him, with some ambiguous kind of love. It's the opening scene of Matthew Bourne's tremendous modern version of Swan Lake, and that resonant image and the tale he unfolds from it has made it a classic of modern theatre, marvelled at around the world. But why it works is the emotion generated by the palpably strange and authoritative physicality of the Read more ...
graeme.thomson
My, what strange and wondrous treasures await the record producer given exclusive access to the private vaults of a Beatle. He will, for instance, find entire radio programmes preserved on multi-track tape, and recordings of F1 cars roaring past at some unspecified race track. He will stumble upon a humbled Fab being given his very first sitar lesson by Ravi Shankar, and be privy to a brief musical moment beamed in across the decades from a room at the Jaipur Palace Hotel. There will be a few decent songs, too.One day every last 1/4 inch of this eccentric audio trove may well be exposed to Read more ...