Interviews
Jasper Rees
Siân Phillips (b 1933) belongs to a remarkable generation of British actresses. They include Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Eileen Atkins, Vanessa Redgrave, Joan Plowright and Sheila Hancock. Although just as indomitable a presence on stage and screen, Phillips is set apart from them not only by dint of her Welshness – Welsh was her mother language as a child – but also by the curious shape of her career.As she has detailed in two memoirs – Private Faces (1999) and Public Places (2001) - Phillips was originally called Jane, but a schoolteacher Cymrified her name for her in class and it stuck. She Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Record producer Steve Lillywhite has been awarded a CBE in the 2012 New Year Honours list. Born in 1955, Lillywhite started his career in the late 1970s working with new wave and post-punk bands such as XTC and Siouxsie & The Banshees. He went on to produce everyone from Peter Gabriel and Talking Heads to Morrissey and Kirsty MacColl, to whom he was once married. His most enduring relationship, however, is with U2. It began with Lillywhite producing their 1980 debut album, Boy, and has continued to the present day. Here he recalls being in the studio as their 2004 hit, “Vertigo”, came Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When he was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus, Christopher Hitchens carried on talking. He gave a number of riveting interviews – with Lynn Barber in The Sunday Times, Andrew Anthony in The Observer, Mick Brown in The Telegraph – as he prepared himself for a journey which, for the author of the bestselling God Is Not Great, would not involve meeting any sort of maker. I had my own encounter with the essayist, polemicist, self-styled contrarian, Bush-supporting apostate, drinker and smoker in 2005 as he made his annual pilgrimage - if that's not too devotional a word - to the Hay Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Asked what attracted her to the music of South America, Catherine Ringer says, “C’est comme ça. Boom-ta-ta-boom, ta-ta-boom, ta-ta-boom-da boom, boom-da-da-boom.” She begins singing. “Boom-da-boom-da-boom, doo-doo-da-doo. It’s the rhythm of rock'n’roll,” she concludes. Ringer still exudes the spontaneity that defined Les Rita Mitsouko, whose first French hit, "Marcia Baïla", was fuelled by Latin rhythms. Yet now, she’s on her own, in London promoting her first solo album, Ring n’ Roll, released here this week. Her partner Fred Chichin died in November 2007.He’s gone, but Ringer says, “There Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In 2006 the thatched house in Lymington on the Hampshire coast which had been the home of Ken Russell (b 1927) for 30 years burned down. All of the director’s original film scripts, including Women in Love, The Devils and Tommy, were destroyed. So was the bulk of the music collection which inspired him to make his groundbreaking films about composers in the 1960s. There is, however, one part of the Russell archive which has survived, for the simple reason that for 50 years it had never once been in his possession.In the 1950s, after giving up on a career as a dancer, Russell freelanced as a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Lemmy Kilmister (b 1945) was born Ian Fraser Kilmister in Burslem, near Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, but spent his formative years in Anglesey. His father, ex-RAF padre, left when he was an infant and he was raised by his mother, who worked as a librarian, and his grandmother. He was interested in rock and pop from an early age and formed various local bands, most successful of which were The Rockin’ Vicars who had a CBS recording contract. Moving to London in 1967 he quickly became involved again in the music scene and blooming counterculture, acting for a while as roadie for Jimi Hendrix. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The trajectory of Terence Rattigan’s standing finds two peaks separated by a deep trough. From the late Thirties to the mid Fifties, he gave a voice to a social class which liked to keep its feelings under lock and key. Then in 1956 Rattigan was occluded by the dazzling verbal incontinence of Jimmy Porter. In 1991 a production of The Deep Blue Sea at the Almeida starring Penelope Wilton rebooted his reputation.His centenary amounts to another celebratory reassessment. Theatres small and large have been turning to the unvisited margins of Rattigan’s work. But Separate Tables and The Browning Read more ...
Jasper Rees
At Thanksgiving in 1999, a 75-year-old retired widowed museum director came out to his family. He had only recently been widowed after a marriage lasting more than four decades. One of the people to whom he broke the news was his son Mike Mills, then in his early thirties and not yet a film director. This year the movie inspired by that moment was released, and it now appears on DVD.Beginners, written and directed by Mills, features a delightful and zesty performance from Christopher Plummer in the role of Hal, who announces his homosexuality to his son, a cartoonist played by Ewan McGregor. Read more ...
peter.quinn
Born in Los Angeles, raised by his mother in Bakersfield, and now living in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, Gregory Porter's resonant baritone is one of music's wonders. Porter's Grammy-nominated debut album, Water, has earned him praise from critics and fellow artists alike. Released in the UK in April this year to coincide with his appearance on Later... With Jools Holland, Water leapt to Number One in both the UK's iTunes and Amazon charts.Porter's amazing vocal abilities have seen him described by no less a jazz luminary than Wynton Marsalis as “a fantastic young singer”. Read more ...
Ismene Brown
On Saturday one of the master ballets of the Royal Ballet genius Frederick Ashton returns to the Covent Garden stage, Enigma Variations. Its owner is an architect, one of Ashton’s last friends, and one of the handful to whom the choreographer left the small number of ballets he felt would be of financial benefit to them when he died in 1988. But as time goes by, those ballets' ownership passes on to others, and worries have been mounting about their vulnerability in an art form written in ephemerality.Now that architect, Tony Dyson, has succeeded in constructing a Foundation to protect the Read more ...
joe.muggs
Nova Scotia-born Leslie Feist is the very model of a 21st-century artist: independent in spirit yet able to work the mainstream industry to her advantage, technologically savvy and au fait with all the means to build and sustain a profile and sales while still maintaining some sense of artistry and dignity. Yet she is also resolutely traditionalist in many ways, with the rich traditions of Laurel Canyon rock, Brill Building songwriting and older, rootsier sounds audible in her songs, and a sense of rather old-school Bohemianism to her dedication to music as a lifestyle and the collective of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Cosmo Jarvis (b 1989) was born in New Jersey but grew up in Devon. He has produced two albums, Humasyouhitch/Sonofabitch (2009) and Is The World Strange or Am I Strange? (2011), that combine incisive lyricism, goofy humour, rap, rock, terrace-chant choruses, studio orchestration and an unlikely fusion of musical styles, sometimes more jovially eccentric than hip. His highest-profile song is "Gay Pirates", a musical hoedown about love on the high seas that garnered Stephen Fry as a vocal fan. Jarvis has also developed a parallel role as a film-maker, corralling a group of Devonshire friends Read more ...