Features
Kieron Tyler
“Bruce Lacey has had this unbelievable career,” says the Turner prizewinning artist Jeremy Deller. “His is an alternative version of British art history - people didn't seem to know that Bruce has intersected with British history. I felt he deserves to be looked at again." Deller has put his energies into a documentary, exhibition and film season, all celebrating this influential, but largely unsung and unique British artist.In the new documentary The Bruce Lacey Experience, Lacey himself says, “I’m a satirist or, to put it a crude way, a piss-taker. If I see something, I like to take the Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Wandering through the winding alleyways of the Medina, there was Bjork dressed in a dazzling blue dress and hat and listening to a Gnawa group with its dull, thudding bass and metal castanets. She was here to perform at the Fes Festival of Sacred Music, although the presence of Bjork suggests at times the notion of sacred may be a bit blurred. She has anyway said that her favourite singer is the wonderful Sufi singer Abida Parveen, and spent several days exploring the city.Fes is one of the holiest cities in Islam. With a university that predates Oxford and Cambridge by three Read more ...
garth.cartwright
Some people go on holiday to relax on a beach. Others to trek through a glorious landscape. Or to explore magnificent architecture/extravagant nightclubs. Myself, well, I’m a musical tourist. Which often means I’m in rather blighted states. I’ve spent more time in Mississippi than New York, regularly returned to Romania yet barely know France. So when the offer came to attend a musical festival in La Réunion I didn’t have to think twice.La Réunion, an island in the Indian Ocean, rarely attracts UK attention – beyond when Piton de la Fournaise, Réunion’s very active volcano (pictured below), Read more ...
mark.hudson
Standing in Tate St Ives with the sun gleaming on the Atlantic, you wonder who they are, all these chilled, nonchalantly now people. Through the great curved window, the sun is setting over the barren headland of the Land’s End peninsular, the landscape that inspired Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson et al. But in here, in the Alex Katz private view, white-haired survivors of the town’s Fifties and Sixties heyday are outnumbered by people who look like they’ve stepped through a door from Hoxton and points further east in London’s underground art hinterland.There are a few Mayfair-on- Read more ...
Natalie Shaw
The minister for culture Ed Vaizey has said that London 2012 isn't just about London, but showcasing Britain to the world. This may be true in the simple geographical spread of events leading up to the Olympic Games, but in Derry-Londonderry's case, it ís equally about instilling a sense of civic pride. In 1991, Irish poet and playwright Seamus Heaney adapted Sophocles' Philoctetes as The Cure at Troy. His verse on the timeless qualities of human nature seemed to exist outside the situation Derry found itself in back then, although his words on how the city would "heal" now read like a 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 ...
Joe Muggs
It's a nervous beginning. This is the first ever presentation of the first proper album by one of the lynchpins of British underground music, and the soundsystem isn't right. Record label personnel and friends are flung across Paris to requisition new loudspeakers, while the invited audience drinks mojitos. After all this, it would be deeply embarrassing if the record turned out to be bad.Spoiler warning: once the right speakers turn up, the record proves not to be bad. In fact it is stupendous. It was never guaranteed, but the project did have promise. The idea of one of the founding fathers Read more ...
simon.broughton
“Come to the front with those guns. You need to frighten those poor Brits – pah, pah, pah, pah, pah!” Michael Williams hurls his fist forward as if wielding his own weapon as he urges the demonstrators with their sticks and guns forward. The crowd of black singers in front of him are recreating an anti-apartheid protest in Cape Town Opera’s production of Mandela Trilogy, which gets its European premiere in Cardiff on 20 June.Williams is the librettist and director of Mandela Trilogy and managing director of Cape Town Opera. And I’m in the Opera’s rehearsal room in the Artscape in Cape Town to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
For perhaps the most widely cheered orchestra on the planet, it doesn’t look like much of a concert venue. Fenced in with wire, flanked by a road which leads away to low-rise housing, a scrappy patch of scrubland stretches over a few nondescript acres. Indeed the only hint of anything to caress the eye is the looming silhouette of Stirling Castle on an adjacent promontory.It’s here nonetheless, in Raploch on Thursday 21 June, that The Big Concert will take place and, with three other events nationwide, officially open the London 2012 Festival. On a stage as sizeable as the one they rig up at Read more ...
Joe Muggs
So here it is, our fourth show of new, rare, exclusive and peculiar music - as ever recorded at Red Bull Studios with Brendon Harding ably manning the machines.As ever, the show is vaguely themed, with Peter and Joe doing their best to emphasise "vaguely" by looking at areas where ideas and genres blur. This time round, they are looking at jazz and its offspring, asking the question "where does jazz stop?". So they have Armenian jazz, Chicagoan ghetto-electro jazz, Croydon grime jazz, Icelandic jazzy folktronica, Hungarian jazz and Ethiopian jazz-funk, as well as some music from Brazil so far Read more ...
Tim Crouch
It has been nearly 10 years since I started writing for theatre. The second thing I wrote was a commission for the Brighton Festival who offered me the opportunity to make and perform a piece for young audiences inspired by a Shakespeare play. That was I, Caliban – a separate production of which is currently touring with Bristol Old Vic/Company of Angels alongside their version of I, Peaseblossom, the second of my Brighton commissions. After Peaseblossom came I, Banquo in 2005. And then I, Malvolio five years later – a show that is filling most of my touring commitments until the middle of Read more ...
Tom Bird
Over the past six weeks, we at the Globe have put on a festival called Globe to Globe. The concept (an idea of Dominic Dromgoole’s) was always very simple to explain: all of Shakespeare’s plays, each in a different language. But the reality of that, of course, was unprecedented, unwieldy and just plain large. It’s impossible, particularly with hangovers literal and metaphorical, to sum up what it meant to the hundreds of actors, the tens of thousands of audience members (the vast majority of whom had never been to the Globe before), or the hardy souls who stood through every single play. All Read more ...