Features
Peter Culshaw
The music world is reeling from the death of Charlie Gillett. He was not just an influential DJ who was instrumental in widening the listening habits of millions of listeners on his World Service and other radio shows, a journalist, writer and a key figure in promoting global music. He was also a beacon of decency and rare integrity in the music world who affected so many people. Heartfelt tributes have been pouring into his site with postings from complete strangers the other side of the world, to members of his family and even his post-man.I found out the shocking news when Caspar Llewellyn Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Business is booming for Australia's cinemas. 2008 was a record-breaking year at the box office, and international festivals run annually in the major cities. Yet, despite successes as diverse as Lantana, Wolf Creek, Muriel's Wedding and Priscilla Queen of the Desert, just 33 home-grown films were released last year – fewer even than in 1911. Three decades ago, the New Australian Cinema was one of the most exciting national movements in the world, thanks to work like Picnic at Hanging Rock, Mad Max and My Brilliant Career. Today Oz films are struggling. Could it be that - rather like the Read more ...
alice.vincent
At seven o'clock on a Friday night, with the first spring twilight of the year as a backdrop, Newcastle’s Civic Centre reverberated to a new composition for its Carillon bells. Mingling eerily with birdsong, it marked a rather different start to the weekend from the hoards of hen nights getting ready for a night on the Toon. This was the opening night of AV, the biennial international festival of electronic arts.The festival chose energy as its curatorial theme. It was a snug fit for a town associated as strongly with its foundations in industry, and more recently with economic hardship and Read more ...
ash.smyth
When the subversive graphic artist Sarnath Banerjee won a MacArthur grant he opted "to research the sexual landscape of contemporary Indian cities", embroiling himself in the aphrodisiac market of old Delhi and introducing the English reading public to the great Hindi word swarnadosh (erm, "nocturnal emissions"). Banerjee (b. 1972) is generally credited with having introduced the graphic novel to India. Incorrectly, as it happens; but with Corridor (2004) and The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers (2007) – over and above his work as illustrator, publisher and film-maker – the Goldsmiths-trained Read more ...
edward.seckerson
On the eve of his brand-new staging of Janáček's Katya Kabanova for English National Opera, David Alden - the one-time "bad boy" of opera - talks about first-night riots, Britten and Donizetti triumphs, and the dramatic potency of Janáček. Live and uncut.
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David Nice
Britain's most communicative singing actor, lyric-dramatic tenor Philip Langridge has died at the age of 70. I offer a personal reminiscence, looking back on some of the greatest theatrical experiences of my life, and ask conductors Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Sir Mark Elder, Edward Gardner and Vladimir Jurowski as well as director Richard Jones what Langridge's example has meant to them. List your top ten operatic performances: it's an exercise some critics are asked to undertake by rating-hungry newspapers, and a task many of us like to indulge in simply to remind ourselves what's truly Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's appropriate, given that the Oscars remain the mother of all awards shows, that Sunday night's ceremony made a point of honouring both a mother from hell (Mo'Nique in Precious) and another from Inspirational Movie heaven (Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side). But it was clear there was one thespian earth-mother who reigned supreme as a long ceremony went on. And on. And on. That, of course, is Meryl Streep, now the most-nominated actress in Oscar history and a touchstone of sorts throughout the evening. Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin may have been the night's nominal hosts, but Streep Read more ...
graeme.thomson
I am talking to Toumani Diabaté on a phone line into Bamako that, as he explains with an audible shrug, sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. He was due in London a couple of weeks ago to promote Ali & Toumani, his album of duets with the late, great Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré, but was struck down with malaria at the eleventh hour. It rather puts the standard rock star bleating about "stress and exhaustion" to shame. “At the last minute I had packed my suitcase but I started to vomit and malaria came, it was really bad,” he says. “Thank God, thank God, today I’m getting better." Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Opera North's Howard Assembly Room (above) is no longer a well-kept secret. Lovingly restored to its former Victorian glory, this one-time annexe to the Grand Theatre, Leeds, has had a chequered history - even briefly servicing the furtive mackintosh brigade as a picture palace of the bluest persuasion. Now, though, it's been born again as a vibrant performance space. A new season of events under the umbrella title of VOICES is about to launch featuring acts as diverse as The Tallis Scholars, Jackie Oates and Chumbawamba. General manager of the space Richard Ashton and artistic director Read more ...
howard.male
On a new CD compilation from Strut Records out this week, Next Stop... Soweto, we’re back in Soweto in the 1960s and 1970s and it's the dark, dark days of apartheid; an era in which it was actually against the law for a black South African to even be a musician, and live music was banned from most public places in black areas. There were also no cinemas, bars, hotels, shopping centres or electricity and death was an everyday fact of life. Yet only fifteen miles away, white Johannesburg’s skyscrapers glistened; an affront to the asbestos roofed, poverty-steeped insult to human dignity that was Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Soviet-era film director Sergei Paradjanov is a figure whose complicated biography has often overshadowed his innovative and distinctive cinematic style. The first full UK retrospective of his work at the British Film Institute on London's South Bank, marking the 20th anniversary of the director’s death, gives a chance to reassess the paradoxes of his heritage, and delight in a character whose rebellious passion for life and for artistic beauty brought him through some of the worst trials that the Soviet system could impose on an artist. Meanwhile, an exhibition of photographs by his long- Read more ...
ash.smyth
Thursday Never been to the Galle Literary Festival before. Very excited. A long weekend of bona fide book-nerdishness is just what I need – if only to stop me lying on the roof for three days with a book. Also I have one-on-one time lined up with Wendy Cope and Rana Dasgupta. Wendy Cope is my heroin(e), the woman who showed me that poetry could be funny. Dasgupta is Delhi’s enfant génial, or so says Sir Salman Rushdie. I’ll take his word for it.Also, a splendid opportunity to get out of Colombo and mooch around, boozing and breakfasting with Sri Lanka’s great and good, in the intensely Read more ...