Features
Jenny Gilbert
Like the British high street, the once richly diverse landscape of dance in the UK is likely to look very different once lockdown is fully lifted. There will be losses, noticeably among the smaller companies whose survival was always precarious. There will be downsizings. There will be painful gaps where a major talent has given up the fight, retired to run a flower shop or become a hill farmer. It will take years for the sector to recover.All the performing arts have taken a hammering, and heaven knows this isn’t a competition, but dance, and ballet especially, is a case apart. The technique Read more ...
Mark Kidel
The Master Musicians of Joujouka, described by William Burroughs as a “4000 year-old rock’n’roll band”, and recorded by Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones in the late 1960s, have always been something of a cult – even in their own land. Based in the rural foothills of the Rif Mountains in Northern Morocco, they are a professional clan that delivers performances renowned for their extraordinary transformative power.I first heard them in 1980, when musical adventurer Rikki Stein, later manager of Fela Kuti, brought the musicians to Britain on their on their first tour, a low-key affair, that Read more ...
Owen Richards
Sound of Metal has been a long time coming. Director and writer Darius Marder faced years of delays ranging from casting changes to the whole world shutting down. Was it worth the wait? Well, six Academy Award nominations including Best Film certainly suggest it was.The film follows Riz Ahmed and Olivia Cooke as Ruben and Lou, band members and lovers living the ideal rock'n'roll lifestyle. But when Ruben starts to suffer major hearing loss, it's clear their co-dependent relationship is built on shaky foundations. To avoid falling back into addiction, Ruben must isolate himself in an AA Read more ...
theartsdesk
"Television and I grew up together." As a baby boomer born in 1947, Susan Bordo is roughly the same age as our beloved gogglebox, which began life as a broad box with a ten-inch screen, chunky and clunky and encased in wood. With the rapid changes in technology in the years since, "television", as Bordo points out, has become estranged from its material status. “In 2020, ‘television’ is what we watch, not the material object we watch it on.” Combining memoir with social and political history, her book is about our changing relationship with TV and the box's far-reaching consequences for our Read more ...
Abigail Young
February 2020: an item a long way down the agenda of the nightly news caused me to remark, fairly casually, “I wonder if that will affect me”. I had already heard about Covid-19, the new virus emerging from China; now it was spreading into places where I earned my living. I was beginning to worry.For the last 20 years or so I have been leader of a wonderful chamber orchestra in Japan, Orchestra Ensemble Kanazawa. It is a 50% job and I swing backwards and forwards between the Far East and London six or seven times a year, enjoying a richly varied life on Read more ...
theartsdesk
Wandering, ambling, sauntering. The last, least heard of the three, captures a sense of leisurely aimlessness: a jolly meander unbound by destination, admitting none of the qualms of timekeeping or pacing. In his latest anthology, sequel to Beneath My Feet (2018), "laureate of walking" Duncan Minshull brings together 60 writers, from Petrarch to Patrick Leigh Fermor, Edith Wharton to Edward Lear, and Edith Wharton to Robert Macfarlane, who have roamed the routes of Europe. An expansive collection, it's an ode to sauntering, in all its pleasures and variety. The below is an extract from Read more ...
Anna Lucia Richter
It’s actually quite a strange feeling to know that my CD Il delirio della passione is now out. I recorded this amazing, all-embracing Monteverdi project with Luca Pianca and Ensemble Claudiana over a year ago, in January 2020. That was another world, another time. At that point, PPE and masks belonged in hospitals, we greeted each other with hugs and many of us musicians were known to groan at the prospect of months of busy touring – a luxury now. I regarded myself a true soprano and my calendar was pretty full for the next two years. Had my future self visited me and told me that I would be Read more ...
Owen Richards
Writing something people want to stream one billion times is inconceivable for most of us. But then, most of us aren't Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Daryl Hall. Alongside John Oates, he is behind some of the greatest pop songs of all time: "Maneater"; "She's Gone; "Out of Touch"; "Rich Girl"; "I Can't Go For That (No Can Do)"; and of course, the billion-stream masterpiece that is "You Make My Dreams".Over 50 years after forming, the band are still finding new audiences. They've become a favourite for film soundtrackers and samplers. But they don't rest on former glories - Live from Daryl's Read more ...
Clare Norburn
Love in the Lockdown started out as my “Lockdown 1.0 project” - although, of course, we didn’t call it Lockdown 1.0 back then. We didn’t know other lockdowns would follow and that nearly one year on, here we would be, locked down again with theatres and concert halls still closed. It seems inconceivable now, but a year ago, I had never heard of Zoom. Right now, I live on Zoom: my online play with music is being rehearsed, directed and filmed over Zoom - and by actors and musicians on their phones and recording devices. The nine short episodes are directed by Nicholas Renton Read more ...
Nigel Hess
It has been well-documented over the last few months that there has been an upsurge in listener numbers for many radio stations offering classical music – notably BBC Radio 3, Classic FM and Scala Radio – and, during these unprecedented times it comes as no surprise to discover that so many people (of all ages) are finding solace in music which, in some cases, they are turning to for the first time.For me there’s a family resonance – my great-aunt, Dame Myra Hess, set up a series of lunchtime concerts in the National Gallery during World War Two for war-weary Londoners and she seemed to know Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Interest in Britney Spears has not waned. The #FreeBritney movement, the new documentary Framing Britney Spears, and the ongoing controversy around her father’s legal conservatorship have served to put her back in the public eye over the last year. Not that she ever drifted very far away from it. She is, after all, Britney Spears. Eight years ago, theartsdesk offered an overview of her career via her videos. We now revisit it. Despite many dismissing her output as empty fluff, I argued then that “there's a rich story to be told, reflecting the paradoxical nature of the woman herself and Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Theartsdesk is a labour of love. Bloody-mindedly run as a co-operative of journalists from the beginning, our obsession with maintaining a daily-updated platform for good culture writing has caused a good few grey and lost hairs over the years. But it has also been rewarding – and looking back over the 10 years of Disc of the Day reviews has been a good chance to remind ourselves of that. One thing in particular that drew me into the collective when it was founded, and has kept me going throughout, was the understanding that artistic forms would be treated with equal respect and Read more ...