Even in our garish online age, most celebrities and pop stars sensibly obfuscate the details of their private lives.Not so much Lily Allen. She seems to work through her issues by laying it all out there. No tabloid can pull a scoop if you’ve Tweeted everything already (as she did when announcing she’d hired female prostitutes on her Sheezus tour to spike Daily Mail revelations). Her 2018 memoir, My Thoughts Exactly, was eye-wateringly candid. It’s not just the juice she shares, but the way it makes her feel, why she reckons she behaves as she does. Our attention is drawn, but engaging can Read more ...

It’s funny: people say a lot online that what you’re allowed to like and dislike in music is bounded by age, gender and so forth. “It’s not FOR you,” they say. And in many ways, when it comes to Taylor Swift, that’s fair enough.There are certainly quite a lot too many heterosexual men in their 50s opining on her in ways that are a bit off: angry that she’s not Joni Mitchell, or that she’s a bit full of herself, or that her melodies are simple… Angry with a passion they can’t find for any other pop music. And no, sir, this music IS not for you. However, for those of us that do care about pop Read more ...

One of the great moments of Private Eye magazine’s fustiness in recent years was putting Mariah Carey in Pseud’s Corner, for the quote about how she deals with the ageing process: “I do not acknowledge time.” That quip is of course in no way pseudo-intellectual, and in every way fabulous, as anyone with the slightest knowledge of Carey or pop culture would grasp immediately. Of any major star, she is the one who has most comfortably inhabited the diva role in the 21st century, her dry-as-a-bone “I don’t know her” put-down of Jennifer Lopez from 2003 now meme-ified into immortality as the allt Read more ...

Monstering the Rocketman by Henry Naylor, Pleasance Dome ★★★★Henry Naylor doesn’t hold back in his latest Fringe offering, an entertaining monologue in which he examines The Sun’s treatment of Elton John in the 1980s, an era when tabloids reigned supreme in the UK media – and trust in them started to erode.Against an onstage projection of screaming tabloid headlines from the era, Naylor tells the tale through the eyes of a keen young reporter hoping to make his mark in his first week at The Sun, then edited by the abrasive Kelvin MacKenzie – “The most foul-mouthed man in Britain” as Read more ...

Writer Ariel (Ayo Edebiri; The Bear) has worked at a music magazine for three years but in spite of coming up with great ideas, she never gets assigned stories.“You’re middle as fuck,” says her boyfriend, by way of explanation, as they eat Japanese food together in New York. She’s only 27, not interesting or experienced enough to land the big interviews. And her lazy editor Stan (Murray Bartlett) just takes advantage of her fine research.Nothing terribly unusual about that, perhaps, but it’s the only premise that makes sense in director Mark Anthony Green’s debut feature. He worked for years Read more ...

Dying is easy, comedy is hard, according to the Georgian actor Edmund Kean. Luckily, everybody involved with the much-awarded Hacks understands precisely the creative anguish that top-flight comedy demands, and in its third season the show puts further expanses of clear blue water between itself and the competition.Constructed on the fraught and frequently hostile relationship between septuagenarian superstar Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and her young and ambitious scriptwriter Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder), Hacks is a forensic examination of the showbiz life and the showbiz business. The Read more ...

The Mosinee Project, Underbelly Cowgate ★★★★In May 1950, a small US town awoke to hammer-and-sickle flags hanging from lamp-posts, its local newspaper transformed into a Soviet propaganda journal, its citizens’ firearms confiscated and handed to loyal communist troops, and – most alarmingly – its mayor detained under armed guard.It’s a fascinating and little-known byway of US history, and how the Wisconsin community of Mosinee arrived at that elaborate and eyebrow-raising simulation is the subject of the debut Fringe show from new theatre company Counterfactual. And what begins with a Read more ...

In the 1960s, Cilla Black was rescued from hat check duties at The Cavern and made a star. In the 1980s, Rick Astley was whisked away from tea-making at the Stock-Aitken-Waterman studios to launch, 30 years later. a billion RickRolls. In the 2020s, Frankie Taylor is spirited away from a Milton Keynes cinema popcorn stand to the bright (and I mean bright) lights of Bollywood. Okay, it’s the least likely of those unlikely routes to stardom, but this is Musical Theatre, a world in which if you just believe hard enough, you too can be the idol of millions, with all the dubious rewards that Read more ...

The death of Marilyn Monroe is a wet dream for conspiracy theorists. Like the assassination of JFK in the following year there is plenty of material in the official accounts that doesn’t quite make sense – which opens the door to free-form speculation.Intrigued by the numerous theories about Monroe’s demise, actress Vicki McKellar and Olivier Award-winning West End and Broadway director Guy Masterson have teemed up to create The Marilyn Conspiracy, which was first staged at the Edinburgh Festival in 2018 and now comes to the Park Theatre in north London. The result is a cogent thriller which Read more ...

Unless you were around when The Beatles toured America in the mid-1960s, it’s doubtful you've heard anything like this. In 40 years of extensive gig-going, I have not. Taylor Swift has just performed “Champagne Problems” at the piano (pictured below), a song from Evermore, the second of her indie-folk flavoured COVID-era albums. There’s a rising feminine roar, Wembley Stadium on its feet, the noise grows and grows, an earthquake cacophony of women and girls screaming, so many that, combined with tens of thousands of hands clapping, it fills the head like cosmic hum. It surely cannot grow Read more ...

Taylor Swift’s unfathomable ability to articulate human emotion shines as brightly as ever in her latest double album The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology. The 31 track collection combines the gentle melodies of previous albums folklore and evermore, the soul baring chaos of Red, the cool synth-pop production of Midnights, and the extreme vulnerability and intricate storytelling that is persistent throughout her entire discography.Swift’s dedication to authenticity is to be credited for the success and inevitable longevity of this album. Having shared a diaristic account of her Read more ...

So, a jukebox musical celebrating the apotheosis of the White Saviour, the ultimate carnival of rock stars’ self-aggrandisement and the Boomers’ biggest bonanza of feelgood posturing? One is tempted to stand opposite The Old Vic, point at the punters going in and tell anyone within earshot, “Tonight Thank God it’s them instead of you”. Such a reaction was obviously on John O’Farrell’s mind when writing the book for this new musical and he spikes those guns (to some extent) by using a device that is occasionally clumsy, but just about does the job. Jemma (Naomi Katiyo) is our sceptical Read more ...