interviews
Kieron Tyler
When Shirley Collins appears at The Roundhouse next week, it will be 50 years since she last played there. On 30 May 1969, she and her sister Dolly were on a bill promoting their then label Harvest Records. When she plays there on 31 January, she is the main event. After her comeback album Lodestar was issued in November 2016, the knowledge that Shirley is the most important voice of traditional English music has been reinforced.Lodestar was released 37 years after her last full-length album, 1979’s Shirley & Dolly Collins set For as Many as Will. The – as she puts it – “long layoff Read more ...
Owen Richards
Nadia Murad caught the world’s attention when she spoke at the United Nations Security Council. She spoke of living under ISIS, daily assaults, escaping, and the current plight of the Yazidi people, in refugee camps and still under ISIS control. It was a heart-breaking plea for support to the world’s silent nations. But in a rapidly changing news landscape, it’s easy to stay silent and wait for the next story come to come along.On Her Shoulders is a new documentary about Nadia’s plight, and specifically the amount of travelling, planning and interviewing she subjects herself to just to keep Read more ...
David Kettle
Writer and director David Nicholas Wilkinson felt moved to make his reflective, rather melancholy documentary on the 48% who voted to remain in the EU, he says, because nobody else was making one. When it came to funding the project, not a single Brit would invest (though he has German and Irish backers) – potential supporters were apparently too nervous of their names getting out.Have the values of Remain already become so ignored and so – well, unacceptable? Possibly. Which, of course, makes it all the more crucial that Wilkinson has provided Remainers with this platform to present their Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Masculinity, whether toxic or in crisis (but never ever problem-free), is a hardy perennial subject for British new writing, and this new piece from playwright Simon Stephens, Frantic Assembly director Scott Graham and Underworld musician Karl Hyde is a verbatim drama made up of interviews with men, which the trio conducted in their home towns of Stockport, Corby and Kidderminster. The overall theme is fatherhood, men’s relationships with their Dads. Given that this is such well-trodden ground, does Fatherland, which was first seen as part of the Manchester International Festival in 2017, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As the Brighton Festival 2018 draws towards its closing weekend, its Guest Director, the artist David Shrigley, has committed to an illustrated talk about his work that “will contain numerous rambling anecdotes but not be in the slightest bit boring”. In the programme, he claims to have promised this signed in his own blood. Such drastic assurance proves unnecessary. His talk his sardonically funny, sometimes causing waves of raucous laughter and applause to sweep across the packed Dome Concert Hall.The format is simple. Accompanied by a woman signing, who Shrigley often tells not to Read more ...
Neil Bartlett
Director, playwright and novelist Neil Bartlett has been making theatre and causing trouble since the 1980s. He made his name with a series of controversial stark naked performances staged in clubs and warehouses, then went on to become the groundbreaking Artistic Director of the Lyric Hammersmith in London in 1994. Since leaving the Lyric in 2005, he’s worked with collaborators as different as the National, Duckie, the Bristol Old Vic, Artangel, and the Edinburgh International Festival. Four of his previous Brighton Festival shows have been at the Read more ...
Liz Thomson
In our era of 24/7 news, downloadable from anywhere in the world at the touch of an app, it's hard to remember that not so very long ago the agenda was set by the BBC - the Home Service as Radio 4 was then called, and BBC TV, just the one channel, which broadcast news at a handful of fixed points during the evening. Outside broadcasts, "OBs", were slow, labour-intensive and expensive. Politicians were respected. So too journalists.That was the BBC that a new-minted history graduate named John Tusa joined in 1960, beginning his graduate traineeship at Bush House in what was then known as BBC Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In the week that the police announced the final Grenfell Tower fire death toll, this is a timely release. Paul Sng’s 82-minute documentary, narrated by the actress Maxine Peake, is a serious investigation into the state of social housing in the UK, most especially the way it’s being co-opted into the private sector to make as much money as possible for corporate free market ideologues and those trailing in their wake.Sng, along with his cinematographer Nick Ward and editor Josh Alward, have made a small budget go a long way, utilising striking imagery of urban desolation, intercut with old, Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Death of a Gentleman begins as a hymn to Test cricket, and becomes an elegy, as its makers cross the globe in a deceptively haphazard-looking pursuit of the men who run the game. Jarrod Kimber and Sam Collins are two journalists in search of a story. That the plot is not a murder mystery (who killed cricket?) but a jellyfish – Who’s running cricket? What do they want? Is anyone not in the pocket of an Indian concrete company? – becomes the story itself.Tightly cut from around 50 talking heads, it’s a film that shouldn’t work. There is no silver bullet. Cricket-lovers have watched the Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The past few years have seen the anniversary reissue, or concert tour in which classic albums are performed in their entirety, become something of a standard. Not so for Tori Amos, who this year is celebrating two decades since the US release of her debut solo album Little Earthquakes. To mark the occasion, she is instead collaborating with the Netherlands’ renowned Metropole Orchestra to rework and recreate some of her best-loved songs in an orchestral setting.The resulting album, Gold Dust, will be released next month and accompanied by a limited run of dates with the orchestra, including Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The first anniversary of Amy Winehouse’s death seems like both a temptation and an opportunity for a sensationalist, hyperbolic tribute. Refreshingly, this Arena film, which told the story of the night that a superstar in the making performed to an 85-capacity church in the Irish fishing village of Dingle, for the most part avoided the clichés: the word “tragedy” wasn’t even mentioned until 38 minutes in.“You don’t just go to Dingle by accident,” Philip King, director of Irish music series Other Voices, explained by way of introduction. Every winter the show manages to attract some of the 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 ...