If you’re planning on making a biopic of a major musical figure, you would be advised not to miss out various rather vital aspects of their life. For instance, Bohemian Rhapsody dealt – if at times obliquely – with Freddie Mercury’s homosexuality and AIDS. The recent Bruce Springsteen film Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere attempted
MAX JONES: “What do you think of the Beatles as artists and people?” BOB DYLAN: “Oh, I think they’re the best. They’re artists and they’re people.” —Melody Maker, March 1965 For more than 60 years, people have been fascinated by the connections between Bob Dylan and the Beatles. All were born during World War Two.
Grade: C– Kanye? No, I can’t, quite. I will always quietly overlook the idiotic political sensibilities of the conformist millennial legions who comprise our pop charts – the keffiyeh-clad Hamas wannabes, the BLM halfwits, the greenies, the men-can-be-women wankpuffins – in order to let their music be judged on its own merits, free from boomer
HBO Max is the latest streaming channel trying to lure you into yet another of those subscription contracts you only remember having signed up for about three years later when you’re trying to work out why you are so skint. Its showpiece series is The Pitt which attracts ten million viewers per episode and has
It’s a great shame that Elsa Schiaparelli is less widely known than her rival Chanel. Perhaps that’s down to how difficult her name is to pronounce. Is it “shap,” “skap” or “skyap”? Tristram Hunt, director of the V&A, answers with a quip from Schiaparelli herself: “No one knows how to say it, but everyone knows
About a decade ago, with my writing career going nowhere fast, I received some savvy advice from my then-literary agent. “Write about the royal family,” he said. “There’s an endless appetite for books about them. They combine history, social commentary and gossip with old-fashioned fascination with the rich and powerful. You can’t go wrong.” I
One of the miracles of art history is how painting, so often written off, keeps on coming back. Right now we are in the middle of just such a resurgence, and one sign of the current vitality of the medium is the emergence of painters such as Hurvin Anderson. Admittedly, Anderson – who was born
How would you like your nostalgia served, sir (and it is usually “sir”): in mist-shrouded monochrome or crazed lysergic Technicolor? Earlier this month, I saw two bands in the same venue, a few days apart. Neither having released any new material for more than a decade, both duly crammed their sets with their greatest hits.
Did you know that a secretive thing called private equity owns almost 10 percent of the UK economy? Did you know that it controls the jobs of several million people and may well own your local hospital, water supply, children’s school or even your home? No? Here is a book that aims to straighten you
The early Greek inhabitants of Sicily peered into Etna’s crater and declared the volcano to be full of monsters. Its “impenetrable darkness” reminded Samuel Taylor Coleridge of his opium addiction. Helena Attlee, whose hugely enjoyable The Land Where Lemons Grow (2014)won acclaim, brings to her portrait of Etna a softer, more admiring – yet respectful
This story is little more than a brutal anecdote, which Patrick Radden Keefe has chosen to tell at excessive length. It has the kind of fact-checked gravity that indicates a star American journalist bent on perpetrating an entire book. (“Built in 1923 and originally known as the Empire Stadium, Wembley was the most iconic sporting
Kanye “Ye” West has been barred from appearing at London’s Wireless Festival by dint of having his temporary visa withdrawn. The move has generally been met with approval, save by those disappointed fans of his music whose pre-ordered tickets will now be refunded. “Kanye West should never have been invited to headline Wireless,” said Prime
On a winter’s morning, outside the Three Lives bookstore in New York’s West Village, Karl Ove Knausgård has just finished signing copies of his latest novel, The School of Night. His features are familiar from the dustjackets – the gray-blue eyes, the grizzled beard – but he is surprisingly tall and his signature silver mane
I was in Budapest last month, where the city’s castle is now being rebuilt in its old neo-Baroque style. The plan is to create a near-exact replica of the complex as it stood before the city’s siege in 1945, when it was reduced to rubble during the fighting. So much of the original was destroyed
When so much contemporary art is riven with obscurity and angst, it is disorienting, at first, to encounter something as straightforwardly enjoyable as Hockney’s latest exhibition. Aged 88, the artist went out into his garden in Normandy with his iPad to make a visual diary of the year 2020. A hundred or so of the
How times change. Our forebears once thought that full-figured Bill Haley was at the razor-sharp, frighteningly decadent and anarchic edge of pop culture. Compared to the Rolling Stones’ subsequent carnival of drug busts, court appearances, car crashes, house fires, paternity suits and chosen or enforced overseas exile, not to mention the matter of Keith Richards’s
The only thing misery loves more than company is a backbeat. While capturing pure happiness surely remains the Holy Grail of any artistic endeavor, the blues is the bedrock of popular music for a reason. Sure enough, as we ready for the clocks to go forward, two albums arrive which could hardly be said to
It’s a crisp afternoon, and in a darkened room in central Amsterdam a woman is being smothered in snakes. Projected on to three walls is a massive video close-up of her face. She is young and beautiful and remarkably composed: just a nose twitch here, an eyelid flutter there, as a python wriggles across her
Colm Tóibín is a master of understatement, his work characterized by great emotional intelligence coupled with redoubtable restraint. This is his third anthology of stories, following Mothers and Sons (2006) and The Empty Family (2010). Within a few pages, he fills the gaps between words – the things he doesn’t say – with as much
In Ian Leslie’s John & Paul, the creative relationship between the titular Beatles is treated as a platonic love story. Matt Thorne widens the paradigm with seven more pairings, variously rivalrous, amorous, respectful, disrespectful and occasionally frankly tenuous. The 11 American and three British musicians here have careers that collectively cover seven decades of popular
At the Nuremberg trial of the main Nazi war criminals, one man stood out: Adolf Hitler’s favorite architect and later armaments minister, Albert Speer. He cut a gentlemanly figure in a gallery of rogues. The strutting, smirking Hermann Goering reminded Rebecca West, who attended the trial, of “a tout in a Paris café offering some
Covent Garden’s new Ring cycle has reached Siegfried, and once again, you can only marvel at Wagner’s Shakespeare-like ability to anticipate modern preoccupations. Want to talk about the manosphere? Well, here’s opera’s most profound study of the playful, disruptive, world-making energy of the adolescent male psyche. The least interesting thing that you can say about
Nostalgia is often seen as a positive emotion, but the word actually derives from the Greek nostos, meaning “homecoming,” and algos, meaning “pain.” Nostalgia is really a type of homesickness, an ache for something lost. As audiences watch the new trailer for the HBO Harry Potter television series, the algos may hit pretty hard: those tantalizing two minutes are the reminder we need that you can’t catch lightning in a bottle twice.
The actor Andrew Garfield attracted some controversy recently when, promoting his new family film The Magic Faraway Tree, he revealed that he had seen the Harry Potter series for the first time. “I know it’s controversial and we shouldn’t be putting money in the pocket of inhumane legislation right now, through she that shall remain
The past few years have seen a slew of devastating style assaults on the English language known as “LinkedIn speak.” You know the type of word salad: “synergize” instead of “combine,” “ideated” instead of “thought of,” “holistic” instead of – well – looking at something as a whole. Alarmingly, there is now an app, Kagi Translate, that allows you to type
Stephen Colbert is many things – late-night host, perpetual thorn in the side of President Trump and, some would suggest, a comedian – but few have hitherto described him as a Hollywood screenwriter. Which is why it was some of the most jaw-dropping news that the entertainment industry has seen in recent months that it
The title of David Byrne’s most recent album and current tour is Who Is The Sky? The phrase works two ways. Read literally, it has the playful 1960s feel of a Yoko Ono film or some absurdist Fluxus piece; firmly on brand, in other words, for someone as steeped as Byrne in New York’s downtown
More than 30 contemporary artists have contributed to the Wellcome Collection’s latest exhibition, which asks what it’s like to age at a time of unparalleled longevity. But as so often happens at the Wellcome’s exhibitions, it’s the ephemera that draw the eye first. “These 2 men are the same age,” says a leaflet advertising Kellogg’s
Goldman Sachs inspires awe and envy in equal measure. Those who survive the Wall Street investment bank’s annual cull earn fortunes. Leavers join an alumni network that makes the Freemasons look like plodders. The “Government Sachs” roll call includes prime ministers (Mark Carney, Mario Draghi, Rishi Sunak and Australia’s Malcolm Turnbull); US Treasury secretaries (Robert
