There’s no better date night than one spent with a bowl of popcorn and a film. Although watching a movie may seem like an easy, fool-proof date idea, there’s actually a lot of planning that goes into picking the right title to suit the mood. It’s important to take all genres, vibes, and even Letterboxd reviews into […]
Even if you don’t know Chuck Leavell by name, you’ve almost certainly heard him play. You might know his piano work from the Allman Brothers Band’s thrilling 1973 instrumental “Jessica”, which achieved hummable ubiquity across the UK as the theme tune from Top Gear. Then there’s his session playing for bands such as Train, who put Leavell front and […]
There’s a schism in the world of historical romance novels. It’s bigger than the British Regency sub-genre and it even predates Bridgerton, the hit Netflix series based on Julia Quinn’s octet of bodice-rippers. But the wildly popular TV version – which shifts non-committally between a series with race-blind casting and a series attempting to fantastically reimagine the race politics […]
Madrid music festival mixes the biggest names in rock with Europe’s most interesting musicians Mad Cool festival is the closest European music fans will get to Coachella without leaving the continent. There’s the Mad Max desert of a location (a dusty open-air space on the outskirts of Madrid), the astroturf, the Ferris wheel. But there’s a distinctively […]
Sally Phillips is used to strangers grinning at her. “I haven’t played a lot of murderers, so when I walk down the street, people smile at me,” she says. To them, she is the giggling receptionist in I’m Alan Partridge, a range of wacky characters in Nineties sketch show Smack the Pony, Bridget Jones’s brassy best friend […]
Nicki Minaj is running late. Two jumbo screens on either side of the main stage relay this message to the large and growing crowd awaiting their final Wireless headliner. Some take this as a sign to leave; we are on the third day of a festival that has been pushing 30 degrees all weekend, and it is a […]
It’s hard to imagine better weather for the second weekend of Wireless. Across the three-day event in Finsbury Park, the sun shines, glows, and sets in Instagrammable colours. Revellers carry miniature fans but otherwise remain unphased by the scorching temperatures, chuffed that their festival outfits are, for once, actually weather appropriate. By the time R&B singer-songwriter […]
The internet is the worst. But, approximately three years ago – just for a bit – it was the best. Why? Because everyone was reading “The Crane Wife”. Then telling their friends to read “The Crane Wife”. Then… talking about “The Crane Wife”. New York novelist CJ Hauser’s elegant, bittersweet essay about why she cancelled […]