On a sleepy Tuesday night, beneath an arts and crafts store in the heart of Sydney, there are battles raging. Long white tables stretch out under bright lights to the back of the room. Chairs on each side are occupied by hoodies, smart work shirts and pop culture tees as players – mostly men – … Read more
You may think that club beats and baroque arrangements wouldn’t mix well, but Oklou is proving otherwise. Marylou Mayniel, 31, is a producer, vocalist and composer from a village in rural west France. As a child she played classical piano and sang in school choirs before moving to Paris in 2015 and London two years … Read more
The A-list headliners Download13 to 15 June; Donington, LeicestershireAll eyes will be on masked metallers Sleep Token as they gatecrash the cosy world of veteran rock headliners, joining Green Day and Korn atop a bill studded with barbed delights, from Svalbard’s grandiose hardcore to Loathe’s dreamily atmospheric post-metal. Huw Baines BST Hyde Park27 June to … Read more
You know the feeling: you’re watching a shocking docudrama about a toxic waste scandal, or the baseless prosecution of 555 sub-postmasters, or the fraudulent founder of a blood-testing biotech company, and you start thinking – did this all really happen? So you do some digging online. Usually, it turns out there has been a mild … Read more
For nearly 160 years, the blue plaque has marked sites of historic importance. Now one English institution has found its own way of signifying a flagship moment while interrogating its past – a blue dress. The new artwork, at Manchester Art Gallery, commemorates the occasion when the African American abolitionist Sarah Parker Remond made a … Read more
Contentious classics, book-to-screen adaptations and the future of festival funding were some of the hottest topics at this week’s London book fair, which saw around 30,000 agents, authors, translators, publishers and other industry professionals meet in Olympia, London, across three days to hammer out rights deals and discuss the future of publishing. Here is our … Read more
Nova Twins vocalist-guitarist Amy Love is trying to make me feel better about the litany of things that have gone wrong during our one-hour chat. She and her bandmate Georgia South entered the shabby-chic dressing room of London’s Omeara in a whirlwind of denim, arraying themselves on the mismatched armchairs after a soundcheck that didn’t entirely go … Read more
Kieran Culkin’s mile-a-minute turn in A Real Pain was the single most lauded performance of this past awards season, winning pretty much every best supporting actor prize on offer, up to and including his Oscar two weeks ago. As an erratic, unfiltered loose cannon joining his strait-laced cousin, played by writer-director Jesse Eisenberg, on a … Read more
When Jan Scott Wilkinson, frontman of the band formerly known as British Sea Power, was first asked to work on a video game soundtrack, he was sceptical. “We didn’t know much about the game, but our manager Dave seemed to think there was something interesting about this Robert guy who had been pleasantly hounding him,” … Read more
Going out: Cinema Last BreathOut nowA survival thriller that hews close to the documentary on which it is based, about a 2012 diving disaster in which a diver carrying out repairs 100m below the surface of the ocean became trapped. Starring Woody Harrelson, Simu Liu and Finn Cole, it’s the fiction debut of Alex Parkinson, … Read more