Ahead of a London theatre run in May, Ultravox singer says 1985 charity gig probably couldn’t happen today because of low attention spans

Sitting in the royal box at London’s Wembley Stadium, just shy of the 40th anniversary of the Live Aid concert that he helped make happen here, Midge Ure ponders its legacy. “We created a monster,” he says. “And it had to happen.”

The two Live Aid shows in London and Philadelphia on 13 July 1985, featuring performances by U2, Queen, David Bowie and more, form the core of the stage musical Just for One Day. Today, it was announced that it will transfer to London’s West End in May, after short runs at London’s Old Vic in 2024 and Toronto earlier this year.

Continue reading...

Pearson, who will be the first disabled actor to play the role in a film, said: ‘I can think of no greater honour than to tell the true story of Joseph Carey Merrick’

Adam Pearson, the actor who appeared in Under the Skin and the Oscar-nominated A Different Man , is to play the lead role in a new adaptation of The Elephant Man.

According to Variety , Pearson will play Joseph Merrick, whose physical disfigurement led to him becoming a freak show exhibit and then a notable figure in late Victorian London, in a film based on the celebrated play by Bernard Pomerance that became a hit in London and New York after premiering in 1977. Pomerance’s son Moby is writing the screenplay, and shooting is due to begin in 2026.

Continue reading...

Exclusive: Black Sabbath frontman details training he is doing to ensure he is fit to play all-star reunion gig in July

Amid concerns about his health, Ozzy Osbourne has insisted he will perform in July at what is being billed as his final concert, fronting the original lineup of Black Sabbath.

Speaking along with his bandmates to the Guardian’s Alexis Petridis in an interview to be published on Friday, he said: “I’ll be there, and I’ll do the best I can. So all I can do is turn up.”

Continue reading...

The band’s rightwing critics are now cancel culture advocates, while defenders demand limitless free speech

• Dorian Lynskey is the author of 33 Revolutions Per Minute

Earlier this year, the Northern Irish hip-hop trio Kneecap appeared to be entering their respectable phase. Their self-titled film, a raucous semi-fictionalised biopic directed by Rich Peppiatt, won a Bafta for outstanding British debut, while Kemi Badenoch’s attempt to block a grant awarded by the British Phonographic Industry was overturned in court . As the film illustrates, Kneecap were accustomed to being denounced by unionist MPs but both sides reaped useful publicity. “We have a very dysfunctional, symbiotic relationship,” admitted rapper Naoise Ó Cairealláin.

This process was dramatically derailed last week when Kneecap touched the third rail of Gaza and accused Israel of genocide on stage at Coachella festival in California. Cue fury from Fox News, calls for their visas to be revoked and, according to their manager, death threats. The British press combed through old videos and found clips that appear to show two explosive onstage pronouncements from Kneecap’s November 2023 UK tour: “Up Hamas, up Hezbollah” and “The only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP.”

Dorian Lynskey is a writer, podcaster and author of 33 Revolutions Per Minute and The Ministry of Truth

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here .

Continue reading...

History and autobiography are brilliantly intertwined as the Booker-winning author explores the choices and chance connections that shape our existence

At the start of this boldly experimental memoir, the Booker prize-winning author Richard Flanagan visits the site of a Japanese labour camp where his late father was interned during the second world war and where he ends up awkwardly having his photo taken with a former guard, Mr Sato. The war ended weeks after the US launched an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing 60,000 people in less than a minute. That bomb also led to Flanagan’s father, then days from death, being freed, which in turn allowed him to father a child who would grow up to become a writer. “How many people need to die in order that you might read this book?” Flanagan asks.

Question 7, named after a riddle posed by Chekhov, is a book about the connections and choices that shape our lives, for better or worse. Flanagan is the narrator, his reading by turns mournful, reflective and quizzical as he plots a path through the lives of his parents, the writer HG Wells, Wells’s sometime inamorata, Rebecca West, and the physicist Leo Szilard, who masterminded the nuclear chain reaction that was instrumental in the creation of the bomb. These historical vignettes are intertwined with Flanagan’s own childhood memories of life in Tasmania, an island with a troubled history, and culminate in his account of a near-death experience at the age of 21, when his kayak became wedged underwater. As he assesses his own complex heritage and those of pivotal figures from the past, Flanagan reflects that “there is no memory without shame”.

Continue reading...

Pierre-Laurent Aimard
(Pentatone, two CDs)
Kurtág himself approved Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s selection of 81 pieces from the composer’s 10 volumes of miniature pieces, now among the past half century’s great achievements

In 1973, György Kurtág began composing piano miniatures to which he gave the collective title of Játékok (Games). He has continued to add to the series, so that now there are well over 400 such pieces, for both solo piano and four hands, which have been published in 10 volumes so far. The pieces, rarely more than a couple of minutes long and sometimes lasting just a few seconds, were first intended as didactic exercises, designed to elucidate a musical point or a detail of keyboard technique, but the collection soon began to encompass other occasional works and more personal expressions – birthday greetings, tributes and memorials to friends and fellow musicians, paraphrases of other music – becoming a complete encyclopedia of Kurtág’s compositional methods.

The composer and his wife, Márta, who died in 2019, regularly performed pieces from the growing collection in their recitals together, as well as recording a number of them. Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s selection, approved by Kurtág and recorded with him in attendance, takes in a total of 81 pieces drawn from all the published volumes, with the exception of the fourth and eighth, books of pieces for piano duet and two pianos, but also including some that are still in manuscript that will appear in the as yet unpublished 11th volume.

Continue reading...

Everyman, Liverpool
Nathan Powell sets out his stall with a crowd-pleasing play about intergenerational tensions in a Caribbean cafe

This play by Nathan Powell, appointed creative director at Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse last year after Suba Das’s departure, is not a tightly structured, slick affair. But, directed by Amanda Huxtable, it is enormous fun, full of heart and undeniably entertaining. If this first play is a measure of his ambition, Powell intends to be a crowd-pleaser. Takeaway wouldn’t be out of place in the unabashedly popular Royal Court across town.

The title refers to Hyltons, a community-loved, family-run Caribbean cafe headed up by matriarch Carol (Phina Oruche) and her two “British pickney” adult daughters, Browning (Adi Alfa) and Shelly (Bene Sebuyange). At the heart of Toxteth, “Toccy” to the locals, the takeaway is set to become a victim of gentrification, a change against which local young people are either rioting or leading an uprising, depending on which character’s point of view you agree with. Either way, the local football pitches are being set ablaze and the offices of the would-be property developers are under attack.

Continue reading...

Going back out on tour, the 13-time Grammy winner recalls stark inspirations and steamy studio sessions as she answers your questions

You’ve had a decades-long career. When did you first feel that you had “made it ”? LondonLuvver
I wasn’t expecting to do music for a job. I was into social activism in college, and I just had music as a hobby. My boyfriend managed a bunch of blues artists and I asked if I could open for some of them – just to have fun and hang out with my heroes. Unbeknown to me, there really weren’t any women playing blues guitar and doing the mix of songs [I was], and I immediately got more offers of gigs and even a record company offer within about a year. That first gig I got under my own name, when I was 19, was a total surprise: that’s when I felt I had made it.

How was it growing up with a father [ John Raitt ] who was such a big Broadway star? Abbeyorchards7
He had hits in the 1940s with Carousel, and in the 50s with The Pajama Game. By the time I was 10 or 11, he was on the road touring in the summer – he loved taking Broadway shows out to the countryside. That influenced me a lot later when I decided to veer off from college and go into music: his love of travelling, of every night being opening night, and putting everything he had into every performance. And he was on tour basically until his mid-80s, so I think that had a tremendous influence on me: like, we can’t believe we get paid, and this is our job.

Continue reading...

The Next Big Story competition, run by writing school The Novelry, is encouraging entries from would-be authors ‘historically overlooked by the publishing industry’

A new competition is offering £75,000 to an aspiring writer based on just three pages of their novel.

Actor Emma Roberts, Bridgerton author Julia Quinn and Booker-winning Life of Pi author Yann Martel are among the judges for The Next Big Story competition, run by online fiction writing school The Novelry.

Continue reading...