The portrait was taken by photographer Matt Porteous in Cornwall earlier this month.
All Right Reserved. Designed and Developed by Martyn Jones.
Ruth Slenczynska was a child prodigy who played with five US Presidents and recorded into her 90s.
The childhood best friends from Liverpool never expected to be offered a spot on the popular series.
The comedian says he always “fantasised” about being involved in a Shakespearean play.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream at The Rep gets a modern Birmingham twist.
The medical examiner said the 14-year-old’s cause of death was determined months ago but was blocked from release.
Cumbrian writer Shaun Wilson has made his longform debut with a self-deconstructive work of experimental autofiction, and if you wanted to make Malc’s Boy sound far more forbidding and less accessible than it actually is, that’s the way to go about it. Malc is the author’s dad, in these pages and in real life, and the median reader can but speculate how much truth there is behind father and son’s exploits as related here, but as characters in a novel they’re drawn with aplomb.
Wilson shuffles between formats and tenses to allow himself to comment on his own book, and at a sense of reserve the literary culture in which he’s now embedded. This has happened against the odds, it would seem. The upbringing depicted in Malc’s Boy was far from impoverished, but perpetually adjacent to what passes for a criminal underworld in the Lake District, and when every night on the town is likely as not to end in a fight then the development of one’s authorial voice may take a back seat.
Some of these recollections, which date back to the mid-1980s when Shaun had just started primary school, are told straight-bat. Others are presented as transcripts of conversations between Malc and boy, in heavy Cumbria dialect (if you’ve limited familiarity with this, basically keep in mind its dual proximity to Newcastle and the Scottish Borders and you’re on track), and as well as hashing out the finer details of the historical skulduggery the pair debate what the book should or shouldn’t feature, and the mechanics of how it might come together.
Towards the end, Shaun’s partner Martine exerts her influence similarly – a female (and feminist) voice in a book predominantly shaped by and around men and their destructive tendencies. She’s knowingly positioned as a counterbalance to the machismo that’s baked into nearly every page of Malc’s Boy, and if this is a case of the author having his cake and eating it there are rich pickings left over for the rest of us too.
Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Stanley Tucci and Emily Blunt were among the actors who appeared on the red carpet.
Clickbait culture hits the headlines in Erin Van Der Meer’s biting new satire, The Scoop. Set in 2014, a time when legacy media outlets were facing mass layoffs, Marie Claire editor Frankie sees her glamorous career go up in smoke. As her former colleagues scramble to find new jobs in everything from PR to pyramid schemes, Frankie is left with a moral quandary: does she stay unemployed or join the ethically reprehensible Johnson News?
The interview isn’t very promising. As a night shift worker, she would be responsible for trawling social media to dig up dirt on D-list celebrities, and her would-be boss makes Piers Morgan look cuddly and impartial. But when a generic snap of a singer out doing some shopping quickly spirals into the scoop of the century, will Frankie jettison her conscience to come out on top in this new cutthroat world of digital journalism?
Funny, fast-paced and terrifyingly prescient, The Scoop is a searing indictment of our chronically online world, where shock headlines have become the whole story and the truth is relegated to an inconvenient footnote. After following Frankie on her frenetic race to the bottom, you’ll never scroll through your newsfeed in quite the same way again.
Led by founder and only consistent member Domenic ‘Nicky’ Palermo, Nothing are a band simultaneously easy and impossible to pin down. While they can sound like and scan like a thousand other pedal-powered noiseniks, they really are the best at what they do. In Cardiff, that’s underscored by their incendiary opener, July The Fourth: a deep cut, and a perfect way to get things going.
Bearded and resplendently world-weary in a battered cap, like a sort of shoegaze Captain Birdseye, Palermo guides the set with a detached, salt-weathered cool. His dedication to the substance of Nothing for 15-plus years arguably lifts them above just another overdriven guitar band.
Throughout the set immense reverb fills a well-attended room, as the guitars, guided by some seriously stacked pedalboards, blur into each other. Aided by the excellent Doyle Martin – who also leads the sublime fuzz rockers Cloakroom – and Best Coast’s Bobb Bruno on bass, sheets of distortion and occasional industrial beats both crush and soothe.
A mix of newer offerings from the latest album A Short History Of Decay blend perfectly with bombastic favourites. This includes Bent Nail, from landmark album Guilty Of Everything, which emerges as a euphoric peak. And the band really hit a bombastic stride with offerings such as April Ha Ha and the absolutely anthemic Zero Day, from 2018’s Dance On The Blacktop.
Bathed in a candy crimson and chalk-blue light and haze, like a bar band in Twin Peaks, the quiet intensity spreads across the set, guiding the melancholy and the hope infused within Nothing’s music. This culminates as the set builds to a crescendo with new album highlight Never Come Never Morning bringing down the curtain. Nothing may be a bit battered and bruised around the edges, but they still hit all the right trigger points, and long may that continue.
Nothing, Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff, Wed 15 Apr
words JAMES W ROBERTS photos NOEL GARDNER