In this week’s newsletter: Everyone has to start somewhere … and in front of someone. Thankfully, these soon-to-be-huge artists left the mime act and dodgy covers (mostly) in the past
From the Beatles slogging through mammoth sets for jeering sailors in Hamburg basement bars, to Ed Sheeran playing just about every open mic night in the south of England, even the biggest acts had to start small. So when we asked Guide readers to share their memories of seeing now-massive bands and artists before they were famous, it was inevitable we’d get some great tales. So much so, in fact, that we’ve decided to devote the main chunk of this week’s Guide to your pre-fame gig recollections. We’ve also asked Guardian music writers – seasoned veterans of seeking out the next big thing – to share a few of their memories. Read on for tales of Kurt Cobain in Yorkshire, Playboi Carti’s set in an east London snooker club and an ill-advised David Bowie mime performance …
My teenage self was shy and miserable, before a coming-of-age film unleashed an adolescence of drink, sex and drugs. It was a years-long party that eventually came crashing down
At 13, what felt like almost overnight, I turned from a happy, musical-theatre-loving child into a sad, lonely teenager. Things I had cared about only yesterday were suddenly irrelevant, as I realised that nothing and no one mattered, least of all me. It’s an angst that adults often find difficult to remember or understand; as the famous line from The Virgin Suicides goes: “Obviously, Doctor, you’ve never been a 13-year-old girl.”
Going to an all-girls Catholic school, I didn’t even really know that sex, drugs and alcohol existed, or that they had currency, until I watched Thirteen for the first time at 14, after seeing a still on Pinterest. The reckless rebellion the two best friends portrayed was seductive to me, and within weeks of watching the film, I’d met some girls from the co-ed school opposite who were having sex, going to parties and taking drugs. Soon, I was doing it all too.
Auditorium to remove bacon and sausages from cafe during stage run after request from campaign group
Campaigners are calling on theatre bosses to stop serving bacon, sausages and ham in their cafes – at least while Peppa Pig and her family are performing in the same building.
Moth, Toastie and Conkers battle it with their microphones. Plus, the story of Sarah Ferguson’s former dresser who was found guilty of murder. Here’s what to watch this evening
For centuries in Ireland lifting huge boulders was a way to test strength and bond communities, says Instagram sensation Indiana Stones
David Keohan surveyed the County Waterford beach and spotted a familiar mound half-buried in sand: an oval-shaped limestone boulder. It weighed about 115kg.
He wedged it loose with a crowbar, wiped it dry with a cloth, dusted his hands with chalk and paused to gaze at the Irish Sea, as if summoning strength from the waves pounding ashore.
She scandalised the art world in the 1990s with her unmade bed, partied hard in the 2000s – then a brush with death turned the artist’s life upside down. Now she’s as frank as ever
There is a long buildup before I get to see Tracey Emin – her two cats, Teacup and Pancake, preceding her like a pair of slinky sentries as she walks into the white-painted basement kitchen of her huge Georgian house in Margate. The lengthy overture is because – though I’ve been invited for noon – Emin is a magnificently late riser. Her average working day, her studio manager Harry tells me, runs from about 6pm to 3am. And so, while the artist is gradually sorting herself out, Harry takes me on a tour through her home town in the January drizzle, the sea a sulky grey blur beyond the sands.
At last, Harry is ringing the doorbell, and Emin’s lovely housekeeper, Sam, is sitting me down in the kitchen, then finally here she is, dressed in loose dark trousers and top, with those faithful cats. Emin is recognisably the same as she’s ever been – the artist who scandalised and entranced the nation in the 1990s with her tent embroidered with the names of everyone she’d ever slept with; with her unmade bed and its rumpled sheets and detritus. She still has that sardonic lip, those arched brows, those flashing eyes. But these days she is surprisingly calm, slow moving, her greying hair swept back into a loose bun. This is the Emin who has worked hard, survived a great deal and, somewhat unpredictably, ended up a national treasure.
Emerald Fennell’s film brings the raunch to Brontë’s romance, while Nintendo’s beloved plumber stars in a colourful, family-friendly sports game
Wuthering Heights Out now
Out on the wily, windy moors, writer-director Emerald Fennell has constructed a new interpretation of the Emily Brontë classic. Margot Robbie is Cathy while Jacob Elordi takes on Heathcliff, and as you might expect from the film-maker behind Saltburn, the passionate pair are set to leave no height unwuthered.
A stylish high-stakes armed robbery thriller with Chris Hemsworth and Mark Ruffalo, and a gentle supernatural comedy from Mackenzie Crook. Here’s the pick of the week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews
Aldwych theatre, London William Nicholson’s take on CS Lewis’s marriage to an American divorcee should have you in bits but it fails to feel as eviscerating as it should
The drama of love and loss in Shadowlands has played out movingly in film and on television. William Nicholson’s take on CS Lewis’s marriage to an American divorcee is that of late-found passion, terminal illness and a crisis of the celebrated writer’s Christian faith. In all its iterations, it is an old-fashioned weepie. In this production, originally staged at Chichester Festival theatre, it just feels old-fashioned.
It has charm and pulls you into its sadness but seems as creaky as the half-filled, wood-panelled library in its backdrop. There is too much a sense of a drama unfolding, from the moment Lewis (Hugh Bonneville) receives a letter from American fan, Joy Davidman (Maggie Siff), to his slow falling in love and her descent into illness.
Berlin film festival: Shahrbanoo Sadat is a charming presence in front of the camera and a skilled film-maker behind in this shrewd and contemporary tale
The Afghan film-maker Shahrbanoo Sadat is a warm and approachable presence as writer, director and star of No Good Men – a tale of Afghanistan’s women in 2021 as they are about to be surrendered to the Taliban with the withdrawal of US troops.
It’s an urgent tale, which incidentally closes with a fervent finale reminiscent of Casablanca – although the central turnaround in the male lead’s heart, gallantly disproving the title, is maybe a bit smooth.
No Good Men is screening at the Berlin film festival and will be released at a later date
Johnny Flynn and John C Reilly offer casting heft, but this moody, technically sound tale of an unfolding epidemic in 1870s Wisconsin lacks emotional substance
There is some very concerted image-making and mood-making in this technically accomplished yet unsatisfying drama from first-time, Norway-based director Dara Van Dusen. It is a sombre tale of the American old west, adapted by Dusen from the novel by Stewart O’Nan, and somehow has the feel of a short film indulgently taken to feature length. Its visual gestures and set pieces, although striking and often shocking, felt for me disconnected from any emotional truth – a truth that sustained, developed storytelling may have provided.
The setting is a frontier town in Wisconsin in 1870, and Jacob (Johnny Flynn) is both sheriff and pastor – although he wears neither badge nor religious garment. He has seen traumatising service in the civil war, in which he appears to have achieved high rank, although some in the town are suspicious of his Norwegian background. He is married to Marta (Kristine Kujath Thorp) and they have a young child.
Wuthering Heights is the latest film to turn heads over anachronistic costumes, but it’s not by any means the first
Emerald Fennell’s retelling of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights finally hits cinema screens this weekend. Ever since the first set of photos were released, the anachronisms of the costumes have been central to the conversation.
As fashion industry watchdog Diet Prada put it: “The costume design for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights scandalised audiences with its freaky mix of Oktoberfest corseting meets 1950’s ballgowns meets futuristic liquid organza meets … Barbie?”
Protests in Buenos Aires, Lindsey Vonn crashes at the Winter Olympics and Bad Bunny performs at Super Bowl LX – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists
Longtime fans of the cult TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000 know that the series’ one constant is change (well, that and bad movies).
The show’s cast and crew were in a near-constant state of flux, a byproduct of the show's existence as a perennial bubble show produced in the Twin Cities rather than a TV-and-comedy hub like New York or LA. It was rare, especially toward the middle of its 10-season original run on national TV, for the performers in front of the camera (and the writers’ room, since they were all the same people) to stay the same for more than a season or two.
Series creator Joel Hodgson embraced that spirit of change for the show's Kickstarter-funded, Netflix-aired revival in the mid-2010s, featuring a brand-new cast and mostly new writers. And that change only accelerated in the show's brief post-Netflix "Gizmoplex" era, which featured a revolving cast of performers that could change from episode to episode. Hodgson leaned into the idea that as long as there were silhouettes and puppets talking in front of a bad movie, it didn't matter much who was doing the talking.
With just seven weeks before its funding runs out, the UK’s greatest cultural asset and most trusted international news organisation must be supported
“The programmes will neither be very interesting nor very good,” said the then BBC director general John Reith, when he launched its Empire Service in December 1932. Nearly a century later, the BBC World Service, as it is now known, broadcasts in 43 languages, reaches 313 million people a week and is one of the UK’s most influential cultural assets. It is also a lifeline for millions. “Perhaps Britain’s greatest gift to the world” in the 20th century, as Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary general, once put it.
But this week Tim Davie, the corporation’s director general, announced that the World Service will run out of funding in just seven weeks. Most of its £400m budget comes from the licence fee, although the Foreign Office – which funded it entirely until 2014 – contributed £137m in the last year. The funding arrangement with the Foreign Office finishes at the end of March. There is no plan for what happens next.
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.
Mentions of reading in Tinder bios are up 29% in the last year. But is searching for a fellow fan of one’s favourite author really a shortcut to compatibility?
‘One of my Hinge prompts is: ‘What’s the best book you read this year?’ and I swipe left on anyone who says a book I don’t like,” says 29-year-old Ayo*. “Someone once replied with a book by Jordan Peterson, which was a massive ick.”
It’s a blunt approach to romance, but Ayo is far from alone. Books have long functioned as cultural shorthand for personality – signals of taste and worldview – but dating apps have accelerated and intensified that process. In an attention economy that rewards speed, these signifiers have to be legible at a glance.
Grant Gee’s film thoroughly inhabits the creative and personal torment experienced by the American pianist – with a terrific supporting Bill Pullman turn
This elusive, ruminative and very absorbing movie presents its successive scenes like a sequence of unresolved chords carrying the listener on a journey without a destination – and is, incidentally, one of those rare films featuring a wonderful supporting turn that does not undermine or upstage the rest. It’s a film about music. Particularly, about what remains when a musician cannot play and is left to consider the terrible sacrifices made, without conscious consent, to this all-consuming vocation that creates family pain and jealousy almost as a toxic byproduct. It’s a drama to put you in mind of Glenn Gould and Hilary du Pré, sister of Jacqueline.
Screenwriter Mark O’Halloran has adapted the 2013 novel Intermission by Owen Martell about renowned jazz pianist Bill Evans. It focuses on a period of emotional devastation for Evans, when no music was possible – perhaps a restorative intermission, perhaps the start of a calamitous new aridity – when his close friend and bassist Scott LaFaro was killed in a car crash in his 20s.
The Puerto Rican star’s album Debí Tirar Más Fotos jumps to No 2, while the song DTMF rises to No 4
Despite being one of the most streamed musicians in the world, Bad Bunny had never had a solo UK Top 10 hit – until now.
The Puerto Rican musician has attracted a huge number of curious new fans – and jubilant preexisting ones – after last week’s Super Bowl, where he performed in a half-time show described by many people as one of the greatest in NFL history.
Byelection candidate accused of indulging ‘alt right fantasy’ by suggesting women need ‘biological reality’ check
Reform UK’s candidate in the Gorton and Denton byelection has been accused of wanting a “Handmaid’s Tale future” after unearthed YouTube footage revealed he called for “young girls and women” to be given a “biological reality” check.
In a clip posted to his personal YouTube channel in November 2024, Matt Goodwin stated that “many women in Britain are having children much too late in life”.
Francis Bown says its grey concrete and childlike composition expressed the fatalism and despair of the time, while Helen Keats reflects on other brutalist builds
Beehive socialism | Ratcliffe’s apology | Tommy Cooper’s dream | Valentine’s Day | Love boat
The beehive may not be quite the utopian dream it first appears to be (Letters, 9 February). Worker bees need to be so active during the summer months that they typically only survive for about four to six weeks. Drone bees’ longevity is not much better. The lucky ones may get to service the queen, but die as a consequence. Unsurprisingly, the queen fares much better. Tom Challenor Ealing, London
• So Jim Ratcliffe is sorry for his choice of language use in relation to immigration (Report, 12 February). What about being sorry for his sentiments? Could I suggest that he spends a week as a bed-bound inpatient in a NHS hospital before he makes a judgment about the contribution of immigrants? Liz Thompson Oxford
From ‘honour’ killings to nuclear war, some screen works have led directly legislative action – despite what jury head Wenders suggested at the Berlin film festival
Should film festivals be more than just screenings and red carpets? Should they prompt us to think about the role cinema plays in the world? Novelist Arundhati Roy certainly thinks so. She pulled out of the jury at the Berlin festival in protest at jury president Wim Wenders’ claim that films should “stay out of politics”; she said Wenders’ stance was “unconscionable”, and that to “hear [him] say that art should not be political is jaw-dropping.”
Wenders had suggested that cinema is a way to build empathy, but not directly change politicians’ minds. However this is simply not true. Some films – both documentary and narrative – have not only changed public opinion about social issues but led directly to legislation. Despite evidence to the contrary, politicians are people too. They can be moved. And sometimes they are even moved to action.
BP Pulse Live, Birmingham The US band’s brawny, pit-inciting riffs come laced with blurry waves of distortion, making for music that is oddly reflective and melancholy
Early 00s metal is enjoying a revival, but that alone can’t account for the dramatic surge in commercial fortunes being enjoyed by Deftones. Thirty-one years on from the release of their debut album, they find themselves, as frontman Chino Moreno has put it, “literally bigger than we’ve ever been”. Between the release of 2020’s Ohms and last year’s Private Music their monthly listener figures on Spotify surged from two million to 17 million. The 15,000-capacity venue where they open their UK tour is accordingly heaving.
The reason, with a certain inevitability, is TikTok virality. Tonight, Deftones’ setlist is liberally peppered with tracks ubiquitous on the social media app, from opener Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away) to encore Cherry Waves – although why its users have alighted on them is a matter of conjecture. On fan forums, opinions range from the practical (younger listeners discovered the band after emo rappers sampled their music) to the more earthy: there is discussion of a phenomenon called – dear God - “hornycore” into which the Deftones apparently fit because Moreno has “sexual tones” and is “a fox/daddy”.
Theatre Royal, Glasgow There are strong performances and much to admire in Dai Fujikura and Harry Ross’s opera about the Japanese artist, but it feels strangely inert
‘I might become the art myself,” sings the artist Katsushika Hokusai in the new opera by composer Dai Fujikura and librettist Harry Ross. And here he is, doing just that: played by the baritone Daisuke Ohyama, with the forces of Scottish Opera ranged around him.
Over five acts, The Great Wave gives us episodes from Hokusai’s life and death, beginning with his funeral then continuing in flashback, including a dream sequence in which he encounters the wave that inspired his most famous print. As you might expect, it looks beautiful. The production is the work of an all-Japanese team headed by the director Satoshi Miyagi, and it’s full of Hokusai’s pictures, projected upon the bamboo walls of Junpei Kiz’s set, which reflect the artist’s barrel-shaped coffin. It often sounds beautiful, too: Fujikura uses the shakuhachi – a recorder-like flute, played by Shozan Hasegawa – as the basis for a light-infused soundworld conjuring openness and simplicity in almost Copland-esque style, made piquant with fluttering, elusive orchestral textures.
From Blue Lights gossip to How to Get to Heaven from Belfast cocktails, the city has become a small-screen hotspot – and is basking in its newfound fame
‘I love them!” Minutes after I jump into a taxi at Belfast International airport, the driver is beaming about Derry Girls. So many tourists he picks up want to talk about the hit comedy and, as a fan himself, he’s happy to oblige.
We’re stuck in traffic, which is odd for this small city on a wet Tuesday morning. “It’s because all the media are here,” he jokes. But there is some truth to it. I’m visiting for the world premiere of How to Get to Heaven from Belfast, the new series from Derry Girls mastermind Lisa McGee, and to see how the capital became home to the best TV.
Royal Court Upstairs, London Cave people with very different perspectives meet on an elk hunt in Jack Nicholls’ savage but sweet play about love and violence among early humans
Love is expressed with a licked thumb run down a forehead in Jack Nicholls’ dazzlingly unpredictable debut play. Savage and sweet and entirely strange, The Shitheads transports us back tens of thousands of years, to a time when survival required good aim with your hand axe, and squeamishness would not serve you well.
Early humans Clare (Jacoba Williams, slippery and wild) and Greg (Jonny Khan, puppyishly excitable) meet on the hunt for an elk (a beautiful raggedy creature designed by Finn Caldwell and captained by Scarlet Wilderink, absolutely alive – until it is not). Never having met anyone like the other, they are both in awe of their opposing perceptions of time and the future, of living and dying. Worthy of a licked thumb.
(Atlantic) Casting off her Bratty cigarettes and sunglasses, the pop visionary channels the torments of Heathcliff and Cathy and the tumult of the Velvet Underground on her latest captivating pivot
In the catalogues of rock and pop artists, film soundtracks usually seem like interstitial releases. For every career highlight Shaft or Superfly, there’s a plethora of soundtrack albums that carry the tang of the side-hustle. It was doubtless flattering to be asked in the first place – who doesn’t want to feel like a polymath? – but the results are doomed to languish in the footnotes, alongside the compilations of B-sides and outtakes, where only diehard fans spend extended amounts of time.
But the release of House, the first single taken from Charli xcx’s soundtrack to Wuthering Heights, strongly suggested that its author saw Emerald Fennell’s take on Emily Brontë as a chance for a reset. In 2024’s Brat, she made an album you could genuinely call era-defining without fear of embarrassment: if an album makes an impact on the US presidential campaign and its title ends up refashioned as an adjective in the Collins English Dictionary, then it’s definitely era-defining.
Georges Seurat takes an eerie trip to the seaside, Yinka Shonibare puts empire in its place and Sean Scully reveals his source – all in your weekly dispatch
Seurat and the Sea If you thought French 19th-century paintings of the seaside were all happy impressionism, you will be disconcerted, then absorbed by Seurat’s eerie modernist shores. Read the review.
• Courtauld Gallery, London, until 17 May
Apollo theatre, London Jonathan Lynn’s farewell to the beloved parliamentary sitcom casts Griff Rhys Jones as ex-PM Jim Hacker, making one last call on his wily consigliere
Death comes to us all but, slightly before it, so too does that period when no one’s certain whether you’re still around. “I’m not dead,” splutters Griff Rhys Jones’s Jim Hacker in this Yes, Prime Minister reboot. “I’m in the House of Lords!” The ex-PM is also now master of an Oxford college, but is faced with expulsion from this sinecure by students riled by his affronts against woke orthodoxy. And so, in Jonathan Lynn’s elegiac swansong for his well-loved sitcom duo, Hacker calls upon his old consigliere Sir Humphrey to rescue him from trouble one last time.
Lynn (who wrote the original with the late Antony Jay) directs too, alongside Michael Gyngell, a production first staged in 2023 at the Barn in Cirencester. Its ambition, as Hacker’s care worker Sophie telegraphs by quoting Shelley’s Ozymandias, is to examine the mighty once they have fallen. Whither Hacker and Sir Humphrey, now exiled from the corridors of power, hanging on to a world they now barely understand? The latter is condemned to a care home, indeed, by his “evil queen” daughter-in-law. There is poignancy in that, but it’s not dwelled upon in a show that majors not in depth of feeling, far less dramatic incident, but in urbane wit and the illicit thrill of hearing old codgers say inappropriate things.
Making a movie is a lot like pulling off a heist. That’s what Steven Soderbergh—director of the Ocean’s franchise, among other heist-y classics—said a few years ago. You come up with a creative angle, put together a team of specialists, figure out how to beat the technological challenges, rehearse, move with Swiss-watch precision, and—if you do it right—redistribute some wealth. That could describe either the plot or the making of Ocean’s Eleven.
But conversely, pulling off a heist isn’t much like the movies. Surveillance cameras, computer-controlled alarms, knockout gas, and lasers hardly ever feature in big-ticket crime. In reality, technical countermeasures are rarely a problem, and high-tech gadgets are rarely a solution. The main barrier to entry is usually a literal barrier to entry, like a door. Thieves’ most common move is to collude with, trick, or threaten an insider. Last year a heist cost the Louvre €88 million worth of antique jewelry, and the most sophisticated technology in play was an angle grinder.
The low-tech Louvre maneuvers were in keeping with what heist research long ago concluded. In 2014 US nuclear weapons researchers at Sandia National Laboratories took a detour into this demimonde, producing a 100-page report called “The Perfect Heist: Recipes from Around the World.” The scientists were worried someone might try to steal a nuke from the US arsenal, and so they compiled information on 23 high-value robberies from 1972 to 2012 into a “Heist Methods and Characteristics Database,” a critical mass of knowledge on what worked. Thieves, they found, dedicated huge amounts of money and time to planning and practice runs—sometimes more than 100. They’d use brute force, tunneling through sewers for months (Société Générale bank heist, Nice, France, 1976), or guile, donning police costumes to fool guards (Gardner Museum, Boston, 1990). But nobody was using, say, electromagnetic pulse generators to shut down the Las Vegas electrical grid. The most successful robbers got to the valuable stuff unseen and got out fast.
Last year a heist cost the Louvre €88 million worth of antique jewelry, and the most sophisticated technology in play was an angle grinder.
DIMITAR DILKOFF / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Advance the time frame, and the situation looks much the same. Last year, Spanish researchers looking at art crimes from 1990 to 2022 found that the least technical methods are still the most successful. “High-tech technology doesn’t work so well,” says Erin L. Thompson, an art historian at John Jay College of Justice who studies art crime. Speed and practice trump complicated systems and alarms; even that Louvre robbery was, at heart, just a minutes-long smash-and-grab.
An emphasis on speed doesn’t mean heists don’t require skill—panache, even. As the old saying goes, amateurs talk strategy; professionals study logistics. Even without gadgets, heists and heist movies still revel in an engineer’s mindset. “Heist movies absolutely celebrate deep-dive nerdery—‘I’m going to know everything I can about the power grid, about this kind of stone and drill, about Chicago at night,’” says Anna Kornbluh, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She published a paper last October on the ways heist movies reflect an Old Hollywood approach to collective art-making, while shows about new grift, like those detailing the rise and fall of WeWork or the con artist Anna Delvey, reflect the more lone-wolf, disrupt-and-grow mindset of the streaming era.
Her work might help explain why law-abiding citizens might cheer for the kinds of guys who’d steal a crown from the Louvre, or $100,000 worth of escargot from a farm in Champagne (as happened just a few weeks later). Heists, says Kornbluh, are anti-oligarch praxis. “Everybody wants to know how to be in a competent collective. Everybody wants there to be better logistics,” she says. “We need a better state. We need a better society. We need a better world.” Those are shared values—and as another old saying tells us, where there is value, there is crime.
The picture, taken with Paul Thomas Anderson at this year’s Oscar nominee lunch, recalls the eerie image that closes Kubrick’s 1980 horror classic
Frankenstein director Guillermo del Toro’s “jazz hands” pose in the Oscar nominee luncheon photo was part of his and fellow director Paul Thomas Anderson’s attempt to recreate the celebrated group shot, featuring Jack Nicholson, that appears at the ending of The Shining.
Del Toro responded to a post – in which he and Anderson had been inserted into the image from the 1980 horror film directed by Stanley Kubrick – by saying: “[Y]ou got it! PTA and I said: Let’s do the Shining pose and we tried.”
An AI clip featuring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting has caused concern among industry figures
A leading Hollywood figure has warned “it’s likely over for us”, after watching a widely disseminated AI-generated clip featuring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting.
Alexandra Palace, London Following a six-night stint in NYC, Fred Gibson returns to London for a brilliant, five-hour melange of his own tracks and wildly energising guest-star mini-sets
Fred Again, AKA Fred Gibson, has been on an impressive run in recent months: a tour from Madrid to Mexico City, a six-night residency in New York, and the emergence of dozens of the songs forming his unfolding album, USB002. He now comes home to the UK; literally with this four-show residency at Alexandra Palace in London, and also in the musical homages he pays on the opening night.
In succession, Gibson plays Arctic Monkeys’ When the Sun Goes Down, a techno mix of EsDeeKid’s 4 Raws, and a blend from Spice’s dancehall track So Mi Like It to the Chariots of Fire theme over a drum’n’bass beat – comedy patriotism, but very enjoyable for it, and all showing absolute disregard for any sense of purism in electronic music.
In the opening to his acclaimed travelogue Roads to Santiago, the Dutch author Cees Nooteboom writes that “there are some places in the world where one is mysteriously magnified on arrival or departure by the emotions of all those who have arrived and departed before”. Travellers have existed in every age, Nooteboom continues, but only for some does there exist a particular sorrow: that of the one who departs with no hope of return. For them, the voyage out becomes the life.
Nooteboom, who was born in the Netherlands in 1933 and died this week aged 92, was drawn to what could be grasped through the “prism of movement”. In a body of work that includes some 60 books of fiction, poetry, reportage and travel writing, of which only a dozen or so have been translated into English, he became a chronicler of departures. In The Following Story, Nomad’s Hotel, The Foxes Come at Night and Lost Paradise, Nooteboom, his characters and his subjects take to the road. They glimpse histories dissolving from memory and past cruelties rekindled, again and again, in ways that chill the heart. Nooteboom was 12 years old when his father was killed during the second world war; he has said that his first childhood memories are of the bombings and the destruction in their wake.
Director revered by actor’s character in Dawson’s Creek is among film industry figures – also including Zoe Saldaña and John M Chu – to make large donation to family
The film director Steven Spielberg has donated $25,000 (£18,365) to a crowdfunder to help the widow and six children of the actor James Van Der Beek, who died this week after being diagnosed with cancer in 2023.
Dawson Leery,Van Der Beek’s character in Dawson’s Creek, the 90s teen soap that shot him to fame, was an aspiring director who idolised Spielberg. Show creator Kevin Williamson had based the character on himself; he went on to write the horror-comedy Scream and other films in the franchise.
From sparks flying during The OC’s Spider-Man snog to love stories so powerful they make you weep, Guardian writers have picked the television couples whose tales never fail to make hearts pound. Now we would like to hear yours. What is your favourite TV romance, and why?
If you’re having trouble using the form click here. Read terms of service here and privacy policy here.
In Emerald Fennell’s BDSM-tinged film, critics have praised Clunes’s turn as the ‘devout misogynist’ Mr Earnshaw
It has been billed as the sexiest adaptation of Wuthering Heights, with bodices ripped to shreds and a flirtation with BDSM. And yet the standout star of Emerald Fennell’s new film isn’t one of its smouldering young lovers, played by Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, but British television’s most affable grump – Martin Clunes.
Clunes plays Mr Earnshaw, the patriarch of the Earnshaw household whose decision to bring home a destitute young Heathcliff from Liverpool to the Yorkshire Moors sets in motion the destructive love story at the centre of Wuthering Heights. In Fennell’s reworking, Cathy’s elder brother, Hindley, is abolished entirely, with his cruelty, boozing and gambling folded into the father instead.
His debut LP brought success, but stardom messed with his mental health. After stepping away for three years to surf, travel, and work a succession of jobs, the Londoner is back – and has fixed his relationship with music
In 2022, everything changed for Tom Misch. The London-based singer-songwriter had been at the height of his powers: his easygoing blend of hip-hop-influenced beat-making with soulful guitar melodies and yearning vocals led his self-released and self-produced 2018 debut album Geographytochart at No 8 in the UK, while 2020’s collaborative record with the jazz drummer Yussef Dayes reached No 4 and earned them both an Ivor Novello award nomination. In 2022, riding high from the viral social media success of the live Quarantine Sessions he had posted during the Covid lockdowns, he was playing larger stages than ever in the US and Brazil and was booked for a summer leg in Australia. Suddenly, in July, he decided to pull the plug.
“I had an intense year of touring and I wasn’t feeling good, I wasn’t enjoying it any more,” he says. “My mental health was getting worse and I was so anxious I had to cancel the Australia tour. I was forced to stop, really, and I had no plan for what would happen next.”
A poll has found differences between men and women’s motivations for watching romance films together, with 20% of men hoping it may result in sex
As groups of women block-booking rows of seats with friends to see Wuthering Heights look likely to help propel Emerald Fennell’s adaptation to the top of the Valentine’s weekend box office, a new survey suggests men are amenable to watching romantic movies at home – although their motivations for doing so are mixed.
A poll of 2,000 film fans on behalf of the wall-to-wall romance movie Freeview channel Great Romance has found that the top three reasons given by men for watching a romance film are feeling closer to their partner (36%), wanting a quiet life (21%) and thinking it might lead to sex (20%). Twenty per cent said that such films “remind me of the magic of when we met”, while half that number said such an activity was “low effort but still feels like bonding”.
Bad boy Heathcliff is described as ethnically ambiguous and ‘dark’ in the novel, yet is played by a pretty straightforward white Australian Elordi
Tired of movies for kids? Superhero capes and flatulent animated squirrels? Me too. Fortunately, you and I are in luck. This weekend brings the wide release of Saltburn director Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. As is befitting Fennell’s established style, the movie offers over-the-top sexual titillation (though, crucially, zero nudity) and elaborate production design. Plus, a contemporary pop soundtrack from Charli xcx. A horny film version of a 19th-century novel is as adult-skewing as it gets at the box office these days.
Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi suck face and stand around in the rain in expensive costumes for over two hours in a movie that Fennell proudly declares a loose translation from the page. It excises a large portion of the book’s story and focuses its eye primarily on the illicit romance between Cathy Earnshaw and swarthy Heathcliff. Crucially, it should be pointed out that Heathcliff is technically Cathy’s foster brother, which allows Wuthering Heights to fit comfortably into one of the most popular genres of online video in the world.
Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist
Nowhere Burning by Catriona Ward; Pagans by James Alistair Henry; Pedro the Vast by Simón López Trujillo; Operation Bounce House by Matt Dinniman; A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing by Alice Evelyn Yang
Nowhere Burning by Catriona Ward (Viper, £16.99) The latest from the horror/crime virtuoso combines supernatural, psychological and all-too-human terrors in a tale drawing on elements ranging from Peter Pan to historic serial abusers. Nowhere House was in a remote American mountain valley; when it burned down, the terrible crimes committed by Hollywood star Leaf Winham against young men were revealed. Subsequently, runaway children turned the valley into a fortress, surviving on food they could catch or grow, with occasional forays into the towns below. Riley has heard the rumours, but it is only when she sees a green-clad boy – or is it a girl? – hovering outside her bedroom window offering directions on how to find Nowhere that she realises this might be her chance to escape and save her little brother from their sadistic guardian. Her experiences are interwoven with stories from others drawn there: Marc, a journalist determined to get inside the fortress; Adam, the only one of Leaf’s victims to survive; the pioneers who built the first house in the valley, and more. A dark, grimly compelling and very twisty tale.
Pagans by James Alistair Henry (Moonflower, £9.99) In this entertaining alt-history debut, we are in a 21st-century Britain where the Norman conquest never happened, split along religious and cultural lines. The Saxons are led by the High King, who rules the greater part of England; Scotland is behind a wall, allied to the Nordic Economic Union; and the indigenous Celts are second-class citizens. In the buildup to a London summit to discuss plans for British unity, a Celtic negotiator is found dead, nailed to a tree in Epping Forest. Detective Captain Aedith Mercia of the London police teams up with Drustan of the Dumnonian tribal police in a search for what seems to be a religiously motivated serial killer; they find evidence there could be a greater political threat. It’s a great read, combining clever world-building with engaging characters and an exciting story, and ending with a promise of more to come.
The Londoner defies classification, writing, producing and arranging her unique mix of neo-soul, R&B, indie and grunge – and gathering some big-name backers along the way
From London Recommend if you like Rochelle Jordan, Ragz Originale, Sailorr Up next New music due later this year
Natanya tears genres open and rebuilds them in her own image. Her drums swing loose and jazzy over heavy 808s; synths drift dreamily before snapping into gritty guitar riffs. Writing, producing and arranging all her own work, she weaves together neo-soul silk, R&B groove, indie edge, and flashes of grunge, all carried by a buttery falsetto that nods to Aaliyah, Amy Winehouse, Janet Jackson and early Destiny’s Child.
The artist often swapped painting for etching as a way to rediscover his craft. Now a new exhibition shows these flashes of inspiration in all their intimate glory
At home one evening in 1951, Lucian Freud did three drawings of fellow artist Francis Bacon. The biographer William Feaver recounts the anecdote as Freud told it to him: Bacon had stood up, undone the buttons on his trousers, rolled up his sleeves and wiggled his hips a little, saying: “I think you ought to do this, because I think that’s rather important.”
By Freud’s own admission, the older painter was provocative in more ways than just this pose: “I got very impatient with the way I was working. It was limited and a limited vehicle for me,” Freud told Feaver. He felt his drawing stopped him from freeing himself, he said, “and I think my admiration for Francis came into this. I realised that by working in the way I did I couldn’t really evolve. The change wasn’t perhaps more than one of focus, but it did make it possible for me to approach the whole thing in another way.”
MK Gallery, Milton Keynes His work was so painstaking and slow to produce that the models – including a certain trainee barrister – often didn’t make it to the end of a portrait. It makes for paintings that seem drained of life
Euan Uglow, they say, is an artist’s artist, and therein lies the problem. If you were approaching his painstaking canvases out of curiosity – how to construct the figure, capture precise perspective, proportions – I can see how their visible workings (complex little dashes and crosses and plumb lines and geometric grids) would prove revelatory. But lots of us come to art to be inspired, transported, to feel. And for all their technical prowess, Uglow’s 70-odd regimented paintings at MK Gallery leave me cold.
First, some context, which we get immediately upon entering – in a slightly maddening move, the five-room retrospective of the artist opens with a room of seven paintings, of which only two are by him. After studying at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in London from 1948 to 1950, he moved to the Slade. He was influenced by Paul Cézanne and Alberto Giacometti, as well as three tutors, all of whom are represented here.
From sparks flying during The OC’s Spider-Man snog to love stories so powerful they make you weep, Guardian writers pick the television couples whose tales never fail to make hearts pound
As TV romances go, it’s not the most original. Nerdy teen boy finally gets the queen bee he’s loved since they still had baby teeth – and off we pop on a four-season cycle of dramatic breakups and grand-gesture-fuelled reunions. Yet through all of the faintly ridiculous plotlines, their romance is anchored by that most elusive of on-screen tricks: actual, palpable chemistry. There is the sarcastic sparring, the physical spark (who could ever forget that Spiderman snog?) but also a feeling of deep care and genuine friendship – one that helps both characters grow into promising mini-grownups by the end. Watching the pair navigate insecurities, battle identity crises and generally make some spectacularly poor choices, lets us all feel better about the emotional dumpster fires of our own adolescence. And the fact that they keep on choosing each other speaks to that part of our teen selves that longed to find someone who might jump on to a coffee cart and declare their love for us – or at least wait around all summer while we campaigned to save sea otters. Lucinda Everett
We want to hear people’s thoughts on reading the novel ahead of the new adaptation – and if you’ve watched the film how does it compare?
Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights came to theatres worldwide on 13 February, with the director Emerald Fennell saying she hopes it will “provoke a sort of primal response.”
But Brontë’s tempestuous 1847 novel itself has been described as too extreme for the screen and on its release it was certainly not interpreted as a love story. “I can’t adapt the book as it is but I can approximate the way it made me feel,” Fennell has said.
The award-winning French foodie romance is a perfect filmic feast for Valentine’s Day, while Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner serve up an adventurous rom-com ride
Skip the Valentine’s Day restaurant booking and treat your beloved to this filmic feast instead. French-Vietnamese filmmaker Tràn Anh Hùng (The Scent of Green Papaya) won Best Director at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival for this study of a slow-simmering love affair between French gourmand Dodin (Benoît Magimel) and his cook, Eugénie (Juliette Binoche). They spend their days at Dodin’s country estate, dreaming up new dishes with which to wow his coterie of dining companions, who meet regularly to admire Eugénie’s artistry as well as her beauty. Hung’s unhurried camera savours every delicious morsel, but alas, even a nine-course meal cannot last forever.
Saturday 14 February, 9.35pm, BBC Four
(Epitaph) Even after 35 years, the intricacies and emotional pangs of these masters of technicality remain undimmed, drawing from a seemingly bottomless well of inspiration
Metalcore has become a diluted premise, associated more with bands that write processed, sing-along choruses than the mix of metal technicality and punk-rock fury it started as. Converge’s 2001 breakthrough Jane Doe remains the masterpiece of the genre’s pre-bastardisation days: vicious as a pit bull, yet played by men unafraid to test the limits, as evidenced by the tormented, 11-minute title track. The New Englanders have never rested on their laurels, either, with subsequent releases emphasising different shades of their trademark anarchy.
The band’s 10th album and first in nine years (Chelsea Wolfe collaboration Bloodmoon: I not included), Love Is Not Enough condenses their carnage, intricacies and emotional pangs into their shortest-ever run time. Distract and Divide and To Feel Something are incensed and tightly arranged, as if Napalm Death and Slayer had joined forces to strangle you through the speakers.
(Self-released) The Aymara musician takes inspiration from an Andean tradition, resulting in a scrappy sonic meditation with woozy melodies and pockets of warmth
The new album from Joshua Chuquimia Crampton takes its name from the Andean ceremony Anata, which gives thanks for the harvest before the rainy season. Made up of seven dense and distorted instrumentals, the record is the California-based Aymara musician’s attempt at capturing the energy of ceremonial music – not some rosy, polished version, but how it might sound recorded on a phone, clipping and all.
The concept might sound bizarre, but for fans of JCC, it makes total sense. His music, often self-released and proudly unmastered, is characterised by its murky textures and amp-blasting volume. He took this rudimentary approach to the max with last year’s collaborative project Los Thuthanaka, alongside his sibling Chuquimamani-Condori, which was splattered with cartoonish vocal samples, whistles and syncopated rhythms. Here he returns to his solo formula, with just guitar, bass and a few Andean instruments. You’d call it stripped-back if it wasn’t so noisy.
Theatre Royal Stratford East, London Using photographs from an archive album of Auschwitz staff relaxing, this searing drama builds into an unforgettable inquiry
This play is based around a single photo album sent to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2007. Inside were images from Auschwitz, not of the mostly Jewish prisoners but people working in the concentration camp, from top brass to those much further down the chain.
They are seen smiling, resting and putting up Christmas decorations. Whose album was this, who are the people in the photos and how can we ever fully know what led them here? In trying to reach its answers, this Pulitzer prize finalist, conceived by Moisés Kaufman, plays out like a profound, innovative and unique documentary detective drama.
Login
