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‘The lyrics to Lola by the Kinks are gross – I was really taken aback’: Moby’s honest playlist
Mar 26, 2026 • theguardian

‘The lyrics to Lola by the Kinks are gross – I was really taken aback’: Moby’s honest playlist

The DJ and multi-instrumentalist thinks Donna Summer still sounds like the future, but which ‘unevolved’ Kinks staple can he no longer stomach?The first song I fell in love withI would sit by the radio and record songs on an old Dictaphone that I found under my grandfather’s desk. I spent the summer listening over and over to I Fought the Law by the Clash. Even through a Dictaphone, it sounded like a building exploding.The first single I boughtConvoy by CW McCall for $1 from Bradlees discount store in Connecticut, and listened to it 40 times in a row. I think it was at that point my mom thought: “He’s both going to be a musician and an addict.” The song I do a karaokeI take pride that I’ve never done the same karaoke song twice. My Way by Frank Sinatra wasn’t my finest moment. Nor was In Da Club by 50 Cent. At least my Bust a Move by Young MC wasn’t as terrible as it could have been. Continue reading...

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The Comeback review – Lisa Kudrow is back as Valerie Cherish … but with no laughs
Mar 26, 2026

The Comeback review – Lisa Kudrow is back as Valerie Cherish … but with no laughs

It’s been 21 years since we met the self-absorbed TV star in this industry satire. But as she comes out of retirement, the results are woeful – and it’s not just the AI scriptValerie Cherish may just be the closest thing America has to its own Alan Partridge. Both narcissists clinging desperately to 1990s showbiz successes (starring in a popular sitcom and hosting a BBC chatshow respectively), they are also two rare examples of comedy characters who have returned sporadically over multiple decades: Steve Coogan’s alter ego made his television debut 32 years ago, while Lisa Kudrow first appeared as Cherish in The Comeback in 2005, returning for a second season nine years later and a third this week.Yet the pair are most alike as prisms through which their creators can satirise the ever-evolving entertainment landscape. Thus far, Partridge’s career has been bookended by sports commentary and self-funded documentaries about mental health; in between we’ve had sendups of local radio, travelogues, podcasting, celebrity memoir and teatime magazine shows. The Comeback, meanwhile, began as a twin spoof of the studio sitcom and reality TV. Co-created by Kudrow and Michael Patrick King (best known for directing and writing for Sex and the City and And Just Like That), season one revolved around the making of a fly-on-the-wall documentary about Cherish’s return to work in a trashy comedy called Room and Bored. In 2014, The Comeback – the name of both the actual show and the reality TV programme within it – was revived to chronicle another career renaissance; this time, Cherish won serious acclaim as the star of Seeing Red, a dark dramedy inspired by the real-life conflict between her and Room and Bored’s heroin-addicted co-writer Paulie G.The Comeback aired on Sky Comedy and is on Now in the UK and HBO Max in Australia Continue reading...

‘I’m a big bear. I lumber’: showbiz superstar Richard Kind on delivering performances you can see from space
Mar 26, 2026

‘I’m a big bear. I lumber’: showbiz superstar Richard Kind on delivering performances you can see from space

The first time Kind starred in Nazi-spoof The Producers, he lost 30lb. Is he – and the West End – ready for his return? And why is he so worried about his old flatmate George Clooney?Richard Kind has played everything from a child’s imaginary friend in the Pixar fantasy Inside Out to a neighbour with antibiotic-resistant pinkeye in Only Murders in the Building. He was a physics savant with a sebaceous cyst in the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man, Joaquin Phoenix’s final tormentor in the nightmarish Beau Is Afraid and Larry David’s insufferable cousin Andy in Curb Your Enthusiasm, where he squabbled over the correct direction of travel for a Lazy Susan and became an accessory to the murder of a swan. “Ubiquitous?” splutters Kind, his letterbox mouth agape. “I’m all over the fucking place! Nobody works more than me.”We meet at the Garrick theatre in London, where the genial 69-year-old is beginning a seven-week stint in Mel Brooks’ bad-taste, Nazi-spoofing musical The Producers. Kind is temporarily taking over from Andy Nyman in the role of Broadway huckster Max Bialystock, who plans to swindle his backers by staging a surefire stinker called Springtime for Hitler and pocketing their investments when it closes prematurely. Continue reading...

‘It shook the plaster off the ceiling’: Self Esteem and David Hare on reviving rock romp Teeth ‘n’ Smiles
Mar 26, 2026

‘It shook the plaster off the ceiling’: Self Esteem and David Hare on reviving rock romp Teeth ‘n’ Smiles

It lit up the 1970s with its nihilistic tale of a hippie band imploding in a trail of drugs, booze and violence. What can it tell us about the music business today? Writer David Hare and wild-child rocker Self Esteem plug in The first time Rebecca Lucy Taylor read David Hare’s 1975 play Teeth ’n’ Smiles, she says, her “mind was blown”. “I couldn’t believe it,” says the artist better known to music fans as Self Esteem. “The way I feel about my actual life is so mirrored in this play. It just mirrors what the music industry today is like.”In a sense, that’s a surprising thing to say. You could view Teeth ’n’ Smiles as something of a period piece. Set in 1969, it is the saga of a band imploding in a mass of drugs, alcohol and violence backstage at a Cambridge May ball – inspired, Hare says, by the experience of seeing a “grumpy, angry, miserable” Manfred Mann going through the motions at a similar event while he was a student at Jesus College. There is debate among the band’s members about the late-60s countercultural “acid dream”, and the attendant belief in rock music as a revolutionary force capable of inciting social change. But the play seems less a product of the era in which it is set than that in which it was written. It is soaked in the disillusionment and broiling discontent of the mid-70s, when the countercultural dream was unequivocally over. Continue reading...

The Pitt review – ER fans have been waiting for a brilliant show like this
Mar 26, 2026

The Pitt review – ER fans have been waiting for a brilliant show like this

Noah Wyle is back on our screens as a lovable doctor in the punchy, gory and totally addictive series that has taken the US by storm. Believe the hype!It’s here at last. The medical drama that took its native US by storm last year has finally crossed the pond. All 15 episodes of The Pitt’s first season, set in almost real time over a single shift in the overstretched emergency department of a busy Pittsburgh hospital, are being offered to tempt us all into subscribing to yet another streaming service – HBO Max, which also promises other baubles, such as the new Harry Potter series and the adaptation of DC Comics’ Lanterns plus rich pickings from its prestigious back catalogue, such as The Sopranos, Succession, Game of Thrones and Friends (which departed Netflix last year, giving many viewers the first insight into the true transience of life).But The Pitt is the one that we older viewers, perhaps, have been waiting for. For it comes from much the same team that produced the then-groundbreakingly gritty ER, and it stars one of its most enduring talents, Noah Wyle. He arrived in the 1994 pilot episode as third-year medical student John Carter, and we followed him as he endured, then thrived under Dr Benton’s tough-love training, qualified in emergency medicine and moved up the ranks at Cook County before bowing out as a main character in the season finale in 2006. With many a literally heart-stopping moment in between, let me tell you. The show made a megastar out of George Clooney (as womanising paediatrician Doug Ross) but Wyle was never less than brilliant. Continue reading...

‘A new world is being born’: author Rebecca Solnit on the ‘slow revolution’ the far right cannot tolerate
Mar 26, 2026

‘A new world is being born’: author Rebecca Solnit on the ‘slow revolution’ the far right cannot tolerate

It’s easy to focus on authoritarians and their petty victories. But zoom out and the picture is more encouraging, says the woman who popularised the term ‘mansplaining’, whether it’s in feminism, or the environment, or civil rightsWhen I speak to Rebecca Solnit, she is beaming, and I can’t immediately figure out why. Her new book, The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change, blasts in with a pragmatic positivity, it’s true. She writes with a “pull yourself together, don’t even think about despair” tone. But that’s not why she’s smiling – it’s because Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor just got arrested. “Why is the UK doing these things the US should be doing? Why now? Wow!”This “feminist chortling” (as she calls it) about the disgraced royal is right in the bailiwick of the writer who virtually invented the term mansplaining. A truly hilarious story about a man explaining her own book to her at a party became the pandemically viral essay Men Explain Things to Me in 2008, then a fierce, controlled critique of the patriarchy in a book of the same name in 2014. Continue reading...

Raye: This Music May Contain Hope review – a wildly ambitious epic of unbridled self-expression
Mar 26, 2026

Raye: This Music May Contain Hope review – a wildly ambitious epic of unbridled self-expression

(Human Re Sources)Almost overstuffed with musical ideas, the singer’s second studio album can be self-indulgent and messy, but it’s a heartfelt and exuberant grand statement from an artist determined to go her own wayLast autumn, Raye was the subject of a lengthy profile in a major fashion magazine. In it, the singer told an anecdote that placed her in precisely the position you would expect following her successful debut album: ensconced in the studio with a very big name producer, the better to capitalise on its success. But the recording session was, she suggested, “fuckshit”: the producer simply turned up with a beat and expected her to sing over it. Raye declined to, as she put it, “do that dance … I was just thinking: ‘Get me out of here.’”This story seems telling in light of This Music May Contain Hope, an album that very much suggests an artist determined to go her own way. It’s about an emotional breakdown occasioned by romantic woe, online criticism, a troubling call from her grandmother and, she notes, “seven negronis”. And, like Lily Allen’s West End Girl, it flies in the face of perceived wisdom about how people consume music in the streaming age, being a 17-track, 73-minute concept album divided into four sections and evidently intended to be listened to from start to finish. Continue reading...

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Clash of the Superpowers: America vs China review – Trump vomits all over Norma Percy’s film
Mar 26, 2026 • theguardian

Clash of the Superpowers: America vs China review – Trump vomits all over Norma Percy’s film

The revered documentarian wades into unexplored territory with the US president and Xi Jinping’s relationship – and there is a moment so startling that it feels like pure comedy goldIt’s not normal to view documentaries about international trade negotiations as light relief, but we are where we are. Clash of the Superpowers: America vs China is a two-parter produced by film-maker Norma Percy, whose signature style – on series including The Iraq War, Putin vs the West and Inside Europe: Ten Years of Turmoil – is to use first-hand testimonies to revisit diplomatic flashpoints from a decade or so ago: sufficiently soon after the events for everyone who was there to still be alive, but late enough for them to no longer be in the same job and now be willing to gossip.Percy’s latest opens with the arrival of Chinese president Xi Jinping at the Davos forum in 2017. On his debut appearance at the event, Xi stimulates delegates with a speech positioning himself as a champion of free trade, offering to work with other countries for mutual economic benefit. What might historically have been an odd tack for China’s leader is not that surprising to the bankers, financiers and politicians in the room, who know Xi is pre-empting the inauguration, a few days later, of Donald Trump as US president. Continue reading...

Robyn: Sexistential review – pop doyenne returns with emotional grenades and a new philosophy
Mar 26, 2026 • theguardian

Robyn: Sexistential review – pop doyenne returns with emotional grenades and a new philosophy

(Young)After 2018’s meditative Honey, the Swedish star returns to her trademark skin-tingling electro bangers – but this time she’s unpicking her trademark fixation on romantic loveThe self-proclaimed Fembot has always pushed people’s buttons. Robyn might be best known for bringing raw emotion to the dancefloor, but her pop bangers about desire and despair are often spiked with commentary on social programming: “Plug me in and flip some switches,” she once quipped, posing as a sexed-up cyborg with a bloody, beating heart. So it’s not a shock to find the Swedish star in a lab coat on Dopamine, her first single in seven years. The song rushes with glittering, arpeggiated synths, but Robyn, now 46, holds it at arm’s length. “I know it’s just dopamine, but it feels so real to me / I’m tripping on our chemistry,” she muses, taking notes as her synapses tingle. “Is love more than chemicals?” she seems to be asking. Does it matter if it’s not? But this time the song is no social critique – it’s a whole new philosophy.Sexistential, Robyn’s ninth album, unravels the fixation on romantic love that fuelled her biggest songs. Gone are the soft edges and pulsing, sensual house of her previous album Honey, and back are the sharp electronic sounds of 2010’s Body Talk through a new lens. With long-term collaborator Klas Åhlund and a few familiar faces (including Metronomy’s Joe Mount and Swedish pop royalty Max Martin), Sexistential reimagines Robyn’s discography without romance as a vehicle. The title track is a sub-three-minute case study in her new mentality. Over minimal, jerking 80s house Robyn raps about hooking up while undergoing IVF as a solo parent: “Fuck a single mom, I’m not judgmental,” she winks, cleaving sex from reproduction and nuclear family. Its counterpart is Blow My Mind, a revamp of her billowy 2002 single made psychedelic, faster, sharper – no longer a textbook love song, but a song about loving her young son. Continue reading...

Through the Centuries: Songs of Madeleine Dring album review – puts paid to any idea that she was not a serious composer
Mar 26, 2026 • theguardian

Through the Centuries: Songs of Madeleine Dring album review – puts paid to any idea that she was not a serious composer

(Chandos) Whately/Drake Kitty Whately and Julius Drake perform the fervent, fun and intoxicating works of a British musician whose fresh assessment is richly deservedBorn in 1923, Madeleine Dring studied at the Royal College of Music, where her teachers included Herbert Howells and Vaughan Williams. An unconventional career, including stints in theatre, pantomime and cabaret, was cut short by her death from a brain aneurysm at 53. Already considered a maverick, the fact that much of her music remained unpublished until the late 1990s threatened to condemn her to obscurity.Enter Kitty Whately and Julius Drake, whose wide-ranging survey puts paid to any idea that Dring was not a serious composer. Drawing on poets from Shakespeare and his Elizabethan colleagues to the composer’s contemporaries, Dring’s canny knack for word-setting proves as effective as her ability to find a distinctive new melody for an old chestnut such as It Was a Lover and His Lass. Continue reading...

Dario Fo at 100: a deliriously funny playwright with a deadly serious purpose
Mar 26, 2026 • theguardian

Dario Fo at 100: a deliriously funny playwright with a deadly serious purpose

The great Italian entertainer’s plays, such as Accidental Death of an Anarchist, have not lost their power to make audiences roar with laughter while confronting injusticeIn Britain we tend to separate political and popular theatre. The genius of Dario Fo, who was born 100 years ago on Tuesday, is that he brought them together in his multiple roles as dramatist, actor, director and designer. Along with his wife, Franca Rame, he took satire to the people and in plays such as Accidental Death of an Anarchist and Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! he achieved a global reach that justly earned him the Nobel prize for literature in 1997.You could say that protest and performance were in his genes. His father was a stationmaster and part-time actor whom he joined in wartime resistance to the Nazis in northern Italy, helping to smuggle Allied soldiers across the border to Switzerland. He became famous, however, in 1962 when he and his wife fronted a weekly TV variety show that attracted huge audiences: an engagement that was abruptly ended when they refused to accept censors’ cuts. Continue reading...

‘The most stunningly awful wonderful record’: how the Shaggs became rock’s most divisive band
Mar 26, 2026 • theguardian

‘The most stunningly awful wonderful record’: how the Shaggs became rock’s most divisive band

Often completely out of tune and rarely in time, the group of sisters forced to play together by their father gained an army of fans from Frank Zappa to Kurt Cobain. A new documentary celebrates their cult statusWhen Austin Wiggin Jr was a boy, his mother read his palm. She foretold that Austin would have two sons she wouldn’t live to see; he’d marry a strawberry blonde; and his daughters would play in a popular band. By 1965, the first two omens had come true. Austin felt this was reason enough to pull Dorothy, Betty and Helen Wiggin from school in pursuit of musical superstardom.Austin’s domineering daily regime began immediately: mail-order homework, calisthenics, and constant band practice under his watch. Whether they liked it or not, the sisters were now the Shaggs – and barred from being anything else. They were rarely permitted to leave their home, save for church, shopping, and a gig every Saturday at the town hall in Fremont, New Hampshire, where for five years they played to peers they never got to know. Continue reading...

White stuff: capturing a land without colour – in pictures
Mar 26, 2026 • theguardian

White stuff: capturing a land without colour – in pictures

For six months out of 12, Japan’s northernmost island, Hokkaido is covered in snow. Elizabeth Sanjuan’s haunting images make the most of this monochrome landscape Continue reading...