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a day ago

Global Music Column – August

Duma – Duma Alongside the burgeoning experimental electronic scene in east Africa is a small but committed underground of metal bands, ba...

a day ago

Kamaal Williams – Wu Hen

Coming to prominence in 2016 as one half of jazz duo Yussef Kamaal, producer and pianist Kamaal Williams spearheaded the London-based rev...

a day ago

'You need to lower your expectations': top tips from Indian Matchmaking

“Compromise and adjustment is what I tell all my clients – you need to lower your expectations,” says Sima Taparia. Speaking over video c...

Jul 21

'This show is just the start': inside the BBC's all-person-of-colour A Suitable Boy

‘This is an Indian story,” says Tanya Maniktala, “so it’s about time it was told by us.” The 22-year-old actor is speaking by video call ...

Jul 16

'I’ve seen how uprisings have come from pain': Idris Elba on Black Lives Matter

“History maketh the man,” says Idris Elba. The actor is quoting his late father, a man who he has spent the past two years playing a vers...

Jul 16

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Womad 1985: the qawwali star invokes rapture

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s voice is quite unlike any other. At turns heavy and hulkingly powerful, yet also nimble and pointedly precise, hi...

Jul 16

My streaming gem: why you should watch Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham

Clocking in at three and a half hours long, Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham is a remarkably swift Bollywood experience. In fact, the 2001 film c...

Jul 7

Global music column – July

Keleketla! – Keleketla! Call and response is a key form in music, from west African drum circles to jazz and hip-hop. It’s a means of mus...

Jul 7

'What if my kids are scared of me?': Alex Brooker on life as a disabled dad

Last year, Alex Brooker was swimming in the cold waters of Lake Windermere, struggling to reach the shore. The comic and TV presenter beg...

Jun 30

‘It’s like we just fell on to this planet’: the rise of psych-rockers Khruangbin

Onstage, the Texan trio Khruangbin are a strange sight to behold. At their sold-out show at London’s near-5,000 capacity O2 Academy Brixt...

Jun 30

My pandemic epiphany: I loved becoming a fitness junkie

Ever since my gym teacher stood, arms folded, laughing at my inability as a four-year-old to tuck myself into a ball and perform a somers...

Jun 16

Bootsy Collins: 'We're all funky, just not all of us know it'

At the age of 17, William “Bootsy” Collins packed up his homemade bass guitar and left home to tour the world with James Brown. He was he...

Jun 16

Global Music Column – June

Siti Muharam: Siti of Unguja The Indian Ocean archipelago of Zanzibar has historically been a meeting place of cultures, from the Indian ...

May 30

Lil Dicky on Dave: 'Everything the show says about my penis is true'

‘I couldn’t ignore this thing that was the driving force of my childhood and my neuroticism,” Dave Burd tells me over the phone from Los ...

May 26

The 100 greatest UK No 1s: No 10, Marvin Gaye – I Heard It Through the Grapevine

It can be hard to grasp the depth and breadth of Marvin Gaye’s career. He seems to have lived one of those kaleidoscopic lives that could...

May 21

The Zoom boom: how video-calling became a blessing – and a curse

Just before lockdown, 29-year-old Ala Uddin became ill with coronavirus-related symptoms and had to self-isolate in his London flat. “For...

May 18

Murder, mystery and a hit record: the unbelievable story of Ike White

Ike White had the kind of life that sounds too outrageous to be true. Given a life sentence for murder at the age of 19, he spent his tim...

May 11

How we made The Story of Tracy Beaker

Jacqueline Wilson, author I’d been writing children’s books for a while, but they had mostly disappeared without a trace. One day, I saw ...

May 11

'I'd join you always': how Gogglebox's Leon and June captured our hearts

Everything from the nightly news to emails from an online store we ordered an appliance from five years ago is desperate to tell us about...

May 8

Global music column – May

Place: Ecuador While most would name Colombia as the home of South America’s forward-thinking club scene, neighbouring Ecuador has quietl...

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