‘I’ve picked up 1.2m cigarette butts!’: five litter loathers who refuse to let it lie
On every street in Britain, you’re likely to find a piece of litter. It is estimated that 2m pieces of rubbish are dropped in the UK...
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- Sep 22
Speakers Corner Quartet Step Into the Spotlight
In a corner of suburban South London, four musicians are hunkered in a dark room, sinking deep into a groove. On Moog synth and violin,...
- Sep 19
BCUC are finding strength in numbers
Not much comes close to the experience of watching BCUC live. The South African seven-piece have spent the past 20 years honing their...
- Jul 13
“Indo-Caribbeans are underrepresented”: How Windrush migration inspired a global club music movement
At 17, Riaz Bacchus was DJing on pirate radio stations in London when he stumbled on a genre of music that seemed to perfectly express...
- May 22
‘I didn’t even know men could get it’: the hidden impact of male postnatal depression
Seventy hours into the birth of his first child, Lewis was told that his wife needed to be rushed into surgery for an emergency...
- Apr 5
‘John Travolta was sizzling hot!’: an oral history of Grease
Forty-five years ago, audiences first glimpsed the sun-kissed, palm-lined campus of Rydell High, the school setting for the movie musical...
- Mar 27
‘It’s a rockstar album’: the UK jazz musicians marking five decades of Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew
“We played for three days straight with no notes on the page and no repeats. There were 12 musicians in the room, just listening and...
- Jan 27
Farewell, Netflix password sharing
I used to watch an unhealthy amount of TV. A minimum of 24 shows per week for the best part of two years, to be precise, when I worked on...
- Jan 26
The one change that didn’t work: I deleted all my social media apps – and found myself bored
A year into the pandemic, in early 2021, I was spending most of my time online. I sat and I scrolled – on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram...
- Dec 28, 2022
‘I will be resisting the urge to watch so much TV’: the thing I’ll do differently in 2023
For two years, I watched a minimum of 24 TV shows every week. From Strictly Come Dancing to The Crown, BBC Four documentaries on canals...
- Nov 18, 2022
Blowing up: six of Britain’s new jazz musicians on making a living out of their passion
For much of the last decade, improvised music in the UK has been carving out its own path. Interweaving everything from saxophonist Nubya...
- Nov 16, 2022
‘The baddest technician’: how Don Cherry is still making jazz new
Nineteen fifty-nine was a pivotal year in jazz. In August, trumpeter Miles Davis released his landmark album Kind of Blue, which would go...
- Nov 14, 2022
How the jazz-dance underground has broken into the mainstream
For Ed Cawthorne, AKA producer and multi-instrumentalist Tenderlonious, jazz came through the dancefloor. Finding his first love for...
- Oct 20, 2022
Work Sucks, I Know — Ammar Kalia on escaping the pigeonhole
“Another ‘race issues’ piece, is it?” A text pings from my older brother. We had been chatting about work, and I’d just sent him an...
- Oct 8, 2022
Mount Kimbie are forging a new musical identity
Kai Campos and Dom Maker are used to taking their time. As the band Mount Kimbie, the pair have spent the past 14 years crafting three...
- Aug 23, 2022
The highlife sound forged by civil war and the dancefloor
In 1957, at only 10-years-old, Waziri Oshomah was sneaking out of his home in the southern Nigerian region of Etsako to watch club bands...
- Aug 18, 2022
‘I had a very welcome lie-in on Friday’: the joys and challenges of switching to a four-day week
In June, the UK embarked on the biggest trial of a four-day work week in the world. More than 3,300 employees at 70 companies agreed to...
- Jul 22, 2022
‘Our love triangle was outrageous!’ Neighbours legends remember the good, the bad and the very silly
On 18 March 1985, Australian viewers were introduced to a suburban cul-de-sac. Over the course of an unremarkable pilot, a noisy stag do...
- May 16, 2022
The celebrated assassin: the play about Gandhi’s killer, still dividing India
‘Sometimes the truth is messy and illogical,” says Anupama Chandrasekhar. “But theatre can display the truth in ways journalism or other...
- Apr 15, 2022
Hounslow's Finest: Bend It Like Beckham At 20
There was something unique about growing up in Hounslow in the late ‘90s. A stone’s throw from Heathrow Airport, this largely working...
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