Jude Rogers

2 weeks ago | observer.co.uk | Jude Rogers

Lally MacBeth’s The Lost Folk urges us to take care of our most precious traditions before they disappear Before diving into this compendium of people, collections, customs, objects and worlds connected to folk culture, its title needs to be tackled. Why is the material within it, much of which survives in some form, described as “lost”? For Lally MacBeth, it’s about “the danger” of this stuff disappearing. I get it.

2 weeks ago | observer.co.uk | Jude Rogers

Rylan Clark gets to the heart of the matter; Miriam Margolyes lets rip; a journalist, a politician and a spy reveal all; and a feminist theatre company is formed There are many theories about how romance blooms, and then there’s Stephen Fry’s assessment, which, it turns out, is the pits. “At some point, love sprouts in your brain in the same way hair sprouts under your arms,” he tells Rylan Clark, remembering the arrival of the schmaltzy stuff in his adolescence.

3 weeks ago | observer.co.uk | Jude Rogers

The new voice of BBC 6 Music on storytelling, why radio will always be better than playlists made by algorithms, and respecting your elders Born in 1993 in London, where she still lives, Zakia Sewell is a writer and documentary-maker, and BBC 6 Music’s newest DJ. Her Sunday evening show, Dream Time, mixes jazz, folk, dub, ambient and global sounds.

3 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Jude Rogers

Barry McIlheney, who has died aged 67, presided over many late 20th-century media success stories. In 1989 he launched the monthly film magazine Empire as editor, and in 1999 the celebrity weekly Heat as publisher. In his first job as editor, at the pop music fortnightly Smash Hits, he had more than doubled the magazine’s sales in just over two years (it sold 400,000 copies when he took the job in October 1986; in November 1988, its Poll Winners’ Party special sold over a million).

1 month ago | theguardian.com | Jude Rogers

Travellers’ songs sung in Scots are the focus of Josie Vallely, a gutsy, Glasgow-based artist performing as Quinie (pronounced “q-why-nee”; “young woman” in the Doric dialect), whose third album acknowledges ancestors watching over her. It includes traditional singers Lizzie Higgins, Jeannie Robertson and Sheila Stewart, whose rawness drones, speaks and soars over these 11 varied tracks, mixing tunes from fiddles, Gaelic sean-nós singing, and canntaireachd (the vocal mimicry of pipe music).