-
2 weeks ago | 
newstatesman.com | Kate Mossman
V ladimir Putin is generally late to the stage for plenary sessions, and at the Arctic Forum in late March he turned up 40 minutes before Steve Rosenberg’s broadcasts for the News at Six and Radio 4. “And because I’m the only BBC person here now, I’m constantly on call, and it’s quite tiring, you know…” Rosenberg says, brightly, on Zoom from a white room in Moscow.
-
3 weeks ago | 
newstatesman.com | Kate Mossman
Pop music is often thought to be a rehearsal for adult experience – a space in which teenagers explore the complicated shades of romantic feeling they haven’t yet met in the world. I think it can be something else, though – a form of regressive longing, taking you back to your earliest feelings of love. It is part of an adolescent’s job experience to regress like this – to seek some rejuvenating return to childhood feelings amid all the confusion.
-
4 weeks ago | 
thetimes.com | Kate Mossman
-
4 weeks ago | 
newstatesman.com | Zuzanna Lachendro |Michael Prodger |Kate Mossman |Zoe Huxford
“Call me Ishmael”, the opening line of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick,commands the reader. In her exciting feminist reimagining of the classic, the 2020 Goldsmith’s Prize shortlisted author Xiaolu Guo instructs the reader to call the narrator Ishmaelle. Guo’s plot follows a similar trajectory to the original. The cast is slightly changed; Captain Ahab becomes Captain Seneca and rather than sailing on the Pequod, Ishmaelle finds herself on the Nimrod.
-
1 month ago | 
newstatesman.com | Kate Mossman
The cover art for Yoko Ono’s Season of Glass could be one of the most famous photos of the 20th century, but somehow isn’t. It shows the glasses pulled off John Lennon’s face after his assassination in December 1980, the left frame opaque with dried blood. Next to them is a glass of water, with a misty view of Central Park in the distance. It was taken in January 1981, from the Dakota building apartment Ono and Lennon shared.
-
1 month ago | 
theguardian.com | Kate Mossman
I am of a generation that had no name: we slipped down the crack between the spotty cheek of gen X and the well-moisturised buttock of the millennials. We are the last generation that will wow our grandchildren by explaining that we came of age completely without the internet. We wrote letters through secondary school; we replaced these with email when we got to university and wrote 15,000-word screeds to one another, which we still keep in files in our Hotmail accounts.
-
1 month ago | 
newstatesman.com | Kate Mossman
Paul Brady likes to say that Tina Turner bought his house and Bonnie Raitt pays his pension: his songs have been covered by both of them. When he opens the door to his place in Dublin, he’s softly spoken; when we part ways an hour later he says, “to be honest, I was completely surprised when you wanted to come”. Brady talks with a light kind of irony, punctuating things with a high titter: he holds something back of himself. In his autobiography Chronicles, Bob Dylan wrote: “Some guys got it down.
-
1 month ago | 
newstatesman.com | Kate Mossman
A male friend interviewed Lady Gaga in 2012 and she got completely nude while they talked, sitting under a very fine piece of netting. It was a different era, and Gaga, like an old fashioned popstar, was both in control, and a slave to the machine. I’ll forever recall the excitement that greeted the woman who’d come to save recorded music. The industry was still capable of Barnum and Bailey press stunts in those days: in 2012 Rihanna flew 150 journalists around Europe on a private plane.
-
2 months ago | 
newstatesman.com | Kate Mossman
Sam Fender’s giant success could be explained, not just by his similarity to Bruce Springsteen, but by the fact that he is the UK’s first politicised blue-collar solo rock act. How can we not have had one? While the first rockers were largely working class, they moved up through art school and dated the landed aristocracy. They’ve always formed bands, and they don’t tend to sing about working-class things.
-
2 months ago | 
afr.com | Kate Mossman
Kate MossmanFeb 19, 2025 – 5.00am or Subscribe to save articleEmailLinkedInTwitterFacebookSubscribe to gift this articleGift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe. Subscribe nowAlready a subscriber? The Prince Charles Cinema, for those who don’t know, is not an arts cinema with those leather sofas where people bring you bottles of chilled white wine.
