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Oct 24, 2024 | 
northernsoul.me.uk | Robert Martin |Helen Nugent |Nancy Collantine
A new book reveals how a couple from Yorkshire started a dog rescue in Bulgaria called Street Hearts. Northern Soul’s Rob Martin collared them for a chat. In the bitterly cold winter of 2019, a young puppy, just a few months old, was found with his siblings freezing and starving to death in a garden in rural Bulgaria. Like so many others, the litter had been left to fend for themselves, scrabbling in the snow with little chance of survival.
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Oct 22, 2024 | 
northernsoul.me.uk | Helen Nugent |Andy Murray |Nancy Collantine
Check out this beautiful Northern Coast photo gallery by Paul Hunter.
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Oct 22, 2024 | 
northernsoul.me.uk | Helen Nugent |Andy Murray |Nancy Collantine
Few can claim a lifelong pedigree in the world of music that compares with Joe Boyd. As a young American living in 60s London, he brought many legendary blues artists over to play in the UK, before becoming a producer and record label boss key to the careers of Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, Fairport Convention and more.
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Oct 22, 2024 | 
northernsoul.me.uk | Desmond Bullen |Nancy Collantine |Robert Martin
When a show this lauded comes to town, expectations are high. Traplord has garnered swathes of praise and incredible reviews since premiering in 2022. It even won an Olivier award for Best New Dance. That’s quite a reputation, bolstered by that of its creator Ivan Michael Blackstock who is often described as a cultural innovator. It was certainly the feeling that hung in the air as the audience entered The Warehouse at Manchester’s Aviva Studios.
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Oct 21, 2024 | 
northernsoul.me.uk | Desmond Bullen |Nancy Collantine
Outside, the low skies of a Sunday afternoon incipient with mist seem little higher than the International Anthony Burgess Foundation‘s exposed brickwork, while inside the audience appears blown together like leaf drifts, wrapped in the colours of autumn and the layers of winter. As proceedings commence with an introduction by writer and academic Okechukwu Nzelu, fleeces are unzipped, scarfs unravelled, tea put aside.
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Oct 21, 2024 | 
northernsoul.me.uk | Nancy Collantine |Desmond Bullen |Robert Hamilton
Summer is a quiet time in the OperaWatch offices here at Northern Soul Towers. Much twiddling of thumbs, long boozy lunches and musing on whether or not the southern jessies at English National Opera will ever move north. It is, therefore, a great relief when the leaves begin to turn brown and a chill in the air signals the beginning of autumn and signs of activity in the office.
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Oct 21, 2024 | 
northernsoul.me.uk | Nancy Collantine |Desmond Bullen
As a group show of more than 50 female artists, there’s no obvious theme. Yet something like it exists and it feels like isolation. Rogue Women 3 speaks of modern-day malady. From the tightly cropped tearful painting Crocodile Tears by Natalie Dowse and the lone lifeless pigeon Dead Bird, Christmas Day by Andrea Booker, to the solitary figures of Yvadney Davis’ Dame Lorraine’s Standing Ovation, Amy Dury’s Castor and Hannah Wool’s Sitting (Margarita’s carpet), there is introspection.
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Oct 2, 2024 | 
northernsoul.me.uk | Andy Murray |Nancy Collantine |Laura Davis
Cats get such a raw deal in Martin McDonagh’s bloody farce The Lieutenant of Inishmore that they’re mentioned in the show’s trigger warning. The poor felines are daubed with shoe polish, shot, bashed in the head, run over by a bicycle and murdered off-stage by an IRA splinter group. This brutality – and the human-on-human killing spree that follows it – will likely come as no surprise to those familiar with McDonagh’s output, which includes the films In Bruges and The Banshees of Inisherin.
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Oct 2, 2024 | 
northernsoul.me.uk | Andy Murray |Nancy Collantine |Desmond Bullen
It requires a careful approach. To say too much about Joy Unspeakable – a theatre piece with music that takes the words of four women, each diagnosed with an eating disorder, and makes them unignorable – is to risk diminishing its dramatic effects. Which is apt enough, since the approach that Joy Unspeakable itself takes is full of care for both its subject matter and its subjects.
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Sep 27, 2024 | 
northernsoul.me.uk | Andy Murray |Nancy Collantine
Every day is the anniversary of something. When Northern Soul speaks to legendary singer/songwriter TV Smith, some nostalgic Facebook group happens to be remarking that it’s exactly 47 years since the release of Gary Gilmore’s Eyes, the sinister Top 20 hit by Smith’s punk-era outfit The Adverts. “Really?” Smith says, wide-eyed. ”Oh God, it probably was, yeah.”Smith has gone on to have a long and fascinating career, so is it a blessing or a curse for that hit to linger on as his calling card?
