Phoenix: ‘Every political cycle France has an existential crisis’ | Phoenix

Phoenix (clockwise from top left) Christian Mazzalai, Thomas Mars, Deck D'arcy, Laurent Brancowitz

Deck D’Arcy has a theory. The Phoenix bassist thinks that, on the band’s fifth album, 2013’s Bankrupt!, they “lost the groove”. The French four-piece were at the height of their fame: 2009’s Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix […]

‘Hip-hop honeys’ and sitting as a political act: why Tschabalala Self is one of America’s hottest artists | Art

‘I want to make people feel like they have more perspective’ … overseeing production of Seated.

‘Imagine you’re on a bike, as opposed to a car, a train, or a plane,” says Tschabalala Self. “Imagine how the world appears, how quickly and easily you’re able to move through it. How clearly […]

‘To sing in Kashmiri is political’: Ali Saffudin, the singer-songwriter who smuggled his album to the world | Music

‘I needed someone to harness my music and get it out to the world.’

‘If someone like Neil Young or Bob Marley were born in Kashmir, who do you think they would have supported?” Ali Saffudin asks. “The oppressed. These are my inspirations.” For Saffudin, a Kashmiri folk singer-songwriter, […]

A night out with Kneecap, Ireland’s political hip-hop rebels

Three band members, one with a knit cap over his face, crouch down.

It’s not even 8:30 on a Monday night, and already a good quarter of the roughly 200-person audience crammed within the converted courtyard that is Bardot’s stage for the weekly School Night concert series is […]

‘I keep hope alive’: Tamara Tunie on playing Kamala Harris in political dystopia The 47th | Theatre

US vice president Kamala Harris in March 2022.

Tamara Tunie is limbering up to play the vice-president of America in Mike Bartlett’s new political satire, The 47th. “I have great admiration for what she’s achieved,” says Tunie, in a back office at the […]