Owner of Night & Day is taking Manchester city council to court in hope it will drop notice served 18 months ago
Much-loved Manchester music venue Night & Day will be back in court this week appealing against a noise abatement notice brought by an adjacent flat.
The owner of the bar, a fixture of the city’s Northern Quarter for 30 years, is taking Manchester city council (MCC) to court in the hope it will drop the notice served 18 months ago.
Continue reading...British singer was billed to perform on Saturday alongside Cyndi Lauper and New Zealand singer John Stevens
Sir Rod Stewart has cancelled a performance in Australia after being told he has a “viral infection”.
The 78-year-old singer-songwriter, who has had six No 1 hits in the UK charts including Baby Jane and Maggie May, was due to sing at the festival A Day on the Green in Mt Duneed Estate, Geelong.
Continue reading...Handwritten poem in Greek from his undergraduate years has recommended sale price of £20,400
A handwritten manuscript containing a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge railing against the slave trade has been temporarily barred from leaving the UK in the hope that a British buyer can be found.
The poem, written in Greek by Coleridge across six mottled pages, attacks the horrors of slavery and condemns those who overlooked the conditions of enslaved people on the Middle Passage transportation route in the late 18th century.
Continue reading...Ticketing giant will refund $10 to fans who bought cheapest tickets on the band’s US tour, and $5 to everyone else after frontman asks for an explanation
Ticketmaster will refund some of its fees to fans buying tickets for the Cure’s US tour, after frontman Robert Smith took them to task over their “unduly high” fees that were, in some cases, adding up to more than the price of a ticket.
On Thursday, Smith told fans that he was “as sickened as you all are” and he would contact Ticketmaster after many took to social media to complain about the ticket sales behemoth’s additional fees.
Continue reading...Perfect storm of Covid, Brexit, energy prices and cost of living crisis blamed for disappointing figures
Visitor numbers at the UK’s leading attractions are still almost a quarter lower than before the pandemic, thanks to a perfect storm of Covid, Brexit, energy prices and the wider financial crisis, according to the sector’s trade body.
Figures published on Friday by the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions show that while the number of visits to its sites rose by 69% in 2022 compared with the year before, this was still 23% lower than in 2019.
Continue reading...After playing with the Beach Boys, George Harrison and other mid-century stars, Gordon was convicted of killing his mother during a psychotic episode in 1983
Jim Gordon, a session drummer in the 1960s and 70s who contributed to hits by the Beach Boys, Steely Dan and dozens more, has died aged 77.
He died in a psychiatric prison in Vacaville, California. Gordon had been incarcerated since 1983, after he killed his mother during a psychotic episode. He was diagnosed as schizophrenic and sentenced to 16 years to life, but never attended parole hearings and never left prison.
Continue reading...Mixed group to take over duties of Escolania choir at Montserrat monastery one weekend a month
Women and girls are to be admitted to a choir at the Montserrat monastery near Barcelona, home to the famous Escolania all-boys choir, for the first time in its 700-year history.
The new chamber choir, made up of a mix of about 25 boys and women and girls aged 17 to 24, will be separate from the Escolania, which comprises 45 boys aged nine to 14.
Continue reading...News of the Grammy award-winner’s performance comes weeks after organisers apologised again for how wild weather and traffic were handled last year
The Grammy award-winning singer, rapper and flautist Lizzo will headline the 2023 Splendour in the Grass festival, a year after the New South Wales event was hit by a series of disasters.
Festival organisers announced Lizzo’s performance ahead of the full line-up, which they said would be “coming very soon”, as well as revealing a new “flexible pricing model” for tickets, under which prices will increase as the event approaches.
Continue reading...This year’s Academy Awards with Jimmy Kimmel at the helm drew an average TV audience of 18.7m – and a bigger share of younger viewers
The audience for the 2023 Academy Awards broadcast improved substantially on last year’s unimpressive figures, with a 12% jump on what was the second worst ratings performance in history.
Early ratings from Nielsen, supplied to the Hollywood Reporter, said that the show on ABC attracted an average of 18.7m viewers, compared to 16.6m in 2022. The audience share in the key 18-49 age demographic also improved, from 3.76 last year to 4.0.
Continue reading...French pop singer invites Sigur Rós, Jim Jarmusch and more for June festival at London’s Southbank Centre
Christine and the Queens has announced the artists who will be performing at this year’s Meltdown festival, which he is curating.
Taking place at London’s Southbank Centre, 9-18 June, Christine and the Queens promised “art to save the city – to free its contours and enliven the soul”, and will himself perform twice on the closing weekend.
Continue reading...Ireland wins just two awards, for best special effects and best live-action short, after being nominated for 14
Ireland had hoped for Oscar glory but instead ended up the butt of jokes about drinking, fighting and incomprehensible accents as it claimed just a couple of the coveted golden statuettes.
Just two awards out of 14 nominations was disappointment enough but Hollywood added insult to injury with national tropes that elicited eye rolls in Ireland.
Continue reading...Director dedicates award to all political prisoners after film about Russian opposition leader wins best feature documentary
Russian liberals on Monday celebrated the Oscar win of Navalny, a documentary about the poisoning and imprisonment of the “hero” Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
The film, which won best feature documentary at the Academy Awards in Los Angeles on Sunday, follows an investigation by Navalny’s team together with the Bellingcat group as they unmask FSB agents who were sent to poison Navalny in 2020. The Kremlin has always denied involvement.
Continue reading...Film fans in south-east Asia hail Everything Everywhere All at Once stars Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan
Cinema fans across south-east Asia have celebrated groundbreaking Oscar wins for the Malaysian film star Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan, who was born in Vietnam.
Yeoh, the first person of south-east Asian descent to win the best actress award, for her role in Everything Everywhere All at Once, described her victory on Sunday night as “history in the making”.
Continue reading...Fiction and essays tackled subjects including militarism and nuclear disarmament, innocence and trauma
Kenzaburo Oe, a giant of Japanese writing and winner of the Nobel prize in literature, has died aged 88.
Spanning fiction and essays, Oe’s work tackled a wide range of subjects from militarism and nuclear disarmament to innocence and trauma, and he became an outspoken champion for the voiceless in the face of what he regarded as his country’s failures. Regarded by some in Japan as distinctly western, Oe’s style was often likened to William Faulkner; in his own words, in his writing he would “start from my personal matters and then link it up with society, the state and the world”.
Continue reading...PM says British Museum collection is funded by taxpayers and protected by law
Rishi Sunak has vowed to protect the Parthenon marbles from being returned to Greece, saying they remain a “huge asset” to the UK.
The prime minister stuck by commitments made by his predecessors Liz Truss and Boris Johnson to safeguard the treasures at the British Museum in London.
Continue reading...Exclusive: report describes culture of low fees and exploitation as research finds median hourly rate of £2.60 an hour
Artists working in the public sector are struggling to stay afloat amid a culture of low fees, unpaid labour and systemic exploitation, research shows.
A survey of people engaged by everything from flagship galleries to smaller projects found an overall median hourly rate of £2.60 an hour, dramatically below the UK minimum wage of £9.50.
Continue reading...The unique service, commissioned by a French king and used only once by the British monarch in 1967, could fetch up to £442,000
A unique set of porcelain dessert dishes and plates commissioned by France’s King Louis-Philippe I, and believed to have been used only once, for a visit by Queen Elizabeth II, is to be auctioned in Paris.
The 98 pieces, embossed in gold and each painted with a picture of a different animal, were found in a dining room cupboard in the Chateau de Sassy in Normandy. They are expecteed to fetch nearly half a million pounds.
Continue reading...Decision taken after corporation takes its highest-paid presenter off air and his fellow broadcasters refuse to appear in solidarity
Match of the Day will be broadcast without any presenters or pundits this weekend, after the main host, Gary Lineker, was suspended from the BBC for breaching impartiality guidelines over his criticism of the government’s asylum policies.
In a dramatic and unexpected escalation of a crisis that has been brewing all week, the corporation took the decision to take its highest-paid presenter off its flagship football show after he was criticised by Tory MPs and the rightwing media.
Continue reading...Underground community of Sarajevans recall in new documentary the years they spent trapped in their city
As a radio operator during the siege of Sarajevo, Boris Siber made use of music to blast the enemy airwaves and destroy their communication. “The Clash, Jimi Hendrix and the Sex Pistols, as loud as possible on the frequencies they were using … they changed frequency, then I found them again. That was my task.”
Siber – a member of a hit Yugoslav comedy troupe before the war forced its breakup – also kept up civilian and military morale as a radio comic. “Music and mic were my weapons.”
Continue reading...Plans to film veteran broadcaster close to birds for Wild Isles series pulled over concerns about his health
Television producers feared David Attenborough would catch bird flu and die during filming for his latest series – likely to be the veteran broadcaster’s last job on location.
Wild Isles, which premieres on Sunday, will be Attenborough’s first landmark series on the natural history of Britain and Ireland. Filmed over the course of three years, the five-part series aims to shine a light on the challenges affecting the British Isles and celebrate nature that exists on our doorsteps.
Continue reading...