Category Archives: Culture

The Cure’s Robert Smith convinces Ticketmaster to refund ‘unduly high’ fees after fan anger

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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.

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Visitors to the UK’s leading attractions down 25% on pre-Covid numbers

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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.

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Jim Gordon, session drummer on dozens of hits such as Layla, dies aged 77

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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.

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Spanish monastery admits girls to choir for first time in 700-year history

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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.

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Lizzo to headline 2023 Splendour in the Grass a year after festival chaos

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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.

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Oscars TV ratings improve – to third worst ever

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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.

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Christine and the Queens announces artists for 2023 Meltdown festival

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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.

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Eyes roll at ‘cringey’ jokes amid Irish disappointment at Oscars haul

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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.

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Putin opponents and Russian liberals celebrate Navalny’s Oscar success

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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.

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‘I was screaming’: Malaysia and Vietnam celebrate Oscars triumphs

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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”.

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Kenzaburo Oe, Nobel prize-winning Japanese writer, dies aged 88

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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”.

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No plans to return Parthenon marbles to Greece, says Rishi Sunak

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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.

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Artists in UK public sector making far below minimum wage, survey finds

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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.

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One’s old china: set of plates fit for the Queen comes up for auction

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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.

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BBC to air Match of the Day without presenters after Gary Lineker’s suspension

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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.

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‘Punk was my weapon’: the rebel power of culture in siege of Sarajevo

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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.”

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Producers feared David Attenborough would catch bird flu and die during filming

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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.

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Alex Gibney in the process of making ‘unvarnished’ Elon Musk documentary

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The Oscar-winning film-maker has announced he is months into making Musk, which will examine the controversial entrepreneur

Oscar-winning film-maker Alex Gibney has announced that he is in the process of making a documentary about Elon Musk.

The documentarian behind films such as Taxi to the Dark Side and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is months into the making of Musk, “a definitive and unvarnished examination” of the provocative tech entrepreneur.

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French philosopher urges people to rebel – by making friends

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Geoffroy de Lagasnerie says focus on friendships over relationships or family is radical act in today’s society

Building your life around close friendships rather than family or romance is a joyous and necessary act of rebellion, and governments should put in place “friendship ministries” to radically rethink the way society is organised, a key French philosopher has argued.

Geoffroy de Lagasnerie this week publishes a manifesto for friendship, 3 Une Aspiration au Dehors, detailing his close friendship with two other writers, Didier Eribon and Édouard Louis. The three friends eat together in the evening, speak many times daily, wish each other goodnight and good morning every day and synch their schedules to make sure they prioritise friendship moments, namely meeting up for long chats. He described the friendship as the centre of their lives, “one long discussion that never ends”.

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How retrofitting the UK’s old buildings can generate an extra £35bn in new money

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Heritage and property groups outline plan to boost energy efficiency at historical sites to create jobs, cut emissions and meet net-zero targets

Retrofitting the UK’s historicsl buildings, from Georgian townhouses to the mills and factories that kickstarted the Industrial Revolution, could generate £35bn of economic output a year, create jobs and play a crucial role in achieving climate targets, research has found.

Improving the energy efficiency of historical properties – those built before 1919 – could reduce carbon emissions from the UK’s buildings by 5% each year and make older homes warmer and cheaper to run, according to a report commissioned by the National Trust, Historic England and leading property organisations.

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