Entertainment

Since 2013 London’s Exhibition Collective has been nurturing East London’s artistic community with regular workshops and annual themed shows yet 2017 is set to be its most accomplished year yet. Established by a small group of creative friends living in Stoke Newington, the EXC has since grown into a fourteen strong group of emerging artists working in a variety of forms including collage, pen and ink, photography, paint, pottery and needlework. The group will open their four-day exhibit on the...

After stops in London and other global cities for viewings, a painting believed to be by Leonardo da Vinci has sold at auction in New York for a record $450 million. The painting, Salvator Mundi (Saviour of the World), is among fewer than 20 by the Renaissance painter who lived over 500 years ago that are still in existence and the only one that was privately owned. All others are in museums and art galleries around the globe. "On a...

The dance hall where The Beatles first performed their debut single is going to auction - with a guide price of just £175,000. An audience of teenage girls screamed as John, Paul, George and Ringo belted out ‘Love Me Do’ in 1962 at the Majestic Ballroom in Birkenhead, Merseyside. The venue was built as a cinema in 1916, but its glory days were the 1960s when it was at the centre of the Liverpool and Merseyside music scene. The dance...

A rare copy of the first ever atlas of England and Wales has sold for more than £100,000 at auction. Christopher Saxton was a Yorkshire-born surveyor who is known as the ‘father of English cartography’. And in the 1570s he spent seven years travelling around England and Wales for Thomas Seckford, who was the master of requests to Queen Elizabeth. His maps were engraved and printed between 1574 and 1578 and were first issued in atlas form in 1579. This...

Perhaps the best thing to come out of the US election was comic and impressionist Peter Serafinowicz’s Sassy Trump. Voicing Donald Trump’s actual words – only voiced “0.001% more catty” –  helped us appreciate quite how shockingly barmy the flamboyant reality TV star’s outrageous ramblings really are. (Watch a fabulous example below.) And now audio visual remixing wizard Eclectic Method has remixed and cut up Peter Serafiowicz’s Sassy Trump videos into one bizarre musical tirade - and remember these are all actually...

Listen to Julie Byrne if you like: Joni Mitchell, Laura Marling, Nadia Reid, Patti Smith, Carole King, Bob Dylan, Richard Hawley, Mark Chapman  Julie Byrne has an instantly mesmerising stage presence. Before her first song, she gives a brief introduction - in her familiar husky, peaceful tone - and we could just as well be about to partake in a guided meditation. Everything about her is therapeutic – from her soft melodies and gentle mannerisms, to the way she picks...

Kyle Abraham is set to debut his seminal work Pavement at Sadler's Wells this week. Pavement is set in a culture plagued by discrimination and genocide in Pittsburgh’s historically black neighbourhoods. Performed with seven dancers in Abraham’s trademark interdisciplinary style, which Abraham typically refers to as a 'post-modern gumbo', combining balletic and hip hop movements, the work is set to an eclectic mix of Bach, Benjamin Britten, Sam Cooke, Donny Hathaway and extracts from operas all mixed with sounds of...

So much for being the voice of the oppressed. The music of the forgotten and the derider of stereotypes and cultural demarcations. The world’s most popular art form has been swallowed by corporate America. Hip-hop, has been hijacked by the world’s elite. Embodying a continuum of struggle and acrimony, the genre once flaunted its revolutionary history, belligerence for authority and supercilious intelligence. But now, it flaunts naked woman, designer clothes and overpriced luxury cars. Hip-hop’s modern day founders Grandmaster Flash,...

Australian singer-songwriter Emily Barker is in town on Wednesday, playing the Borderline in support of her latest release Sweet Kind Of Blue. She has penned and performed theme songs for BAFTA and Ivor Novello winning television dramas Wallander (starring Kenneth Branagh) and The Shadow Line, and for the movie The Keeping Room, as well as an entire musical score for the poignant and well-received 2015 road movie, Hector, starring Peter Mullan. How would you describe the experience of recording Sweet...