Entertainment

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...

In any other situation a Twitter feud between two men trading insults about being "old" or "short and fat" would take pride of place in the basin of social media banality, but when the two people concerned are sitting on a nuclear arsenal and a combined army of over a million active personnel one starts to worry for the future of civilisation. Yet such is the state of the world that as 2017 grinds to an end we are forced to watch...

As I am a kale eating, energy conserving, Trump loathing, Corbyn loving, Lily Allen listening, hug a tree, kiss a bee, spray paint on a bedsheet and wave it at the march activist - no animals harmed in the making of products and does no one think of the children? - of course I read the Guardian. It’s sort of the daily Bible for people who are dubious about actual Bibles.  But here’s a nasty little secret that would bring...

An extraordinarily rare copy of the first map to name America has emerged - and it is expected to sell for almost £1 MILLION. The 1507 map, by Martin Waldseemüller, is being described as a "significant cartographic discovery". It names American for the first time and is also the first map to illustrate separate South and North American continent. The map, by the most important cartographer of the early 16th century, is one of five copies in existence and was...

A new book has been released that claims to prep Generation Y on how to thrive in a world screwed up by Baby Boomers. Lucy’s Cohen’s ‘The Millennial Renaissance lays out an actionable, profitable plan for surviving the tough world Millennials have inherited from their parents. With the housing market increasingly inaccessible, retirement seeming like a distant dream and university debt racking up business entrepreneur Cohen offers millennials an alternative to the path taken by the boomers—an innovative and attainable approach to both...

It is quite possible, and beyond that most satisfactory, to lose one’s thoughts in consideration of the idea that the turbulently shifting great moments of history produce or recognise precisely the artists required to frame those occasions for present and future generations to understand and appreciate. Without Homer, ancient Greece would be but a rubble of interesting statuary and quite likely without Homer it all would have been paved over decades ago. Our knowledge of the clashing fortunes and misfortunes...