‘James Brown kept cutting our stage time’ – how the Stylistics made You Make Me Feel Brand New

‘The first time we opened for James Brown, we got 20 minutes on stage. Then when he heard the crowd response, he cut it to 15. By the end of the tour, he’d cut us back to five’Three of us were in a Philadelphia group called the Monarchs and the other guys were in the Percussions. When we left school, some went on to university and others were drafted into the military. The Monarchs were left with three members and the Percussions with two, so our English teacher and manager, Miss Beverly Hamilton, suggested we combine

Even among artists in exile, the myth of Russian cultural supremacy lives on

Many liberal Russians shelter in states once part of the Soviet Union. It’s time that they learned to respect the cultures and languages their nation has so long suppressedOne day in the 1990s, I was playing with my cousin in a local park in Chișinău, the capital of Romanian-speaking Moldova, when two little girls from the Russian-speaking minority asked us what our names were. We told them: Mihai and Maria Paula. They immediately rebaptised us: “Misha i Masha!” To them, we were all Russians after all.In 2024, such expressions of cultural imperialism are still rife in Putin’s Russia, but you wouldn’t expect to find them among Russian liberals, an estimated million of whom left their country after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago

Albanese government must ban dynamic pricing and prosecute scalpers, local ticketing agency says

The government must ban dynamic pricing and banish scalpers if consumers are to pay fair prices for concerts, the head of Australia’s largest locally owned ticketing platform says.Last month the Albanese government said it planned to change consumer laws to address the practice of inflating tickets while customers wait in online queues, known as dynamic pricing, after tickets for the US rock band Green Day’s Australian tour rose to up to $500.While the details of the reforms are yet to be released, the Humanitix co-chief executive officer, Joshua Ross, said the government and ticketing companies could do more to prevent people and online sites from buying tickets for the sole purpose of reselling them at huge markups.“They need to create examples of it with proper prosecution,” Ross said. “And if they can clean up the scalping world by making the disincentive strong enough, then it makes sense to ban dynamic pricing

‘People feel terrible. They want to laugh’: can comedy make light of Trump 2.0?

“When Trump first won, there was almost a novelty to having a character such as him in a position of such vast responsibility – that was a new thing for comedy to address,” said Andy Zaltzman, chair of Radio 4’s The News Quiz and the satirist behind The Bugle podcast and multiple political comedies.The first Trump presidency spawned debate about whether it’s possible to satirise a man whose extreme appearance and rhetoric mean he presents as a walking caricature. The New York Times even ran a piece titled “How President Trump ruined political comedy”.Now comedians in the UK and US are trying to work out how to deal with a second, possibly darker, Trump presidency.“Trump is so ridiculous that he makes comic extrapolation harder,” said Chicago-born, London-based standup Sara Barron, who found much of the comedy targeting Trump “did not provide catharsis”

Jon Ronson: ‘What will be the next culture war? Autism. And climate migration’

If you could have learned one lesson earlier on in your life, what would it have been?Don’t tweet. I remember right at the beginning of Twitter – and this is really indiscreet, so I hope the parties involved won’t mind – but I remember Matt Stone from South Park said to me, “Look at Lena Dunham. She’s got this incredible show on HBO. She’s can express herself in these beautiful ways on HBO. And then she goes and fucks it all up on Twitter

David Hare: ‘I don’t have much time. I am trying to write a lot of stuff’

Now 77, the playwright who has chronicled British life for 50 years, says he is stepping up his work rate as he has limited scope to tell important storiesSir David Hare has charted the forces and habits shaping British life for more than half a century, on stage and on screen. His work for cinema stretches from the 1985 film of his play Plenty, starring Meryl Streep, to his screenplays for Damage, The Hours and 2016’s Denial. And his string of theatrical “state of the nation” accounts of political and moral dilemmas, with hits such as Pravda, starring Anthony Hopkins, The Absence of War, starring John Thaw, and Amy’s View, with Judi Dench, have regularly set the cultural agenda.But now, at 77, Hare has revealed he is to seriously step up his work rate because he fears that, for him, it is already “five minutes to midnight” and so he has limited scope remaining to tell important stories.The leading playwright and Bafta-winning director now has three new dramas in production and plans for more