"If you want to know about me and Morrissey, Google it."

Around half an hour into my conversation with Johnny Marr, things take a distinctly awkward turn. Up until this point, the hallowed ex-Smiths guitarist-turned-serial collaborator-turned-solo artist has been warm, chatty, full of sunshine and bonhomie. As we are introduced, I mention that we met once before about 10 years ago and Marr – looking sharp in dark jeans, Crombie-style coat, his hair sculpted into the customary Mod cut – does a valiant job of pretending to remember.
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Theatre review: The Kite Runner, Brighton Festival

It was always going to be a tall order bringing Khaled Hosseini’s mega-selling 2003 novel about friendship, betrayal and exile to the stage.
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Music review: The Great Escape, Brighton

It’s hard to shake the feeling that The Great Escape, the annual three-day gigathon for new bands and Brighton’s answer to Texas’s South-By-South-West, has grown too unwieldy for its own good. Certainly, the queues outside venues that snake all the way to Eastbourne offer little hope to the majority of seeing the year’s buzz bands such as The Strypes, Swim Deep or Parquet Courts.

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Comedy review: Daniel Kitson, Brighton Festival

Daniel Kitson’s new show is a reflection on reality, memory and our sense of self. Hardly wall-to-wall giggles, you might think, but this publicity-shy, TV-shunning, Perrier Award-winning comic’s talent lies in burrowing into the human psyche and dispensing profound nuggets through tales in which, more often than not, he is the hapless protagonist. After The Beginning, Before The End is like a TED talk with added LOLs.
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Radio column: Attenborough goes down a tweet

Did I awake at two minutes to six on Monday morning – a Bank Holiday, no less – to hear David Attenborough's inaugural Tweet of the Day on Radio 4, so as to bring you a wholly authentic report of the listening experience? Did I heck.
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Radio column: CBC's WireTap

I might, in the past, have mentioned my struggles with radio comedy. In writing this column, I have put myself through immeasurable torture – that is, listening to a parade of stand-ups bleating about traffic wardens, missing socks and sagging genitalia in the late-night slot – in the hope that somebody might cajole my face into something approximating a smile.
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Radio column: Maths and music

Can pop music be reduced to a mathematical equation? I'd prefer to think not. In my wistful moments, while listening to The Smiths' "What Difference Does It Make?", or Eels' "A Daisy Through Concrete", or Laura Veirs' "Galaxies", I'd rather not imagine smart alec songwriters using X's and Y's to send these wondrous sonic shards tearing through my vital organs. I need to know that tears have been shed, that souls have been broken and blood has been spilt to create these songs that can reduce me to weeping, snot-smothered fool in seconds.
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Radio column: An epic survey of sound

"Now you're talking," I thought as I checked out the blurb for Radio 4's Noise: a Human History, a mega-series told in 30 parts. If the likes of The Listening Project and The People's Songs – both hugely ambitious and beautifully made socio-historical documents – are anything to go by, size really does matter in radio.
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Book review: Mom & Me & Mom, by Maya Angelou

There is violence in Maya Angelou's new book. There is also sorrow and bitterness and pain. But mainly there is love. Mom & Me & Mom is about a bond between mother and daughter that is slow to come, ferociously hard-won, very nearly lost, but, in the end, indestructible.
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Radio column: Overcoming prejudices

Until now, I've always had the World Service and Radio 4 down as the places to look for hard-hitting, politically challenging documentaries. You know the kind. The ones that can deposit you, still in your dressing gown and slippers, into the middle of a sub-Saharan war zone, or a Bolivian coke factory, and deliver a sharp punch to the guts any time your concentration might be in danger of drifting off.
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Radio column: Brand rolls with it

“I'm high as a kite,” declared Russell Brand breathlessly. “I've drunk a whole lot of caffeinated beverages to get me in the mood.”

I suspect the top brass at XFM – which has the distinction of being the first radio station to fire him after he read out pornography live on air – were in the market from something stronger to steady their nerves as Brand, alongside Noel Gallagher and a selection of guests, began a one-off, three-hour stint to raise money for the Teenage Cancer Trust.

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Radio column: What women want

On Sunday morning, I awoke to the sound of Clare Balding, she of horse-racing, memoir-writing, Olympics-presenting, Crufts-championing, quiz-show hosting, moorland-yomping and general switch-on-the-box-and-there-she-is-again fame.
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Devendra Banhart: 'I was singing as a woman when I was a child'

Devendra Banhart is having a cry. Not a huge one. One small tear and it's over. "I told you this would happen," he says, blinking. "Didn't I tell you?"

It's true, he did. An hour earlier, shortly after Banhart finished an interview with the radio presenter Lauren Laverne on BBC6 Music, during which his mind appeared to be elsewhere, he told me: "I find talking out loud, even to my friends, really difficult. And my friends would tell you that I will cry eventually. Not because I'm self-conscious. I know I'm an idiot and there's a liberating aspect to that. I just get teary at the most inopportune moments. It's like, because it's not really the time or place to be doing that, it just sort of happens."

Like farting?

"Exactly."

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Radio column: Bottling up

"What did you buy?" asked Victoria Derbyshire. 

"A bottle of gin," replied Rachel.

"And where did you drink it?"

"The first mouthful would have been in the toilet at Tesco... Then I went to a hotel."

"And drank the rest of the bottle?"

"I presume so, yes. I blacked out."

And so the cycle began again.

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Book Review: How Many Camels are There in Holland? By Phyllida Law

The title of the actress Phyllida Law's book refers to a question that dementia specialists put to their patients to help determine whether they have Alzheimer's. Law spent two years caring for her nonagenarian mother, Mego, in the tiny Scottish village of Ardentinny, with occasional help from friends, fellow villagers, and her daughter, the actresses Emma and Sophie Thompson.  Mego's memory was already failing when her husband Arthur died. She had been known to put her shoes in the oven and bacon in her sock drawer. Now she was brushing her teeth with shampoo and trying to exit a room via the window rather than the door. "Mother was lost," says Law.

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