Burt Bacharach, the Grammy and Oscar-winning composer famed for hits including "Walk On By", "What's New Pussycat?" and "Do You Know The Way to San José", certainly has some tales to tell. There's the time he found Marlene Dietrich in his hotel room washing his socks. There's also the time he was invited to perform at a reception at the White House, during which President Reagan fell into a deep sleep.
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There are times, with Radio 4, when the only way to listen is while lying horizontal in a darkened room with a cold compress on your head. I find this to be requirement while spending half an hour in the company of Melvyn Bragg as he pontificates over the concepts behind Dutch humanism or prophecy in the Abrahamic religions at 9 o'clock in the morning straight after the three-hour hard-news assault that is the Today programme.
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Massive stadium shows by massive stadium-filling pop stars tend to come with a concept. When fans are paying upwards of £60 a ticket, it pays to put in some effort and go all out on spectacle. Beyoncé, Lady Gaga and Madonna festoon their shows with fireworks, crazy hydraulics, "meaningful" am-dram narratives and a vast supporting cast of choirs, dancers, and circus performers. Rihanna, who has had more No 1 singles than Beyoncé and Gaga combined, does none of this. Rihanna's concept is her vagina.
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It's possible that, when the Welsh actor Rhys Ifans gave "the interview from hell" to a journalist from The Times recently, he was having an off day. It's possible, as his people subsequently claimed, that a combination of medication and some unspecified bad news had made him behave out of character. It's also possible that, as a man who tells an interviewer to "fuck off", that he's "bored with you. Bored. Bored", and then exits in a rage, that Ifans is a rude, self-regarding pain in the backside who joins that exclusive club of stars (members include Tommy Lee Jones, Lou Reed, Philip Seymour Hoffman) that all that the most masochistic journalists would swim through molten lava to avoid.
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"It was a very small room, 10 by 15 feet, without light, without a door," said the mayor of Bangalore, recalling the moment last October when he watched a man with schizophrenia being rescued from 10 years of solitary confinement in his family home outside the Indian city. "(There was) one very small window, it was kept only to feed him," the mayor continued. "You wouldn't even call it a room as there was no exit. There was no way for him to get out. It was not a room that was locked, there was a wall all around him."
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I'm not quite sure how I missed Radio 4's Wireless Nights the first time around. This is the late-night, awards-strewn show in which the Pulp frontman-turned-national treasure Jarvis Cocker reveals the peculiar stuff that British people get up to under cover of darkness. (Oh, stop it, not that).
The Sussex company Park Bench Dance Theatre’s show opens with two barefoot, smartly dressed women shuffling on to a empty stage with a dining table. They disappear again and return with some chairs. A long and wordless tussle ensues in which identical dining chairs are shifted and swapped, shunted and dragged, and swapped and shifted again.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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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"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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