I’m a bit worried I won’t be able to run after all this dancing. The start line of the Great Ethiopian Run, a 10k road race for around 40,000 people in the centre of Addis Ababa, is the opposite of tense. The crowd around me seem perfectly happy to stay in this spot all day,…
‘Haile moves at speed,’ they warn before a weekend spent trying to pin Haile Gebrselassie down for a conversation in Addis Ababa. Well duh. The 49-year-old Ethiopian has held 27 world distance running records, moving from dominance in the Olympic and World Championship 10,000m in the Nineties to a remarkable second wind as a marathon…
On 2 October, six months after he last wore it, Anoosheh Ashoori put on the uniform of an Iranian prison inmate one more time. He added a pair of handcuffs, bought for £2 on Ebay, put a sign in his backpack that said: ‘WOMAN LIFE FREEDOM’ and joined the start line of the London Marathon….
Little Simz arrives to meet me outside a King’s Cross brasserie sporting enormous headphones and a mustard yellow hoodie advertising her own album. The title of the imminent release is on the back: Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, which is both grammatically suspect and doesn’t bode particularly well for a candid interview. On the front…
Ellie Goulding is on my computer screen in her pyjamas. Weirdly, though, a home-based Zoom interview is a step down in intimacy from clicking play on the video for her latest single, Power, in which the star rolls around on her bed in an open white shirt, black bra and stockings. She filmed it herself,…
Just because it has to be a remote four-way video interview doesn’t mean the Beastie Boys won’t make an effort. When the two surviving band members, Mike Diamond and Adam Horovitz, dial in from their locked down LA homes alongside Spike Jonze, the director of a new documentary about the group, all three are sporting…
Björk at the O2 Arena is a concept that might have made more sense in the Nineties, if only the venue had existed. That was when the Icelandic musician was making platinum-selling albums, her startling, vaulting voice front and centre in pop culture. Today the mainstream is a distant memory as the 53-year-old, together with…
Headie One apparently got his nickname because his head looks like a 50 pence piece, but it’s hard to tell as the Tottenham rapper descends the backstage stairs in Brighton’s Concorde 2 venue. At the latest stop on a headline tour that will culminate at Brixton Academy next week, his biggest show yet, he’s got…
“Oh my goodness!” Janelle Monáe exclaims when asked for her memories of her first visit to Glastonbury, in 2011. “I remember our bus catching fire on the way there and us almost dying. It was a ‘Get on stage as soon as you arrive’ type of situation. I also remember the crowd being one of…
Lizzo sounds terrible. Not on her new album, Cuz I Love You, on which the one-time rapper takes up singing with all the lung-busting power of a classic soul star. On the phone, it’s all coughs and croaks and significantly less of the boundless energy that has made the Detroit 31-year-old a beacon of positivity…