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…
Sitting in his home studio in Hackney, just out of two weeks’ quarantine and still a long way from his music life getting back to normal, Dave Bayley of Glass Animals is feeling optimistic. “Between me and the guys, we have a lot of ideas for how to keep things ticking – almost too many…
“Our career so far has taught us to be patient,” says Doyin “Bugsey” Julius, the more talkative half of Nottingham’s foremost rap duo Young T & Bugsey. “Wait your turn. Don’t wait for ever – you still have to grab it – but our time will come.” Signed to a major label record deal four…
I ask Noah Cyrus whether she considered, when launching her music career, the possibility of using just her first name, Adele-style, or choosing a different name altogether. “I came up with so many aliases. I think I wanted to wear a mask so I didn’t have to deal with my insecurities,” the 20-year-old admits. “But…
“Poets have collaborated on libretti and hymns and lyrics for songwriters right back to the beginning, so it’s not unusual,” says Simon Armitage of his move to mix music with poetry, although starting a band, LYR, is particularly unsurprising behaviour for him. Surely the indie-est of poets with his floppy hair and loudly proclaimed obsessions…
“You just missed the Queen,” says Jessie Ware as she stands to greet me in the bar of the Soho Hotel. She means her mum, Lennie, who is becoming almost as well known as the singer since they started co-hosting a podcast, Table Manners, which has been so successful that next month it becomes a…
Dan Snaith, who makes electronic music as Caribou and also, sometimes, as Daphni, is telling me about the time he turned down Rihanna. It was 2015 and he was surfing on the success of his last Caribou album, Our Love, which had earned him his first trip to the UK top 10, a Grammy nomination…
Agnes Obel has suffered a bump to the head. A thick white plaster sits near the Danish musician’s left eyebrow, which she forgets about at one point, accidentally touches, and winces. She doesn’t say how she did it, but after a while in her company it’s easy to believe that a major jolt occurred when…
At the memorial service for Richard Swift, the musician and producer who died in 2018, aged 41, from complications related to alcohol abuse, a friend approached Nathaniel Rateliff. “We can’t do this for you too,” the friend said. “It wasn’t meant in a mean way. It was meant in a loving way,” Rateliff, also 41,…
I don’t usually get a hug at the start of an interview – sometimes at the end, if I haven’t said anything too offensive. Ari Leff pulls my outstretched hand into a big one as soon as I enter the room. It would have been even nicer if he’d still been wearing his coat, a…