Glastonbury: The 1975, Alanis Morissette and more to star on first day of music
After two days of build-up, Glastonbury will open its main stages on Friday with performances from music stars including Alanis Morissette, Wet Leg, Rizzle Kicks, Denzel Curry, PinkPantheress, Loyle Carner and Busta Rhymes.The day will reach its climax when rock band The 1975 headline the Pyramid Stage at 22:15 BST, giving their only concert of the year.The band, fronted by Matty Healy, have reportedly spent four times their festival fee on a "specially designed set" for the show.Meanwhile, there's fevered speculation over the mystery acts on this year's bill, with Lewis Capaldi rumoured to be making a return to live music at the festival after a two-year hiatus.
The singer stepped out of the limelight in 2023 after a difficult performance at Glastonbury, where a combination of anxiety and Tourette's caused him to lose his voice.The singer received a huge outpouring of support from fans, who helped him finish his set by singing along to Someone You Loved.Days later, he scrapped his future concerts, saying he needed time to get his "physical and mental health in order" and "adjust to the impact" of his Tourette's diagnosis.With a new single, Survive, released at midnight on Friday, the star is the presumed frontrunner to play the Pyramid Stage's "TBA" slot at 17.00 BST.
Friday's other big enigma is the surprise guest who is scheduled to open the Woodsies tent at 11:30. The venue, formerly known as the John Peel Tent, is dedicated to alternative pop and indie acts - with rumoured performers including Olivia Dean, Jamie xx, Lorde and Haim, who have a gig in Margate later on Friday.Meanwhile, The 1975 will top the main stage bill, with fans hoping for a glimpse of their forthcoming sixth album, tentatively titled GHEMB (God Has Entered My Body)."It's such a big gig, and it's the only show that we're playing this year," their manager Jamie Oborne recently told the Money Trench podcast."Matty thought doing it in isolation would be a really powerful thing. I obviously agreed with him, as I often do."
Tickets for the festival sold out in just 40 minutes last November, before the line-up had been announced.The majority of festivalgoers arrived for the gates opening on Wednesday, and were treated to an opening ceremony featuring theatre and circus performers in front of the Pyramid Stage that evening.Others started their festival with a "ravers to runners" 5k race on Thursday morning, braving a torrential downpour as they circled the site.And thousands of revellers spent Thursday night sampling the festival's nightlife, as the dance stages opened with DJ sets from acts like Confidence Man, Eliza Rose and BBC news analysis editor Ros Atkins.
This year's festival is expected to have a political dimension, too, with performances and talks addressing political upheaval, conflict in the Middle East, the climate crisis, and the rise of the far right.Among the speakers is former Match of the Day presenter Gary Lineker, who will take part in a panel called "Standing Up for 'Getting Along' in a World that's Being Pushed Apart".He told the festival's on-site newspaper The Glastonbury Free Press that the talk was inspired by the idea that "everything is done to try and divide us"."And I think if people can pull together - because I think most of us are decent human beings - then just a bit more kindness in the world would go a long way at the moment."Festival founder Michael Eavis said he stood by the event's left-leaning ethos - which sees a share of profits go to organisations including Oxfam, WaterAid and Greenpeace."I think the people that come here are into all those things," the 89-year-old told the Free Press. "People that don't agree with the politics of the event can go somewhere else."
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Times
25 minutes ago
- Times
Michael Gove on divorce, gay rumours, dating and the Camerons
Michael Gove has agreed to this interview nominally to plug his new podcast, which he says will be 'mischievous, right-wing, not always predictable' — core brand Gove — but we both know why I'm really here. His ex-wife, Sarah Vine, has just published her memoir, How Not to Be a Political Wife, garnering a gazillion column inches, and Gove wants either to brief his own version of events or surf the wash of her publicity wave. (Possibly both.) And, since I've already interviewed Vine at length, I now feel like a niche form of couples therapist — or Derek Batey, host of the Eighties game show Mr & Mrs. Gove is detained, so I sit for 20 minutes in his office at The Spectator taking in the bookish clutter, knackered furniture, depressing strip lights and a plastic fern in a pot. On his desk is a book of essays by Denis Healey — he's fascinated by the intellectual hinterland of Seventies politicians — and behind it is a silhouette of Churchill, the only thing he's unpacked. Although he became editor of the magazine last October, everything else, including a drinks cabinet of half-empty single malts, belonged to his predecessor, now a Times columnist, Fraser Nelson. Finally Gove, 57, materialises looking hassled, then is off again: 'So, so, so sorry, back in three minutes.' When he eventually settles beside me, looking slimmer than of late, he seems surprisingly nervous. Always articulate, 20 years in politics made him a fluent performer and navigator of interviewer bear traps, especially personal ones. But Vine's book has plunged his private self into public print and, although mainly warm and affectionate, she paints him as a prodigious drinker, social climber, absentee husband and distracted father tethered to the wheel of political ambition. Moreover, Gove must be wary that since I knew him and Vine (both former Times staff) until the mid 2010s, I've witnessed much of this for myself. So every Gove sentence is punctuated by loud, prolonged 'ahhhhhs' and 'ummmms' to buy time while he selects the precise (ie safest) word. Even so, he's incapable of dullness. When I suggest that as Spectator editor and the newly ennobled Lord Gove of Torry he has attained his final form, neither journalist nor politician but a synthesis of both, he says, 'I never expected really to be a peer, but I suppose it's a, ahhhh, sort of, ummm, capstone on a political career. It's a way of, ahhhhh, saying almost all the previous chapters have closed, but the story hasn't quite ended.' Then he adds, 'I don't know anything about golf, but being in the Lords is a bit like being a superannuated golf pro turning up to a pro-celeb tournament. Having played in the Open, now you're appearing with Russ Abbot.' I say I'm not sure how his noble friends will take that. 'Well, you know, it [the Lords] is a wonderful place, but the Commons …' Now on to the book, the Amazon status of which he's tracking so carefully — 'It's No 1 in political biographies!' — I feel he's worried it will steal the thunder of his own vaguely mooted memoir. Was it strange seeing his private life laid so bare? He says that given Vine, as a Daily Mail columnist, had already written so much about him, 'It's not quite out of a clear blue sky,' and in any case she has a right to her view: 'Sarah put up with a hell of a lot being married to me.' And while it was painful to recall upsetting moments, such as when the couple and their children were accosted on holiday in New York and told, 'Wankers like you shouldn't have kids,' none of it was 'a new shot through the heart'. Vine's thesis is that Gove strove to keep up with his far richer, posher fellow Tory modernisers, David Cameron and George Osborne, via affectations such as paying for his outer London house to have a more prestigious 0207 (ie central) phone number, learning how toffs pronounce 'Ascot' (ASS-cutt), and buying wine or cologne at fancy shops in St James's with royal warrants. Yet since in class terms David and Sam Cam never saw the parvenu Goves as equals, they were treated not as true friends but family retainers who, when no longer useful or biddable, could be coldly dispatched. • The Camerons froze me out too, but I didn't moan like Sarah Vine Although he won't explicitly contradict Vine's account — and reading her book pre-publication, he asked for no changes — he paints it as a rather broad brushstroke: 'I think the heuristic is an oversimplification of things, but it's not — what's the word? — untrue.' He claims no memory of the 0207 business, although says in London postcode terms, 'They [the Camerons] were the elves and we were the hobbits.' But his tastes were established 'before I ever got involved in politics, before I met David Cameron. And it's definitely the case that I gravitate towards, in terms of creature comforts, things that are establishment-coded. For example, you'd be more likely to find me in tweed than a denim jacket. Also, I like pedantry and … all the curious aspects of life in Britain and England.' As the adopted son of an Aberdeen fish merchant, he compares himself to Pip in Great Expectations, the lowly orphan who clambered up through society to become a gentleman. 'I think it's particularly a feature of having been adopted,' he says. 'I grew up in a house where there were books, but not many. My dad's favourite reading matter was Reader's Digest condensed books. My mum's was Catherine Cookson. I was spoddy, swotty, bookish from an early age, and so there was an element of being a cuckoo in the nest. And my sister — also adopted — is profoundly deaf. So there was a sense in my mind growing up that I had this intellect or curiosity that set me apart slightly from my family. Not in terms of feeling unloved — quite the opposite — but in terms of being slightly different as a sort of breed, you know? I had different interests, different characteristics.' (Of his biological family, whom he has never tried to trace to spare his adoptive parents pain, he will say only that it feels like an unanswered question.) Oxford contemporaries recall Gove wearing tweed suits bought in Oxfam for £1.50, already a young fogey. His politeness, self-deprecating wit and appetite for debate with those with whom he disagreed meant he was liked even by those on the left. Yet Gove had a strand of theatricality: he acted in plays, even a film, was a star debater, president of the Oxford Union and, before the term 'troll' was coined, wrote opinion pieces intended to provoke. Gove identifies with Alan Bennett, who chronicles the expanding gulf between himself and his working-class Leeds parents after he goes to Oxford. Gove's own family were proud their private-school scholarship son was entering a prestigious university, 'but, by definition, your interest in a variety of things creates a certain sort of distance. So for my dad, when he was alive, or for my mum now, having a drink would not involve a glass of wine. And drawing distinctions between bordeaux and burgundy would seem like a different life.' Fine wine, opera (especially Wagner), gambling at gentlemen's clubs and running with a fast, rich set who revelled in such pastimes were just, he says, things he enjoyed. If he were a truly determined social climber, he argues, wouldn't he feign other 'establishment-coded' passions for 'tennis, horse racing, property porn, which I have no interest in at all'? According to Vine, their inferior standing in Tory high command first became apparent when David Cameron moved Gove from education secretary to chief whip — a demotion and a pay cut to a job he hated — because Lynton Crosby's polling found his unpopularity with teachers an electoral drag. 'If anything,' Gove says, 'Sarah took it harder than I did at the time, although I definitely felt let down.' But while Vine smarted about a betrayal of friendship, Gove saw Cameron as 'a CEO saying, 'We've got to carry on making a profit and what you've been doing is not a profit centre, so I'm going to have to move you on. Otherwise the whole thing will sink. So, you know, suck it up.' ' Similarly, when Cameron decided to call the EU referendum he expected Gove to abandon his longstanding, deep-rooted Euroscepticism to support the PM's Remain position. 'His view was 'we' — as in the group of people in his leadership campaign, in modernising the Conservative Party — are a team and tribe, and the people who want us to leave the EU are the guys who generally got things wrong about how the Conservative Party needs to change. 'So you might agree with them on this issue, and it might be a really big issue, Michael, but these guys are only going to take the country and the Conservative Party back. So swallow your doubts on this. Just trust me and get with the programme.' ' But this time, Gove did not fall in line. What he regrets now, he says, is being 'insufficiently clear' to Cameron that he would campaign for Leave. 'Sarah is right,' he says, 'in that I often find it difficult — and I hope I find it easier now — when I disagree with someone and it's likely to be painful, to say what I really think.' He deferred telling Cameron his intention in the hope 'something would turn up to prevent an inevitable rupture'. Does he believe his friendship with Cameron was real, not merely political? 'Yes,' he says emphatically. But that friendship is over? 'Impaired, which is sort of a euphemism. Not the same, and I can completely understand why. He felt he'd earned the right, as the captain, to expect members of the team to recognise it was better for us all to hang together.' But Cameron, in his own memoir, accuses Gove of fundamental disloyalty, both over Brexit and for dramatically changing his mind about supporting Boris Johnson's 2016 leadership bid. Are you a disloyal person? 'No.' Do you still see Cameron? 'Infrequently, cordially. Remember we shared a cabinet table for a year. [When Cameron was Rishi Sunak's foreign secretary.] The last time I saw him was about three weeks ago, at a reception for the New Schools Network, and he couldn't have been nicer.' Gove admits his conflict-averse nature may surprise those who see him as 'a guy who crosses the road to have a fight … who can't see a controversy without joining on one side or the other'. But his distaste for shouty rows means he was ill suited either to be chief whip or (briefly and earlier) news editor at The Times. Vine, who is similarly anti-confrontational, depicts their marriage as quietly petering out rather than as a series of stormy battles. She describes how when they moved house in 2017, Gove totally disengaged, retreating to their bedroom to read, leaving his wife and mother-in-law to unpack. 'I think now I was depressed,' he says. (He'd just been sacked as justice secretary by Theresa May.) Nonetheless, it was pretty selfish. Has the book made him wish he'd done anything differently? 'Yes,' he says. 'Simply being more present. Being at home and with the family more, and then, when at home with the family, being there.' Not always distracted? 'Yes.' • Everything we've learnt from Sarah Vine's new book But isn't the truth that a ministerial career is simply more exciting than sitting at home with small children watching Peppa Pig? 'Politics is much more than a job — it's a crusade. You get involved in politics because things really matter. Now, people might say I'm deluded or that I got terrible things wrong. But you don't do it to pay the bills or because it's intellectually interesting — although it is. You're doing it to change things. So in my mind, a phone call unreturned, a submission unread, a speech unmade, a meeting postponed, were all opportunities to advance what we were doing. So if you're going to turn around how the country's prisons are run or change the school system, it's closer to being involved in a conflict than a job.' Vine and Gove's problem, he says, was lacking either extended family or a cushion of wealth to help them cope. Yet Cameron was famous for 'chillaxing', regular date nights, balancing his life. 'David was in that respect, as in so many, just a cut above,' Gove says, echoing the gushing terms in which Vine writes of Sam Cam. 'Better at politics, better at managing life. Most politicians don't have the degree of focus, self-discipline, consideration — the all in one package that David had. Whether I'm one of the worst, I don't know. But politics is littered with relationships that have undergone tremendous strain and gone wrong. And there will be different explanations for that — the male ego, the propensity of politicians to take risks, and other deformities that characterise people who are drawn into public life. But one of the things about David is that he's just a more effectively operating human being than most of us.' Gove makes government sound like dancing in The Red Shoes: passion turns into an unstoppable frenzy that ultimately destroys you. He lists the sundry pressures: the constant public scrutiny, so no MP 'can walk down the street and pick their nose'; the risk of a misspeak on breakfast TV, which 'for 24 hours — and it is only 24 hours — means you will be laughed at on social media'. Vine often notes Gove's heavy drinking, that he glugged half a bottle of whisky during the expenses scandal, was nearly sick on the Pope after a heavy night and (I've observed this at dinner myself) his unquenchable thirst for red wine. Vine told me she was once so concerned she sent him to the Mayr clinic in Austria, where he was told 'he has the liver of a baby'. Did he drink to combat stress? He swerves the question and says the reason he runs in the morning is because, 'Exercise clears mental space. I think for all sorts of people there will be different ways of coping — and I'm a Scot. But I'm not drinking at the moment.' (He does still smoke.) After the divorce in 2021, his life changed dramatically. While Vine lives with their daughter, Bea, 22, and son, Will, 20, both students, Gove moved initially to a grace and favour apartment for his own protection, since Ali Harbi Ali, the jihadist who murdered the Tory MP Sir David Amess, was found to have first stalked Gove as a potential target. Now he lives with Dr Lola Salem, 32, an Oxford lecturer in music and French. A trained opera singer who is, as a mutual friend puts it, 'even more combative and right-wing than Michael', she sounds like his perfect match. He says he'd rather be discreet about Salem. But, I say, you did snog her openly in J Sheekey fish restaurant. (A photo was passed on to the papers.) 'Manifestly,' he says. 'In my mind, the street is sniper's alley. But in a restaurant, you expect a certain amount of politeness.' Before meeting Salem at a Civic Future leadership conference, Gove tried the Bumble dating app. His experiences, he says, were fairly standard 'except for the aspect of being the notorious Michael Gove'. He had to prove to one woman it was really him by holding up a copy of that day's newspaper, hostage-style. He had a few pleasant dates without any mutual spark, but found the process 'fascinating … the pictures people choose, the descriptions they give themselves'. To the question, 'What does your online ad algorithm assume you are?' Gove replied, 'Loaded, but sadly that isn't true.' Before Vine, Gove had several serious girlfriends including the historian Amanda Foreman and Simone Kubes, now the Tory peer Baroness Finn. Even so, rumours still persist that Gove is a closeted gay man. Vine ascribes this to his many gay friends (he lived in Mayfair with the entrepreneur Ivan Massow and the former Tory MP Nick Boles) and his gay advisers, such as Henry Newman, plus his slightly camp taste for fripperies such as Geo F Trumper colognes. Gove adds, 'I also think people like the idea anyone in public life will have a kink or secret of some kind. So everyone from Peter Lilley to the current PM has had rumours spread about them. And this was one that latched onto me. I find it hilarious. But any protestation sounds like you're trying to cover something up.' Has he ever kissed a boy? 'No … except my son.' He seems happy to be outside politics, liberated from ministerial cars, using the Tube again, no longer walking with his head fixedly down. He goes into an excited reverie about the pleasures of people-watching, how amazed he is by the fashion dominance of 'athleisure wear'. Did he stand down as an MP last year because he knew when he lost Surrey Heath in the general election people would talk about 'staying up for Gove'? He admits 'that was at least one part of it', but he reckoned too that having angered over the years everyone from teachers to Boris fans he was an electoral liability. 'And also,' he says, 'I felt exhausted.' In the end, the Lib Dems won with a mighty 21 per cent swing. He says politicians rarely have legacies: 'Things are never static; there are never permanent victories.' He says he made his greatest mark in education, had a genuine zeal for reform as justice secretary, but there was too much unfinished business. He mentions how, after the Grenfell fire, he brought in the Building Safety Act. But of course, his one abiding legacy is Brexit. I ask if in 2016 he'd known how the next decade would play out, how exiting the EU would suck away so much energy from issues he cared about, whether he'd still have supported it. 'I don't know that I would have had the courage to say, 'Let's leave.' I hope I would have done.' But then he adds, more robustly, 'Some of the things which made me more pro-Brexit were the reactions to it. How the condescension towards people beforehand became more vivid and strident afterwards. 'These people didn't know what they were voting for,' or, 'Voting Leave is correlated with a lower level of education.' That only made me more pleased to have been on that side.' As for Brexit bonuses, he says, 'It's literally too soon to say. But the loudest predictions of ruin from the Remain side have certainly not come true, nor have the most extravagant predictions of benefits from Leavers.' Of his most notorious quote that 'people have had enough of experts', he says, 'I went through a period of actually thinking, 'Well, that isn't quite what I said. It's an inaccuracy. I want to try to make the case properly.' And now I think, 'That's fine. And do you know what? [His eyes gleam.] We have had enough of experts.' You're doubling down? 'Yes.' Whom do you mean by experts? 'People in organisations with three-letter acronyms. The IFS, CBI, IFP. And so on. Book-smart people who attempt to reduce the complexity of humanity to something that will fit into a PPE essay.' Can you imagine voting anything but Conservative? 'No. I used to, but now it's too late.' It's in your blood? 'Yes.' Never Reform? 'No.' I ask if he's back on speaking terms with Kemi Badenoch after having an affair with her friend, causing the break-up of a marriage. His eyes go saucer-wide and he won't comment. 'I am a huge fan of Kemi, but she's got a much more high-pressure job than me.' Do you think she's doing it well? 'Yes.' Isn't she too fighty to bring the electorate or even the Tory party with her? 'I think it's a good thing to be fighty.' He's fascinated by Blue Labour, got to know Lord Glasman during the referendum, has known Labour's campaign strategist Pat McFadden since the Nineties, when he worked for Donald Dewar, while Gove was a researcher on Scottish TV. 'I admire Morgan McSweeney. I very much admire Shabana Mahmood. I admire Wes Streeting. I don't dislike Keir Starmer at all; I just think he and Rachel Reeves have got themselves into an unnecessarily difficult situation … I'd say he's handled foreign affairs and defence better than I would have expected, and domestic politics worse.' Editing a political magazine must be fun, but doesn't he miss the power and tumult at the heart of government? 'This is a crap analogy, because I haven't been either, but it's a bit like I was a farmer and then I was called up. I served my time as a soldier and then, at the end of it, I was demobbed. Maybe it's the case that I will forever carry the PTSD from the trenches with me, but I'm now back on the farm. I really enjoy being a farmer, but there were experiences that were irreplaceable as a result of having been called up where we did things that needed to be done.' Then, as I am leaving, I note several shirts on the back of his office door. 'I need them to get changed into because I'm always spilling things down me,' Gove says. (He is noted for his lack of physical coordination.) But he does smell very nice. What is that fragrance, I ask, and he rushes to his briefcase to pull out a bottle of a Geo F Trumper cologne called Spanish Leather. 'I know!' Gove says. 'It's only going to fuel the gay rumours.' Quite Right, a new podcast from The Spectator, launches in September. Find out more at
Times
25 minutes ago
- Times
Our summer reading guide: 10 terrific books for children
One of my favourite books of the year so far, this is Adrian Mole for the gaming generation. Nathanael Lessore is a rising star and his latest tale, about a wisecracking introvert who suddenly finds popularity through an online alter ego, has had my 11-year-old son in stitches. The whip-smart dialogue really captures the way he and his friends speak. Beneath the jokes, there's real emotional depth to this cautionary tale about balancing your online life with your real one. It also provides youngsters with the added pleasure of explaining — tweensplaining? — all the slang terms to the adults in their lives. A brilliant read for tween boys (and girls) everywhere. Hot Key £8.99 pp320Buy a copy of What Happens Online There's no shortage of children's adventure stories set in ye olde London, but this one stands ragged shoulders above the rest. It's the 1830s and street urchins are vanishing. Strange figures are shadowing the markets and something's lurking in the sewers. No one seems to care apart from Cassia Thorne, a debtor's daughter who scrapes a living selling ballads at Bartholomew Fair. Determined to solve the mystery, she teams up with Teo, an orphan based on the children who really were trafficked from Italy to London to work as street musicians. Their world is made vivid in this sophisticated and exciting adventure, inspired by Dickens's Little Dorrit. & Schuster £7.99 pp336Buy a copy of Deep Dark • Seven books to get kids reading again — Dr Seuss, Wimpy Kid and more Geraldine McCaughrean has been described as 'one of the greatest living children's authors' and this novel — her 170th — is a masterclass in urgent, powerful storytelling. It follows the fates of four young Londoners who forge a close friendship when they make a split decision to avoid evacuation and flee back to the bombed out, rubble-strewn neighbourhood they call home. The world of the Blitz is brought into raw, flaming life. It feels like plunging into one of those black-and-white Pathé film reels and finding everything in colour. Although the setting may be historical, the issues of peace, conflict, forgiveness and revenge are anything but. Brutal, beautiful and £8.99 pp288Buy a copy of Under a Fire-Red Sky The words 'blank verse' and 'baseball' don't float your boat? No matter, because Black Star is wonderful whether you like sport or not. It's not really about baseball at all; it's about being a black 12-year-old girl in 1920s Virginia. In this age of shortened concentration spans, blank verse is the perfect format, distilling big ideas into short and snappy stories that deliver plenty of literary bang for their buck. As always, Kwame Alexander's writing zings with confidence. Come for the quick read, stay for the crash course in the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks and Harlem Renaissance pioneers such as Langston Hughes. 'This ball's on fire, better sound the alarm.'Andersen £14.99 pp384Buy a copy of Black Star • Eight books to get your child excited about reading Another blank verse novel, but this time with a very northern English accent. Nate has just navigated a difficult final year of primary school but now a new world of anxieties and expectations lies ahead. It's called … secondary school. 'Teachers with tans wear new start smiles: Welcome, welcome. This way to the hall. This must be how gladiators felt on their way to the arena.' This is a big-hearted book with moments of lyricism and a little bit of grit. It's honest and relatable but never miserable. A particularly good read for primary school-leavers who are about to take their first flight to secondary £9.99 pp480Buy a copy of The First Year Published just ahead of the Uefa Women's Euros next month, this manual covers 'all the football skills every fan and player needs to know'. Using photographs of the talented young boy and girl players from Oadby Owls, a community club in Leicestershire, each page features how-to tips on different aspects of the game, from perfecting your first touch to placing a shot. Design is the biggest selling point here: the book is light on text and big on photographs and diagrams. According to the author and 'football mum' Katie Daynes, the manual aims to help 'all those parents who spent their weekends supporting grassroots football […] understand and appreciate the game better'.Usborne £7.99 pp104Buy a copy of Football Skills • The 9 best graphic novels for kids – recommended by teachers Osamu Tezuka, the 'godfather of manga', died before he could give one of his beloved characters an ending. Almost 50 years later the baton has been passed to the American writer Samuel Sattin, and the artist duo known as Gurihiru to complete the tale of Unico. And what an enchanting reboot it is. The artwork does justice to the cinematic sweep of Tezuka's work, and the story of a 'brave, young unicorn' lost in time and space, spreading love wherever he goes, while struggling to remember who he is or where he came from, will appeal to a broad range of age groups, from eight upwards. £10.99 pp224Buy a copy of Unico As Dolly Parton said: 'It takes a lot of time and money to look this cheap' — and a lot of clever plotting has gone into this ridiculously escapist thriller. Two teenage girls meet on a train. One is a spoilt brat who is being sent to a Swiss rehab centre as punishment for her wild behaviour. The other is a skint backpacker with her own secrets. They hatch a cunning plan to swap identities. Each steps off the train into the other's life — on the condition they will return to the same spot to swap back in six weeks' time. Cue a cat and mouse game between two supremely scheming frenemies that ricochets around Europe until a very unexpected denouement in the … Isles of Scilly. Preposterous, improbable and lots of £9.99 pp368Buy a copy of The Other Girl • Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what's top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List Giddy up for a pony story with a twist. Forget Follyfoot and My Friend Flicka, this is a surreal and quirky survival story set in the kind of New Zealand you don't usually see in the tourism adverts. A grieving 12-year-old girl runs away from home with her mother's ashes and her most trusted companion, 'a nuggety little bay' named Tooth. There are criminals, a genuine sense of peril, and themes of grief and family breakdown. And did I mention the horse talks? Tender but never twee, it's an indie movie just waiting to happen. I loved £7.99 pp220Buy a copy of Ride North The Notwitches is a triumph of nonsense. There's no message. There's no big 'ishoo'. It is a celebration of silliness for silliness's sake, and hallelujah for that. (For all the hand-wringing over the reading for pleasure crisis, it's often forgotten that books like this make reading fun in the first place.) Gary Panton earned his comedy stripes writing for The Beano, Hey Duggee and Bluey so knows a thing or two about entertaining little ones. His first children's book features a young girl called Melanda who runs away from her three horrid aunts. It revolves almost entirely around the increasingly surreal conversations with the gnomes, mermaids and sleepy rock monsters she meets along the way. Well, I say mermaids; these ones are reversed: 'Top half of fish. Bottom half of a lady.' They run around on the sand, 'Sounding their siren call, 'hiya!'' Cheeky and refreshing, with an old-fashioned dose of House £7.99 pp304Buy a copy of The Notwitches
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
‘Pop music can be so scared to offend': Ca7riel and Paco Amoroso, the Argentine duo subverting machismo
Over impeccable jazz-funk arrangements and Latin percussion, a man in a furry blue trapper hat raps like he's inhaled a Benson & Hedges multipack, while his partner brings lip-curling, hair-twirling attitude to his own lyrical delivery. This is Ca7riel and Paco Amoroso's Tiny Desk Concert, an online performance that turned the two Argentine vocalists into global sensations almost overnight after it came out last October. It has now racked up 36m views and Rolling Stone has called them 'the future of music'. Some eyebrows were raised, though, by the English translations of their lyrics: crude, daft, often hilarious tales of parties, sex and girls – even, accidentally, goes one punchline, the same one. 'We're always having fun and trying to confuse people,' Amoroso explains on a video call from Madrid, during a 53-date tour that includes London, Glastonbury and Japan's Fuji Rock. 'Yesss, confuse!' his co-pilot pipes up, impishly. 'Our life is like a TV show and we change in every episode. We have our meloso [schmaltz], our punky side, our rapper side.' The duo revel in 'honesty, absurdity and contradiction', they say. Some new fans lured in by their viral moment were surprised to hear that their 2024 major label debut, Baño María, was far more electronic, with Charli xcx-rivalling electro-house, airy reggaeton, and – on La Que Puede Puede – a bolshy mix of dubstep, EDM and trap. In a South America still dominated by reggaeton, Ca7riel and Paco Amoroso are proudly, even subversively, unclassifiable. That genre-hopping spirit goes way back: the pair, now both 31, met at primary school, realised they had similar surnames (Ca7riel is Catriel Guerreiro; Paco Amoroso, Ulises Guerriero) and pursued music. Ca7riel became a guitar teacher, dreaming of being the next Steve Vai; Amoroso studied violin but switched to drums – 'I wanted to be a rock star.' They tried for seven years with funk-rock band Astor, releasing a 2017 EP to little fanfare. But soon trap was sweeping the nation – and the rest of South America – via YouTube. 'We saw an opportunity to be seen by everyone,' says Amoroso. What do Argentinians do differently? 'We have no shame and no fear,' says Ca7riel. They started releasing tracks as a duo, split in 2020, and reunited in 2023, though they still perform solo tracks in their shows. They agree they're more 'fearless' as a duo and write lyrics together like it's a jam session. They're also more famous, so much so in Spain that their Tiny Desk has been parodied on national television. Ca7riel has flown his 73-year-old mother out from Buenos Aires to Spain to experience the tour, the first time she'll have seen him perform abroad. 'She can't believe it,' he says. 'It's weird to me but it's so weird to her.' You wonder what his mum made of their Madrid arena show. It flips through genres like a hyperactive TikTok feed, from funk-pop to nu-metal, and, like their Tiny Desk, they sing sitting on stools like a boyband. When he's on his feet, Ca7riel, who is also in the metal band Barro, has the strut of Freddie Mercury and a screamo howl; Amoroso, the Hansel to his Derek Zoolander. 'We are giving everything on stage,' says Amoroso. The show ends with male bodybuilders who hoist them in the air, linking to the themes of their recent release, Papota. Argentinian slang for being pumped on steroids, the EP pokes fun at the music industry and image. The song #Tetas (direct translation: tits) depicts a fictional music producer in Miami who tells them they need to get buff, sing in English and go viral on TikTok – 'to win a Latin Grammy', says Amoroso. They've felt those pressures, but are setting their sights beyond the Latin pop world and collaborating with UK electronic producer Fred Again. 'We don't make music to win Grammys,' Amoroso says. The pair amplified their gym bro satire by wearing muscle suits on a recent Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon performance. But expanding later on email, the pair suggest they have a more serious message too. 'There's definitely a pressure for Latin men, especially artists, to look like action figures. Six-pack, perfect jawline, dripping in machismo,' they say through a translator. Mocking this, they've used a 'chad filter' in their visuals, they appear naked in a hot tub on Baño María's cover and they sometimes share a kiss at the end of their stage show. 'We're not anti-body, we're anti-box,' they add. 'Pop music can be so polished, so scared to offend, but we want to poke at expectations: of masculinity, of genre, of what a Latin artist should look or sound like.' Not that they shy away from polish: #Tetas has a knowingly saccharine chorus, worthy of Backstreet Boys. It's the 'most cheesy shit' they've done, says Ca7riel. But, adds Amoroso: 'When the chords are right and the lyrics are fun, everything is possible.' Like video game avatars, they have 'a skin that we put on and we're able to change, musically and visually'. Lately they have taken to describing themselves as degenerados – not just 'degenerates' as it translates, but genre-less and gender-less too. As for Glastonbury? No word yet if they are shipping in the Chippendales but they are open to the great unwashed on Friday afternoon at West Holts. 'It's a special festival,' says Amoroso, 'and the freaks will be watching us.' 'And,' hoots Ca7riel, 'we are freaks too!'
