Rewind announces 9 nostalgic acts for 2026 festival: Line-up, venue and tickets
Rewind will bring nine exciting headliners to Bla Bla Dubai on Saturday February 7 2026 including the legendary Bananarama.
Returning for a fourth year, you can expect live performers, several bars and DJs in addition to chart-topping classics from yesteryear.
Tickets are on sale now with general admission priced at Dhs395 and VIP tickets at Dhs675 for the all-day outdoor festival.
Set against the backdrop of the Arabian Gulf and Ain Dubai, the festival promises to be a fun-filled day of partying.
(Credit: Rewind)
The Rewind 2026 line-up in full
Iconic English pop group Bananarama will headline the whole festival and are best known for hits like Shy Boy, Cruel Summer and Venus.
Nik Kershaw, best known for his pop and new wave stylings, gained popularity with songs like Wouldn't It Be Good, The Riddle and I Won't Let the Sun Go Down On Me all hitting the charts in the 80s.
Heaven 17 consists of former members of The Human League and found fame in its own right with hits such as (We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang and Temptation.
Jason Donovan is a multi-talented Aussie actor and singer known both for his role in the soap Neighbours and for his music career. Too Many Broken Hearts and his duet with Kylie Minogue Especially for You ' brought him success.
British pop duo Go West are also on the line-up with hits like We Close Our Eyes, Call Me and King of Wishful Thinking to their name.
(Credit: Rewind)
American singer-songwriter Tiffany rose to fame in the late 80s with her timeless cover of I Think We're Alone Now and Could've Been both topping the charts across the globe.
British soul, funk and disco group The Real Thing are considered the UK's most successful black group of all time. You to Me Are Everything, Can't Get By Without You and Can You Feel The Force all hit the charts in the 1970s.
English rock band Cutting Crew gained international fame in the mid-80s with their debut album Broadcast, which included the single (I Just) Died in Your Arms.
And tribute band Disco Inferno will perform all the best disco classics to keep the party going.
From Dhs395. Sat Feb 7. Bla Bla Dubai, JBR. blabladubai.ae
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Spectator
2 hours ago
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Rattigan's films are as important as his plays
A campaign is under way to rename the West End's Duchess Theatre after the playwright Terence Rattigan. Supported as it is by the likes of Judi Dench and Rattigan Society president David Suchet, there's evidently a desire to right a historical wrong. Author of classics such as The Browning Version, The Winslow Boy and Separate Tables, Rattigan was known for his poise, melancholy and restraint, all of which put him at odds with the coterie of upstart writers of the 1950s – still amusingly known as the Angry Young Men. It's an oft-repeated chapter of theatre history that arch-kitchen-sinkers such as John Osborne made the environment virtually impossible for Rattigan to work in. Rattigan joked about it at the 1956 opening of Look Back in Anger. It was as if Osborne were saying, 'Look, Ma, I'm not Terence Rattigan!' he quipped. However, the Rattigan-bashing was always an empty indulgence. Osborne himself admitted as much on these very pages in 1993, writing: 'I have been intrigued by the success of the current revival of Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea. Rattigan was under the general frown when I first joined the Royal Court Theatre in 1956, and both George Devine and Tony Richardson were appalled when I confessed to being moved by the play.' Perhaps a Rattigan Theatre would indeed lay some of the ghosts to rest. But on first hearing news of the campaign, another thought occurred: Rattigan deserves a cinema as well. Film was arguably much kinder to him than theatre ever was in the low ebbs of his career. It supplied him with constant work, saw some of his best adaptations, and allowed his writing to weather the storm. Without his breakout play French Without Tears (1936), British cinema wouldn't have acquired one of its classic rogues, Rex Harrison, whose name it thrust into the spotlight. But French Without Tears was chiefly important because its adaptation in 1940 was Rattigan's first collaboration with director Anthony Asquith – and the first success of his screen career. Few could match Asquith's ability to adapt stage classics for film. The son of liberal prime minister Herbert, Asquith junior had directed an Oscar-nominated Pygmalion (1938), with Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller, as well as the most celebrated version of The Importance of Being Earnest (1952), with Edith Evans as the definitive Lady Bracknell. Like so many British artists, Rattigan and Asquith were drafted into propaganda duties during the war. And it resulted in their first truly great work, The Way to the Stars (1945). The film had a Who's Who cast – Michael Redgrave, John Mills and Trevor Howard, all of whom would return to work with Asquith and Rattigan – and in its quieter moments, observing the grin-and-bear-it times of a British bomber base, hinted at their true creative potential. Postwar, Asquith returned to Rattigan's stage work with an adaptation of The Winslow Boy in 1948. It perfectly captured the it's-just-not-cricket mentality of the original play with its story of a boy unjustly expelled from naval college. Rattigan would take up these themes again (to lesser effect) in The Final Test (1953), but The Winslow Boy had the advantage of Robert Donat in the lead role at the height of his powers. Asquith's take on The Browning Version was another great example of his refusal to follow the growing spectacle – albeit much of it magnificent – of contemporaries such as David Lean and Michael Powell. Refraining from visual tricks or even much of a musical score, Asquith allows Rattigan's poise and melancholy to speak for itself. It may be one of the most quietly devastating English films ever made. And as the retiring classics teacher who may or may not be missed by his pupils, Michael Redgrave gives one of his most heart-wrenching performances as Crocker-Harris. Rattigan was not tied to Asquith, and pursued multiple projects outside of his preoccupation with upper-middle-class England. He created the original screenplay for Brighton Rock (1948), for example, Graham Greene's story of wide-boy knife gangs directed by John Boulting. It was reworked before reaching the screen but Greene crucially retained Rattigan's vision of the work as a thriller rather than an intellectual treatise. The Boultings kept Rattigan's change of ending, too, in which a gramophone recording of Pinkie (Richard Attenborough) jams on 'I love you…' before he lays into his love interest. Rattigan didn't generally shy away from the brutality of romantic relationships. The Deep Blue Sea (1955) is testament to that. Influenced by the relationship between Rattigan and actor Kenneth Morgan, the play's curtain-twitching portrait of a squalid postwar London is still one of his most unflinching of love stories. Vivien Leigh was cast as Hester, the spurned lover of RAF pilot Freddie, played by Kenneth More, who had transferred from the original play. More suggested that Leigh brought too much glamour to the part. Yet with Leigh's mental health deteriorating and her personal life crumbling, she appears in hindsight to have been all too right for The Deep Blue Sea. Rattigan then teamed up with Leigh's husband Laurence Olivier on The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), but Rattigan's last great screen work was his collaboration a year later with Delbert Mann on the Oscar-nominated Separate Tables. Another of his tragic ensemble pieces, the film saw a wealth of stars gathered in a run-down Bournemouth hotel, all forced to examine their lives after the revelation of a scandal involving the retired Major Pollock played by David Niven. Niven has the film to thank for the only Oscar win of his career, and Rattigan for his second nomination. (He received his first in 1952 for scripting David Lean's The Sound Barrier.) What happened next might have been the apex of Rattigan's screen career yet turned out to be the beginning of the end. In 1960 he had started working with the Rank Organisation to adapt his T.E. Lawrence play Ross. It was to star Dirk Bogarde and Asquith was slated to direct. But there was a problem: another Lawrence film was already in the works. Out of respect to David Lean – and under some pressure from Lawrence of Arabia producer Sam Spiegel – the studio pulled the plug on the project. Bogarde called it his 'bitterest disappointment'. Rattigan and Asquith ploughed on, assembling star-studded casts for two further movies, The V.I.P.s (1963) and The Yellow Rolls-Royce (1964), with all favours from friends called in. But even with Rattigan's work finding new audiences on television, the 1960s were relentlessly unforgiving. His last screenplay of note was the wonderful musical adaptation of Goodbye, Mr Chips (1969), with Peter O'Toole, before he fled into creative (and tax) exile to Bermuda. A knighthood in 1971 and a minor reconciliation with the theatre industry before his death in 1977 did little to remedy his unhappiness. The West End rediscovers Rattigan's work almost every decade. But the screen never forgot him. Terence Davies's hypnotic version of The Deep Blue Sea (2011) with Rachel Weisz and Tom Hiddleston converted a whole new generation. Rattigan no doubt deserves a theatre. His contribution continues to enrich the British stage – especially in its deeply English themes, its styling and restraint. But his dedication to the screen suggests a Rattigan cinema wouldn't go amiss either.
Spectator
2 hours ago
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Dear Mary: Was I wrong to strip my guest's bed before she left?
Q. My friend has had an irritating experience in our local cinema. She speaks fluent French and teaches it in secondary school. Her enjoyment of a very good French film with English subtitles was ruined by a group of women in the back row laughing loudly each time a joke was made in French, before the subtitles appeared. This ruined the experience for my friend, who often sees French films there. How should she shut these show-offs up if they do it again? – E.S., Sussex A. Loud laughter is unacceptable in any circumstances, let alone in a small screening room. However 'erudition signalling' is a plague of all arts venues. At the opera, know-alls disrupt by chortling merrily at incomprehensible libretto jokes before the surtitle appears. You cannot stop the offenders, as the need to flag superiority is a main driver of ticket sales and the annoyances must be endured if your independent cinema is to survive. Q. I have been invited to Sicily for five days by a new friend whose family own an incredible villa there. As there will be no cook in situ I'm worried we will have to go out to dinner in a restaurant each night and that I may be expected to pay for him (because he's providing the roof over our heads). If he will expect me to pay each night – which some might think reasonable – then I can't afford to go. How can I get clarity on this, Mary? – T.W., London W12 A. Text him saying: 'I've had to order a new bank card. If it doesn't arrive by the time I leave I'm going to have to get cash out from my bank in London. How much do you think I will need – tops – for the five days?' Q. A dear friend recently came to stay for a night. While she was having her morning coffee downstairs, I nipped up to her room and stripped her bed and brought the sheets downstairs to the kitchen. She looked very affronted and told me she felt it was 'unfriendly' to have done this, as if to say she wasn't welcome to stay any longer. I explained that I already knew she had no intention of staying longer and that, as I have no domestic help, it suited me to launder the sheets immediately. Mary, were my actions rude? – J.F., London SW12 A. Your guest was right to feel a little unnerved by the urgency you displayed over the laundering. Like an Englishman's home, a guest's room is their 'castle' until such time as he or she has definitely left your premises. Although it seemed rational to you, by stripping the bed you pre-empted the tiny possibility of your guest changing her mind and staying an extra night. This went against the spirit of hospitality.
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2715 : Occidentals
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