Bristol in Pictures: Annie Mac, Prince William and Tony Robinson
Well, where to begin? It's all been going on in Bristol this week.First, legendary DJ Annie Mac packed them in at Prospect, then the Prince of Wales dropped in at Pensford.Blackadder actor and celebrity Bristol City fan Sir Tony Robinson started off a charity walk at Ashton Gate, then, at the same venue, hundreds of people turned out for the Anti Banquet event on Friday night.To round things off, there was a typical Bristol scene on Saturday morning - hot air balloons in the sunshine over the harbour.
After dark: DJ royalty visited Bristol last weekend as Annie Mac was the main act for a night of dance music at Prospect in the south east of the city.
Job well done: Hundreds of people attended the Anti Banquet event at Ashton Gate on Friday evening. Some of the best chefs in the city gave up their time for the evening, which raises vital money - organisers hope £100,000 this year - for charities tackling food poverty across Bristol.
A love story: Romeo and Juliet, directed by Corey Campbell, is bringing a rap, soul and R&B version of the Shakespeare play to Bristol Old Vic until 5 April.
On my signal: Prince William the Prince of Wales dropped in to an event aimed at young farmers in Pensford south of Bristol, speaking to the guests and watching some physical challenges, including a tug-of-war.
Look up: As soon as the clearer, warmer days arrive you can be sure to see hot air balloons over Bristol. Some passed over the city centre early on Saturday.
Red letter day: The Bristol City Robins Foundation and social action group Game Changers dropped in at Everygreen Primary Academy in Easton. Pupils met the Bristol City robin and were encouraged to wear red as part of the Show Racism the Red Card campaign.
Match action: Team Bath Netball's first NXT Gen League match in Bristol proved to be a thriller as they were edged out by a last-gasp goal by Manchester Thunder at Clifton College, the visitors winning 50-49.
His ship came in: Retired sailor Alan Wilcock, 75, had plenty of reasons to be cheerful after winning £1m on a National Lottery scratchcard. Where better to pose for the cameras than the SS Great Britain?
Not to be: Despite a great hit from Romaine Sawyers to make it 1-1, Rovers slipped to a 2-1 defeat against Mansfield at the Mem on Saturday.
Lifesavers: Blackadder star Sir Tony Robinson joined a nationwide relay aimed at encouraging football fans to learn how to perform CPR. Sir Tony, a Bristol City fan, started his leg at Ashton Gate as part of the British Heart and Sky Bet campaign.
New partnership: SUP Bristol, which runs paddle sports on the harbour, has now become part of the Mendip Adventure Group. David Eddins from Mendip and Tim Trew from SUP posed for the camera to celebrate the news.
Read all about it: Children's author and poet Alex Wharton dropped in as more than 60 Emersons Green Primary School pupils joined staff to celebrate South Gloucestershire Council opening open a new children's area at the local library.
Let the hunt begin: Bristol Zoo Project and other tourist attractions across the West and South Wales have created one of the biggest Easter egg hunts of the year. From now until 4 April, several golden eggs are being hidden at locations across the regions, one a day. Clues will be placed on the zoo's social media accounts each day and anyone who finds an egg zoo tickets and a toy.
Recognition: Consultant Rachael Morris, who works at Weston General Hospital, has been awarded a medal from the Royal College of Emergency Medicine for her "outstanding" work caring for older people. Dr Rebecca Maxwell, chief medical officer for University Hospitals Bristol and Weston NHS Foundation Trust, said the trust was "proud" of Rachael's achievement.
Going green: Two of the city's business improvement districts (BIDs) have joined forces to help companies make changes as Bristol aims to become a net zero city by 2030. The City Centre and Redcliffe & Temple BIDs are offering advice and support along with the Bristol Climate & Nature Partnership.
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BBC News
30 minutes ago
- BBC News
The Gold star Tom Cullen recalls 'magical' Llandrindod Wells childhood
One of the stars of drama The Gold has said growing up around theatre in mid Wales was a "magical" experience. Tom Cullen, features alongside Hugh Bonneville in the returning BBC One show, said "drama is very much in the blood". He grew up in Llandrindod Wells, Powys, where his parents worked at a local theatre company."If you'd told that kid that I'd be doing what I'm doing, I wouldn't have believed you," he added. Cullen's earliest memories are of being in and around the theatre, saying he "grew up in a rehearsal room". "My primary school was next to the theatre so I'd finished school, walk down and just sit there and watch that these adults mess around and play."Acting has been a source of joy for the whole family since, he told Lucy Owen on BBC Radio Wales. His parents used to act and his brother and sister have both gone into the profession."It hooked its claws into all of us," Cullen is preparing for the release of the second series of the drama based on the Brinks-Mat heist in said he still had to "pinch myself every day" adding he was "incredibly grateful" to be doing something he plays John Palmer, who he called a "fascinating character" with the second series exploring how his "whopping ego" leads to his downfall. The actor has also starred in Ar Y Ffin - a Welsh language programme aired on S4C, despite the fact he does not speak said he is looking to change that as he gears up to move to Cardiff this summer."I'm not a Welsh speaker although I'm learning at the moment," he said."My daughter will be going to a Welsh school in Cardiff so I'm going to have to understand what the homework is."He said it was "fantastic" to work on the show, which was filmed in Wales."I got to work with loads of old friends that I've known since I was a teenager. It was just absolutely joyous," he added. Looking to the future, he said it was "fantastically fun" to join the House of the Dragon, which has been filmed in north Wales, for the next season, currently has no release Cullen "can't talk much about it" at this stage, he said the set design was something that impressed him in particular."They just build a castle with multiple levels and huge banquet. It is just absolutely extraordinary." The Gold returns to BBC One and iPlayer at 21:00 BST on Sunday.
The Guardian
5 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘The breakup was like an amputation that saves you': Cate Le Bon on healing from heartache and her heavy new album
Cate Le Bon has shaved her head. She had been wanting to do it for ages. 'Just feels nice to get rid of this hair you've had on your head for a long time,' she says, cutting into a mushroom pie outside a south London pub in early May. 'Feels quite restorative. Feels functional, which I like.' Her blue sweater vest exposes her bare arms, the left tattooed with a tiny 'T' wearing a crown, to the stealthy midday heat. A woman shaving her head can carry a lot of cultural baggage, but can also get rid of it. Typically pragmatic, ever in her own lane, the Welsh musician and producer hasn't really noticed a reaction either way. 'I've really just been in the bubble of friends and family for the past year, not really been out and about too much, which has been really nice.' Born in Carmarthenshire, Le Bon, 42, has been living back in Cardiff after spending much of the past decade in California. Her desolately beautiful seventh solo album, Michelangelo Dying, was supposed to come out last year. Instead, exhaustion and persistent illness after the dissolution of a long relationship, and her desert dream with it, meant everything had to stop. Le Bon can appear regal live, manipulating her guitar with Tilda Swinton-level poise, but in person she's softly spoken, gentle and succinct. She would rather avoid specifics about the end of the relationship: 'It's not really about him,' she says, of Michelangelo Dying. Instead, the album is about grieving a fantasy and 'realising you've completely abandoned yourself in the throes of this all-encompassing love. The breakup was always like an amputation that you don't really want, but you know will save you.' Her lyrics outline a world falling apart and not being able to do anything about it, even being told the world is different from reality as trust wastes away to nothing: 'You smoke our love like you've never known violence,' she sings with crushed condemnation on Heaven Is No Feeling. In an unparalleled catalogue of uncanny, soft-worn post-punk that's entirely Le Bon's own – one that started in 2008 and hit its stride with 2016's absurdist Crab Day – the album is another cut above: emotionally direct in a new way for her, but submerged in a crystalline murk, like light refracted through shadowy water (the artwork depicts her drowning). She recorded it between Los Angeles, Cardiff, Hydra and, finally, the Joshua Tree desert that had been her home and creative wellspring, to give the album its spiritual conclusion. 'There's something about that space where I feel I'm all ages at once,' she says. 'I feel it when I'm in the sea, when I'm in love, when I'm with people who ignite me.' Guitar refrains repeat throughout the record as she puzzles out the 'impenetrable. That's how I felt – like I tried everything.' Her melodies give these songs their shape: 'She's got this vocal phrasing that's awkward in the best way,' says collaborator John Cale, who appears on the song Ride. 'The voice is beautiful but her delivery is what opens her up to everything.' At home in Cardiff the post-punk iconoclast is just Cate Timothy (Le Bon was a joke from an early gig poster that stuck). She starts her day by making coffee and listening to drone music: 'almost like medication' – Ellen Arkbro, Kali Malone, Éliane Radigue, the latter recommended by Bradford Cox of Deerhunter, whose last record Le Bon produced. 'It creates this porous landscape that reacts to however you're feeling in the moment,' she says. She's also been making drone music with friends 'for nothing other than the joy of it, the healing nature of it, and having time to do stuff like that that isn't for something.' Her best friend since the age of 11 lives close, as does her younger sister with her new baby, as well as her cousin and her parents. Le Bon gardens, cooks and walks her new rescue dog, the scruffy terrier Mila, who has springy eyebrows and a great sense of humour. 'There was always this proverbial dog I was going to get at some point, which I suppose represented a lot of things,' she says. 'I saw her on the West Wales Poundies [Dog Rescue] site and went: Oh, I think that's my dog.' She can't show me a picture of Mila fast enough: she looks like a Shirley Hughes illustration. 'I think making space for her in my life, and prioritising her, as ridiculous as that sounds, has been really wonderful.' Caring for Mila and having a routine that lasted more than a few months between tours reminded Le Bon to care for herself. She had been trying to outrun heartbreak, busying herself producing for other artists: Devendra Banhart, Wilco, Horsegirl; she's in Peckham this week with Dry Cleaning before they record their third album in France. Even though she only works with acts she feels a connection with, she says, 'I was very willing to go anywhere, any time, to work on stuff I loved. I didn't really have a home. I became very exhausted from it.' She had been experiencing full-body hives, debilitating back issues and strange anxiety. Her symptoms eventually made her realise she had felt 'a reluctance to see things as they are', she says in her calm, considered way, 'because you think love is enough, and I think that's the most heartbreaking thing, when you realise that love isn't enough.' Originally, Le Bon set out to make a very different kind of record: a spikier, sharper follow-up to the warped beauty of 2022's Pompeii. The breakup was 'a very messy end, a decision that was made and not made at the same time', she says. 'It was discombobulating. I kept thinking I would come back to myself by making a record, but I was trying to make a record that had nothing to do with it.' Eventually, she had no choice but to get over her resistance to writing about love. 'There's a softness that comes from the surrender,' she says of the album's almost dubby, decaying sound. 'A fluidity, a kind of honesty in throwing yourself into something because you know you have to, instead of bracing yourself against it.' She describes the album as 'photographing a wound but picking at it at the same time'. The contradiction of heartbreak is the desire to escape it while also refusing to let it go: 'Heartache railing against its own impermanence', as Le Bon puts it, beautifully. 'When you're in it, you feel like it will never end. And there is a comfort in that, because it keeps you attached to something that really meant, or means, something to you. Sometimes you don't want it to end because it will keep you in those loops. Once you get out of them, that's when it ends.' Historically a magnetically ambiguous lyricist, Le Bon wrote more directly than ever 'because I was trying to communicate with myself'. She aimed to confront 'the violence of seeing things as they actually are'. It's hard, she says, when love is 'mixed invention: the fractured nature of memory, memories of the future and what you hope something is.' On Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday)? she sings: 'Dig deep, are you dumb or devout?' It's the fine line between having faith in someone and duping yourself. 'That sunk cost,' she says. 'You continue to hope that something will change.' She thought she was singing to or about her former partner, but realised: 'I am all the characters at once.' On About Time, she sings: 'I'm not lying in a bed you made.' She says now: 'It's the bed I've made really, isn't it?' Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion The song Body As a River dwells on the sickness that had been creeping up on her: 'I read what I write and it's never without shame,' she sings. When women make decisions for themselves, says Le Bon, 'it's often coupled with a shame of sorts, a feeling of your responsibility for other people's feelings or emotions: that you're unable to carry everything for someone because you love them so much.' She keeps returning to a quote by author Alice Munro: 'When a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind … When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.' Michelangelo Dying, says Le Bon, contains no profound revelations. 'It's about putting things down so you can unencumber yourself and move on. Making decisions that are much more aligned with reality.' The album's imagery was inspired by another room, Tunisian-American artist Colette Lumiere's installation Recently Discovered Ruins of a Dream, depicting a woman alone in a chamber lavishly draped with fabric, with mirrors. 'That's what I really wanted the record to feel like,' says Le Bon. 'You can roll up your sleeves and take something on, then you have a rest, because something is resolved.' Trying to run past heartache, she says, meant 'forgetting the best part, where you reap the rewards of your work; that period of absorbing what has just happened'. We talk again a few weeks later, when Le Bon is with Dry Cleaning near the Loire valley. It's her day off. Later, she's going to swim in a lake and go to the supermarket for continental treats. They have consumed much bread and wine. 'I'm really enjoying being here and being really present,' she says. 'The band just keep revealing themselves to be more and more lovely.' Relationships such as this have become paramount. 'I've learned something about decentralising the importance of romantic love,' she says. 'In this past year I've seen that Delmi' – the friend she met when she was 11 years old – 'is one of the great loves of my life. Seeing things as they are, you can welcome things in that complement you better. That forest fire of romantic love makes you abandon a lot of things.' The past few years have also recalibrated Le Bon's relationship with music. Before making 2019's Reward, she took a year off to study carpentry, just to make sure she was making music out of heart, not habit. Her recent break taught her that sometimes 'you have to stop something you really love because you love it too much. You have to really take care of your relationship with something like music when you love it but it's also your job. It's a practice. It can't just be a feeling that you gorge on.' Cale tells me he admires Le Bon's 'constant evolution: you really don't know what you'll get but you know it'll be sincere, honest, thoughtful.' She returns the compliment. 'He's been in one of the biggest, most influential bands, then as a solo artist he's kept this forward motion where he's tried to uncouple himself from that. He's constantly shedding so he can get to the next thing. Because of that, he's all the ages and no age at all. He's got his head down in the purpose and intention of creating. And I find that really inspiring.' You can imagine dozens of younger artists saying the same about Le Bon: she's such a potent influence that a Fake Le Bon seems to pop up every other week. It's not in her nature to have noticed: whatever identity traps or 'self-referencing' social media encourages in artists now, 'I try heavily to avoid that in quite a violent way,' she says. 'I never think about anything I've just done, and then I think about what I can do next. I think it's healthier. It lends itself to a lightness, a freedom that makes you more porous to doing things differently the next time.' Le Bon isn't touring Michelangelo Dying until October. 'I wish we were starting tomorrow,' she says. In the meantime, her dream room of one's own is a big garage to do all her projects in. At home, she will walk Mila, read Renata Adler, Rachel Cusk, keep going to the women's boxing group she joined recently. She's left the heartbreak behind. 'That choice to take it on, and not just put it aside, but really heal from it and learn from it, has allowed me to shed it all.' Michelangelo Dying is released on 26 September.
Telegraph
6 hours ago
- Telegraph
The art, rage and illicit love affairs of Augustus and Gwen John
Augustus John once ate a hedgehog. Born in 1878, by his 20s he was one of the country's most famous artists, known for his dazzling draughtsmanship, Bohemian leanings and fascination with Romani encampments (where he dined on said hedgehog stew). Over the course of his marriage, his wife, Ida, slowly resigned herself to his affairs, eventually inviting his lover, Dorelia McNeill, to move in with them. Their ménage grew to include children by both women; one painting of their family life is called Caravan: A Gypsy Encampment. Never one to resist what he desired, Augustus had plucked Dorelia from an intense friendship with his artist sister, Gwen. Both siblings studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, but where Augustus's output was vast, wayward and produced at pace, Gwen, 18 months his senior, was happy if she managed 'one beautiful square inch in a day'. She said that she was 'born to love' (both men and women), but it was love of a different kind to her brother's fly-by-night promiscuity. Her most famous affair, with Auguste Rodin, 35 years older, soon suffered from the intensity of her devotion. Judith Mackrell has produced a fine portrait of these two artists in her double biography, Artists, Siblings, Visionaries. Forged in the same unremarkable Welsh childhood, each in different ways threw off society in order to paint and love. Augustus's early career was a dazzle of technical brilliance, deeply influenced by Rembrandt. Gwen was indebted to figures such as Whistler and Vuillard, masters of the misty and the muted. Her quiet and mottled interiors, of women alone or cradling cats, have a glowing stillness and piercing precision that make her brother's verve seem merely bumptious. Mackrell's approach is nuanced, with no trace of gushing bar the title (I hope the three-noun formula doesn't catch on). The delicacy of Gwen's painting is never mistaken for meekness or fragility of character, and Mackrell avoids the cliché of contrasting Gwen's introspection with her brother's extrovert panache. Beneath Augustus's relish for life lay struggles with anxiety and depression. And Gwen could be socially gregarious and physically adventurous. On holiday in Dorset, she plunged on impulse into the churning sea and nearly drowned, but was thrilled by the 'delicious danger'. The book refers always to 'Gus', a nickname used only by Gwen, as if each sibling were narrating the other's story. Mackrell places herself unfashionably, but rewardingly, in the background. She has an eye for the telling detail, where her silence can be as revealing as any high-handed ticking-off; she quotes Augustus dribbling over Dorelia – 'your fat entices me enormously, I long to inspect it' – and no more needs to be said. Empathy for her subjects does not reduce her compassion for those caught in the siblings' turbulent slipstream. Augustus, for example, was accused of rape by Caitlin Macnamara (to whom he introduced her future husband, Dylan Thomas). Mackrell permits herself a moment of accusation, the more powerful for its rarity: 'the hard truth remains that she'd been little more than a child, a very damaged child, when he seduced her, and, in that, he was guilty of abuse.' The book is thrifty with dates, sometimes leaving the reader temporally adrift, and I would have welcomed lengthier quotations from letters, especially in the compelling stretch devoted to Gwen's affair with Rodin, during which, at his urging, she poured her desire into the written word. Mackrell enticingly describes a series of graphic letters blazing with 'supplication, anger and sexual provocation', but sticks mainly to paraphrase. This is the fourth book on Gwen to appear in recent years (following Celia Paul 's acclaimed Letters to Gwen John and studies by Alicia Foster and by Emma Chambers). As for Augustus, Michael Holroyd's 1974 biography has not been superseded, and Mackrell leans on it heavily: around half of her endnotes cite his work, and she offers little new material. But as Ida wrote to a friend before she married Augustus, 'these Johns, you know, have a hold that never ceases.' The value of interweaving the two lives within a single frame more than justifies the repackaging, and the two strands are tightly braided rather than laid out in alternate chapters. Augustus always said that his sister was the greater painter; it's hard to disagree. Gwen slowly retreated into a world of cats and Catholicism, painting for herself and for God, and then not painting at all; she died in 1939, having produced little for some while. Augustus survived her for 22 years, a period of physical and artistic decline covered here in a single chapter. Most of his final portraits, lazy and lumpen, were bashed out for money; there were many mouths to feed. Officially he fathered 13 children, but legend had it that, walking through Chelsea as an old man, he would pat the head of any passing infant, just in case it was his.
