The Music Quiz: Uptown Funk namechecks which popular actor in the first verse?
Which rapper makes her feature film debut in Spike Lee's forthcoming crime movie Highest 2 Lowest?
Nicki Minaj
Doja Cat
Megan Thee Stallion
Ice Spice
Who made Grammy Awards history by refusing a gong?
Sinéad O'Connor
Kris Kristofferson
Kurt Cobain
Patti Smith
Scissor Sisters named a song after which Beatle on their 2006 album, Ta-Dah?
Ringo Starr
John Lennon
George Harrison
Paul McCartney
A particular Bangles song can be heard several times during the 2024 thriller Speak No Evil, starring James McAvoy. Which one?
Walk Like an Egyptian
If She Knew What She Wants
Eternal Flame
Manic Monday
Complete the title of the forthcoming memoir by Del Amitri's Justin Currie, The Tremolo Diaries: Life on the Road and Other...
Stories
Diseases
Songs
Trials
Rapper and record producer Tyler Okonma is better known as Tyler, the Creator. What is his middle name?
George
Gregory
Graham
Gilbert
Who both produced Irish band The Atrix's 1980 single Treasure on the Wasteland, and played at Wembley Stadium's Live Aid event in 1985?
Bono
Bob Geldof
Elvis Costello
Midge Ure
2014's Uptown Funk by Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars namechecks which actress in the first verse?
Susan Sarandon
Michelle Pfeiffer
Geena Davis
Jessica Lange
What's the car brand in the title of Post Malone's 2018 album, Beerbongs &...?
Bugatti
BMW
Buick
Bentley
Complete the title of the 1992 debut album by TLC: [Blank]...On the TLC Tip.
Ooohhh
Oooohhh
Oooooooh
Ooooooohhh
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Irish Times
an hour ago
- Irish Times
Eileen Walsh: Women actors ‘are like avocados. You're nearly ready, nearly ready - then you're ripe, then you've gone off'
What is the longest period of time you have sat in a venue watching a piece of theatre? Three hours? Four? Maybe six for some rare double or triple bill? Well, from 4pm on Saturday, June 14th to 4pm the following day, actor Eileen Walsh will be spending 24 hours on stage at the Cork Opera House , in a one-off performance of The Second Woman. This is an Irish premiere of the show, running during Cork Midsummer Festival , and a co-production with the Cork Opera House. It was originally created in 2017 by Australians Anna Breckon and Nat Randall, and has been performed in various cities around the world, including Sydney, New York and London. The show is described as 'a durational theatre experience', which sounds about right if you are a member of the audience, but how will the person holding everything together on stage for 24 hours manage to endure in this truly epic role? 'I've done 72 hours in labour,' Walsh says matter-of-factly, as she looks through the lunch menu at Dublin's College Green Hotel. 'You stay awake when you have to.' READ MORE The place is busy and noisy, and there is a particularly loud group sitting in the banquette behind me. As we start talking, I fret a little that my recorder won't pick up Walsh's voice amid the general din of cutlery and lunchtime clamour. But later, when I play back the recording, every word of hers is in there, perfectly clear. Of course it is; it's the voice of an actor, trained to enunciate and carry; to cut through all the noise. Walsh is in an orange singlet and black trouser suit, her dark hair in a ponytail. I know what age she is (48, I've done my research) but if I didn't, I couldn't tell by looking at her enviable chameleon face. The question of age is relevant because this theme is woven through The Second Woman, and her character of Virginia. 'Her age is never mentioned,' Walsh says. 'But it's very much about age and ageing, and about how men see us women.' Walsh has been acting for all of her adult life; in theatre, film and TV. Some of her recent appearances were opposite her old friend Cillian Murphy in the adaptation of Claire Keegan's novella, Small Things Like These ; and in Chris O'Dowd's streaming series Small Town, Big Story . The question is, how is she going to prepare for her latest, and longest, performance? 'I don't know if you can prepare for it, because it is all such an unknown,' she says. 'Part of the preparing for it is a bit like letting go, and trusting in the process. Even if you had done it before, it is an unknown because it would be 100 new situations and 100 new people.' Eileen Walsh: Being a mother is so difficult because you are being constantly pulled. Photograph Nick Bradshaw Walsh will not be alone on stage. Her character Virginia plays the same scene 100 times, each lasting seven minutes, each with a different male character, all called Marty, 100 Martys in total. In Cork, as in other cities where the show has been performed, the Martys are mostly amateurs, with some professionals in the mix. Will there be anyone famous? 'I think there are surprises,' Walsh says cautiously. 'I think it will be a mix of people I have worked with before, and who are interested in the theme of the project. But I don't know, and I won't know until I see them on stage on the night – if there are any. The last thing I want is to spend 24 hours wondering if Liam Neeson is coming.' Or indeed, Cillian Murphy. Or Chris O'Dowd. The core of the lines spoken by each character in each scene stays the same, but the scene itself has the possibility of opening in various different ways. The male character, by improvising, can choose what kind of relationship he wants to have with Virginia. None will have rehearsed with Walsh, so until each scene starts, she will have no idea which back story the person playing opposite her will choose. 'The opening of the scene is a window of opportunity for them to say something along the lines of 'As your brother,' if they don't want any romantic interaction. Or, 'As your dad,' or, 'As your friend.' So they can set their own parameters if they want to. Essentially it is all about relationships.' Stage directions allow for various kinds of action, and little pieces of physical exercise and respite for the actor. 'There's an opportunity to have a dance, there's an opportunity to have a drink, there's an opportunity to sit or to eat. You get an opportunity to sit down briefly, but other than that you are on the go. It's very physical. Then there is an opportunity at the end of each scene for the participant to choose to end the interaction in a positive or negative way. As much as my character is having a monumental breakdown, the men remain main characters in their lives all the time.' Walsh does the scene seven times, with some minutes at the end of each hour to reset the stage again. 'The props might have been moved, the drink might have been spilt. You stay on stage the whole time while that is happening, and then every few hours there's a comfort break, to have a pee, or fix make-up.' In The Second Woman Eileen Walsh plays the same scene 100 times, each lasting seven minutes, each with a different male character, all called Marty, 100 Martys in total. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw When the show was performed in London at the Young Vic in 2023, Walsh queued for three hours to watch a three-hour slot. 'We had to wait for people coming out to be able to buy tickets,' she explains. Walsh had no idea that two years later, she herself would be playing this extraordinary role. How do you rehearse for such a role? 'The rehearsal process is two weeks, and by day two you are working with four actors in turn. They will give me a flavour of what to do if someone freezes on the night, or if they are going on too long.' These actors won't be appearing in the performance; they will be trying to work through some of the different possible variations of the same seven-minute scene. But no element of preparation will come close to replicating what the actual night of performance will bring. Both Breckon and Randall will be coming over to Cork from Australia for the rehearsals, and to see her 24-hour performance. The Second Woman will be Cork-born Walsh's first major stage role in Ireland since returning from Britain last October. She lived there for some 30 years, first with husband Stuart McCaffer, and then as a family with their children, Tippi and Ethel. It's impossible to see acting as a life choice in Ireland now. How do you get a mortgage? Have kids? I don't know how young actors do it — Eileen Walsh 'Tippi is 19 and was born in Edinburgh.' (She's named for Tippi Hedren, now 95, who famously appeared in Hitchcock's The Birds; mother of Melanie Griffith, grandmother of Dakota Johnson.) 'I had watched The Birds, and thought Tippi was such a lovely name,' Walsh says. 'Ethel was born in London and she is 16. The girls were partly responsible for us moving back. Tippi was really interested in coming back and maybe doing drama school here. And we found a lovely school for Ethel. It kind of made sense.' When I ask if her children will be going to see the show, Walsh says her rehearsal time in Cork coincides with Ethel's Junior Cert. She thus won't be available at home for reassuring in-person hugs with her exam student. 'Being a mother is so difficult because you are being constantly pulled.' Tippi and Ethel have a better understanding and tolerance of parents being temporarily absent for work than most of their peers, having been raised in a household with two creative parents (McCaffer is a sculptor). After being away from Ireland for 30 years, both the paucity of available housing and the cost of it was a deep shock to Walsh when they returned. 'Looking for a rental for two adults and two kids, the costs were eye watering. Not only could we not get in the door for a lot of places, but the costs involved in trying to rent a two-bedroom flat while we were looking for a house were crazy. 'The costs are crippling. Dublin is laughing in the face of London when it comes to housing prices.' They did eventually find somewhere. 'We bought a wreck of a house we are desperately trying to do up.' Walsh wonders aloud how actors in Ireland today, especially in Dublin, are managing to develop a professional career while also finding affordable housing. 'I moved out of home at 17 and it was possible to pay your rent – and also have a great time. It is just not possible any more, and I don't know how younger versions of me are coping now. 'Financially it's having the result of turning acting into a middle-class profession, because what young kids from a working class background can afford to hire rehearsal space and to live within Dublin? It's impossible to see acting as a life choice in Ireland now. How do you get a mortgage? Have kids? I don't know how young actors do it. Besides, of course, moving away from Ireland.' Eileen Walsh: 'I moved out of home at 17 and it was possible to pay your rent and also have a great time ... I don't know how younger versions of me are coping now.' Photograph: Nick Bradshaw Back in 1996, when Walsh was still a student, she was cast in the role of Runt opposite Cillian Murphy as Pig in Enda Walsh's seminal then new play, Disco Pigs. (The two Walshes are not related.) The whole thing was a sensational success for all three of them, and burnished their names brightly. When the film version was cast a few years later, Murphy remained in the role of Pig, while Elaine Cassidy was given the role of Runt. Walsh said at the time she didn't even know the auditions were being held. It's a topic that has come up over and over again in interviews during the intervening years, the What If's around that casting. It's clear that Walsh was deeply hurt. She was 'heartbroken' at the decision to not cast her in this role that she had first brought to life. One can only imagine the strain it put on her friendship with Murphy at the time, for a start. It must also have been difficult for Elaine Cassidy to keep hearing publicly how something that was nothing to do with her had so affected the morale of another fellow actor. 'I feel like I've spoken a lot about that,' Walsh says now. 'It was a lesson for me very early on. And it wasn't the first or the last time I got bad news. And just because the role was yours doesn't mean it stays yours. They are heartbreaking things to learn. Or if someone says they want you for a job and then they change their mind, that's a f***ing killer as well. It's not something that gets better with age. It just burns more, because the opportunities are better, so the burn is greater.' [ From the archive: Cillian Murphy and Eileen Walsh on 'Disco Pigs': 'It was the ignorance of youth' Opens in new window ] At this point in our conversation, there are a number of other expletives scattered by Walsh, as if this old and sad wound has triggered some kind of latent, but still important, emotion. We talk for a while about how ageing in the acting profession – wherever one is located in the world – frequently works against women in a way it does not against men. 'I think women are constantly being told that for men, acting is a marathon and for women it's a sprint, because you have a short time to make an impact. You're like an avocado,' she says. I ask her to repeat that last word, unsure if I've heard it correctly. 'Avocado,' she says firmly. 'You're nearly ready, nearly ready – then you're ripe, then you've gone off. That's what you're made to feel like. Do it now, while you're lovely and young and your boobs are still upright, or whatever, While you're taut. And I think that is a total f***ing lie. It might be a marathon for men, but to remain in this business as a woman, it's like a decathlon. You have to f***ing go and go and go and it takes tenaciousness and being stubborn and strident to know your values. 'Men are allowed to feel old and to be seen like a fine wine, whereas I think for women it just takes so much boldness to stay in this profession as you age. And also to play parts where you don't have to always be the f***ing mother or the disappointed wife.' Eileen Walsh as Eileen Furlong in Small Things Like These. Photograph: Enda Bowe In the last year, Walsh has appeared in three significant screen productions: Small Things Like These; Say Nothing , the Disney + adaptation of Patrick Radden Keefe's book about the Troubles in Northern Ireland in which she plays Bridie Dolan, the aunt of Dolours and Marian Price who was blinded in a bomb-making accident; and Small Town, Big Story in the role of Catherine, a wheelchair user who is having a steamy affair with a colleague. In Small Things Like These, she co-stars with Oscar-winning Cillian Murphy, three decades on from Disco Pigs. 'A long circle completed,' she says. [ Small Things Like These: Cillian Murphy's performance is fiercely internalised in a film emblematic of a changing Ireland Opens in new window ] Claire Keegan's novella is set in 1985 in Co Wexford, and focuses on what happens when Bill Furlong, a fuel merchant, husband to Eileen Furlong and father of five daughters, discovers what is going on at the local convent, which is also a laundry that serves the town. Murphy – whom she calls Cill – contacted her when she was playing Elizabeth Proctor in Arthur Miller's The Crucible at the National Theatre in London. He asked her to read the script for Small Things, which Enda Walsh had written. 'I know that Cill as producer was very intent on working with people he knows and loves and worked with previously and had kind of relationships with. The whole movie was spotted with friends and long-time collaborators.' After she had read the script, she went to meet director Tim Mielants. She and Murphy 'had to do something similar to a chemistry meet. That meeting was filmed when we worked on some scenes together.' Small Things Like These: Eileen Walsh as Eileen Furlong and Cillian Murphy as Bill Furlong. Photograph: Enda Bowe/Lionsgate The two play the married couple in the movie, Bill and Eileen Furlong. 'It's a very tired relationship. They are a long time into the marriage, and they are very used to each other, so it's a no chemistry-chemistry meet, if that makes sense.' Walsh got the part. I remind her of what she has said earlier in the interview about being fed up of playing roles of mothers and disappointed wives, which one could see as a fair description of her role of Eileen Furlong. This role, Walsh makes clear, was very different from any kind of generic cliche of playing a mother or wife. 'Playing Eileen, she wasn't a put-upon wife, but was a mirror of what an awful lot of women were like at that time in Ireland. [ Irish Times readers pick Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These as the best Irish book of the 21st century Opens in new window ] 'Claire Keegan's writing is such a gift to any actor. Claire's story behind everybody is very dark. Nobody gets an easy ride with a Claire Keegan character, and that's a real draw to any actor. She doesn't soft soap anything. For me to play that character, to play Eileen, meant I saw so much of my own mother and the women that I grew up underneath, [women] I grew up looking up to. It was a hard time. They were trying to make money stretch very hard, at a time when dinners would have to be simple and very much planned to the last slice of bread. They were not women spouting rainbows.' As it happens, Walsh's next big upcoming role after the Cork Midsummer Festival will be that of Jocasta, Oedipus's mother, in Marina Carr's new play, The Boy. It will open at the Abbey in the autumn as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival. She'll play a mother in this interpretation of a Greek myth, certainly, but again, no ordinary one. Rehearsals start in July. [ From the archive: Eileen Walsh: How I reconcile motherhood with playing Medea Opens in new window ] Meanwhile, back to her modern-day Greek marathon in Cork this month. Due to the length of the show, there are a variety of ticket types the public can avail of. You can buy a ticket for the entire 24 hours, and either stay at the venue for the whole time or leave and return. On return, you may have to queue again and wait for a seat to become free. Other tickets are being sold for scheduled time slots for a number of hours. If you choose to come for the 2am slot, for instance, you'll pay a bit less for your ticket. There will also be some tickets available at the door, although it's likely you'll have to queue. There will be pop-up food and drink venues in the foyer to provide sustenance. The Cork Opera House has a capacity of 1,000 seats. If those seats keep turning over a during the 24 hours, thousands of people will have an opportunity to see this remarkable highlight of Cork Midsummer Festival: truly a night like no other this year in Ireland.
Irish Times
an hour ago
- Irish Times
Re-reading my teenage diaries: joy and pain radiates off the pages
I didn't realise it at the time, but I came of age at the very end of an era. As someone who was born in the 1970s, I turned out to be part of the very last generation of habitual letter writers. For centuries, people with the means and the education had left written traces of themselves behind. Some wrote diaries; almost all wrote letters. When I started college in 1993, letters were the only way of keeping in touch with faraway friends. But then, incredibly quickly, everything changed. During my college years I wrote dozens of letters – letters to friends on Erasmus or summers abroad, letters from my own summers in Berlin and Boston. Sometimes I abandoned a letter and left it unfinished, tucked inside a notebook or folder pad, because so much had happened since I started writing it, the letter was out of date. But in the summer of 1997, just after I graduated, I got my first email address. And letters vanished from my life completely. While I was writing those letters, I also kept a diary, documenting my life (or more accurately, my extremely dramatic feelings about my life) in a series of ring-bound notebooks. For decades those unfinished letters and diaries were hidden away in my wardrobe and in a box in my parents' house. Until last summer, when I unearthed them and found myself travelling back in time. My first novel for adults, Our Song, is the story of Tadhg and Laura, who were bandmates in college before their friendship ended acrimoniously when they were 21. Sixteen years later their lives are very different – Tadhg is a massively successful musician, while Laura's just been laid off from her advertising job. But then Tadhg contacts Laura and asks her to finish a song they started writing together in their college days. The novel's narrative moves between the older Tadhg and Laura as they rediscover their old musical and personal chemistry, and the story of their younger, messier selves. And that's where my diaries and letters came in. READ MORE It's a long time, to put it bluntly, since I was 21. If I wanted to accurately capture the feelings of the younger Laura, I needed to remind myself what it felt like to be young and messy and full of big emotions. I needed to remember what it felt like to make stupid romantic choices, to never be honest about my feelings, to have my heart broken. Luckily, I had the perfect means to do just that. [ Anna Carey: 'Today's teenagers are pleasingly similar to my generation' Opens in new window ] When I opened the large cloth-covered notebook that covered the period of my life from 1994 to summer 1997, I thought reading about my college years for the first time in decades might be funny. I knew it would be helpful for the book. I didn't, for one second, predict that it would be so emotionally intense. Back when I wrote my first young adult novels, I had looked at my diaries from my mid-teens and laughed at the melodrama of my little teenage self. That girl from the early 1990s felt like a kid. She felt like another person. But the writer of my college diaries didn't feel like another person. She felt like me. Younger, of course, and much messier and more dramatic, but to my own surprise I didn't feel a massive sense of distance between the person who wrote about her college heartbreaks and the fortysomething reading about them three decades later. And so when I read my way through that notebook and the one that followed, I was reliving the highs and lows of my mid-1990s life. I found myself feeling genuinely angry with people I hadn't thought of in decades, about incidents I had totally forgotten. I found myself emotionally experiencing all of it. My joy and my pain radiated off the page so strongly, it was almost overwhelming, decades later. Anna Carey at Two Pups Cafe in Fairview, Dublin After I told a friend about my weirdly emotional research project, she unearthed the letters I'd written to her back in the day. Then I found the letters she wrote to me, and for weeks we photographed and WhatsApped every page of our 1990s correspondence to each other, both of us weeping with laughter over long-ago misadventures. And it wasn't just letters. In college, to practise her typing, my friend went through a phase of transcribing our conversations on her family computer as we chatted in her house. Miraculously, she found printouts of these transcripts and suddenly there we were, our brilliant, hilarious, stupid young selves, with our in-jokes and personal dramas, talking about gigs and parties and people we forgot about decades ago. It made me laugh until I cried and then suddenly to my surprise I was crying not with laughter, but at the sheer intensity of this contact with my own youth. It's a strange thing, going back in time. And sometimes you realise the story you've told yourself about that period could have been a very different one. Reading my diaries and letters, I could clearly see the narrative I created for myself at the time, one that I internalised and that still affected how I saw my younger days. But decades later, I saw that I could have chosen to tell a very different story. My younger self made decisions that, at the time, I refused to see were decisions. I put up with situations that were making me angry and miserable when I could have just walked away. Early on in college a boy told me he wasn't in love with me any more. At the time it was the most blunt, hurtful thing anyone had ever said to me, one that hung over me for months. Unsurprisingly, I remembered that all too well. But I had no memory of the fact, documented in my diary almost as an aside, that he told me it was because he didn't think I had ever really been in love with him. And looking back, I realised he had been right (on that point, at least). But when I was young and hurting, I didn't see it that way, or I didn't care, because what mattered was that he had rejected me. After writing that detail in my diary I forgot about it. How would the next year of my life have been different if I hadn't forgotten the part I'd played in that relationship's end? If I'd framed the incident as one in which I wasn't totally passive? It made me wonder what stories I'm telling myself about my life now. That's a lot to get from a 31-year-old notebook from Miss Selfridge. [ How I turned my book The Making of Mollie into a play – with a little help from some young innovators Opens in new window ] The French writer Henry de Montherlant famously wrote that 'happiness writes in white ink on a white page' and so it's not surprising that most of my diary entries were full of angst. In summer 1997 I went to Boston and fell in love with an American man (Gen Z might disapprove of age-gap relationships but they have nothing on my generation; my friend unearthed a letter to a mutual pal in which she wrote that 'Anna has two jobs and a Texan lover who's 25 '. Bear in mind I turned 22 towards the end of that summer so this was hardly a problematic gap). I was very, very happy and in a healthy romantic relationship for the first time in my life, and I hardly wrote in my diary all summer, apart from a few breathless lines marvelling over my magical good luck. It was the American boy who set up my first email address for me, and when I tearfully returned to Dublin we corresponded not via letters but emails, all of which vanished into the digital ether long ago. I didn't know it, but that was the beginning of the end for me and letters. My diary writing continued, but it also petered out after I got together with my now-husband back in 2001. My diary thrived on drama, and a happy, settled relationship is not very dramatic. Anna Carey and her husband-to-be Patrick Freyne on stage with their band El Diablo circa 2000. But then, to my surprise, both diary writing and letters returned to my life. About 10 years ago I got a 'one line a day' five-year diary, a dated journal in which you write a single sentence about each day. It wasn't like my old diary, where I poured out my soul, but it was a written record of my day to day life – something I wished I'd done more back in the '90s, instead of spending my summer in Berlin writing very little about my magical experiences in an amazing city at an incredible time in its history but a lot about my stupid boy-related angst. Letters returned in an unexpected form. At the height of lockdown in 2020, the New Yorker magazine writer Rachel Syme started a pen pal exchange, and I signed up. I've been corresponding with my Brooklyn pen pal Erin for five years now; we hit it off from the first letter, and I love that there are now written records of our lives and thoughts and feelings on each side of the Atlantic. When I was writing my new book, I wrote to Erin about its progress, sharing the highs and the lows. It makes me happy knowing that somewhere in Brooklyn is a series of postcards and letters telling the story of how I wrote Our Song. For a book that couldn't have been written without handwritten journals and letters, it feels just right. I think my younger self would approve. Our Song is published by Hachette Ireland. Anna Carey will be talking to Sinéad Moriarty as part of the Dalkey Book Festival on June 14th.
Irish Times
an hour ago
- Irish Times
Trump country: ‘Most people just see those of us who live here as hicks and hillbillies'
'There are two words that a southwest Virginian just cannot say,' Bill Smith explains as he sips a whiskey in Good Times, one of the more recent places to open in the town of Big Stone Gap. He pauses for effect. ''Yes.' And 'No'.' Because they don't want to be impolite? 'Well. That's part of it. They also don't want to hang their asses. You can hear it in the jokes. Someone can say something really cutting. And then they'll say, 'Awh, I was just joking with ya.' I came from a place where if you don't answer a question straight, you get: what's the matter, can't you make up your mind?' READ MORE Smith moved from Montana to Big Stone Gap (population 5,114), one of Virginia's many recovering coal towns, 30 years ago. He brought with him a sense of adventure inherited from his mother, who was a big-band singer from Chicago and, later, a renowned drama schoolteacher in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Smith is one of those people who move in no hurry and yet seem to have packed a thousand lives into seven decades. He was a firefighter in California, plus a musician, plus an actor. In Virginia, he worked manual jobs, then as a sports reporter covering the Big Stone Gap school football team during a few feverish all-state seasons. He also curated the acclaimed Crooked Road festival. On the afternoon we meet he has just finished-up substitute teaching at the local high school. He'd never heard of Wise County, much less Big Stone Gap, before the 1990s. But one night he caught a performance by Roadside Theater, an Appalachian touring group, and he met Nancy Countiss. 'That was it,' he chuckles. 'I came out here in 1994. Not on a whim. But I fell in love. The last show I did was in Montana, and 10 days later I was learning how to make hydraulic hoses here for minimum wage.' By 'out here' he means the pioneer trail in reverse: crossing the fabled Cumberland Gap, the mountain pass that intersects the Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia state lines, and into the triangular wedge of counties in southwest Virginia. He arrived just as the coal companies had begun their exodus, disrupting the deeply established patterns of life throughout Appalachia, the 13-state mountainous region of the United States that has acquired a reputation that is in some ways distinct from and deeper than the country itself. Bill Smith: 'Education was never a priority bcause you could go into the mines and make more than the teacher' Cumberland Gap viewing point Bill Smith doesn't yet consider himself local, 'although it helps that my wife's family's been here 300 years'. He's a natural raconteur and has a fizzing mind with which he bounces through topics and centuries at will. Over the course of an afternoon, he tells me that here, the big open-plan Good Times restaurant, was the original location for the town newspaper the 'Post', where he began working in 1996 'just as Westmoreland coal was leaving and things were tense'. He talks about the difference between formal schooling and inherited knowledge. 'Education was never a priority. Because you could go into the mines and make more than the teacher. People have a tendency to look down on miners. But it is highly technical and dangerous and always has been.' That takes him on the rich seam of storytelling running through the Pow [Powell] Valley, and the inherited music tradition. He talks about the Bristol museum, about an hour away, where Ralph Peer all but created the US country music tradition through a series of recordings he made in the summer of 1927. 'And you can't throw a dead cat around here without hitting a musician. Some of the best old-time and bluegrass music in the country is within 100 miles of here. Last Saturday there were three different bands in town. But before the pandemic there weren't really any bars here to speak of. For years, it used to be the front porch.' He explains how the consequences of the pandemic are still taking a toll. 'Too many kids came out of Covid damaged. They were feral. This is our first proper year back in school. The pandemic in this area – we had almost 1/10th of our population die. I lost 14 friends. I think it was over 1,000 people in Wise County.' Something jigs a memory of an inherited story: his wife's great-great grandfather, eight years old and walking for days with his family on the move to Wise County. 'He was carrying the family pewter. And a chair. Well, seems he got real tired of hanging on to the pewter and he chucked it. Piece by piece. Into the woods. But we have that chair still.' Then he says, out of the blue, ' Daniel Boone walked the ground right about my house,' as if the famed pioneer had passed by just last week. Trump country: In the 2024 election Wise County returned Donald Trump with an 81 per cent vote, neighbouring Lee County with 85 per cent The overarching point is that while Smith still considers himself 'an oddity' to the true locals in town and in this part of Appalachia, the richness and singularity of the region has him spellbound. 'It's wild,' he says. 'And it's conservative. And it has cultural depth.' It is, we agree, a long way from Washington, longer than its 430 miles suggest. You can catch a little of Virginia's hauteur in its nickname, 'Old Dominion'. Arlington House, perched above the cemetery, looms over Washington, DC , as the former home of the Confederate general Robert E Lee. If you drive the I-80 and swing a right past Senator Tim Kaine's constituency office in Abingdon, after which the state turns truly mountainous and bewitching, you will finally end up in Lee County, named after the famed general's father. The cross-state drive takes about seven hours, allowing stops for petrol and Dunkin' Donuts. In the 2024 presidential election, Wise County returned Donald Trump with an 81 per cent vote. Neighbouring Lee County voted Trump by 85 per cent. These are thumping returns in counties that can make for grim reading in the statistical data: 27 per cent of people live below the poverty line in Lee County. An unofficial stat: in an area of gorgeous natural beauty, Lee County shows no hotels on the usual listing sites. Barbara Kingsolver, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Demon Copperhead, which is set in southwest Virginia. Photograph: University of Edinburgh/PA It has, more recently acquired a literary significance as the setting for Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver's phenomenally successful, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that transposes the blueprint for David Copperfield on to a live-wire teenager in southwest Virginia during the opioid epidemic that ravaged this part of the state. Kingsolver grew up in Kentucky and lives in Virginia. She has railed, wonderfully, against the authenticity of vice-president JD Vance's memoir Hillbilly Elegy which, she said, was dismissed by neighbours for 'the hollowness, the fact that he isn't really one of us'. In the same 2024 Guardian interview , she said she has, despite the accolades, 'dealt with this condescension, this anti-hillbilly bigotry for a lot of my life'. [ Barbara Kingsolver: 'The first time I set foot in Ireland I felt so at home. Something about the language, the culture' Opens in new window ] Kingsolver is a fearsome defender against all the national prejudices Appalachia has faced down. More impressively, she has put her money where her mouth is. January marked the opening of the Higher Ground recovery centre in the town of Pennington Gap. It's a bungalow dwelling in the heart of the town that has been converted to a refuge for women recovering from addiction. The shelter is funded by Kingsolver, with absolutely no fanfare. Over lunch in the McDonald's down the street, Elizbeth Brooks, who grew up in Lee County and runs the centre, tells me she understands exactly what Kingsolver means by the casual prejudice thrown at Appalachians. 'I feel like it varies. I mean there is a stigma to our area. And we are – I don't know, most people just see those of us who live in Appalachia as hicks and hillbillies and all that. And they do. And … I agree with Barbara. On the TV shows and everything it's all they focus on. They don't focus on the beautiful areas up here. They don't spend time here. 'My own family, when we travel, if you go to a bigger area, people can be rude and disrespectful. Here we are friendly. My dad will wave at every single car. The finger raised from the wheel. Even the counties surrounding Lee County will kind of make jokes … 'Oh they're from Lee County'. Some people take offence. And especially with schools and stuff too. There's … a snobbery.' About eight years ago, one of the worst moments of Brooks's life catapulted her into an unlikely transformation. She was eight months pregnant with her first child when she says she was arrested and, because of previous charges, placed on a Court Recovery programme. She had, in her teens, graduated from alcohol and marijuana to opioids and methamphetamines, dropping out of Wise college and falling into a pattern of addiction. Elizabeth Brooks: 'If you go to a bigger area, people can be rude and disrespectful. Here we are friendly' 'When you are in addiction there is a lot of isolation,' she says. 'You shut everybody out.' A 2019 report by the Washington Post included data analysis recording that, between 2006-2012, 34.9 million opioids, or 120 pills per resident, were shipped into Wise County alone. Brooks regards her eldest child Jayden as 'my miracle baby'. She has been sober since July 7th, 2018, and was working as an addiction counsellor when she was asked to run the new centre. She speaks with Kingsolver regularly, usually on Zoom. 'She's been wonderful. I don't know how she does it because she's a very busy woman.' There are six women in the residence now. 'I do their medications. It's kind of about building up their stability and accountability and getting them stable in the real world. A couple of my girls … they are, I wouldn't say hot-headed, but they are little firecrackers. And their personalities clash a little. So, it is kind of learning how to be emotionally stable as well. I tell them: there is more to recovery than just being sober. You need to work on yourself, get your mental health right, get your job and just be accountable for yourself.' One of the very first residents, Crystal, who is working at the counter in McDonald's, talks about the transformative effect the home has had on her life. Brooks likes that prospective residents be sober for about five or six weeks before taking a place there and returning to employment is part of the deal. But it can be difficult finding a job in Lee County. The Appalachian Regional Commission reports that in Lee between 2018-2022, 26 per cent of people lived in poverty and the average household income was $41,000 (it is $75,000 nationally). Brooks works nine to five. Jayden is autistic. She is due to give birth to her third child this summer. Evenings are busy: weekends a chance to come up for air. 'I tell my girls too – I'm no different from they are or any better because in my recovery, at any point, it's always a battle for me, too, just like it is for them. I've learned a lot about my triggers and staying away from them situations I don't need and that's what keeps me sober. Because I'm not saying I still couldn't have a bad day and go down the wrong path. We were like a runaway train ... I felt like we didn't have any kind of leadership whatsoever — Hank Fannon 'And before my fiance now - a thousand people would tell you I would never be engaged to a police officer in my life. And I would never have been with somebody who treated me with the most respect, that I respect myself with. It's very different now, and I am very grateful.' She and her fiance have held back on their wedding date because of the growing uncertainty over Medicaid changes; her boy is dependent on the treatment he receives through the programme. She is closely tracking the political conversation on autism taking place in the capital. In April, US health secretary Robert F Kennedy pledged 'a massive testing and research effort' to determine the cause of autism. Trump has appeared to suggest that vaccines could be to blame for autism rates, although decades of research have concluded there is no link between the two. [ 'Slippery slope to eugenics': advocates reject Robert F Kennedy jnr's national autism database in US Opens in new window ] 'There aren't many options for my son around here. So that would affect him. I feel like that would have made a really big impact on the election if people knew that. Just because it is going to hurt everyone. And I don't really see the helping part of it. I don't understand how that helps because unless you have a child with autism you don't really – there is nothing that causes it. And I think they could have worded it a lot better.' Hank Fannon: 'Trump is the most patriotic thing that has come through in a long time' Still, this is steadfast Trump country. And the ARC reports slowly climbing figures of median income levels and employment throughout the region. There is no sign of any real crisis of faith in Trump Republicanism here. On the way back from Big Stone Gap, I find Hank Fannon at the telephone in the office of the immaculately tidy tyre business he owns. Like seemingly everyone in this part of the country, Fannon's voice is rich and melodic. A television in the corner of the office is showing Fox News on silent and images of Trump's recent visit to the Middle East. The Fannons are in both the tyre and real estate business. 'It's a little tighter-fisted than it was,' he says. 'But Trump … he's the most patriotic thing that has come through in a long time. That shooting, wherever it was ... that put him in the White House. And the tariff thing is impacting, yeah. I sell some American-made stuff. All the China-built stuff. It's probably raised prices, $20, $30 a tyre. And I can't eat nothin. 'People are subject to doing impulse spending with this kind of stuff. If you need a tyre, it's just like going to the doctor: hurt's bad; 'I gotta get something done now.' But we were like a runaway train the other way. I felt like we didn't have any kind of leadership whatsoever. I knew when Trump came back into play it would tighten up a little – for a while.' But property prices, always modest, are beginning to rise. Appalachia is not immune to the property escalation heist that has gripped America. People are noticing the extraordinary value to be had in this part of the country – and the stunning landscape. We talk for a while about the economic realities of the region. Fannon sighs before answering. 'This is a depressed community, first off. There is a lot of poverty here. So, indirectly I am living off fixed-income people. So … I don't know. It bothers me some. We sell real estate in this region and it has been cheap real estate. But right now ... you can put a sign in the yard. A lady died three weeks ago and her daughter and I went to school together. And it sold in two days.' Joey O'Quinn works part-time in the tourism centre and plays in a band called the Hillbilly Hippies It also sold for well above the asking price. Up in Big Stone Gap, Joey O'Quinn, who works part-time in the tourism centre, is talking to a friend of his, Les Bailey. There's a bottle of gift whiskey on the counter and they joke about never opening a second bottle before noon. Bailey is rushing off to take their mutual friend, Larry Mullins, to the doctor. They all play in a band called the Hillbilly Hippies. Tourism is beginning to make an impression. Big Stone Gap is slowly opening itself up to the idea that it can be an attraction to outsiders, with new restaurants and cafes alongside the staunch jeweller's and legal firms on the main street. It has the natural splendour and the unrivalled music heritage and – the scarcest of commodities – authenticity. The local cafes and restaurants are friendly and without affectation of any sort. O'Quinn, who worked as a regulator with mining companies, believes the future for this part of Virginia lies in tourism, flipping the 'hillbilly' stigma after centuries. 'We have to be sensitive to that balance. This has been an impoverished region, yes, since the 1800s. But there are so many good things in terms of music and the mountains and all that culture.' Close to the tight triangle of land where the three state lines of Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky intersect, people driving the US-58 often do a double take as they pass by Junior Whitt's place. The striking thing about these counties is the absence of Trump banners or mementoes. But Whitt's place is a shrine to Maga-ism. Junior Whitt's place is a shrine to Maga-ism. Photograph: Keith Duggan He is sitting on a sun chair enjoying a smoke when I stop to ask him what inspired all of this. We find ourselves looking at the Confederate flags he has hanging. He says he hangs them because they are part of the history of the state, of the region. Often, strangers stop and ask to take photographs and Whitt will engage them in conversation. 'Well, from what I'm hearing all the time: they are for Trump,' he says in a gentle voice. 'They are not for the other side. I don't go for the transgender stuff and all this critical race theory stuff. I don't go for this stuff and a lot of other people don't go for it. That's why I'm against the Democrats. I don't vote for all that. And a lot of other people say, well, I don't vote for that either. I say, well, it's the same damn package. If you vote for 'em you, vote for it. They say, 'I never thought about it that way; you're right'. Yeah, I'm right. 'This house across the road ... they are big Democrats. We get along and everything. I hear it every day. People from out of state come through, see this, stop and walk around. And they're for Trump too. If the Democrats got back in, they would have destroyed us.' We chat for a while more. When there are no cars passing, it is incredibly serene here. Whitt waves an arm against the blue sky in the vague direction of his childhood home, on a farm near the Pow river. His parents were Democrats. He says his father would turn in his grave if he could see the party now. He sounds suddenly frustrated and tired by the state of American politics. 'See, back then you had some good Democrats. They sat down and talked with people.'
