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Times
30-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
This intense tale of a destructive love affair is a masterpiece
According to the novelist Angela Carter, the feminist press Virago — of which she was a leading light — was fuelled in part by 'the desire that no daughter of mine should ever be in the position to write By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, exquisite prose though it might contain. 'By Grand Central Station I Tore Off His Balls' would be more like it.' The man whose balls needed to be torn off was the poet George Barker, a heavy-drinking roué who fathered 15 children by four women. This tomcattery, however, did not diminish Elizabeth Smart's love for him. It seemed that nothing could, for hers was a frenzied love, sparked in the late Thirties when she chanced upon Barker's poetry in a bookshop on Charing Cross Road and declared herself smitten. Until her death in 1986 she kept every memento of their relationship stored under her bed, as their four children would eventually discover. The intense, destructive romance between Smart, a budding writer from an affluent Canadian family, and Barker, a fêted but impecunious poet from Essex, inspired her best-known work. By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, a slim volume of poetic prose, garnered little attention when it was published in 1945, but gained a cult following after it was reissued in 1966, its lyricism later influencing musicians such as Morrissey. After Smart's fateful encounter with Barker's poetry she struck up a correspondence with him. Although Barker was married and teaching in Japan, she paid to fly him and his wife to visit her in California where she had joined a writers' colony. The book's opening is based on this episode and what follows is a chaotic, rhapsodic account of the early years of their affair, which would play out across continents and last for decades. I use 'account' loosely for the story is fictionalised and deliberately threadbare — the mere outline of a love triangle between nameless characters — and the prose is a maelstrom of metaphors. As the narrator plucks lines from TS Eliot and draws on classical mythology, pining like Dido for Aeneas, we are left to piece together the events that have occurred. Along the way we deduce liaisons, pregnancy, exasperated parents (hers), broken promises (his), bitterness and rows. At one stage the lovers are arrested for — we presume — being an unmarried couple intent on having sex and crossing a US state border. This is where the biblical language comes into its own (the book's title, of course, is taken from Psalm 137, but with the rivers of Babylon replaced by Grand Central Station, where the final chapter is set). During the interrogation the policeman's questions are spliced with verses from the Song of Solomon: 'What relation is this man to you? (My beloved is mine and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies) … Were you intending to commit fornication in Arizona? (He shall lie all night betwixt my breasts.)' • What we're reading this week — by the Times books team The hard truth is that it is difficult to sympathise with the narrator or her beloved. Smart's moral compass is often as out of kilter as Barker's. In the clutches of her infatuation she makes questionable choices (understatement!) and is so beholden to her volatile, self-centred lover that 'neither the shabby streets nor the cooped-up hotel ever became for me, as they were always for him, symbols of wretchedness and no cash'. So a light read this is not. Every page is driven by torment. As the author and critic Brigid Brophy put it, 'The entire book is a wound.' Yet Smart's ability to capture the pain and ecstasy of love is nothing short of extraordinary. Her narrator, knowing the spectacular hurt that lies ahead, declares that she is 'mortally pierced with the seeds of love' and the cooing mourning-doves 'are the hangmen pronouncing my sentence'. After the Second World War, Smart worked as an advertising copywriter to support her family. She joined Queen magazine in the early Sixties, co-wrote cookery books and eventually settled in a remote part of Suffolk to focus on her creative writing. There were several short collections of poetry and, most notably, The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals (1978) in which she returned to her and Barker's tale, again by way of a nameless female narrator and her faithless lover. • Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what's top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List I suspect that Carter was more approving of that later book title yet it was By Grand Central Station that she hailed as 'a masterpiece'. If you can brace yourself for a heavy dose of abstraction there are lines of searing beauty that will long stay with you. By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart (HarperCollins £10.99 pp160). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
Daily Mail
24-07-2025
- Daily Mail
Illegal traders and pedicabs fleecing tourists on Westminster Bridge are fined £20k in council crackdown
Illegal traders and pedicabs on Westminster Bridge have been fined more than £20,000 in a council crackdown after fleecing tourists. Seemingly harmless rickshaw bikes ferrying tourists around have become a serious concern for Transport for London (TfL) over the safety of the bikes, anti-social behaviour by its drivers and rip-off prices. Meanwhile, illegal traders flogging goods such as peanuts, balloons and hot dogs have been swindling tourists out of their cash without paying tax on their earnings. The fines, costs and victim surcharges total £20,202.50 following the latest round of prosecutions at City of Westminster Magistrates Court on Wednesday. Prosecutions for five unlicensed street traders operating on Westminster Bridge selling peanuts and balloons saw £11,127.50 in convictions handed down. One of the vendors was convicted for the second time in two months for previously selling hotdogs. Additionally, nine pedicabs operators - several repeat offenders - have been hit with some of the biggest individual fines totalling £9,075.00 following the latest round of rickshaw bikes prosecutions. The riders' fines, costs, and victim surcharges ranged from £750 to £1,460 under the Control of Pollution Act 1974. A shop on Charing Cross Road, hit with the largest fine of £3,382, had previously received multiple warnings for selling a multitude of souvenir goods on the street. While the company was dissolved in the lead up to court, the director was still held personally liable and convicted. Teams from the central London local Authority will continue to patrol hotspot areas, warning visitors against the dangers of using pedicabs, and work with the Met to prosecute those in breach of current legislation. Given the repeat prosecutions, the council is exploring options such as injunctions or banning orders for the more prolific riders. Deputy Leader and Cabinet Member for Children and Public Protection Cllr Aicha Less said: 'This is Westminster, not the Wild West. These fines send a clear message: if you break the rules in our city you will end up out of pocket and out of excuses.' 'Whilst we work with TfL to finalise a structured the licencing scheme is being finalised, our City Inspectors continue to prosecute pedicab drivers and partner with our neighbours in Lambeth and in the Metropolitan Police to ensure unsuspecting tourists are not ripped off.' Given the repeat prosecutions, the council is exploring options such as injunctions or banning orders for the more prolific riders Over the many years since arriving in England's capital, the appeal and charm of the rickshaw bike has sometimes descended into something darker - a way to rip people off. These concerns have run so deep that an official consultation was launched by TfL, which raises concerns over the safety of the bikes, anti-social behaviour by its drivers and rip-off prices. In TfL's consultation which opened on January 27, they said one of the main aims for regulating pedicabs in London was to 'make them as safe as possible', ensuring they are 'driven in a safe and professional way'. They are also proposing licensing requirements similar to taxis and private hire vehicles, meaning a pedicab driver's licence would be required, issued for one year at a time.
The Guardian
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘I threw it in the bin with everything else he gave me': the mix tapes that defined our lives
At 18 my go-to albums were Dog Man Star, His 'n' Hers and a mix tape called Really, Basically, In a Sort of a Way, Volume 1. Named after the mutterings of a particularly long-winded lecturer, it was the first of many TDK D60s – always the same brand! – from my mate Pat. We had met at our university's registration day a few weeks earlier and would be friends for more than 20 years until his death in 2018. By then he'd not only been on staff at the NME – teenage Pat's dream job – but also written a book about its history. Side A of the tape (entitled 'Barry Manilow Live!') has bands we'd bonded over, such as Kenickie and These Animal Men, two of our first London gigs together. Blur's Popscene is included because we were sweaty regulars at the club night of that name at LA2 in Charing Cross Road. The other one ('David Hasselhoff B-sides') includes Gallon Drunk, the Byrds and Stereolab, all a bit more mature, all nudges into new directions. Everything on the inlay card is in caps and even Pat's handwriting was cool. I hero-worshipped him well beyond our university years and he shaped my taste in films and fashion as much as music. When we were young he could be brutally, hilariously scathing about bands he despised; later, that energy would be spent more on championing than dissing. It's years since I owned a cassette player but, looking at the tape now, I'd forgotten it ends with a 'secret bonus track!' I'm guessing it's a shared guilty pleasure (Carter USM?) and can't wait to find out. It'll be another joke from not just a cool and funny friend but an all-round unfaltering one. Chris Wiegand Nobody had ever made me a mix tape (or a CD playlist as it would have more likely been, since I grew up in the 00s) until my 19th birthday, and even then it wasn't a proper one. Having failed to track down a blank CD in Madrid, where we were both working as au pairs, a girl from Colorado I wasn't exactly dating but who was definitely more than just a friend wrote me a list of songs on a page pulled out of a notepad. I remember reading it for the first time, with its loopy handwriting, doodles, and songs chosen just for me, and thinking it was the most romantic thing in the world. Like most 19-year-olds, I was confused and anxious about so many things, but she brought so much kindness and fun into my life. We were the same age, and I can't imagine that she had everything figured out herself, but she seemed to know more than me about most things, music included, and it was exciting to take a step into her world. I must have lost the scrap of paper at some point over the last decade, and now I can't recall a single song that was on there. I wish I did, and I wish I had a way of contacting that girl from Colorado – I still owe her a 'mix tape' in return. Lucy Knight I find it easily in a bag in the attic – it has a sticker of a cat smoking a spliff, cut around the spools: a remnant of the 90s ska band Hepcat. The one mix tape I would never bin. Chris gave it to me in late 1999. He was 17 and playing gigs at venues like the Astoria. I was 16 and couldn't go to most of the gigs at venues like the Astoria because it was a school night. It's not what you'd call your classic heart-on-sleeve emo mix. It's full of hardcore and punk anthems by bands such as Operation Ivy, Madball, Good Riddance and, randomly, multiple tracks by New Bomb Turks (he must have just bought their album at Tower Records in Piccadilly Circus, where he, then later we, would go on pilgrimages to find all the newest albums). There are also, seemingly, no songs on side B. I re-listen to the tape now on my grandpa's old cassette deck, and have to endure almost 45 minutes of static to get back to the start – I simply cannot risk pressing fast forward in case the whole precious thing gets chewed up. Then, all of a sudden, the radio-recorded dolphin tones of Mariah Carey emerge from the static singing Heartbreaker, a track he knew I loved more than any punk, then cuts off before Jay-Z's verse. Worth the 43 minutes of white noise, truly. But the start of side A, the pièce de résistance – and surely the real reason he wanted me to have the tape – was so I could hear his own band. Two tunes, recorded live with laughably terrible sound levels but faultless drumming by Chris. Two tunes my teenage self listened to over and over. Twenty-five years on, this is the only version of those songs that remains. I absolutely love that they are unShazamable, that they exist solely on this crinkly tape that is one listen away from ruination. I still love those tunes – just as I love his new band. Our two children do, too. Kate Abbott We didn't call them mix tapes back in the day. Well, I didn't. Wasn't cool enough. They were just tapes with songs on. The first life-changing one was sent to me by a friend Steve and it was just the most brilliant mix of all the punk songs I didn't know – the Damned, the Buzzcocks, the Ramones, the Pistols, of course, and best of all the Vibrators with Baby Baby. It was – and is – amazing. Lush, romantic, as much full of yearning as feedback, and super loud. Imagine Phil Spector turned punk and you've got Baby Baby. It didn't make me a punk (still too uncool), but it did make me want to dye my hair black (pointless, as it already was), spike it up with sugar, and stick a red arrow through my ear. Which I did a bit later. The last mix tape I made, in December 2023, was very much a modern mix tape. Improvised on the night, and on YouTube. Mum was dying and I spent the night by her bedside with my laptop. I just played song after song that I loved for her, unsure whether she could hear. I introduced them, like a DJ. 'And this is Tom Waits's version of Somewhere for you Marje because it's exceptionally beautiful and I love you.' 'And here's a little number from Linda Ronstadt and Aaron Neville Don't Know Much,which makes me cry and think of you because I love you.' 'And here's Leonard Cohen at his most melodic singing Dance Me to the End of Love, and I've chosen this because, erm, I love you.' 'Now for something a little different, Late for the Sky by Jackson Browne, which I've chosen for you because I love you, even if its meaning is a bit more complicated.' The songs kept coming through the night and I played them really loud. 'And of course the night would be incomplete without Stevie Wonder's As. This one's for you Mum because yes, you've guessed it, I love you.' Each one was a love song and in their own way about immortality. I didn't know it at the time. And I didn't know what was coming next. I was just somehow reaching for the right songs, in a state almost as altered as Mum's. I like to think she heard them. But even if she didn't, she knew how much I loved her. She died early the next morning. Simon Hattenstone Back in the late 90s, whenever melodic noise-rockers Idlewild would tour, my sister and I would go. We had spent hours engaged in classic sibling bonding: listening to guitar squall while I prevented the mosh pit from stamping on my little sister's head. Yes, her taste often tended more towards the likes of Steps, but for some reason we both loved this band's scuzzy pop, and one day, she made me a tape of one of their live gigs. I was extremely excited. I saved it for a long bus journey, popped it into my Walkman, fired it up and sunk into angular, dissonance-strewn indie. It was absolute joy. There were new songs! Ferociously taut renditions of the classics! And … the random intrusion of Kiss Me by Sixpence None the Richer. Confusion reigned as I suddenly found myself listening to a Christian rock troupe's schmaltzy ode to smooching – until it abruptly segued back to the gig. And then back to Kiss Me. And then back to the gig. Five minutes later, a blisteringly distorted riff mutated into an advert for a local car dealership. At which point I realised something: my sister had decided to check out a poppier radio station halfway through recording – and inadvertently created the world's worst Idlewild remix tape. My sister has since died. I'll never be able to drag her out of a mosh pit again, or hear her attempt at a silly impression of the vocal tics of Idlewild frontman Roddy Woomble. But I'll always have that tape. It might have been intended as a killer Idlewild live recording, but it's ended up something much more precious: a testament to her glorious daftness. Best mix tape ever. Alexi Duggins I was given this mix tape in early 2004, at the outset of a relationship that lasted for almost a decade. It lives on a shelf in my living room with a few other cassettes, displayed for aesthetic reasons, since I no longer have a tape deck to play them on. Looking at it now, it seems like a vivid portrait of my ex and his then passions, from the picture of James Dean rolling his eyes on the handmade cover to the scratchy and abrasive music on the tape itself, from Her Jazz by Huggy Bear to Gutless by Hole, deep cuts like Other Animals are #1 by Erase Errata alongside classics like Patti Smith's Redondo Beach. More than half the tracks are by female or female-fronted acts; my ex was brought up by his mum and most of his friends were women. He once told me that men had been responsible for all the negative experiences in his life (I suspect that our relationship has now been added to this list). Looking at the track listing I'm reminded of his great taste, noting the appearance of Maps by Yeah Yeah Yeahs, then pretty recent but now a romantic classic. We had our ups and downs, to put it mildly, but I'm glad I have this memento of our early tenderness and intimacy. Alex Needham I am very slightly too young for the golden era of mix tapes – open my first Walkman and you would have only found storybooks on tape – but I am exactly the right age to be part of the micro-generation of teens that burned CDs (or MiniDiscs) of stolen MP3s from LimeWire for our friends and crushes. There were two enormous problems with this method of sharing songs: one, the file compression made everything sound unlistenably terrible, and two, what you thought you were illegally downloading from LimeWire was very often not what you were actually downloading from LimeWire. I discovered this when my best friend made me a mix of what she thought were songs by my favourite German metal band, Rammstein. In fact it was a CD full of entirely random European songs that someone on LimeWire had egregiously mislabeled, including a Dutch version of Aqua's Barbie Girl, all with that spangly sound that was unique to low-quality MP3 mixes of the era. We laughed about this for years, but fun fact, that mix CD was how I discovered Finnish metal (and Megaherz, the most early-00s German metal band to exist). Keza MacDonald The Beatles' I Want to Hold Your Hand. Weezer's Holiday. The Cribs' The Lights Went Out. These are some of the songs that my first boyfriend chose to burn on to a CD for me. It was summer 2006. I had found my true tribe outside of school, most nights (and early mornings) were spent in fields, my last year of sixth form was nigh and I had finally fallen in love. I fell hard. I could not believe – or handle! – feeling that way about somebody. Music was starting to properly soundtrack my life for the first time: club nights and indie gigs, soaking up the albums my new mates played and making plans for Leeds Festival. My ex opened my world to some great music I wouldn't know without him. I thought that CD was so cool and romantic. ('He wants to hold my hand!') The short version of this tragic love story: the relationship soured and it ended by winter. It would take me at least a couple of years to get over it. At some point, I threw the CD in the bin along with everything else he had given me – too young, inexperienced and cried out to know I might quite want to see these items again one day. But every time I hear those songs play – and I do regularly seek them out – I'm comforted by a rose-tinted wave of nostalgia. They take me back to a time when life was just really starting – way more highs and heartbreak ahead. I'm glad I'll always have the music to take with me. Hollie Richardson Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
The Guardian
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘I threw it in the bin with everything else he gave me': the mix tapes that defined our lives
At 18 my go-to albums were Dog Man Star, His 'n' Hers and a mix tape called Really, Basically, In a Sort of a Way, Volume 1. Named after the mutterings of a particularly long-winded lecturer, it was the first of many TDK D60s – always the same brand! – from my mate Pat. We had met at our university's registration day a few weeks earlier and would be friends for more than 20 years until his death in 2018. By then he'd not only been on staff at the NME – teenage Pat's dream job – but also written a book about its history. Side A of the tape (entitled 'Barry Manilow Live!') has bands we'd bonded over, such as Kenickie and These Animal Men, two of our first London gigs together. Blur's Popscene is included because we were sweaty regulars at the club night of that name at LA2 in Charing Cross Road. The other one ('David Hasselhoff B-sides') includes Gallon Drunk, the Byrds and Stereolab, all a bit more mature, all nudges into new directions. Everything on the inlay card is in caps and even Pat's handwriting was cool. I hero-worshipped him well beyond our university years and he shaped my taste in films and fashion as much as music. When we were young he could be brutally, hilariously scathing about bands he despised; later, that energy would be spent more on championing than dissing. It's years since I owned a cassette player but, looking at the tape now, I'd forgotten it ends with a 'secret bonus track!' I'm guessing it's a shared guilty pleasure (Carter USM?) and can't wait to find out. It'll be another joke from not just a cool and funny friend but an all-round unfaltering one. Chris Wiegand Nobody had ever made me a mix tape (or a CD playlist as it would have more likely been, since I grew up in the 00s) until my 19th birthday, and even then it wasn't a proper one. Having failed to track down a blank CD in Madrid, where we were both working as au pairs, a girl from Colorado I wasn't exactly dating but who was definitely more than just a friend wrote me a list of songs on a page pulled out of a notepad. I remember reading it for the first time, with its loopy handwriting, doodles, and songs chosen just for me, and thinking it was the most romantic thing in the world. Like most 19-year-olds, I was confused and anxious about so many things, but she brought so much kindness and fun into my life. We were the same age, and I can't imagine that she had everything figured out herself, but she seemed to know more than me about most things, music included, and it was exciting to take a step into her world. I must have lost the scrap of paper at some point over the last decade, and now I can't recall a single song that was on there. I wish I did, and I wish I had a way of contacting that girl from Colorado – I still owe her a 'mix tape' in return. Lucy Knight I find it easily in a bag in the attic – it has a sticker of a cat smoking a spliff, cut around the spools: a remnant of the 90s ska band Hepcat. The one mix tape I would never bin. Chris gave it to me in late 1999. He was 17 and playing gigs at venues like the Astoria. I was 16 and couldn't go to most of the gigs at venues like the Astoria because it was a school night. It's not what you'd call your classic heart-on-sleeve emo mix. It's full of hardcore and punk anthems by bands such as Operation Ivy, Madball, Good Riddance and, randomly, multiple tracks by New Bomb Turks (he must have just bought their album at Tower Records in Piccadilly Circus, where he, then later we, would go on pilgrimages to find all the newest albums). There are also, seemingly, no songs on side B. I re-listen to the tape now on my grandpa's old cassette deck, and have to endure almost 45 minutes of static to get back to the start – I simply cannot risk pressing fast forward in case the whole precious thing gets chewed up. Then, all of a sudden, the radio-recorded dolphin tones of Mariah Carey emerge from the static singing Heartbreaker, a track he knew I loved more than any punk, then cuts off before Jay-Z's verse. Worth the 43 minutes of white noise, truly. But the start of side A, the pièce de résistance – and surely the real reason he wanted me to have the tape – was so I could hear his own band. Two tunes, recorded live with laughably terrible sound levels but faultless drumming by Chris. Two tunes my teenage self listened to over and over. Twenty-five years on, this is the only version of those songs that remains. I absolutely love that they are unShazamable, that they exist solely on this crinkly tape that is one listen away from ruination. I still love those tunes – just as I love his new band. Our two children do, too. Kate Abbott We didn't call them mix tapes back in the day. Well, I didn't. Wasn't cool enough. They were just tapes with songs on. The first life-changing one was sent to me by a friend Steve and it was just the most brilliant mix of all the punk songs I didn't know – the Damned, the Buzzcocks, the Ramones, the Pistols, of course, and best of all the Vibrators with Baby Baby. It was – and is – amazing. Lush, romantic, as much full of yearning as feedback, and super loud. Imagine Phil Spector turned punk and you've got Baby Baby. It didn't make me a punk (still too uncool), but it did make me want to dye my hair black (pointless, as it already was), spike it up with sugar, and stick a red arrow through my ear. Which I did a bit later. The last mix tape I made, in December 2023, was very much a modern mix tape. Improvised on the night, and on YouTube. Mum was dying and I spent the night by her bedside with my laptop. I just played song after song that I loved for her, unsure whether she could hear. I introduced them, like a DJ. 'And this is Tom Waits's version of Somewhere for you Marje because it's exceptionally beautiful and I love you.' 'And here's a little number from Linda Ronstadt and Aaron Neville Don't Know Much,which makes me cry and think of you because I love you.' 'And here's Leonard Cohen at his most melodic singing Dance Me to the End of Love, and I've chosen this because, erm, I love you.' 'Now for something a little different, Late for the Sky by Jackson Browne, which I've chosen for you because I love you, even if its meaning is a bit more complicated.' The songs kept coming through the night and I played them really loud. 'And of course the night would be incomplete without Stevie Wonder's As. This one's for you Mum because yes, you've guessed it, I love you.' Each one was a love song and in their own way about immortality. I didn't know it at the time. And I didn't know what was coming next. I was just somehow reaching for the right songs, in a state almost as altered as Mum's. I like to think she heard them. But even if she didn't, she knew how much I loved her. She died early the next morning. Simon Hattenstone Back in the late 90s, whenever melodic noise-rockers Idlewild would tour, my sister and I would go. We had spent hours engaged in classic sibling bonding: listening to guitar squall while I prevented the mosh pit from stamping on my little sister's head. Yes, her taste often tended more towards the likes of Steps, but for some reason we both loved this band's scuzzy pop, and one day, she made me a tape of one of their live gigs. I was extremely excited. I saved it for a long bus journey, popped it into my Walkman, fired it up and sunk into angular, dissonance-strewn indie. It was absolute joy. There were new songs! Ferociously taut renditions of the classics! And … the random intrusion of Kiss Me by Sixpence None the Richer. Confusion reigned as I suddenly found myself listening to a Christian rock troupe's schmaltzy ode to smooching – until it abruptly segued back to the gig. And then back to Kiss Me. And then back to the gig. Five minutes later, a blisteringly distorted riff mutated into an advert for a local car dealership. At which point I realised something: my sister had decided to check out a poppier radio station halfway through recording – and inadvertently created the world's worst Idlewild remix tape. My sister has since died. I'll never be able to drag her out of a mosh pit again, or hear her attempt at a silly impression of the vocal tics of Idlewild frontman Roddy Woomble. But I'll always have that tape. It might have been intended as a killer Idlewild live recording, but it's ended up something much more precious: a testament to her glorious daftness. Best mix tape ever. Alexi Duggins I was given this mix tape in early 2004, at the outset of a relationship that lasted for almost a decade. It lives on a shelf in my living room with a few other cassettes, displayed for aesthetic reasons, since I no longer have a tape deck to play them on. Looking at it now, it seems like a vivid portrait of my ex and his then passions, from the picture of James Dean rolling his eyes on the handmade cover to the scratchy and abrasive music on the tape itself, from Her Jazz by Huggy Bear to Gutless by Hole, deep cuts like Other Animals are #1 by Erase Errata alongside classics like Patti Smith's Redondo Beach. More than half the tracks are by female or female-fronted acts; my ex was brought up by his mum and most of his friends were women. He once told me that men had been responsible for all the negative experiences in his life (I suspect that our relationship has now been added to this list). Looking at the track listing I'm reminded of his great taste, noting the appearance of Maps by Yeah Yeah Yeahs, then pretty recent but now a romantic classic. We had our ups and downs, to put it mildly, but I'm glad I have this memento of our early tenderness and intimacy. Alex Needham I am very slightly too young for the golden era of mix tapes – open my first Walkman and you would have only found storybooks on tape – but I am exactly the right age to be part of the micro-generation of teens that burned CDs (or MiniDiscs) of stolen MP3s from LimeWire for our friends and crushes. There were two enormous problems with this method of sharing songs: one, the file compression made everything sound unlistenably terrible, and two, what you thought you were illegally downloading from LimeWire was very often not what you were actually downloading from LimeWire. I discovered this when my best friend made me a mix of what she thought were songs by my favourite German metal band, Rammstein. In fact it was a CD full of entirely random European songs that someone on LimeWire had egregiously mislabeled, including a Dutch version of Aqua's Barbie Girl, all with that spangly sound that was unique to low-quality MP3 mixes of the era. We laughed about this for years, but fun fact, that mix CD was how I discovered Finnish metal (and Megaherz, the most early-00s German metal band to exist). Keza MacDonald The Beatles' I Want to Hold Your Hand. Weezer's Holiday. The Cribs' The Lights Went Out. These are some of the songs that my first boyfriend chose to burn on to a CD for me. It was summer 2006. I had found my true tribe outside of school, most nights (and early mornings) were spent in fields, my last year of sixth form was nigh and I had finally fallen in love. I fell hard. I could not believe – or handle! – feeling that way about somebody. Music was starting to properly soundtrack my life for the first time: club nights and indie gigs, soaking up the albums my new mates played and making plans for Leeds Festival. My ex opened my world to some great music I wouldn't know without him. I thought that CD was so cool and romantic. ('He wants to hold my hand!') The short version of this tragic love story: the relationship soured and it ended by winter. It would take me at least a couple of years to get over it. At some point, I threw the CD in the bin along with everything else he had given me – too young, inexperienced and cried out to know I might quite want to see these items again one day. But every time I hear those songs play – and I do regularly seek them out – I'm comforted by a rose-tinted wave of nostalgia. They take me back to a time when life was just really starting – way more highs and heartbreak ahead. I'm glad I'll always have the music to take with me. Hollie Richardson Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
The Guardian
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Theatrical hitmaker Justin Martin on Prima Facie's follow-up: ‘It wrestles with how to bring up boys'
Earlier this year, opposing theatres in Charing Cross Road displayed 'sold out' signs for their shows. Both of them – Stranger Things: The First Shadow and Kyoto – were co-directed by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin. 'It was surreal,' says Martin. 'Someone sent me a photo and I thought: I'm keeping that. As a little Australian, I'm still surprised to make a living out of this crazy career.' The Guardian's journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more. Kyoto had a limited run but Stranger Things has been going for 18 months and has 'the noisiest audience I've ever heard', Martin reports. 'I think the stat is that 60% of [them] have never been to a play before. So they eat popcorn throughout and just respond in a really natural way. If it's boring, they leave. If they're frightened, they really scream and gasp. It's very live but, if you're used to traditional theatre, it's weird.' Martin has had a centre seat for the modern evolution of theatregoing. As a solo director, he staged Suzie Miller's Prima Facie, a horrifying monologue by a barrister who is a survivor of rape, with Jodie Comer winning Olivier and Tony awards in London and New York. Uniquely for a stage play, it also twice topped the UK cinema box office when screened by NT Live. For Martin, that felt as unlikely an achievement as having double hits in London. 'I think a lot of it was Jodie,' he reflects. 'But also the subject matter of the play: that people wanted to be part of that conversation about relationships and consent. With a new play, you never know what you've got until it meets the audience. The first preview of Prima Facie, the audience was almost all women and I'd placed Stephen Daldry in the middle of the stalls to give me notes. And, even as the final music cue played, all the women in the theatre leaped to their feet with such energy and passion. And that was pretty much repeated everywhere.' Martin and Daldry intermittently fantasise about creating templates for sellout shows that can be copied around the world by assistants who occasionally check in by Zoom with the creators on their yachts. 'Sadly,' he laughs, 'we don't seem to have achieved that. We have to be around a lot for every run.' Just back from working with Daldry to open Stranger Things on Broadway, Martin will next year direct Comer again in a UK and Ireland tour of Prima Facie. Next month, he makes a National Theatre debut with Miller's new play. Whereas the earlier work took its title from the Latin legal phrase meaning 'at first sight', Inter Alia borrows the lawyers' term for 'among other things'. And, after the barrister's monologue of Prima Facie, Inter Alia is a sort of double soliloquy, for a high court judge, Jessica Parks (Rosamund Pike), who delivers both her public and private thoughts as a family crisis tests, inter alia, her judiciousness. 'In conversation' is a favourite term of Martin's for how culture works and Inter Alia has a lot to say to Adolescence, the Netflix mega-hit, as the judge becomes involved in the case of a young man accused of an assault on a classmate. 'They're definitely related,' Martin agrees. 'Both Inter Alia and Adolescence are talking about what everyone's talking about, which is how to bring up boys with an understanding of women and consent. What interested me about Adolescence was the response: get rid of mobile phones, get rid of social media. And you think: that's one of the things but there are other issues about our complicity in the society we've created. Rosamund's character in our play is trying to bring up a feminist son. And what does that mean? Suzie's play is wrestling with how to bring up boys.' The Adolescence overlap is another example of a phenomenon that fascinates Martin: how plays are changed by the surrounding context. Kyoto by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson – known to Martin and Daldry as 'the Joes', having previously written for them The Jungle, the 2017 immersive drama about a refugee camp at Calais – premiered in summer 2024 by the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon and transferred to London this year. 'What was amazing about that play,' says Martin, 'is that we changed it a little bit between the two productions but the world had changed a huge amount.' He means the election of Donald Trump, which made the audience even more unnerved about an American lobbyist, Don Pearlman (played by Stephen Kunken), trying to sabotage the 1997 international agreement in Japan to reduce global warming. 'If you do stuff about what's going on now, which is what I like to do, then it's exciting when the context changes the play. Because of Trump, the play's discussion of the divisiveness of America had a different focus.' Kunken was, pantomime-like, regularly booed at curtain calls. But Martin has deep experience of theatre bumping into current affairs. In 2013, when Margaret Thatcher died, he was assistant director to Daldry on two West End shows in which the contentious former prime minister was satirised: Lee Hall and Elton John's musical Billy Elliot and Peter Morgan's Westminster bio-drama The Audience. 'We thought: hang on, these shows become about something different tonight. Stephen held an audience vote at Billy Elliot about whether the song fantasising about Thatcher's death should be included. [It was.] And Peter and I went on stage before The Audience and talked to the, er, audience about whether the Thatcher scene should be included. [It was.] But, when it gets like that, it's really exciting. When Haydn Gwynne, who was playing Thatcher, came on, the audience all went deeply quiet as if: are we allowed to do this tonight? But then she did her deep curtsey to the queen and everyone laughed and it was as if there was permission to be in conversation with what had just happened. It was electric.' Martin was working as 'resident director' (day-to-day show-running) on the Australian production of Billy Elliot when he first encountered Daldry and moved up, via assistant and associate director, to co-director (on The Jungle, Kyoto and Stranger Things). Some duos who use that term sit side by side at desks during rehearsals, but not Daldry/Martin: 'We divide up the show and then come back together to look at what the other has done. Every director runs out of ideas in a rehearsal room so it's great to have someone who can pick it up and run with it.' Together and separately, a trait of their productions is pace. Without ever dropping a word, Comer in Prima Facie gave a sense of a racing brain and body. Kyoto, a hefty two-act play, felt much shorter than its running length. Martin nods: 'I love it when a play is just ahead of the audience and they're trying to catch it. With a monologue, it's someone's inner thoughts and people think so quickly so it has to go: boom, boom, boom. When I started on Prima Facie, it wasn't quite coming alive and I rang up the friend who did it in Australia and she said with monologues you have to go at a rapid pace because of the speed of thought. I think pace is everything. Although it can be a fight now because a lot of actors try to act between the lines. That's the influence of screen work where it's in the pause, it's in the look. But in theatre you have to act on the line. It's an oral medium; if you're not hearing it, there's nothing going on. Stephen and I are notorious for saying to actors: if you're doing nothing, then nothing is happening.' Martin is one of a group of Australian directors – Simon Stone, Benedict Andrews, Kip Williams – who have worked prominently in London. 'I came over chasing a partner who had moved here and I just found it was the place I wanted to work,' he says. He is pleased that Inter Alia is scheduled for NT Live. 'For someone living across the world from where my parents are, it's a way of connecting … But, more importantly, it's democratised theatre.' All his big shows have been new – including The Fear of 13 with Adrien Brody – but do producers ring up and offer The Cherry Orchard or Richard III? 'Yep.' And he says no? 'Yep. Until I find my own way into a classic the way Stephen did to An Inspector Calls, where you feel the play is turned on its head.' After Inter Alia he is planning to complete a trilogy with Miller: 'We have a third one with another Latin legal title that I can't say for the moment.' While Martin insists that collaboration must remain sub judice for now, his track record suggests audiences are unlikely to be in absentia. Inter Alia is at the National Theatre, London, 10 July-13 September, and in cinemas as part of NT Live from 4 September. Stranger Things: The First Shadow is at the Phoenix theatre, London.
