GEOFF BOTTOMS relishes a profoundly human portrait of a family as it evolves across 55 years in Sheffield
Oldies still goldies
PETER MASON sees PP Arnold and Mavis Staples deliver blistering sets at the Cornbury Festival
PAUL DONOVAN applauds an excellently crafted new musical that explores the life and death of Ruth Ellis
PAUL DONOVAN is tickled by the excruciating take-downs of one of the funniest, wittiest, political writers around.
RON JACOBS points out, via a transcription of Kissinger’s secret recordings, that Trump could never have existed without Nixon and Kissinger
ELLIS RAE is persuaded that the advantages of the ‘talking cure’ are superior to the treatment of mental illness with drugs
JOHN GREEN, MICHAL BONCZA and BELLA KATZ review The Good Boy, Broken English, and Don't Be Prey
PP Arnold + Mavis Staples
Cornbury Festival, Great Tew
SOMETIMES the old ones are the best. On a second day of the Cornbury festival dominated by 20-something female singer-songwriters of a tepid, insipid ilk, it was left to two women in their seventies to inject some much-needed soul into proceedings.
PP Arnold and Mavis Staples have followed very different routes to musical stardom – the former by moving from the US into the excitement of swinging-sixties Britain, the latter mainly by staying close to her bluesy Chicago roots.
But both have retained a heartfelt and joyous faith in the redemptive quality of music that the likes of Pixie Lott, Megan McKenna and Amy MacDonald were unable to convey on other Cornbury stages. Both also possess an easy charisma and gospel-inspired feistiness that can hardly fail to move anyone watching.
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