Ben Cowles speaks with IAN ‘TREE’ ROBINSON and ANDY DAVIES, two of the string pullers behind the Manchester Punk Festival, ahead of its 10th year show later this month
Their walls are our stones
MIKE QUILLE has some ideas about how to bring about radical cultural change
Wall 28/3/18
PAUL FOLEY is disappointed by a production that encourages the audience to laugh at rather than with the characters
Odysseus’s homecoming myth is treated as a factual story, with strong resonances for our contemporary world. This is an implicit anti-war film that has an urgent relevance, writes JOHN GREEN
The Star's critics ANDY HEDGECOCK, MARTIN HALL, MICHAL BONCZA, ANGUS REID reviews Holy Cow, One to One: John and Yoko, King of Kings, Panda Bear in Africa
PATRICK JONES recommends a vital anthology from Afghan and Iranian poets where the political and personal fuse into witness-bearing and manifesto-making
WILL STONE is impressed by Hania Rani who is already making a name for herself in the male-dominated world of modern classical music
MIK SABIERS enjoys the theatrical feminist six piece who have a lot of fun that the audience feeds off as the set rolls on
LAST September I reported on The World Transformed festival, organised by Momentum alongside the Labour Party conference in Brighton. Building on the commitments in the 2017 Labour Manifesto, it included several workshops on culture looking at what the elements of a radical culture policy might be.
That manifesto, clearly reflecting the personal vision of Jeremy Corbyn and his team, was a marked improvement on previous ones. He was the only candidate in 2015 to support the role of the arts in nourishing everyday creativity and its potential for political dissent.
The manifesto also backed policies to improve working-class access to culture, both as workers in creative industries and as spectators and consumers of culture.
More from this author
MIKE QUILL reports on a lively conference in Barnsley that took stock of working-class access to culture and proposed strategies to embed culture within the trade union movement
MIKE QUILLE relishes political theatre at its most entertaining, engaging and effective
MIKE QUILLE is impressed by the rigorous Marxist approach to be found in a new book on the dialectics of art
ADAM THERON-LEE RENSCH talks to Mike Quille about what it is to be a working-class writer in the US and patronising perceptions of class that abound left, right and centre