You might know Roachford for his big hit Cuddly Toy or latterly from being a member of Mike and The Mechanics. This new album was meant to be released in April but was postponed until now. The record was produced by Jimmy Hogarth who has worked in the past with Paolo…

With the help of popular singer-songwriter Frank Turner, Music Venue Trust announce their Official Beer Partner Fightback Brewing Company will begin selling bottled Fightback Lager, Fightback Cider, Fightback Berries and Fightback IPA online in support of the #saveourvenues campaign. Fightback Lager, launched in 2018 and stocked in over 60 Grassroots Music…

A lot has changed in the world in the five years since we last heard new music from Lianne La Havas. Indeed, it has been so long that some would be forgiven for thinking 2015’s Grammy-nominated Blood would be the last we heard from the London singer-songwriter. I at the…

Maria Clancy is an artist based on the Yorkshire/Lancashire border whose work reflects the things she admires and adores. Her medium of choice is usually watercolour: she enjoys its wilful unpredictability and has come to love it despite its notoriety as being an unforgiving medium. Her subject matter are the…

Each generation has its own fear to face. In our case, it was the atom bomb and the potential for nuclear disaster. The notion that the two world leaders of Russia and America each carried a case containing a red button, just waiting to be pressed, was not fanciful to…

Irish band The Coronas have been going for 13 years now but this album might be the first you have heard from them. It seems that the four piece became a trio last year when guitarist Dave McPhillips left the band, thankfully the group decided to carry on. Main songwriter and singer…

Recommended to me by a friend and ex-colleague, this novel is definitely worth a read. The first couple of pages of the book are simply reviews from all sorts of luminaries from Oprah Winfrey to Barack Obama and all the major newspapers, both here and in the US, and it…

Anyone for Edmund? is a highly entertaining work of satire, written by former features writer and theatre critic, Simon Edge, who deftly applies his journalistic skills to fiction. The story delivers a wonderful blend of what you know to be pure fiction and what you suspect has been written with…

This dystopian winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature is a complex and deeply compassionate insight into friendship and humanity. The narrative follows the life of Kathy from her childhood in Hailsham (an idyllic institution for raising children) to her work as a carer as an adult. From the outset…

Residents of Scarborough are being asked to participate in a digital project which explores what ‘home’ means to them. This engaging digital art commission is designed to bring together individual and collective experiences and connect diverse voices and realities from the varied communities of the town. Homecoming; A Placeless Place is…

Taj Atwal – star of Stella, In the Club and Line of Duty – is set to become a patron of York’s Theatre@41. The Monkgate venue is working hard to secure a post-Covid future and Taj has offered to help champion the cause. Taj studied at York College before heading to…

In The Book of Five Rings of 1645, legendary Kenjutsu master Miyamotto Masashi wrote ‘Be detached from desire your whole life long…do not seek pleasure for its own sake or let yourself be guided by the feelings of lust or love’. Neither the infamously vain Dorian Gray nor the socially…

For some writers, plot development is secondary to considerations of tone, of mood. Ray Robinson’s brave excursion into the sparse interior of the world of itinerant Jake Eisner – ex-farmer, on the run for murder – reveals narrative through back-story, allowing the reader to construct a picture of a life,…

If you want to listen to 41 songs that have been in the charts over the last few months then the Now complications are always a good place to start. In the era of downloads and streaming you might think that no one would want to buy a compilation like this…

The first thing that comes to mind when listening to this impressive album is that if these songs had been sung by Lewis Capaldi or perhaps James Arthur they would be massive hits. That is not to say Rhys Lewis does not deserve to be a household name, he does but…

Mark Burgum is a visual artist based in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire and his work, drawing on a strong linear technique exploring the interplay of line and tone might, on the surface, appear simple in its construction, yet this masks a much more complex undertone. The wilderness and moorland that surround…

Coming soon is not so much theatre in the round as theatre in the Rowntree! Park Bench Theatre, under the auspices of engine house theatre, is bringing live entertainment back to York with a COVID-secure outdoor theatre season of monologues for all ages. Rowntree Park - between 12th August and 5th September…

Ross Douthat’s The Decadent Society: How We Became Victims of Our Own Success by New York Times Columnist Ross Douthat is a thoroughly compelling read that dissects life as we know it, diagnosing all its flaws and providing rational and well-informed suggestions as to where, why and how it all…

The SWING THAT MUSIC tour comes to Lawrence Batley Theatre, Huddersfield, on Wednesday 16th September 2020, in a socially-distanced auditorium. The much acclaimed Down for the Count Swing Orchestra swings across the music of the 1930s and '40s, from the likes of Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Count Basie and Glenn Miller.…

The acclaimed Bradford theatre company Freedom Studios are looking for experienced writers to get involved in Street Voices 8, the company’s popular free six -month playwriting course. Freedom Studios are looking for distinctive voices and new perspectives with an ability to write and the potential to develop. Under the guidance of playwright…

Filmed opera is a very different artefact from opera on film. The latter is a cinematic version of a stage production. Filmed opera, on the other hand, is an opera removed from the auditorium with the action taking place in a realistic setting. When an opera, or any performed work…

The Psychedelic Furs for many will be best known to many for their hit Pretty In Pink which was eventually re recorded to become the theme song to the film of the same name. For many of their original fans it was like they had sold out at the time,…

Formed a decade ago by childhood friends, Glass Animals are about to release their third studio album, Dreamland. With the initial release postponed by the quartet to "keep focus on the Black Lives Matter movement and the discussions taking place around racism and police brutality around the world," their ever-growing…