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Interview: Patrick Smith of Veggies
Mon 06 Jun 2011If you grew up in Notts and don’t partake in meat, you probably owe a huge debt to Patrick Smith. Why? Because he’s spent three decades as a vegan activist while slinging veggie burgers from a van in town, backin the day when ‘vegetarian option’ meant ‘just chips’. Now operating his veggie business out of the SumacCentre in Forest Fields, he talks about a meat-free career, the Ratcliffe-on-Soar debacle, and Mark Kennedy…
Interview: Darren Fletcher
Mon 06 Jun 2011Darren Fletcher is the Arnold lad who gets paid to go to the World Cup and the Super Bowl, gets his feet under assorted press boxes for Five Live, banters with the entire UK about footy and hosts the An Evening With... nights at the Approach. And he knows Robbie Savage...
Interview: Liam Bailey
Mon 06 Jun 2011He’s knocked about with Damian Marley and Aswad’s Brinsley Forde. His new album is produced by Salaam Remi, of Fugees and Nas fame. He’s been at No.5 with Chase and Status, he’s signed to Polydor, and Amy Winehouse has got his tea on. Yep, things have moved on a bit for Liam Bailey since he played LeftLion gigs back in the day, but he’s still proper Notts...
Interview: Tim Smith of Fourmost Films
Mon 06 Jun 2011Fourmost Films come from the Shop stable with a can-do attitude, a string of short films that have garnered attention from all over the place and a hunger to turn Nottingham into one of the hubs of the UK indie-film scene. Head honcho Tim Smith manages to drag his head from the edit suite long enough to spell out his masterplan…
Interview: Marcus Clarke
Mon 06 Jun 2011Marcus Clarke and his wife Helena Smee have spent the last twenty years in a Sherwood house full of dismembered body parts. Calm down, Officer – they’re only keeping their hands in as one of the UK’s foremost puppet-based production companies with a list of credits as long as, well, your arm…
Giles Croft on NEAT 11 Festival
Thu 26 May 2011Another huge boost to the local arts scene takes place this summer with the launch of the Nottingham European Arts and Theatre Festival, a collaboration between the big local venues showcasing top-line performances from around the continent. Festival artistic director Giles Croft explains all…
Interview: Architects of Air
Fri 06 May 2011Sticking bits of plastic together for Architects of Air is a rite of passage for many a Nottingham arts graduate. The resulting pneumatic sculptures - known as luminaria - have toured the world, celebrating the beauty of light and colour. This June they’ll be drifting down to land at Lakeside, so time for a chat with AoA’s artistic director Alan Parkinson….
Interview: Justin Moorhouse
Wed 27 Apr 2011"Hostility isn't a problem, really, indifference is much worse. If people are indifferent you can't change them."
Interview: Royal Gala
Sun 17 Apr 2011Royal Gala is an eighteen-legged ska-reggae-funk music phenomenon from Notts. The band was put together by guitarist James Waring and is fronted by vocalist Lou Barnell, with seven other musos also along for the ride. But this is no ‘manufactured’ group. It’s more like a load of random mentalists thrown together in a
room full of instruments and dance drugs and told to play or die. As you may guess, we rather like the noise they make…
The Heavy Sounds
Sun 10 Apr 2011We have a word with Clint Harris, owner of The Heavy Sounds in West End Arcade...
Interview: Richard Herring
Sun 10 Apr 2011From TV fame as part of Lee and Herring in the nineties to the comedy wilderness in the early noughties and back again; the career of Richard Herring has always been interesting. Over the last few years he’s become a regular on 6Music, a prolific podcaster and come to within an inch of winning Celebrity Mastermind. We caught up with him before his appearance at the Playhouse…
Interview: Alistair McGowan
Wed 06 Apr 2011Alistair McGowan is best known for his work as an impersonator on prime-time TV shows like The Big Impression and Spitting Image. But as well as being able to turn his tongue to just about anyone, he’s also an experienced actor and writer, having been awarded a BAFTA and nominated for an Olivier. So what’s he doing spending the best part of April in Notts you might wonder…?
Interview: Andy Barrett
Fri 01 Apr 2011Andy Barrett has been creating community drama events and site-specific performances in Notts for years, as well as writing plays such as Garage Band and a musical about Dolly the sheep. We caught up with him as he prepared for the Nottingham European Arts and Theatre Festival (NEAT).
Interview: Writing East Midlands
Fri 01 Apr 2011As the Cleggeron takes a hatchet to the arts we decided to have a chat with Henderson Mullin, head of Writing East Midlands (WEM), to see how his organisation may be able to help local writers survive difficult times...
Interview: Billy Ivory
Wed 23 Mar 2011"You can’t take wide shots of the countryside around Eastwood without Ikea getting in the way"
Interview: Don McCalman
Fri 04 Mar 2011Don McCalman worked through the dark ages of Nottingham nightlife; a time when door staff were bouncers, a lobbing down a flight of stairs was an acceptable way to deal with an errant customer and the profession was completely unregulated. Then he wrote a book about it...
Interview: Ace Bhatti
Tue 22 Feb 2011With an acting career that has already taken in the likes of Cardiac Arrest, Emmerdale, Bend It Like Beckham, Band Of Gold, Coronation Street and The Sarah Jane Adventures, Ace Bhatti – from the extremely North London borough of Sneinton - is the newest cast member of EastEnders…
Interview: Gruff Rhys
Fri 18 Feb 2011Gruff Rhys is best known as the singer of the Super Furry Animals, but he’s also a documentarian, solo artist and plastic bottle modeller. Guess which one of those skills he’ll be demonstrating at the Glee Club this month?
Interview: Skiman
Sat 05 Feb 2011Daniel Waithe – otherwise known as Skiman – is a prodigy of Notts superproducers The Elementz, the latest in a long line of bar-spitting behemoths from the NG and the man behind dancefloor-destroying mixtape Afterdark. And he’s still only 18…
White Dolemite
Wed 22 Dec 2010You probably didn’t realise that Nottingham had its very own action cinema icon walking the streets – neither did we until recently. But White Dolemite is to HoodTown what Shaft was to Harlem and alongside his buddy Video Mat (and let’s just say they share a similar relationship to that of Spiderman and Peter Parker) they have been creating some great movie posters over the last few years. The movies themselves are *ahem* not particularly easy to find though…
Interview: The Soundcarriers
Mon 20 Dec 2010"We get bigger audiences outside of Nottingham, in places like Manchester, Sheffield and London, but it's starting to change"
Interview: John Robertson
Wed 15 Dec 2010John Robertson was your archetypal terrace favourite for over a decade at Forest. In part it was because he obviously liked his pies, pints and fags, but mainly for providing the cross that Trevor Francis got on the end of in 1979, the goal that beat Hamburg in 1980, and all those photos of kids holding up the European Cup in Nottingham pubs thirty years ago.
Interview: Jeanie Finlay on Sound It Out
Thu 09 Dec 2010Originally from the North East, but now firmly established in Nottingham as both an artist and a film maker, both music and community have played a big role in Jeanie Finlay's work. Now the two come together for her latest project, Sound It Out - an observational, documentary portrait about Teeside's last surviving independent record shop...
Interview: Alan Fletcher aka Dr Karl Kennedy from Neighbours
Sun 28 Nov 2010He’s played the world’s favourite doctor for the past sixteen years, been the front man and singer in The Waiting Room for the past five, and would do almost anything for his legions of almost obsessive fans. When we heard that we was heading to The Walkabout in Nottingham as part of a UK tour, we called up Alan Fletcher, AKA Neighbour’s Dr Karl Kennedy, for a quick chat about music, his fans and being referred to as a DILF...
Anne McDonnell Interview
Mon 22 Nov 2010To celebrate National Short Story Week we spoke to local publisher, Pewter Rose Press