Hailed as folk music’s answer to Lady Gaga, 19-year-old Geordie songstress Beth Jeans Houghton usually performs wearing a peroxide wig and a metallic bra. As the story goes, three years ago she emerged from the crowd at Green Man festival after Devendra Banhart asked for a member of the audience to get up and sing a song. Since then, Houghton has been fine tuning her sweet, breathy vocals on winsome tunes such as, I Will Return, I Promise.
An album is now on its way, and Houghton has already supported Bon Iver, Mystery Jets and King Creosote. This month she takes centre stage, touring the UK with her band, Hooves of Destiny. While her look maybe brash and glam, don’t be fooled. Behind the quirky facade lurks a well of gentle folk tunes full of mandolin and magic.
Twin’s fashion director Celestine Cooney delves inside the hearts and minds of Taylor, Shiloh and Britney in-between shots on Boo George’s denim story, Kentucky Rain.
Remember that perfect car journey cassette tape? Or lovingly writing out a track list for the boy you liked? Mixtapes were the way we shared our music love. Sadly, the days of the comforting clunk and click of a cassette player are as long gone as those crushes.
Spotify and others have tried to revive the art of the mix through shared play lists and the like – but somehow it’s not quite the same. Luckily we have discovered The Mixtape Club – who have found a way to bring back the magic of the compilation. It began with burning mixes onto CD’s for friends while at art college, fast-forward a few years and Micah Panama and Brian Thomas, who live in San Francisco and Brooklyn respectively, have created their own website dedicate to the mix.
“We started the site with a simple mantra: ‘The Mixtape Club is an organization dedicated to the art of the mixtape’,” says Panama.
Each month they invite ten designers and friends to submit ten tracks along with an original artwork album cover. The mixes are available for that month only and then they do it all over again.
“A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do,” says Panama.
This month’s mix brings together tunes from Animal Collective and Sébastien Tellier to Madeleine Peyroux and A Tribe Called Quest. Amongst the cover art is a dreamy barren wood photograph taken by designer Yuri Angela Chung, as well as a DIY paintbox style thumb picture by Driko Moto. Who said MP3s have no soul?
Is it us or do these rather magnificent mannequins spotted in the Prada window look uncannily like Twin’s favourite model, Freja Beha Erichsen? Clever Miuccia. Ok so it’s not Freja’s typical tomboyish look – but we covet the hell out these summery, graphic print day dresses. Next stop Portofino.
After instigating MySpace rumours that they were a group of Swedish kids, nostalgia poppers Summer Camp finally revealed their true identity-singer-songwriter Jeremy Warmsley and Elizabeth Sankey, aka the editor of Platform magazine.
Mystery solved, this week the pair have just put out their blissful spectral pop track Ghost Train on Moshi Moshi records. The secrecy surrounding their collaboration, which is fuelled by a mutual love of John Cusack films and Molly Ringwald in The Breakfast Club, has injected some refreshing enigmatic charm into the hit-parade.
Check out the montage video featuring shots from a 1969 film titled ‘Last Summer’, featuring a young Barbara Hershey, pre Beaches fame.
Coachella kicks off in California this week, and we are starting to gear up for another summer of Hunter clad lost weekends in the British countryside. The granddaddy of festivals, Glastonbury, turns 40 this year and photographer Liam Bailey is celebrating with an exhibition of photographs taken over years of faithful attendance. Since the early Nineties he has been capturing the acts of abandon and free spiritedness that happen when so many people pile into a field for a weekend under the stars. Steering away from the main stages, his images concentrate on the mud, tents and mayhem that make the festival so unique.
Liam Bailey’s Lost & Found – Celebrating 40 years of Glastonbury is at The Print Space in Shoreditch from Thursday April 15 to May 4. liambaileyprojects.com
Yes, Laura Marling is one of the most quietly exciting British artists to have come to the fore in recent years. We look forward to letting her music wash over us on balmy summer nights, but it’s the artwork for her limited edition new album, I Sing Because I Can, that really makes our hearts beat faster in our tiny chests. Invest now.
Over 20 years before Kathryn Bigelow won the Oscar for Best Director, Sally Potter – the woman behind Orlando and Rage – made cinema history in 1983 with her first feature film The Gold Diggers.
Using an all-female cast and crew – all of whom received equal pay – the film was made for £250,000 and was a landmark in female filmmaking.
Radical and experimental, complete with dance numbers and songs performed by Potter herself, the story centres around a bank worker (Colette Laffont) who becomes obsessed by how money is circulated and traded, and the uncanny way it always ends up in the hands of powerful men. Her path converges with that of beautiful blonde, Ruby (Julie Christie) a film star who is herself an object trading on her beauty. Together they become a united front against bureaucracy and commodification.
As far as feminist-fantasy musicals go The Gold Diggers is in a category of its own making – for those in Glasgow this Thursday night there’s a rare chance to catch a big screen showing at the Centre for Contemporary Arts.
‘Curiosity, imagination and small things that talk about bigger things’-this is what Luminous Books is all about.
Artist Louisa Bailey started out with just a single shelf of about 20 paperbacks before opening her pop-up shop tucked just off Dalston’s Kinglsand Road, at the George Polke Gallery in September 2009.
Every Saturday Luminous Books presents a highly edited collection of rare and unusual second hand editions. An act of defiance against the endless choices posed by bookshop chains and a great antidote to the online Amazon experience, book lovers are encouraged to browse through the works of writers like Jorge Luis Borges, Bertrand Russel and Miranda July, or contemplate Plato’s cave, whales and the Antarctic.
You can also catch Luminous at various East London markets, and this Easter Sunday at Wills-Moody Jumble Sale. Keep an eye out for copies of J.D Salinger in early April when illustrator Nicola Starr will present her collection of rare Salinger editions.
Luminous Books is open every Saturday 12 – 6pm. George Polke gallery, 3.5 Frederick Terrace, E8 4EW www.luminousbooks.co.uk
Hot on the fashion heels of The Sartorialist’s first book, Swiss-born Yvan Rodic was in London this week to launch his own collection of images of style-makers snapped on the pavements of London, New York, Paris, Reykjavik and beyond. Bringing together over 300 photographs from his cult blog, Facehunter, the book is a paean to our continued love affair with street style as the new fashion frontline.
Design blog It’s Nice That is a daily fix for discovering new talent and inspiring ideas from across the creative industry. In their biannual printed magazine the team bring together the best online posts from the past six months for us to physically thumb our way through, as well as treating us to some specially written interviews and features from top creative figures.
Check out April’s issue for interviews featuring the likes of graphic design legend Milton Glaser, fashion designer Sir Paul Smith and artist Maisie Broadhead amongst others. Designer Ken Garland rifts on his love of rust, while artist Johan Lofgren’s expounds on his impressive collection of vintage board games.
It’s Nice That Issue #3 with Parra print is available to pre-order only from the It’s Nice That for £10. www.itsnicethat.com/shop
Few actors have consistently provoked like Samantha Morton. On-screen we’ve seen her skip town for Spain after her boyfriend’s sucide in ‘Morvern Callar’, get everyone talking as Sean Penn’s mute lover in ‘Sweet and Lowdown’ and even take on Marilyn Monroe in ‘Mister Lonely’.
Morton’s ability to mesmerise and disconcert is no less powerful in her 1997 debut ‘Under the Skin’. Here she plumbs promiscuity, masochism and rage as Iris – a young woman who tries to overcome her grief at the sudden loss of her mother through casual sex – pushing her relationship with her sister to the limits. The ICA are screening ‘Under the Skin’ this weekend. It’s well worth a revisit.
LoneLady, AKA Julie Campbell is a self-styled writer, vocalist and super-tight guitarist. Recorded in a ramshackle studio in one of Manchester’s crumbling mills, her debut album ‘Nerve Up’ invokes the ghosts of Joy Division, Wire and The Fall. Though her inspirations are dark and dour, her post-punk tunes are positively popping.
‘Nerve Up’ is out on 22nd February on Warp Records.
What captures the eye of New York gallerist James Danziger captivates us too. His personal blog The Year in Pictures sifts through the layers of our dense cultural world, distilling the best photographs, as well as other jewels, for us to fall in love with and delight in. Up there, a picture of William Eggleston and Charlotte Rampling, illustrating a post about Juergen Teller.
Have you ever wondered what links Gareth Pugh’s PVC and Chanel’s LBD?
Black is the answer according to a new exhibition at the MoMu in Antwerp, that explores the history of its changing role in the way we dress. From Beatniks to Goths, subcultures have long embraced the dark side of dressing, and ‘BLACK – Masters of Black in Fashion and Costume’ reveals how the darkest of hues has captured the fashion mood for centuries.
The exhibition cuts a swathe through fashion’s dark past – from Sixteenth Century aristocrats, through to Rei Kawakubo’s avant-garde designs for Comme des Garçons in the Eighties – and encompassing female emancipation in the Twenties – thank you Coco!
Kaat Debo, director of the MoMu says: “In the Sixteenth Century Antwerp became one of the important centres for dyeing fabrics black, therefore, the city has a historic connection to the colour.”
With silhouettes on show from Belgian’s Ann Demeulemeester and Olivier Theyskens it’s clear that in Antwerp black’s not back – it never went away.
‘BLACK – Masters of Black in Fashion and Costume’ runs from March 25th until August 8th 2010, at MoMu – Fashion Museum in Antwerp. www.momu.be/en
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