Guitarist Peter Green last performed with Fleetwood Mac, the band he help found, in 1970. Fellow founding-member Mick Fleetwood has honoured Green's legacy in an all-star concert that will be shown in cinemas, celebrating the band's early music. Mick Fleetwood talks to Samira about the early days of Fleetwood Mac, working with Peter, and dreams of a Fleetwood Mac reunion. Filmmaker Cathy Brady has already won international prizes for her short films. Now she’s made her debut feature film, Wildfi...
Sep 06, 2021•28 min
Irish author Sally Rooney’s third novel 'Beautiful World, Where Are You' has just been released amid a fanfare of publicity and speculation. It follows the runaway success of the TV adaptation of her Booker longlisted second novel, Normal People, for which she was nominated for an Emmy Award. Essayist and critic Sinéad Gleeson and writer Zing Tsjeng, Executive Editor of Vice UK, join us to review. Film Critic Jason Solomons is Front Row’s correspondent at this year’s Venice International Film Fe...
Sep 03, 2021•41 min
When Quentin Tarantino’s debut novel, was published earlier this summer, he gave his only UK broadcast interview to Front Row. Now in a special edition of the programme, Kirsty Lang presents an extended version of that interview. For the subject of his new book, Tarantino turned to his last film, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, which looked at the Hollywood of the late 1960s, through the relationship between an actor, who fears his career is in decline, and his best friend, his stunt double. The ...
Sep 02, 2021•28 min
Ian Rankin, author of the Inspector Rebus crime novels, has recently completed a book left unfinished by the father of the ‘tartan noir’ genre William McIlvanney who died in 2015. Ian explains how he pieced together the fragments and notes left by McIlvanney and wrote his own sections of The Dark Remains, a prequel to McIlvanney’s Laidlaw series. He also reveals that the experience of working on the novel may mean a new lease of life for Rebus. With summer music festivals linked to spikes in Cov...
Sep 01, 2021•29 min
The murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 and the subsequent police investigations threw up a lot of questions about institutional racism and corruption within the force. Another enquiry which began in 2006 was led by DCI Clive Driscoll, who decided to go right back to basics and investigate the crime anew. In a new three-part drama on ITV, Steve Coogan plays Driscoll and Hugh Quarshie plays Stephen’s father, Neville. We speak with them both about the murder, the trial, the enquiry and what a drama...
Aug 31, 2021•28 min
Liz Carr's role in Silent Witness was a groundbreaking step in the depiction of disability in primetime TV drama. The actor, comedian and broadcaster, who has used a wheelchair since childhood, looks back at her early years, her law degree, and how that led her to life of activism for disability rights. Liz spent six years playing Clarissa Mullery in the BBC drama series, and she discusses the work she has been offered since she left, with latest projects being a major new Jack Thorne TV drama a...
Aug 30, 2021•28 min
Paula Hawkins’s novel The Girl on the Train sold 23 million copies and was made into a film starring Emily Blunt. Now she has written A Slow Fire Burning, a who-and-why-dunnit about damaged people trying to move on with their lives, set along the Regent’s Canal in London. She talks to Front Row about starting with character, creating suspense, and how she reflects on the success of The Girl on the Train. Alan Warner’s 1998 novel, The Sopranos, won the Saltire Society’s Scottish Book of the Year ...
Aug 27, 2021•41 min
Jason deCaires Taylor has been working in underwater art for 15 years. Today, he joins us to discuss his new museum Musan, built in the Mediterranean sea off the coast of Cyprus. The Answer Me This podcast began in 2007. Presenters Helen Zaltzman and Olly Mann have been answering questions from listeners about anything and everything over the subsequent 400 episodes. And now they've decided to call it a day. We find out how podcasting has evolved over the years. Fred D'Aguiar's book Year of Plag...
Aug 26, 2021•28 min
Following the announcement of the death of the musician Charlie Watts, tonight’s Front Row is an archive edition featuring John Wilson in conversation with the band he was a member of - The Rolling Stones. The programme was recorded in 2012 to mark 50 years since the band’s first performance. In it, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, and Ronnie Wood reflect on life in the Rolling Stones as they prepare to return to the stage.
Aug 25, 2021•28 min
Music journalist David Hepworth reflects on the life and drums of Rolling Stone Charlie Watts who has died aged 80. Natalya Romaniw is a soprano on her way to stardom. With numerous Madame Butterflies, Mimis and Tatyanas under her belt, Natalya was on the brink of international fame when the pandemic hit and took her momentum. Now she’s preparing to sing the eponymous Tosca in Puccini’s masterpiece, and she tells Tom how she’s preparing for one of opera’s most iconic roles and performing post-lo...
Aug 24, 2021•28 min
American conductor Kalena Bovell makes her Proms debut with the Chineke! Orchestra this week. She tells Samira about her path into conducting, and why it’s so exciting to be performing music by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor at the Royal Albert Hall. Following the death of singer Don Everly over the weekend, Bob Stanley joins us to reflect on the importance, sound and influence of the Everly Brothers. Award winning playwright and screen writer Jack Thorne has delivered this year’s McTaggart Lecture at ...
Aug 23, 2021•28 min
Michael Sarnoski is the director and co-writer of Pig, starring Nicolas Cage and a pig that is brilliant at finding truffles – until it’s stolen. Cage’s trip to the culinary hot spots of the big city to find his pig reveals more about his past and explores ideas of grief, redemption, and what to value in life. The director joins Front Row to talk about casting Cage – and casting the right pig. The singer-songwriter Moses Sumney has an extraordinary and distinctive voice and his songs challenge t...
Aug 20, 2021•41 min
At last, Cinderella has made it to the ball. After postponement, rearrangement, and postponement again because of, first the lockdown, then social distancing requirements, Andrew Lloyd Webber's new musical, Cinderella, opened last night. Emerald Fennell takes a radical approach to the fairytale: in her version Prince Charming is missing, presumed dead; the beauty industry is satirised and the banality of surface allure exposed. Still, there is pazzazz aplenty: big numbers, big frocks and big hai...
Aug 19, 2021•28 min
This year's Edinburgh Festival is a smaller affair than normal but it's packed full of delicious cultural goodness. We speak with film director Isaac Julien about Lessons of The Hour- a 10-screen film about the former slave and emancipationist Frederick Douglass who visited Edinburgh many times. Just These Please is a four-piece comedy group who have had more than 6m views on YouTube for their sketches and whose Edinburgh Fringe show has sold out. Poet and playwright Hannah Lavery has many works...
Aug 18, 2021•28 min
The Edinburgh Festival is a much more pared-down event this year because of Covid, but despite this there is still plenty on offer. Comedian Henning Wehn is filling the Edinburgh Corn Exchange and he'll be discussing the challenge of preparing for a festival with all live comedy events cancelled for so many months. Playwright Frances Poet discusses the world premiere of her unsettling play Still at the Traverse Theatre. Edinburgh-based writer Arusa Qureshi will being us her observations of how t...
Aug 17, 2021•28 min
Dr Ahmad Sarmast, founder and director of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music tells John Wilson of his fears and hopes for music-making as his country falls under the control of the Taliban. Some things can only be expressed in song. That’s the idea behind The Song Project at the Royal Court Theatre where five of our foremost female playwrights - E.V. Crowe, Sabrina Mahfouz, Somalia Nonyé Seaton, Stef Smith and Debris Stevenson - collaborate with composer Isobel Waller-Bridge, choreograp...
Aug 16, 2021•29 min
Last year, Icelandic pianist Vikingur Olafsson was Front Row's artist-in-residence from Reykjavik. Finally this week, he's able to join John Wilson in the studio, where he talks playing at the Proms and how great it is to be back performing in front of live audiences. He shares stories from his new Mozart album (including a childhood tantrum against the child prodigy), and plays Mozart and Cimarosa live in the studio. A storm has blown up over poet Kate Clanchy’s recent reaction to a review on G...
Aug 13, 2021•41 min
In 1962 the USA and USSR engaged in one of the most terrifying acts of brinksmanship the world has seen. But few people know of the role played by an ordinary British businessman in bringing the Cuban Missile Crisis to an end. New film The Courier, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, tells the true story of Greville Wynne, recruited by MI6 to penetrate the Soviet nuclear programme. Director Dominic Cooke talks to Tom about creating this Cold War spy thriller. Deceit is a new four-part drama on Channe...
Aug 12, 2021•28 min
Russian composer Igor Stravinsky died 50 years ago this year. Yet his influence is still felt today, whether it's the pounding rhythms of The Rite of Spring or the musical borrowings of The Rake's Progress. Radio 3's Kate Molleson explains how Stravinsky changed the musical landscape, and just why we should be celebrating a composer born nearly 140 years ago. Aurora Orchestra are preparing for their appearance at this year's BBC Proms. And the preparations involve memorising The Firebird, to pla...
Aug 11, 2021•28 min
Paradise opens at the Olivier auditorium of the National Theatre tomorrow. It's a new version of a play that had its premiere, and was acclaimed, in 409BC - Philoctetes by Sophocles. Just before the final preview begins, writer Kae Tempest tells Kirsty Lang why this ancient story of a wounded soldier, in constant pain, abandoned on an island, grips them today. John Boyne’s new novel is a humorous and scathing takedown of the world of social media through the lens of a particularly grotesque fami...
Aug 10, 2021•29 min
Phil Wang joins us to discuss his stand up show, Philly Philly Wang Wang that he filmed at the London Palladium over the pandemic. Exploring race, romance, politics, and his mixed British-Malaysian heritage, he talks about his addiction to making people laugh, as well as explaining why he doesn't fear getting cancelled. Shape Open have created an online exhibition featuring the work of 24 disabled and nondisabled artists working across Europe and North America, and has disability as its theme, a...
Aug 09, 2021•28 min
Sir Tom Stoppard's Olivier Award-winning play Leopoldstadt closed because of Covid in March 2020. Tomorrow it returns to the same stage and the same cast will tell again the story a Jewish family, in Vienna in the first half of the 20 century. They fled the pogroms in the East and later suffered terribly under Nazi rule. The plot has parallels with Stoppard's own family - all four of Stoppard's grandparents perished in concentration camps. He talks about returning to the theatre, if he has revis...
Aug 06, 2021•41 min
Sarah, Duchess of York, talks to Nick Ahad about her debut Mills and Boon novel, Her Heart for a Compass, based on the life of her ancestor, Lady Margaret. She talks about the parallels between her own life and her heroine’s, including finding freedom in America. She discusses the impact of newspaper headlines on her mental health, her plans to make a feature film about Prince Albert's mother Louise, and what she makes of TV series The Crown. Composer Max Richter’s new album ‘Exiles’ is a combin...
Aug 05, 2021•28 min
On the anniversary of the Beirut port explosion, we talk to representatives from both The British Museum and The Archaeological Museum at the American University of Beirut, who are working together to restore eight ancient glass vessels which were severely damaged. We review Vivo, a new full length cartoon film on Netflix featuring compositions by and the voice of Lin-Manuel Miranda. Does it reach Hamiltonian levels of greatness or is it a less spectacular creation? The DCMS has announced that U...
Aug 04, 2021•28 min
Booker Prize shortlisted Turkish writer Elif Shafak has a new novel: The Island Of Missing Trees. Set in Cyprus it follows lovers who risk everything in a divided island. And one of the narrators is a fig tree. Shafak explains about melding passionate ecological and political information and messages. Jonathon Heyward makes his Proms debut this week conducting the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain. He tells Samira why he loves working with youth orchestras, isn't so keen on being labelle...
Aug 03, 2021•28 min
Yesterday the audience was on its feet – more than once - to applaud the cast, the band and the design of Anything Goes at the Barbican Theatre in London. On Front Row today Samira Ahmed talks to Kathleen Marshall, the director and choreographer about the appeal of the show today, and to Sutton Foster, the American star making her UK debut as Reno Sweeney, who gets to sing some of Cole Porter’s greatest songs including I Get a Kick Out of You which she has recorded especially for Front Row. Co-w...
Aug 02, 2021•28 min
Ben Okri's new play Changing Destiny is an adaptation of one of the world's oldest known stories, the ancient Egyptian Tale of Sinuhe. Tonight marks not only its opening night at London's Young Vic theatre, but the first time the venue has opened its doors since last year. Artistic director Kwame Kwei-Armah, who directs the play, talks to Tom live from the Young Vic just a few minutes before the curtain goes up. This evening, Sir James MacMillan has a new piece being premiered at the First Night...
Jul 30, 2021•41 min
Geeta Pendse visits the new Museum of Making in Derby - an £18 million redevelopment that celebrates the city's 300-year industrial heritage. Jamie Thrasivoulou, Derby County Football Club's Poet-In-Residence, shares what it's like to perform a poem to a stadium of roaring football fans. The writer Mahsuda Snaith discusses her flash fiction written in response to Kedleston Hall as part of the National Trust's Colonial Countryside project. BBC Derby's Martin Williams learns how to create a Map of...
Jul 29, 2021•28 min
Tokyo: Art & Photography at The Ashmolean in Oxford is a celebration of the city currently hosting the Olympics. The exhibition’s curator Lena Fritsch discusses the show which spans the arts of the Edo period (1603-1868) when the country was officially closed to the outside world, to today, and considers the sprawling metropolis’s appetite for the new and innovative. Comedy series Ted Lasso revolves around the eponymous American football coach who, fish-out-of-water, comes to London to coach...
Jul 28, 2021•28 min
As a 3.5 metre tall puppet called Little Amal begins an 8,000km journey from Turkey to Manchester to highlight the difficulties faced by refugee children, Samira talks to theatre director and producer David Lan live from Gaziantep on the Turkish-Syrian border about ambitious artistic project The Walk. The longlist for the 2021 Booker Prize has been announced and we discuss the 13 chosen novels with Sameer Rahim from Prospect Magazine and Claire Armitstead from The Guardian. Are these the right t...
Jul 27, 2021•28 min
