As a performance in Bingley’s Myrtle Park, Brighter Still marks both the longest night of the year and the culmination of ...

As we approach the end of 2025, we’re looking back at the things that have brought us immense comfort during the year. For the team at Northern Soul, books were once again a source of great joy, and ...

When I was a teenager and discovered poetry, I dreamed that, one day, I would run the first poetry-only bargain bookshop. I was going to call it ‘Ezra Poundland’. Sadly, despite my love of a good pun, ...

Lost Souls, the debut album by Cheshire trio Doves, was released 25 years ago. That quarter of a century has been a hell of a ride for the band, made up of brothers Andy and Jez Williams and frontman ...

Returning to Manchester’s O2 Ritz after more than two decades carries its own charge. The street is famous now, polished by memory and tourism, but once felt darker, riskier, electric with possibility ...

If you want to understand how adventurous and abstract theatre can be, watch a children’s show. Children are the most honest audience you’ll ever sit among. Rarely will you hear one lean over and ...

Scour the country. Nay, the universe. Pay what you will and marvel at the exquisite professionalism and expensive production values of the priciest extravaganza. You will not find a Christmas show ...

As December devours the daylight, it’s hard to avoid the winter skies. In the twinkling between dawn and dusk, their restless moods shift from eggshell expansiveness to concrete introspection, hemmed ...

Contemporary art sits between two forms of repetition. One is the tired canon that keeps circling familiar movements, the other is the endless stream of algorithmic images that look perfect but feel ...

We are now in peak panto time, so Sergei Prokoviev’s L’Amour des Trois Oranges (The Love for Three Oranges) is a ripe choice for the RNCM’s winter opera offering. This is parody: comic stuff with ...

Over this festive season, the theatre scene is awash with big, glittering shows full of singalongs, dancing, hilarious cross-dressing, and half-remembered TV actors. That’s all fine family friendly ...

As I explain the plot of The Pied Piper of Hamelin to my 13-year-old niece, I watch her expression turn to horror. “Well, there’s this piper who is asked to rid a town of a rat infestation. He plays ...