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Florence Welch may have a big fringe and give kooky interviews, but she ain’t no Lily Allen. Tonight the 22-year-old rose goddess-like from the stage, her chiffon shawl and Titian locks billowing behind her. Yes, there was a wind machine and rather a lot of cape-flapping, but the performance more
than lived up to the stage-twirling melodramatics.
With soaring vocals to rival Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick, and some hair-on-end harmonies and harp-plucking, F&TM delivered a phenomenal set, from the shouty ’Kiss with a Fist’ to a soul-raising cover of Candi Staton’s ’You Got the Love’. Will these young upstarts ever come down to earth? Let’s hope not.
Concorde, 2 June
5/5
Colette Bernhardt

A packed evening opened with Andrew Collins (of every E4 list show fame) delivering a short but interesting ‘lecture with jokes’ focusing on the Mitford sisters and some odd dancing.
After a strong stand up set from Richard Herring it was onto the podcast – one hour, six minutes and 36 seconds of obscene irreverence and hilarious banter between the two which worked in front of an audience brilliantly.
Even after that they took questions and kept the laughs coming late into the night. If you download the resulting podcast you can hear my own uproarious laughter throughout.
Come back soon Collings and Herring; we want more!
Duke of York’s Picturehouse, 28 May
5/5
Simon Plotkin

Victoria Nangle chats to comedian, activist, novelist and policy collector Mark Thomas

Mark Thomas is enjoying the sunshine, but more than that, he’s enjoying his new tour. Obviously there’s going to be some political content to it – this is Mark Thomas, scourge of the status quo and campaigner for the little people. But how will it manifest? So I asked him – what’s the show about?
“Okay. It’s a comedy show, and basically what I do is I ask people to come up with suggestions for policies to improve our lives and make the world a better place. And people put forward their policies and then we discuss them in the show and then we vote on them and we choose a policy and I go and campaign upon it.” That sounds brilliant. And he’s had some classic policies come out of it so far. “Some of them we’ve started working on already. The good thing is there’s loads of really really good ideas. It’s really fun to do.” Any examples? “Last night when we were in Manchester they insisted on having two policies. The policy at one was that you should have a recall system for MPs so that you can sign a petition and recall an MP back to their constituency now and again. The other one that won was that there should be an age of consent for religion.” Read the rest of this article »

Paddy Ashdown spoke to Ralph Miller about his highs, lows and why he couldn’t work for Gordon Brown

Paddy Ashdown has tried his hand at a few things down the years. The charismatic soldier-cum-diplomat with a degree in Chinese has helped rebuild a Balkan state, sat in both Houses of Parliament and spent 11 years as leader of the Liberal Democrats. I caught up with him to discuss his varied and extraordinary life ahead of the release of his autobiography A Fortunate Life. Read the rest of this article »