Aside from being a fantastic way to score a sponsorship deal with Gillette, tennis is a game best played with two people. It is appropriate, then, that Tennis (the band) is based around a married couple: Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley. This should immediately set alarm bells ringing in the head of anyone unlucky enough to know the back stories of Sonny and Cher, The White Stripes (sort of) or Abba – or indeed anyone who dislikes cosiness, tweeness or self-indulgence. The husband-and-wife band is never a great idea – it tends to result in either total self-destruction, or a kind of suffocating loveliness that can do nothing but boast of the wonderful love that these people share. 

Being a grumpy, misanthropic git, this is anathema to me, so I approached Tennis with a sense of foreboding. I need not have worried. Tennis may write love songs of a kind, but they seem to be more wistful than boastful: talking not of the perfection of their relationship, but instead of the sacrifices and difficulties faced in love. It’s quite touching, but not exactly musically mould-breaking. Indeed, anyone who enjoys Grizzly Bear will recognise the stabbing piano on ‘Origins’. 

Tennis draws on a couple of indie trends to set themselves apart from the crowd. The first is a ‘vintage’ style of production that leaves a lot of the music sounding like something that might occur had the Beatles and the Beach Boys collaborated. This works rather well up to a point. The feeling of satisfaction when you realise that the opening guitar on ‘Robin’ is only a hair’s breadth away from being the opening to ‘Please Please Me’ is tempered by the fact that the whole effect is a little fake – like a Polaroid picture taken using an iPhone App. 

Tennis do, however, do the slacker ‘thing’ properly. They are laid back enough to be medically pronounced as comatose, but not self-consciously so. Not for them are the obnoxious stylings of Best Coast or Wavves. This is genuinely laid back indie pop, which, whether faux-vintage or not, is definitely worth your time.

4 STARS

As a Stonewall award-winning journalist (an award for those who have made a positive impact on the LGBT community) and celebrated author of four novels centred on LGBTQ issues, Paul Burston is a major figure in Britain’s gay literary scene. He also has a long history of campaigning for LGBT rights: the above image is of Burston at a 1990 demonstration. Following his compilation of the all-time top ten gay novels for The Guardian and establishment of the Southbank’s famous ‘Polari salon’, a monthly literary event featuring entertainment and a panel of writers discussing gay fiction and LGBTQ issues, Burston has been featured in The Independent’s annual ‘pink list’ for five consecutive years and dubbed ‘gay London’s Jane Austen.’

As a Stonewall award-winning journalist (an award for those who have made a positive impact on the LGBT community) and celebrated author of four novels centred on LGBTQ issues, Paul Burston is a major figure in Britain’s gay literary scene, with a long history of campaigning for LGBT rights. Following his compilation of the all-time top ten gay novels for The Guardian and establishment of the Southbank’s famous ‘Polari salon’, a monthly literary event featuring entertainment and a panel of writers discussing gay fiction and LGBTQ issues, Burston has been featured in The Independent’s annual ‘pink list’ for five consecutive years and dubbed ‘gay London’s Jane Austen.’

In many bookshops, one can find shelves dedicated specifically to ‘LGBT fiction’ – do you think LGBT fiction can be or should be considered as an independent genre?

  ‘Gay fiction’ tends to be treated rather like genre fiction, which is ridiculous really, as gay fiction can cross many different genres. There are gay thrillers, gay comedies, and so on. But if having a section marked ‘LGBT’ helps readers to discover new LGBT authors, then I’m all for it.

Do you think that gay liberation in fiction is dependent upon the creation of a ‘gay tradition’, where plot and theme are directly centred upon gay identity and occurrences that arise from this identity, or do you think it should rather permeate existent traditions? For example, should gay equality be constituted by a science fiction novel in which the protagonist is, incidentally, gay?

 The ultimate aim of gay liberation is that there should be no need for such a thing as a gay identity. Obviously, we’re not there yet! Until we are, gay people will want to read books about people they can identify with, and that will often mean books with gay characters and plots centred on questions of sexual identity. But then the same is true of most readers. People like to read books about people they can identify with, whether it’s straight men reading Nick Hornby or women reading Marian Keyes. That said, I also enjoy books where a character’s sexuality is incidental to the story. Someone like Clive Barker will drop a gay character into a horror novel or a  fantasy novel, and the fact that the character is gay isn’t the most interesting thing about him. That, to me, is truly liberating.

You have a considerable background in gay activism – how much of your work as a writer is informed by this activism, and how much is simply inspired by your identity as a gay man? Can you discriminate between these two identities?

 I still consider myself an activist, and I write a lot of what you might call political journalism, insofar as being gay and writing about LGBT lives and rights is still considered to be political. But I don’t consciously set out to be political in my novels. ‘The Gay Divorcee’ wasn’t intended to be a political book, but when it was first published, I did some radio interviews and the very first question I was asked was, ‘Is gay marriage an attack on the family?’ As for distinguishing between my life as a gay man and a gay activist, walking down the road with my partner and choosing to hold his hand is a political act, whether we like it or not.

Musically speaking, these are good times for birdwatchers. The pastoral is back in a big way – in some areas of the modern folksy indie landscape you can’t turn around without tripping over bands called Goose Archipelago  or Chirpy and the Tweet-Tweets. Fronted by an ornithologist and named after a family of seabirds, it’s easy therefore to pigeonhole Shearwater with the opener of their new outing Animal Joy; lilting, incantatory vocals deliver a cryptic narrative that namechecks dogs and swallows like a child completing a Springwatch garden survey.

Jonathan Meiburg’s outfit has been around for a long time, since 1999, starting life as a side-project of Okkervil River – and they’re no one trick flying pony. What’s most striking about their recent work is its prominent, forceful drumming, more integral to the production here than to any recent album since The National’s tautly percussive breakthrough, Boxer.

As many of Meiburg’s lyrics are suspiciously elusive, a metaphor might help. Imagine a secret Fleet Foxes gig, where young men gather around a fire in the woods to toast marshmallows and plait daisy-crowns for local maidens. Now imagine someone turning up to that event with a massive drum, and beating it vigorously until someone sets fire to his artfully-tangled beard.

Shearwater at their best sit in the middle of this false polarity – ‘Animal Life’ is an enthralling blend of ancient and modern, rural and urban, and ‘You As You Were’ sounds like LCD Soundsystem begging for their supper when their tour bus has broken down somewhere in Texas Hill country. However, somewhere in the middle of unnecessarily extended rock epic ‘Insolence’, the album itself gets a little lost and a little uncertain. 

It’s been a while since Shearwater flew the nest; I’m just not sure if they’ve quite succeeded in building a place of their own.

3 STARS

I would have liked to have been psychic as a teenager. There’s something reassuring about knowing that, in one of those scalding adolescent moments, you can make somebody’s kidneys explode with a thought. Secretly being psychic, or a superhero, or a wizard, or possibly a martial artist, would be fantastic in that awkward period when you’re hoping to become an alpha male, but seem to be able to do little but grow slowly hairier.

On second thought, it is probably just as well teenage boys are not psychic. Take, for example, Chronicle, where three high-school kids find a crystal thing down a hole near a warehouse rave (‘What did Jung say about glowsticks?’) and develop the power to move objects around slightly unconvincingly with their minds. Naturally it all goes fatally wrong before 83 minutes are up.

Chronicle’s gag is that, like Cloverfield or The Blair Witch Project or all those other movies, it has been filmed by the characters themselves. So in dull moments you can play a game of ‘What exactly are the chances that someone happened to be filming this dramatically significant moment?’ It is partly explained by the fact that one character is a misfit with a thing for filming his life. ‘You don’t think it’s weird? Like it puts a barrier between you and everything else?’ ‘Maybe I want a barrier.’ Or maybe he just has his eye on the film rights.

With its shaky handheld camera, Chronicle keeps its superkids in a real-ish world of high-school angst. (Although each looks roughly twenty-five.) There is less battling the forces of evil than doing magic tricks to impress girls and then sulking. Angst-bitten teen superheroes may not be head-explodingly new. But in Chronicle the multicoloured lycra and the supervillain never actually turn up. The boys are too busy devastating the Pacific Northwest themselves.

Chronicle is a surprisingly good debut film. But it shows its immaturity a little. The boys’ CGI psychic powers look a bit wobbly. Floating objects tend not to move at quite the same rate as the purposeful limbs or clenched temples thrust towards them. And the characters I could swear I have seen before in my pyjamas in some More4 teen drama or other.

But overall, rather like finding a big psychic crystal down a hole near a warehouse rave, Chronicle is an unexpected treat. It just may not quite blow your mind.

FOUR STARS

When I say Gary Numan, you probably say ‘Cars.’ On the cusp of releasing a ‘Best of’ DVD, composed of ‘various bits of rare TV footage and a collection of promo videos,’ one might expect Numan, like the average listener, to be looking back over the acres of a career that has spanned over thirty years. The opposite is true.  

‘When I listen back to old stuff, which isn’t very often, the only thing that really glares out to me are the mistakes, the things that I could have done better. Chord structures that could have been more interesting; melodies that could have been more beautiful, or dynamic. Every album is an attempt to make up for the mistakes of the last one, to try to find new sounds that I’ve never used before or heard before and to try to put those sounds in ways that I’ve not done before.’ 

The difficulty lies in finding something for everyone. ‘Some fans will quite happily stay in 1979 forever, while others are always very eager to look at what you’re doing next. You’re constantly trying to do things that will please all the different factions that you have. The longer the career goes on, the more factions there seem to be, and it becomes increasingly difficult to do things that please everybody.’ It’s tempting to pigeonhole Numan based on his early work. ‘I don’t think anyone realized that it would go on quite as long as it has, now that it’s been 34 years, since I started. It’s funny because, for me, you don’t get quite as excited about that sort of thing as you do about a new album.’  

Having released Dead Son Rising in October of last year, Numan is back in the studio, and constantly looking forward. ‘I’m working flat out at the moment, trying to get a new album finished by the end of May. I’m massively into that and it’s very exciting. It really gives you a reason to get up in the morning. It’s that side of the business that’s getting me going and keeping me interested for such a long time.’ And the new album’s style? ‘My intention for it is that it should be the heaviest, darkest thing that I’ve ever done. It’s hugely powerful in the right environment – to take it on tour every night is thrilling, really. It’s not gentle music at all, or happy or beautiful – it’s a bit of an onslaught, and I love every second of it.’  

The studio experience is changing, though, not least due to the array of technology now at Numan’s fingertips. ‘There is so much choice now: it’s just ridiculous the amount of things you can do. One of the disciplines that you have to learn as this new technology has come along is how to know when to stop. You can spend a week just listening to different snare drums – there are fucking thousands of them! The other thing with technology is that you spend most of your time being back at school. Big piles of manuals by the bed – it’s not the sexiest thing in the world. You’re just learning all the time. You spend your entire life feeling ever so slightly stupid – or I do, anyway, because I never feel like I’m quite on top of any of it. I’m always just about hanging on by the skin of my teeth. The technology really helps, but it can really hinder it as well. It’s a tortuous old path, from start to finish.’

In November 2010, Wadham college was the first college in Oxford’s history to raise the rainbow flag. We raised it during Wadham’s annual Queer Week, a week of events that celebrates LGBTQ culture of the past, present and future, culminating in the famous Queer Fest party.

In November 2010, Wadham college was the first college in Oxford’s history to raise the rainbow flag. We raised it during Wadham’s annual Queer Week, a week of events that celebrates LGBTQ culture of the past, present and future, culminating in the famous Queer Fest party.It was a small gesture that generated an extremely positive response. Many students, residents, academics and tourists were talking about the flag and taking photos of it. News of Wadham flying the flag even spread to the international media: it made the front page of Pink News, Europe’s largest LGBTQ news service.

The rainbow has traditionally been a symbol of inclusivity, hope and diversity, and its more specific use now as a pride symbol reflects this. The rainbow flag is generally thought of as just a symbol of gay pride, but it is not only that – it more broadly represents a symbol of support for LGBTQ rights. You do not need to be a member of the LGBTQ community to support the advancement of the rights of a community that still faces discrimination and persecution across the globe.This is why we have come  up with an initiative to get every college involved and flying the flag  so that people could walk through Oxford and see that there is a message of support for the LGBT community coming from not only Wadham, but  the rest of Oxford university.

It’s been seven years since Alexander Payne served up his brilliantly, bittersweet Sidewaysand now he’s back with another offering The Descendants. It’s come to UK cinemas on the back of a wave of praise from our American cousins and for the most part it lives up to the hype.

George Clooney plays Matt King, a Hawaiian lawyer whose wife goes into a coma after a boating accident. With his wife out of the picture it’s up to him, the self-confessed ‘back-up parent’, to try and pull his family together and connect with his two daughters. On top of this he also has a decision to make. Due to a law change a huge area of land that has been held by the Kings for generations has to be sold and Matt has the final decision.

The film’s story is wonderfully written. Payne has a way of starting out with a simple premise and ratcheting up the complexity without making it feel forced or contrived. The dialogue is nice too, swaying perfectly from drama to comedy and back again, although there are a few moments when it was a bit too snappy for me to believe.

At the centre of the film is Clooney giving a fantastic performance. With all the Oscar buzz around it I was expecting a ‘big’ performance and it’s the exact opposite. It’s a terrifically low-key character study that seems better the more I think about it, and importantly you don’t spend the film thinking you’re watching George Clooney (perhaps the best compliment that can be given to a movie star of his stature). The supporting cast isn’t overshadowed though, with good performances all round and a particularly fab turn from Robert Forster as Matt’s father-in-law.

Maybe though the best performance comes from Hawaii itself. Every aspect of the film. from the soundtrack to the characters, is infused with the island’s culture and history, and the film’s tremendous sense of place means that characters and dialogue that would otherwise be jarring seem to fit this island paradise. Oh, and it’s beautiful to boot.

The Descendants is a lovely film about loss, family and the ties between our history and our land. It hits a few bum notes that can suck you out of the groove but a superb second half makes it well worth watching.

“People tend to reserve their extreme homophobia for when I’m not around,” Sue Sanders tells me at the beginning of February 2012, eight years after she founded LGBT history month and forty-five years on from the first act legalising homosexuality in the UK. “They’ll inform me it’s ‘not a problem’ and will ask what I’m making all this fuss about.” It’s clear that for Sue, the battle for LGBT equal rights is far from won. 

LGBT history month was founded by Sanders as both a political and social movement. It began as part of the organisation SchoolsOUT which aimed to encourage a wider understanding and discussion of LGBT issues in schools. Its birthplace as a part of this campaign group also highlights how important Sanders feels the institutions that govern education and work are in the fight for equality. The passing of the Public Duty Act last year, the first act which regulated homophobia in the workplace, was something the LGBT History Month group have fought for since their inception. 

The underlying concept of LGBT History month idea is actually a strikingly simple one: to, as Sanders puts it,”put LGBT people central” in the cultural eye for one month of the year. It is about carving out a cultural space for a culture that has, for a very long time, been suppressed. When I ask about the significance of ‘history’ for the movement, Sanders replies: “History is crucial: the stories of struggle, of individuals. Part of growing up is learning about your families, your community, giving you stories, giving you concepts. If you’re a member of the LGBT community you’re not going to get those stories from your biological family at all.”

In the past, the month has featured an exhibition at the British Museum of artifacts of people who experienced same-sex desire throughout history, but which had never been displayed in this context before.  The LGBT History Month website carries the disclaimer: “Sometimes we may ‘out’ a historical figure… if we do so and you can prove us wrong, please contact us with the evidence and we will correct the error.” While controversial, the ‘correcting’ of history to include the stories of LGBT figures seems a key project for the movement. However Sanders also says “I would use the word ‘history’ loosely. If you look at the calendar, people have taken it and used it in many different and creative ways.”

This year (and last) the theme of the month has been sport. Sanders made the decision to give two years to sport because “we knew it would be hard.” She notes that “if you talk to most young LGBT people their most hated lesson is sport,” and that many LGBT  sportspeople either play in LGBT clubs or else “grit their teeth,” enter ordinary clubs “keep their heads down or begin to try and challenge homo- and transphobia within those clubs.” The prejudices within sport are, for Sanders, “rooted in assumptions about gender,” and thus is a focaliser for prejudices endemic in society. And, Sanders argues, changing the perception of LGBT people within sport is going to involve much more than one gay footballer coming out: “The mainstream media think that if that happens all will be well. That’s nonsense.”

The organisation’s major progress regarding sport so far lies in a charter released by the government and signed by certain sporting authorities, pledging to tackle homophobia in sport. “We’re waiting to see the list [of authorities who have signed up],” Sanders tells me, “and then it will be up to us activists to go to those clubs and say, ‘what difference has this made, what are you doing about it?’”

As Sanders points out, the movement for LGBT rights as a whole is a very young one, and legislation is only the beginning: “Laws do not change the world. We have to have cultural shifts.” She points out that the laws for equality for women or disabled people were effected many years before any kind of equality was achieved, and therefore “the cultural work that we need to do to get [LGBT] human rights to be embedded will take as long, if not longer than it has for race and gender and disability.” However, for Sanders LGBT history month represents a ‘door’ for institutions and individuals to open – an opportunity for them to contribute to the changes in attitudes necessary if equality is to be achieved. While she believes there is a long way to go, she tells me that the calendar of over a thousand events is all the proof she needs that “the movement has been a success.”

When I meet Venezuelan conductor Natalia Luis-Bassa after her rehearsal with the Oxford University Orchestra, I am taken aback by her exuberance as she exclaims (in spite of her day of arduous travel followed by three hours of Shostakovich and Bartók), ‘I’m having the time of my life!’. And, with this remark, she sets the tone for our conversation.

 Luis-Bassa has lived in the UK for the past sixteen years and alongside conducting the Hallam Sinfonia in Sheffield and Haffner Orchestra in Lancaster, she is a professor of conducting at her alma mater, London’s Royal College of Music. Despite joining Venezuela’s acclaimed youth music programme, El Sistema, as an oboist aged fifteen, with full parental support for her musical interests, Luis-Bassa came to her tertiary musical studies relatively late. After starting a degree in Tourism, she enrolled at the Instituto Universitario de Estudios Musicales at 22, transferring her concentration from oboe to conducting as soon as the course was established. This was a natural move given her enduring fascination with the discipline, learning full orchestral scores alongside her individual orchestral parts. She became the first person to gain a degree in orchestral conducting in Venezuela and moved to England to begin her postgraduate study at RCM, where she was subsequently awarded the Junior Fellowship in opera conducting. 

Discussing her musical influences she cites some of the usual suspects, ‘very much Bernstein, a lot of Karajan’, adding that theirs were the best vinyl recordings available to her growing up in Venezuela. On summer courses she attended in the UK she remembers encountering performances by Abbado and Rattle, but after meeting him personally at RCM in 1998, Luis-Bassa identifies conductor Sir Colin Davis as a strong influence and in many respects, her musical mentor. As she observed him, Luis-Bassa became enraptured by his respectful treatment of orchestras which provoked a desire in her to follow him ‘not only as a musician, but as a human being’, recalling his advice, ‘they are the ones playing Natalia, give them a smile – we exist because of them.’ She remembers one of her early performances of Brahms’ Second Symphony where the bassoons made a conspicuous mistake in the second movement. After the concert she discovered the bassoonists resolved to stop playing at the moment she had glared at them. ‘By looking at someone, look what I did? We are human, we all make mistakes. The way is to smile at them, encourage them.’ In her opinion, this attitude towards orchestral playing has left a permanent mark on the industry: ‘Conductors are not dictators anymore, orchestras have power’.

 When I ask her about the secret of El Sistema’s success, she offers a tripartite explanation: its inversion of convention by immersing children in orchestral playing from the outset, its breaking down of elitist barriers and its emphasis on the development of social skills. She hails its founder, José Antonio Abreu, as ‘a genius’, utterly deserving of efforts made to nominate him for the Nobel peace prize, particularly since founding the project initially meant visiting impoverished areas of Caracas and engaging in blunt exchanges. ‘He had the guts to say “give me your gun and I’ll give you a violin”.’ Operating all over the country and involving about 300,000 young people, the majority of whom are from poor socio-economic backgrounds, the programme receives considerable funding from the government.

Though it only emerged on the international stage in recent years, Luis-Bassa is keen to highlight the programme’s existence for decades prior to the current government who have, in some ways, caught the wave of El Sistema’s success and appropriated it for themselves given its ‘socialist’ appeal and opportunity to promote Venezuela internationally. Luis-Bassa remains hopeful that British imitations of the El Sistema movement will, in time, achieve success given that there appears to be a need for them. ‘There are too many young people doing nothing … the London riots could have been avoided,’ she claims. While she concedes that there is more red tape to navigate in the UK,  there are also ‘laws here that don’t exist in Latin America’; namely the resources and infrastructure available that lend themselves to such initiatives. In Venezuela, ‘conditions are hard, we rehearse in garages … With more practice and less nothing’, she reassures me, ‘I’m faithful that it will work.’

 Luis-Bassa modestly puts her success in the UK down to luck. ‘Even as a woman and a foreigner, rejection has been the last thing I have experienced’. She describes a ‘why not, let’s try?’ attitude she has encountered in Britain. ‘That’s the thing I adore about this country: they like challenges.’ Since she considers her career to have been relatively obstacle-free, I feel I have to enquire as to why there are still so few professional female conductors. Her face falls and her eyes narrow. ‘There are more than you think,’ she tells me. Rather than blaming archaic musical institutions or suggesting discrimination in the industry, her response is imbued with characteristic optimism. She asserts that the responsibility lies in the perseverance of aspiring female musicians who must ‘keep working, not hesitate and not doubt a single inch of being able to do it.’ She names Marin Alsop and Xian Zhang as two women who are quietly ‘clearing the path for the ones that are about to come.’ She is convinced it’s not a matter of gender, ‘we are all able to do it as far as we are able to convince the ensemble we’re in front of.’ Looking me in the eye, she reaffirms, ‘we will get there – and this will soon be out of the repertoire of questions I get asked’, which is followed by a cascade of laughter.

 As we reach the onerous topic of the future of classical music, Luis-Bassa cuts to the chase; ‘why hasn’t it died yet?’ To her, classical music is rooted in live performance, ‘the orchestra could have been replaced by robots years ago’; she claims that we need live performance with all its mistakes and peculiarities. ‘It will never die because it’s different every time and we need it, we are asking every day to have the experience of live music’. Brushing off concerns of the aging audience demographic, she puts it down to factors of time and money. This relaxed attitude is perhaps informed by her liberal approach to the relationship between classical and pop music. ‘I have always said that Mozart was the Michael Jackson of his age.’ She is quick to establish that as classical, pop and folk music are all traditions specific to certain times and places and since ‘the traditions should never die’, they will all be worthy of attention in future generations. ‘Pop music needs to be present since it is part of the idiosyncrasy of people; keep it, support it, dance to it.’ The inflexible categories we place on music can be problematic, she suggests, given the cross-fertilisation between genres, referencing the influence of popular folk music on composers like Brahms, Dvorak and Bartok (the latter notably dedicated his life to collecting folk melodies). 

Though she maintains she is still in the ‘discovery period’ of her life, Luis-Bassa’s musical taste is eclectic, ranging from salsa to Bruckner and beyond, but her light tone is replaced with one of absolute sincerity when our discussion veers back towards Brahms. ‘I adore him. He is a composer I identify with.’ Carrying the burden of Beethoven’s legacy, Brahms failed to produce his first symphony until he had reached his 40s, and in her mid-20s, Luis-Bassa made the decision not to perform Brahms symphonies until she reached the age he was when he wrote them, ‘well, 43 came and I had to do it. I am loving it.’ As time escapes us, I can’t help feeling left with a strange sense that Natalia Luis-Bassa is somehow a human embodiment of El Sistema,  exuding warmth, musicality and energy, yet humble at her core.