Interviews

‘People thought I was insane’: Graham Nash on the birth of Crosby, Stills and Nash

9 September 2023 9:00 am

Adam Sweeting talks to Graham Nash about Joni Mitchell, the Hollies and the birth of Crosby, Stills and Nash in the Laurel Canyon idyll of the 1960s

Joy, fear and regret in contemporary Britain

20 August 2022 9:00 am

For two and a half years, as Britain adjusted from normality to the most disorienting collective trauma of our lifetimes,…

We do love to be beside the seaside

13 August 2022 9:00 am

In the garden of my house in Cornwall there is a smooth granite stone about the size and shape of…

Has Cuba’s revolution finally fizzled out?

6 August 2022 9:00 am

In 1968, the US anthropologist Oscar Lewis arrived in Cuba with a tape recorder and a mission to capture the…

Did postmodernism pave the way for Donald Trump?

14 May 2022 9:00 am

David Shields is an American author who has decided to collate many of the questions he’s been asked in interviews…

Contains moments of spellbinding banality: Radio 4's The Poet Laureate has Gone to his Shed reviewed

21 August 2021 9:00 am

The interview podcast is a genre immoderately drawn to gimmicks, as the logical space of possible formats is gradually exhausted.…

The man at the heart of punk: the late Pete Shelley recalls his Buzzcocks years

17 July 2021 9:00 am

Manchester, in the words of the artist Linder Sterling, is a ‘tiny little world’. Nearly three million people live in…

New Yorkers talk the talk

15 May 2021 9:00 am

New York in a nutshell? No way. New York in a New York minute? Forget about it. The city contains…

'We knew there was greatness in these songs': Steve Diggle of the Buzzcocks interviewed

16 January 2021 9:00 am

Graeme Thomson talks to Steve Diggle, front man of Buzzcocks, about orgasms, boredom and Pete Shelley

'You can't have opinions any more': Rick Wakeman interviewed

19 December 2020 9:00 am

Rod Liddle talks to Rick Wakeman about lockdown, the Sex Pistols, and how you can’t have opinions any more

Meet the front man of ‘the most revolting band in the world’

28 November 2020 9:00 am

Michael Hann talks to Corey Taylor, front man of ‘the most revolting band in the world’, about PTSD, Donald Trump and life after alcoholism

There’s no single trick to making money — just resist a noble calling

18 April 2020 9:00 am

‘Beauty is pain,’ the model Gigi Hadid asserts. She’s one of the successful, rich people quizzed by William Leith in…

The director that everyone loved to hate: David Thomson interviews Peter Bogdanovich

21 March 2020 9:00 am

David Thomson talks to the director about Buster Keaton, falling out of favour with Hollywood, and his mentor Orson Welles

How Enoch Powell fancied himself Viceroy of India — and other startling revelations

19 January 2019 9:00 am

Interviews, like watercolours, are very hard to get right, and yet look how steadily their art has become degraded and…

Some artists talk for hours unprompted. Others, such as Patrick Caulfield (above), find the simplest question often difficult to answer

It’s a lifetime of hard work being an artist

12 January 2019 9:00 am

Once, when a number of Royal Academicians were invited to Buckingham Palace, the celebrated abstract painter John Hoyland (1934–2011) found…

The 1958 world première of Pinter’s The Birthday Party at the Lyric Hammersmith: John Stratton as McCann, John Slater as Goldberg and Richard Pearson as Stanley

The last survivor of The Birthday Party’s 1958 première remembers the traumatic first night

17 February 2018 9:00 am

‘Mad, wearying and inconsequential gabble,’ sighed the Financial Times in 1958. ‘One quails in slack-jawed dismay.’ Here’s the FT at…

‘I was tossed out of the tribe’: climate scientist Judith Curry interviewed

28 November 2015 9:00 am

Meet Professor Judith Curry, the sceptical climate scientist rarely quoted in Britain’s media

‘I was facing truths I didn’t particularly want to look at’: Michael Moorcock interview

8 August 2015 9:00 am

Cult novelist Michael Moorcock on fantasy, his father, and the London he loved and lost

‘The problem isn’t that we’ve been slaves to free markets’: Joseph Stiglitz interview

30 May 2015 9:00 am

Joseph Stiglitz, the left’s favourite economist,on making the free market work

Forces of nature: Maggi Hambling with ‘Amy Winehouse’, a painting exhibited at her Walls of Water show last year

‘This stuff goes on being alive’: Maggi Hambling on the power of painting

18 April 2015 9:00 am

Maggi Hambling on Rembrandt, Twombly and the power of art

Alex Salmond sets out his terms for Ed Miliband

28 March 2015 9:00 am

‘Would you like a glass of pink champagne?’ asks Alex Salmond at 3.30 p.m., sounding very much like a man…

George Osborne interview: smaller government is not enough

7 March 2015 9:00 am

George Osborne on his love affair with Greater Manchester, and his party’s need for ‘a bit of the Heseltine’

Jonathan Sacks on religion, politics and the civil war that Islam needs

1 November 2014 9:00 am

Former chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks on the return of religion to public life and the civil war that Islam needs

Clive James on his late flowering: ‘I am in the slightly embarrassing position where I write poems saying I’m about to die and then don’t’

4 October 2014 9:00 am

Clive James on poetry, civilisation and the critical benefits of facing leukaemia