Sarah Bradbury

“As a great philosopher - James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem - once said, ‘dance yourself clean,’” David Le'aupepe, frontman of Aussie indie band Gang of Youths calls out to his sun-drenched audience between tracks, sharing his discovery that “shaking your arse can help you through grief, trauma and anxiety…”
It was just one of many moments of stage-chat poignancy to befall the 2019 edition of Barcelona’s music festival Cruilla. Celebrating it’s 10th birthday, Festival Cruilla kicked off early t...

“I want people to get to know who I am and where I came from,” Aaron Frederick Junior, aka AJ, Mitchell tells Clash from backstage at the Camden Assembly. “Because I've never really talked about my life, my journey.”
The 18-year-old American singer-songwriter has just finished up soundcheck at the London venue ahead of his first-ever UK gig and is giving the lowdown on his forthcoming debut album ‘Skyview’ - named after a movie drive-in in his hometown, Belleville, Illinois, no less - due out...

“You can trace the all-male norm right back to ancient Greece and then into Shakespeare’s time,” the theatre director George Mann tells me. “When women were forbidden to be on the stage. The power of subverting that norm is still resonating – shocking, but all the more reason to do it.”
Mann’s Medea is the latest bold production taking the British theatre scene by storm by utilising an all-female cast at Bristol Old Vic. But despite the growing trend, those wishing to play around with gender ...

Are women funny? That’s the tediously perennial question – still hotly debated online – but one that surely has been answered more than enough times to leave little room for doubt. For the millennial generation, there have been a number of awe-inspiring waves of female-led UK comedy with the likes of Victoria Wood, French and Saunders, Jo Brand, Smack the Pony, Katherine Tate, Black Books’ Tamsin Greig paving the way for the women on stages and TV screens today: Sarah Millican, Katherine Ryan...

“Have you got any energy left?” James Blake asks a captivated audience from the Seat stage on day three of Primavera Sound circa 2am. While I believe these sort of questions from artists mid-gig are largely rhetorical, had there been genuine interest in the answer, from me it would have been an emphatic no.
By this point, my legs had virtually given way and Blake’s undoubtedly atmospheric and moving renditions of 'Mile High' and 'Retrograde' were forming little short of lullabies. Of course, ...

As he drops the career-defining Project Purple, South London MC Yungen tells Sarah Bradbury why he's in a newfound place of creative maturity and happiness
It’s been four and half years since Yungen aka CJ Brookes put out project Black and Red. While a long-awaited debut album is still in the making, the rap artist felt it overdue for him to put out fresh material: “I thought, you know what,” he says from a sofa in Sony’s swanky West London studio. “While I still have people's ear, I want to ...

"We just go with our instincts... It's important to go follow your gut."
It’s been over a decade since Swedish electronic four-piece Little Dragon - consisting of front- woman Yukimi Nagano, drummer Erik Bodin, bass player Fredrik Wallin and keyboardist Håkan Wirenstrand - put out their debut self-titled record. In that time they’ve garnered a staunch following the world over drawn to their uniquely soul-infused synth-pop. After five critically- acclaimed albums, the Scandinavian group, who s...

"When I saw the final film, it totally made sense. It’s much more honest. It's much more real..."
As we sit in a screening room in the Mayfair hotel watching the final 15 minutes of Free Solo, I find myself instinctively wanting to look anywhere but the screen yet equally unable to look away.
“I take enormous pleasure in watching people cover their faces,” elite-climber and subject of the film Alex Honnold says when he is invited up on stage after the film has ended, a broad grin on his face....

Assassination Nation opens with a “Trigger Warning” for “bullying, classism, death, drinking, drug use, sexual content, toxic masculinity, homophobia, transphobia, guns, nationalism, racism, kidnapping, the male gaze, sexism, swearing, torture, violence, gore, weapons and fragile male egos.” In other words, strap in, or switch off.
By irreverently pre-empting reactions, writer and director Sam Levinson (Another Happy Day) takes all expectations of a teen movie and unapologetically bulldozes t...

Kate Bush is a singular artist whose impact, not only on music but on our culture more broadly, is so pervasive, it’s hard to see its sides. The timeless appeal of her songs means, at 60, she has touched multiple generations, stretching from her explosion onto the scene in 1978 through to today: you can’t move for gig reviews or artist interviews that cite Bush as a reference point or influence, whether for style of vocal, aesthetic or lyrical sensibility.
She represents for many a force of u...

As I make my way through the backstage corridors of London’s Savoy Theatre, I hear Boyzone rehearsing brand new track “Because”, co-written with Ed Sheeran, through the open door of their dressing room.
I’m doing my best to stay cool, the consummate professional. But the 10-year-old girl in me, the one with the fold-out Smash Hits poster of each of the band’s faces on her wall, who knows every word to “Love Me for a Reason”, is threatening to break out in a state of hysteria as I step in to f...

Unless you had something better to do between 2007 and 2012 than get hooked on Gossip Girl, you will recognise Penn Badgley’s chiseled cheekbones, piercing green eyes and sideways smile from his stint as the loveable Dan Humphreys in the smash-hit teen series. Or perhaps as Todd opposite Emma Stone in her breakout 2010 teen rom-com Easy A.
Now he is definitively leaving behind his nice guy associations to play Joe Goldberg in the new Netflix thriller, YOU. It all starts innocently enough. We’...

“I was writing after I had my son. But I don’t think I wrote anything good for three years,” Dido says. “Partly because my songwriting is so much about light and dark. My whole MO from the beginning has been that every song is about a conflicted situation or emotion. Then I had Stanley and was like, ‘I just love him, I want to keep him safe.’ There was nothing to write. I stopped seeing the light and dark.”
“For me, life is a series of little moments, insane happiness or a split-second decisi...

Yannis Philippakis talks Sarah Bradbury through the secrets of a creative process that's kept Foals in constant evolution
“It was probably the longest break that we've ever had from being in the band,” Foals frontman Yannis Philippakis explains to me from a whitewashed studio tucked away up a cobbled street in Elephant and Castle. “I think that fed into the feeling of wild creativity: we didn't go into the studio with any parameters or any destination in mind.”
Over a decade on from their 200...

It perhaps shows my age that many of the albums that provided the soundtrack to my formative years are all returning as decade-long anniversary editions. No matter, as is there anything better than having an excuse to feel that rush of nostalgia, listening to records that bottle a feeling, a moment in time?
The trip down a musical memory lane is not only a joy for music fans but for the artists themselves, as Joseph Mount, founding member of British electronic pop group Metronomy, whose curre...