Britain’s most senior military commander has called on the US to “stay strong, stick together, and see through” conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East as he appealed against future American isolationism on a trip to Washington DC.
Adm Sir Tony Radakin said at a conference he believed “the world is undeniably becoming more dangerous” and invoked memories of D-day to justify potential future US engagement in struggles against authoritarian regimes.
Citing next month’s 80th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy, Radakin said the battle had involved “young men” from the US, UK and other allied countries, fighting on the beaches with a sense of purpose to defeat Adolf Hitler.
“They were to see through what Gen Eisenhower termed ‘the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world’,” Radakin said. “In all the great conflicts of the 20th century, the west prevailed because we understood what was at stake.”
The speech at the Ash Carter Exchange came a few weeks after the US Congress voted through fresh military aid worth $61bn to Ukraine and $14bn to Israel after a hiatus of several months, though he did not refer to it directly.
Radakin acknowledged the battlefield situation in Ukraine had deteriorated for the defenders, though he did not directly link it to the protracted hold-up in funding caused by Donald Trump-aligned Republicans in the House who were sceptical about the value of further military aid to Kyiv.
This year, having rebuffed the Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive, the Russian army “has been able to make modest tactical gains”, Radakin said. Territory in the east had only been captured slowly, he said, and “at even higher cost in men and material and to the national economy of Russia”.
The west, if it acted, had the capacity to support Ukraine with “millions of rounds of ammunition, thousands of drones, hundreds of tanks and armoured vehicles”, he said, while Russia would have to “twist its economy out of shape to sustain the war”, widely expected to last into 2025.
Ukraine, the Middle East and China were interlinked by “a battle of ideas”, Radakin said, between “an authoritarian and belligerent Russia and a dynamic, democratic Ukraine” and “between a reckless Iran and its terrorist network on one side, and the responsible nations of the Middle East on the other”.
He warned of a split “between a China that believes it can dominate and coerce, and those nations that share a commitment to an international system that is open and free” – an effort to link future funding of Ukraine with more established US concerns about the security of Israel and the rising power of Beijing.
The UK, he said, had joined with the US, France and others last month in helping Israel repel a major missile and drone attack from Iran “to prevent the conflict with Hamas escalating into all-out war” – though his only explicit reference to the crisis in Gaza as Israel stepped up its attacks on Rafah was to say “international aid is coming”.
Responding to “a more combative world” required statecraft, Radakin told his audience in the US capital, forming closer partnerships with allied nations and being willing to take military action if needed to uphold “the rules and values” shared by the west.
“The task now is to stay strong, stick together, and see it through,” he said.
Farming has always been a risky business. To the chaos of Brexit and the relentless squeezing of the supermarkets, we can add the rapidly escalating threats associated with climate change. In most industries, at the point where risk is judged to outweigh the potential commercial reward, both capital and people tend to make a swift exit, following economist Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of self-interest.
The problem with farming is that most farmers are emotionally invested in their work. An exit is seldom considered – perhaps we should be more like the bankers, but they wouldn’t be much good at growing potatoes.
Around the world, farming practice evolves in response to past success. Over 30 years, I’ve recorded planting and harvest dates, temperatures and yields, using data to guide my decisions, just like generations of farmers before me. But over the past decade, as the pace of change in weather patterns has accelerated, the value of that accumulated experience has become increasingly irrelevant. For most farmers, this last year has been about grabbing rare, good weather windows and trying to make the most of wet conditions as we repeatedly fail to get crops sown.
As the risk of crop failure has grown, margins have shrunk, meaning there’s nothing in the bank to pay for the bad years. Farm-gate prices have been driven down to levels which, in a good year, just about cover costs, but leave nothing to cover crops lost to adverse weather.
Much of the UK’s arable land was unpassable with machinery from mid-October to mid-April. Many farmers couldn’t sow an autumn crop of barley or wheat and the crops that were sown often failed or rotted in waterlogged seedbeds. By the time it was dry enough to sow, it was too late to establish an economically viable crop. For the worst affected, the loss is near 100%, with the UK’s wheat, barley, oats and oilseed rape production projected to drop 17.5% this year.
In horticulture, the biggest problem has been delayed spring plantings, pushed back to late April. For lettuce, this six-to-eight-week delay in planting will shorten the season by up to three weeks as well as disrupting sales and work patterns (and annoying customers through failure to supply). Even assuming that the rest of the summer is favourable, this loss of time from a 20-week season is catastrophic for a grower operating on the tightest of margins: any chance of a profit gone before we sow the first seedling.
I also read, with mounting frustration, suggestions by some academics that rising temperatures and levels of CO2 in the atmosphere increase the potential for photosynthesis and, therefore, crop yields. Farmers don’t work in a lab. It is not averages that determine our crop performance, it is the extremes that have to be managed in order to give the crop any chance of approaching its theoretical maximum yield.
As a result of poor UK harvests, there is also mounting anxiety over rising beer and bread prices. Most farmers receive less than 1% of the profit made from the food they grow. About 5p of the price of your pint is accounted for by the cost of the malting barley used in its brewing, and for bread, it’s between 10p and 20p per loaf, for the wheat used to bake it. If farmers achieved a (very unlikely) 30% price rise to compensate for an anticipated 30% yield loss, it would add a few pennies to the price tag. I suspect much of the public would support these modest, justifiable increases if it meant keeping British farmers in business.
Unfortunately, that’s not how our food system works. Of the 20% food inflation experienced by the public (supposedly attributable to picking labour, fertiliser and fuel price rises due to the Ukraine war) a minuscule proportion made its way back to the farmer. Tesco made a £2.3bn profit last year, while 49% of fruit and veg farmers fear they’ll be out of business before the end of this one. Money talks.
To achieve resilience in the face of these challenges and changes, farmers also need to invest in a transition which removes some of the risks of extreme weather events. Perhaps a sign of things to come is the strawberry industry, where in the past 30 years things have moved from being 90% outdoors to 90% indoors. On a broader scale, farmers must also invest in their soils – particularly improvements in structure, achieved through careful cultivations and preservation of organic matter, which allows faster percolation of rainfall, resulting in reduced runoff and risk of soil loss.
Change costs money, but where will it come from? Some might come from government funding or the “public money for public goods” advocated by Michael Gove and his successors, but the reality for most farmers is that green schemes and increasing environmental legislation – although wholly necessary – also demand costly modifications to farm practice, and (at best) just about cover the cost of implementing them in the first place.
In many cases, the only thing sustaining the farming industry is the emotional commitment of the farmers. Most of us love what we do, but that is not enough to save an industry that has been on its knees for decades. According to my calculations, to have any chance of a robust green transition and consequent food security, farmers need an average 20% price rise, in addition to being paid for those all too often taken for granted “public goods”.
The British oil services company John Wood Group has rejected a £1.4bn takeover offer from a Dubai-based rival, Sidara, which “fundamentally undervalued” the company.
Aberdeen-based Wood is the latest British company on the London Stock Exchange to face takeover speculation amid deepening concerns that UK-listed stocks are undervalued compared with other markets.
In a statement the Wood board said the FTSE 250 company had received an unsolicited approach from Sidara to snap it up for a price of 205p a share, but had unanimously rebuffed the offer.
“The board carefully considered the proposal, together with its financial advisers, and concluded that it fundamentally undervalued Wood and its future prospects,” it said.
A spokesperson for Sidara declined to comment.
The approach emerged about a year after the US-based private equity firm Apollo Global Management abandoned a 240p-a-share bid for Wood after multiple attempts and offers, without citing any reasons.
Wood is not alone in being a London-listed takeover target. A multibillion-pound bidding war appears to be developing around the FTSE 100 miner Anglo-American after it dismissed an offer from rival BHP as undervalued. The Swiss mining company Glencore is also understood to be drawing up an approach and there is speculation that the British-Australian miner Rio Tinto could follow suit.
Last year BP was forced to assure investors that it was not a takeover target as its shares continued to lag rivals in the US.
Wood’s share price is well below its pre-pandemic levels of about 600p a share. It jumped from 164p to 204p a share in early trading on Wednesday after the company statement, before settling at about 188p by lunchtime.
It is under pressure to revive its floundering market valuation after an activist investor, Sparta Capital Management, called on the Wood board to undertake a strategic review of the business and “actively seek alternative solutions” to its lagging UK share price – including a possible sale.
Franck Tuil, who founded Sparta in 2021 after leaving the investment firm Elliott Asset Management, said: “If the UK public markets are unwilling or unable to engage in Wood’s story, we believe you should undertake a strategic review and actively seek alternative solutions.”
He added that it might be “time to recognise that the next chapter of Wood’s journey could be best supported by different owners”, and urged the group to “explore the best way to maximise shareholder value, including a sale of the company”.
In 1990, as her duo Indigo Girls were heading to platinum-selling success in the US, Amy Ray founded her own label called Daemon Records, formed as “a supportive network for each other within it, almost like a co-op,” she says. She internalised this “ecosystem idea” from Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye and the Washington DC punk scene, as well as the 90s riot grrrl movement.
But the inspiring new documentary, It’s Only Life After All, makes it clear that Ray also learned quite a bit about the power of community from Indigo Girls themselves: the folk band she co-founded in Atlanta with high-school choir buddy Emily Saliers. The duo twice broke into the US Top 10, won a Grammy, and sold millions of albums in the late 80s and early 90s, and today remain a reliable, busy touring and recording act – even earning a high-profile spot in the Barbie movie. Community is woven into every aspect of their lives and careers: the women are principled activists and queer icons who have a fiercely devoted fanbase, and take great care to nurture these relationships via their art and direct action.
“We don’t want it to be a vanity film,” Ray says of It’s Only Life After All. “We want it to be about the community, because that’s where we came from and that’s what we’re part of still. And it’s bigger than us, really.” The film duly underscores the duo’s commitment to causes such as animal and reproductive rights, and Indigenous environmental activism; it incorporates moving interviews with fans, who detail the formative moments they’ve experienced alongside the Indigo Girls’ music, such as coming out, getting married or divorced, embracing sobriety and growing up queer.
Speaking on a video call, the duo have the kind of conversational ease and respect intrinsic to a decades-long friendship: neither interrupts the other. Ray has always appreciated the Indigo Girls’ supporters and admired the “amazing things” they accomplish. “There’s teachers, peace workers, activists, doctors, librarians and people that do creative things,” she says of their audience. But hearing fans discuss the Indigo Girls’ music in the film – and bearing witness to the joy of fans sharing it with each other – was “profound” for her. “The audience is all one energy,” she says, a reverent tone in her voice. “It’s all woven together so tightly. It gave me even more respect for what it is.”
It’s Only Life After All also honours the various artists and musical communities that have supported the Indigo Girls: the Atlanta club Little Five Points, where the duo honed their skills as performers; pioneering queer musicians such as Ferron and the Butchies; folk icon Joan Baez; and fellow DIY-minded Georgia bands such as REM, who tapped the Indigo Girls to open an 1989 arena tour. “We couldn’t have made it without REM,” Ray says. “I mean, they gave us the biggest break anybody had given us.”
But even though a major label had snapped them up in 1988, the pair’s music didn’t fit neatly into any sort of box. Their acoustic instrumentation and bewitching harmonies made them a logical fit for the folk world, but the Indigo Girls didn’t shy away from amplifying their acoustic guitars with pickups, giving their sound a rougher edge.
Their smart, elegant lyrics covered the exquisite complications of life – longing, desire, beauty, darkness, anger – with philosophical dreaminess and southern gothic edge. Ray and Saliers have always written lyrics separately. In It’s Only Life After All, both confess slight embarrassment at some past songs: Saliers is incredulous about some of her more literary forays (“Who fucking writes about The Lady of Shalott?” she says, laughing) while Ray laments the solipsism of Blood and Fire.
But separately, each come to a similar conclusion about their individual songwriting strengths: using their lyrics to connect to, and empathise with, other people. A signature song, 1989’s Closer to Fine, celebrated striving for optimism even when everything else in the world felt uncertain. That type of thing riled up a cynical music press: It’s Only Life After All illustrates that Indigo Girls were ignored by mainstream magazines or criticised for their earnestness, and dogged by sexism and homophobia.
At the 1990 Grammy awards. Photograph: Chris Walter/WireImage
Watching today, the invasive (or at least ill-informed) lines of questioning from interviewers are shocking. Vintage footage in the documentary includes a journalist starting out with this: “Y’all have sort of the reputation now of being a ‘woman’s group’ – that if men listen to you, something horrible will happen to [them].” In another striking moment, Ray and Saliers are asked to read a particularly harsh archive New York Times review, with its first line: “Earnest pretentiousness has new standard-bearers.” Saliers replies: “Men folk singers could get away with a lot of these sentiments without being destroyed in a review like this.”
It’s Only Life After All also explores how different the musical landscape was for queer artists when the Indigo Girls first emerged. Both women had been out within their own communities before signing to a major label, but Saliers was reluctant to talk about her sexuality publicly: “When national press was reaching out about being queer, I had a lot of fear about it at first.” For starters, she didn’t want to be pigeonholed; but she was also a more private person, “protective of my personal life, because I had an uncomfortable relationship with being in the public.”
Drawing on support from Ray, she eventually came out in public on her own time and terms. “And then it was like a veil was lifted,” Saliers says. “[It] was just a wonderful freedom that occurred, and then there was really no fear from that point on.” And today Saliers celebrates how there’s “a place for queer artists that simply did not exist when we first started out. It’s good to remember that.” Still, seeing the film solidified “the reality that we had gone through some things,” she says, “that we faced pushback societally for being gay, and that we experienced sexism and homophobia and we experienced self-homophobia as a result of all the forces.”
Part of that arose from an oppressive cultural climate, where being queer was the punchline of a joke or greeted with hatred. (Saliers describes a harrowing incident of gay bashing where she was punched in the face.) But this also stems from deeply personal experiences. In the documentary, Ray details a college relationship where her partner had trouble accepting (and thus had shame around) being gay – and Ray subsequently went through a “self-loathing time”, exacerbated by the dawning realisation that not everyone approved of the relationship. “You think you’re just in love,” she says in the film, “and then you’re like, ‘Oh, wow – no, people think this is bad.’”
Indigo Girls performing in Berkeley, California, in 1997. Photograph: Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images
Director Alexandria Bombach anchors the film with new, ultra-candid interviews such as these alongside archive material (fortuitously, Ray used to tote a camera around on the road). The duo were already familiar with Bombach’s work – they were moved by her award-winning 2018 documentary On Her Shoulders, about 23-year-old Yazidi genocide survivor Nadia Murad – and “trusted her instincts and artistic abilities” as they made the film. Ray thought to herself: “What’s the point of doing this if we’re not just completely open about everything?”
Being open came easier to Ray; she had previously publicly discussed things such as living with gender dysphoria. Saliers, however, was talking about some deeply personal things – especially her struggle with (and recovery from) alcoholism – for the first time in an in-depth way. Bombach’s “disarming” nature left her “really free to reveal to her whatever the things were that she was asking”. Over time, Saliers has also found it easier to be open. “I still consider myself a fairly private person, but there’s a balance that I’ve been able to find.”
It’s Only Life After All gets a wider online release this week, but it premiered in 2023 as Closer to Fine was having its own moment in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, where Margot Robbie as Barbie belts out the song during a transformative car ride. Saliers notes that after the movie came out, she first checked the Indigo Girls’ listener stats on Spotify. “Of course, they exploded,” she says, and then chuckles loudly. “But then it just got back to the usual number.”
But both women say the Indigo Girls’ audiences have swelled since Barbie and It’s Only Life After All, with the renewed excitement increasing “the numbers and the energy and the enthusiasm” of their live shows, Ray says. She cites the grassroots, word-of-mouth support that’s always sustained them: “People that had followed us for a long time, when they saw this stuff happening, they used it as a moment for them to influence their peers to take back up the idea of coming out to see us play.”
This year they will play some of their biggest venues in 25 years, thanks to co-headlining tours with Melissa Etheridge and then Amos Lee. “We couldn’t play most of those places just by ourselves as a headliner,” Ray admits. “We’re still a working band in a lot of ways.”
Elsewhere, their songs propel another recent film, the jukebox musical romance Glitter & Doom, including a lovely new original tune called What We Wanna Be; Ray released a solo album in 2022 If It All Goes South via Daemon Records. Saliers is writing the music for no less than three musicals: Starstruck, co-written by Tony-nominated actor Beth Malone, plus another based on the Indigo Girls’ 2020 song Country Radio and one more on the 2018 documentary The Gospel of Eureka, about LGBTQ+ lives in small-town Arkansas.
For Saliers, It’s Only Life After All is a reminder of “an amazing balance of differences” between her and Ray: “Different sensibilities, personalities, voices, songs.” But she explains how fortunate they both feel, with It’s Only Life After All underlining “the beauty of our community – people who keep our musical reality alive. We’re getting up there in age, and I feel more a resurgence of joy about playing live concerts. It’s actually as big as it’s ever been, if not bigger.”
Drake and Kendrick Lamar have been battling it out for days in a vicious diss-track feud, but what started out as a sparring of wits between two of the world’s biggest rappers has quickly devolved into an excruciating game of who can expose the most damning thing about the other.
On his songs Meet the Grahams and Not Like Us, Lamar addresses Drake’s well-documented history of disturbing and inappropriate alleged behavior with minors, while on Family Matters, Drake has revived years-old domestic violence accusations against Lamar. Both Drake and Lamar deny any wrongdoing.
At one point, Drake even goes as far as to make fun of what he seems to have misunderstood to be a story about Lamar’s own experience of sexual abuse. (On 2022’s Mother I Sober, Lamar raps about child sexual abuse, which Drake assumes Lamar experienced himself.) What are we even doing here?
In the course of the nasty back-and-forth, they’ve made women – women who are possibly survivors of sexual abuse, harassment or domestic violence – the collateral damage of their violent mud-slinging.
Drake addressed the accusations against him with a line on The Heart Part 6: “If I was fucking young girls, I promise I’d have been arrested / I’m way too famous for this shit you just suggested,” he raps. The ironies of this denial would be darkly hysterical if they weren’t so sick. We all know the legal system is far from a reliable arbiter of justice and truth, but come on, Drake – really? That’s it?
These men are casually rapping about child sex abuse, domestic abuse and harboring secret children that they’ve presumably known about for years, but only chose to reveal when they were fighting.
And using each other’s possible victims as ammunition in a battle that has nothing to do with these women isn’t just perverse and morally reprehensible, it reveals the degree to which hip-hop and the music industry as a whole continue to protect terrible men even while their behavior or alleged behavior is an open secret.
When it comes to victimizing women, men rarely call each other out unless it’s convenient or beneficial to do so. Lamar had the nerve to admit as much. “We hate the bitches you fuck ’cause they confuse themself with real women / And notice, I said ‘we’, it’s not just me, I’m what the culture feelin’,” he raps on Euphoria.
The track records of these men show that they were fine being custodians of silence when speaking out did not serve their agendas. If Drake hates intimate partner violence so much, why has he loudly supported Tory Lanez, who is in jail for shooting fellow rapper Megan Thee Stallion? Lamar’s pretense of advocating for victims of sexual violence is also a grim joke: his last album featured Kodak Black, who was sentenced to probation in 2021 for attacking a teenage girl, who said he bit her on the neck and breast and persisted after she asked him to stop.
It’s tempting to dream of what things would be like if rappers decided to take a more radical approach to protecting women; if the “culture” that Lamar speaks of would actually hold its peers responsible, and if powerful men spoke up for their female peers as fiercely as they came together to protect one another.
Still, if there was one productive thing to emerge from this fight, it’s that it’s finally shining a serious light on the many problematic ways in which Drake engages with his Blackness and with cultures outside of his own.
At the end of the day, he is a biracial light-skinned Canadian who is able to (and happily does) manipulate his proximity to whiteness in ways that other darker- skinned, coarser-haired Black men who have actually lived the life that Drake fantasizes about on songs like Knife Talk never could. Of course, while Drake might be an interloper with gangster dreams who thinks going to jail scores you cool points, taking shots at his persona is a far cry from accusing someone of child sex abuse and the two denunciations not belong in the same world, let alone on the same diss track.
Ultimately, the best rap beefs strike a harmonious balance between entertaining and coldly humiliating. And it wouldn’t be a battle – surely not a good one – if they didn’t shoot below the belt. But this frenzied, brutal back-and-forth that’s supposed to point the finger at the ways the other person is a terrible human has only reaffirmed the code of silence that even enemies are willing to help each other uphold within hip-hop’s boys’ club.
Calling someone a pedophile or a groomer or a woman-beater simply doesn’t strike the right note when you knew about the allegations the whole time and only spoke up to win a fight.
Hunger and disease are rising in Latin America after a year of record heat, floods and drought, a report by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has shown.
The continent, which is trapped between the freakishly hot Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, probably suffered tens of thousands of climate-related deaths in 2023, at least $21bn (£17bn) of economic damage and “the greatest calorific loss” of any region, the study found.
Global heat records have now been broken for 11 months in a row, causing death and destruction across many parts of the planet. Latin America and the Caribbean have experienced some of the worst effects.
In a summary of last year’s toll in this region, the WMO said disasters and climate change, along with socioeconomic shocks, are the main drivers of acute food insecurity, which affects 13.8 million people.
Acapulco in Mexico had a category 5 hurricane last year, the first ever to make landfall on the Pacific coast. Photograph: David Guzmán/EPA
As the climate warms, diseases are spreading across a greater area. The WMO noted that more than 3m cases of dengue fever were reported in the first seven months of 2023, breaking the previous annual record for the region. Uruguay experienced its first cases of chikungunya and Chile widened alerts about the Aedes aegypti mosquito vector.
There were an average of 36,695 heat-related excess deaths each year in the region in the first two decades of this century. Last year’s toll has not yet been calculated, but it is likely to exceed the average given the record temperatures and prolonged heatwaves in many areas.
Mexico had a record high of 51.4C on 29 August, and many areas sweltered in a prolonged heatwave. By the end of the year, 76% of Mexico was experiencing some degree of drought. In October Acapulco was hit by the first ever category 5 hurricane to make landfall on the Pacific coastline. Hurricane Otis killed at least 48 people, damaged 80% of the city’s hotels and left damages calculated at $12bn.
Other areas of Central and South America endured unusually fierce heat and prolonged drought. The Panama Canal had 41% less rainfall than normal, causing difficulties for one of the most important conduits of world trade.
The south of Brazil has repeatedly suffered deadly flooding. At least 65 people died in São Paulo in February 2023 after torrential rains and landslides. Another 48 were killed and 20,000 displaced in the state of Rio Grande do Sul in September after 300mm of rain fell in 24 hours and now the same southern state is deluged once again. Streets have turned to rivers in Porto Alegre, the capital, forcing the international airport to close while the football pitch of the Arena do Grêmio resembles a lake.
In Lake Tefé, Brazil, river dolphins died in hot, shallow and polluted waters. Photograph: Bruno Kelly/Reuters
Last year, floods also took lives, disrupted business or ruined crops in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Peru and Bolivia.
Combined with drought, this has hurt agricultural production in one of the world’s most important food production regions. Wheat production in Argentina fell 30% below the five-year average, and a similar loss is expected in the harvest of the grain in the Brazilian state of Paraná and Rio Grande do Sul. Some of these losses have been offset by record maize production in other parts of Brazil, but food prices are rising. Overall, Latin America has suffered significant calorific losses, the report said. In countries that are also experiencing political and economic problems, such as Venezuela, Haiti and parts of Colombia, this is creating a food crisis.
The costs in human lives, lost food production and economic damage are expected to rise for as long as humans continue to burn gas, oil, coal and trees, which emit heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere.
“Sadly, this is probably only the beginning,” said Prof José Marengo, the lead author of the WMO report and director of the Brazil National Center for Monitoring and Early Warning of Natural Disasters. “Extreme events are becoming more frequent and the period of return is becoming shorter.”
She may be the owner of a bakery in the centre of a city famous for its millefeuilles and religieuses, but in recent days Beth Beji’s team has been fielding requests for a rather different sort of cake: a Taylor Swift-themed sweet treat.
“There is a huge obsession with Taylor Swift and we see it in the orders coming in,” said Beji, of Clove Bakery. “We’ve had a lot of orders for custom layer cakes, cupcakes, cookies featuring her. We’ve had requests for Taylor Swift on a stage with a microphone in fondant, Taylor Swift riding a unicorn, Taylor Swift album covers, cakes with her face on them … The orders are very specific in the details.”
Beji said her team at the bakery on rue Greneta, near Les Halles shopping mall, were getting into the spirit of things. And as the countdown begins in the French capital to the arrival of the singer’s Eras tour on Thursday – her first performance of a three-month European trip – they are not the only ones.
Honor McWilliams, 24, a Swiftie from Glasgow who lives in Paris teaching English at the Sorbonne, can hardly contain her excitement over attending the opening concert at La Défense, the first of four long-sold-out gigs on 9-12 May. She will also attend on Saturday with her sister Grace and two friends who are flying in from Glasgow, and will be travelling to Milan for a third concert in July.
After previously seeing Swift perform in London, Glasgow, New York and Dublin – and meeting her briefly in London after being picked out of the crowd by Swift’s mother – McWilliams has spent a total of €255 for the Paris tickets and has been babysitting to pay for them. “To this day my love of Taylor Swift has been a cornerstone of many of my personal, and even professional, relationships,” she said.
Honor McWilliams and her sister Grace with Taylor Swift in 2014 (left) and in 2021 with a lifesize cutout of the singer. Photograph: Honor McWilliams
“I connect so much with the French university students I teach here because of our shared love of Taylor Swift. Each week they’ll ask me for my opinion on the latest Taylor Swift news, and I will find any way I can to make reference to her in lessons. One student even termed me the ‘Taylor Swift of the Sorbonne’, which may very well be the best professional compliment I will ever get.”
What is the core of Swift’s appeal? McWilliams cites “the eloquence of the lyrics in her songs, her work ethic, gravitas, her intelligence and captivating ability to tell stories, connect with others and generate such enthusiasm.”
Swift’s popularity has been a slow burn in France, where she gave her first concert in 2010. There was a touch of Emily in Paristo the official video for Begin Again, a 2012 song from her fourth studio album Red. Shot in Paris, it shows her as the quintessential American in Paris, writing postcards, walking on the Pont des Arts and visiting a patisserie as she meets a handsome stranger who approaches her in a cafe.
Swift arrives in Paris for a TV appearance in 2014. Photograph: Marc Piasecki/GC Images
She continued to associate the city with romance. The only concert to promote her 2019 album Lover, a wondrously lovestruck album written amid her relationship with the actor Joe Alwyn, was performed in Paris – a show entitled City of Lover, performed at the relatively intimate Olympia venue. She then wrote a song entitled Paris for her 2023 album Midnights, where Swift, “so in love that I might stop breathing”, imagines being with her partner in the city. “I wanna transport you to somewhere the culture’s clever”, she sings, adding “let the only flashing lights be the tower at midnight” – a reference to the glittering light show put on by the Eiffel Tower.
It all adds a certain frisson to her tour opener this week, but Prof Linda Bloss-Baum, an assistant director of the business and entertainment programme at American University’s Kogod School of Business in Washington, says Swift’s arrival is a big deal for any city.
Fans wait outside the Hotel de Crillon in 2013. Photograph: Marc Piasecki/FilmMagic
“It has an incredible economic impact. I know many American people who have opted to take a trip to Europe to see Taylor Swift because the tickets were more affordable. They’re making a holiday of it, so it’s not just the tickets, it has an economic benefit for the whole city with people staying in hotels, eating in restaurants. The ripple effect with Taylor Swift is amazing, unprecedented.”
She added: “France has always been a bit of an anomaly in terms of the music business, with perhaps a little less appetite for US pop as a genre, but Taylor Swift is an exception. She seems to generate an emotional reaction from people who don’t necessarily even speak English but want to be part of the phenomenon. I think what has happened is that, post-Covid pandemic, people are seeking an experience and this is the experience people want this year. It’s top of their list. The average concertgoer is not holding back in spending. They’re forging a lifetime marker.”
The Paris concerts are especially anticipated because they are the first following the release of Swift’s enormously successful new album The Tortured Poets Department, which has broken a series of streaming records since its April 19 release. Fans are hoping that she will append material from the album to the Eras setlist.
Swift performs at L’Olympia in Paris in 2019. Photograph: Dave Hogan/Getty Images
The conservative newspaper Le Figaro has even got in on the Swift act with an article advising desperate, ticketless Swifties on how to avoid being ripped off with fake tickets.
The official price was between €69.50 and €245.50 for seats and up to €827.40 for VIP packages. Warning that resale prices were likely to be higher and could involve counterfeits, the paper warned: “If you haven’t bought your ticket on an official site there’s no way to easily verify the authenticity or validity of a ticket.”
At Clove Bakery, the team is working flat out to have all their orders ready on time. “It’s incredible, and not what we set out to do when we opened the bakery seven years ago, but it’s also a lot of fun for the bakery team who are all young and getting involved in the excitement too,” Beji said.
Last month the games company Take-Two Interactive announced it would reduce its global staff by 5%, laying off 580 people to reduce costs. It was one of many such announcements in 2024, but this case is especially egregious because Take-Two ownsRockstar Games, which publishes Grand Theft Auto, AKA the most successful game in the history of the world,and is definitely not short of profits. Last week, Bloomberg (£) reported on internal documentation showing the likely victims of these cuts: studios Intercept Games in Seattle and Roll7 in London are set to close. Both are part of Private Division, the giant publisher’s indie game label.
I spent some time with Intercept’s Kerbal Space Program 2 last year, when they were gearing up to launch. This exceptionally nerdy game about getting tiny green astronauts into space, which hews so closely to the real life physics of space flight that it inspired a generation of engineering students, has had a troubled time. It had been through a studio closure and a change of developer already, and its early-access launch did not exactly go without a hitch (Rock Paper Shotgun called it a “hot mess”). Kerbal Space Program 2 deserves a chance to turn things around, but it is understandable why its developer ended up on the block.
Roll7, meanwhile, was only acquired by Take-Two in 2021, and has released two successful and critically acclaimed games since. OlliOlli World is a fantastic, stylish cartoon skateboarding game with oodles of personality. And the similarly slick-looking Rollerdrome (pictured below), an arena deathmatch game on rollerskates, won a Bafta last year for best British game. Roll7 has a 15-year history of interesting and – crucially! – profitable games, most based on interesting and original ideas: Not a Hero was a 2D cover shooter where you were sent out to assassinate criminals by a purple bunny; Laser League was an arena combat-sports game inspired by Tron.
Every studio closure is a tragedy for the people affected, but this one feels personally gutting. I’ve played Roll7’s games for more than a decade, starting with the superbly intricate 2D skateboarding game OlliOlli, which obsessed me on my PlayStation Vita for most of 2014 – and they are really good. OlliOlli World (pictured above) is tremendous. I’ve also met (and interviewed) several of the people at Roll7 over the years, and it was a developer with a unique creative culture. It absolutely sucks to lose a studio like this. But it’s also such an insulting rug pull for a studio that, until a few years ago, was getting by as an independent outfit.
Rollerdrome. Photograph: Roll7
When Eurogamer interviewed the studio’s leadership shortly after the 2K acquisition, co-founder John Ribbins seemed palpably relieved to have been acquired by a big publisher, because he thought it came with a certain level of safety. This news is an unwelcome reminder that there is no such thing as safety in the games industry, even if your studio is successful by any measure, making acclaimed and successful award-winning games. Most of the world’s big publishers now operate on an extreme “go big or go home” basis that leaves no room for anything that isn’t grotesquely profitable. When even a studio like Roll7 can’t count on the support of a company like Take-Two, can anyone?
Take-Two still hasn’t officially confirmed the closure, though. “On April 16th, Take-Two announced a cost reduction program to identify efficiencies across its business and to enhance the Company’s margin profile, while still investing for growth,” reads its statement. “As part of these efforts, the Company is rationalising its pipeline and eliminating several projects in development and streamlining its organisational structure, which will eliminate headcount and reduce future hiring needs. The Company is not providing additional details on this program.”
The kind of games and studios that are being “rationalised” out of existence here are exactly the kind that we need in 2024: smaller, creatively interesting games that offer alternatives to the increasingly homogeneous gaming behemoths that have been hoovering up money for more than 10 years. Roll7’s releases are exactly the kinds of games that should form part of an artistically as well as monetarily valuable portfolio for a publisher such as Take-Two.
Grand Theft Auto prints money, and the publisher’s executives take home tens of millions every year. Is it actually true now that such a publisher can’t support smaller games, too – even if they win awards and turn a profit? What is the point of having an “indie” publishing label if you’re simply going to buy good studios and shut them down after barely two years?
This is another cautionary tale about the vandalism that gaming’s biggest corporations can enact on the studios they acquire, and I feel as incensed by it as I did by Microsoft’s closure of Lionhead in 2016. As this newsletter went to press, IGN reported the equally devastating news that Microsoft is to shutter Tango Gameworks, makers of the brilliant and interesting Hi-Fi Rush and unique Japanese ghost story Ghostwire Tokyo, along with Arkane Austin – whose latest game, Redfall, was a flop, but which previously had a hand in some of the most critically acclaimed games of the last generation.
Gigantic, samey games played by tens of millions of people should not be the entire future of video games. Creative developers deserve better than this, and so do we.
What to play
Good for total cowards … pixel horror game Crow Country. Photograph: SFB Games
Styled like a lost PlayStation 1 classic, Crow Countryis a horror adventure game in which you explore an abandoned theme park full of mutated … guests, and it is really creepy, right down to the lo-fi rattling and squelching and creaking of all the old attractions. Even without all the mutants, this theme park itself is horrible! Why would anyone have come here?
I particularly admire the dedication to the mid-90s low-poly fuzzy-around-the-edges look, which recalls the best of this era of horror games without the endless loading times, annoying controls and inventory management. If you like the sound of this game’s premise but are, like me, a total coward, I have good news: you can play the game in a mode with no enemies, so you can solve the puzzles and soak up the horrible ambience without the constant threat.
Available on: PC, PlayStation 5 Estimated playtime: Less than five hours
Helldivers 2. Photograph: Sony Computer Entertainment
PlayStation has had an unpleasant week. After its breakout hit Helldivers 2 (above) sold millions on PC, the company demanded that PC players sign up for a PlayStation Network account in order to continue playing. This resulted in a player revolt, the game being removed from sale in 177 countries where PSN is not operational, more than 100,000 negative Steam reviews and, eventually, an ignominious climbdown. “We’re still learning what is best for PC players,” read Sony’s statement. That much is blindingly obvious.
The bigger Florida version of the Universal Studios Nintendo theme parkis shaping up pretty well. That Donkey Kong-themed Mine Cart rollercoaster looks just the right amount of terrifying.
In more “big publishers are terrible at fostering creativity” news, a video from DidYouKnowGaming’s Liam Robertson (via Kotaku) lays out how US studio Vicarious Visions was ultimately prevented from working on a whole bunch of interesting projects, from a Donkey Kong 3D platformer to more remasters of the Tony Hawk skateboarding games, in favour of … yet more Call of Duty.
What to click
Question Block
A Highland Song video game screenshot. Photograph: inkle
Reader Ben provides this week’s excellent question:
“I am increasingly frustrated by big games such as Assassin’s Creed, which attempt to capture the ‘feel’ of a place but become a mass repetitive swathe. By contrast, I was amazed how Untitled Goose Game captures an esoteric British village perfectly, with no speaking characters and relatively simple shapes. Can you recommend any other games that faithfully represent regions on a small-scale?”
Alba: A Wildlife Adventure is one of these for me (with the important caveat that I have never been to Valencia, where it is set). It portrays a small island community and the people, birds, colours and geography of the place feel so intimate and believable. A Highland Song, meanwhile, depicts a place with which I am intimately familiar: the mountains and austere coast of Scotland. Its perfect light and rough brushstrokes communicate the unforgiving beauty of my home country so gorgeously. And there’s the Yakuza/Like a Dragon series, whose perfect re-creations of Japanese cities heave with life.
I’d love to hear from readers on this one: what games set in real places have done a great job of conjuring their spirit? If you’ve got a recommendation, a question for Question Block, or anything else to say about the newsletter, hit reply or email me at [email protected].
London’s Garrick Club has finally voted to allow women to become members, 193 years after it first opened its doors.
The vote was passed at the end of a private meeting during which several hundred members spent two hours debating whether to permit women to join. In the end, almost 60% backed the move.
The Garrick, which is located in Covent Garden in the West End of London, has been under intense scrutiny since the Guardian published a list of about 60 names of the club’s most influential members.
They included the deputy prime minister, Oliver Dowden, the secretary of state for levelling up, Michael Gove, the head of the spy agency MI6, Richard Moore, and Simon Case, who as cabinet secretary is the prime minister’s most senior policy adviser and the leader of nearly 500,000 civil servants. Case and Moore were among a number to resign their membership after the Guardian’s coverage.
The club’s management revealed previously it had received letters and emails from more than 200 members informing them that they would resign if the vote had gone against women.
What are gentlemen’s clubs?
Private social clubs with male-only membership, they were originally set up by men typically from Britain’s upper classes in the 18th century and onwards. The Garrick was founded in 1831. The original wave of such clubs were opened predominantly in the West End, which continues today: the area of St James’s is still referred to as “clubland”.
How does the membership system work?
It varies from club to club but typically membership is by election after at least two members formally nominate a person to join.
In the case of the Garrick, the admissions process is notoriously complex and slow, requiring names to be written in a red leather-bound book, seconded by two pages of signatures, before prospective members are invited in to dine at the club, and their nomination is discussed by committee members, with an opportunity for unpopular nominees to be blackballed.
What is the history of women’s membership at the Garrick?
In 2011, Hugh Bonneville proposed fellow actor Joanna Lumley for membership; his decision to write her name in the book of proposed candidates triggered such anger among some of the club’s 1,500 members that the page was ripped out from the nomination book. In 2015, the club voted to continue its policy of not admitting women as members, Although 50.5% voted in favour of allowing women to join, the club required a two-thirds majority before the rules could be changed.
Why are the rules on women’s membership at the Garrick about to change?
There has been a groundswell of support to admit women since the Guardian published details of the membership this year, revealing the club’s central position as a bulwark of the British establishment, featuring scores of leading lawyers, heads of publicly funded arts institutions, the head of the civil service and King Charles.
It is not men gathering in single-sex spaces that motivated such calls but rather the uniqueness of the Garrick with its powerful membership list casting an unflattering spotlight on Britain’s still very-male dominated establishment.
On Tuesday, after high-profile resignations and renewed scrutiny, the Garrick’s membership finally voted to allow women to become members, with 59.98% of votes in favour.
What will happen next?
It is unlikely there will be a sudden influx of women to the club, despite the vote. The membership process is notoriously complex and drawn out. However, it is possible that a number may be at least nominated in the short term.
Pro-women members have already drawn up a list of sevenw women they plan to nominate for membership: the classicist Mary Beard, the former home secretary Amber Rudd, the Channel 4 News presenter Cathy Newman, the Labour peer Ayesha Hazarika, the actor Juliet Stevenson, the chancellor of Coventry University Margaret Casely-Hayford, who also chairs the board for trustees at Shakespeare’s Globe theatre, and the former appeals court judge Elizabeth Gloster, now a peer.
I got into photographing motor sport through my friendship with Damon Hill. When we met, 40 years ago, I had a job in the marketing department of an office supplies manufacturer and he was mostly on a motorbike, either earning his living as a dispatch rider or racing at Brands Hatch. Then he switched to racing on four wheels – his dad, Graham Hill, had been a double Formula 1 world champion. Damon is a really shy bloke and it was important to him to be with people who weren’t just fascinated by his family history. I didn’t know one end of a racing car from the other.
My ambition was to work for Allsport, the sports photography agency. Eventually, I got a job there and stayed on the staff for three years until I couldn’t cope any more with going to Tottenham on a Tuesday night in the middle of February. Eamonn McCabe, the picture editor of the Guardian and the Observer, gave me a few shifts a week, and suddenly I was in at the deep end.
Damon and I shared an office in Shoreditch. He was trying to get sponsorship for his racing. The big dream was that he’d win the world championship and I’d be there to take the picture. Ten years later it happened.
I wanted to be the Don McCullin of sport. Everyone was shooting long-lens action and I hated it. People like Garry Winogrand and Joel Meyerowitz influenced everything for me. It was about learning how to work around people, using short lenses, not getting noticed, earning trust. In 1992, I started doing a lot of work with the Williams F1 team, where Damon was the test driver. Then Alain Prost came in for 1993 and Damon became the No 2. When Prost left, Ayrton Senna came in for 1994 – which was big news.
A photographer I knew called Walter Iooss had published a book about Michael Jordan, showing the world’s most famous sports figure in the bath with his kids, or on the golf course. I said to Damon: “We should do a book like this, about what it’s like to race with Ayrton Senna.”
It became a very intense season. Senna was killed at Imola and suddenly the battle for the world championship was between Damon and Michael Schumacher. When we got to Suzuka in Japan for the penultimate race of the season, Michael was a few points ahead. But if Damon won, we’d be going to the last race at Adelaide knowing that if he won there, too, he’d be world champion.
What we didn’t have for the book, which had become Damon Hill’s Grand Prix Year, was a picture of his main rival – not in his race suit or on the track, something a bit more intimate. At Suzuka I grabbed Michael and told him what I wanted. He said: “Fine, come with me.” So we went into his trailer and he said: “What do you want me to do?” I said: “I don’t know – just pick up the phone, maybe.” I was going to have two minutes with him and I couldn’t just have him staring at the camera.
He picked up the phone and sat down on the couch. Perhaps he called someone. I don’t know. But what really made it was when the fans outside crowded around the window to stare at him. It became a picture not just of him but of their reaction to seeing him.
The next day Damon won the race and we went on to the last round in Adelaide, where Michael knocked him off the track to snatch the title. Two years later I was at Suzuka when Damon finally won it.
A few years after that, I spent time in Liberia, Angola, Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea, working for Unicef, documenting conflict and the issues that would contribute to the spread of HIV. I saw some horrible things. But when lockdown came, I was at home in West Sussex worrying about whether I’d ever be busy again and doing the thing that I love. I would cycle through the woods on the South Downs, photographing the paths and the trails and the trees. Now I go out on foot with a 5×4 plate camera. You breathe the air and look at the trees and it gives you a bit of joy, makes you feel alive.
My book, Macchina, is the product of 40 years spent observing people’s passion for the car and the road and speed, their fascination with and dedication to the petrol engine, whether it’s the noise of a big old V8 on a two-lane blacktop somewhere in the US, a thoroughbred racing engine at Le Mans, or a banger going round a track in King’s Lynn. It was inspired by a classic book called At Speed, by the American photographer Jesse Alexander, published in 1972. I’ve always professed never to be a huge race fan, never been blown away by cars going round and round a circuit. I was always more interested in the human element.
Macchina by Jon Nicholson is published by Fyshe. An accompanying exhibition is at the Aperture Gallery, London, 9 May to 9 July.
Jon Nicholson’s CV
Jon Nicholson
Born: London, 1961.
Trained: Self-taught.
Influences: Garry Winogrand, Joel Meyerowitz, Robert Adams.
High point: “Putting together Macchina. All the ducks were in a row.”
Low point: “I don’t think I’ve had one. They’re all experiences, some not as good as others.”
Top tip: “Good shoes and a smile. And don’t carry too much equipment.”