Innholdsfortegnelse for 1/9/2023 i The Big Issue

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @bigissueuk @thebigissue Melting pot The irony of the letter from Dr Mary Brown in the Christmas edition [Issue 1543, December 12] was not lost on me. As an English woman living in Scotland, she seeks to decry England as a racist extreme right-wing society while also criticising other English people who choose to move to Scotland to live. Having read her letter, it made me think about my experience over the previous two days. I live in a medium-sized, unremarkable market town in the middle of England. It is conservative by nature and Conservative by electoral representation. On Sunday I attended my local church, where the Irish priest was presiding over a baptism…

INTERVIEW Oona Chaplin Oona Chaplin has found her paradise. She’s calling The Big Issue from a “little farm community land project” in Northern California. There are a few families living together “with the trees and the frogs and the little shrimp we have in the creek”. The actress and activist is finding balance in her life. “Not so long ago I went to the Avatar premiere,” she says (Chaplin will appear in the next film in the franchise). “I felt like a complete country bumpkin. “I was turning compost in the morning and then suddenly I was on the red carpet – or the blue carpet, rather.” Chaplin, granddaughter of Charlie, daughter of Geraldine, is a familiar face on TV screens. She’s starred in Taboo, Black Mirror, the best…

SHAUN KEAVENY Laying it on the line Laconic, irreverent, and fired by an overwhelming passion for music, Shaun Keaveny is one of the most loved DJs in the history of BBC 6 Music. A born broadcaster, his departure from the station in 2021 was never going to be the end. Since then, he’s launched a massively popular podcast and become a pioneer in the future of “listener-run” live radio. Following in the spiritual footsteps of Desert Island Discs, The Line-Up uses music chat to get the great and the good – from Johnny Marr and Joe Lycett to Self Esteem and Jodie Whittaker – to open up about their deepest desires and fears. Now in its fourth series, the podcast sees each of these celebs pick their dream line-up for…

DEBT ADVICE It’s easy to think of debt as something that happens to other people – until some misfortune, or a spiralling cost-of-living crisis, means you find yourself under financial heat. It’s easy, too, to avoid dealing with it for as long as it can be put off. Both the stress of and stigma surrounding debt can stop people speaking up for help. But if there’s one tip debt experts could give everyone, it’s this: act now. Organisations such as StepChange report that people will often wait for up to a year after getting into money difficulties before they try to seek support. There’s no shame in needing help. Getting into debt is no moral failure, whether you have struggled as daily costs soared or you fell into difficulty driven…

REVIEWS The music legend putting a fire in every reader’s belly As a writer and musician, I’m always interested in others’ approach to the creative process. When that someone is legendary music producer Rick Rubin, I’m even more interested. Rubin’s decades-long career has seen him produce a wildly eclectic mix of musicians and bands – everyone from Slayer to Adele by way of Johnny Cash and the Beastie Boys – and that eclecticism suggests a man at home facilitating the creativity of others. Rubin has put all that experience into his new book, The Creative Act, a beautiful, cloth-bound hardback with the intriguing subtitle, A Way of Being. That subtitle hints at what’s inside, as Rubin’s approach is less a practical guide and more of an existential enquiry into the…

Do people still make new year’s resolutions? I gave up in 2020, which incidentally was when the world decided to give up as well. Since then, making plans has felt too much like tempting fate, so now I start the year by hiding under the duvet, watching old episodes of The Office and waiting for the next terrible thing to happen. It’s not a great hobby, admittedly, but it’s better than making overnight oats. While I’m still not feeling optimistic enough for any radical self-improvement this month, I still have the capacity to imagine a world where we can all have more fun and enjoy life, rather than feeling like we’re in one of Elon Musk’s doomed self-driving cars, trundling off the edge of sanity. So as we tentatively step…

THIS WEEK JOHN WILL BE Watching: Extras, comedy series on BBC iPlayer Reading: Brighton Rock by Graham Greene Listening: Ricky Nelson’s Greatest Hits Doing: Preparing ammunition for the parliamentary and Big Issue activities of 2023 If you read my column regularly you will know I have occasionally struggled with trying to read James Joyce’s Ulysses. For Christmas I awarded myself a vast book full of annotations and notes called The Cambridge Centenary Ulysses, edited by Catherine Flynn. I am determined to finish this big bugger by the middle of the year. And now there is another reason for it. Declan Kiberd, a professor at Notre Dame University in Dublin and author, wrote a brilliant article about the above book in The Times Literary Supplement. And this quote, taken from the…

I was 12 years old when me and Danny [Goffey, future Supergrass bandmate] first got together in his bedroom. He had this really crappy drum kit that was falling apart, I brought a little keyboard. We were like, “we’re gonna make a band!” I quickly realised the keyboard wasn’t very cool, so I ditched it to learn how to play guitar. I had a couple of guitar lessons at school, but they were so dull – I learned G, E, D and A and then ditched the lessons and thought, that will do me. I could write punk songs with those four chords. I grew up surrounded by music. All the parties we used to have – get-togethers, family dos. A couple of my uncles were good guitarists, and we…

There is a brightness and optimism to Say She She’s sound. Their album Prism has been like a shot of vitamin C during these darker months JAZZ A look ahead to new songs and sunnier times During an interview with GQ Japan in 2020, as coronavirus began to take hold around the world, the Oscar-winning composer Ryuichi Sakamoto offered some words of encouragement: “As a person involved in culture, my only hope is that art, music and poetry have never been interrupted during the 200,000-year history of homo sapiens.” This quote feels no less resonant as we barrel towards what will likely be another year of discord and uncertainty; culture, at least, can be counted on. Sakamoto, best known as a founding member of experimental electronic group Yellow Magic Orchestra,…

ULF GUSTAFSSON, 65 sells Faktum in Gothenburg As a little kid, I went to IFK Göteborg’s football school, and we had Ronnie Hellström as our goalkeeper coach [considered one of the best keepers in the world in the 1970s]. It was great fun. Later I started playing in Qviding. I became the centre-back and got to be part of Leif Eriksson’s football school, which was a TV programme broadcast at the time. I remember I was even paid 50 Swedish Kronor. That was awesome. My friend’s dad played in Gais’ A team and once in the third grade we got to watch the Gais A team versus IFK derby. Gais won that match. Since it was my best friend who brought me and they even set off green flares, I…