Bangui, CAR
Peace hopes: The Russian-backed government of the Central African Republic has agreed a peace deal with 14 rebel groups, following two weeks of talks in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum. Announced by the African Union, the deal raises hopes of an end to a brutal civil war that has ravaged the mineral-rich but impoverished country. The conflict began in 2012, when mainly Muslim Séléka rebels overthrew the Christian president and seized power in the capital, Bangui. Christian militias then fought back, driving Muslims out of cities and towns across the country. With atrocities committed by both sides, hundreds of thousands of civilians have been displaced, and thousands have been killed.
The birth of the 007 theme
It’s hard to imagine a James Bond film without Bond’s signature theme; but Monty Norman didn’t write it for 007, says Adam Luck in The Mail on Sunday. In 1962, Cubby Broccoli asked Norman to write the score for Dr. No, and paid for him to fly to Jamaica, where it was being filmed, to find inspiration. There, he met Sean Connery, and watched Ursula Andress walking out of the sea, singing his song, Underneath the Mango Tree. “She looked unbelievable, but was singing poorly in this broad Germanic accent. In the end, my wife sang and it was dubbed.” The trip was productive, but a theme tune still eluded him – until he remembered a song he’d composed years earlier for a musical based on V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas.
Written for the sitar, “it was too ethnic, with this Indian feel. But I got the idea of splitting the notes and putting them to a guitar. From that moment on, I was sure I had the James Bond sound.”
Whiteread on the two Tates
Rachel Whiteread’s House –a cast of a terraced house in east London – helped spark a huge interest in contemporary art in the 1990s. But 25 years on, she thinks Britain’s relationship with it is still very superficial. “People flick through exhibitions like a magazine,” she told Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian. “[They] expect things to be immediate.” Tate Modern is “just like a shopping mall: people go in, and they go up, and they go down... and then they leave, having bought a sandwich and been to the shop. I actually prefer Tate Britain as a museum: it’s quite traditional and you look at something slowly, rather than dashing through.” Many of her own pieces are not much visited at all: House was torn down after 11 weeks; others are hidden in remote places. But for her, it is not about how many people see them. It’s about how they persist in memory. “The most important thing about them is that they exist: it’s kind of the sound of one hand clapping.”
Eddie Marsan’s class war
One of Britain’s best character actors, Eddie Marsan is now in demand in Hollywood, says Ed Cumming in The Independent. But having been brought up on a council estate in east London, he remains close to his roots – and he is intensely political. A lifelong Labour supporter, he hates what Jeremy Corbyn is doing to the party, and often fights that corner on Twitter. Last year, though, he was involved in a more unusual row, when he was attacked for tweeting that he preferred dinner parties to pubs. “All I said was I wasn’t a great fan of pubs, because when I grew up, closing time was frightening for lots of kids on the estate. The amazing thing is [my critics] never consider that the people who come round to my house [for dinner parties] may be working class too. It reveals so much about them.” Don Mccullin’s war photography has won him renown, says Bryan Appleyard in The Sunday Times, but at 83, with a major retrospective of his work showing at Tate Britain, he wishes he’d devoted more of his career to the photographs of street life that first made his name. It all started in 1958, when Mccullin – who grew up in poverty in London – took a portrait of a new age: a gang of boys posing in sharp suits in the wreckage of a house. It was the start “of rock’n’roll”, he says. “After it kicked off, people thought there was going to be a revolution... [With] a bit of rock’n’roll in you, you fought better, you were more cocky and you thought the doors had been opened that had been closed to you all those years.” He got a job on a local paper, but he went everywhere, always drawn to the poorest and toughest places. Then he gravitated to war zones. “War encouraged a kind of junkyism,” he reflects. “You went there and it was exciting, you looked at each other and you knew you were in the right place at the right time – all that was wrong, in a way.” And though he has taken some of the greatest photos of war, the idea of taking a “great” war photo troubles him. “The more beautifully I compose, the more iconic the pictures can become, which makes me stray away from the reason I took them in the first place. You’re not doing any of those victims any favours anyway; they’re not going to survive… You’re not going to save that person.”