Rock’n’roll flotsam: Bar Italia at the Jericho Tavern
On Sunday 14th May, a mixed crowd of students, locals, and (according to The Times) “various figureheads from Oxford’s music scene” gathered in the Jericho Tavern for a show by Bar Italia, a London-based band currently touring to promote their new album, Tracey Denim. I use the word ‘perform
The Last Dinner Party: you are cordially invited to tone it up
The Last Dinner Party have only released one single and yet they’ve supported the Rolling Stones at Hyde Park, played a sold-out show at Camden Assembly and are performing on the Woodsies (fka John Peel) stage at Glastonbury, shared with Christine and the Queens, Rina Sawayama and many more. How i
Artist of the Week: Hugo Max
Your room is full of giraffes, on birthday cards, figurines, blankets. They pop up in a lot of your recent work. Why giraffes? Where to begin with giraffes? There’s an old Jewish joke that giraffe meat would be kosher, but they don’t know where to cut the neck. Which, purely from a paint
Hide and Seek with the Brain
The brains of today remind me of hamsters on wheels: forever playing catch-up, running from one day into the next, set on rebuilding themselves. At times, stretching themselves awake in a baby, and later, spreading across the sky. There are two types of people who can teach you a great deal about th
The Curse of Wuthering Heights: A case study into why adaptations flop, and why directors can’t stay away.
Wuthering Heights has an element of the reverse Midas touch, in the sense that almost every director who touches the book ends up tarnishing it. It has been dubbed ‘The Unfilmable’, but that hasn’t stopped people from trying. Over twenty screen adaptations of the novel exist, including a 200-e
“Art, yeah? What’s it about?”: The Features team has a LARP
On May Day Eve, some Isis Writers headed to Tap Social, or Atik, or the Bullingdon, but Jules and Isaaq did not. Well, we did, but before our respective events, we decided to pop along to a Live Action Role Play event organised by Xsist Media in advance of Lucas Closs’ play Mitigating Circumstance
Westwood Ho! Or, the Oxford Fashion Gala 2023
It’s eight in the evening on 2 May: around thirty half-dressed, slightly less than half-made up models are huddled in a jumbled queue, slowly moving up the steps into Freud. The bouncers have just kicked everyone out of the venue in order to check their IDs (venue regulations halt for no 
‘Stock Till You Drop
There’s something a little carnivalesque about an Oxford college putting on a music festival. For a single day, Wadham takes Woodstock; straight-laced Oxford students become free spirits, transported away from Parks Road into a nostalgic reimagining of the summer of ‘69. It’s all quite
Review: Forgery
Sitting on a crowded bench in Wadham’s antechapel, waiting for the sold-out performance of Forgery, my first thought was ‘What an enormous organ!’. Once the play began, however, it was clear that the unusual venue was perfect, enhancing the play’s grandeur and menace. The production was also