John Walsh
The Independent
United Kingdom
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Past articles by John:
Lights, cameras and even a little action as Cannes kicks off
The 56th Cannes Film Festival kicked off in traditional Riviera glitz fashion yesterday under a cloudless blue sky.Late sunlight gleamed off the highest balconies on the Croisette, gulls flew over the palm trees and a sea of tuxedos and curiously naff ball gowns swayed across the mile-wide red carpet that leads up to the Palais where all the evening screenings are held. Once you've waved to the… → Read More
Tales of the City: An English idyll
Summer arrived at the weekend, so I left town to roar up to Cambridge and drink beer in the sunshine and talk to brewery types in the run-up to the Cambridge Beer Festival, which celebrates its 30th birthday on Monday. Perhaps under the influence of that ale-swilling trendsetter Madonna, I've rediscovered the huge, mislaid pleasure of flooring pints in elderly pubs with horse brasses around the… → Read More
There is nothing like a Damien
Damien Hirst is surrounded by underpants. The Hieronymous Bosch of Leeds, the psycho wunderkind of the British avant-garde, is standing in London's Joop gallery swamped by fundamental garments. Wherever you look, there are unmentionables in all shapes and textures: outsize pants, pants crusted with sugar, pants hardened with wax, pants covered in industrial cleaning fluid, pants adorning the… → Read More
Tales of the City: One giant leap for... um
You are a civilian astronaut called Mike Melvill, and you have just travelled to the edge of outer space in a rocket plane whose design has cost Microsoft $20m. You have been carried miles up into the blue empyrean by a mothership, then released like an abandoned child, and the rockets beneath you have blasted your craft 62 miles above the Earth. Tell us, Mike, about the wonders you… → Read More
How much does it hurt?: The methods used by doctors to measure pain
One night in May, my wife sat up in bed and said, “I’ve got this awful pain just here”. She prodded her abdomen and made a face. “It feels like something’s really wrong.” Woozily noting that it was 2am, I asked what kind of pain it was. “Like something’s biting into me and won’t stop,” she said. “Hold on,” I said blearily, “help is at hand.” I brought her a couple of ibuprofen with some water,… → Read More
Umberto Angeloni interview: The connoisseur behind the Caruso brand is raising tailoring to an art form
Who would you expect to be the chap at the beating heart of Italian menswear – the top-quality stuff that costs a fortune in Paris and New York shops – and where would you expect to find the centre of his kingdom? → Read More
Blixen, restaurant review: Unbeatable comfort food on the edge of Spitalfields Market
This will be my last-ever restaurant review for the Independent Magazine. After a dozen years, a couple of modest awards, a plethora of polysyllabic phrases and a near-obsession with crème brulee, I am hanging up my spiral notepad, my monogrammed napkin and my well-thumbed copy of Alan Davidson's Penguin Companion to Food. → Read More
Dickie Fitz, restaurant review: Fitzrovia's latest addition breathes sophistication
Dickie Fitz is the fourth and most recent London eating house from the Affinity Group, a glumly named but consistently impressive gang of restaurateurs with a fondness for the periphery of literary culture. → Read More
Alexei Sayle interview: The 80s stand-up legend on drugs, communist dentists, and the comedy revolution
On Saturday 29 May 1979, a crowd of comedy fans converged on a new nightclub in London's Soho. To get in, they had to negotiate a side entrance in the hookers' alley of Meard Street, take the lift four floors up to an evil-smelling topless bar called the Gargoyle Club, before descending a steel-and-brass staircase – allegedly designed by Matisse – to the faded glamour of the tiny Nell Gwynne… → Read More
100 Wardour Street, restaurant review: Steeped in music history, an address with a lot to live up to
Ah, the importance of a good address! And in the memories of London baby boomers, few addresses make your heart thud like No 90 Wardour Street, old home of the Marquee Club. The venerable great-grandaddy of rock venues has had more homes in the last half-century than Zsa Zsa Gabor, but from 1964 to 1988, it was in the heart of the Soho grid, playing host to the cream of Sixties rock'n'roll and… → Read More
Limetree Kitchen, restaurant review: Unadorned surrounds belie gastronomic riches
One sunny day in 1797, Samuel Taylor Coleridge had burnt his foot with scalding milk and couldn't join his weekend guests on a hike to view the ocean. So he sat under a tree and wrote a poem while waiting for them to return. It began: "Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,/ This lime-tree bower my prison!" He concluded, 70 lines later, that it was a pretty fine prison, being a visitation… → Read More
Shuang Shuang, restaurant review: When the cooking is as do-it-yourself as this, who gets the credit?
It's easy to be distracted when you're looking up Shuang Shuang online. Instead of finding images of Chinese food, your screen is filled with pictures of a young Oriental actress in abbreviated swimwear, a plunging black evening gown and Kill Bill-style action-hero garb. The reason is simple: she's called Mavis Pan Shuang Shuang, a 27-year-old Chinese actress who is a) gorgeous, b) very popular… → Read More
Review of the Year 2015: Atrocities with hope and laughter
Two obscured faces dominated the visual landscape of 2015: one of a killer in a desert and one of a victim on a beach. They defined a year in which the human race found itself at contrasting extremes of cruelty and pathos. → Read More
Shotgun, London W1 - restaurant review: A US-style barbecue joint that floods the senses
Say what you like about Shotgun, the new barbecue restaurant in London's West End, but it must be the narrowest joint in town. I've seen wider telephone booths. Dwarfed by its neighbour, a substantial new branch of Dishoom, its frontage is so modestly proportioned that you can't believe there can be tables and chairs inside with people walking around them. → Read More
Driftwood Hotel, restaurant review: Five stars for this thrilling Cornish outpost
My God, Cornwall's a long way. After approximately 17 hours' drive from London, through cascading rain, enfilading hail, pea-souper mist, blinding sunshine and quasi-Biblical combinations of all four, we found ourselves hopelessly, Dante's Inferno-esquely, circumnavigating the village of Portscatho at 9.30pm, desperately seeking a phone signal so we could ring the Driftwood Hotel and beg them… → Read More
The Black Swan, restaurant review: A Michelin-starred pub in the wilds of Yorkshire that is really worth a detour
Boasting a Michelin star and run by the most dynamic combination of brothers since Romulus and Remus, the Black Swan is what food guides used to call a "destination" restaurant. And it's quite a journey to reach it. It's 45 minutes' drive northwards from York, taking in fabulously wild moorland scenery, the awesome Georgian pile that is Ampleforth School and – an eerie sight in the moonlight –… → Read More
Beatie Wolfe interview: Musician explains why she's selling new album Montagu Square on a shirt, but not in record shops
Montagu Square, the second album by the Anglo-American singer-songwriter Beatie Wolfe, is out this week, but you won’t find it on the shelves in HMV. You can download it from iTunes, Amazon and Google Play, you can buy a lyric book with a CD insert from her website, and you can get the tracks on a deck of “intelligent” cards provided you’ve got an Android phone on which to play them. Oh, and… → Read More
Thomas Heatherwick interview: The designer talks about the furore surrounding the garden bridge
As a child, Thomas Heatherwick was a fan of the comic inventions of W Heath Robinson, whose best drawings – the Automatic Back Scratcher, the Self-Operating Napkin – featured ingenious contraptions held together by cogs, pulleys, steam kettles, candles and lengths of knotted string. → Read More
The Little Taperia, restaurant review: A south London pet shop has been turned into the home of great tapas
Who would have predicted that Tooting, for decades a byword for unlovely Sarf Lahn- den grot, would start turning into a new Hackney or Dalston? A couple of years ago, I reviewed a new Lebanese restaurant there called Meza. It was not the most sophisticated joint but the food was excellent, especially farrouj meshwi, a poussin that had been spatchcocked, de-boned, marinated in garlic, peppers,… → Read More
Rita Ora interview: The singer on The X Factor, performing at the Oscars, and being an ambassador to Kosovo
It's 6pm on a Thursday evening in Berkeley Square, and I'm in a first-floor Green Room surrounded by half-naked mermaids. To be strictly accurate, only some of the girls are got up as mermaids. Others may be sea horses or anemones, molluscs or cuttlefish, but they're certainly undersea creatures. → Read More