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Front Row: Ray Davies; Guerrilla; The Odyssey; Damien Hirst's exhibition

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10/04/2017

Ray Davies; Guerrilla; The Odyssey; Damien Hirst's exhibition

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, Ray Davies; Guerrilla; The Odyssey; Damien Hirst's exhibition

From the Kinks to Americana; Dreda Say Mitchell on Guerrilla; poets respond to The Odyssey

From the Kinks to Americana, Ray Davies on his new album; Dreda Say Mitchell on Guerrilla; Daljit Nagra reads his response to The Odyssey; Matthew Collings on the Hirst exhibition.

Ray Davies is best known as frontman to the Kinks, a quintessentially English band, yet it is America which is at the heart of his most recent project. He talks to us about his first solo album in a decade, Americana, an ambivalent yet deeply personal homage to the country which has inspired him, banned him and almost killed him.

Unlike the American Black Panther movement, the British version was largely non-violent. Members included the late writer Darcus Howe, poet Linton Kwesi Johnson and photographer Neil Kenlock. Guerrilla, a new six-part series by Sky Atlantic, uses the movement as a springboard for a tense thriller set in a fictional Black Power underground cell in 1970's London. Broadcaster and author Dreda Say Mitchell has seen it.

The Odyssey Project is a new Radio 4 series which sees ten poets offer contemporary poetic responses to Homer's The Odyssey. Poet in Residence, Daljit Nagra reads his own poem and discusses the process of curating the project. 

This weekend saw the opening in Venice of Damien Hirst's new exhibition Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, which the artist claims cost millions of pounds of his own money. The exhibition, reportedly 10 years in the making, has divided critics. Matthew Collings gives his response. 

Presenter: John Wilson 
Producer: Rebecca Armstrong.

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