Front Row

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Front Row: Katie Melua, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Crimes Against Christmas

Katie Melua, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Crimes Against Christmas

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, Katie Melua, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Crimes Against Christmas

Singer Katie Melua, and Tate Britain re-opens with the work of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Singer-songwriter Katie Melua; contemporary British portrait painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye at Tate Britain; an online advent calendar podcast, Crimes Against Christmas

Seventeen years after achieving global success with her debut album, Katie Melua talks about her latest record Album No.8, and how she took a course in short fiction writing before embarking on the lyrics. Plus she performs a special acoustic performance for Front Row.

British-Ghanaian artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye paints 'figments': portraits of fictitious people constructed from memory and fantasy. As Tate Britain re-opens, her Covid-postponed show Fly in League With the Night surveys her body of work from 2003 to the present day with a distinctive sense of mystery. Art critic Asana Greenstreet reviews the exhibition and gives us a sense of Yiadom-Boakye’s importance to British art now.

Husband and wife team Feargus Woods Dunlop and Heather Westwell from the New Old Friends Theatre company have come up with a novel way of beating Covid restrictions on live performances by turning their traditional Christmas show into an online advent calendar podcast – Crimes Against Christmas, which is loosely based on Agatha Christie’s Then There Were None.  Feargus Woods Dunlop talks to Elle Osili-Wood about how and why they did it.

Presenter Elle Osili-Wood
Producer Jerome Weatherald

Main image: Katie Melua
Image credit: Rosie Matheson

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Katie Melua, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Crimes Against Christmas

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