Concrete Playground

Following the announcement of this year's theme for the Sydney Writers' Festival, Concrete Playground caught up with the festival's artistic director, Chip Rolley. Texan-born Rolley, 47, reveals his personal take on the 2012 theme: the fine line between what is public and private.Read what Rolley as to say about the question...

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Every season has its fashions and fads. This past summer, there was only one thing we spotted more in our favourite bar haunts than hot dogs: cider. While a glass of sweet, delicious cider is undoubtedly on trend, we suspect that it will last a little longer than most.Concrete Playground...

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Usually when we see a teenage romance at the heart of a film we’re watching a film made for teens. Goodbye First Love is no such film. The young lovers Camille and Sullivan do not kiss under the speckled light of a disco ball at prom. Mia Hansen-Love's third film...

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Charlie Murphy deserves some serious credit. Trying to forge a career as a professional comedian is pretty tough at the best of times, let alone when your brother is none other than Eddie Murphy. Yet Charlie has not only taken that plunge – he's come out the other side as...

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According to Dean Sewell — Moran Prize winning photographer and part of the Oculi collective —  there was this duffel bag. Inside it was a banner a hundred foot long, decorated with two words.  This was on the maiden voyage of the Sydney to Hobart ship, the Spirit of Tasmania. There...

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Being The Drums means being one of the most hardworking bands around at the moment – since they skyrocketed in hype in 2009, The Drums haven’t slowed down, incessantly touring and releasing two LPs in that time. They’ve visited antipodean shores before, working the festival circuit and are about to...

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The Kooks were back in Sydney last week at the tail end of their Australian tour. We spoke with band member, Hugh Harris, about bringing in the New Year at Falls, cooking spag bol and retracing his roots in his spiritual homeland, Sydney.Hey Hugh, thanks for chatting with me today....

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After a huge 2011 - a new album and a year long world tour, the Arctic Monkeys landed in Australia post-Christmas. The band is back in Sydney this week to perform two sold-out shows and, lucky for us, the perfectly coiffed and sonorous toned lead singer, Alex Turner, took time...

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He has been gamboling around the Melbourne indie scene for years with Crayon Fields, but it is Geoffrey O'Connor's debut solo effort, Vanity Is Forever, that has garnered most attention since its release in October. The album, full of sultry synthesisers and insinuating stories, has gotten a lot of people talking,...

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Concrete Playground recently caught up with David Stewart, one of England's most respected photographers. He started off capturing punk bands like The Clash and The Ramones, as well as the colourful characters of Morecambe Promenade, from which he developed a distinctive style of portraiture. Often eerie, funny, creepy and touching (sometimes at the...

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Haruki Murakami's novel Norwegian Wood is filled with fuzziness, unreliability, landscapes that shift between the real and imagined, and the saturated sensation of tragedy. It's not the easiest thing to adapt to film, but director Tran Anh Hung (I Come with the Rain, The Scent of Green Papaya) has found...

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Bangs is the Sudanese refugee turned viral internet star who just wants to take girls to the movies and meet them on Facebook. His innocent song topics combined with his unique video aesthetics have lead to his YouTube channel receiving over 5 million hits.Tess Cameron caught up with Bangs prior...

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