Category: 5. Entertainment

It only takes a moment with Kun – the 26-year-old singer-songwriter who rose to fame on China’s Idol Producer – to feel like long-lost friends.

The boy group member turned singer-songwriter is quick to jump into conversation about his seemingly favorite topic – making music. There’s plenty to talk about. His latest single, “Deadman,” was released a month ago. The soulful track’s release was accompanied by a cinematic music video, which the 26-year-old was deeply involved in creating.

Fresh off a somewhat-surprise performance of the song song at 88Rising’s Head in the Clouds festival last month, Kun sat down with The Hollywood Reporter to talk about making deadman, his love for music and what’s next in his “new journey.”

Can you tell me more about your latest single “Deadman?”

Well, I’m very, very happy because this track was made last year, so it was a year [until the time] when people could actually hear it. I heard it a thousand times already, so now people actually are hearing it and a lot of them are surprised. I think they’d [say], “Oh, I didn’t know Kun’s voice was like this now.” But I was just doing my thing over the past year. I would just keep cooking music in the studio. That’s what I love. I like to focus on it, and I made a lot of demos. But “Deadman” is definitely the one I loved, so I’m very happy. Finally, I put out this track. Something about this track has the vintage sound that I’ve never made before, and [there’s] the contrast between the vintage and the modern thing. I think it’s very interesting, so I really wanted people to hear it.

It does have an nostalgic feeling to it. It feels like you’ve heard it before, in a good way, not a reptetitve way. Tell me about the process making songs?

There’s no reference, to be honest. We have the guitar player [and the] piano players. I just tell them, “Hey, let’s do this groove.” I would just start giving a groove, a tempo, we set up a vibe. I start [to] freestyle, just easy. No reference. I’ll tell them, “Hey, I want to do something like old school, but not too old.” Does that make sense?

I like soulful stuff. I listen to a lot of classic jazz, soul and R&B. They know what I like. I like Prince. I like Elvis. They all know that. My friends, we make music together, so when I start free-styling, they just know. They’ll tell me, “This is the line.” We’re just chilling. We’re just playing.

Do you have a favorite part of releasing this single?

Definitely the music video. There’s a lot of crazy stories behind the music video. Look at his face, look his face. It is like, we shot it in Montenegro. It’s a very beautiful place. I was there for a week, a whole week. I learned the choreography there, and I learned fighting. I learned dance. We set up the rig. It was kind of crazy, and the schedule was very tight. We had to move to different locations, and I couldn’t even sleep at night, so I was posting [to my Instagram] story that I was just sitting on the sofa like, “I hope this will be good, I hope everything will be fine.” My friends were always asking me, “What’s going on? Why are you not sleeping? It’s supposed to be very late right now, right?” It wasn’t an easy one. Definitely. But I’m very thankful for all the people that worked on this project. It’s not an easy one. It’s kind of like a movie shoot.

That is impressive, especially given the scale.

I wanted to make this character. He’s dying over and over again because of the things he loves, so he’s bleeding all the time, very painful. Always rocking with the guitar like today is the last day, today’s the end. This is going to be the last song I sing to the world. That’s the direction we went for, and that’s the first line I said to everybody. “Hey, I want to write a song. It sounds stupid, but what if I die tomorrow? Today is the last track I’m going to play.” That’s how we got “Deadman.”

It sounds like you’re very, very creatively involved in everything you do. What is that so important to you as an artist?

I’m just a creative guy. I like to learn new things. I like to create new stuff, like cool shit, but in my own way, I don’t want to be anybody [else]. I just want to be myself, right? I just want to sound like myself. I just want to do my own thing. I’m the guy that’s always [improving] myself. I always hate the old me. It is like, “Why did I [do] this shit?” [There’s] nothing bad about it. I just want to be better all the time. You get what I mean? That’s just my personality, so I just like to beat myself.

Essentially, for you, your only competition is yourself?

Exactly.

Can you tell me a bit about Head in the Clouds and what it was like performing there?

This time I really just came here to support. [I wasn’t] playing a set. I only have one new track out. I want to play the new songs. I don’t want to play the old songs. We can probably play [them] next time, like a new set, maybe in New York. But this time I was mostly just here to show people the new music, what it sounds like. I wanted to show the audience in America, let them hear the new track. And also connect with my fans. I love the crowds.

What is it like performing in the U.S. for you? Do you enjoy it? Do you find it a little different?

I think it’s different. It’s very cool. It’s my first time [doing a festival]. In China, we have a lot of festivals too, but [I] never really go to [them]. I was only doing [my own] concerts, so this is the first time. I just really did something I haven’t done before. I’m just very happy. I’m really enjoyed it.

We didn’t even have a lot of time to prepare [with] rehearsals. I just went on the stage and tried it. I didn’t even know what mic I was going to use. I didn’t even know who was going to give me my in-ears and everything. It’s a funny story. I was actually fixing the mic stand when I was singing the high notes. Somebody didn’t tighten it, so it was just going up and down. I’m trying to fix it, but I’m also singing the high notes. It’s kind of crazy, but there’s a lot of stories people don’t know.

Do you want to perform more in the U.S.?

We will. We will. I feel like we’re just starting. Starting from “Deadman,” everything is just new. [I’m] starting a new journey, so It’s really just the beginning. Head in the Clouds, it’s fun. It’s a good start. It’s helping a lot of Asian artists. That’s something I respect. There’s not a lot of labels [or] festivals that’s helping Asian artists. That’s amazing. That’s something very cool.

What is like to be able to perform at a festival like that?

It’s a very good experience for me. When I’m singing, everything just kind of tunes out. I just focus on the track. I just want to put out the message I want. I just want to show people, “Hey, this is the new sound.” In the past, we just spent too much time in the studio. I spent too much time in studio. And I know that my fans [have been] waiting for too long. I feel a little sorry. I always say that. I feel sorry sometimes they don’t see me that much. I don’t even post a lot… That’s just me. I’m not an internet guy. I’m not a social [media] guy. That’s just not me. I just like to focus on my thing. Sometimes I feel sorry to my fans, so this time when they asked me to play [the] festival, they said, “Can you play a set?” I said maybe next time, but I can show up. I can come to support. I’d like to because I love Head in the Clouds. I love the vibe.

Former Spandau Ballet frontman Tony Hadley and folk group The Unthanks are among headline acts at this year’s Lichfield Festival, organisers have announced.

The festival, which runs from 8 to 20 July, takes place across venues such as Lichfield Cathedral, St Michael’s Church, the Guildhall and Beacon Park.

Organisers said the event, which it dubbed one of the country’s “most eclectic multi-arts festivals” would feature world-class artists and local voices from music, theatre, dance and comedy.

The festival also included a world premiere of Gingerland, a new dance show created by Strictly Come Dancing dancer Neil Jones, a spokesperson added.

On for two nights, the family-friendly comedy features a “dazzling cast of top professional dancers, with glamorous costumes and original music,” organisers added.

Other artists headlining this year’s event include brass ensemble Black Dyke Band, Sam Every (Little) Big Band, choir Tenebrae and jazz artist Jacqui Dankworth.

The 11-day festival will close with a candlelit concert by Jeneba Kanneh-Mason in Lichfield Cathedral.

A new discounted ticket initiative was also launched this year, offering discounted prices for under 30s, carers, children and eligible community groups,

Tickets and the full event programme have been listed on the festival’s website.

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Steve Coogan has accused Keir Starmer’s Labour government of a “derogation of all the principles they were supposed to represent” and said they were paving the way for the “racist clowns” of Reform UK.

The actor, comedian and producer said the party he had long supported was now for people “inside the M25” and described the prime minister’s first year in power as underwhelming.

“I knew before the election he was going to be disappointing. He hasn’t disappointed me in how disappointing he’s been,” he said.

Coogan spoke to the Guardian ahead of an address to the annual Co-op Congress in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, where he called for locally led grassroots movements to assemble across Britain and take back control from “multinational institutions and billionaires”.

The Bafta-winning actor, best known for his Alan Partridge persona, has backed Labour in several recent general elections but switched his support last year to the Green party.

Coogan, 59, said he “agreed wholeheartedly” with the statement released by former Labour MP Zarah Sultana on Thursday night, when she announced she was quitting the party to co-lead a left-wing alternative with Jeremy Corbyn.

Sultana said Britain’s two-party system “offers nothing but managed decline and broken promises” and that Labour had “completely failed to improve people’s lives”.

Coogan said: “Everything she said in her statement I agree wholeheartedly. I wish I’d said it myself.” However, he added that he was “reserving judgment” as to whether to support the new party at future elections if they field candidates.

The Philomena star said he did not blame working people for voting for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.

“The success of Reform, I lay squarely at the feet of the neoliberal consensus, which has let down working people for the last 40 years and they’re fed up,” he said. “It doesn’t matter who they vote for, nothing changes for them.

“Keir Starmer and the Labour government have leant into supporting a broken system. Their modus operandi is to mitigate the worst excesses of a broken system and all that is is managed decline. What they’re doing is putting Band-Aids on the gash in the side of the Titanic.”

In his most strongly worded attack on Labour yet, Coogan described the party’s priorities in the last year as “a derogation of all the principles they were supposed to represent”.

“We have a Labour government and it’s no different from a Conservative government in neglecting ordinary people,” he added.

“I think Labour governs for people inside the M25 – that’s who they’re preoccupied with, and gesture politics. Every decision that comes from central government these days to me looks political and strategic and nothing to do with sincerity or any kind of firmly held ideological belief.”

Without meaningful action to improve the lives of ordinary people, Coogan said, both Labour and the Conservatives would face electoral oblivion.

“They’ll pave the way for the only alternative, which is a racist clown. Reform couldn’t organise a piss up in a brewery but if there’s no alternative you understand why working people will make that choice,” he said.

Coogan spoke in Rochdale’s Grade I-listed town hall, which this weekend is hosting a congress of co-operative movements from across the world to mark this year’s UN-designated International Year of Co-operatives.

The actor is a supporter of Middleton Co-operating, a community-led initiative based in his home town, just outside Manchester, which aims to provide locally run energy, banking, social care, housing and other schemes.

He said the government’s focus on attracting investment to major cities had created a “doughnut of neglect” with poorer communities “ethnically cleansed”.

“You look at Manchester, you look at Liverpool, and you go: ‘Wow, look at these shiny new buildings’ and everything looks clean, there’s no crisp bags flying about in the street,” he said.

“The disenfranchised people who lived there before are not there any more. They’ve been ethnically cleansed. They’ve been booted out to the next poor area. So who’s benefiting?”

Coogan urged Labour to breathe life back into towns by empowering grassroots groups to take over neglected buildings, using compulsory purchase orders for example.

“It’s not just the fact that people are disempowered and feel like they have no autonomy. It’s compounded by the fact that these people, these multinationals, are enabled and supported by the government to keep their foot on the neck of working people,” he said.

It was “perfectly understandable” for working people to vote for Farage’s Reform in large parts of England, where many voters feel disenfranchised, Coogan said.

“But if any government wants to address that extremism, what they have to do is tackle the root cause,” he added.

“The root cause is poverty and economic decline in the post-industrial landscape, especially in the north. If Labour addressed that problem, Reform would go away – all their support would dissipate.”

On an unseasonably warm day in October 2023, I arrived, ahead of the queues, at London’s Southbank Centre for a conceptual art takeover by the world-famous Marina Abramović Institute.

I had recently read Marina’s memoir Walk Through Walls, which had resonated. So, when I’d seen the event advertised – hours-long performances by artists she’d invited, curated and introduced by Marina – I bought a £60 ticket and waited for my time slot to enter the Queen Elizabeth Hall. I hadn’t seen performance art before, and this was due to include her well-known work The Artist Is Present with an artist sitting, static and silent, in a chair all day, as Marina once did for an accumulated 736 hours and 30 minutes at the Museum of Modern Art. I felt certain that it would affect me, I just wasn’t sure how.

It came at an interesting time in my life. I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian family, the daughter of a priest who was physically abusive. I’d been in therapy for years, but my experiences still affected me and I’d recently cut contact with my father with my family. So, when I entered the first room at the Southbank where Marina was to spoke and introduce around a dozen artists, I was still coming to terms with this new way of dealing with my past.

I was immediately drawn to one of the artists, a man from Myanmar who was to perform the chair piece with a cloth sack over his head. We heard how he’d been part of an organisation in Myanmar that opposed violence and therefore risked death if he was publicly identified. I was moved by what he was risking for his art. I also knew it was a hard piece; Marina wasn’t going to give it to just anyone.

As people moved between performers, I saw him, seated in the atrium, with a large crowd; I waited for a quieter moment to return. When I finally stood before him, I was overcome. I felt an urge to sit down in front of him and didn’t care what others thought. I was compelled to do it for myself. I can’t say how long I sat there, maybe an hour. In that time, I rewrote my definition of “strength”. I used to think my father’s aggression made him strong but now I saw someone using his muscular arms and legs to be still, for peaceful protest. I imagined the loss he must have experienced in war and the mental strength to sit there. I thought of what I’d read in Marina’s book; how pain set in three hours into sitting still.

I cried: the good tears, where you let part of your past go. It felt cleansing. When I left, I felt lighter. I decided that this would be my father figure now: this person who had strength but did not hurt me, who had reasons to be aggressive but did not direct his anger towards a six-year-old whispering in her brother’s ear or disturbing his preaching, as my father had.

It unlocked something in me. It gave me a positive male figure to replace what had gone before and helped me not to hate my father or men. It also unblocked the creativity that had laid dormant within me, an artistic side that had reminded me too much of my father’s similar creative charisma. I started drawing: comic-books and illustrations.

I’m an atheist but I believe there are spiritual moments you can choose to embrace: this, for me, was one. I think of it often. I even have the poster from the takeover in my toilet, serving as a daily reminder. I’m 41 and throughout life I’ve learned to expect the unexpected. Usually, when I go to see art it’s to learn something new, and this was a big one. This changed me as a woman, as a soul, an immigrant, a creative, a child. That man gave himself to us as an artist and I accepted his gift.

Too Much (Netflix, Thursday 10 July) opens with a montage of the kind of woman you could be, if you were a carefree New Yorker who upped sticks and moved to London on a whim. You could be a candlelit period heroine, roaming across the moors, or one of Jack the Ripper’s victims, or you could be a sturdy northern police sergeant, which leads to the slightly strange spectacle of seeing Megan Stalter from Hacks doing a French and Saunders-style parody of what looks a lot like Happy Valley.

The much-hyped new Lena Dunham comedy follows Jess (Stalter), an open-hearted American woman who moves to London to escape a broken heart. There, she falls for a messy indie musician called Felix, whom she meets when he’s playing a gig in a pub. Dunham co-created the series with her husband Luis Felber, and it is loosely based on their real-life romance and marriage.

Jess decides to reinvent her life following the decline of her relationship with the highly strung Zev (Michael Zegen). Zev has quickly moved on to an influencer, played by Emily Ratajkowski, and Jess records long videos about her feelings, addressed to Zev’s new girlfriend, which she never plans to send … but you can probably guess that they won’t stay private for ever. Following a post-breakup spell amid the matriarchs of her Long Island family home, she  packs her bags and books a room on a British estate. What Jess imagines an estate to be is basically Mr Darcy emerging from the lake at Chatsworth. You can imagine the estate she ends up on when she arrives in London.

This culture-clash, fish-out-of-water strand is not the main point, though it does bubble under throughout. It offers the chance to hear British slang and idioms with new ears: if “getting a bollocking” never sounded strange to you, then it is worth considering that if you have no idea what it means in the first place, it can come across as a little smutty. I wonder if it is also the first time “oi oi saveloy” has made its way on to a Netflix series.

When Jess meets Felix (Will Sharpe, in leather jacket, lipstick and nail polish), her Mr Darcy/Mr Rochester dreams shuffle off in a very different direction. It is clear from the off that they like each other very much, but they don’t have the patience to pretend to be better people, or show each other their best sides. Instead, they come together over their flaws and oddities, finding a way to be together despite their considerable excess baggage. Too Much presents itself as a romcom, at least on the surface – Jess loves Love Actually and Notting Hill, and each of the episodes gets a romcom pun as its title – but in the end, it is an abrasive, complicated, grownup version of romance, rather than any picture-perfect illusion.

The Bear has sparked an ongoing debate about what counts as comedy and what counts as drama, by entering itself into various comedy categories at awards shows, despite being defiantly laugh-free and deeply traumatic in almost every scene. While Too Much isn’t quite on that same level of harrowing, viewers should know in advance that it is not exactly a laugh-a-minute lolfest. Jess must slowly work out how she lost herself in her relationship with Zev, while Felix’s family are an eccentric, unreliable nightmare, and his struggles with sobriety are pressing and ongoing. You begin to hope that it’s only loosely based on real life when it delves into the grotesque, cartoonish awfulness of the English upper classes. Not even the most obnoxious of interlopers deserves to be exposed to a country house horror show in which grown women have nicknames that make them sound like horses.

Too Much is stacked with a stupidly strong cast, who drop in seemingly for fun: Richard E Grant, Stephen Fry, Rita Wilson, Rhea Perlman, Naomi Watts, Andrew Scott, and that really is only scratching the surface. But in the end, despite being dressed up in romcom clothing, Too Much is about broken people finding love, actually, while learning to live with pain. Look out for it in those best comedy categories, 2026.