Editor’s Note: Arts and culture

Featured image: the Theatre Royal, Brighton. Photograph by Ian Muttoo (via Flickr)

Among all of the articles that are published here on So So Gay it can be hard for me to pick out favourites. From political interviews to dating diaries, charity stories and many others, I’m often overawed by the amount of work we receive from a very dedicated team of writers.

But if there is a stand-out section, it surely has to be arts and culture. In the last month alone, we’ve run interviews with Nadia Oh and Frankmusik, with earlier interviewees including Patrick Wolf, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Darren Hayes and John Cameron Mitchell – to name but a few. We’ve seen our reviews quoted on DVD covers, movie posters and theatre billboards. We’ve reviewed music festivals ranging from Glastonbury to the BBC Proms. And we have a constant stream of reviews of new music, films and plays, giving you a chance to suss out what’s good, bad and mediocre before shelling out for tickets.

So, when we here at So So Gay were trying to work out what to do this month, arts and culture seemed to be a natural choice. This is, after all, the month of the awesome Edinburgh Festival, the BBC Proms are in full swing, and summer blockbusters are hitting the silver screen; what better way to mark the British summer than to spend a month talking about all the artsy fun that’s to be had? This isn’t about playing to our strengths: arts and culture are so important to us, it seemed to make sense to go specifically berserk about it for a whole month.

And that’s exactly what we’re doing. We’ll be publishing interviews with (among others) the likes of Coronation Street’s rather lovely Charlie Condou, the famously brassy comedian Ruby Wax, and those most peculiar darlings of cabaret, Bourgeois & Maurice. And our writers will be trawling the festivals to bring you previews and reviews from some of the most popular entries in Britain’s cultural calendar.

All of that along with our usual mix of competitions, interviews, news, reviews and opinion. August might be the height of the silly season for most publications, but here at So So Gay we’ll be working our little cultured socks off in the name of art. Enjoy!

Andy Wasley
Editor-in-Chief