Rising Talent

She’s friends with Lena Dunham and has discovered the best way to get a killer role is to write it for yourself. Meet the actress everyone is talking about ‘Maybe I shouldn’t talk about this,’ says Greta Gerwig, sipping tea in a Soho hotel. Conversation has turned to how few decent roles there are for actresses in Hollywood. The career-sensible thing for her to do now is keep quiet. But she pulls a what-the-heck face and tells it how it is.‘It drives me nuts. You see tip-top actresses who’ve been nominated for Oscars playing the babe role in stupid superhero movies. Those parts should go to random babes. If great actresses are taking those roles it means there’s nothing out there. Which is depressing.’She talks like this, in perfect paragraphs. And she isn’t whingeing. Like Kristen Wiig and a growing list of funny, smart actresses sick of one-dimensional girlfriend roles, Gerwig is writing her own films. In her brilliant new comedy ‘Frances Ha’ – co-written with her boyfriend, director Noah Baumbach – she gives one of the performances of the year as daffy Frances. A struggling dancer, she lives with her best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner) in Brooklyn – ‘like an old lesbian couple that doesn’t have sex’. Watch the 'Frances Ha' trailer Frances is stuck in that just out of university, can’t-pay-the-rent phase. Trouble is she’s 27. Unlike Frances, Gerwig’s own twenties looked effortless. After writing and starring in tiny indie films, she became an a

London's most popular restaurants Coppa At the top of a winding staircase you’re met by views of London Fields on one side, railway tracks on the other. But on the rooftop there’s a myriad of multicoloured garden sheds – yep, it’s a Hackney pop-up bar and restaurant. Coppa comes from the people behind nearby pizza and salumi restaurant Lardo. Unlike its industrial-chic sibling, Coppa’s look mixes retro British picnic and Mediterranean beach holiday. Gingham table cloths, enamelware and strings of plastic lemons abound. Family ties are clear though with a largely Italian menu, and the name, which is again inspired by a cut of cured pig (rolled shoulder or neck). Coppa is somewhere to settle down in a cosy garden shed (if you can bag one) and enjoy a few small plates with an Italian tipple. As well as Aperol spritz and other Italian-inspired cocktails, there are also alcoholic granite (slush-style ices) featuring unusual liqueurs such as the bitter cynar, which is made from artichokes. Thin, crisp, deep-fried courgette sticks (zucchini fritte) made the perfect accompaniment to our drinks, while chicken skewers rubbed with the spreadable spicy southern Italian sausage – ’nduja – were deliciously charred from the barbecue. Dishes are delivered as and when they're ready by some of the friendliest wait staff we've encountered in London. Being southern England and not Sorrento, the crochet blankets definitely came in handy as the night drew in at Copp

Step into a world where anything is edible with London's most creative confectioners (then try their tricks for yourself!) More about 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' Watch interviews with the cast and production team and get your hands on those golden tickets with our 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' information page. Read more about the production Bompas & Parr Mad-scientist-artist-jellymaker Sam Bompas tells Daisy Bowie-Sell how he and partner Harry Parr began experimenting with food as a hobby in 2007 and haven’t looked back. Why jelly? ‘It’s a unique food: the wobble makes everyone smile and the first bite is with the eye. We also like its challenges – we had to learn from scratch how to model architectural jellies.’ What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever made? ‘A five-ton architectural jelly sea around the SS Great Britain. It was the length of two Olympic swimming pools and took an entire day to make.’ Was that also the hardest thing you’ve attempted? ‘Actually, it was relatively easy. The hardest was a four-ton chocolate waterfall and climbing wall, which we made for Alton Towers. Because it was for a themepark, it had to be made to the same spec as a North Sea oil rig.’ What’s your biggest disaster? ‘I once almost puked live on TV. A young producer kept pushing us to make ever-wackier flavoured jellies. I made one that was blackcurrant blancmange and zebra meat. It’s not good to taste one of your own jellies and then vomit.’ What

See Bicep live in London 'I wouldn’t say we were built. If you met us, we’re still the skinny nerds you expected’ When it comes to names in dance music, irony rules. Deadmau5 is a living human, Girl Unit is just one bloke and Fatboy Slim is, well, neither fat nor slim. In that spirit, the last thing you’d expect Bicep to care about would be their physiques. As it turns out, the Belfast-born duo of Matt McBriar, 25, and Andy Ferguson, 24, owe their friendship to rugged physical exertion, as the latter explains: ‘We met playing rugby when we were eight-years-old. It’s always been part of the culture amongst our friends – some of them played rugby for Ireland. Once we discovered partying, though, rugby got booted out of the window.’ Bicep are one of the hottest names in the world right now. Their irresistibly jacking productions are burning up dancefloors, while they’ve hosted rooms at Fabric, Space in Ibiza and Manchester’s huge Warehouse Project as DJs. After touring America and Australia, they’ll be throwing a party at Oval Space alongside two of the most revered names in the business – eclectic hedonists Optimo and a rare London show from modern disco heroes Metro Area (who play their first live show in a decade). Bicep have also been at the forefront of the revival of deep house music, but more on that later. It’s remarkable that they only decided to make a career from DJing two years ago – after Ferguson and McBriar abandoned successful jobs in advertising and design respe

We talk beaches, bass and Bach with the Lawrences, the two young brothers who are bringing quality dance music back to the charts When she wasn’t tinkling the ivories in piano bars, Guy and Howard Lawrence’s mother used to sing in a covers band that regularly played the Grand Hotel in Brighton. Today, her boys are checked in as guests. I meet the two brothers behind Disclosure in the lobby, hours before a DJ set at Digital – the club where Guy first discovered the type of music he wanted to make. There’ll be more trips down memory lane later, but first an innocent request: ‘Can we go down and skim stones on the beach?’ asks Howard. Here’s what you need to know about Disclosure: they’re the sound of 2013 and they’re scarily young. Guy (right) is 21 while Howard (left) is just 18.‘I actually got kicked out of sixth-form college for doing this’, the latter says of the group. They’re fiercely talented and their fizzy mix of garage, house and infectious, tell-your-mates pop is bringing UK dance music back into the mainstream again. Remember the late ’90s? Prepare to feel old: ‘We missed garage the first time round. Guy was three and I was one,’ says Howard, without any cockiness. See Disclosure live Disclosure Raised in Reigate and now based in south London, Disclosure are the scarily young Lawrence brothers, Guy and Howard. They've been making forward-thinking dance music since 2010 but made a big breakout dent with their garage/house remix of Jessie

Here are two things you might not know about the sound of the future. One: it’s being made right now, in London, by a corduroy-wearing geek and his drummer mate. And two: a lot of it is actually the sound of the past. Intrigued? So are many others who’ve already picked up on the appeal of Public Service Broadcasting – a band, history project, and live cinema show all rolled into one. The duo, J Willgoose Esq and Wrigglesworth (who only has one name, ‘like Pele’), take audio samples from old documentaries and public information films, and layer them over their own zeitgeisty post-rock and electronica. It could have been just the sort of ‘cool’ academic project that results in something worthy but terrible, but the sound of PSB has blitzed the current London music scene with its energy and originality. YouTube hits for their single ‘Spitfire’ have topped six figures, while the band has had to add a second London date to their upcoming tour due to demand. What’s the next step? The Roundhouse? Brixton Academy? No – a tour of primary schools. ‘I thought it’d be a good idea to do five or six primary schools up and down the country…’ says Willgoose, when I meet him in a screening room at the BFI’s Fitzrovia archive… ‘because boy bands do that quite cynically for secondary schools. Primary schools are better – not such a critical audience.’ See Public Service Broadcasting live Public Service Broadcasting Sample-heavy soundscapes are this excellent London

Everything you need to know about the Lebanese rising star She’s this week’s token ‘worldy’ one on Jools Holland, right?Up to a point. Hamdan is a Paris-based Lebanese artist drawing on the ‘golden age’ of Arabic music who sings in Egyptian, Kuwaiti, Lebanese and Palestinian, but… … where’s the lute?Exactly. Now working with Marc Collin of Nouvelle Vague, she brought minimalist techno to Beirut as one half of Soapkills and made an LP of electropop with Mirwais, producer of Madonna’s ‘Music’. So why haven’t I heard of her before?She turned down contracts offered on the condition she sing in English. As she pointed out, no one knew what the Cocteau Twins were saying either. And what is she singing about?On ‘Deny’, the opener to her solo debut ‘Ya Nass’, her husky vocal curls around a prayer to the moon for a sniff of her absent lover’s scent. Sounds like an arthouse director’s wet dream.Look out for her in Jim Jarmusch’s new vampire-indie ‘Only Lovers Left Alive’, singing in a Cairo club. She’s a stunner. Can I mention that?Only if it leaves us room to tell you about her visits to Syria to seek out unarchived songs by Arab women. There’s far more to this one than meets the eye. The Bottom Line: Smokin’, not token. See Yasmine Hamdan live in London Yasmine Hamdan You're going to be hearing a lot more from this Paris-based Lebanese singer, who made her name in the Middle East with the Beirut electronic duo Soapkills, collaborated with CocoRosie and recorded an album, 'Arabology',

See 'Gaze is a Gap is a Ghost' at the Lilian Baylis Studio Is he the best new choreographer I’ve never heard of? Something like that. The 30-year-old American has made Europe his home after studying at the influential PARTS school in Brussels. Now he makes clever contemporary dance work that takes influence from both sides of the Atlantic. Great. Can we use this as an excuse to draw some broad national stereotypes? Yes, let’s do that. What it seems to boil down to is that the Belgians sit around conceptualising all day, while the Americans just get off their asses and do it. Although Linehan doesn’t put it quite like that. Which approach does he prefer? He’s chosen to stay in Belgium. Turns out a bit of clear thinking makes for better work, and the fact that there’s a ton more funding available for artists in Continental Europe is a plus. Culture-straddling seems to have worked for Linehan, whose work comes out part New York hipster smarts, part European conceptual rigour. Best of both! What does that look like? For a start, he’s not into pure dance. ‘I’m curious about joining dance with other forms and how it can interact with those forms and relate to our daily lives,’ says Linehan. Which other forms? Often text. He’s into wordplay in a way that brings to mind a grown-up Dr Seuss – the latest piece is called ‘Gaze Is a Gap Is a Ghost’. His highly structured but playful approach to movement is a kind of dance equivalent of that (minus cats,

From street dance to Monteverdi via Liberty X, Tony Adigun explains his latest project We live in an age of improbable collaborations: egg and bacon ice cream, Iggy Pop and car insurance adverts, Tories and Lib Dems. So hip hop and baroque opera? Why not. As part of this month’s Spitalfields Festival, contemporary urban choreographer Tony Adigun is bringing a bit of London street style to the world of the madrigal, as his company, Avant Garde Dance, performs to the music of Monteverdi alongside singers and musicians from the Early Opera Company. How did this happen? Turns out the starting point wasn’t the Italian master composer who pioneered the Baroque sounds of the 17th century, but a quintet of early noughties reality show runners-up, Liberty X.‘I went on tour [as a dancer] with Liberty X with a live band and it was the most amazing experience,’ says Adigun. ‘Every night was different, a different energy. That made me really fall in love again with both elements [dance and live music]. I wanted to bring that to our world.’ More about Spitalfields Summer Festival Since then Adigun has been determined to make his own work with live music, but a 389-year-old Monteverdi score wasn’t what he originally had in mind. It has proved a challenge. Firstly dealing with the music itself, which is driven by its text (the show’s centrepiece is a story of gender confusion and fighting to the death!), and secondly dealing with the classical music world