This weekend sees Soft Cell play the O2, a one-off gig celebrating their era-defining music. It’s 16 years since they last worked together and 37 since their heyday, yet they clearly still have a devoted fan-base: they sold out the gigantic London venue in one weekend.

Chas Hodges has died at the age of 74, bringing to an end a career that reaches back to the very beginnings of British pop music. He was best known as one half of Chas and Dave. The duo he formed with Dave Peacock were the poster boys of rockney, a chirpy fusion of three-chord rock'n'roll and rollicking Cockney wit.

Forty years on from its beginnings as part of New York's gay lib movement, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo is playing to a global, largely straight audience. As the company launches a major UK tour, starting this week at the Peacock Theatre in London, its director of 28 years analyses its longevity.

Ryuichi Sakamoto has conquered underground and mainstream with seeming ease over four decades, never dropping off in the quality of his releases. Indeed his most recent projects, following his return to public life after treatment for throat cancer in 2014-15, are among his best.

Ian Rickson’s route into theatre was not conventional. Growing up in south London, he discovered plays largely through reading them as a student at Essex University. During those years he stood on a picketline in the miners’ strike, and proudly hurled the contents of an eggbox at Cecil Parkinson. He is a lifelong supporter of Charlton Athletic.

French director Michel Hazanavicius made a name for himself with his OSS 117 spy spoofs, Nest of Spies (2006) and Lost in Rio (2009), set in the Fifties and Sixties respectively and starring Jean Dujardin as a somewhat idiotic and prejudiced secret agent. But it was with The Artist in 2011 that he hit the jackpot, marrying his gift for period recreation with a story of genuine depth and warmth.

David Shrigley (b. 1968) is an artist whose work has become broadly popular via a wide range of formats. At first glance, his stark pen-on-paper drawings seem akin to humorous newspaper cartoons – and, indeed, he’s contributed to The Guardian for years – but there's another layer to his work, something odder, slyer, psychologically attuned to the relationship between the subconscious and the ruthlessness of the human condition.

As well as a long series of books and multiple exhibitions all around the world, including forthcoming ones this year in Shanghai, Stockholm and on the Greek island of Hydra, Shrigley has a strong track record of working with musicians. He has directed videos (Blur, Bonnie “Prince” Billy), designed cover art (Deerhoof, Malcolm Middleton, etc) and taken part in music (Worried Noodles, Music and Words, etc). He also created a strikingly bizarre mascot for Partick Thistle football club in 2015 and had his “thumbs up” sculpture Really Good on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth until earlier this year.

Based in Glasgow for almost three decades, Shrigley moved to Brighton three years ago and is this year’s Guest Director of the Brighton Festival. His new book Fully Coherent Plan is published on 3 May 2018.

THOMAS H GREEN: What is your relationship with Brighton?

DAVID SHRIGLEY: I moved here in 2015. The festival’s been a really great thing to become embedded in the arts scene, a really nice social thing in practical terms of being an artist. My studio’s based here so I stay put in the mornings, unlike a lot of unfortunate people who have to go to London. I’ve enjoyed the Festival ever since coming here. It’s nice to have an obligation to see almost everything. Some years you end up wishing you’d been to things but never quite getting round to it, or they sold out.

How has your involvement been?

I think if I hadn’t chosen to make the performance I’m making [“alt-rock/pop pantomime" Problem In Brighton] it’d probably be pretty easy but actually making a new piece where I’m out of my depth, having a hand in directing music, that’s quite exciting, something I really wanted to do. If I didn’t do it now I wouldn’t get round to it. Everything’s a bit fraught. We start rehearsing in a week [this interview took place in mid-April] so the actors are living in my basement, in my studio.

Why are they in there?

Because otherwise we’d have to pay for them to stay in a hotel. We’re trying to spend the budget wisely so everyone gets paid.

It’s a musical with a mosh-pit, right?

Yes, I suppose it’s really up to the audience whether a mosh-pit is involved.

Presumably some of the music is designed to that purpose?

It’s a bit moshy, yeah, so the fact it’s a standing gig lends itself to a bit of movement. We’ll see. We’ve got that in mind.

Which events at the festival have you particular emotional investment in?

I guess, like most people, I’ve read the brochure and press release. You have to see a few things before you find that one thing that’s an absolute gem, but you never really know what that’s going to be until you’ve seen everything. Last year we went to see ten things, probably none of which we had any prior knowledge of. Swan Lake at the Dome was the thing I really enjoyed last year [Irish dance/theatre company Teac Damsa’s Swan Lake/Loch na hEala]. I really wouldn’t have anticipated liking that. You’d think a modern interpretation of Swan Lake set in urban Dublin, gritty realism meets a ballet… no. But it was fantastic. You have to make the effort.

How did you persuade singer-songwriter Malcolm Middleton to perform at the festival? I thought he’d given up doing shows with his acoustic guitar...

[Laughing wryly] I guess he feels he owes me. We’ve become good friends over the years and he knows I’m a big fan of what he does. I think he’s making a special exception for me. In general, with his music he’s restless creatively, always wanting to do something different. There’s the [experimental] Human Don’t Be Angry stuff, the collaboration we did [Music and Words], then there’s Arab Strap as well with Aidan Moffat. He just doesn’t want to have to do the same thing again and again in order to make money, because you’ve got to still love it. If you don’t, it makes it difficult to do it. I understand the predicament he’s in, but I do love his acoustic stuff. I love that performance, just him and his guitar.

Which of your works are you most often asked about by journalists and humans in general?

It varies. I used to get asked a lot about the Fourth Plinth but that’s over now so that conversation is complete. This year I get asked about the Life Model II piece (Shrigely and Life Model II, pictured right). Because it’s a giant female I get asked about gender politics. So I should really try and figure out what my spiel is right now before I embark on the dialogue. Suffice to say I wasn’t thinking about that. It wasn’t a statement about the representation of gender but a statement about drawing and the representation of things rather than people. You hope that nothing too contentious raises its head. The discussions will be interesting and inform the work and your opinion of it. It’s a work in progress. People are asking me a lot about A Problem in Brighton but I don’t know what to tell them because we haven’t finished it yet. That’s a problem for the marketing department. As soon as I’ve got some material, I’ll put it on Instagram. We’ve got to sell tickets. It’s hard to sell tickets for things where you don’t really know what they’re about!

There’s a lot of really juicy music at the Brighton Festival this year, but if you could curate an epic Glastonbury-style green field affair, with money no object, who would be on?

I wouldn’t go to a green field festival. I hate festivals. I’m a bit of a germophobe. I don’t like chemical toilets and I need to wash my hands under running water. I’m a bit of an armchair traveller. I spent my entire childhood on camping holidays and by the time I’d got to 16 I was completely done with holidaying under canvas. That’s another thing I don’t like, the trek to the toilet block in the middle of the night. I gave Brighton Festival a list of things I wanted. I really didn’t expect them to get it all together. Deerhoof is quite a disparate group and Ezra Furman is from the States as well. There was a plan to get Mogwai to play at the Dome but they were busy. Certain acts work at festivals but perhaps don’t work so well at one-off gigs. I always think Sleaford Mods are a really good festival band because somehow their presentation of sound seems to work wherever they play because it’s so sparse and abrasive. In a dream scenario I’d quite like to see Slayer. They’re one band I’ve never seen in my life, although I’m not a particular speed metal aficionado.

I Google Imaged your name and your drawing Drunk Again (pictured left) comes up top – what does that say about anything?

I’ve pondered Google Image many times. I’ve no idea. I certainly don’t feel it’s a seminal image in my oeuvre, put it that way. The thing that annoys me most about Google Image is it turns up pictures you haven’t done that are attributed to you and there’s no way of getting rid of them.

Do you have a favourite colour?

I think it’s probably a very vivid rose pink. It’s the colour that I seem to use a lot when I’m making paintings, a very vivid magenta. There’s a colour you can get called perfect pink that I think probably isn’t very archivally sound, meaning it will fade over time, but, yeah, I’d go for perfect pink.

Where is the oddest place art has taken you?

Aspen, Colorado is a pretty weird place. It’s a small town in the mountains where rich people go skiing. It has a population of 8,000 yet they have an art museum there. It’s like St Moritz in Switzerland which is another place on the art trail. The reason why you end up going there is because rich people live there, so you’re there to hawk your wares to the people who are responsible for the terrible economic situation we’re in.

How do you find having to describe your art to people like me?

I guess it’s become normal. My first moment in the sun was more than 20 years ago now. When you are an artist, you’re constantly having conversations with people who don’t know anything about art. They might ask you, for example, to tell them what conceptual art is – and I think I should be able to tell them. If you’re a professional and involved in the art world for your entire adult life, as well as your education, you should be able to have those conversations and be comfortable. More recently I’ve started to spend a lot of time in East Devon. My wife has a little house there, so we go there and hang out in the village pub. They’ve cottoned on to the fact I’m a well-known artist, looked me up on the internet and say, “That’s rubbish! What’s that all about?” So you have these conversations with people. You can’t insulate yourself from them. Ultimately it’s valuable to talk about the work: the context is half the work.

• Find out more about Brighton Festival 2018

Overleaf: David Shrigley introducing Brighton Festival 2018

Very early in his career, Andrew Haigh worked as an assistant editor on such Ridley Scott blockbusters as Gladiator and Black Hawk Down. He didn't actually meet Scott in person until years later, when the eminent director had no recollection of him.

In a classical recording industry seemingly obsessed with marketing beautiful young female violinists, but very often presenting them in repertoire to which most of them seem to have little individual to add, how do you make your mark? Norwegian Eldbjørg Hemsing came up with a bright idea typical of a thoughtful approach in which the music always comes first: to twin a 1914 concerto she genuinely admires by a compatriot very few people will know, Hjalmar Borgstrøm (1864-1925), with what is perhaps the ultimate 20th century challenge to violinists, Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto.

Gob Squad is a “seven-headed” Anglo-German arts collective who specialise in multimedia performance. Beginning in Nottingham in 1994 and now based in Berlin, their work ranges from site-specific to installation and film but, more recently, mainly theatre. They major in using technology to “make connections with places outside the theatre or to create different spaces inside the theatre where we can talk to the audience in quite intimate ways”. Recent works include War and Peace and My Square Lady. For the Brighton Festival they're presenting Gob Squad’s Creation (Pictures for Dorian), based on Oscar Wilde’s famous novel, at the Attenborough Centre for Creative Arts from 23-27 May. It will then tour to London’s Southbank Centre as part of LIFT Festival from 4-7 June 2018. Theartsdesk spoke to Gob Squad’s Sharon Smith (b.1970).

THOMAS H GREEN: Are there comic elements in what Gob Squad does?

SHARON SMITH: We think we’re hilarious! We like to employ a light touch. Often our themes and aims are epic, and a way we deal with that is by employing what we call naive blind faith. So we like to set ourselves very big challenges then deal with the inevitable failure, and there’s a certain pathos and, hopefully, comedy about that.

What do you, personally, do in Gob Squad?

Well, we’re quite committed to the collective idea. We argue everything. There’s no director in the group. Everybody is fully involved in all aspects of making and performing. The seven members of Gob Squad are, if you like, the shareholders. We’re the core. Then there’s quite a large family that hovers around that core; video designer, lighting designer, music and sound designer, people designing costumes, set realisation. So we outsource departmental jobs but we all have our fingers in the pie. We exchange roles constantly then we keep this collective thing and we're quite opposed to authorship within the work. Everything’s very fluid.

What have you done to Oscar Wilde?

We hope that we’ve done him proud because we love him. We’ve taken that as our springboard for talking about beauty in this age and also about who is the artist, who is the spectator of the artwork, and who is the subject. This triangle we borrowed; Basil, Henry and Dorian [in A Picture of Dorian Gray] create this triangle, so we borrowed that and the Faustian pact with the Devil and a few beautiful verses from the book. We’ve built something incredibly lush visually because of the lushness of Oscar Wilde’s writing, his descriptions of what is beauty and nature and art really inspired us to make something drenched in beauty.

For this piece, you interact with local performers. How does that work?

We’ve never done this before, actually. We made a call-out to local performers in the area. We wanted people under 22 and people over 75, three young people and three older people to join us in this multi-generational cast, because Gob Squad are middle-aged. The requirement was you’re either aspiring to be onstage in some way or you’ve spent a life onstage, so basically your body has been looked at and been your currency, your work. You’ve enjoyed the gaze of spectators. That’s the thematic common ground.

Have you been to Brighton before?

Yes, we’ve been working for a little bit at the University of Sussex at Falmer, built up relationships over the last couple of years. We’ve been doing workshops and we performed our last show, War and Peace, there. Four of us in the group are from England and quite a few of my very favourite people live in Brighton. I have an old relationship with it because of the Polytechnic. One of my favourite people of all time is Mine Kaylan, she was head of arts and culture there. And Matt Rudkin who was a freelance artist, an incredible artist based in Brighton. It’s a very special place, culturally, for me and it’s by the sea and the beautiful hills. It’s just a total win-win, isn’t it - a brilliant city.

How did you end up in Berlin?

Because of Gob Squad. Gob Squad’s been together for 25 years. It started in Nottingham and we still have a little office there. We’re very committed to keeping an active profile in the UK but we came to Berlin in the late-Nineties mainly because of opportunity. We were offered a great residency here at a place called Podewil and one thing led to another. Even now, although it’s changing, it’s possible to live here solely as an artist without trying to run around doing other jobs. There’s very good funding in Germany for the arts. It’s a very important part of cultural life, the free theatre scene and so on.

What are your own thoughts on ageing?

Well, of course I want to be incredibly graceful and ideological about it. I want to age gracefully. I do love spending time with old people. My granny’s 94 and she’s one of my favourite people in the whole world. But at the same time, as a middle-aged woman of 48 in the process of the menopause, I’m losing what I had. It’s happening daily and I’d be lying if I didn’t say I feel quite vain. So I’m caught between two places and I think what this project has taught me is that the middle place is, in some ways, the hardest part of the ageing process. For women, when you finish the menopause, things change, you’re free, potentially, if you’ve still got health and fitness. You can have this whole other emancipated chapter, free of ties that bind you. In a way, I’m quite looking forward to it.

Has physical beauty become our obsession in this age of endless visual documentation?

Yes, yes, I utterly do believe that. I don’t know anybody that doesn’t hate it and feel a little bit imprisoned by it. It’s the ultimate end-of-capitalism prison; the body is our last site of exploitation for both men and women, trapped by the capitalist fiction that if we work harder, try harder and spend more money and time on it, we’ll be better, more attractive, successful and happier. It’s the ultimate product. It’s not just beauty, it’s a commodity.

You are a feminist. How do you feel when artists such as Nicki Minaj claim their porno chic videos are empowering for women?

I’m a massive Nicki Minaj fan. I was having a conversation about Beyoncé the other day, about girl power and how that space is also occupied by the capitalist machine, a product probably surrounded by men, even though the figurehead is a woman, steeped in the male gaze. Strong women are speaking up for themselves and owning their bodies… at least the illusion of that has got to be better than its opposite. I don’t think it’s entirely an illusion either. Nicki Minaj is emancipated and exciting for women - and still for men - so I’m conflicted about it but my daughter, I hope, grows up feeling very empowered by visual culture, gender fluid, even post-gender, not so concerned by the history and politics that Nicki Minaj has grown from.

• Find out more about Brighton Festival 2018

Overleaf: Watch a trailer for Creation (Pictures for Dorian)