Over 30 years after he made his debut as a solo artist, woodwind multi-instrumentalist Courtney Pine is still Britain’s most prominent and influential jazz musician. He had a crucial role in reviving interest in jazz in the 1980s and 1990s, and has been an important role model for black British musicians.

It’s about time Juliette Binoche and Claire Denis teamed up: the legendary French actress, Gallic film royalty known by her countrymen and women as La Binoche, with one of the country’s most unique directors, both talented and formidable women who have very much forged their own paths in the cutthroat world of the film industry.

Just like waiting for a bus, there are now two collaborations between them, made in quick succession: the second, a science fiction co-starring Robert Pattinson, is in post-production. The Arts Desk met Binoche in Paris to speak about the first.

Let the Sunshine In has the ring of schmaltzy romcom or some feel-good, self-help musical; it hardly bodes well. And yet this is Denis (pictured below), whose work – Chocolat, Beau Travail, White Material, 35 Shots of Rum, the aptly named Bastards – doesn’t dabble in popcorn frivolity, but tangible, often painful reality; even her vampire film Trouble Every Day had the disturbing stench of believability.

Thus the new film, which involves a middle-aged, divorced artist, Isabelle (Binoche), and her desperate search for ‘one real love’. Through the course of the movie she considers numerous suitors, each clearly unsuitable, at least two of them married, Isabelle throwing her heart, soul and body at them, with humiliation and disappointment the reward. Though she has a 10-year-old daughter, we see the girl onscreen just once, as she’s driven away by her father. Isabelle’s focus is herself and her fear that her love life is behind her; and for someone who is seemingly successful and intelligent, and old enough to know better, she’s rather foolish about it all.

With its romantic theme, Let the Sunshine In is closest to Denis’ Vendredi Soir, an offbeat, touching love story involving a man and a woman who meet in a traffic jam. But the new film is edgier, more pessimistic and, actually, funnier. Denis has co-written the script with the French author Christine Angot, and the pair are so on the money in their characterisations and situations that the result is variously sad, discomforting and enjoyably ridiculous, with Isabelle and her amours equal targets; the writers also shoot a few well-aimed arrows at the pomposity of the Parisian art world.Denis has surrounded her star with some accomplished male foils, not least Gérard Depardieu as a clairvoyant to whom Isabelle turns in the film’s wondrously bonkers final scene. This is another first, since the pair haven’t acted together before, the encounter lent added spice by the knowledge of Depardieu’s unsolicited criticism of Binoche in 2010, when he told a journalist: “I would really like to know why she has been so esteemed for so many years. She has nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

She shows plenty opposite him, but that’s no surprise. And this is Binoche’s show. Gaudily dressed in mini-skirt and leather boots, her make up overdone, invariably on the verge of welling up, her Isabelle teeters on the edge of nonsense. Yet Binoche also reveals shards of integrity, intelligence, passion and some self-deprecating humour in her character. Despite her spectacular signature laugh, the actress has done relatively little comedy, though this confirms a gift for it.

The suggestion is of a full-blooded individual thrown off-kilter by romantic panic. It’s a raw, real, winning performance, in an off-beat, female-centred film, talky in that way that many failing relationships are, and speaking quite boldly about the problems that women of a certain age may have to find love, or at least a half-decent male companion.DEMETRIOS MATHEOU: What attracted you to this?

JULIETTE BINOCHE: I know something about the difficulty of love. I was touched by the writing, because it's rare to have a script that is so well-written, which feels real. And it was my first time with Claire Denis. To have the complicity of those two women, Claire and Christine, putting together those fragments of love, was very appealing.

But we didn't know it was going to be that funny. When I saw the film the first time people were laughing a lot, and I was laughing as well. The second time I saw it I was crying. The film can be taken very differently. It depends how you feel, what kind of distance you have. 

Why do you think the character is so unlucky in love? 

I think she's trying to find a solution outside of herself, for her lack of love, her need, which is what we all tend to do. What I've learned going through life is that you've got to find some place in you that is at peace, first, in order to then attempt a relationship. But it takes courage. And it takes time also. 

I don't believe that suddenly everything is resolved because you're in a couple. When I was a young lover I thought you really had to meet your alter ego, the other part of yourself. Now I don't think that exists. True love, the one that stays forever, is in you. It takes a while to understand that. That's why you suffer so much. When you're not expecting everything from the other person, then I think that things can happen, in a different way.

The film also touches on the way that social differences can affect relationships.

That's a big question, and not an easy one. Can love survive social differences? It’s  a very important subject to the writer, Christine. She had been through that kind of situation. So what she writes about it is very explored, lived, and I felt that in the writing. For the man who I meet when dancing, Claire decided to cast Paul Blaine, because he was more fragile in a way, and that was very intelligent. I felt the difference somehow. It brings something special to the film.

What did you bring of yourself to this character? 

Everything. 

The film ends with Depardieu’s clairvoyant (pictured below) Have you ever looked for those kinds of answers? 

I've been to a psychic, in my twenties especially. I understand the thirst for it, wanting to know the truth. When you're hesitating about something or someone, you think it's going to help you. It does help in a way, if it defines what you're feeling already, but I find it dangerous, because anybody can tell you anything and then you go for it. It's all crazy, I think. Your belief system, that's what's most important. You need to trust your intuition. Did Depardieu apologise by the way, for his criticism of you? Any humble pie on the set?

No. But I didn't need an apology. Actually three months after his declaration I saw him by accident in the street. I went to him and I took him in my arms and I said ‘Gerard why are you so mean to me? What have I done to you?’ And he said 'No, no, no, I'm saying stupid things, don't believe them.’

He then said, ‘I'm fed up that you're working with perverse directors’. I asked him who he was talking about. And he said, ‘Well, Leos Carax and Haneke’. But then he said that [Haneke's] The White Ribbon is actually a good film. After we separated I thought, ‘Well he's made films with Pialat, he's made films with Blier! I think he was just caught out by meeting me like that.

You know, the first time I ever went on a film set it was Danton [which starred Depardieu, in 1983]. I was just 18, still in high school. A friend of my father's was working on the film and invited me to watch the shooting. I was excited. And Gerard came to me, very open, and he said ‘What are you doing here?’ I said I was to be an actress. He said, ‘Work on your classics’. He was very cute and generous. So when suddenly years later his declaration happened, I was shocked. 

So many of the scenes in the film feel raw, immediate. Did you try different ways of playing them?

No, because we didn't have a lot of time. We shot the film in five weeks. Very quick. Even the Depardieu scene is one day. So I had to make sure that I knew my text. Then you just throw yourself into the scene.

How did you find the experience of working with Claire Denis?

It was beautiful. It was like watching a painter. It was not always the logical way, she would go one frame, one shot at a time, working in steps, more than having the general idea of it and knowing exactly which shot she wanted. It was moment to moment, which I liked. I was learning by seeing her see.

Also she has such respect for human beings. She loved all the characters. There was no hierarchy, it was a very moving way of going through a film. 

And you’re working with her again? 

Yeah, in one year we've made two films together. That’s never happened to me. Science fiction. Nine actors in this space, coming from very different places. It was exciting.

Is there a different spirit on set when working with a female director? 

I've never really felt that, because you work with the sensibility and the intelligence of someone. The complicity is not sexual. There's a seduction that's happening between the actors and director, but the seduction has to do with the fact that we need to create this fire between us, so that we can go into the work together, see if we need another take, never losing time.You’ve been working now for some 30 years. How do you stay challenged or engaged?

I’m always trying to find something new, that I’ve never done before. Repetition feels like near death. Creation is about the new. Something is going to happen but you don't know what. So you're moving towards that moment. 

Life gives me things, I say yes or no. Or I create encounters. Abbas Kiarostami [Certified Copy, pictured above] and Bruno Dumont [Camille Claudel 1915, Slack Bay] were directors I was dreaming about working with – so you have to pick up the phone or go to that person and say it. Sometimes it's that’s simple.

So what was the challenge in this film?

I think it was the writing, because it was already there, I just had to put my hand in the glove. That was a new kind of situation for me. Most of the time we are really trying hard as actors because the writing, the script is not precise. But with Christine it's been felt, it's been lived.

When a script is not well written it's usually because it comes out of the head and not out of experience, and you really feel it when you’re acting and learning the lines. But on this one I felt lifted by the writing, and by the actors. 

You’ve done nudity before, but not often, and this film goes straight into a long nude scene. Are you ever comfortable with such scenes?

You kidding me, I'm fucking scared! But I'm doing it. I think you've got to go into your fear, that's the challenge of it. So you can learn something from it, and change the fear eventually. Singing is very frightening to me, because I’m not a singer, and I’ve discovered how to put emotion into the singing. And the same with dance. But I'm frightened like anybody. 

• Let the Sunshine In is released in cinemas on 20 April

@dem2112

Overleaf: watch the trailer to Let the Sunshine In

The second thing I noticed about Miloš Forman, who has died at the age of 86, was the spectacular imperfection of his English. All those decades in America could not muffle his foghorn of a Bohemian accent, nor assimilate the refugees from Czech syntax.

Jeremy Cunningham (b.1965) is bass player and a founding member of The Levellers, as well as being a visual artist in his own right. During the 1990s The Levellers, and most especially their 1991 album Levelling the Land, became a phenomenon. The group were punk-influenced folk-rockers whose songs were often polemic and political. It was no coincidence that their main flush of popularity was during the premiership of John Major. They became a focus for anti-government feeling, especially among those affiliated with the travelling and festival communities (remember Major’s “New age travellers? Not in this age. Not in any age” speech from the 1992 Tory conference).

The band have put out eleven albums, eight of them Top 40 hits, including their latest, We The Collective, an acoustic re-rendering of highlights from their back catalogue, with a couple of new numbers thrown in. It made No.12 in the UK album charts earlier this month. To this day, their 1994 appearance at the Glastonbury Festival remains one of the biggest crowds ever drawn to the Pyramid Stage and in 2003 they launched their own Beautiful Days Festival in Devon, which has gone on to great success.

While Cunningham would be the first to point out that the band is a collective effort with no member more important than any other, his dreadlocked form seems emblematic of The Levellers and what they represent. He was, after all, the only member of the band to adopt, for some years, an itinerant road-living lifestyle. I meet him in the Metway, the band’s Brighton headquarters, also home to their record label On The Fiddle. With his reddish dreads piled high on his head, he sips herbal tea on a sofa. He has a presence that is both gentle and fierce, edgy yet friendly and forthright, punctuating his conversation with a distinctive cackle.

THOMAS H GREEN: What was the thinking behind the new acoustic album?

JEREMY CUNNINGHAM: Basically we’d pretty much written three quarters of a new electric Levellers album and came to a standstill. We wanted a crowbar that would kick us over creatively, to be able to move onto the next phase. Because it was coming up to our 30^th anniversary the powers-that-be were very keen on us doing an acoustic album, rearranging the old songs, putting a few new ones on as well.

What was it like working with John Leckie [famed producer of Stone Roses, Radiohead, Muse and others]?

Really good, he’s a lovely man. On our first day together his eyeball fell out [laughs]. It wasn’t quite as dramatic as that! We were playing through stuff and his retina got detached. He had to be rushed to hospital and lay in a strange position for ten days before he could come back, so we got on with it ourselves, did the major arranging. By the time he came back with his eyeball back in place we played him the songs and he was like, “They’re all shit! That’s shit! That’s rubbish!” He wasn’t quite as blunt as that but he is quite blunt and we like that. Me and Mark said, “Is there anything you do like?” He ummed and ahhed. We went through all the songs we were going to play really thoroughly with him doing a bit of musical guidance. We want our producers to give us musical guidance - they just can’t fuck with the lyrics. He was really good. As soon as we all got to know each other a bit better, even some of the songs he didn’t like, he appreciated why we wanted to do them and started to work on them with enthusiasm. We only work with producers that become the seventh member of the band otherwise there’s no point. You might as well just get an engineer. For this album we needed guidance and we’re massive fans of him and the records he’s done.

Is he doing your new studio album proper?

Quite probably.

Tell us about the two new songs on We The Collective, “The Shame” and “Drug Bust McGee”.

“The Shame” was written immediately after the body of that little Syrian child washed up on that Greek island. Simon wrote the song. He was just appalled – “I’m going to write this song and put everyone to shame.” In the meantime I’d written a song kind of about it as well but he came back really quickly with the complete song and it pissed all over what I’d done so that was one of the first songs, all written for the new electric Levellers album. They were ones we thought most appropriate to use in this situation. He played it to Leckie and he was like, “Fuck, that doesn’t need any work done, just sing it.” Mark wrote “Drug Bust McGee” at a very similar time, about undercover police getting involved with protesters, deeply embedded, having kids with them, then bolting and the women concerned having the rug completely pulled from under their feet.

Watch the video for "Shame" by The Levellers

What book are you currently reading?

I read history. I’m reading two actually. My main field is I’m very into early medieval history. I’m reading The Dictionary of Irish Saints by Pádraig O Riain, a very famous early medieval scholar. Then I’m reading, on and off, a massive 900 page commentary on The Book of Revelations from The Bible. It's by Craig Koester, the Anchor Bible Commentary. It’s amazing, not religious, it’s a historical commentary.

They sound quite heavy, those books.

Oh, they’re weighty. I’ve been reading for 20 years about this stuff.

The Levellers have a special relationship with their fans. Is that a fair thing to say?

It’s a nice thing to say. I’d like to think so.

It seems to exist outside the parameters of the usual fan/musician relationships…

I think that’s why they like it. We’re just normal. We go out and drink in the same pubs. We don’t really give a fuck about all that. We learnt our lesson early from bands like The Clash. Joe Strummer, who we were lucky enough to play with, said, “My ego destroyed this band and I should have kept in touch with the people that mattered,” so we were always very conscious of that and still are. We do a festival each year – Beautiful Days – and the fans are the shareholders.

What was it like working with film director Alex Cox on the video for “Too Real”?

Brilliant. Love Alex Cox, he’s amazing. We were big fans of his from Repo Man then he did Sid and Nancy. Around that time he was introducing an alternative film thing on the telly – Moviedrome – and we went, “Oh, maybe he’d be interested.” We didn’t know him but liked his general vibe. We asked him and he was all over it. Not only the video; he hung about for quite a long time and got deeply involved. The “Too Real” thing, he wanted to film it in Liverpool, his home town. It gave him an excuse to get some of his mates in – and some of ours. it was an absolute pleasure.

Watch the video for "Too Real" by The Levellers, directed by and featuring Alex Cox

[Noticing poster on wall for Levellers documentary A Curious Life] I haven’t seen that…

That’s my mum and dad in the poster. The film was done by Dunstan Bruce who used to be singer in Chumbawamba. He was with us about three years, just hanging out. It ended up with me being the main one in it but that was only because Mark had just had a baby, Jon [Sevink, Leveller's fiddle-player] was moving, and everyone was busy. I ended up being the narrator but it’s about the band. Dunstan got heavily involved. We were touring a lot at that point. He did blogs with us, live blogs on tour. That was eight years ago now, when he started it. The film came out in 2015.

In the late Nineties I had an enjoyable relationship with China Records and the music they released. It was home to yourselves, Morcheeba, The Egg, Zion Train and others. That changed when they were bought by Warner Brothers. How was it for you?

We didn’t know anything about it, we just suddenly found ourselves on Warners. It was basically because Derek [Green, China MD] ran out of money due to a messy divorce, sold the company to Warners. They really wanted Morcheeba and we were kind of a bit of a bonus but they didn’t really know what to do with us. We found ourselves on a major label writing the most obscure leftfield album we’ve probably ever written and it all came on top. We hated it and bought ourselves out of the contract. It cost us a lot of money and they were glad to see us go as I don’t think we made them any money either.

What is The Levellers relationship with the States, in the sense of, how does the band go down there?

In some parts very well but in terms of making an impact it would be like a mosquito on a giant, the impact we’ve made on the States.

But if you tour there you pull a crowd?

Yeah, yeah, the last one we did we went to specific areas we knew we’d be well-received, which is mainly the cities of the north-east and down to Washington DC. We’re not talking big shows, we’re talking 500 capacity, maybe a little more in New York. But when you get to the Midwest it’s a different country.

Some of those states, while they have weird politics, the music culture is very folk/roots orientated, so you’d have thought The Levellers would go down well. They like a good hoedown.

They do but they don’t like politics. We really confused them down there by having a fiddle player and a guy playing electric guitar and singing about radical stuff. They just couldn’t get their heads round it. We thought it would be a great fit. We went out there to support Public Enemy and Rage Against the Machine, two great bands, we just went down like the proverbial lead balloon.

Like in The Blues Brothers, in a cage with beer bottle being hurled at you?

Not quite that bad but getting onto it. It’s one of the only shows I’ve seen Mark just walk off stage; “Fuck you cunts” and he just walked off. That has never really happened before or since. And that was in Nashville the home of country music. It was educational, definitely.

Very few bands that have been around for any time have mixed age groups of fans. How about The Levellers?

There’s a broad spread. Because we’ve been going for so long, it’s the people who got into us in the ‘90s… and then their kids. There’s a surprising amount of young people, then there’s a lot of older fans and some original guys who came and saw us when we were unknown. People get their own lives, drift off, then come back. Its mental and it’s lovely. I’ve done it myself with bands. You can meet your mates and have a beer, that’s half what it’s about for the older guys. The younger ones just want to be blown away by a great live show.

Very few successful bands retain the same line-up, decade after decade, but you lot have have. Is there a secret to your longevity?

Yeah, the total is bigger than the sum of its parts and we’re very aware of that. Ever since the start we’ve all been paid equally, we distribute everything equally, doesn’t matter who wrote the song, so we don’t argue about money. We’re very aware that the noise we make is bigger than any individual.

• More new music on theartsdesk

Overleaf: watch the video for the single "Drug Bust McGee" by The Levellers

Joan Wasser – aka Joan as Police Woman – is known as a sophisticated songwriter and a pretty groovy person. But most of all it’s her gorgeously warm voice that's earned her a cult following. Over seven albums her angst-ridden vocals have explored heartache and compulsion with a blend of soul and indie-rock.

Edinburgh, October 2015. Robin Ticciati is still flying high from a remarkable performance of Brahms's First Symphony, the start of an intended cycle with his Scottish Chamber Orchestra in his seventh season as principal conductor. After a revelatory dissection of the thinking that shaped the interpretation, we both look forward to the end of the experience later in the season, with the Fourth.

Brett Goodroad (b. 1979) is an artist and painter based in San Francisco. Born and raised in rural Montana, in 2012 he received the Tournesol Award, overseen by Sausalito’s Headland Center for the Arts. The Award recognises one Bay Area painter each year and financially assisted Goodroad and gave him studio space, allowing him to develop his distinctive, figurative, abstract style.

Seth Kriebel, 45, is a performer, much of whose work involves audience participation. He is bringing the show A House Repeated to the Brighton Festival 2018 between 6^th and 11^th May. Of American origin, born and raised near Philadelphia, Kriebel moved to the UK in 2001 and, over the last few years, has achieved increasing profile and success with shows such as Beowulf, The Unbuilt Room and We This Way.

THOMAS H GREEN: Was your background in the States arts-orientated?

SETH KRIEBEL: This is always difficult to try and contextualise for a British audience. Where I’m from is roughly equivalent to Lancashire, in that it’s full of straight-talking working people, so mine wasn’t a particularly arts and culture household, but it wasn’t anti that either. The arts just didn’t figure that much.

What pushed you in the direction your career went?

I should clarify that I don’t in any way consider myself to be an actor. Actors tend to pretend to be other people. They play a character whereas the first thing my co-performer, Zoe Bouras, and I do when we walk on stage is announce, “Hello, I’m Seth, hello, I’m Zoe” so we’re performing but we’re not acting. This particular show came out of the fact I liked games when I was a teenager in the early Eighties. I liked computer games before the era of graphics so it was all text. All of the action and environments happened in your imagination. It was very much like reading a book, but it was interactive and the consequences of your decisions would unfold. The show I’m bringing to the Brighton Festival is very directly an attempt to capture that experience live.

When you were in the States, were you also involved in performative arts?

Not so much. My training was actually in film, so I was in film and television. Then I met my wife, moved over to Brighton with her job, phased out the film and TV and moved into the arts. For nine years I ran a company, Rules and Regs, which produced residencies for artists, so they could develop and try new things. It tended to be towards the performance side, whether visual art or a painter doing whacky experimental stuff. That kind of crossed me into doing my own stuff.

What are your thoughts on Brighton?

I love it, a great place to live. I wouldn’t live anywhere else in the UK. There’s always lots of energy and lots of stuff going on. It doesn’t feel huge and overwhelming like London can, but it’s close enough to London so you can access all the world-class things London has. Locally we have loads of amazing things too, but it’s still a place you can walk across in about an hour, and you’re always bumping into people you know so it has a neighbourly feel, with the energy of a city.

How many nights a week do you hit the town, then?

Zero, because I have a child.

A baby?

Not any more, she’s actually shockingly old now. When I look at her I go “[SHRIEKS]” and say, “When did you grow up?” But I’m, just sort of emerging from that younger child cocoon.

What was your favourite vintage video game?

I knew you were going to ask that but I don’t have one because I always played these games at my friend’s house. I didn’t have a computer, so I don’t remember the names of these different games. I just remember that feeling of looking at live glowing green text on a black background and how that could evoke such an amazing world to explore.

There were also books where you could choose your own story, weren’t there?

Yes, I had loads of Choose Your Own Adventure books which I loved dearly. They gave you a slightly different sense of interaction. They gave you a choice of A, B and C, whereas in the games you could type in anything and only some would get a response in terms of advancing the narrative. It was really up to you to figure out what you were going to do. I must warn you against using the term Choose Your Own Adventure too freely. A few years ago a theatre used that phrase to promote a different show I was doing and got rapped over the knuckles by the American company who own the copyright. It’s a trademarked phrase.

If you could work with anyone on the planet and money was no object, who would it be?

One of the central ideas behind the company Rules and Regs was imposing restrictions on all artists and then finding creativity in working your way around those restrictions. Restrictions breed creativity. Necessity is the mother of invention. So in my own practice I’m very much a cut-my-coat-according-to-my-cloth kind of guy. Having said that, Brian Eno, a previous Guest Director of the Brighton Festival, is very interesting in that he was one of the architects of Oblique Strategies which is a restriction system where you pick a card and then let that influence your artistic process, so he’d be quite fun to try something with.

You say you’re not an actor but your performance bears relation to stand-up, right?

Yeah, it’s not dissimilar to that. There isn’t a culture of storytelling outside of that for children. So I try to avoid using the word “storyteller” which, in a way, is what a stand-up comedian is, except all their stories are skewed for laughs. When we view something live that’s not comedy it tends to go into this narrative tradition – “I’m going to pretend to be a soldier” or whatever – so somewhere in that cultural gap I tend to sit, storytelling not for children. Like any story it depends very much on the audience. I’ve formalised that. Instead of just tailoring my delivery I actually ask the audience, “Ok what do you want to do now?”

The word storytelling also has connotations of hippies at festivals…

This is why I avoid that word, because it either conjurs a nice guy who’s going to really entertain a six-year-old, or kind of “Hey, man, let’s all sit cross-legged in a circle and just work things out”. Cool if that’s what you’re into but this is something completely different.

So what is it?

A House Repeated is one of those things that makes perfect sense when you’re there. It’s super-easy to understand, but whenever I do any press or write publicity copy it’s difficult to communicate quickly. Without trying to be pithy, here’s how it works. Zoe and I are standing on a bare stage between two banks of audience, so the audience is seated traverse, one half of the audience is facing the other half, and we’re in the middle. After the intro and all that, I turn to my half and I describe a place: “Imagine you’re standing outside. In front of you is a building.” That kind of thing. Then I give some options about where they might go and ask them what they’d like to do: “You can go through the door; you can go upstairs?” Go upstairs. Turn to another another member of the audience: “In that room you’ll find this.” Maybe there’s a bottle on the table, what do they want to do? They can interact. Zoe’s audience are also giving her instructions as to how to explore this imaginary environment. Now, as they navigate their way through, maybe a narrative or an implied narrative starts to unfold. Two different audiences are each controlling a different explorer, an avatar, and might see what the relationship is between them. That kind of thing. It’s hard to get that down in less than 50 words for a brochure.

What was the last thing you saw at the theatre?

Last night when I was in a show! Actually, it’s been a very busy beginning of the year where I’ve been performing a lot myself so the last thing I saw was A Christmas Carol at The Spire in Brighton, a church converted into an arts centre. My family were over from the States so we all went and it was a really enjoyable seasonal thing to do.

•  Find out more about Brighton Festival 2018

Malcolm Middleton (b.1973) is a Scottish singer-songwriter whose music has a devoted fanbase. Instead of the faux-vulnerable, non-specific, sub-Jeff Buckley flannel touted by many of his contemporaries and younger peers, Middleton’s work is grounded in the physical grit of the everyday, boasting a social realism underpinned by mordant humour and, often, heartbreaking emotion.

Middleton first came to the attention of music fans as a member of pithy indie observational duo Arab Strap with Aidan Moffat. By the time they wound down in 2006, he had already launched a solo career defined by literate, downbeat indie/acoustic songs. He released five albums in this vein then changed musical direction, swerving into the more abstract, experimental Human Don’t Be Angry project. In 2014 he made the foul-mouthed, funny Music and Words album with the artist David Shrigley, and in 2016, after a seven-year break, he released a new solo album, Summer of ’13, only this time bedded in his own brand of off-kilter electro-pop.

Shrigley is guest director of this year’s Brighton Festival and has invited Malcolm Middleton, one of Britain’s most talented but undersung songsmiths, to perform a rare solo set on Thursday 24 May. To celebrate this coup, theartsdesk caught up with him, snowed in at home in Anstruther, Fife. His first words were these: “As long as there are no questions about music we’ll be fine.”

Listen to "The Ballad of Fuck All" by Malcolm Middleton

THOMAS H GREEN: Are you and David Shrigley friends?

MALCOLM MIDDLETON: We did the album in 2014 but we’ve been mates for longer. He did the artwork for my album A Brighter Beat in 2007 (pictured below right) so we’ve known each other since then. I originally got in touch with him because I liked one of his photographs and wanted to use it for an album cover. I emailed him and he came round. The plan was to do a new piece for the album cover and we tried a few things but I wasn’t really into them so we went with the balloon image.

What are your plans for the Brighton Festival show?

It won’t be anything unique. I don’t do unique. He’s asked me to come down and play an acoustic show of my songs.

I thought you’d knocked acoustic shows on the head?

Did I say that? I probably did. I think that was back in 2009-10. I got a bit sick of it so I did some Human Don’t Be Angry stuff and the David Shrigley record, then I did my half-electronic album a couple of years ago, so I certainly knocked it on the head for a while, but in the last year I’ve been picking up the guitar a bit more and enjoying it. Saying that, I’m just going into the studio to record a new album which is song-based, but apart from this Shrigley thing in Brighton I’m not really into the idea of playing the songs live too much. Sitting on stage with an acoustic guitar doesn’t really thrill me. Even though I’ve done the record I’m not too much into doing live stuff.

But on a practical level isn’t that how you earn money?

Not really. It can be. I like writing songs and recording them but I don’t like performing them. I’m trying to think of other ways to do music that isn’t sitting with my guitar on stage.

I recently bought a 2004 7” single of yours, “Ryanair Song/7” Cigarette”, that isn’t on any album. How did that come about?

I have fond memories of that. A guy called René over in Amsterdam had this label, Nowhere Fast Records, and he wanted something original after my first album came out. They were songs that were quite throwaway and “Ryanair Song” was quite funny and youthful, even though I wasn’t that young. They sound raw because they were recorded in my house… badly.

What is your impression of Brighton?

There isn’t anything much I can say, on the record. The first time I went was in ‘96-‘97 when we [Arab Strap] supported Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, or maybe it was Mogwai, Last summer Arab Strap played there and we had a day off so we went down the beach; however, we’d come straight from Scotland and weren’t dressed for sun, sitting there in black jeans and black shirts.

Listen to "Solemn Thirsty" by Malcolm Middleton

What book are you currently reading?

Oh God, do I have to say? I’m reading a book called How to Stop Time by Matt Haig. My wife gave me it. It’s a Sunday Times bestseller which I wouldn’t normally pick up because it’s got an introduction by Richard & Judy but I’m enjoying it as throwaway pulp. It’s kind of a thriller about a guy who doesn’t age very quickly.

For your last solo album. Summer of ’13, you worked with the electronic artist Miaoux Miaoux and it was a much more synth-led work than anything you’d done before. Will we be seeing more of that?

I hope not. There are a couple of songs on my new solo album that are electronic things but I’m trying to stay away from it. It’s always hard talking about your previous release because you need 10 years to go back to it and warm to it. Right now I’m not that keen on it but at the time I remember thinking it was good, just before I released it. After that, it involved me learning how to play keyboards for about three months, fiddling about with leads and stuff, which I didn’t enjoy, so I’ve knocked all that on the head.

How would you feel about a jukebox musical being made from your songs?

I’m not sure that’s possible. The songs don’t have that vibe where they could be played at family fun days. I don’t have a repertoire of happy songs so people sometimes book me but then look at me as if to say, “Why are you playing these songs?” while I just think, these are the songs that I write. I can’t imagine there being any need for a musical or it being that popular. You think of a musical being something to go and see and enjoy and I don’t think my songs are about enjoyment. Maybe some of the songs… maybe you could look into that and come back to me…

Finally, when you look at the drawing of you on the album Waxing Gibbous (pictured above left), do you like it?

No, no, but, also I can’t not like it, it’s of its time. It’s better than the first version which looked a bit more like Frank Bruno. I like it, it’s funny. I showed my son it and he didn’t even know it was me, didn’t recognise it. I like the way the art was done but its certainly not an iconic cover.

• Find out more about Brighton Festival 2018

Considering the coal-dark nature of her music, it was unsurprising Sweden's Anna von Hausswolff was dressed entirely in black while meeting up at London’s Rough Trade East shop to talk about her new album Dead Magic. Less foreseeable was her sunny disposition and willingness to veer off topic. She happily explored what has brought her to this point and spoke enthusiastically about her inspirations.