James Balmont

hen I joined the band Swim Deep 13 years ago, my dreams were much like those of any young musician: to play Glastonbury, to tour America and to hear our music on the radio – all of which we’ve managed to achieve. But what I hadn’t counted on was finding a fanbase in China. Despite us never having knowingly released our music there, Swim Deep recently returned triumphant from our fourth run of shows on Chinese soil in barely 10 years, and we’re not the only British indie band benefiting from t...

Playing a surfboard-shaped axe, Takanaka was a stadium-level artist at home but little known in the west – until YouTube brought him a huge new audience
In November 2025, Masayoshi Takanaka announced his first ever UK solo gig. Originally slated for London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire, there was such demand that it was upgraded to two nights at Brixton Academy – nearly 10,000 people will flock to see a 72-year-old Japanese jazz fusion virtuoso play a surfboard-shaped guitar in March. Come the sum...

The South Korean auteur Park Chan-wook and Lee Byung-hun, the lead actor in No Other Choice, sit down with AnOther to discuss the making of a melodramatic masterpiece
January 22, 2026
There’s a show-stopping scene in No Other Choice – Park Chan-wook’s sensational new black comedy about a laid-off paper-mill veteran who goes to desperate lengths to secure a new job – that has lived rent-free in my head since its screening at the BFI London Film Festival in October of last year.
At the narrativ...

The latest true story from the world of combat sports to hit the big screen packs a surprisingly tender punch. The Smashing Machine – closely adapted from the 2002 HBO documentary of the same name – has already earned Benny Safdie (Uncut Gems) the Silver Lion for best director at September’s Venice Film Festival.
But it was the viral footage of star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and subject Mark Kerr – a once-legendary mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter whose career was coloured as much by his pers...

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Not speed dating, ‘Speed’ dating
On a cold November evening, behind the unassuming door of a former jewellery box makers’ on Pentonville Road, an independent creative space is filling up with fashion model managers, cinema workers and engineering consultants. They’re here in search of romance; I’m here to find out what could possibly unite such an eclectic mix of singletons. Unlike regular dating events, attendees at Anomalous Space’s first-ever ‘Admit Two’ night are being paired off bas...

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It’s February 2014, and Swim Deep are in Hong Kong for the last show of our first-ever tour of Asia. It’s a moment none of us want to forget.
After a year of promoting our debut album ‘Where the Heaven Are We’, we’ve made it to one of the most striking cities on earth, where we’re surrounded by jungle, sea and skyscrapers.
We’re in one of the most bizarre venues we’ll ever set foot in tonight: it’s an Italian restaurant, except they’ve pushed all the tables and chairs aside and erected a ma...

The Collectors is a new series that celebrates the intimate communities that congregate around tech and how these alternative families help spark friendships and keep devices relevant. For Part 1, James Balmont visited London’s first-ever Tamagotchi club, where he found a community of e-pet obsessives, who claim this hobby has been transformational.
In the residential suburbs of London’s bucolic Crouch Hill, inside an unassuming church backroom usually reserved for piano lessons, a retro tech...

Dive into Taiwan’s ambient music tradition, traced through nine rare and influential records spanning the 1980s to the present.

Taiwan may be best known internationally for its bubble tea, computer chip manufacturing, and the towering Taipei 101 skyscraper. But beyond these hallmarks — and its lush scenery and sumptuous cuisine — exists an elusive lineage of ambient music dating back to the mid-1980s, when artists like Jimi Chen (Chen Shyh-Shing) began blending spiritualist practices with mus...

The dystopian techno drama is directed by Neo Sora, son of the legendary composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. THE FACE speaks to Sora and composer Lia Ouyang Rusli about the film’s powerful sonic heartbeat.
Midway through Happyend, the dystopian narrative debut of Japanese-American filmmaker Neo Sora, a pivotal confrontation takes place as two delinquent teenagers drag a stolen subwoofer through a foreboding metropolis.
Beneath a huge concrete overpass, which is lit up like a Brutalist spaceship, the b...

“We could clone a sheep in a laboratory,” writes Henry Carroll in his new book The 1990s: A Visual History of the Decade. “But we still relied on the Yellow Pages to order a takeaway.”
The 90s, as Carroll’s eye-popping new photo collection reminds us, was a decade of mess and life and culture poised on a tantalizing cusp. The X-Files, ‘Girl Power,’ Tamagotchis, and Mr. Blobby vied for the public’s attention alongside solemn newsreel footage about CFC cans, glue-sniffing, and the Srebrenica ma...

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The rise and fall and rise again of Britain’s most historic cinema
With more than 100 cinemas, London is a wonderland for cinephiles. Pull back the curtain of some the most beloved picture houses and you’ll find fascinating histories galore. The Regent Street Cinema is one of those places. This month it celebrates 130 years since it became the birthplace of British cinema with screenings of the Lumière brothers’ groundbreaking Cinématographe show in 1896. It changed entertainment forever...

In a neon-drenched port town on New Year’s Eve, 1999, a hoodlum named Apollo, who has never kissed a girl, falls for a beautiful young singer named Tai Zhaomei. As the rain batters down, this Y2K Romeo and Juliet slip into the backstreets, coming up against mobsters, biker gangs, karaoke singers, gunshots, flocks of birds, drug dealers, and even vampires in a bid to steal a ship and escape to the sea. The average filmmaker might stage such a sequence with a sense of style and verve. But Chine...

In the mid-90s, the long-awaited arrival of the information superhighway promised to transform the lives of people all over the world.
Though the average desktop hard drive stored just 500MB of data, and search engines like Google and AskJeeves were still only concepts, the total number of websites online would skyrocket from 2,278 at the end of 1994 to over 23,500 by June 1995, cementing the internet’s unshakeable foothold in the cultural zeitgeist.
Screens were flooded with features that pu...