Skip to main content Q&A With Past Music Hothouse Success Story Nerve Centre Partners With Tower Museum For Laurentic Centenary Exhibition Creative Centenaries Exhibition Opens in National Library of IrelandTroubled Geordie hero Gazza is to talk live about his life next week during a one-off screening of new documentary, Gascoigne. The former football great will be taking part in a question-and-answer session being streamed live to North East cinemas when the film makes its debut on Monday. The documentary covers Paul Gascoigne’s famous ups and well-documented downs in a life that has seen him make front-page news for both his sublime skills on the pitch and his destructive alcohol-fuelled behaviour off it. Much is in his own words and on-screen the legendary player, and firm favourite in the North East, is candid about his struggles. With the approach of the 25th anniversary of the Italia ’90 World Cup, the film makes a timely study of one of football’s greatest ever players.
Ahead of a DVD release on June 15, it is having a nationwide screening at 6.50pm on Monday evening with the live chat with Gazza following via satellite link from the Brixton Ritzy Picturehouse cinema in London. Its local screenings are expected to be a hit with his die-hard fans and the host cinemas are Vue in Gateshead, Tyneside Cinema and the Empire in Newcastle; the Odeon at Metrocentre and Silverlink, Boldon Cineworld and Showcase in Stockton. Gascoigne is built around an extended interview with the former star who talks about his rise from his cash-strapped childhood in Dunston, Gateshead, to his glory days when he was famed for his ferocious free kick and dribbling abilities and won the nation’s hearts with his emotional exit at Italia ‘90. It captures his equally famous spirit and humour, while he also gives a unique insight into his much-publicised battle with drink. Directed by Bafta-winnner Jane Preston, who has worked with Gazza before, it also features archive material of his career highlights as well as interviews with those who knew him and those he played with and against, including Gary Linker, Jose Mourinho and Wayne Rooney.
His Q&A will be hosted by sports journalist Henry Winter and the panel will include Pete Davies, author of All Played Out - the “inside story” of the 1990 World Cup, and former player and manager Stuart Pearce. The Chronicle readers are in with a chance to bag free tickets to Monday’s screening of Gascoigne, and live Q&A with Gazza, at Vue Cinema in Gateshead. The cinema in Trinity Square is offering 10 readers the chance to win a pair of tickets to the 6.50pm special event. with the words Gascoigne Competition in the subject box. The film is a 15 certificate so entrants need to be over 15. The first 10 correct entries drawn will each win a pair of tickets. Atlas Obscura on Slate is a blog about the world's hidden wonders. Like us on Facebook, Tumblr, or follow us on Twitter @atlasobscura. Like something out of an epic fantasy novel — or maybe The Lego Movie — Fingal's Cave, located on the Scottish island of Staffa, is a 270-foot-deep, 72-foot-tall sea cave with walls of perfectly hexagonal columns.
Celtic legend holds that the cave was once part of a bridge across the sea, built by giants to fight one another. (The other end of the bridge is Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland, which exhibits the same blocky look.) Science says it formed from enormous masses of lava that cooled so slowly that they broke into long hexagonal pillars, like mud cracking under the hot sun. When naturalist Sir Joseph Banks rediscovered the cave in 1772, it quickly captured the English imagination and inspired the work of artists, writers, and musicians. Composer Felix Mendelssohn premiered an overture about the cave in 1832. That same year, artist J. M. W. Turner painted a mist-swirled depiction of it. In the ensuing centuries, the geological feature has continued to inspire — one of Pink Floyd's unreleased tracks from their 1970 Zabriskie Point soundtrack sessions is called Fingal's Cave. Matthew Barney also used the cave as a location in Cremaster 3, a 2002 fever dream of a film that formed part of his Cremaster Cycle art installation.
Visit Atlas Obscura for more on Fingal's Cave. Photo: Gerry Zambonini/Creative Commons Photo: Peter Hitchmough/Creative Commons Curious caves around the world: The stalactites of Gcwihaba Caverns are home to thousands of bats The Hellfire Caves were excavated to hide a secret society of wealthy Pagans Exceptional acoustics and an unsavory history characterize the Ear of Dionysus View Fingal's Cave, Isle of Staffa, Scotland, UK in a larger map Visit Atlas Obscura for more on Fingal's Cave.In a romantic sense. What a monumental ball-ache. For a start it usually happens in a pub or club, which means you’re senseless with booze and have to shout, thereby steamrollering any nuance in what you have to say and rendering your best-laid conversational zingers as blithering drunktalk. Plus, the whole situation is so phony. If you’re single, and you’re introduced to another single person, you’re inclined to project a desperate sort of I-am-potentially-available-for-sex version of yourself, which may have precious little to do with your actual personality.
Frankly it’s a miracle anyone gets together ever. No wonder dating sites are booming. They take the social sting out of meeting strangers. Actually, that’s not true: dating sites merely defer the agony until the first date. But still, you can see the appeal, especially as online dating has lost some of its stigma. These days no-one thinks you’re some kind of whey-faced spod just because you met your girlfriend on Guardian Soulmates. Then again, maintaining an online persona can be just as exhausting as manufacturing a real one. All those categories to fill in and interests to feign (fringe theatre, Vogon poetry, kabbadi). Some of us don’t even have personalities beyond our music taste. Wouldn’t it be easier if we could just list bands we liked? Well yes, obviously it would. Enter Tastebuds.fm, a new-ish dating site aimed solely at music fans. Its USP is its simplicity: you just enter your favourite music, and it puts you in touch with people in your area who like the same thing.
“A lot of dating sites are boring,” says co-founder Alex Parish, a web developer and part-time musician. “It’s hard to spark up a conversation. But with Tastebuds you have this easy route in.” Launched in summer 2010, the site now has 10,000 users, though Parish says he doesn’t know how many of those people – if any – have gone on actual dates after meeting on Tastebuds. You can certainly see the mainstream potential, though the concept of music-powered dating raises a number of questions. Can you base a relationship on a shared love of Esben And The Witch? Is this really anything new? Haven’t people always (well, since 2005-ish) used social media, especially Myspace and Last.fm, to project their music tastes and meet new people? I thought I’d sign up and find out if Tastebuds could be the social web’s next big thing, or just a clever gimmick. Trouble is, I’m married, so I couldn’t exactly play it straight, in case (yes yes, staggeringly unlikely, I know) I got some actual attention.
So I used a cunning disguise. Parish told me the site’s users are predominantly indie-rock types: the most frequently selected artists are Radiohead, The Smiths, Arcade Fire, Animal Collective. Unfortunately, I like those artists too and I couldn’t run the risk of meeting someone with whom I had anything in common. So I pretended to be into acts only a maniac could love: Jamiroquai, The Lighthouse Family, Son Of Dork, and Afroman of ‘Because I Got High’ fame. So, who did Tastebuds try to set me up with? Based on our shared music tastes, only six people were deemed suitable, all of them Jamiroquai fans. One of them, Agata, seemed unwilling to reveal any part of her face above the mouth, which made we wonder what she was hiding. An eye patch, perhaps, or a comedy Groucho Marx glasses-and-moustache. Then there was Shaunee, who looked like a nice person, but you know, again with the Jamiroquai. It’d never work out. What if ‘our song’ ended up being something off ‘A Funk Odyssey’?