Grange Park Opera, West Horsley, Surrey
Natalya Romaniw is touching as the heroine trapped in a loveless marriage, while Susan Bullock is chilling as her monstrous mother-in-law in David Alden’s staging

Only a generation ago Janáček’s operas were outsiders, regarded as spiky and hard to place. Now they are so much part of the repertoire that they are regularly served up between the champagne and interval picnics of the country house opera circuit. Grange Park Opera’s latest Janáček production, in the theatre in the grounds of West Horsley Place – which fans of the TV series Ghosts will recognise as Button House – reunites some big names for his 1921 opera, supporting a powerhouse role debut from the Welsh soprano Natalya Romaniw.

The director is David Alden, almost fresh from reviving Janáček’s Jenufa at ENO and here revisiting a work he first staged more than a quarter of a century ago. His familiar fingerprints are all over it. Apart from some chaotic moments as Katya’s world unravels in the final act the action is staged simply and allusively on Hannah Postlethwaite’s sloping slab of a set, with Tim Mitchell’s lighting creating silhouettes that seem almost like characters in their own right. The era is vaguely Janáček’s own, the setting dour and almost plain apart from a door marked Vychod, “exit”, at the back. In the storm, whipped up by chorus members brandishing umbrellas, the ruined building in which everyone shelters is unambiguously an abandoned church, the chorus witness Katya’s self-inflicted downfall as a stony-faced congregation.

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© Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

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© Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Band say carbon emissions for vinyl production will be reduced by 85% thanks to new method, as they announce 10th studio album

Coldplay are aiming to make the most ecologically sustainable vinyl record yet, for their newly announced album Moon Music.

Each 140g vinyl copy of Moon Music, released 4 October, will be manufactured from nine plastic bottles recovered from consumer waste. For a special “notebook edition”, 70% of the plastic has been intercepted by the environmental nonprofit The Ocean Cleanup from Rio Las Vacas, Guatemala, preventing it from entering the Gulf of Honduras and the Atlantic Ocean.

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© Photograph: Anna Lee

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© Photograph: Anna Lee

Donington Park, Leicestershire
Plagued by rain, technical issues and boycotts – as well as by some distinctly non-metal headliners – the weekend is practically a washout, despite some virtuoso shredding and fiery melodeath lower down the bill

Is this the most cursed edition of Download to ever go ahead? Optimism for the 2024 edition of the heavy metal festival was at a low from the off, when the two-thirds non-metal trio of Queens of the Stone Age, Fall Out Boy and Avenged Sevenfold were announced as headliners. Then, in the week before the event, the smaller stages were gutted by bands such as Pest Control and Ithaca pulling out over the sponsorship of Barclaycard, which has ties to defence companies supplying Israel.

Early on the Friday, as the festival begins, “bimbocore” provocateur Scene Queen announces on the second stage that Barclays has withdrawn its sponsorship of the weekend, and that she’ll be donating her payment to charities supporting Palestine. The Callous Daoboys, similarly, scream “Free Palestine!” after being one of the few acts to actually grace the fourth stage today. Their violin-backed mathcore makes for a brilliantly disorientating sonic cocktail.

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© Photograph: Tracey Welch/REX/Shutterstock

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© Photograph: Tracey Welch/REX/Shutterstock

The likes of Fatboy Slim and Armand van Helden remixed original tracks into mutant dancefloor beasts, but thanks to streaming and risk-averse labels, this artform is threatened

Back in the 1990s, the right dance remix could make – or sometimes resurrect – a career. Fatboy Slim’s mix of Cornershop’s Brimful of Asha took a marginal indie band to the top of the British charts, Andrew Weatherall saved Primal Scream from potential obscurity with his remix of their lachrymose ballad I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have (which became Loaded) and Todd Terry’s remix of Everything But the Girl’s Missing gave the band a new lease of life in electronic music.

Kelli Ali says that Armand van Helden’s 1997 remix of Spin Spin Sugar by her former band Sneaker Pimps – a classic of the early UK garage scene – introduced the group’s music to an audience “who were maybe searching for something to listen to outside the club, when the sun came up.” She says: “It meant that our music crossed over to a whole generation of hardcore clubbers. I still have friends saying they were dancing to the track recently, which is pretty epic in terms of longevity for a remix.”

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© Photograph: Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images

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© Photograph: Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images

Seven out of top 10 most played acts, encompassing radio, broadcast and public places, are British

Britons rule the airwaves in the UK, with Ed Sheeran taking the most played spot and homegrown artists dominating the top 10 in a chart compiled by the music licensing company PPL.

For Yorkshire-born and Suffolk-raised Sheeran, 33, it is the seventh time in nine years he has topped the list of music used across UK radio, TV and in public places.

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© Photograph: Gilbert Flores/Billboard/Getty Images

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© Photograph: Gilbert Flores/Billboard/Getty Images

University of Liverpool hosts Tay Day to coincide with singer’s Eras tour concerts at Anfield

It was mid-afternoon in the 600-seat lecture theatre in the Yoko Ono Lennon Centre at the University of Liverpool and the audience was deep into an analysis of sexual racism in Taylor Swift’s music videos.

At the front of the room, blown up on a giant screen, were several screenshots of the singer kissing white men in a variety of music videos, held in contrast with three images of her conspicuously not kissing her black love interests. How much of this is a product of a fundamentally racist society? What is her responsibility as a pop star to fight against society’s evils?

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© Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

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© Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Thirty-minute mix from world’s rarest album played at Mona in Tasmania, leaving listeners buzzing – and ‘a bit sad’

This waiver I’m signing says it is binding until the day I die or the year 2103 – whichever comes first. I’ll be 112 years old in 2103 or (more likely) very dead. Who knows if anyone will still be talking about Wu-Tang Clan then, or what state Once Upon a Time in Shaolin will even be in by 2103. The album exists in a sole physical copy and that’s a CD – will any one other than antique dealers even have CD players then? In any case, I’ll make sure not to slip up at age 111.

I must sign (and I’m rigorously frisked) to ensure I have no plans to make a covert recording of what happens next, as I enter Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art. This is where Once Upon a Time in Shaolin will be for the next week as part of the gallery’s new exhibition, Namedropping, examining status, celebrity, scarcity and notoriety. Once Upon a Time in Shaolin fulfils on all counts: a never-before released album by a generational-defining group, that exists as a single copy in an ornate silver box and sold for millions. About 9% of the 500 people who will get to hear it at Mona are travelling from overseas; the gallery closed the waiting list when it reached 5,000 people.

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© Photograph: Mona

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© Photograph: Mona

Royal Festival Hall, London
The peerless 71-year-old opens this year’s Meltdown festival sounding very much like the Chaka Khan of the 70s and 80s used to, and performs 50 years’ worth of potent disco, soul and jazz classics with effortless vibrancy

The opening gig by the curator of this year’s Meltdown festival begins in impressively grandstanding style. The lights in the Royal Festival Hall dim, the familiar intro of I Feel For You by rapper Melle Mel booms out, and an introductory film unspools. The cast of faces paying tribute to Chaka Khan is pretty extraordinary: Stevie Wonder, Michelle Obama, Grace Jones and Joni Mitchell appear alongside old clips of Whitney Houston and Prince singing Khan’s praises. And so is the archive footage: dog-eared copies of old albums by Rufus, the funk band she intermittently fronted from 1973 to 1983, are pictured next to images of her performing with Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and Ray Charles. It is all evidence of a strikingly varied career.

You hear her before you see her: a frankly extraordinary succession of pitch-perfect extempore wails from offstage precedes her arrival. Then here she is: a diminutive, big-haired figure in sparkling black, alternately complaining about the British weather (a recent rain-drenched festival appearance was “like a horror film”) and joking about her advanced years (age-related memory loss is apparently less of a problem when you’ve lived a life as tumultuous as Chaka Khan’s, because “if I could remember everything I’d done, I’d probably kill myself”).

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© Photograph: Pete Woodhead

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© Photograph: Pete Woodhead

The music publicist was given up for adoption and always had a sense of not belonging but, in his job, he found his kindred spirits

I always knew I was adopted. I had a sister, Mary, and a brother, Tony, and we all looked quite different, so I suppose our adoptive parents, Harrington and Elizabeth had to tell us the truth. They took us all in as babies – each one a year apart – I’m the eldest. We were all told from the beginning and it was a warm, loving family – it was only me that was the tearaway.

We were happy growing up in Worthing, Sussex, and our parents provided a loving family home, so I didn’t think about being adopted much during my early childhood. But as I moved into my teenage years and beyond, my parents struggled to contain me – as Bob Dylan sang, “Your sons and daughters are beyond your command,” and so it was with me.

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© Photograph: Dan Burn-Forti/The Observer

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© Photograph: Dan Burn-Forti/The Observer

He made rock history with the Velvet Underground, produced landmark albums for the likes of Patti Smith and collaborated with John Cage. At 82, Cale’s 18th solo outing proves he’s still making music at the bleeding edge

Even over the phone from Los Angeles, John Cale has a certain presence. It’s not just the still resonant Welsh lilt of his speaking voice or the way he takes his time to settle on the right words, more his tangential way of thinking – about music, songwriting, the world in general. This is someone, after all, whose 1999 biography was titled What’s Welsh for Zen?.

That phrase echoes in my head more than once during our transatlantic conversation, Cale having lived in Los Angeles for 10 years now after a long stint in New York. His answers, while always courteous and considered, sometimes tend towards the abstract and are marked by a reluctance to be pinned down about the subject matter of his songs.

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© Photograph: Marlene Marino

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© Photograph: Marlene Marino

The pop star and the TV presenter are lifelong friends, and it’s their intimacy – and honesty – that gives their new BBC show its edge. They discuss their storied careers, and how they turn life’s challenges into audio gold

In a photographer’s studio in north London, sitting at a wooden table with mugs of tea, two friends are having a chat. They’ve discussed food and clothes, but now they’re on to their actual friendship: the reason why we’re here.

“I think before this podcast,” says Miquita Oliver, “a lot of people who were aware that Lily and me have a friendship would be basing it on pictures of us leaving the Groucho pissed when we were 23…” She looks at Lily Allen, who is laughing quite hard.

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© Photograph: Perou/The Observer

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© Photograph: Perou/The Observer

Mayor Eric Adams sent letters rescinding key and asking for it to be sent back to City Hall, which received it on 10 June

Sean Combs has returned his key to New York City after a request from mayor Eric Adams in response to the release of a video showing the music mogul nicknamed “Diddy” attacking R&B singer Cassie, officials said Saturday.

The mayor’s office said Combs returned the key after Adams sent letters to the embattled musician’s offices in New York and California on 4 June rescinding the key and asking for it to be sent back to City Hall. The city received the key on 10 June.

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© Photograph: Willy Sanjuan/Invision/AP

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© Photograph: Willy Sanjuan/Invision/AP

Barbican Hall, London EC1
Folk, classical and jazz textures from a quietly stellar band back the singer’s elegant, swooping voice on an almighty debut tour

Eyes shut, feet bare, with the stage in virtual darkness, singer Beth Gibbons clings to her microphone stand as though to a sapling in a gale, a veil of blond hair periodically falling across her face. It’s a pose every bit as era-defining as the microphone stance of fellow 1994 alumnus Liam Gallagher. Oasis’s Definitely Maybe and Portishead’s Dummy both came out that year, the latter introducing Gibbons’s otherworldly, jazz-inflected voice.

Tonight, Gibbons’s instrument, flawless against the march of time, hovers over a backdrop of groans, drones and keening melodies coming from seven players backlit by a succession of dark reds and blues. Often, Gibbons turns away from the mic, as though unable to face the words she has just sung.

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© Photograph: Andy Hall/The Observer

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© Photograph: Andy Hall/The Observer

The singer-songwriter on an embarrassing water-slide mishap, changing her son’s name, and Chloë Grace Moretz’s matchmaking skills

Born in Massachusetts, Meghan Trainor, 30, released albums as a teenager. She had a diamond-certified hit with her 2014 song All About the Bass and won the best new artist Grammy in 2016. She has had eight multi-platinum singles, two multi-platinum albums, sold out three world tours and written hits for artists including Jennifer Lopez and Little Mix. Her new album is called Timeless and she performs at Wembley’s Capital FM Summertime Ball on 16 June. She has two sons with actor Daryl Sabara and lives in Los Angeles.

When were you happiest?
Whenever I’m with my kids.

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© Photograph: Lauren Dunn

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© Photograph: Lauren Dunn

As LP sales boom in the UK, so has the illegal trade in poor-quality fakes. But the record detectives are fighting back

In July 2018, the peace of an upmarket cul-de-sac in rural Hampshire was suddenly disturbed by the arrival of two police officers and three people from trading standards banging on the door of a big redbrick house. They had a warrant to carry out what was called an “inspection”, but was really a raid.

The man they were investigating was 50-year-old Richard Hutter, and the job they had to do that day took three hours. As they searched his home, he spent most of the time in the kitchen, insisting that he had done nothing wrong. His mood was one of shock and deep discomfort. For at least six years, he had quietly sold his wares online and funded an apparently affluent lifestyle to the tune of around £1.2m; now, the consequences were coming home.

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© Illustration: Willa Gebbie and Christophe Gowans

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© Illustration: Willa Gebbie and Christophe Gowans

A teenage Riley gets to know Anxiety and Envy in the Pixar animated sequel, and Westeros descends into civil war as the Game of Thrones prequel returns

Inside Out 2
Out now
The first Inside Out gave us five personified emotions living inside the mind of 11-year-old Riley. Now a teen, Riley and her brain must contend with the arrival of new emotions, including Anxiety (voiced by Maya Hawke), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser).

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© Photograph: Disney

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© Photograph: Disney

The latest documentary about the Britpop Monkees finds them reassembling for a stadium gig, though we’ll have to wait to hear complete songs

The Blur fan does not want for documentaries. From the ramshackle Starshaped in 1993, which captured these Britpop Monkees pre-megastardom, to the slick New World Towers in 2015, this is a band that knows what the camera wants: deadpan daftness and onstage hijinks interspersed with melancholic reflections on age and Englishness. The 2010 doc No Distance Left to Run showed the quartet reuniting after a prolonged estrangement: “Let’s get the band back together one more time!” growled singer Damon Albarn. This latest look-back-in-languor can’t do much more than give the concept another run around the block, with added early archive footage. Now the band are back together again after a second prolonged estrangement, and they have a new dragon to slay: Wembley stadium. “The less we do, the bigger we get,” observes drummer and current Mid Sussex Labour candidate Dave Rowntree.

Armed with a new album (The Ballad of Darren), they play assorted warm-up shows – Wolverhampton! Eastbourne! – as well as a homecoming gig in Colchester, Essex. Here, Damon (looking like Albert Steptoe) and guitarist Graham Coxon (sounding like Dudley Moore) find that the music room at their former comprehensive has been named in their honour. Their suggestion that its ambience might benefit from some paisley wallpaper and a bowl of weed is met with muted horror by the head teacher.

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© Photograph: no credit

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© Photograph: no credit

The Eras superstar released six last-minute new variants of her new album to pip Charli XCX to the No 1 album and break her own record, but there is only one winner when it comes to making pop fun

Earlier this month, when asked about why her friend and collaborator Taylor Swift is so popular, Lana Del Rey didn’t mince words: “She wants it. She’s told me so many times that she wants it more than anyone,” she told the BBC. “And how amazing – she’s getting exactly what she wants. She’s driven, and I think it’s really paid off.”

To a casual observer, the remark might seem unremarkable, even obvious – but for her nearly 20 years in the music business, Swift has painstakingly made sure onlookers never see her sweat. As she’s broken sales and touring records, Swift has maintained a veneer of unflappable benevolence that obfuscates her admirable business savvy and clear understanding of what her fans, and the music business at large, want. Del Rey was saying the quiet part out loud: Swift’s success may, at its core, come down to her preternatural musical ability, but her maintenance of that success was aided by intense ambition.

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© Composite: Getty, Harley Weir

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© Composite: Getty, Harley Weir

Whether you want to ask about A Grand Don’t Come For Free, writing and directing his debut feature film or his Fred Again-inspired new fanbase nothing is off the table

Trust Mike Skinner to put it succinctly: “I’ve spent many nights wasted, but not wasted any nights in Fabric over the years,” he said on the announcement of his new mix to celebrate 25 years of the fabled London nightclub. Fabric Presents: the Streets centres on the club’s reputation as “one of the homes of bass music”, said Skinner, “and that’s some of the music I’ve been playing out the most.” His mix opens with a new Streets track, No Better Than Chance, and spans UKG and bassline crew TQD to grime artist Manga Saint Hilare and Fred Again.

The record comes amid a busy period for the 45-year-old rapper, who has a looming set at Glastonbury and last year released and starred in his debut film, The Darker the Shadow, the Brighter the Light, and an accompanying album – entirely written, directed and even financed by himself. “I thought: ‘How hard can it be?’” he told Miranda Sawyer last year. “You know, I’ve done millions of music videos. I do music videos every week. So I was like: ‘It’s what, 90 minutes? That’s 30 music videos … But it’s not like 30 music videos. Because with music videos, you’re not beholden to a story that has to make sense. You just film a load of stuff and pick out what looks the nicest and the music does the rest. You can’t do that with a film.”

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© Photograph: Pedro Alvarez/The Observer

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© Photograph: Pedro Alvarez/The Observer

Move follows protests from bands and fans over the bank providing financial services to defence companies supplying Israel

Barclays has suspended sponsorship of all Live Nation festivals for 2024 – including Download, Latitude and the Isle of Wight – after protests from bands and fans over the bank providing financial services to defence companies supplying Israel.

The bank signed a five-year sponsorship deal with Live Nation in 2023. It is understood that the suspension does not apply to the entire contract.

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© Photograph: Joseph Okpako/WireImage

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© Photograph: Joseph Okpako/WireImage

First released in 1983 the German new wave song has since become a byword for 80s cool – now it is about to unite the tournament on the terraces

If you are planning to brush up on your German ahead of tonight’s opener of the European Championships, one umlaut-heavy phrase could come in handy: Völlig losgelöst.

Meaning “completely untethered”, these two words form the chorus of Peter Schilling’s Major Tom, a German new wave song that first climbed to the top of charts around the world in 1983 but stands good chances of becoming the unofficial anthem of the football tournament summer 41 years later.

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© Photograph: United Archives/Getty Images

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© Photograph: United Archives/Getty Images

Late star’s two daughters claim their brother failed to disclose certain assets during his time as estate trustee

Tony Bennett’s two daughters are suing their brother, alleging he mishandled and failed to disclose some of their father’s assets in his role as trustee of the late singer’s estate.

The lawsuit filed on Wednesday in New York by Antonia and Johanna Bennett accuses D’Andrea “Danny” Bennett of not accounting for all of the proceeds from this year’s sale of Tony Bennett’s catalogue and certain image rights to the brand development firm Iconoclast.

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© Photograph: AFF-USA/REX/Shutterstock

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© Photograph: AFF-USA/REX/Shutterstock

Emirates Old Trafford, Manchester
The pain of losing drummer Taylor Hawkins is still audible in some of these songs, but the band’s togetherness is plainly stronger than ever

Just over two years after the shattering and untimely death of drummer Taylor Hawkins left them facing trauma and turmoil, Foo Fighters deliver a two-and-a-half-hour-plus masterclass in how to put the show back on the road. “Do y’all love rock’n’roll music?” yells Dave Grohl as Monkey Wrench starts proceedings with a level of intensity they maintain all night. “In times like these you learn to live again,” he sings a few moments later, the song’s extended voice and guitar intro emphasising the lyric’s extra poignancy.

Onstage, the band’s togetherness and chemistry seems as strong as ever, possibly more so. Despite the grey skies and early downpours, the wet and windswept frontman puts everything into his vocals while stage right, rhythm guitarist Pat Smear – who first played with Grohl in Nirvana – still beams from ear to ear like he has the best job in the world. Before Aurora, their late bandmate’s favourite song, the singer reveals they still “tell Taylor Hawkins stories all day”.

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© Photograph: Carsten Windhorst/CAMERA PRESS

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© Photograph: Carsten Windhorst/CAMERA PRESS

It’s six years since the former girl group star announced her first solo album. Now – after a breakup, family illness and battles with her label – her vision of ‘divine femininity’ is about to be unveiled

When we speak on the eve of her 28th birthday, Normani is feeling wistful. Living out in LA, she is putting the finishing touches to her debut album, a diary of her journey “to womanhood”. Six long, hard years in the making, Dopamine is her ambitious attempt to reignite R&B’s glory days of big beats, big emotions and even bigger choreography. But as she embraces the feeling of a career milestone finally coming into view, her thoughts are back in Texas, where her family lives. She’s trying to get them to move nearer to her, but Grandma is proving hard to win round.

“We moved to Houston from New Orleans in 2005 [after Hurricane Katrina], so for her, even just being in Texas is still a lot closer to where her siblings are,” she sighs. “I don’t want to rip her away from that, but obviously, I’m still like: ‘Grandma! Come here right now so we can cuddle!’”

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© Photograph: Marcus Cooper

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© Photograph: Marcus Cooper

Afterwards, I spoke to Sting. He said I’d done so well and laughed that it was a tough crowd

I knew it wasn’t a normal phone call. A man was asking if I could sing at a wedding he was organising. It was in 2000. Only a few years before, I’d become one of the first female priests ordained in the Church of England. There had been a lot of press coverage – positive and negative. For a time, it seemed I was the public face of the controversy around female priests and I didn’t like it.

What piqued my interest was that the man I was speaking to wouldn’t tell me who was getting married, just that it was very high-profile. I was intrigued, but it was the run-up to Christmas and I knew I’d be busy, so I said no.

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© Photograph: Mark Chilvers/The Guardian

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© Photograph: Mark Chilvers/The Guardian

The celebrated MC takes your questions on losing his brothers to muscular dystrophy, converting to Islam and making an album no one can listen to

What do you feel is the most important aspect to a truly great rapper? Is it flow, wordplay or storytelling? Or is it non-technical things like their worldview, their upbringing or the people they surround themselves with? Dylandep
It’s all of the above. You gotta really practise and then you got to understand your flow, understand wordplay, how to use your vocabulary. It do depend on where you’re at in your life and the life that you’re living. But as long as you know what you’re talking about, and you’re talking the truth and you got a nice flow, you could make it.

How did living with disability in your family [his younger brothers had muscular dystrophy and died young] affect your art and aspirations? moniquita
That was a big part of my life. You’re a reflection of how you came up – you can’t ever shake that. Now I’m older, I can really understand the situation. But back then I was like: damn, once a person could walk and do everything like normal and now they can’t walk no more, they can’t function or operate like they used to. That’s a drastic change. It was hard to see – it really affected me.

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© Photograph: Danny Hastings

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© Photograph: Danny Hastings

In a year of major releases from stars, the British singer has managed to come out on top with Brat: a catchy, internet-consuming album that captures a particular moment

How famous is Charli XCX? Even Charli XCX isn’t sure. “I’m famous but not quite / but I’m perfect for the background” she sings on I might say something stupid, the single slow-ish track off her new album, Brat. She’s not wrong; a good portion of the public knows the British singer, if they know her at all, for a top 10 hit from more than 10 years ago. But to a community of largely women, LGBTQ+ people and music critics, she is the biggest pop star in the world, the one everyone’s obsessed with – a persona Charli has leaned into with uncompromising, deadpan bravado: “It’s OK to just admit that you’re jealous of me,” she taunts on Von Dutch, the lead single off an album whose meme-generating cover is literally green with envy. On the deliriously catchy 360, she sings: “360, when you’re in the mirror, you’re just looking at me”, which references internet “it girls” such as Julia Fox – “I’m everywhere, I’m so Julia.”

And this week, at least online, she’s right. Brat is one of the most critically acclaimed albums of the year, now one of the top 20 all time on the site Metacritic (score: 95); her sold-out show/rave in Brooklyn this week drew such online fixations as Julia Fox, Lorde, Matty Healy and his new model fiancee Gabbriette, with tickets reselling for $10,000; many have pointed out that fellow pop artists Camila Cabello and Katy Perry are jacking her sound and lo-fi style, evidence of what Vox’s Rebecca Jennings called the “broader XCXification of culture”. A sickly, striking shade of Brat green spread on social media. The 15-track album of nearly straight club bangers, which contains not a single radio nor CVS-friendly track, is slated to debut at No 4 on the Billboard Hot 200 – by far Charli’s most commercially successful album to date, doing similar numbers to the relatively much more streamed (and doctor’s office friendly) Dua Lipa.

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© Photograph: Harley Weir

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© Photograph: Harley Weir

Caroline Shaw/Sō Percussion
(Nonesuch)
All five musicians share writing and performing duties on these 10 songs. The closing version of Schubert’s An die Musik is mesmerisingly beautiful

Composer and vocalist Caroline Shaw’s second album with the four multi-instrumentalists of Sō Percussion is a true collaboration, with writing and performing duties shared between all five musicians. There’s a gleefully eclectic range of sources and influences woven into the sequence of 10 songs, which ends with the group’s own take on Schubert’s An die Musik, in which the melody is slowed right down, individual harmonies highlighted, and extra layers of decoration added; led by Shaw’s haunting breathiness it’s mesmerisingly beautiful, and despite all the transformations, still strangely Schubertian.

All the numbers are built up in a similar way, layer upon layer, perhaps starting with a bass line or a rhythmic scheme, adding more instrumental colours and samples, and with the texts of the songs a mix of words mostly by female poets, including Christina Rosetti, Gertrude Stein and Emily Dickinson, and by the musicians themselves. There’s a distinctly minimalist flavour to some of the songs – Slow Motion starts out like a riff on Steve Reich’s Clapping Music, for instance, while Silently Invisibly unfolds over a metallic pulsing. But the melodic lines that Shaw adds above them belong to a very different musical world and, as in everything here, the results are never quite what you might expect.

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© Photograph: PR handout

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© Photograph: PR handout

Inspired by JaneBrown's comment in a LinkFilter thread [⇔ Linked], I went looking for more music by vocalist Edythe Wright. Jackpot, here's The complete Edythe Wright compilation via YouTube (90 minutes)!

Wright worked extensively with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra from 1935-1939 and was a popular act during heyday of the Swing era.

She was the epitome of Summer of Love chic – and became overshadowed by tragedy. But as her raw power is celebrated on stage in London, her family and bandmates explain there was far more to the singer than her legend

‘Janis Joplin is important to a lot of people for a lot of different reasons, and it’s not my job to tell them that they’re wrong.” It’s 8am in Tucson, Arizona, and the late singer’s brother Michael is being diplomatic as he considers the legacy of an era-defining woman who so many people feel they know. But he has a job to do nonetheless: “When she passed, I had an obligation to protect her history,” he says, against a backdrop of gleaming gold and silver records.

Michael was only 17 when Joplin was found dead of a heroin overdose, aged 27, on the floor of a hotel room in Los Angeles. Fifty-four years later, journalists such as I are still knocking on his door, searching for new insight into the life of a singer whom the talkshow host Dick Cavett once introduced as “a combination of Leadbelly, a steam engine, Calamity Jane and Bessie Smith”.

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© Photograph: Crawley/Kobal/Shutterstock

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© Photograph: Crawley/Kobal/Shutterstock

Johnston/Minnesota Chorale & Boychoir/ Minnesota O/ Vänskä
(BIS, two CDs)
Conductor completes his Mahler cycle with this unfussy and effective recording

Osmo Vänskä’s account of the Third Symphony, recorded in Minneapolis in the autumn of 2022, completes his Mahler cycle with the Minnesota Orchestra that began with the Fifth in 2015. The qualities of that first disc, with Vänskä’s deliberately unhistrionic approach, the superb orchestral playing and vivid (if sometimes over-bright) recorded sound, have more or less defined all the releases that have followed. As some of the reviews have demonstrated, the soberness of the performances won’t be to all tastes – those who admire, say, Leonard Bernstein’s Mahler recordings may find them lacking in physicality and drama. But at their best – as in the outstanding account of Deryck Cooke’s performing version of the Tenth Symphony – the unfussy directness of Vänskä’s conducting is powerfully effective.

If the Third Symphony doesn’t quite reach those heights, it certainly has moments of stirring grandeur and beauty. Vänskä’s tempi are generally on the slow side – the whole work, easily the longest of all Mahler’s symphonies, takes almost 10 minutes longer here than it does in Claudio Abbado’s astounding live performance from the Royal Festival Hall in London in 1999, which has to be the benchmark for any new version of Mahler 3. The scherzo is a little stately perhaps, but the performance only rarely drags, most obviously in the fourth movement after beginning in an almost audible ppp, and despite the eloquence of mezzo Jennifer Johnston’s delivery of the Nietzsche setting.

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© Photograph: Lisa-Marie Mazzucco

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© Photograph: Lisa-Marie Mazzucco

After 10 years at the helm of Britten Pears Arts, Wright is stepping down. He looks back at his festival highlights, and forwards to classical music’s increasingly uncertain future.

‘You know, had Britten and Pears pitched up on Dragons’ Den with their idea for turning a disused malting house into a concert hall, they’d have been turned away,” says Roger Wright. “There was no business plan!”

But what began with Benjamin Britten’s straightforward idea of transforming a former industrial building by the River Alde in Snape into a hall big enough to house orchestral concerts and operas for his Aldeburgh festival, has, over the decades since, developed into a centre, not just for concerts, but for all the other year-round activities that come under the umbrella of Britten Pears Arts (BPA).

Roger Wright picks his Aldeburgh festival highlights 2015-2024

Les Illumininations (2016) “A circus theatre performance staged by Struan Leslie, culminating in Britten’s Les Illuminations, performed by Sarah Tynan – an astonishing feat of musical and physical virtuosity.”

Billy Budd (2017) “Opera North’s semi-staging of Britten’s Billy Budd with Roderick Williams in the title role, was the first time the opera has been performed in Snape Maltings – the stunned silence of the close demonstrated its impact.”

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© Photograph: (no credit)

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© Photograph: (no credit)

Although barely visible on TV, the UK’s 700,000-strong community has a growing presence in music, books and film. We meet some of its hidden stars

With its high-tempo use of Multicultural London English and blend of drum’n’bass and acoustic guitar, the song Five by Bedford-based rapper Pat is instantly recognisable as a product of the UK’s contemporary rap scene. Yet even the most fast-mouthed stars of British grime would probably struggle to integrate the word niezapowiedzianych (“unannounced”) into their rhyme schemes.

Born in Silesia, western Poland, Patryk “Pat” Wojcik moved with his family to England in 2007, three years after Poland joined the European Union. He learned to speak English by listening to British rappers such as Jme and Devlin, and makes music that pays homage to his native country and his adopted home, with lyrics such as “I chase cash like I’m Mateusz Gotówka” – a nod to the Anglo-Polish Aston Villa footballer also known as Matty Cash.

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© Photograph: Entertainment Pictures/Alamy

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© Photograph: Entertainment Pictures/Alamy

Digital art collective that now owns album sues convicted pharmaceutical executive for making copies

The convicted pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli has been sued in New York by a digital art collective that said it paid $4.75m for a one-of-a-kind album by the hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan, only to learn that the man nicknamed Pharma Bro made copies and is releasing the music to the public.

Shkreli paid $2m in 2015 for the album, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, and gave it up to partially satisfy a $7.4m forfeiture order after his 2017 conviction for defrauding hedge fund investors and scheming to defraud investors in a drugmaker.

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© Photograph: Susan Walsh/AP

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© Photograph: Susan Walsh/AP

Ustinov Studio, Bath
Deborah Warner’s staged version of Winterreise is a powerful and deeply moving piece of theatre

Schubert completed his great song-cycle Winterreise in what was effectively his own last winter; he would be dead just a year later. In this setting of 24 poems by Wilhelm Müller, depicting a man rejected in love and his painful journey across a freezing, stormy landscape, both actual and metaphorical, the singer’s challenge is exploring that balance between vocal and psychological elements.

By his own admission, tenor Ian Bostridge’s engagement with the cycle has long been obsessive. Now, he and pianist Julius Drake – singer as ego and pianist as id, Bostridge’s definition of the relationship – have collaborated with Deborah Warner in creating a staged version and it seems as if all their previous experience – 100-plus performances, different recordings, a film as well as a book – has flowed logically into this powerful and deeply moving piece of theatre.

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© Photograph: Claire Egan

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© Photograph: Claire Egan

Celebrated for her insouciant cool and varied style, the late singer was a muse across decades of fashion. Here are some of her greatest ensembles

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© Photograph: Everett/Rex/Shutterstock

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© Photograph: Everett/Rex/Shutterstock

OVO Hydro, Glasgow
The chameleonic rapper and singer plays it both cocky and cute as she squares up to the crowd and bravely ditches some of her biggest hits

‘I’m a puppet, I’m a sheep, I’m a …” Doja Cat pauses, coyly. Her frenzied audience fills in the rest: “Cash cow!” A natural provocateur, the LA rapper and singer has a complex relationship to her pop star status, her megahit discography and the fans who stream it. Demons, a seething, brass-heavy rap single from her latest album Scarlet, posits all-conquering success as a kind of immunity from criticism, yet as she lists her victories (“I just bought a limousine”) she theatrically rolls her eyes.

Doja is a contrarian, but one with an unusually focused vision. She hangs off a rope made out of twisted blond hair, like a freaky Indiana Jones, on a stage which is half UFO, half Yeti: gleaming metal walkways, risers draped in more fake hair, and a ludicrous amount of pyrotechnics. Snaking lines of fire whip left and right, large flames blasting upwards when she cocks a finger during early single Tia Tamera.

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© Photograph: Theo Wargo/Getty Images for Live Nation

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© Photograph: Theo Wargo/Getty Images for Live Nation

Acts including Speed, Scowl and Ithaca voice opposition to Barclaycard sponsorship over financial services provided to defence companies

Multiple bands have pulled out of Download festival over Barclaycard being used as its official payment partner, in protest against Barclays providing financial services to defence companies supplying Israel.

Download, the UK’s biggest rock, metal and punk festival which takes place from 14 to 16 June, lists Barclaycard as one of its official sponsors alongside Liquid Death, Red Bull and others.

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© Photograph: David Dillon

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© Photograph: David Dillon

Billie Eilish’s third is a triumph, Shabaka goes woodwind and Yunchan Lim makes the most thrilling piano debut of the decade … here are our music team’s picks of the best LPs from the first half of the year

Being called “overproduced” is generally a criticism but BMTH make it a virtue on this ridiculously high-intensity album. The glitched-up production reflects a fiendishly intricate digital world, while frontman Oli Sykes’ emotions are more histrionic – and affecting – than ever. At a time when so many bands are content with tinkering at the edges of what’s been done before, it’s bracing to hear BMTH be so relentlessly ambitious and fused to the present moment. Read the full review. Ben Beaumont-Thomas

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© Composite: Guardian Design/Atiba Jefferson/Petros Studios

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© Composite: Guardian Design/Atiba Jefferson/Petros Studios

Jin has finished his stint in South Korea’s military but group won’t be able to reform until RM, Jimin, Jungkook, J-hope and V are discharged in 2025

Jin, the oldest member of the K-pop supergroup BTS, has completed his military service in South Korea, although their legions of fans around the world will still have to wait at least a year until all seven artists are reunited.

The star, who in December 2022 became the first member of the group to begin 18 months of military service, emerged on Wednesday from the 5th Army Infantry Division’s base in northern Yeoncheon province, 60km north of Seoul, to be greeted by fellow bandmates J-hope, RM, V, Jungkook and Jimin.

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© Photograph: Im Byung-shik/AP

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© Photograph: Im Byung-shik/AP

Hardy shot to fame singing airy, carefree pop before she took control of her career, hung out with 60s rock aristocracy and became a sophisticated singer-songwriter of rare sensuality and melancholy

• Françoise Hardy, French pop singer and fashion muse, dies aged 80

Yé-yé was France’s homegrown response to rock’n’roll: pretty young singers – almost all female – performing a lightweight Francophone adaptation of American music with lyrics about teenage concerns. And at first sight, the 18-year-old Françoise Hardy was the epitome of a yé-yé girl. She was strikingly beautiful (“I was passionately in love with her,” recalled David Bowie decades later, “every male in the world, and a number of females, also were”); she was never off the airwaves of France’s premier yé-yé radio show, Salut les Copains, and never out of the pages of its accompanying magazine. Her first hit was the suitably innocent-sounding Tous les Garçons et les Filles, a wispy take on a rock ‘n’ roll ballad.

But it transpired that Hardy was a different kind of yé-yé girl. For one thing she wrote her own material, like her idol, the black-clad chansonnière Barbara. Eschewing the gauche attempts of France’s professional songwriters to mimic American rock’n’roll or translate its lyrics, 10 of the 12 tracks on her debut album were her own compositions, written with arranger Roger Samyn. This was an extraordinary state of affairs for pop music in 1962: the following year, the Beatles – the band generally credited with cementing the notion that artists could write their own material rather than relying on cover versions – would release their debut album, with just over half its contents penned by Lennon and McCartney.

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© Photograph: Stanley Bielecki/ASP/Getty Images

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© Photograph: Stanley Bielecki/ASP/Getty Images

Singer and actor who wrote some of her country’s biggest pop hits had suffered with lymphatic cancer for many years

• Remembering Françoise Hardy: France’s girlish yé-yé star was a groundbreaking musical artist

Françoise Hardy, whose elegance and beautifully lilting voice made her one of France’s most successful pop stars, has died aged 80.

Her death was reported by her son, the fellow musician Thomas Dutronc, who wrote “Maman est partie,” (or in English, “mum is gone”) on Instagram alongside a baby photo of himself and Hardy.

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© Photograph: GRAGNON Francois/Paris Match via Getty Images

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© Photograph: GRAGNON Francois/Paris Match via Getty Images

Alexander Morris alleges racial discrimination and false imprisonment after being placed into restraining jacket

The lead singer of the Four Tops said a Detroit-area hospital restrained him and ordered a psychological exam after refusing to believe that he was part of the Motown music group.

Alexander Morris, who is Black, filed a lawsuit Monday against Ascension Macomb-Oakland hospital in Warren, alleging racial discrimination and other misconduct during an April 2023 visit for chest pain and breathing problems.

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© Photograph: Amy Harris/Invision/AP

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© Photograph: Amy Harris/Invision/AP

Occasionally, people make music, and then wildly different people cover that music with wildly different sounds and results. I like when this happens. I especially like when it happens without changing the pronouns of the original piece. "Look into his angel eyes..." hits differently when it comes from a sparsely accompanied, gravelly male voice, instead of, ah, ABBA. from Genderswap.fm by Eva Decker

Covers, previously

The dance music legends are preparing their first live shows without their late frontman. They explain why they can’t replace his voice, but can continue his spirit

In 2002 Faithless were granted a sunset slot on Glastonbury’s Pyramid stage, and attracted close to 100,000 people. “England had actually just lost the football, so lifting the crowd took real energy to get people going,” says the band’s Sister Bliss. “It’s a funny coincidence – we’ve played Glastonbury twice before and both times England had lost in a big game.”

The electronic band, then consisting of vocalist Maxi Jazz and production duo Sister Bliss and Rollo, still won the crowd round, thanks in part to two genuine 90s classics: Insomnia and God Is a DJ. The former has frontman Maxi Jazz delivering a monologue racked with anxiety about sleepless nights, but its central line “I can’t get no sleep” became a joyous mantra for nocturnal ravers – and the subsequent synth melody was an instant classic. On 1998’s God Is a DJ, meanwhile, Maxi Jazz delivered a gripping sermon, declaring the club as his church and dance music as offering the same deliverance as religion. Fans duly worshipped them.

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© Photograph: No credit

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© Photograph: No credit

This series is a sometimes frustrating, ultimately illusory fantasy befitting the elusive chanteuse herself

When I was 12 I wrote Mariah Carey a fan letter. She had suffered a very public emotional breakdown (as worded by her team at the time) and I sought to reassure her that her legion of fans, known by the collective noun “Lambily”, had her back. I impressed upon her that the only reason her debut movie, Glitter, had engendered such censorious critical and public wrath was bad timing: it was slated for release the same week as the 9/11 attacks. One day, I insisted, the culture would catch up to her genius. I told her she could call me on my parent’s landline anytime outside school hours and, smearing on some Coca-Cola lip smacker, sealed the letter with a kiss.

Fast forward through the requisite adolescent rejection of girlhood and all its infantile associations, including Carey and her five-octave range, and it turns out I had remarkable foresight. The 90s and 2000s icons – Mariah, Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton – have all re-entered the cultural conversation, and it’s a repentant one in which we’re saying, “Sorry for all the sexism!” Even Glitter went from being much-maligned to a considerable cringey, camp classic.

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© Photograph: Stephanie Keith/Reuters

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© Photograph: Stephanie Keith/Reuters

Disenchanted with Motown, star songwriters Holland-Dozier-Holland set up a pair of bold new labels: Hot Wax and Invictus. As a new box set is released, its artists remember their personal, political songs – and exhausting battles

Motown Records famously churned out songs like cars on an assembly line, and songwriting team Holland-Dozier-Holland (HDH) – brothers Eddie and Brian Holland, and the late Lamont Dozier – built some of the company’s most gleaming, purring models, writing smashes such as Martha Reeves and the Vandellas’ Heat Wave, the Four Tops’ Reach Out I’ll Be There, and 10 of the Supremes’ 12 US chart-toppers. But while HDH’s tenure at Motown is rightly celebrated, their subsequent work has been neglected by comparison, despite being thrillingly soulful, stylistically diverse and sharply political (as captured on a new vinyl box set).

HDH’s time at Motown ended badly. Around 1967, their attempts to renegotiate their years-old contracts on more equitable terms were repeatedly rebuffed by Motown patriarch Berry Gordy. Dozier writes in his autobiography that HDH then decided to “essentially go on strike” and “stop turning in songs” in protest.

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© Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

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© Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

A two-part docuseries looks back at the history of piracy and how the music industry found itself in such a precarious place

Back in the 90s, when Stephen Witt was attending the University of Chicago, he stumbled on to something many kids did at the time. “One day, I turned on the computer, went into a chat channel and discovered all this music out there ready to be downloaded,” he said. “I never once asked myself: ‘Is this a good thing or a bad thing for me to do?’ It was free music!”

Today, everyone knows just how bad a thing that turned out to be for the music industry, nearly destroying it by the early 2000s. What most people don’t know, however, is the story behind the people who created the technology that made this revolution possible, as well as the group of kids who first figured out how to use its tools so enticingly. That’s the tale told by a thought-provoking and highly entertaining new docuseries titled How Music Got Free.

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© Photograph: Paramount+

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© Photograph: Paramount+

Sixty years since the Fab Four arrived to mass hysteria, a new book captures the thousands who lined up for a glimpse, the moral panic and resulting generation gap

It was exactly 60 years ago that the Beatles arrived in Australia. For those of us who weren’t there – perhaps even those lucky enough to see Taylor Swift’s Eras tour – it’s hard to fathom the level of hysteria that accompanied their 1964 tour: in Adelaide 300,000 people lined the streets to welcome the band on 12 June – the largest crowd ever to greet the Fab Four.

Like Swift, seemingly every waking moment of the Beatles’ tour was dissected; editors were savvy enough to know just mentioning their name was a way of increasing circulation. Now that historic fortnight in Australia and New Zealand has been exhaustively documented in a new book by Greg Armstrong and Andy Neill, When We Was Fab.

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© Photograph: Andy Neill and Greg Armstrong

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© Photograph: Andy Neill and Greg Armstrong