Rachel Walsh responds to an article by Georgina Elliott in which she describes the comfort she felt sitting alone in the cinema after losing her brother

I could relate to Georgina Elliott’s finding comfort and relief in the dark at the cinema (The one change that worked: numb with grief, I sat in the dark, surrounded by strangers – and began to heal, 12 October). After my mum died, I felt like a balloon floating further and further from my life, incorporeal and ghostly.

The cinema was a world within the world to live someone else’s life, experience their triumphs and adventures, and escape the sharpness of my own painful reality.

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© Photograph: SolStock/Getty Images

© Photograph: SolStock/Getty Images

© Photograph: SolStock/Getty Images

The second – the ‘Resurrection’ – was the first Mahler symphony ever to be recorded, and it is still today an essential work in any conductor’s catalogue. But with hundreds of recordings, from Ormandy to Bernstein and Rattle, which does our reviewer recommend?

Is it something in the water? Or is it simply that triumph over adversity sells in today’s uncertain world? Whatever the reason, Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony has already received four major UK performances this year: a season finale for the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester, a season opener for both the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra, and an 80th season celebratory concert for the Philharmonia Orchestra in London. Next month the London City Orchestra perform it in Croydon’s Fairfield Halls.

On disc, the field of Mahler 2s is even more crowded. Apple Music Classical currently throws up 222 listings; Presto Music’s search engine returns 260 results, many of them complete recordings to download or buy on CD or vinyl (some of these, of course, are reissues of recognised classic accounts).

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© Photograph: Mark Allan

© Photograph: Mark Allan

© Photograph: Mark Allan

Singer ‘mortified’ about wearing diamonds from Argyle mine at centre of environmental concerns about Indigenous land

The singer Ellie Goulding has admitted her error at having promoted diamonds at the centre of environmental concerns about Indigenous land in Australia, despite having spent years campaigning on environmental issues – including the effects of mining on ancestral lands.

She appeared at a event in London earlier this month for the jewellery brand Boodles, modelling some of its newly acquired pink diamonds, some of which came from a controversial mine in Western Australia.

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© Photograph: Dave Benett/Getty Images for Boodles

© Photograph: Dave Benett/Getty Images for Boodles

© Photograph: Dave Benett/Getty Images for Boodles

Barbican Hall, London
The London Symphony Orchestra opened their Barbican season with Mahler’s epic Resurrection Symphony, preceded by the UK premiere of Dai Fujikura’s engaging and intricate Amber Alchemy

There have been a fair few Resurrection Symphonies this year, and a positive glut on disc, but Antonio Pappano has form with Mahler and the London Symphony Orchestra can be relied upon to follow where he leads. First, though, the UK premiere of a new work by Dai Fujikura that had precisely nothing to do with the main event but was no less interesting for that.

Amber Alchemy, commissioned to celebrate the centenary of Nomura Holdings, was inspired by the beehives atop the Japanese financial company’s London offices. In his programme note, the composer expressed his intention to evoke rather than illustrate, yet it was hard to ignore the orchestral buzz that underpinned much of this engaging 10-minute work. Quivering strings and a shimmer of vibraphones opened proceedings with striking instrumental gestures trailing off in flickering diminuendos. Pappano and the LSO brought a commendable clarity to Fujikura’s intricately interwoven lines, contrasting the music’s romantic outward sweep with its apian inner restlessness.

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© Photograph: Mark Allan

© Photograph: Mark Allan

© Photograph: Mark Allan

He gave Jimi Hendrix his gear, freaked out Frank Sinatra, inspired Norman Mailer – and tried to topple the American war machine. As a documentary about his band the Fugs comes out, the 87-year-old gives a rare interview

“Charles Manson once wrote me a letter saying, ‘If I was as powerful as you claim then you wouldn’t be here,’” Ed Sanders tells me over a video call, savouring the menace in that sentence.

Sanders is an American maverick; a musician, poet, activist, journalist and author whose greatest hit remains his bestselling 1971 book The Family, in which he chronicled the lives, crimes and trials of Manson and his followers. Sanders was well placed to report on crazed hippies, having played a pivotal role in launching the US counterculture – though he very much espoused peace, love and consciousness-raising, rather than Manson’s apocalyptic worldview.

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© Photograph: Stephen Chernin/AP

© Photograph: Stephen Chernin/AP

© Photograph: Stephen Chernin/AP

(Polydor)
Its release delayed by ill health, Kiwanuka’s latest was made in tandem with 2024’s Small Changes – but it’s much more than a mere companion album

In November 2024, Michael Kiwanuka released his fourth album, Small Changes, an extremely poised and self-assured piece of work. After three gold albums, a Grammy nomination, a Mercury prize win and the ongoing success of Cold Little Heart, a 2017 single hoisted to virality and million-selling status in the US after its use in TV drama Big Little Lies, Kiwanuka – and his long-term production collaborators Danger Mouse and Inflo – evidently felt confident enough to release a beautiful but wilfully understated album. Recorded in LA, some impressive names lurked in the credits: legendary session musicians including bassist Pino Palladino and the drummer James Gadson, who played on Marvin Gaye’s I Want You and Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly; the similarly legendary R&B producer Jimmy Jam served as organist on three tracks. It attracted the kind of critical praise in which adjectives like “unhurried” and “meditative” figured heavily.

But it also wasn’t the whole story. It turned out there was a second album, its songs written – or rather, jammed into existence by Kiwanuka and members of his live band – concurrently with Small Changes. It was made not in LA but in a studio that “looks like a medieval hut” in Southampton. August session musicians and legendary R&B producers were not present during its recording, nor were Danger Mouse and Inflo. Indeed, you could read its opening track, Summer Clothes, as a kind of Dear John letter to both of them (“I’m OK, I found another way … we’ll be back here soon, just not today”).

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© Photograph: Jodie Canwell

© Photograph: Jodie Canwell

© Photograph: Jodie Canwell

Of the dozens of countries approached to water down their laws, Australia appears to be the only one considering it, publishers’ group says

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AI has already been trained on the works of Australian artists including Kylie Minogue and Nick Cave without compensation, the peak global body for music rights has claimed, as the Australian government has been warned against giving in to “strong-arming” from tech companies seeking to weaken copyright law.

The International Confederation of Music Publishers (ICMP) – which represents Sony, Warner and Universal as well as thousands of independent publishers on six continents – has warned that of the dozens of countries approached to water down copyright laws, Australia appears to be the only to consider doing so.

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© Photograph: Dave Tonge/Getty Images

© Photograph: Dave Tonge/Getty Images

© Photograph: Dave Tonge/Getty Images

Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool
Mark Simpson delivers gauzy luminosity and punchy tone in Gavin Higgins’s exquisite new work, conducted with spellbinding pacing by rising star Adam Hickox alongside spirited accounts of Britten and Stravinsky

Twenty years ago, a teenager called Mark Simpson won both the BBC Young Musician of the Year and BBC Proms/Guardian Young Composer of the Year; he commissioned a short piece for clarinet from Gavin Higgins, another young composer. It was Higgins’s first paid work and he promised to thank Simpson by writing him a clarinet concerto. Fast forward two decades: both men have forged award-studded careers, Simpson continues to combine composition and performance – and Higgins has finally delivered that concerto.

Marking the end of Simpson’s tenure as the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra’s artist in residence, its premiere featured the kind of intense splashes of musical colour that leave an afterimage. Climaxes came in slow-burn waves and paroxysms of frenetic activity. Simpson’s solo line – sometimes keening, expressive vocalise; sometimes a wild assemblage of rapid blips and riffs – weaved through the shifting orchestral textures, here haloed by muted brass, there soaring over a low hum of gong and double bass. In one exquisite passage, Simpson’s clarinet was a fine, luminous gauze. Elsewhere he punched through the vast orchestral surge through sheer focus of tone. Certain passages seemed haunted by John Adams at his most maximalist, others by Aaron Copland’s celebrated clarinet concerto. But Simpson inhabited the score as a work made to measure, the physicality of this virtuoso performance unmistakable as soloist and orchestra hurtled ecstatically to its close.

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© Photograph: Gareth Jones

© Photograph: Gareth Jones

© Photograph: Gareth Jones

Linbury theatre, London
Six fearless singers and the Chroma Ensemble, conducted with arresting immediacy by Naomi Woo, rise to the challenge of the brutal musical onslaughts and anarchic orchestrations of Philip Venables’ raw, imaginative score

Sarah Kane revolutionised British theatre with five provocative plays written between 1995 and 1999. Her final work, 4.48 Psychosis, was her most personal, confronting the clinical depression she struggled with for years. The play was first performed posthumously in 2000, after she died by suicide in 1999.

The Royal Opera and Guildhall School of Music and Drama commissioned Philip Venables to adapt the play as an opera, which debuted in 2016. The composer, also known for a certain “in-yer-face” approach, set Kane’s original text almost entirely, realising its 24 disjointed sections in a raw, imaginative score teeming with minimalist licks, prickly synth-pop and consoling nods to the baroque. The libretto shifts between poetic abstraction and scathing exchanges between a patient and a psychologist. An ensemble of six female singers navigates themes of depression, isolation and the agonising choices surrounding medication.

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© Photograph: Tristram Kenton/the Guardian

© Photograph: Tristram Kenton/the Guardian

© Photograph: Tristram Kenton/the Guardian

Hackney Empire, London
Jessica Cale’s soprano is diamond-bright in Elena Langer and Glyn Maxwell’s captivating monologue, while Rebecca Meltzer creates a compelling schoolyard staging of Purcell

English Touring Opera’s autumn season has a mythological theme – which, in practice, means operas about women getting left behind. Touring alongside Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice is this compact double bill, pairing Dido and Aeneas with Elena Langer’s Ariadne, a 20-minute scene for soprano setting words by Glyn Maxwell, which was premiered by Almeida Opera in 2002.

Langer’s mini-opera is essentially a monologue, sung persuasively here by Jessica Cale, her powerful soprano diamond-bright. Anna Morrissey’s production, though, has six people on stage: abandonment feels like something active as well as passive. It begins with Theseus leaving, disentangling himself from both the sleeping Ariadne and the red thread that links them, spooling from a heap on the floor – it’s as if he got back from the labyrinth the night before. When Ariadne wakes he’s still there, pacing in the shadows or turning her bed on its rotating platform.

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© Photograph: Richard Hubert Smith

© Photograph: Richard Hubert Smith

© Photograph: Richard Hubert Smith

Style of emceeing based on high-octane, ad-libbed vocals has flourished thanks to its unique way of captivating crowds

For the 2015 freshmen cohort of the history degree programme at the University of Lagos, their classmate’s first-semester presentation was so captivating that they began calling him Toby Shang, after the 16th-century Chinese dynasty he had focused on.

His crowd engagement that day had been harnessed from his high school days as a ginger-man (energiser) in a three-man band and as a private tutor. By his final year at university, his viral catchphrases and infectious energy had resulted in a hit song, Shedibalabala. Today, he is one of the self-acclaimed “evangelists and pioneers” in the Afrobeats sub-genre some are now calling Afrohype or lamba.

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© Photograph: Sogo Oladele/The Guardian

© Photograph: Sogo Oladele/The Guardian

© Photograph: Sogo Oladele/The Guardian

The singer-songwriter gets a lift from U2 and likes to reminisce to Bette Midler, but which cheesy Euro banger does she secretly like?

The first song I fell in love with
When I was five or six, my mum wouldn’t let me listen to anything other than Christian gospel. Her friend Jane felt sorry for me and brought me a cassette with Whitney Houston on one side and Cher on the other. My ears couldn’t believe what they were hearing. I Will Always Love You made me think: This is what I’m going to do.

The first single I bought
So Young by the Corrs, from Sainsbury’s in Woolton Village in Liverpool. I couldn’t really afford music as a kid, so buying a record was a big deal. I’d heard the Corrs on the radio, liked their voices and thought: I’m buying this.

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© Photograph: -

© Photograph: -

© Photograph: -

A daring, rich and funny study of the ordeal of having to invent and reinvent your own teenage sense of self amid confounding changes

Carol Morley’s self-portrait of the artist as a young woman is rich, tender and terribly funny and sad: a study in the chaos of being young and a triptych of childhood, girlhood and youth, with some daring touches of Terence Davies. It is about the ordeal of having to invent and reinvent your own teenage sense of self, even as the things you thought permanent suddenly collapse – including the background stability of your poor old mum and dad. And it’s also about the untold, unacknowledged story of sadness that lay behind the angry blaze of punk and new wave. Watching this I thought of something I’d assumed lost for ever: my own feelings, aged 17, on hearing Buzzcocks’ Sixteen: “… I wish I was 16 again / Then things would be such fun / All the things I’d do would be the same / But they’re much more fun / Than when you’re 21.” Could it be, I thought, that I’m already sad about not being 16?

7 Miles Out is based on Morley’s autobiographical novel of the same title, the once-upon-a-time-in-Stockport story of Ann, played with charm and zing by Lucy Halliday, and as a sweetly innocent young girl by Amelie Hughes. Young Ann pretends to be making a radio programme with her cassette recorder the way so many did in the 1970s, and hero-worships her would-be rock journalist elder brother Scott (Kasper Hilton-Hille) – based on Morley’s brother Paul – who is already plugged into the burgeoning post-punk and new wave scene.

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© Photograph: Cannon and Morley Productions

© Photograph: Cannon and Morley Productions

© Photograph: Cannon and Morley Productions

In this week’s newsletter: Record labels always push music forward into interesting new places. Here’s a celebration of their power by readers and Guardian music writers

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Last week we asked Guide subscribers to tell us about their favourite record labels, and the response was enthusiastic. Clearly, even in this age of streaming services that flatten albums, singles, EPs and mixtapes into one single “feed”, the lure of a label – and its role in identifying, nurturing and developing musical talents – remains.

So this week, a celebration of the record label: along with some readers’ favourites, we’ve asked music writers to share their personal picks. They’ve put together a great list of familiar and off-the-beaten-track labels that might just help you discover your next favourite album (I can already tell I’ll be spinning the Verlaines record recommended by reader James a fair bit!).

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© Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

© Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

© Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

David Tennant wows in the third series of Jimmy McGovern’s harrowing prison drama, and the Dublin band are back with a beguiling fifth album. Here’s the pick of the week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews

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© Composite: Ewen Spencer

© Composite: Ewen Spencer

© Composite: Ewen Spencer

A social media star comes a cropper in timely horror, and the Spice Girls ledge takes her disco- and indie-tinged bops out on a short tour

The Influencer Project
Out now
When your career involves constantly posting footage of everything you do to social media, it makes things a cakewalk for stalkers. And lo, the influencer-in-peril horror subgenre was born. British social media star Chiara King plays herself in this chilling iteration, set in Copenhagen.

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© Composite: -

© Composite: -

© Composite: -

Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Fazil Say
(Alpha)
Compositions by both musicians themselves frame works by Szymanowski and Prokofiev

Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Fazil Say have recorded Say’s music together before, but this is their first recording to feature Kopatchinskaja as a composer as well, but this is no vanity project: Say’s and Kopatchinskaja’s pieces make good complements to Szymanowski’s three Mythes and Prokofiev’s Violin Sonata No 1.

Say’s Lost Screams Sonata is driven by repeated piano rhythms, its fierceness tempered by an episode in which Kopatchinskaja plays low, ghostly harmonics and Say gently plucks the strings of the piano so it almost sounds like a second violin. Kopatchinskaja’s three-movement piece UniSolo is an impish work with a searching, thoughtful playfulness that comes from the parallel world to the Kurtág miniatures she plays so well.

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© Photograph: borggreve/Courtesy of Marco Borggreve

© Photograph: borggreve/Courtesy of Marco Borggreve

© Photograph: borggreve/Courtesy of Marco Borggreve

Kali Flanagan was handpicked by Julian Casablancas to support the Strokes – now, at 21, he’s writing songs full of the rushing emotions of youth

From New York
Recommended if you like Cameron Winter, Adrianne Lenker, Alex G
Up next My Piledriver Heart album out now; UK tour beginning 4 November

Making coming-of-age music as a young person can feel strange after a pandemic. So here are a few more curveballs. Imagine the breezy, youthful indie you post online in your early teens gets you a record deal. Covid happens. You move to New York, change your artist name, and then Julian Casablancas eyes you at an open mic and invites you to open for the Strokes in Colorado, aged 18, solo.

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© Photograph: Courtesy of Grace Anthony Schmidt

© Photograph: Courtesy of Grace Anthony Schmidt

© Photograph: Courtesy of Grace Anthony Schmidt

Once scrappy post-punk poets, they’re now one of the biggest bands in the world. As they release new album Dopamine Chamber, fans including Kneecap and Shame explain their sensational rise

When Irish rockers Fontaines DC emerged in 2019, they were a bunch of post-punk poets making abrasive guitar music at a time when Dance Monkey, Drake and The Greatest Showman reigned supreme. But today, as their fifth album Dopamine Chamber is released, the quintet are looking towards a 2027 filled with gigs in UK stadiums, US arenas and headline slots at big European festivals – plus rumours of topping Glastonbury’s Pyramid stage. It’s quite a trajectory.

Their rise has been strangely traditional for a time when social media has culture in a chokehold. Ever more ambitious albums, the support of radio and institutions such as the BBC, and a lot of touring have all played parts. Beyond that, “fact is, they’re one of the best bands in the world,” says fellow countryman Mo Chara, one third of Kneecap.

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© Photograph: Ewen Spencer

© Photograph: Ewen Spencer

© Photograph: Ewen Spencer

Singer and TV presenter who had a UK No 1 hit in 1979 with One Day at a Time

The singer Lena Martell, who has died aged 86, enjoyed a career that took her from dance halls in her native Scotland to cabaret in London and stages in Las Vegas and Australia. She performed on the same bill as Sammy Davis Jr and had her own shows on BBC television.

On record, she was a one-hit wonder in Britain with One Day at a Time, a song written by Marijohn Wilkin and Kris Kristoffersonthat mixed country and gospel. “Lord, for my sake, teach me to take one day at a time,” she sang.

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© Photograph: Dezo Hoffman/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Dezo Hoffman/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Dezo Hoffman/Shutterstock

The lore of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, once bought by Martin Shkreli, is explored in a rambling film produced by RZA

For every reason except one, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, the seventh album by the Wu-Tang Clan, should’ve been a commercial hit. The 31-track double album, recorded in secret between 2007 and 2013, reunited all of the remaining members of the hallowed Staten Island rap crew and featured eye-catching collaborators from the standard (Redman, offshoot group Wu-Tang Killa Bees) to the unexpected (Cher, Game of Thrones actor Carice van Houten). The sound, at least according to those involved, harkened back to the glory days of the group’s beginnings in the 90s.

But for years, almost no one heard it. The group only issued a single copy of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin – on CD, ensconced within layers of filigreed silver – with the stipulation, in legalese, that it could not be used for any commercial purposes for 88 years. The decree, either a stunt or a bold artistic statement on streaming’s devaluation of music, depending on your generosity and perhaps your net worth, succeeded in drumming up plenty of hype. And if you were anywhere around the blogosphere or cable news in 2015, you may recall that the beneficiary of that hype – the purchaser and thus single intended listener of this $2m musical treasure – was one Martin Shkreli, the “pharma bro” widely despised for gleefully hiking the costs of prescription drugs for profit.

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© Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix

© Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix

© Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix

(WPDMT)
Bringing back the hyperliterate sound design of their acclaimed 2025 debut, the London duo explore childhood with whimsical humour and terrific musicality

One of last year’s surprise highlights was The Velvet Underground & Rowan, the debut album by the wacky, hyperliterate London duo Worldpeace DMT. That irreverent album title summed up their approach to their references: Leo Fincham and Rowan Miles – also of the Femcels – buttressed nods to Fleetwood Mac and the Beach Boys with a palette straight out of NME circa 2011. If it isn’t a coup to make the sound of Grouplove and Darwin Deez sound cool and urbane in 2025, I don’t know what is.

This year, Worldpeace DMT have changed tack, perhaps in response to suggestions that they’re at the forefront of an emergent genre called “laptop twee”. The duo’s August mixtape Flowers Powers mostly eschewed plunderphonics and heavy sampling in favour of live instrumentation that ran the gamut from Spiritualized to outlaw country; Stick Around for Tea, their second album, brings back a shade of the goofy, Sung Tongs-esque sound design that made their debut such a joy, while pulling Fincham and Miles’ songwriting to the fore.

Stick Around for Tea seems, loosely, to be a concept album about childhood. The inherent whimsy of the Worldpeace DMT project suits these songs, which wring dry humour from lyrics about spiders, tigers and anthropomorphised guitars. Fincham and Miles sing in a self-consciously childish way that belies their taut musicality: a lush, almost Van Dyke Parks jauntiness on Munich Gyaru, for example, or a knack for bulletproof pop structure on the title track. The result is the kind of devastatingly contemporary record that even arch classicists couldn’t possibly turn up their noses at.

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© Photograph: Thomas Connolly

© Photograph: Thomas Connolly

© Photograph: Thomas Connolly

Adored by Madonna and Charli xcx and buoyed by finding true love, the Londoner is branching out into rock and breaking the mainstream. She explains how her working class upbringing made her so fearless

Leaving the important stuff to chance isn’t Shygirl’s style. First aid kit, wind-up radio, batteries: earlier this morning, the singer filled her online shopping basket in preparation for impending disaster. She had read a news article advising households to put together an emergency kit. “I’m that kind of person,” she says, grinning. She woke her boyfriend, who was asleep in bed next to her. “I was like: babe, we’re sorted! I’ve got the water purifying tablets, everything!”

It’s a sticky September afternoon in east London, and the singer, whose real name is Blane Muise, introduces herself as “Shy” and slides into the booth opposite me at an Italian trattoria. She first burst on to the club scene with the naughty, pulsating Want More in 2016, and in the decade since, the singer, rapper and DJ has applied the same rigour to her career as she has to her emergency prepping, going from cult underground artist to rising pop star, opening arenas for Beyoncé and Charli xcx, winning a Mobo award in 2024, and appearing in Madonna’s recent Confessions II – The Film, in which she shared a toilet stall with Arca and Richard E Grant.

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© Photograph: Jessica Madavo

© Photograph: Jessica Madavo

© Photograph: Jessica Madavo

Genuine human creativity takes time, but you know what doesn't? AI slop. There are countless AI models out there that can make something that passes for music, and you might come across those tracks on streaming services without realizing it. Google says it will begin labeling that content in YouTube Music, building on similar disclosures in the main YouTube app.

Google is not outright banning AI music or even speaking ill of it. "Generative AI is opening up new ways for artists to create, experiment, and share music," the company says in a blog post.

However, the company also acknowledges that people want to know if a song was created with generative AI tools. A new label for AI content on YouTube Music is now rolling out in the app and on the website, which looks a lot like a label Google began adding to AI-generated videos on YouTube earlier this year.

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© Google

Musician Hannah Lew has a song out (I think new this year) called "Sunday". Music video. Found via an episode of KEXP's The Runcast which features a live version. Synthpop, melancholy but (to me) inspiring.

Bertrand Chamayou
(Warner Classics)
The pianist brings a singing quality and seeming effortlessness to the complete set of Songs Without Words

Mendelssohn wrote 48 Songs Without Words for solo piano: eight sets of six, mostly under three minutes long, emerging over a 16-year period that spanned most of his short adult life. The handful that still regularly make their way on to recital programmes are only the tip of the iceberg; the complete set hasn’t been recorded as much as you might think, which makes this new release from Bertrand Chamayou still more welcome.

These pieces belong to the world of Schubert Lieder, and Chamayou brings a singing quality to them from the off. The Duetto that rounds off the Op 38 set is beautifully done, the melodic lines alternating like a female and male voice, each lingering just slightly as the other voice takes over. Compared to other interpreters, Chamayou is often softer-edged, his playing a little smoother and more flowing, although there are exceptions: Op 62 No 6 – known as Spring Song, but originally titled Camberwell Green after the then-elegant London suburb where it was written – is given a perky, almost frothy touch in the accompaniment: spring bubbling under like frogspawn in a pond.

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© Photograph: Le Philtre / Parlophone Records Ltd 2026

© Photograph: Le Philtre / Parlophone Records Ltd 2026

© Photograph: Le Philtre / Parlophone Records Ltd 2026

You’re Paul McCartney. So how come you’re still getting het up at a fictional version of you being marginally smaller than a fictional version of John Lennon?

There has been a lot of discourse and conjecture surrounding Sam Mendes’s forthcoming Beatles biopics. Some of this is logical (will people really turn out to see four near-identical films on the same day?), some creative (what animal did they have to shave to make John Lennon’s Abbey Road beard?). At every turn the film has been examined and factchecked and cross-referenced against testimonies from the band’s actual hairdresser.

But until now the remaining Beatles have managed to keep fairly quiet about the whole thing. Last year Ringo Starr mentioned that he’d sat down with Mendes to rework a scene he wasn’t happy with, and Paul McCartney has praised the guitar playing of Paul Mescal, but it appeared that no real red lines had been crossed. Until now.

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© Photograph: John Russo/REX/Shutterstock

© Photograph: John Russo/REX/Shutterstock

© Photograph: John Russo/REX/Shutterstock

As he releases new album Hippies, Thugs and Heroes, the 77-year-old British folk legend answers your questions about Billy Connolly, Californian fish and chips and whether he nearly joined the Eagles

Billy Connolly recalled being in a room with you, Sandy Denny, Nick Drake and John Martyn. Did you feel you were collectively doing something special? poscopy
That might have been at the Royal Festival Hall [in 1969], where Fairport Convention had Nick and John as openers and Billy must have been backstage. He’d have been in the Humblebums with Gerry Rafferty, before he evolved from a banjo player who told jokes into a comedian who played a bit of banjo. He was always a fantastic bloke and we’ve been friends for a long time.

There was a great camaraderie between the stable of acts Joe Boyd produced: Fairport, the Incredible String Band, John Martyn, Chris McGregor. We felt different, not special, and didn’t feel successful because we weren’t. None of these people really sold many records in their lifetimes, but people are still discovering them now. This album is my latest attempt to sell some units.

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© Photograph: Paul Clampin

© Photograph: Paul Clampin

© Photograph: Paul Clampin

(RCA)
Massive in her home nation but less so outside, Angèle is aided by Justice, Soulwax and Caroline Polachek in ​a bold bid for broader appeal – but her resultant album ​can be generic as well as daring

As has often been pointed out, we live in an era where the traditional Anglo-American stranglehold over pop has been broken. Partly because streaming has presented listeners with a far broader choice of music than would once have been imaginable, and partly as a result of social media accounts doing the promotional departments’ job for them, the charts are now as likely to include music made in Seoul or Lagos as London or LA. Spurs’ 62,000-capacity stadium has recently hosted not just Jay-Z, Gorillaz and System of a Down, but India’s Arijit Singh, South Korea’s BTS, BigBang and Stray Kids, and Puerto Rico’s Bad Bunny, who addressed the crowd almost exclusively in Spanish.

Clearly, British audiences’ disinclination to be welded to English-speaking artists is a cheering thing. Equally clearly, there seem to be limits: the same interest hasn’t been afforded Francophone pop. The biggest French-speaking stars in recent memory have either dealt in dance music or acquiesced to recording in English. Belgian rapper Stromae has attracted media interest and co-signs from Kanye West and Lorde without ever progressing beyond cult status in the UK.

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© Photograph: Kenza Le Bas

© Photograph: Kenza Le Bas

© Photograph: Kenza Le Bas

The Back to Black singer’s books, shoes and jigsaw puzzles have gone on display. Elsewhere, a leaky Barbican and some gloriously gloopy sculptures can be viewed in London galleries this week

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© Photograph: Eva Herzog/Courtesy the artist and the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation

© Photograph: Eva Herzog/Courtesy the artist and the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation

© Photograph: Eva Herzog/Courtesy the artist and the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation

What is it about music that makes even non-professionals want to hit the dancefloor, and is it disco, funk or even classical that does it best? Four leading choreographers discuss their theories, with the science to back them up

‘I don’t know what it is about house music that makes me move, but I just can’t help it,” says Faye Stoeser. “And I don’t care what I look like. I just go for it.” “If a Missy [Elliott] track comes on, that’s me, I’m in the zone,” says Dannielle “Rhimes” Lecointe. “With hip-hop it’s something deep within the gut that makes you want to move. It has so many rhythms to it – a heartbeat, a pulse, a ricochet – that you feel in so many different places of your body.”

What is the best music to dance to? Is it house music, it is hip-hop, is it disco or funk? Stoeser and Lecointe should have some insight since, as performers and choreographers, dancing is what they do for a living. When it comes to popular floorfillers, the DJ Intelligence platform found the most-requested track from UK DJs last year was Whitney Houston’s I Wanna Dance With Somebody (with Abba’s Dancing Queen second, and Mr Brightside by the Killers third). In the US, Billboard’s top wedding song is Uptown Funk by Mark Ronson featuring Bruno Mars. A 2013 Mixmag poll named Daft Punk’s One More Time as the ultimate dance track, whereas Radio 2 listeners in 2008 voted for Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean.

But what about those for whom dancing is more than recreation? When it comes to dance on stage, there is plenty that isn’t driven by music at all. Back in the 1940s, the US choreographer Merce Cunningham began to disconnect dance and music in his collaborations with the composer John Cage, rehearsing the dancers in silence. Some choreographers use music to create dance in the studio that is totally different from what they’ll perform to on stage. Dance that’s focused on musical connection definitely went out of fashion for a while, but there are a bunch of shows coming up where music is the absolute driving force.

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© Photograph: Deborah Jaffe

© Photograph: Deborah Jaffe

© Photograph: Deborah Jaffe

Rapper to visit Lincolnshire town 16 years after saying he had never been there in his hit Pass Out

The rapper Tinie Tempah has said he will finally visit Scunthorpe – 16 years after he announced to the world that he had never been to the town in his number one hit Pass Out.

His decision follows a campaign by fans, led by Ben Johns, a Scunthorpe resident, who carried a cardboard cutout of the artist around the Lincolnshire town and encouraged people to pre-save Tempah’s new album.

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© Photograph: Marco Grey/PA

© Photograph: Marco Grey/PA

© Photograph: Marco Grey/PA

Utilita Arena, Birmingham
The opening night of Wonder’s tour marking the 50th anniversary of Songs in the Key of Life leaves jaws on the floor, thanks to sumptuous tracks carrying still-urgent messages

Seated amid a bank of keyboards, Stevie Wonder addresses the audience at the first date of his tour celebrating the 50th anniversary of Songs in the Key of Life, his most celebrated album. He says playing it in full like this was a longstanding ambition: the issue was that it needed so many people to bring it to fruition. He actually fulfilled that ambition a decade ago in North American arenas in 2014 and 2015, gigs from which the 50th anniversary shows take their cue – complete with Superstition added as an encore – but that said, you have to take his point about the number of people involved.

There really are a lot of musicians up there: three percussionists, a string section, five brass players, six backing vocalists, two guitarists, three keyboard players, including Wonder himself, who variously plays a bank of synthesisers both vintage and modern, a grand piano, an upright tack piano and, on Ngiculela/Es Una Historia/I Am Singing, a bizarre stringed instrument called a harpejji that wasn’t actually invented when Stevie Wonder last released an album, let alone when Songs in the Key of Life was made. Harpejii or not, that very much counts as scaling things down dramatically compared to the album’s actual sessions. Made by a man who could pretty much do everything himself, its recording nevertheless involved 108 musicians: eight people are credited for handclaps.

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© Photograph: Katja Ogrin/Getty Images for ABA

© Photograph: Katja Ogrin/Getty Images for ABA

© Photograph: Katja Ogrin/Getty Images for ABA

Corn Exchange, Edinburgh
Irish six-piece embark on their biggest tour yet, turning grisly old stories into a knees-up with politically astute, spit-and-sawdust energy

It’s not often you see crowd surfing during folk songs, let alone songs about murderers-for-hire who targeted priests in the early 1700s. But so it is at a Mary Wallopers show, the Irish trad group with a passionate following for their rowdy folk ragers.

Legs and pints go flying as the six-piece, playing banjo and tin whistle, set about Seán na Sagart, a new track which turns a grisly old story into a knees-up. By its breathless conclusion, the hitman is dead and his victims and clients alike get it in the neck from the band. Singer Charles Hendy grins, savouring the punchline: “You can’t trust the clergy with their holy little bits / And ya won’t be thanked by any god for workin’ with the Brits.”

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© Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

© Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

© Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

Holywell Music Room, Oxford
A perfect example of the Oxford International Song festival’s creative programming, Benjamin Appl’s unforced but focused recital was full of profoundly beautiful music

Over 25 years, the Oxford International Song festival has adopted a creative approach to programming. Benjamin Appl’s pairing of Schubert lieder with spiny miniatures by György Kurtág was a perfect example. Your Schubert crowd isn’t necessarily your Kurtág crew, and yet the 280-year-old Holywell Music Room was packed to the rafters.

Ellen Mawhinney and Daniel Silcock, one of the festival’s Young Artist duos, kicked things off with an aquatic-themed recital that showed off Mawhinney’s powerful soprano and Silcock’s poetic instincts at the piano. From the inspiriting Scottish ballad Kishmul’s Galley to Hamilton Harty’s impassioned Sea Wrack, their smartly curated 15 minutes paved the way for Appl and James Baillieu’s equally satisfying programme, Lines of Life.

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© Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Guardian

© Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Guardian

© Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Guardian

Canada-born singer-songwriter, 82, posts footage of citizenship ceremony to Instagram

Joni Mitchell has become a US citizen, after first moving to the country in the mid-1960s. The Canada-born singer-songwriter, 82, posted footage of her citizenship ceremony on her Instagram account, along with a photo of her next to an American flag, accompanied by the caption: “A journey that began 62 years ago.”

It means that Mitchell can now vote in US elections, something that she had complained she wasn’t able to do.

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© Photograph: Instagram

© Photograph: Instagram

© Photograph: Instagram

A decade after the premiere of his work setting Kane’s hard-hitting play, it’s returning to the Royal Opera House. The composer remembers its fevered beginnings, the sweat and tears shed along the way, and how it changed his life forever

In January 2015, I was on an overnight flight coming back from New York, having attended Prototype, a festival of new opera. I didn’t sleep a wink, but worked without stopping in a packed, dark, sleepy cabin, reading and annotating a book and furiously making notes on my laptop. As if in a fever dream, my mind whirled with text, music, dramaturgy, theatre.

Those six nocturnal hours were some of the most creatively fertile of my life. The book was 4.48 Psychosis; the annotations became the blueprint for an opera. Sarah Kane’s text had unlocked something in me, a fervour, a deluge of ideas. I could barely keep up, noting every impulse, every fantasy, as my mind pinballed around.

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© Photograph: © ROH/Stephen Cummiskey

© Photograph: © ROH/Stephen Cummiskey

© Photograph: © ROH/Stephen Cummiskey

Exclusive: Investigation finds racial inequality in live music industry rife and many genres labelled ‘high risk’ despite lack of evidence

Black and south Asian music events in London face disproportionate cancellations, restrictions and licensing barriers compared with white events, according to a two-year investigation into racial inequality in the capital’s live music industry.

The Race Equality in Music Event Licensing (REMEL) report, led by Black Lives in Music, estimates that cancellations, displacement and events prevented from taking place cost London £127m to £141m annually, with projected losses exceeding £650m over five years.

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© Photograph: Kingsley Davis/Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy Live News.

© Photograph: Kingsley Davis/Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy Live News.

© Photograph: Kingsley Davis/Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy Live News.

Spandau Ballet’s Gary Kemp paid £10k at auction for Epstein’s address book. He then used it to co-author a thrilling account of the swinging 60s – and an intimate portrait of a tormented man whose life was unravelling

The email from Sotheby’s might easily have gone unread. Despite his deep appreciation for the musical heroes who came before him, Gary Kemp is not a collector of rock memorabilia. But there, among the auction lots, was something that caught his eye: a 160x100mm black Twinlock binder that once belonged to the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein.

The listing detailed 57 pages containing 404 entries, many handwritten by Epstein himself, cataloguing the social and business network of the Liverpudlian impresario in 1967, the year of his death. Kemp immediately recognised this was much more than simply an address book: it was a who’s who of 60s London at its swinging peak, from David Bailey and David Frost to most of the Rolling Stones. “I just thought, ‘I’ve got to have this. I’ve got to hold it,’” he says. “It’s got DNA on it.”

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© Photograph: John Rodgers/Redferns

© Photograph: John Rodgers/Redferns

© Photograph: John Rodgers/Redferns

‘You don’t get to take a man from his family … and just walk away from it,’ judge says as former gang leader sentenced

• Tupac trial spotlights decades of US police failures in solving the case

Duane “Keffe D” Davis, the former California gang leader convicted of murder for orchestrating the 1996 fatal shooting of rapper Tupac Shakur, has been sentenced to 40 years to life in prison.

“For three years, I’ve heard you say some variation of the same thing … ‘Yeah, I was involved in this. But I’m different. I’ve moved on. I got out of Compton. I’m a grandfather now,’” Judge Carli Kierny said Tuesday as she delivered the sentence.

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© Photograph: Steve Marcus/Reuters

© Photograph: Steve Marcus/Reuters

© Photograph: Steve Marcus/Reuters

Beacon Theatre, New York
Two decades after country music blacklisted the band for their Iraq war protest, the trio celebrate their unapologetic album Taking the Long Way

Last month, with almost no fanfare, the US formally completed its withdrawal of troops from Iraq, after 23 years of violent quagmire. But it was the beginning of that conflict that loomed over New York’s Beacon Theatre on Monday night, where the Chicks played the second of three sold-out shows. In March 2003, eight days before the US invaded Iraq, the country supergroup’s lead singer, Natalie Maines, said on stage in London she was “ashamed” that then president George W Bush was from the trio’s home state of Texas, triggering a swift, self-righteous and scarily prescient backlash.

More than one person at the Beacon wondered aloud where fellow fans were back then, when a single comment, circulated on AM radio and cable news, led to CD-burning protests and death threats. (High school, was a common answer.) I myself was nine, with a child’s stark view of morality and consequence. Our country was at war, I knew, in an impossibly faraway place, and my favorite band bore the cost of criticizing it. One day, I could catch blue-sky hits including Travelin’ Soldier, Landslide and Cowboy Take Me Away on the radio on the way to school; the next, they were gone.

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© Photograph: Thomas Falcone

© Photograph: Thomas Falcone

© Photograph: Thomas Falcone

They are some of our oldest and most historically significant buildings, yet they receive no secure state funding, writes Dr Coco Parkinson-Huggins

Jonathan Davies’ article (Abide with me: English choral music is a living part of our cultural heritage – we should cherish it, 7 October) speaks beautifully to the contribution of English choral music to our living cultural heritage, highlighting the importance of cathedral choirs in particular, in giving children access to “world-class musical training, extraordinary cultural experiences and educational opportunities that might otherwise be beyond their reach”.

What he misses however, is just how under threat these bastions of England’s religious, cultural and spiritual heritage actually are.

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© Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

© Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

© Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

After having a Pretty Woman moment in a Brooklyn store, the singer-songwriter let rip on X

Name: Kelly Clarkson.

Age: 44. Born in 1982. In Fort Worth, as it happens.

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© Photograph: NBC/Weiss Eubanks/NBCUniversal/Getty Images

© Photograph: NBC/Weiss Eubanks/NBCUniversal/Getty Images

© Photograph: NBC/Weiss Eubanks/NBCUniversal/Getty Images

Concorde 2, Brighton
Drawing almost entirely from her last two albums, and backed by a band rooted in jazz and experimentation, Orton performed her emotionally fraught songs to a rapturous crowd

The audience at Brighton’s Concorde 2 largely look old enough to have first encountered Beth Orton’s music three decades ago, as it wafted around a smoke-filled living room in the post-club small hours. That was the primary means of transmission for her 1996 debut album Trailer Park, which smartly appended classic singer-songwriter tropes to misty electronics. But if they’re expecting an evening of nostalgia, they’re in for a shock. The title track from 1999’s Mercury-nominated Central Reservation aside, her set swerves the music that made her famous, drawing almost entirely from her two most recent albums: this year’s The Ground Above and 2022’s Weather Alive.

This would count as a bold move from someone 30-odd years into their career, were it not for the fact that Orton’s recent albums are so good – the latest fruit of an artistic reboot that began in the mid-2010s, when she shifted a sound that had grown increasingly acoustic and traditional back towards something more experimental and dancefloor-adjacent.

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© Photograph: Andy Hall/The Guardian

© Photograph: Andy Hall/The Guardian

© Photograph: Andy Hall/The Guardian

Raised as one of 11, the Vancouver artist (and model) is now signed by A24. She talks about her ultra-religious childhood and how – despite her album title – she still suffers from imposter syndrome

The first time Sophia Stel came to London, she slept outside in the freezing cold. The Vancouver songwriter had finished a live set last autumn, then gone out until 3am with her then crush, but when they returned to their Airbnb, they found that Stel’s manager had dead-bolted the door and fallen asleep. Stel plus crush looked for a hotel but ultimately had no choice but to kip on the doorstep. “We hadn’t spent that much time together and I got to see how she was in a stressful situation,” Stel says, smiling at the memory. “She kept her vibe up and tried to solve it – I knew I was so in love then.”

A lot has changed in Stel’s life in the year since. She opened her business bank account as an artist, and that crush is now her girlfriend. “It’s a lot of change, but maybe because of my Sagittarius moon, I’m fine with it to an extent,” she says, only half-joking, when we meet at her publicist’s office in south London, the 27-year-old Stel in her uniform of vintage hoodie and Adidas trackies.

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© Photograph: Mikaela Kautzky

© Photograph: Mikaela Kautzky

© Photograph: Mikaela Kautzky

LSO St Luke’s, London
From syncopated funk to the Latin requiem mass, Gregorian chant to bureaucratic recitative, the score to David Önaç new oratorio, premiered by the London Symphony Orchestra, is serious and beautiful

How do you put a value on a human life? If you’re an insurance underwriter that’s not a philosophical question, it’s a practical one. The answer, incidentally, as calculated by Lloyds of London in 1779 was £45: the figure placed on each enslaved person transported across the Atlantic alongside corn, fish and other cargo. Court transcripts from two decades later describe a woman quarantined for smallpox, subsequently bound, blindfolded and tossed overboard tied to a chair. The captain later expressed his regret for the loss of “so good a chair”.

Archives can tell us what, but it takes art to give us the human how of the past. Enter composer David Önaç – commissioned to take the historical documents unearthed from the Lloyds archive and give them howling, raging life in his new Atlantic Requiem, premiered this weekend by the London Symphony Orchestra, an expanded BBC Singers, three soloists and (in a last-minute step-in) conductor Malcolm J Merriweather.

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© Photograph: Mark Allan

© Photograph: Mark Allan

© Photograph: Mark Allan

‘In nightclubs, I’d be the dude scribbling lyrics in the corner while everyone else was dancing or copping off’

I had the lyrics to Not Nineteen Forever before the band existed. They were in a little red book of poems and scribbles that got me a place on the creative writing course at the University of Salford. Most of what became the songs for our first album, St Jude, were in that book. As well as uni, I was working in a shop and spending five nights a week at the Night & Day bar in Manchester, but in a nightclub I’d be the dude scribbling in the corner while everyone else was dancing or copping off.

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© Photograph: Edd Westmacott/Avalon/Getty Images

© Photograph: Edd Westmacott/Avalon/Getty Images

© Photograph: Edd Westmacott/Avalon/Getty Images

Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
Bizet’s incidental music for Daudet’s 1872 play The Girl from Arles was given its first UK complete performance by Sir Mark Elder, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and strong soloists in Jeremy Sams’ staging

‘The prettiest music in the world” was how the playwright Alphonse Daudet described the incidental music Bizet composed for his 1872 play The Girl from Arles – which is a bit like describing Carmen, the opera Bizet would compose less than three years later, as a charming little love story.

Daudet’s play initially flopped but was saved by the music Bizet wrote for it, which comprises 27 separate numbers ranging from string whispers a few bars long to full-blown orchestral entr’actes and celebratory choruses. Two orchestral Suites from L’Arlésienne have long been familiar in the concert hall. But, after more than 150 years, this was the first chance for UK audiences to hear the complete incidental music in its proper context. Presented by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and conducted by Mark Elder, there was a danger this play with music could turn into music with a play – but in fact the two elements complemented each other at equal strength.

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© Photograph: Mark Allan

© Photograph: Mark Allan

© Photograph: Mark Allan

Jay-Z in 8, the rap mogul’s HBO docuseries, covers his life and career in effort to mend his image – with no pushback. Why is he so fixated on the court of public opinion?

During the finale of Jay-Z’s Jay-Z in 8, the recent eight-part HBO documentary series on his life and career, the billionaire rap mogul talked with record producer Rick Rubin about the song Family Feud from his 4:44 album. He clarified one of its lyrics, “Al Sharpton in the mirror takin’ selfies / How is him or Pill Cosby ‘posed to help me?”, in which he chided Sharpton, the civil rights leader, and Cosby, the disgraced actor-comedian, for constantly criticizing rap music. He called Sharpton an “extortionist” who goes “from place to place” demanding: “You want our support … give us the money.” Listening to him chastise Sharpton, I pondered how he doesn’t see himself as a similar figure.

Starting in 2019, Jay-Z partnered with the NFL in 2019 as entertainment director, deciding the Super Bowl half-time performers and working with the league on other community endeavors. Colin Kaepernick, the former NFL quarterback, has recently alleged that the deal came after NFL owners decided they needed a “Black face” to help them quell outrage from Black people after Kaepernick was blackballed by the league for kneeling during the national anthems as a form of protest against police brutality. Jay-Z was lambasted for undercutting Kaepernick’s cause for personal gain, marring his reputation with many fans who came to view him as the same counterinsurgent figure he criticized in the documentary.

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© Photograph: Mubi

© Photograph: Mubi

© Photograph: Mubi

(XL)
This is a beguiling, endlessly inventive and frequently astonishing fifth LP from a group at increasing ease with being the best band of their generation

Fifteen centuries ago, the Byzantine archbishop Theophilus of Adana did first-hand business with the devil for his own superficial betterment. Today, we just blindly tick a little box marked “accept terms and conditions” or let high-street snake oil merchants inject poison into our faces. The Faustian pact has become as depressingly banal as it is endemic and destructive – and unlike Theophilus, we can’t rely on the Virgin Mary to save us now. In the midst of headlines about AI destroying humanity, the idea of listening to music submerged in precisely this shade of doom might sound like, well, hell. If anyone can thread that poisoned needle, it’s Fontaines DC.

When the Dublin band introduced their last album, 2024’s Romance, it came with a surprise new look. Their uncoordinated jeans and shirts had been replaced by neon hair, shiny trousers and bug-eyed sunglasses that split the difference between Korn and the Prodigy. As they faced up to having traded their anonymity to become arena fillers, it wasn’t hard to read this look as a sort of protective cosplay, a cybergoth Sasha Fierce for five fairly low-key Irish lads trying to make peace with leaving their roots behind. Newly melodic and lavishly produced, Romance made no bones about the band’s ambitions and became their first platinum-certified album.

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© Photograph: DOT/Ewen Spencer

© Photograph: DOT/Ewen Spencer

© Photograph: DOT/Ewen Spencer