‘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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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 Their uncoordinated jeans and shirts had been replaced by neon hair, shiny trousers and bug-eyed sunglasses that split the difference between Korn and the Prodigy.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.

The 85-year-old was helped on stage by actor John Stamos, who shared an emotional message about his ‘musical hero and mentor’

After months of cancelled comeback tours, the Beach Boys have played their first public show since July – with co-founder and frontman Mike Love joining the band on stage in Cincinnati, Ohio, despite “facing serious health challenges”.

Love was helped on to the stage by his son Christian Love and the actor and band member John Stamos, who told the audience at PNC Pavilion on Saturday night that Love has “been going through some health issues … but he would not miss tonight”.