10 h. ago ‘Even thinking about Coldplay I get tearful’: Denise Lewis’s honest playlist

The former heptathlete throws shapes to Cameo and got gold-medal inspiration from Whitney, but which rapper helps get her out of bed?The first song I fell in love with I was at nursery school when Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen was the song of the moment. I remember seeing the video on Top of the Pops, which is chilling at first, but epic when it gets to the big guitar break.The first single I bought My mum had this little record player that used to keep me very entertained, so I got her to buy me Ring My Bell by Anita Ward for my birthday or Christmas, from a record shop in Wolverhampton. Continue reading...

Politics

17 h. ago David Byrne review – hope, humanity and dancing in a superbly paced and choreographed show

Brisbane Entertainment CentreSolo songs and Talking Heads classics mingle in a spectacular performance that doesn’t pull any punchesDressed from head to foot in iridescent orange, David Byrne and his 12-piece backing band look as if they’re about to burst into flames. On a vast, empty stage – uncluttered by amplifiers, microphones or any of the usual things that anchor a live performance – the former Talking Heads frontman is still full of twitchy energy.Thankfully, there’s no spontaneous combustion. The template for tonight’s spectacle remains the legendary Stop Making Sense tour of 1984 – via American Utopia – where the show is built in increments. It starts slowly with Heaven, from Talking Heads’ 1979 album Fear of Music, a song that has lost none of its existential power. Continue reading...

Culture

48 h. ago Huge pop star secretly training as acrobat to wow fans on next tour as she teases return to music

WITH two Brit Awards, six Top Ten hits and a decade-long career under her belt, Becky Hill has more than proved herself as a singer. But she is preparing to return to music in 2026 with a new skill under her belt — as something of an acrobat. Bizarre’s Howell met Becky at the launch...

Society

52 h. ago ‘He was, above all, a treasured spirit, who understood how vital music is for the human soul’: tributes to Andrew Clements

In the week that we mourn the death of the Guardian’s long-serving classical music critic, composers, performers, colleagues and others who knew and worked with him pay tribute to a writer whose passing is a huge loss to the music worldI owe Andrew Clements big time. He wrote so positively about my music early in my career and the last article he wrote was singling out my opera Festen for special praise. He did seem to go off me a bit in mid career but he was such a serious and thoughtful critic that I often agreed with him. I got to know him very well in the late 90s as he was the partner of the librettist and translator Amanda Holden. He had such a broad knowledge of music and a great enthusiasm for new music which he wrote and spoke about with such warmth and humour. We spent many evenings in Highbury talking about Stravinsky, politics and Arsenal football club – he cared about the most important things in life. Mark-Anthony Turnage, composer*** Continue reading...

Politics

55 h. ago Add to playlist: the dark fog of Los Angeles saxophonist Aaron Shaw and the week’s best new tracks

The woodwind player who taught André 3000 music theory releases his searching debut album next monthFrom Los AngelesRecommend if you like Miguel Atwood Ferguson, Shabaka Hutchings’s flute music, the ColtranesUp next Debut album And So It Is released 13 FebruaryFor woodwind players, breath is everything: the lifeforce of artistry, the thing that furnishes sound with personality. But a few years ago, the Los Angeles saxophonist Aaron Shaw realised he was becoming increasingly breathless. In 2023, aged 27, he was diagnosed with bone marrow failure, meaning he wasn’t producing enough oxygen-carrying red blood cells. A change of approach was required. Continue reading...

Politics

57 h. ago A$AP Rocky: Don’t Be Dumb review – a charismatic, playful return, but it’s no slam dunk

(A$AP Rocky Recordings)Now a father of three and burgeoning actor, Rocky finally comes back to music with his strongest album since his 2013 debut – though there’s plenty of flabIt has been eight years since A$AP Rocky, once and future king of New York rap, released an album. In the world of hip-hop, where even A-list stars such as Rocky’s friend and collaborator Tyler, the Creator are prone to releasing multiple albums a year, this is a lifetime. In the time since Rocky released his third album, 2018’s Testing, Kanye West has rebranded as a born-again Christian, swerved to the right and released five albums. Rocky hasn’t been sitting around: he’s been a press mainstay, thanks to his relationship with pop superstar Rihanna, with whom he now has three children, and last year was acquitted of firing a gun at a former friend, dodging up to 24 years in prison. He has also found acclaim as an actor, starring opposite Rose Byrne in the lauded dark comedy If I Had Legs I’d Kick You and Den...

Politics

58 h. ago Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore: Tragic Magic review | Safi Bugel's experimental album of the month

(InFiné)The composers’ first collaborative album ebbs from epic, cinematic heights to delicate and dreamy lullabiesAfter years of touring together, Los Angeles-based composers Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore have developed what the former refers to as a “musical telepathy”. Tragic Magic, the pair’s first collaborative album, evidences this bond: born out of a short series of improv sessions in Paris, it’s a wonderfully immersive set of new age and ambient tracks, where Barwick’s airy, reverbed vocals and atmospheric synth washes interweave with, and accentuate, Lattimore’s twinkling harp.The album sessions took place shortly after last year’s California wildfires, which the two musicians experienced as residents. Accordingly, tragedy and hope cut through the dreamlike haze of these unfurling compositions. With its delicate harp loop and hushed whispers, opener Perpetual Adoration is as sweet and dreamy as a lullaby, while the gorgeous, moving Haze With No Haze carries a quiet de...

Events

59 h. ago Sleaford Mods: The Demise of Planet X review – vulnerability and versatility widen potty

(Rough Trade)The duo’s 13th album finds Jason Williamson as baffled and infuriated as ever at the state of the world, with help from some unexpected collaboratorsOver the course of a dozen albums, Jason Williamson (words) and Andrew Fearn (music) have journeyed from DIY to the album chart Top 5 by providing a gut-punchingly bleak and amusingly absurdist commentary on the financial crash, austerity, Brexit and the rise of the far right. On their 13th LP, Williamson again convinces in the role of a potty-mouthed bystander, baffled and infuriated by what goes on around him, whether empty lives in the digital age (“Weights and wanking / Hard bodies and phone lights / That’s all we got”), Trump’s US (“Maga’s off their tits”) or minor daily irritants: “Lazy dog walkers on short walks, mate, wanker!”However, developments here should gently broaden their appeal. Williamson displays a welcome new vulnerability on the harrowing Gina Was, about a childhood incident. Meanwhile, Fearn is subtly ...

Politics

62 h. ago ‘We wouldn’t still be playing if we’d got stinking rich’: the Damned celebrate 50 years of punk, goth and holy grail hunting

An appetite for self-destruction left Dave Vanian, Captain Sensible and Rat Scabies hugely influential but financially insecure. They’re back with a big show and their first album together since 1995‘There isn’t one songwriter, and so the flavour of the band is always going to change,” says Dave Vanian, reflecting on 50 years of the group of which he has been the sole constant member, the Damned. “Captain Sensible is a great fan of syrupy pop music and prog and glam rock. So his writing is very poppy, melodic and quite wonderful. My writing is more melodramatic, more theatrical. And Rat Scabies was a mod who really loved bands like the Who. That melting pot would either not work at all, or be an absolute firecracker.” As the history of the Damned attests, it has, on occasion, been both.There have been three break-ups: in the late 70s, late 80s and early 90s; Sensible and Scabies have had repeated spells out of the band; Scabies only started working with them again in 2022, after 27 ...

Politics

67 h. ago Robbie Williams: Britpop review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

(Columbia)Framed as the music Williams wanted to make post-Take That, Britpop surpasses pastiche and swerves unpredictably. Homoerotic paean to Morrissey, anyone?The arrival of Robbie Williams’s 13th album has been a complicated business. It was announced in May 2025 and was supposed to come out in October, when its title would have chimed with the 90s nostalgia sparked by the Oasis reunion. Williams spent the summer engaging in promotion, unveiling fake Britpop-themed blue plaques around London and staging a press conference at the Groucho Club. There was a launch gig at storied Camden venue Dingwalls, at which he performed not just his new album in full, but his 1997 solo debut Life Thru a Lens.It was a bold choice, given that Life Thru a Lens initially threatened to derail his solo career: at the time, the now nakedly obvious supernova hits Angels and Let Me Entertain You were overlooked while people criticised Williams’s muddled attempts to fit in with, well, Britpop. On stage a...

Politics

3 d. ago Harry Styles announces fourth solo album, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally

After a series of cryptic billboards teasing fans, the As It Was singer reveals the title and release date of his first record since 2022 After a brief teaser campaign in which billboards around the world promised “we belong together” and “see you very soon”, Harry Styles has announced his fourth solo album.Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally will be released on 6 March. It was produced by Kid Harpoon, the British songwriter and producer who has worked on all of Styles’ previous albums. The artwork shows the 31-year-old pop star wearing sunglasses and ducking beneath a disco ball seemingly suspended from the night sky. Continue reading...

Politics

3 d. ago Diary of a degenerate: mapping the music and the madness of Carlo Gesualdo

The Renaissance composer wrote hauntingly sublime music – and committed a grisly double murder before descending even further into psychosis. As a new stage work revisits his life, its director asks if art can be separated from artistCarlo Gesualdo wrote some of the most darkly sublime music of the late Renaissance. He also savagely murdered his wife and her lover in their bed. Now be honest: which would you like to discuss first?The art will always be secondary to the atrocity, however magnificent the madrigals and sacred music. Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, had been cuckolded by the Duke of Andria in a long-running tryst that had become the scuttlebutt at court. The premeditated double murder of 1590 was a truly grisly affair, concluding in the public display of their mutilated bodies on the steps of the palazzo for several days. Continue reading...

Politics

3 d. ago Igor Stravinsky: Late Works album review – kudos to Reuss for bringing this spellbinding music to life

Daniel Reuss/Noord Nederlands Orkest/Cappella Amsterdam(Pentatone)Noord Nederlands Orkest and Cappella Amsterdam breathe colour and light into work from the composer’s most austere periodIn his later years, Igor Stravinsky became fascinated by serialism, both as a means of distilling musical thought and as an intellectual and stylistic challenge for a composer entering his 70s and 80s. The results struck some contemporary listeners as austere, but there’s a self-effacing purity and beauty about this complex, intellectually probing music that deserves a wider audience than hitherto. Kudos, then, to conductor Daniel Reuss, whose precise yet vital interpretations teem with colour and light.There are four main works here. In Memoriam Dylan Thomas from 1954 is an extended, impassioned setting for solo tenor of Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. Threni, a spiny, multifaceted jewel from 1958, sets words from the Book of Lamentations. The haunting Introitus and bristling Requiem Canticl...

Culture

3 d. ago MOBO Awards 2026 Shortlists: Here's every act nominated for the music awards

The contenders for one of the biggest awards ceremonies in British music have been revealed.

Events

3 d. ago ‘A nasty little song, really rather evil’: how Every Breath You Take tore Sting and the Police apart

Sting and his former bandmates go to the high court over a royalties dispute this week – the latest chapter in the song’s remarkably fractious storyThis week’s high court hearings between Sting and his former bandmates in the Police, Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers, are the latest chapter in the life of a song whose negative energy seems to have seeped out into real life.Every Breath You Take is the subject of a lawsuit filed by Copeland and Summers against Sting, alleging that he owes them royalties linked to their contributions to the hugely popular song, particularly from streaming earnings, estimated at $2m (£1.5m) in total. Sting’s legal team have countered that previous agreements between him and his bandmates regarding their royalties from the song do not include streaming revenue – and argued in pre-trial documents that the pair may have been “substantially overpaid”. In the hearing’s opening day, it was revealed that since the lawsuit was filed, Sting has paid them $870,0...

Events

4 d. ago A Day with David Bowie: how a visit to a psychiatric clinic changed him – and his music

In 1994, Bowie and Brian Eno spent a day with ‘outsider’ artists. Intimate photographs, showing in Australia for the first time, reveal the effect it hadFrom the Thin White Duke to Ziggy Stardust, the Berlin recluse to the late-career elegist, David Bowie’s oeuvre is defined by reinvention. As an artist, he was relentlessly attuned to the conditions that might provoke the next creative rupture. One defining moment, however, has largely slipped from the popular imagination: a day spent inside a psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of Vienna – one that would prove unexpectedly formative.In September 1994, Bowie and Brian Eno – who had recently reunited to develop new music – accepted an invitation from the Austrian artist André Heller to visit the Maria Gugging Psychiatric Clinic. The site’s Haus der Künstler, established in 1981 as a communal home and studio, is known internationally as a centre for Art Brut – or “Outsider Art” – produced by residents, many living with schizophrenia...

Science

5 d. ago Full list of dates and cities for BTS World Tour 2026 – and how to get tickets

It will be the group’s first tour since its members returned from South Korea's mandatory military service

Politics

5 d. ago Harry Styles fans in frenzy as cryptic clues around UK tease massive 2026 comeback

Harry Styles fans are in a frenzy over cryptic "We belong together" billboards and a new website. With clues pointing to fresh music and a 2026 tour, a massive comeback seems imminent

Politics

5 d. ago Charlie Puth tickets and how to buy them through presale for world tour

Charlie Puth will be playing four shows in the UK this July

Economics

5 d. ago Music executive LA Reid settles sexual assault lawsuit on day civil trial was due to begin

The former Arista Records chief executive had faced allegations that he derailed the career of former employee Drew Dixon after she rejected his advancesThe Grammy-winning music executive LA Reid settled a lawsuit by a former employee who accused him of sexual assault and harassment, on the day the civil trial was due to begin.In 2023, Drew Dixon alleged that the former Arista Records chief executive born Antonio Reid – who helped develop Mariah Carey, TLC, Pink and Usher – derailed her career after she rejected his advances in 2021. Dixon said that he groped, kissed and digitally penetrated her without consent on two occasions. Continue reading...

Events