3 h. ago ‘Chasing a high through rave music got dark’: Aya on hexes, Huddersfield and her hardcore horror electronics

A revelation at Pontins fuelled the producer to avant garde acclaim. But with ‘sublime’ sounds came struggles with substances. Her intense new album peels back the plaster‘Kissed by a witch, I got hexed!” Aya howls through a storm of screaming electronics and bass groans on I Am the Pipe I Hit Myself With. The song revisits a time before Aya Sinclair was one of the UK avant garde’s most exciting talents – when she was still a Huddersfield teenager, newly into Christian rock. The music gave her “this tingly, bubbly sensation”, she says. “And someone said: ‘This is the holy spirit.’” The experience led her to join a Pentecostal congregation for a couple of years, but after confiding in a church friend about some “feelings” – Sinclair would later come out as a trans woman – she was “kicked out for being queer, essentially. I was given an ultimatum, to either closet myself or leave.” As she whispers in this track, over the quickening click of a Geiger counter, “they had me out on a witc...

Events

53 h. ago Mum 'annoyed' by friends' reactions after choosing singer's name for baby boy

A woman, who's eight months pregnant, has been left feeling irritated by her friends and family's reaction to the name she's chosen for her baby boy, after struggling to come to a decision for months

Politics

5 d. ago Monklands Women’s Aid and Cumbernauld and District Women's Aid join forces to support women across North Lanarkshire

Service users can still expect the same "warm, respectful, and confidential support because every woman deserves to feel safe, supported, and understood".

Politics

7 d. ago Hidden Portraits: The Untold Stories of Six Women Who Loved Picasso by Sue Roe review – artist as lothario

Françoise Gilot is the most compelling figure in this biography of the painter’s lovers – but you get the feeling she would have loathed this book“No woman leaves a man like me,” Pablo Picasso is supposed to have declared to Françoise Gilot, his partner and the mother of two of his children, in the spring of 1953. The couple had by this point been together for a decade, their first encounter having taken place in 1943 in a black market cafe in Paris (Picasso, who was then 61, had approached the 21-year-old Gilot bearing a bowl of cherries). But now he’d become involved with Jacqueline Roque, the woman with whom he’d go on to spend the final years of his life.What to do about this? Gilot would not confront him. Better simply to call his bluff. “I am very secretive,” she said in an interview in 2016. “I smile and I’m polite, but that doesn’t mean that I will do as I said I will do He thought I would react like all his other women. That was a completely wrong opinion.” The following ye...

Culture

2 w. ago Woman feels 'embarrassed' after looking inside coffee machine tank

A woman felt sick when she opened her coffee machine up for the first time in a while – and found something she wasn't expecting. It's become a cautionary tale to others

Events

2 w. ago Woman left feeling sick after discovering what was lurking in her coffee machine

Alex Hazen was left feeling sick after she discovered what was lurking in her coffee machine - despite saying she cleans it every week

Politics

3 w. ago Lisa Riley proves there's no hard feelings with Peter Kay as she attends his comedy show after his 'weight jibe' at fan he compared to the actress

Lisa Riley has shown there are no hard feelings between her and Peter Kay after he recently kicked a woman out of his show and said she looked like the soap star.

Culture