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• On my radar: George the Poet’s cultural highlights

  29-03-2025 16:00
  
  The author and podcast host on a favourite restaurant, adventures in scholastic research for his PhD and the second series of Squid GameBorn George Mpanga in north-west London in 1991, George the Poet is a spoken-word artist, author and podcast host. He studied politics, psychology and sociology at King’s College, Cambridge and is now doing a PhD at UCL about the economic and cultural potential of black music. Aged 22 he signed with Island Records and released an EP before stepping away fr
  
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• Chris Brown charged with GBH over alleged bottle attack in nightclub

  16-05-2025 00:50
  
  American R&B singer arrested in Salford over alleged 2023 London attack, after flying into UK for new tour The US musician Chris Brown has been charged with grievous bodily harm with intent over an alleged bottle attack at a London nightclub two years ago.The 36-year-old rapper, a former partner of the singer Rihanna, was arrested at 2am on Thursday at the five-star Lowry hotel in Salford, Greater Manchester, after flying into the UK for a tour. Continue reading...
  
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• Cassie Ventura grilled about explicit messages on day four of Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs trial

  16-05-2025 00:30
  
  On third day of testimony the former girlfriend of music mogul details violence, abuse and blackmailSinger Casandra “Cassie” Ventura, a former girlfriend of Sean “Diddy” Combs and a key witness in the federal sex-trafficking and racketeering trial of the music mogul, returned to the stand on Thursday for a cross-examination that lasted the entire day and will continue on Friday.On Thursday morning,one of Combs’s lawyers, Anna Estevao, opened her cross-examination of
  
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• ‘Climate change is going to cull us as a species’: folk hero Peggy Seeger on Bob Dylan, the ultimate love song and touring at 90

  15-05-2025 14:00
  The musician and activist answers your questions about her marriage to Ewan MacColl, being the inspiration for The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, and her mother’s legacyTouring at 90 is amazing. What was a career highlight? Nicens_boi
  When I was 60 the thought of touring when I was 70 was anathema and the thought of touring at 90 seemed dreadful! The hardest part is sitting in the car. We’re gonna be away six weeks and I’m a walking hospital case. I have meds, a step stool so
  
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• Shanti Celeste: Romance review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

  15-05-2025 13:01
  (Method 808/Peach Discs)
  Six years on from her acclaimed ‘fast house’ debut, the UK singer-producer invites listeners into a sunlit space between night out and morning afterNo one could accuse Shanti Celeste of being a dance producer who indulges in lofty conceptualising about their music. Not for her, the album that represents the soundtrack to a film that hasn’t been made yet, or a sci-fi-influenced cosmic opera, or a globe-spanning travelogue inspired by the peripatetic life
  
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• Bruce Springsteen review – a roaring, rousing ​s​how that imagines a better America

  15-05-2025 12:29
  Co-op Live, Manchester
  The Boss and his E Street Band pluck hope from the depths of despair with a fiery show that hits out at the US administration but ends with loveBefore Bruce Springsteen sings a word on the opening night of his European tour, he has something to get off his chest. “The mighty E Street Band is here tonight to call upon the righteous power of art, of music, of rock’n’roll in dangerous times,” he says.“The America I love is currently in the hands
  
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• Lord Buffalo drummer removed from plane and detained by US border control

  14-05-2025 22:30
  European tour cancelled after Mexican citizen Yamal Said of Texas-based band detained, despite having US green cardThe Texas-based rock band Lord Buffalo has cancelled its European tour after its drummer, Yamal Said, was detained by US Customs and Border Protection on Monday.Said was removed from a plane en route to the band’s summer tour and has had no contact with his bandmates for two days, according to a message posted to the band’s Instagram account. Said is a Mexican citizen bu
  
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• Bye bye banana wolves! Is social media ruining Eurovision?

  14-05-2025 16:25
  From gorilla stage invasions to novelty butter churners, the extravaganza has always been a haven for wackiness. But it’s getting less outre by the year … and YouTube and TikTok are to blame. More Papa Pingouin required!Eurovision has always been a time to gather round the TV and experience dancing babushkas, gorilla stage invasions and someone inhaling from a helium balloon halfway through their song. But being a Eurovision entry now looks like being part of an exhausting social me
  
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• ‘I terribly wanted to be liked. Still do’: Status Quo’s Francis Rossi on money worries, his deepest neuroses – and sounding like Nellie the Elephant

  14-05-2025 11:48
  Lampooned by critics but loved by fans, Quo turned boogie into blockbuster rock. As a live album captures their 70s peak, their frontman remembers late friend Rick Parfitt – and reconsiders his whole sense of selfIf you want to contemplate quite how far back Status Quo’s roots go, consider this: the band’s founders came together before the Beatles had released their first single, before the idea of “the band” was even a thing in pop music. They’re often dismis
  
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• Guy Garvey on Elbow’s One Day Like This: ‘Every week, someone tells me they got married to it’

  12-05-2025 15:34
  ‘We threw strings at the track and it exploded into Lion-King-esque euphoria. I once got sent footage of a few hundred people on either side of a tube track singing it at each other’By 2007, we’d had a nerve-racking couple of years. We were on the V2 label for our first three albums but they were slowly folding. We signed with Fiction without them having heard a note of our fourth album, Seldom Seen Kid. As the money was running out, it was looking like “proper job”
  
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• Steven Wilson review – an interstellar sound voyage with Floydian grandeur

  12-05-2025 11:41
  Bristol Beacon
  On his first solo tour in seven years, Wilson transports a rapt audience through three hours of prog, bubbling electronica and time-bending post-rock blissA few feet above Steven Wilson’s head, the universe expands and contracts. His attention, though, is on a bank of equipment, from which he’s attempting to pull sounds that match the interstellar scope of the visuals spread across the gargantuan screen that hangs over him. Across the course of almost three hours, he d
  
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• Maren Morris: ‘I never said I’m leaving country music’

  11-05-2025 11:28
  The outspoken country star is moving into her pop era and is keen to set the record straight over what that means for her life in NashvilleThe year 2023 was a tough one for Maren Morris. The country singer, then 33, reached the end of her tour for her third studio album, Humble Quest, and the end of her rope with the conservative politics of country music industry. Her marriage to fellow country singer-songwriter Ryan Hurd, with whom she shares a young son, fell apart. That summer, her future pr
  
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• ‘I’ve always had a soft spot for Lady Gaga’: John Lydon’s honest playlist

  11-05-2025 10:00
  The Sex Pistols and Public Image Ltd frontman prefers drinking to karaoke and loves the Kinks, but which out-there rock song changed his life?The first song I fell in love withI loved Gene Vincent as a kid. Then my mum and dad bought You Really Got Me by the Kinks. It shocked me that the guitar was so tough and brilliant. Ray Davies is one of Britain’s finest songwriters.The first single I boughtRuby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town by Kenny Rogers, from a little store in Finsbury Park,
  
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• ‘Ich komme!’ The smutty Eurovision songs that dodge the censors

  10-05-2025 14:00
  From ensuring your swearwords are in languages other than English to outrageous euphemisms, contestants in the famously camp extravaganza have ways to avoid being toned down …When the winner of this year’s Eurovision song contest is announced shortly before midnight next Saturday, it won’t be the first climax of the evening. “I’m coming / I’m coming,” a scantily clad Finn will announce in the chorus of her song. Australia’s male entrant will invit
  
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• Add to playlist: Merseyside rapper EsDeeKid and the week’s best new tracks

  09-05-2025 14:34
  With a magnificent scouse accent and entertainingly debauched lyrics, EsDeeKid is blowing up fast – plus check out new music from Fiona Apple and moreFrom Liverpool
  Recommended if you like Playboi Carti, 2hollis, YT Up next New music soonSecond in the league table of unfairly maligned British accents behind Brummie, nothing sounds like scouse, consonants rolling around at the back of the mouth while vowels wheedle their way to the front. Delivering the accent at its most potent is rapper E
  
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• That’s me in the spotlight: Michael Shannon on swapping Hollywood for an REM covers band

  09-05-2025 11:20
  The two-time Oscar nominee has teamed with indie rocker Jason Narducy to reconstruct REM albums in full. But can Shannon compete with Michael Stipe, who he calls rock’s most ‘efficient and direct’ frontman?Michael Shannon was a teenager when he first heard REM. “I was out at my cousin’s trailer; he lived in the country. He put Document on his little cassette recorder, and I sat in his room with him and listened to it. Any art I find compelling is usually because it
  
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• Billy Woods: Golliwog review – one of the most engrossing, unnerving records you’ll hear this year

  09-05-2025 09:30
  (Backwoodz Studioz)
  The New York rapper confronts trauma and state-sanctioned terror with his latest release, pulling out innumerable images of inhumanityGolliwog has the ambience of a horror movie: dissonant strings, like nails on a chalkboard, form the basis of the track Star87; agonised screams are sampled throughout; every so often, an ominous drone will fill a song to the point of overwhelm. On that level alone, New York underground icon Billy Woods’ latest album would be a feat of so
  
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• Lido Pimienta: La Belleza review – Gregorian chant meets dembow rhythm in a work of remarkable depth

  09-05-2025 08:30
  (Anti-)
  Inspired by the music of Luboš Fiser and Catholic requiem mass, the instrumentals are deft and surprising, but Pimienta’s captivating, flawless vocals steal the showFive years since her Grammy-nominated breakthrough record Miss Colombia, singer and producer Lido Pimienta has taken a radical shift in direction. On Miss Colombia, Pimienta combined sprightly electro pop with cumbia rhythms and soaring vocals to critique racism and misogyny – now, her fourth album La Belle
  
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• Djo review – Joe Keery mixes genres in an endearing, if uneven, Brooklyn set

  08-05-2025 19:30
  Brooklyn Steel, New YorkStranger Things actor’s musical project has now gone from bedroom to the big stage and, while not all of it works, there’s energy to spareBy now, Djo is not a secret. The psychedelic electro-pop project led by Joe Keery, once an IYKYK solo bedroom-production artist, has reached the mainstream, making the festival circuit at Laneway, Coachella and Glastonbury. And Keery, an actor best known for playing foppish, helplessly winsome Steve Harrington on Stranger Th
  
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• Ready or not, here she comes: Lauryn Hill’s 20 best songs – ranked!

  08-05-2025 15:03
  Ahead of her 50th birthday this month, we rate the best tracks of the multi-hyphenate talent who, with Fugees and as a solo artist, blended soul, hip-hop and reggae with raw emotion and charismaThe closest their debut album Blunted on Reality came to a crossover hit, Nappy Heads is almost unrecognisable as the work of Fugees, who went on to sell millions of records. But it’s an of-its-era joy nonetheless, with a boom-bap rhythm and horns sampled from jazzy 70s funk. Continue reading...
  
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• PinkPantheress: Fancy That review – sharp-minded bops hop across pop’s past and present

  08-05-2025 13:15
  (Warner)
  Denigrated by some as the epitome of attention-deficit youth, the English pop musician became huge nonetheless – and her latest has an inspiringly free-associative feel
  There’s something telling about the fact that PinkPantheress launched the first single from her second mixtape with a video boasting that it was 2:57 long. “Ion [I don’t] wanna see no more song length jokes,” ran the caption accompanying a brief video of her dancing to Tonight, a track that
  
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• Post your questions for folk music legend Peggy Seeger

  04-05-2025 12:24
  
  As she marks her 90th birthday with a UK tour and new album, the singer and activist will answer your questionsAfter a long career which has established her as one of the most significant folk singers on both sides of the Atlantic, Peggy Seeger is about to celebrate her 90th birthday with a final tour and album – and will answer your questions.Born in New York to a musicologist father and a modernist composer, and with siblings including future folk legend Pete Seeger, she started out on p
  
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• ‘Everything we built – gone’: how the wildfires decimated LA’s music scene

  04-05-2025 11:00
  
  January’s blazes in California have devastated the livelihoods of performers, technicians and other music industry pros. They reveal what they lost – and how they’re rebuildingWithin the ashes of what used to be Christopher Fudurich’s home in Los Angeles, some objects from his garage music studio were still identifiable. Microphones charred and blackened, a scorched keyboard and melted cables among the toxic debris. Not just objects; a life’s work, passion and creat
  
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• ‘I was the only person who didn’t know the words to Coldplay’: Anoushka Shankar’s honest playlist

  04-05-2025 10:00
  
  The musician on her love of cheesy R&B, hating karaoke ‘with a fiery passion’, and the people who have sex to her sister Norah Jones’s musicThe first song I fell in love with
  Tana Mana by my dad, Ravi Shankar. In the late 80s he was experimenting with synthesisers and released an album called Tana Mana, an anomaly in his discography. I remember my imagination would light up with the title song – I would picture a village dance, and I’d be acting it out in my liv
  
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• Who is behind the great rock’n’roll ripoff? How Ticketmaster swallowed the live entertainment scene

  04-05-2025 07:00
  
  From grassroots gigs to stadium shows, there’s no escaping the ticketing giant, making billions from hiking up prices (and whacking on fees)Even Donald Trump knows that the price of concert tickets is too damn high. Recently, flanked by the preposterously dressed Maga rocker Kid Rock, the president signed an executive order to protect fans from “crazy prices” by cracking down on scalpers and hidden fees. “Make America Fun Again,” Kid Rock declared.It will take more
  
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• ‘He lived his whole life in that fire’: the tragic story of ‘lost’ singer Jackson C Frank

  02-05-2025 11:20
  A school fire, a shooting and mental health issues plagued a man whose legacy is remembered in a new documentaryThirty years ago, when the music writer Jim Abbott tried to track down the “lost” folk singer Jackson C Frank, he had no idea what he’d find. All he had to guide him was a tip from an old associate of Frank’s to go to a housing facility in Queens, New York, where he was told he was living. When he finally arrived there, the man he saw bore no relation to the Fra
  
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• ‘Music is never fixed in me’ … cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason on surviving a ‘volcano of racism’

  02-05-2025 11:00
  A remark about Rule, Britannia! led to uproar but the star musician is concentrating on the joy and power of classical music. As his first book is published, he talks to Charlotte Higgins• Read an exclusive extract from Kanneh-Mason’s new bookI saw Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s cello case before I saw him – strapped to his back, making him taller. While we talked, the instrument sat beside us, like a temporarily silent twin. A few weeks before, though, I’d heard it sing in th
  
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• Jenny Hval: Iris Silver Mist review – intoxicating tribute to the emotive pull of memory

  02-05-2025 10:01
  (4AD)
  The Norwegian experimentalist’s ninth album is a personal journey through the past and self, focused on the power of scent in evoking forgotten momentsCigarette smoke is Jenny Hval’s Proustian madeleine. An acrid, earthy scent drifts through the Norwegian experimentalist’s ninth album as she recalls childhood memories and beloved pets, and retreads the stages of past performances. On vampy lead single To Be a Rose, with restless drum machine and jazzy brass, Hval transfor
  
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• Sun-Mi Hong: Fourth Page: Meaning of a Nest review | John Fordham's jazz album of the month

  02-05-2025 09:31
  (Edition)
  Ideas of migration and self-discovery inspire the latest album from Hong and her imaginative band, entwined with harmonies and delicate effectsDrummer/composer Sun-Mi Hong didn’t get to where she is now without a struggle for independence. She was born in Incheon, South Korea, to a conservative family and earmarked for a teacher’s life, but her teenage dream was to become a drummer. At 19, as the only woman in a not-overly respectful percussion class, she got wind of the Am
  
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• ‘I don’t want to die in a hotel room somewhere’: Black Sabbath on reconciling for their final gig – and how Ozzy is living through hell

  02-05-2025 06:00
  Heavy metal’s godfathers are preparing a star-studded farewell – but will Ozzy Osbourne, after ‘horrendous’ surgery, be well enough to perform? In their first interview for two decades, the original lineup talk about their hopes and fears for rock’s ultimate gigOn a video call from his home in Los Angeles, Ozzy Osbourne is struggling to recall the exact details of recent years, ones he calls “the worst of my life”. “How many surgeries have I had?&r
  
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