The soul-rockers achieved worldwide success before surprising everyone by deciding to quit while they were ahead. Now they’re back with a new album railing against the state of contemporary America

In the autumn of 2024, Alabama Shakes showed no sign of ending their indefinite hiatus – and nobody was asking them to. Seven years had passed since the blues-soul-rock band, who exploded out of Athens, Alabama in 2009, had last shared a stage. Their transatlantic Top 10 2012 debut Boys & Girls announced them; the million-selling 2015 follow-up Sound & Color went to No 1 in the US and won them four Grammys. Their fanbase included Bruce Springsteen, Robert Plant and Barack Obama. But by 2017 they were physically and creatively spent, and they stopped. Then, in December 2024, with almost no warning, they played their first show in more than seven years.

“We had a friend in Tuscaloosa who had a brewery, but it wasn’t doing so well after Covid,” explains singer Brittany Howard. “He called me and said he was going to do a fundraiser and asked if I’d like to perform. I said, ‘For sure.’” But then she started reminiscing, remembering how that particular friend had been a huge help to the band, not just her personally. She felt the band owed him something, collectively. “So I called the fellas,” she smiles. “‘Do y’all wanna perform at this thing – like, all of us, together?’ And they instantly said yes.”

The actor seemed destined for a long but unflashy career in musical theatre – until a role as a football club owner in the TV hit changed everything. She talks about her new Hollywood era, calling out misogyny and why she’s ‘more than just camp’

Hannah Waddingham clears her throat. Her voice is a little scratchy. Two days before we meet, the star of Ted Lasso hosted the TV comedy show Saturday Night Live UK. She took part in almost all of the sketches that night, from a skit about “two top-heavy, Reading-based drama teachers” called Janet, to a musical number about how many glasses of wine to drink at a bar, to a bit in which she played the stern northern leader of a speed awareness course. In her opening monologue, she zipped through a variety of accents and impressions. “You see?” she told the cheering crowd. “Range! Range.”

I should have remembered this line when making small talk. We are tucked away in the hidden private dining room of a hotel in London, the city where the actor was born and raised and where she still lives with her young daughter. When Waddingham walks through the lobby, people notice her. She is tall, striking, and wearing the pulled-down baseball cap that is an actor’s day-off uniform. During lockdown, Ted Lasso – the amiable football series in which she plays Rebecca Welton, the owner of a fictional team called AFC Richmond – made her famous on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2021, it won her an Emmy award for outstanding supporting actress in a comedy series. At 47, after a long but unflashy career on stage and screen, there was a sense that her time had come.

After 20 mutilated animal corpses were left outside a rural primary school, the creators of award-winning podcast Buried began investigating – with a little help from Chris Packham. It plunged them into organised crime, the dark web and Line of Duty-esque rumours of police corruption

In 2024, a village in Hampshire woke up to something truly disturbing. A mound of dead animals had been dumped outside a school, and blood oozed out on to the streets before children’s classes started for the day. There were about 20 carcasses, including rabbits, hares, pheasants, a fox and a muntjac deer with its head severed. The village was dumbfounded, and the biggest question was: why?

The husband-and-wife investigative journalist team of Dan Ashby and Lucy Taylor – the pair behind the award-winning BBC podcast series, and now forthcoming documentary, Buried – found themselves wondering the same thing. Their new 10-part podcast, Buried: Dead Rabbit, delves into this and finds them plunged into the shady world of illegal bloodsports. Specifically, hare coursing – where dogs hunt hares to kill them, an activity that has been banned in the UK since 2005 – and its links to organised crime and the dangerous, violent characters who are terrorising villages across the country.

Buried: Dead Rabbit is on BBC Sounds now.

The trip-hop star doesn’t believe in getting jiggy to songs and would choose Cyndi Lauper at karaoke. But which classic reminds him of his mum?

The first song I fell in love with
I was going out with this Jamaican girl when we were about 15, and would listen to Night Nurse by Gregory Isaacs all the time. We had a daughter together when we were 17 – she’s 35 now and works as a social worker in Bristol – so that song has always stayed with me.

The song that makes me cry
Astral Weeks by Van Morrison, because it reminds me of my mum and growing up in Bristol. He sings about his mum dressing him and showing him pictures, and my mum was exactly like that. In every childhood photo I’m in a shirt and tie and looking proper.

It’s silly, singular and occasionally tearjerking: this tale of a mechanical companion to an elderly widow is shot through with love and care

The home, warns Jamaican nurse Brianna (Michelle Greenidge), can be a “lethal” environment for elderly people. “You lucky like plucky you never smash your head on the corner of the coffee table, or land teeth first on the iron doorstep!” she says, fatalistically, as Sue (Sue Johnston) tries in vain to explain that she didn’t “have a fall”, but fainted due to low blood pressure. In any case, Sue – widowed two years ago – has wound up in hospital with a sprained wrist and is discharged with her arm in a sling.

At least she has her son, Michael (Paul Ready), to rely on. Except that Michael – gutless, whiny and covered in red blotches from a drug trial he’s joined for quick cash (“if it was dangerous”, he says, “do you really think drug companies would do it?!”) – is moving back in with his cheating ex. His solution? A robot carer, preloved and purchased on a 24-month contract. Cocking snooks at an era where everything is on subscription and at the general direction of late-capitalist travel, the preloved Ann Droid robot is useless without an internet connection, and is delivered by overburdened delivery driver Cass (Sarah Kendall), who we later discover has completed a PhD on Chaucer. Sue is appalled.

Matt Damon dons the sword and sandals in Christopher Nolan’s epic, while the LA singer-songwriter shares more arena-friendly scream-along anthems

The Odyssey
Out now
Christopher Nolan tackles one of the granddaddies of the western canon – Homer’s meaty tale of Odysseus (Matt Damon) and his long trip home after 10 years in the Trojan war. Also starring Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Zendaya and Charlize Theron.

Chris Packham takes us back to the beginning in awe-inspiring fashion, while Christopher Nolan heads for Homer with a grand adaptation. Here’s the pick of the week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews

The director’s more-is-more approach to the 1986 sequel gave us seat-edge action and an indelible performance from a rule-breaking Sigourney Weaver

James Cameron loves tough female characters. That seems like a given now, after three Avatars and two particularly muscular arms belonging to Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2. Even the lushly romantic Titanic is about a supportive, sweet-natured boyfriend lending his love the extra smidge of strength she needs to live a rich and iconoclastic life without him, until she’s freely chucking diamonds into the sea at 100 years of age. But in Cameron’s 1984 de facto feature debut The Terminator (after a Piranha sequel that he attempted to disown), T2’s Hamilton is stalked and appropriately terrified by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s slasher-like killer robot. She’s a great character who gets majorly pumped up for the sequel in 1991. By then, Cameron had plenty of practice: he had already written and directed Aliens, maybe the best pumped-up sequel ever made, which turns 40 this week.

Ellen Ripley, introduced as the warrant officer onboard the ship Nostromo in Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi horror picture Alien, is already a great character by the end of that film. But while the anecdote about James Cameron pitching a sequel by appending a dollar-sign to Alien’s title, concisely showing what a simple pluralization could do, has perhaps overtaken the buffing up of Ellen Ripley in the most-circulated lore about this movie, she’s really the first subject of Cameron’s great plussing. Without betraying the simplicity and resilience of her character in the first film, Cameron reintroduced Ripley as a survivor, landing on Earth almost 60 years after the events of the earlier film. (In a deleted scene restored in the film’s longer special edition, Ripley even learns that her daughter has died in the interim – as an adult, given that Ripley was in cryosleep for decades.)

Radio and TV presenter, who recovered from cancer in 2024, announces she has smouldering myeloma

Lauren Laverne has announced she has been diagnosed with a blood and bone marrow disorder, less than two years after recovering from cancer.

The radio and TV presenter revealed she has smouldering myeloma, a condition characterised by an abnormal level of blood plasma cells in bone marrow, and said she made her diagnosis public out of a desire to help others. In August 2024, she announced she had been diagnosed with cancer, and received the all-clear three months later.

The acclaimed Irish actor started her career in Coronation Street and Casualty before a string of high-profile Hollywood roles

Brenda Fricker, who became the first female Irish Oscar winner for acting with My Left Foot, has died aged 81. Her agent Phil Belfield told the BBC in a statement: “We will never see her like again and the world is lesser for the lack of her … I was honoured to know, love and work with her and she will always have a place in my heart and in the heart of so many film and TV fans the world over.”

In My Left Foot, Fricker plays the mother of Christy Brown, whose cerebral palsy means he only has muscular control over one of his feet. The film, directed by Jim Sheridan, was released to enormous acclaim in 1989, winning the best actor Oscar for Daniel Day-Lewis as well as best supporting actress for Fricker.

‘My belief, as someone who grew up in a town without a bookshop, is that all communities should have one,’ says author of The Midnight Library

Matt Haig, the bestselling author of titles including The Midnight Library and Reasons to Stay Alive, is opening a bookshop in Brighton.

The writer plans to open the shop, called Golden, by Christmas. It is located in the Seven Dials neighbourhood, a part of the coastal city that doesn’t currently have a bookshop.

The education committee also proposed a National Reading Guarantee, ensuring all children have frequent opportunities to enjoy reading

The National Year of Reading should be extended to a National Decade of Reading, an education committee inquiry into reading for pleasure has concluded.

The government should also commit to a National Reading Guarantee that would ensure all children have regular opportunities to enjoy reading, the committee argues.

Christopher Nolan’s epic was given five stars by the Guardian, Independent and Telegraph, while the New York Times called it a ‘monumental adaptation’

Christopher Nolan’s $250m Imax blockbuster version of Homer’s epic poem the Odyssey looks set to be among the director’s best-received of his career, and could be a frontrunner for next year’s best picture Oscar.

The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw was among the vast majority of critics who awarded it five stars, calling it a film “with thrilling ambition, boldness, seriousness, generosity and flair. There are some broad-brush moments in the dialogue, yes, but even these are applied with a muscular flourish.”

Host of The Claudia Winkleman Show was ‘just too nervous to enjoy it’

When the BBC revealed Claudia Winkleman was to be given her own chatshow, she deployed her trademark self-deprecation to note that it “might be excruciating”. Yet after just one series, it is the presenter – rather than the audience or guests – that has found the show to be too much of an ordeal.

The all-conquering host of The Traitors and former Strictly Come Dancing presenter has quit The Claudia Winkleman Show after just one series, saying she was “too nervous to enjoy” the conversations with the great and the good who visited her sofa.

From fierce flooding and escaped pigs to birds that can’t fly due to the weight of plastic in their stomachs, mankind’s biggest challenges are on stark display at Summit Photo 2026

Robin Bernstein’s debut book Mapalakata takes us to the edge of the South African frontier to tell a story inspired by folk tales and historical artefacts

The Avengers star teams up with real-life scholars for a look at the eruption of Vesuvius. At points it’s elegiac and moving, at others it’s majestic and brutal

It’s always funny when documentaries strategically pair a possibly boring topic with a famous face, just to sex them up. A History of NCP Car Parks By Tinie Tempah, say, or World’s Deadliest Sleep Disorders With Anna Maxwell Martin. So when I saw that Tom Hiddleston was hosting a National Geographic investigation into the destruction of Pompeii in AD79 (Disney+, from Thursday), there was no way I wasn’t watching.

The actor has famously sauntered through life’s most vaunted way stations: Eton, Cambridge, Rada, Kong: Skull Island. Privilege and perceived smugness have long been sticks to beat him with. It’s harder to argue he’s not qualified for this job, having earned a double first in classics. Here, he slips into the role of undergraduate detective. A real-life scholar is forced to cosplay as his don during their interview, addressing Hiddleston by surname, issuing prim little reprimands. Hiddleston even translates Latin headstones in the first episode. I don’t know what the ancient Roman for “screw it, I’m leaning in” is, but I think that’s what it means.

In HBO’s four-part series The Man Will Burn, the psychedelic, uber-expensive festival is granted a deep dive

In 1986, a group of starving artists seeking release amid a devastating economic downturn built an oversized wooden stick figure, hauled it on to a San Francisco beach and set it ablaze as police officers and passersby looked on in disbelief. Forty years later, Burning Man is the festival to end all festivals – a sprawling spectacle of music, art and self-expression that draws tens of thousands to the Nevada desert every summer for community, catharsis and spiritual connection. It is a pilgrimage for Bohemians and billionaires, a byword for a particular strain of woo-woo hipsterism, a countercultural institution wrestling with the contradictions between its libertine ideals, corporate reality and the regular presence of lightning-rod figures such as Grover Norquist, the conservative strategist, and Elon Musk’s brother.

The only way to truly grasp the meaning of the place, it seems, is to take the trip –figuratively at first, then literally once fully immersed in Black Rock City’s psychedelic, anything-goes culture. “It’s such an immersive experience that it seems that it would be impossible to capture on film or convey what it feels like to be inside a city that exists for a week, that’s imagined, built and sustained entirely by the people inside,” says Jehane Noujaim, co-director of The Man Will Burn, a new docuseries that premiered on HBO this month on the festival.

What begins as another celebrity lifestyle documentary shifts completely when the former Little Mix star faces a devastating diagnosis for her newborn twin daughters. Every scene is affecting

The fact that cameras were there to witness the worst moment of Jesy Nelson’s life was seemingly a coincidence. Prime Video had been following the former Little Mix singer for a documentary on her life since leaving the band, as well as the birth of her premature twins. What no one could predict was that, seven months later, as producers continued to film the growing family, Nelson’s daughters, Ocean and Story, would be diagnosed with the life-threatening muscle wasting condition spinal muscular atrophy (SMA).

Jesy Nelson: Life Changing starts with a clip from the last time viewers saw Nelson as she relocated to Cornwall with the father of her twins, her fiance Zion Foster, last year. “When they start walking, they can walk on the sand,” a smiling Nelson tells Foster as they sit with their babies on the beach. Of course, anyone who has seen the headlines in recent months knows this is achingly foreboding; a lost future that must be grieved and reshaped.

Carrie Underwood and Kathy Mattea celebrate 100 years of Grand Ole Opry. Plus: controversial comedy in Unacceptable. Here’s what to watch this evening

7pm, Sky Arts

The British actor on no-nonsense women, learning her lines in the bath and encountering a ‘nation of beautiful people’ while filming a new medical drama in Australia

You’re starring in Australian medical drama The F Ward. What was the best medical fact you learned on set?

Some of the operations I studied and watched in order to emulate them, I couldn’t believe that the patient was alive. Half of their body was outside of them; that should be inside!

The confessional classic opened the floodgates for a generation of brilliant female showrunners. But as risk-averse streamers tighten their purse strings, is the industry forcing women’s stories back into a box?

Ten years ago, Phoebe Waller-Bridge locked eyes with the camera and asked her audience: “Do I have a massive arsehole?” An unexpected punchline to a monologue about a booty call that went surprisingly – and literally – south, it announced Waller-Bridge as a new star of British telly. The half-hour comedy series Fleabag broke the fourth wall, and the internet. Its second season was even bigger, spawning countless thinkpieces discussing Andrew Scott as the “hot priest” and the sold-out Topshop jumpsuit worn by Waller-Bridge, which had a keyhole cutout revealing an aspirational slice of boob.

Both Fleabag and Waller-Bridge were praised for blazing a path that female showrunners and their feminist creations could later stomp down. It secured Waller-Bridge an exclusive deal with Amazon worth a reported $20m (£16m) a year. The show’s success certainly changed Waller-Bridge’s life. But, a decade on, as the British television industry has been reshaped by the rise of streamers, budget cuts and dwindling opportunities for new talent, how did it change TV?

Phillips plays the amateur sleuth with scissors in an audacious show that, even by cosy crime standards, is an unyielding slab of snuggle. Bloomin’ heck!

Gather ye rosebuds and clench ye bumcheeks, for there be rumblings in rural Crimeshire. A hairdresser has arrived in the fictional village of Blossom Vale armed with a blow-dried backstory (worked with fancy types in London but apparently now wants peace, quiet and “a place of me own”) and the keys to the high street’s dilapidated salon. Lily Petal (Sally Phillips) is cock-a-hoop with her purchase. “It’s like a time capsule!” hoots capable new assistant Clary (Charlotte Jordan), boggling at the salon’s abundance of browns and oranges. “It hasn’t been touched since the 1970s,” grins Lily, who, with her corduroy flares, diaphanous headscarves and penchant for the collected works of Hot Chocolate, is something of a time capsule herself.

But hark! A local busybody has been found, squished, next to her stepladder. Accident? Or murder most foul? Lily lunges for a magnifying glass.

The Hairdresser Mysteries aired on BBC One and is on iPlayer now

The former poet laureate on growing up with Lawrence Durrell, rereading Henry James and getting to grips with the genius of Alexander Pope

My earliest reading memory
My parents were country people who thought that looking after or chasing animals was more fun than reading: my father used to say that he’d read half a book in his life (The Lonely Skier by Hammond Innes), and while my mother got through three or four novels a year, she didn’t expect me to do anything equivalent. But I do remember enjoying something my grandmother gave me – My Father’s Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett. I must have been seven or so, and thought it was amusing and ingenious.

The books that changed me as a teenager
At my first school, I somehow got my hands on White Eagles Over Serbia by Lawrence Durrell, which my parents thought was unsuitably violent. I never finished it, but enjoyed carrying it around as proof of how grown-up I was. Then, at my secondary school, my history teacher read us some Wilfred Owen (we were studying the first world war), and the poetry-lights in my mind immediately flickered on. When I subsequently bought Owen’s Collected Poems it became a kind of sacred text for me (it still is).

The Runner by Scarlett Thomas; The Madman by Henning Mankell; Everything She Didn’t Say by Jane Casey; The Spy and the Snake by MJ Robotham; Murder at the End of the World by Akane Araki

The Runner by Scarlett Thomas (Scribner, £16.99)
Part thriller, part romantic suspense, Thomas’s latest novel begins in Cyprus, where 34-year-old Jay is literally on the run from someone who wants to kill him. Jay (not his real name) is well used to evading hitmen: the attempts on his life began at university, when a Japanese man arrived at his flat with a samurai sword. People have been trying to murder him ever since, the contract on his life traded like a commodity, in bitcoin. Now his only apparent ally is the mysterious Ellie, although – given his track record – it’s quite possible that she’s trying to off him, too. Just before the reader’s sense of intrigue turns to irritated bafflement, the action rewinds to Jay’s childhood in Kent, and the reasons slowly become clear in this quirky, exciting tale that takes in exorcism, dictators, high finance, con artists and marathons along the way.

The Madman by Henning Mankell, translated by George Goulding and Sarah de Senarclens (Mountain Leopard, £25)
Written in the 1970s and published in English for the first time, The Madman is set in a Swedish town in the late 1940s. The country’s wartime neutrality-on-paper continues to divide: the town’s pro-Nazis want the past forgotten, but the communist sympathisers, bitter about having been interned, want a reckoning. When a letter to this effect appears in the local paper, those accused, including the director of the town’s sawmill, claim that newcomer Bertil Kras has been stirring resentment for political ends. When the sawmill burns down, Kras is blamed for that, too, and the disintegration of the life he has tried to make provokes an existential crisis. An older Mankell might have been more concise, but the slow build towards inevitable disaster makes for true emotional depth, and the theme of othering, isolating and penalising people for their opinions remain horribly topical.

Sinister bogland discoveries haunt the intersecting lives of four characters in this meditative, exquisitely written tale

Almost 14% of Ireland is bog: vast swathes of moss-carpeted land, below which layers of ancient history have been compounded into mulch-black turf. Captivated by their otherworldly beauty, Seamus Heaney wrote some of his finest poetry about bogs – and the bodies discovered, perfectly preserved, in their eerie depths.

Sheila Armstrong’s exquisite second novel, The Red Mouth, also centres around two bog discoveries: the “monstrous, bog-black antler” of a great Irish elk, and the mutilated body of a girl who comes to be known as Belroe Woman. From here we follow the intersecting lives of those haunted, both literally and figuratively, by these excavations and the uncanny landscape that yielded them.

Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some fantastic new paperbacks, from the gripping story of an international murder case to a state-of-the-nation yarn

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Actor Russell Tovey’s narration crackles with compassion and menace in this magical story of a widower and his young sons in mourning

Less than a week after the sudden death of his wife, a grieving man opens his front door to a giant crow who scoops him up into his wing and tells him: “I won’t leave until you don’t need me anymore.” Still in shock, the man is facing the prospect of raising his two young sons alone. The bird, which has previously been roaming around the family’s flat at night, has observed a household of “heavy mourning, every surface dead Mum, every crayon, tractor, coat, welly covered in a film of grief”. In that first visit, the man “woke up and didn’t see me against the blackness of his trauma”.

First published in 2015 and since adapted as a play and film, Grief Is the Thing With Feathers is an inventive and sharply observed novella by Max Porter which uses verse, dialogue and the supernatural to examine a family grappling with the loss of a wife and mother who had been “busy living, and then she was gone”. In a story that shifts between the perspectives of “Dad”, “Boys” and “Crow”, we learn the man is a writer who is working on a book about the poet Ted Hughes called Crow on the Couch.

From 18th-century pleasure gardens to Studio 54, the story of nightlife in all its hedonistic – and political – glory

In this fabulous alternative history of the modern world, the academic and “party historian” Imogen Willetts looks at the last 500 years of civilisation through the sometimes blurry lenses of its after-dark scenes, with fascinating results. She begins by trying to capture what it feels like to go on a big night out, focusing on a phenomenon that, in 1912, the sociologist Émile Durkheim labelled “collective effervescence”. In one passage, she explains this by referencing dancing as part of ancient tribal hunting rituals, listening to Charli xcx’s 365, or singing along to Sweet Caroline with tens of thousands of other people in a stadium.

This is no dry academic study, then, and its mix of historical research, critical theory and conversational references to pop culture makes for a bright and compelling read. What Willetts calls the “seemingly superficial act of getting gussied up to drink, dance, have fun and meet people” is, of course, much more than that, and she scratches away at the layers with skill. Nightlife can contain, or enable, rebellion, community, innovation, art, love, sex and political revolution. From Japan to France, from Shanghai to Germany, via many detours to the United States, she examines historical movements as they might be seen from dusk till dawn.

How do you follow Oppenheimer? By spending $250m bringing Homer’s epic poem to the big screen in Imax. Today’s most powerful director talks big swings, trauma-bonding and the healing powers of chocolate labrador Charlie

‘I’m in that moment of sheer terror,” says Christopher Nolan, sitting in a suite at the Corinthia hotel in London, in a slightly rumpled suit, next to a pot of tea. Outside, crowds jostle, hoping to catch a glimpse of one of the stars within – Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Lupita Nyong’o. It is the day before the world premiere of Nolan’s latest film, an adaptation of Homer’s epic poem the Odyssey, and the last day of waiting before audiences decide whether the biggest gamble of Nolan’s career has paid off. The film, which reportedly cost $250m (£185m), doesn’t just need an audience to show up. It needs the entire moviegoing world to do so.

“It never gets any easier, because I make films for audiences and the audience tells me what it likes,” he says. “They finish the film. I don’t have anything to hide behind. I can’t just be like: ‘Oh, people don’t get it.’ Those aren’t the films I make. What does the audience make of it? Do they turn up? Do they like it if they do turn up?

The Lord of the Rings author’s debt to Norse mythology is simply irrelevant when it comes to the appearance of hobbits and elves on screen today

Casting has come a long way since the early 1980s when it was somehow still acceptable to sign up Max von Sydow to play Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon in 1980, or hire Peter Ustinov as the lead in Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen in 1981 (despite protests at the time). These days, film-makers will have to defend an all-white cast in a medieval fantasy flick, which appears to be what has happened this week to The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum’s Andy Serkis.

Asked by the BBC why every major casting for the new film has been a white actor, Serkis appeared to lay the blame on his literary source material. “Tolkien himself was influenced a lot by Norse mythology, there’s a lot of that feeling,” he said. “The Shire feels very, very much like a very, a very white, you know … They’re not very concerned about what goes on beyond the borders of the Shire, but they know they don’t want people coming in.

As Hairspray and his ‘angriest movie’ Desperate Living are rereleased, the ‘Pope of Trash’ reflects on dead dogs, dirty rats, ‘that lunatic RFK’ and why there are no novelty dances any more

John Waters still remembers the day his 1988 comedy Hairspray was awarded a PG certificate. “It was horrible,” he says.

Until then, Waters, christened the “Pope of Trash” by the novelist William S Burroughs, was notorious for filming the unfilmable. In Eat Your Makeup, he recreated JFK’s assassination only five years after the event, casting the boisterous Divine in drag as Jackie Kennedy. He invented a blasphemous sex act called the “rosary job” in Multiple Maniacs, which also featured a rape-by-giant-lobster. Most repulsively, in Pink Flamingos, he persuaded Divine to scoff a fresh dog turd on camera.

The film helped me realise that getting out into nature would also allow me to escape my anxieties, but I started to see the costs of constant escape

It’s 5.30am, and I’m waking up on a granite slab overlooking the Domeland Wilderness, with nothing but forest, stone and silence for miles. I am 44 days into hiking the Pacific Crest Trail – a journey of about 2,650 miles from the Mexican border to Canada through desert scrubland, pine forests, deep valleys, volcanic terrain and alpine mountains. Each day, I walk about 20 miles with everything I need for the next four months on my back.

I was 16 when I first watched Into the Wild, the film telling the true story of Christopher McCandless, an adventurer who gave up his middle-class life to live in the wilderness. I’d always had a sense of adventure and was enticed by the idea of breaking away from expectations and moving through the world on my own terms. I began to fantasise about escaping my north London bubble to live somewhere as remote and unknown as the wild American landscapes in the film.

The passionate allegory on Stalinism is outrageously reduced to happy-ending panto in this defanged animation featuring the voices of Seth Rogen, Laverne Cox and Glenn Close

George Orwell’s Animal Farm is not a sacred text. There’s no rule that says it can’t be changed in adaptation, especially if, say, you wanted to add some historical perspective from the world that came to exist after the book was published in 1945. But this unforgivably sugary animation from screenwriter Nicholas Stoller and director Andy Serkis, as well as having a pretty cheapo digital look, betrays Orwell by outrageously blandifying and defanging its classic allegory of Stalinism and failed revolution with a dumb happy ending in the Disney style.

The pivotal moment when the pigs and the humans look the same happens not at the end, but around the one-hour stage into a 94-minute film, signalling that a new third act is in the offing. I was initially intrigued, wondering if there would be some ingenious finale in which a wall on the farm is knocked down. But no. The evil pig Napoleon (voiced by Seth Rogen with many a yuk-yuk-yuk) has eliminated his rival Snowball (Laverne Cox), then gobbles up corrupt human money from a newly invented agribusiness corporate character from the human world called Pilkington (Glenn Close) and takes to addressing his followers with the aid of a Big Brother-style giant screen.

No film-maker shows more day-drinking than Hong, and this study of an actor returning from a career break is the same again – as mysteriously addictive as ever

It will not surprise fans of the prolific lo-fi Korean master Hong Sang-soo that his new film in black-and-white – which might be described as “experimental” by those who don’t quite realise that they all look like this – features long scenes, shot from a single, static camera position, featuring a conversation in a restaurant. Nor will they be surprised that one of these scenes contains a sudden, unobtrusive zoom-in to a closer position, for no obvious reason.

It will not be startling for them that the film features someone playing a female screen star of a certain age philosophically pondering her career and life-choices (a key Hong trope). And it certainly won’t be a shock that the film has a character ordering a beer or two before the sun is technically over the yardarm. There is no one in the movies, or in any of the arts, or any aspect of public life, anywhere in the world, who is more utterly dedicated to day-drinking than Hong Sang-soo.

Project a Black Planet: Film, a new season of screenings at the Barbican in London exemplifies how the movement was an act of solidarity, resistance and fierce creativity

Algiers, 1969. What had, for seven years, been the metropolis of a newly independent country became, over the course of 12 days in July, the cosmopolitan centre of an entire continent. That summer, Algeria played host to the first Pan-African Cultural festival (Panaf) and the capital’s streets were transformed into a vista of energising performers, flanked by placards announcing each country’s delegation: Ethiopia, Liberia, Mali.

Picture an Olympics-style opening ceremony, then discard it, for the images captured in William Klein’s documentary of the event, The Pan-African Festival of Algiers, hint at the very dissolving of barriers between spectacle and spectator – an act that brings to life a quote, shown on screen, from Guinea’s first president Sékou Touré: “We must make this revolution with the people … and the songs will come.”

Town Hall theatre, Galway
A beautifully knit ensemble bring infectious, giddy fun to Dion Boucicault’s 1874 caper, finding a delicious balance between whimsy and sincerity

Dion Boucicault’s comic melodrama from 1874 holds a place in theatre history for its playful upending of national stereotypes and expectations. Finding a delicious balance between whimsy and sincerity, Garry Hynes’s inventive production for Druid theatre company celebrates Boucicault’s gifts as a playwright and master of stage spectacle, whose creations dazzled 19th-century audiences in New York and London.

This staging takes a miniaturist approach, with Sligo landscapes, cliff tops and gothic towers depicted as picture-book illustrations glimpsed from a distance. Ladders and furniture descend and glide, with assistance from the nimble cast of 10, most dextrously by Conn “the Shaughraun” (Aaron Monaghan), poacher and trickster. Here, Conn also acts as master of ceremonies cum stage manager, as if standing in for Boucicault himself.

Pitlochry Festival theatre
Following its star through rehearsals and squabbles with her director, this is modelled on Cocteau’s La Voix Humaine but it’s not speaking very clearly

If Frances Ruffelle fancied putting on a one-woman cabaret show, it would be pretty good. The West End and Broadway star has certainly pulled together a decent set of original songs to flesh out I Can Die Too.

Written by a dozen or so songwriters and brightly arranged by musical director Frew, they have the 1980s/90s pop feel of Cyndi Lauper, Britney Spears and Ultravox; a touch of torch song here, a slice of synth ballad there. Backed by cello, violin, keys and drums, Ruffelle is in her element singing them: nothing histrionic and the good judgment to know when the song needs a swing of the hips, a soft-shoe shuffle or just a straight, closed-eyed rendition.

Malmö Dockteater is adapting Jackie Collins’s debut novel about the swinging 60s using anatomically enhanced dolls. Puppets help you explore sex in a different way, they say

Erik Holmström holds up a naked, headless Ken doll. Most of the figure is as you’d expect: lean muscles, smooth skin. But lower down, something’s different. Between those hairless thighs is a small plastic penis nestled in a tuft of hair. “It’s real hair,” says Holmström, the director of Malmö Dockteater (that’s “puppet theatre” in Swedish). Performer and puppeteer Kajsa Ericsson jumps in. “Not real pubic hair,” she clarifies.

This doll is not just a prop of the company’s new show; it’s one of the stars. Malmö Dockteater has adapted Jackie Collins’s debut novel, The World Is Full of Married Men, into an experimental puppet production that leaps fearlessly into the explicit sex scenes that got the novel banned in several countries when it was first published in 1968. After performances in Malmö and Stockholm, the company is bringing the show to the newly refurbished Yard theatre in east London, where it will be performed in Swedish with English subtitles.

The Egg, Bath
The beloved children’s perennial is the basis for a celebration of craft, creativity and the beauty of the natural world in this charming puppetry production

The Egg theatre celebrates its 20th anniversary with Tom Wentworth’s thoughtful but fitful adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s beloved book. As Mary and her friends nurture their secret garden, animal puppets play amid the audience and flowers pop up across a green-washed stage. It’s all very charming – particularly when Cat Rock’s beautiful puppets skip, soar and dart around the theatre. There’s a plucky robin, a majestic owl and a ridiculously lovable fluffy lamb. All the puppets are frayed around the edges with the original fabric exposed; a celebration of craft and creation just as much as the beauty of the natural world.

The puppets are complemented by a striking design from Kat Heath and evocative music from composer Ben Osborn. The Yorkshire Moors around Misselthwaite Manor, where Mary is sent after being orphaned, are brought to life using curtains of fabric and giant gloves with long spindly fingers, worn by actors and swaying wildly in the wind. It’s quite unusual work, which sometimes makes the young audience giggle but gradually takes a hold of the imagination.

Birmingham Rep
With tremendous singing from Ramin Karimloo and Meow Meow, Joe Murphy’s superb staging of the story is full of dark gothic humour

Stephen Sondheim was drawn to fairytales – and not just in the storybook theme of Into the Woods. The origins of Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street, lie in Victorian melodrama, but in the hands of the composer, working with book writer Hugh Wheeler in response to a play by Christopher Bond, it is steeped in the tropes of folklore.

The story of a serial killer who provides the grisly contents for his landlady’s pies is ripe with the kind of dark gothic humour that appealed to the Brothers Grimm. There are shades of Hansel and Gretel in the cavernous oven and of Little Red Riding Hood in the prospect of being turned into someone’s dinner. The composer’s lyrics even quote the nursery rhyme Pat-a-Cake, Pat-a-Cake, Baker’s Man.

At Birmingham Rep until 15 August

Soho theatre, London
Josh Radnor is a music executive whose life is upended by his wayward brother, in a play about masculinity, creativity, appropriation and trauma

On paper, writer Jonathan Caren’s Hit Machine has all the makings of a chart-topping smash. Featuring the London stage debuts of Josh Radnor (How I Met Your Mother) and Noah Galvin (Dear Evan Hansen), with direction from Daniel Bailey (Red Pitch) and music by Grammy-winning bluesman Ben Harper, the three-hander tackles the topics of masculinity, appropriation and buried family trauma through the prism of the creative process.

Set in the louche, soft-furnished home of music mogul Wes (Radnor), the play begins promisingly. Wayward younger brother Alex (Galvin) arrives and throws a plaid-shirted bomb into Wes’s carefully manicured and minimalist life. We begin to see how each sibling plays their role in the strained family dynamic: Wes the high-achiever on the hedonic treadmill always striving for more, and Alex the sprightly yet secretive youngster striving only for approval.

At Soho theatre, London, until 15 August

(Enodoc)
The emotive lyricist and surefooted improvisor sounds lustrous in a 1990 recording featuring an exquisite I Loves You, Porgy

When Norma Winstone, the peerless English vocalist and lyricist, reached 80 in 2021 – still in entrancing voice – a cascade of tributes included one from ECM Records boss Manfred Eicher, legendary master of doing more with less in new music: “She hears things differently, and tells us about them in her own quiet way.” Winstone’s confiding storytelling could have struggled in a noisy world, but landmark albums, the accolades of peers and fans and an MBE have confirmed its soft power across 60 years. So does the release of A Timeless Place, a long-archived 1990 radio broadcast with Winstone fronting Hanover’s NDR Radio Orchestra.

The title track is her much-covered lyric (Mark Murphy, Jazzmeia Horn and Cécile McLorin Salvant have explored it) to pianist Jimmy Rowles’ lovely tune The Peacocks. Glimpsed happiness, missed chances and the sounds and colours of emotions (“I’m drowning now, slowly sinking in a sea of blue and green”) typify Winstone’s materials, and her lustrous low sounds and vaulting octave leaps constantly mutate the implications of words.

(SharpTone)
Granite-hard riffola collides with balm-like electronics and tinkling jazz piano in a thrilling fourth album of musical metamorphosis

Loathe took six years to make this fourth album, explaining they wanted to make it very special. Accordingly, A Stranger to You ventures far from the Liverpudlians’ metalcore origins to create an odyssey of mixed and colliding genres. Punishing riffola and slabs of industrial noise coexist with balm-like electronics, acoustic guitars, shoegaze, tinkling jazz pianos and guest rapper Bucki Sugar’s spoken-word narratives (“ever forward, forever motion”). Other guests include vocalist Olli Appleyard from Leeds rockers Static Dress, production duo Nowhere2run and – most unlikely of all – slinky jazz-soul producer Jordan Rakei.

Precedents for this sort of radical metal departure include Deafheaven’s Ordinary Corrupt Human Love and Linkin Park’s divisive but compelling A Thousand Suns, but, if anything, Loathe make even more musical handbrake turns. Block of Flats hurtles between gentle atmospherics and guttural vocals. The soaring Fortress Down and Meet My Maker suggest a slightly heavier Muse. Harder to Pretend recalls – of all things – Herbie Hancock’s groundbreaking early 70s jazz fusion, while The Way It Breaks haunts as effectively as Disintegration-era Cure.

The annual rundown of Guardian writers picking their most played tracks of the season goes from club-ready pop to sunny tech house

• Check out a Spotify playlist of the choices

Kim Petras’ greatest song to date is also the best outsider country song in recent memory: if Ethel Cain and Lana Del Rey could ever put the beef behind them and duet, the dusty gutter romance of Jeep is exactly how you’d want it to sound. The song creates a flyover state love story in a strangely effective union of hyperpop and Americana, creating a windswept fantasy of “doing some middle America shit” with your man: Four Loko-fueled hookups, gas station canoodling and screaming along to rage music beneath the stars. The truly audacious thing is the bridge, a whispered and impressionistic slur that feels like Petras is eight drinks deep, doing donuts in her car until everything blurs. It’s total make-believe, but Petras is so good at making you feel her longing that it gets me choked up. When she recently came out at a Charli xcx show to perform Jeep unannounced, it already felt like an anthem. Owen Myers

A Grammy nom at 17, a US No 1 ... then silence. With new album Oh Yeah? finally out after four years away, the genre-hopping artist explains the trauma and heartbreak that informed it

Since Steve Lacy became a Grammy-winning artist with a No 1 hit in the US, little has changed for him. His single Bad Habit was one of the biggest songs of 2022, leading to a sold-out tour across North America, Europe and Australia. But off-stage? He bought a new home in Los Angeles, but he hasn’t made any new famous friends. He doesn’t get hounded in public, because he’s a natural homebody. Besides, he’s not really that famous, is he?

“I think my name is bigger than my face, which is great,” he says, smiling mischievously. Sitting in a private room in a London hotel, wearing a Serge Gainsbourg T-shirt and jeans so ripped that they might as well be shorts, Lacy says he thinks he has pulled off the greatest trick of modern pop stardom: being one of the most celebrated musicians of his generation while remaining almost unrecognisable.

The industrial dance duo make music for this summer’s heatwave: filled with dread and jangling with pent-up energy

From Manchester, via Peterborough and Shanghai
Recommended if you like Crystal Castles, Mandy, Indiana, acid house
Up next Festival dates including East London Block Party, Brighton Psych Fest and End of the Road

Salford’s Silverwingkiller sound how this summer’s heatwave feels: delirious, dread-filled and jangling with pent-up energy. Named after the Chinese title for Blade Runner, they build pummelling industrial dance music from nervy breakbeats, the acid sounds of the Roland TB-303 synthesiser and the shared sense of creative freedom that James Baca and Yushang Ni discovered on moving to Greater Manchester, from Peterborough and Shanghai respectively.

(Island)
On the Bradford-born producer’s self-assured second album, drum’n’bass rhythms power up angsty odes with shades of Arctic Monkeys, Kate Nash and myriad genres

Like another of the year’s biggest pop records, Olivia Rodrigo’s You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, the second full-length from the self-proclaimed “emotional junglist” Nia Archives is an album of two halves. The first documents its protagonist falling in love at breakneck speed; the second, the whiplash of sudden heartbreak. Unlike Rodrigo, Archives didn’t grow up starring on Disney Channel, a predestined route to success, but in Bradford, cutting her teeth on early 00s pirate radio, dancehall and landfill indie.

More than most major artists, Archives has carved out her own path. After leaving home at just 16 to move into a youth hostel in Manchester, she started teaching herself to make beats; eventually, she uprooted to Hackney and studied music production, and used her student loan to fund the promotion of her self-released debut single. Since then, she’s made history as the first electronic/dance act to win a Mobo in decades (after publicly campaigning for the inclusion of dance music at the awards in 2022). With her 2024 debut album Silence Is Loud, she became the first junglist to be nominated for three Brit awards, and the first to be nominated for the Mercury prize since 1997 – before she was born.

Five decades since punk bible Sniffin’ Glue, DIY magazines are in rude, rich health. Their creators talk fandom, community-building and resisting the algorithm

‘The most important part of the word ‘fanzine’ is ‘fan’,” says London-based zine-maker Jon Marsh. Existing outside mainstream media, free from the demands of release cycles and search engine optimisation, music fanzines are obsessions turned into tangible objects; self-published primarily for the maker’s own enjoyment, but with the potential of forging connections with like-minded people.

In the 1970s, punk zines such as Sniffin’ Glue, Alternative Ulster and Ripped & Torn allowed fans to share news and enthusiasm quickly and cheaply. Half a century on, music fanzines are enjoying a resurgence as a form of resistance to algorithm fatigue and the hyper-capitalist music industry. “Digital attention span is at an all-time low,” says hip-hop musician ExP, creator of the West Yorkshire Hip-Hop zine. “You’re almost definitely going to spend more time looking at a zine than anything you see scrolling. It’s more interesting and more real.” In the words of Stephen McRobbie, from indie-pop icons and fanzine regulars the Pastels: “It’s the long way round compared to other media, but the scenery is always better.”

From Copland to Gershwin and a new Emily Dickinson-based commission it was America’s evening – but with a surprise Mancunian encore

And we’re back. The “world’s greatest classical music festival” has flung wide the doors of the Royal Albert Hall for another eight-week season. Where the Last Night of the Proms is often strangely separate – a self-contained musical party for an entirely different audience – the First Night is the celebration for those here for the long haul, the scene-setter and season in microcosm. So what does this year’s have to say?

Whatever its current geopolitical strain, the “special relationship” is live and kicking in the concert hall. The 250th anniversary of American independence is front and centre this summer (because nationalism is always less embarrassing when it’s someone else’s), trumpeted from the off with – what else – Aaron Copland’s crowd-pleaser Fanfare for the Common Man.

BBC Philharmonic/Havlat/Kaziboni/Piatti Quartet
(NMC)
Einstein’s field equations, Newton’s universal law and artificial intelligence are among the subjects of Laidlow’s ambitious orchestral works

Robert Laidlow is as at home in the realms of science and technology as he is in the world of classical music. As this NMC debut album demonstrates, his intricate, wildly imaginative work is eminently approachable, even if the core concepts are highly complex.

Warp, a terse, 12-minute piano concerto, proposes a musical solution to Einstein’s field equations as the intrepid Joseph Havlat boldly goes where no pianist has gone before amid the distorting fabric of orchestral space-time. Strident orchestral lines spiral ever upwards, stretching instruments to their limits, while the piano maintains its course towards a serene conclusion. Handsomely recorded, the BBC Philharmonic and Vimbayi Kaziboni offer vibrantly detailed support.

Buxton Opera House
Olivia Fuchs’ delirious spin on the baroque opera comes with TV trickery, more hearts than a cardiologist convention and absolutely gorgeous singing

It’s day seven on “Melissa’s Island”. Melissa is grafting hottie Amadigi but he keeps mugging her off. Amadigi’s head’s been turned by fit bird Oriana, but snakey Dardano is trying to crack on with her too and she’s got the ick. It’s giving toxic relationship energy.

The absurdity of Handel’s magic operas can be a headache for directors. But not for Olivia Fuchs, whose Amadigi for Buxton festival takes the composer’s paper-thin four-hander and swaps magic for TV trickery, sorceresses for all-powerful producers, and a set of foolish lovers for the cast of a Love Island-style reality show. Add an inflatable flamingo, a barrage of cameras and more hearts than a cardiologist convention, and you’ve got a staging that keeps you so busy smiling that you barely notice that you’ve, well, caught feelings.

Monaco/Raftis/Colombo/Frigato/Orchestra Ghislieri/Prandi
(Arcana)
Recorded from a live performance in an 18th-century theatre in Jesi – Pergolesi’s hometown – this is a brain-addling tale of love triangles and long-lost twins set in the ancient Olympics

Pietro Metastasio’s tale of dirty doings at the ancient Olympic Games proved so popular that more than 60 composers set it to music, including Caldara (for whom it was written), Vivaldi and Cherubini. Pergolesi’s version, premiered in 1735, resurrected in 1937, is among the finest, presaging what should have been a glorious operatic career if only the composer hadn’t died at the age of 26.

The story begins as the formidable Megacle is persuaded to compete in disguise as his hot-headed and not entirely honourable friend Licida. What Megacle doesn’t know is that the prize is the hand of Aristea, the woman he has fallen in love with himself. Throw in Licida’s cast-off mistress Argene masquerading as a shepherdess and the discovery that Licida is actually Aristea’s long-lost twin and you have all the ingredients for a plot of brain-addling complexity.

Evil Empire creatives explain how it is playing to today’s ‘metroidvanias’ and honouring the original’s legacy with much fresh slaying to be done

Since the last Castlevania game hit the shelves (2014’s Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2), Konami’s dormant series has unexpectedly spawned a hit genre. With an entire generation raised on “metroidvanias” – a portmanteau of Metroid and Castlevania – millions of players have only ever seen the games inspired by Konami’s seminal games. Now with Belmont’s Curse, launching in October, Castlevania is finally dashing back to console, where Konami hopes to reclaim its side-scroller throne.

Set 23 years after the events of 1989’s Castlevania 3 – the same setting as the hit Netflix show – Belmont’s Curse shakes off the series’ 3D ambitions and takes the Belmonts back to basics. Dispatching players to the demon-infested streets of 1499 Paris, you’re placed in the tattered boots of Trevor Belmont’s daughter, Rose. As a bishop pleads with the Belmonts to rid Paris of the ancient evil besetting the city, Rose heads into the sewers, longsword in hand, and her demon-slaying adventure begins.

PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2; Undercoders
Colourful, counter-cultural and captivating – this rail riding game set in a dystopian Japan is as weird as it is exhilarating

Every now and again a game appears with a premise so outrageous you stop in your tracks to take it all in. Denshattack!, a game about kickflipping trains across a dystopian future Japan, is the epitome of this feeling. Set in a post climate disaster world, people have retreated to corporate-owned domed cities to live out their days in air-conditioned, ignorant comfort. Save for a handful of outcasts, the rest of the country is a mess of broken infrastructure, where rival gangs battle it out on the ruins of Japan’s famously extensive rail network. Naive upstart Emi has one goal: become the best Denshattacker there is, one sick nosegrind at a time.

Taking the idea of an on-rails platforming game to its extreme conclusion, developers Undercoders have combined the best bits of the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series – grinding, flipping and spinning through an entire dictionary of tricks – with the anti-establishment message behind Jet Set Radio. The rivals Emi encounters showcase the history of Japanese misfits, pitting you against ageing rockabillies and violent girl gangs without a shred of judgment.

As global anxieties multiply, ​v​ideo games from Resident Evil to Mouthwashing are providing rich source material to help decode society’s problems

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Horror is so hot right now. There’s Obsession, Evil Dead Burn and Hokum in the cinema, Widow’s Bay, From and Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen on TV, and, of course, a rotting smorgasbord of horror games including Resident Evil Requiem (pictured top) and Reanimal, soon to be joined by Silent Hill: Townfall, Silver Pines and Dreadmoor. We’re also seeing weird cross-pollinations, with horror movie studio Blumhouse making games, while games themselves become horror films and the whole backrooms genre infects every medium it touches.

So it was fascinating to attend last week’s horror and gaming conference at Falmouth University, in Cornwall: a gathering of students, researchers and lecturers, all engaged in the academic study of horror games. There were brilliant talks on zombies and posthumanism, the gothic in games, and the role of monstrous little girls in survival horror (there are a lot of them!). Subjects as diverse as masculine fragility, disability and ageing came up; Will Doyle, creative director at Supermassive Games, gave a great keynote on the art of creating horror in games using tools such as revulsion, spatial alienation and the human instinct of apophenia. I learned a lot about theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Mark Fisher, and about the technical similarities between indie horror games and film noir (for example, the use of darkness and creative camera techniques to “hide” budget restrictions). It was incredible fun.

He was a telecoms engineer by day – and documented the Scottish city’s leather scene by night. Now the 79-year-old has opened his erotic archives and received his first ever solo exhibition

What is the story behind John Wood’s photographs? Some might guess that his portraits, which capture male subjects in various states of undress, very often wearing black leather jackets, gloves and boots, were taken in New York in the era of BDSM photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and Studio 54. Or maybe they were created in a very different kind of darkroom – the type of spaces that inspired the homoerotic imagery of the artist Tom of Finland? If you were given a hundred tries, you’d probably never guess that these erotic, intimate, kinky portraits were taken in a converted attic in the West End of Glasgow, unbeknown to the world (and the neighbours) for decades.

The story of Wood himself is equally unusual. At 79, he is showcasing his first ever solo show at Celine gallery in Glasgow. To say it has been a long time coming would be an understatement: Wood has been making photographs since his teens, when he began teaching himself by studying the images in magazines. The portraits in the show span a 20-year period, from ‘Cal’, a small Polaroid of a man standing nude next to a white doorway, taken in 1982, to ‘June 2002’, a gelatin silver print of an unnamed man clad in a leather waistcoat, while a black leather military-style cap and a cigarette obscure most of his face.

Sir John Soane’s Museum, London
The Empire State building is caught in bed with the Chrysler Building and a milk bottle turns into a dragon in the raunchy and cheekily provocative work of the Dutch artist and architect

In a high-rise New York apartment with a wide window that surveys the Manhattan grid below, the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings are in bed together. The Chrysler melts in a silvery swoon, shagged out, while the beacon atop the Empire State Building still glows fiery red and on the bedside table the Statue of Liberty’s arm holds up a torch suggesting more passion to come. But oh no! The lovers have been caught at it. At the door is the forbidding RCA Building, which has left its usual station at 30 Rockefeller Plaza to see this!

Madelon Vriesendorp’s 1975 skyscraper sex romp drawing Flagrant Délit – “caught in the act” – can be seen twice in her exhibition Mind Games: as a standalone print and as the cover of Delirious New York, the 1978 book by her ex-husband Rem Koolhaas that is both a surreal history of the city and a subversive manifesto for a new kind of modern architecture. Vriesendorp is what exactly? An architectural cartoonist? A cartoonist architect? She is certainly more than just a graphic prankster, and won the 2025 Soane Medal given to visionaries who have “furthered and enriched the public understanding of architecture”. Hence this show. And it all started with skyscrapers copulating.

Patrick Caulfield, Claes Oldenburg and Jasper Johns put Hockney in context while Helen Chadwick’s provocations have a wild Welsh setting – all in your weekly dispatch

Pop Revisited
David Hockney’s brilliantly inventive prints are shown with other graphic masterpieces of the 1960s by Richard Hamilton, Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns and more.
• Cristea Roberts Gallery, London, from 23 July to 20 August

Committed to Bethlem hospital after killing his father in a psychotic episode, Dadd inspired Angela Carter and Queen. Now a new show is exploring his paintings with a more nuanced take on his mental illness

In the autumn of 1843, the influential journal Art-Union mourned “the late Richard Dadd”, an apparently kind and gentle man who a year or so earlier had been a rising star of London’s Royal Academy. Today, Dadd is known, if at all, for having murdered his father while in the grip of severe psychosis, for which he was committed to Bethlem hospital and then to the new Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, where he remained for the rest of his life. As Art-Union concluded: “although the grave has not actually closed over him, he must be classed among the dead.”

At Bethlem, Dadd began painting again. Scenes remembered from his trip around the Eastern Mediterranean – when he first began suffering mental distress – were followed by portraiture allegory, satire, biblical scenes and intricately detailed fantasies, among them the unfinished The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, which he painted between 1855 and 1864, while at Broadmoor. By now he was more patient than artist, and the prism of mental illness through which his work came to be understood has never fully shifted.

‘Nowadays Jairzinho works with kids in the favelas of Rio where the unwritten rule is that visitors have to leave by 5pm. I asked for 10 more minutes and when I turned round, a guy had pulled a gun on my crew’

I’m not a mad football fan. What I most love about the game is its universal appeal – it’s all about a ball crossing a line, and a goal is a goal whether it involves two jerseys in a park or the one that determines the outcome of a World Cup. But when I realised in 2007 that only 58 people had ever scored a goal in a World Cup final and that only 34 of these men were still alive, I thought it would be a great idea to photograph them.

It quickly became apparent that book sales alone would never finance the project – there were only two English players, the rest were in Europe or South America. But a successful pitch to a film producer won me the opportunity to travel to 13 countries with a documentary crew. Over the course of four years, we interviewed every member of the exclusive World Cup club, and I made portraits of them all.

Their scandalous work was once banned. Now it’s in museums. The photographer talks about a lifetime defying conformity – and their ‘very active’ sex life

The peaceful Swedish city of Örebro is not where you might expect to find Del LaGrace Volcano, the US photographer known for their subversive images depicting LGBTQ+ communities, drag kings and sexual desire. Yet this is the place they have called home for the last two decades, having moved with their ex-partner, Matilda Wurm, an associate professor at the city’s university. Now, their days are punctuated by walks around a nearby forest and trips to the local outdoor swimming pool with the pair’s two children. It is a far cry from the life Volcano previously had in London, where they lived in squats, attended S&M fetish parties and documented lesbian cruising culture.

“I do miss it. I think London will always be my city,” Volcano tells me when they pick me up from my hotel in Örebro’s (virtually empty) city centre. Halfway between Stockholm and Gothenburg, the former trading hub – known for its medieval castle – is “not a queer city”, the photographer admits. Most of their neighbours don’t even know they are queer. Volcano, 68, is intersex and calls themself a “hermaphrodyke” – but these days they “pass as apparently a little old man”, they say with a grimace.

Food writer and music enthusiast Ruby Tandoh details a tender picture of the existential threat to the lute. Plus, a joyous celebration of the great outdoors with Caitlin Moran and Adam Frost

This indie “audio magazine” brings together documentaries of all stripes, the common thread being a sense of experimentation. The third issue features food writer Ruby Tandoh detailing a quietly beautiful portrait of the lute, an instrument on the brink of extinction, while Jess Shane revisits a groundbreaking experiment that gave children the tools to turn their reality into poignant poetry. Hannah J Davies
Widely available, episodes weekly

With its gushing interviewees and weird (y’know) ways of talking, the BBC news flagship show I used to present now has me harrumphing at the radio

It’s seven years since I stopped presenting the Today programme and started listening to Radio 3 instead. Or at least, that was the plan. On the first day it lasted for almost an hour. By the second day I’d given up on it. I suppose it was inevitable. You can’t spend 61 years as a news hack – more than half of it presenting the same programme – and then just erase it from your memory and start a new life.

What you can do in my own case – or, rather, can’t help doing – is mutate into a “new” listener. How to describe this “new” listener? I suppose if I were Today’s editor, the phrase “pain in the arse” might come to mind. Having been the one on the radio informing (and possibly sometimes annoying) the listeners for 33 years, I’m now the man shouting at his radio about how irritating the programme has become.

John Humphrys presents The Odd Couple podcast with Matthew Norman

Actor who played Jill Archer for 68 years on the long-running BBC radio soap opera The Archers

Patricia Greene, who has died aged 95, was the world’s longest-serving soap opera actor, and featured in The Archers on BBC radio for 68 years. She joined as Jill Paterson, a demonstrator of kitchen appliances, in 1957, and evolved into the serial’s stern, sometimes interfering, matriarch after marrying Phil Archer (played by Norman Painting).

At her audition for the role, Greene was faced with a quandary. “The script was a rather domineering woman who was demonstrating a machine called the Household Drudge at a garden fete, but it was put to me as ‘a sexy blonde in a tea tent’,” she recalled. She decided to deliver her lines in the deep, sultry tones of the actor Fenella Fielding.