(Edition) Rochford showcases his signature alchemic touch, featuring seven electric guitarists in a fusion of improv, reggae and romantic pop
When Aberdeen-raised drummer and composer Sebastian Rochford’s star rose around the millennium, he quickly made an impact with his precocious and inclusive awareness of 1950-1960s Monk-and-Miles jazz grooves, rock, funk, global music and more. From 2002, Rochford’s unique sax-led quintet Polar Bear began earning nominations for Mercury, Mobo and Urban Music prizes, as well as the kind of fame rare in instrumental jazz. He also played key roles with Acoustic Ladyland, Basquiat Strings, Fulborn Teversham, Sons of Kemet, and as a sideman with Damon Albarn, Brian Eno and Adele.
Finding Ways follows 2023’s A Short Diary (a duo album in partnership with pianist Kit Downes) in dealing with the death in 2019 of Rochford’s beloved poet father Gerard. The title of Finding Ways is no accident: this sharply contrasting record features edgy, metal sounds from seven studio-mixed electric guitarists, including acid-to-improv musician Tara Cunningham, Portishead’s Adrian Utley and former Verve and Albarn sideman Simon Tong. But it’s Rochford’s signature, songlike chemistry – subtly transformed by rich textures, energised by his own unpredictably shifting ambiguities of rhythm – that still infuses his sound.
Storm clouds are gathering over the financial markets, warns Richard Hunter, head of markets at interactive investor:
There are increasing signs of storm clouds gathering over markets, with little relief from the building wall of worry.
Already grappling with stretched stock valuations in the AI space, an unresolved government shutdown and a deteriorating relationship between Beijing and Washington, investors were exposed to a new source of concern in the form of lending practices and bad loans for US regional banks.
After losing their campaign opener against Lyonnes, Arsenal are on the board in the Women’s Champions League after beating Benfica. But there’s still plenty of work to do:
Arsenal’s midfielder Mariona Caldentey said ‘almost everything’ needs to be better after a laboured defeat of Benfica secured the holders’ first win of the Champions League campaign.
(Island Records) The London five-piece throw the kitchen sink at these dizzyingly dense songs, often crushing their melodic pleasures in the process
In an era when new bands struggle to break into the mainstream, the Last Dinner Party’s unusually swift rise (they were supporting the Rolling Stones a mere eight months after their first gig, and won the Rising Star Brit award just two years later) meant they spent much of the press cycle for their Mercury-nominated, chart-topping 2024 debut rubbishing suggestions they’d been manufactured by the music industry. As its follow-up arrives, the London five-piece still seem defensive. “While it may seem to an outsider that we have moved quickly on to a second album,” they write in a self-penned press release, “this timing felt like a natural progression to us.”
From the Pyre certainly doesn’t sound opportunistically rushed out. Quite the opposite, in fact: this is a dizzyingly dense collection of long, intricate tracks that layer biblical imagery, baroque detailing and cacophonous 00s indie energy. From Kate Bush cosplay (Second Best) to slightly tortured metaphors (if This Is the Killer Speaking’s narrator has been ghosted, does that make her a murderer?), often all this sonic and lyrical extravagance seems to come at the expense of basic melodic pleasure. It’s only when the band restrain their instincts for maximalism and melodrama – as on the beautiful (and still stompingly anthemic) I Hold Your Anger, a brooding exploration of maternal instinct – that the Last Dinner Party’s erudite, elaborate pop is able to really sing.
Non-dom regime was abolished in April and carmaker says ‘some people are getting out of that country’
Ferrari has cut the number of cars it sells in the UK as wealthy individuals relocate overseas after tax changes and the abolition of non-dom status.
The Italian luxury carmaker reportedly began limiting the number of vehicles it exported to the UK about six months ago, in an attempt to stop a decline in their residual value.
Three labor unions sued the Trump administration, arguing that it violated the First Amendment rights of visa holders by searching their social media for specific viewpoints.
The Trump administration is showing signs of easing federal limits on marijuana, reflecting shifting views as pot moves to billion-dollar mainstream industry.
His music was ignored for decades. Now, at 81, he is collaborating with pop stars. He and his wife talk about his extraordinary life – and facing severe illness
When Beverly Glenn-Copeland was diagnosed with a form of dementia called Late two years ago, he was advised to stay at home and do crossword puzzles. He tried, but he doesn’t like crosswords, and it didn’t feel right. One day, recalls his wife Elizabeth, he said: “Honey, I know this is meant to be giving me more time, but I just feel like we’re not living a life. I have places I want to see and people I want to meet before I die. Since we have to make money, let’s make money doing what we love to do.”
And so the couple, who live in Hamilton, Ontario, are in London, midway through a tour that is the latest chapter in Glenn’s extraordinary late-in-life journey from unknown musician to revered cult icon. It has only been 10 years since his indefinably radiant music was rediscovered (not that it was ever really discovered in the first place), and he wants to enjoy it.
Loans would be used to boost payments and prize money
The Women’s Super League is exploring borrowing tens of millions of pounds in an attempt to accelerate the growth of the competition. The WSL board has commissioned the investment bank Goldman Sachs and the accountancy firm Deloitte to examine ways of raising funding anda debt deal is the preferred option at this stage.
The borrowing would be used to increase central payments and prize money awarded to clubs, with the aim of stimulating further growth in sponsorship, broadcast deals and club-led investment, as a result of creating a better product.
Igor Kovalenko, 36, the world No 48 with a Fide rating of 2669, has been a frontline soldier for three years and only began playing again a month ago
Ukraine was the most successful nation at this week’s European team championships, winning gold in the open event and silver in the women’s. It also sparked one of the most memorable results of recent years, as Igor Kovalenko, a serving army soldier who played no chess for three years, won the individual gold on fourth board with 6.5/8, the best percentage of the entire tournament.
Kovalenko’s games included a key win against Serbia’s 2024 European individual champion, Aleksander Indjic, and a draw with Gawain Maroroa Jones in the final round when the Englishman was in pole position for third board gold.
Lord Beefy has ruffled feathers with his comments on England’s schedule and he has a point – just not the one he thinks he’s making
It was a shock to hear, this week, that Ian Botham had launched a new podcast. But only because I had assumed he already had one. It seemed impossible that the life peer was the last purveyor of strong opinions to have no permanent platform on Acast. Perhaps he has simply been too content to vent: after all, Brexit is a triumph and cricket is racism-free.
But perhaps he was cannily waiting for the dadcasting trend to peak and usher in the age of the granddadcast. This new venture with his old Question of Sport buddy Bill Beaumont will, undoubtedly, appeal to a certain demographic (myself included) who grew up watching the pair josh with each other across a perennially indulgent David Coleman.
Roberts, the former superintendent of Iowa's largest school district, has an extensive criminal history and was living and working in the US illegally.
Progressive "Squad" member Rep. Rashida Tlaib's, D-Mich., campaign has spent an eye-popping amount on "luxury limousine services" between Oct. 2024 and Sept. 2025, according to her Federal Election Commission filings.
An indie-pop darling details his rise to fame and subsequent public humiliations with appealing frankness
Evan Dando’s autobiography opens in early 2021. The singer is living in a mouldering trailer on Martha’s Vineyard. He has a $200-a-day drug habit and is subsisting off a diet of cigarettes and cheeseburgers that he can’t chew because the heroin, cocaine and amphetamine he’s injecting have caused his teeth to fall out.
It’s all a very long way from Dando’s brief burst of fame as frontman and solitary longstanding member of the Lemonheads: two big albums in 1992’s It’s a Shame About Ray, and 1993’s Come on Feel the Lemonheads, a huge hit cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s Mrs Robinson, an era with Dando’s face taking its place alongside the Betty Blue and magic eye posters on halls of residence walls, the Docs-shod female student’s pin-up of choice. But it’s also not totally unexpected, at least if you have even a glancing knowledge of the singer’s subsequent travails. Mainstream success was short-lived: Dando succeeds in sabotaging his own career in a blaze of hard drugs and wildly unpredictable behaviour. For the last 35 years, drugs and unpredictability – rather than music – is what Dando has become known for. The book’s blurb mentions “heroin chic”, but in truth, Dando’s dissipation is almost impossible to put any kind of romantic gloss on. To his credit, he doesn’t bother, instead recounting one public humiliation after another with a what-can-you-do? shrug.
A cocktail of heroin and cocaine puts paid to a show designed to impress investors who’ve just bought a share of Dando’s song publishing for $300,000, but it’s just one of many gigs that collapse into chaos: he falls offstage, or the police are called and he’s led away from the venue in handcuffs. The Lemonheads miss their slot at Glastonbury because Dando is holed up in a hotel, doing heroin: when he does eventually turn up, he performs an unscheduled solo set, but the crowd throw bottles and boo him offstage. He hangs around Oasis in their pomp, even writing a song with Noel Gallagher: it has to be removed from a Lemonheads album at the last minute, because Gallagher deems it an “embarrassment”.
The headlong rush to build huge new datacenters, in order to support the growth of AI, is raising a number of concerns in the US – around the impact upon the climate crisis, water use and electricity bills. It’s also set to reshape American politics in potentially unusual ways.
Companies such as Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Amazon and Meta are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into new datacenters that will form the backbone to the surging use of AI by businesses and the public.
From Interrailing around Europe to trekking in the Himalayas, our tipsters share their memorable trips made later in life • Tell us about a great winter mountain holiday – the best tip wins a £200 holiday voucher
I went Interrailing at 16 – so decided to do it again at 61! My wife and I bought our passes for all of Europe (under £500 for one-month unlimited rail trips) and it was great to rediscover the sense of freedom and adventure travelling by train gave. Having a romantic dinner in Paris, getting on the night train and having coffee and croissants for breakfast in Nice on the Côte d’Azur for example. I corrected the teenage mistake of trying to do too much and see too many places so we lingered longer in places such as Poland and Romania, soaking up the atmosphere in Wrocław and Bucharest. It was interesting to compare the speed, quality and comfort of train services too. We found that sometimes slow travel was better – like when we got on the wrong train from Rome to Naples, allowing us to appreciate the scenery, locals and way of life of people who were not in a hurry. The trip was a learning experience at 61 as much as it had been at 16. Peter
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