Apple testerait la traduction des paroles en français sur Apple Music, a repéré iGeneration. La fonctionnalité, officialisée depuis juin 2025, est toujours en cours de déploiement.

When the Afrobeat sensation first saw Lemi Ghariokwu’s work, he said, ‘Wow!’ Then he plied him with marijuana and asked him to design his album sleeves. The artist recalls their extraordinary partnership – and the day Kuti’s Lagos HQ burned

‘There were flames everywhere. Soldiers with bayoneted rifles were dragging people out into the streets, staggering, naked and bleeding. Nobody knew if Fela was still inside the burning building.”

Lemi Ghariokwu pauses. For much of our video-call, the 70-year-old artist has joyfully revisited his years as friend and confidant of Fela Aníkúlápó Kuti, the Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer whose legacy has been celebrated recently by both a high-profile podcast produced by the Obamas and a career-spanning box-set, The Best of the Black President, designed by Ghariokwu.

Songsmith’s comments come after his brother Liam stoked rumours Oasis had been courted for the role

Noel Gallagher has said that he would “absolutely” write the theme song for the next James Bond film if asked, saying that doing so would be an honour.

Speaking to TalkSport, the Oasis songwriter revealed that while there had not been any contact between himself and the producers of the franchise, he would leap at the opportunity to contribute music for the film, adding that he thought the theme songs the series was known for should be made by British artists.

The actor first realised what music was when he heard Yellow Submarine and knows a lot of Paul Simon lyrics, but what would he put on at a party?

The first song I fell in love with
My earliest memory is walking into a room at nursery school where they were playing Yellow Submarine by the Beatles. I was captivated by the sound effects, and Lennon shouting: “Full speed ahead!” When it got to the chorus, I remember thinking: “This must be music!”

The first single I bought
When I was eight, I won a competition at school to pick a new record to play at the mini disco we had on Fridays. My teacher took me to Woolworths, and I chose Come Back My Love by [50s revivalists] Darts. The first single I bought with my own pocket money was Mull of Kintyre by Wings from a record shop in Colne in Lancashire. It was No 1 at the time, and I chose it when my dad pointed out that it was by one of the Beatles.

Streaming’s algorithms make it easy to avoid whole discographies – so in the interest of deeper listening, our writers dedicate time to the ones who might have got away

The first time I heard Joni Mitchell, in 1997, she was looped across the chorus of Janet Jackson’s single Got ’Til It’s Gone. The song’s credits would educate me on the sample’s origins; I had previously assumed Big Yellow Taxi was an Amy Grant original. The second time I heard a Mitchell song was when Travis covered the beautiful River as a B-side.

Dave Brubeck called her a great and Mary Lou Williams gave her advice. But the prodigy grew frustrated with jazz, quit and started dismantling her instrument. A superb new reissue showcases her findings

Flipping through the jazz section on a visit to his local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a battered tape by American pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked every bit the quintessential DIY release. “The labels had come off the tape,” he says. “It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art.”

As a collector and occasional producer particularly interested in the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape called Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was best known for making sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner. If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she requested pianos without the cover to make it easier to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a facet that rarely made it to her records.

In 2025 the Doncaster-born singer-songwriter has earned two UK No 1s, three Grammy nominations and the respect of rock’s greats – and he says it’s all down to putting fans first

In November, Dominic Harrison, better known as Yungblud, received three Grammy nominations. The news that he had become the first British artist in history to be nominated that many times in the awards’ rock categories came as a suitably striking finale to what, by any metric, was an extraordinary year for the 28-year-old singer-songwriter.

In June, his fourth studio album, Idols, entered the UK charts at No 1, outselling its nearest competitor by 50%. The same month, the annual festival he curates and headlines, Bludfest, drew an audience of 30,000 to The National Bowl in Milton Keynes. In July, he played at Back to the Beginning, the farewell performance by Black Sabbath, whose frontman Ozzy Osbourne died 17 days after the gig. On a bill almost comically overstuffed with heavy metal superstars paying tribute – Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Anthrax, Slayer – his rendition of Black Sabbath’s 1972 ballad Changes unexpectedly stole the show, appearing to win him an entirely new audience in the process: the crowd at the gig skewed considerably older than the gen Z fans Harrison traditionally attracts.

North Carolina home preserved to commemorate legendary musician and civil rights activist, and to serve as arts hub

It was a surreal experience for Dr Samuel Waymon, Nina Simone’s youngest sibling, to walk back into the renovated childhood home that he once shared with the singer and civil rights activist. On that day in the fall of 2025, Waymon, an 81-year-old award-winning composer, said that memories flooded back of him playing organ in the house and cooking on the potbelly stove with his mother as a child in Tryon, North Carolina. He was overjoyed to see the large tree from his youth still standing in the yard. Simone, born Eunice Waymon, lived in the 650 sq ft, three-room home with her family from 1933 to 1937.

After sitting vacant and severely decayed for more than two decades, the recently restored home is now painted white, with elements of its former self sprinkled throughout the interior. On the freshly painted mint-blue wall hangs a shadow box that encases the rust brown varnish of the original home. A small piece of the Great Depression-era linoleum sits on the restored wooden floor like an island of the past in a sea of the present.

With 2025 but a distant memory, it’s time to get stuck into a huge year of entertainment. To help with this daunting task, we’ve provided a handy, alphabetised guide to the big releases and trends coming in the next 12 months, from AI’s continued rise to a whole lot of Zendaya

Bad news: the intellectual property equivalent of The Terminator is here to obliterate the concept that the mug who actually wrote something matters somewhat. Better news: cinemas are fighting back against AI with films anxious about the new tech, including Gore Verbinski’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (13 February), in which a man apparently from the future (Sam Rockwell) wants to warn people about an incoming AI hellscape, followed by The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist (title says it all really), from the film-makers behind Everything Everywhere All at Once, in March. Then, later in the year, Luca Guadagnino unveils Artificial, his biopic of Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. Catherine Bray

This first newsletter of the new year looks at some of the big questions we hope will be answered in the next 12 months, across film, TV, music and games

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Welcome to 2026! I hope you are enjoying the final dribblings of the festive break, before reality bites on Monday. As is now tradition (well, we did it once before), this first newsletter of the new year looks at some of the big questions we hope will be answered in the next 12 months, across film, TV, music and games. Hopefully it will double up as a decent primer for the year ahead too, though for a more exhaustive rundown check the Guardian’s 2026 previews for film, music, TV, gaming, stage and art. Right, let’s get on with it:

Packed with incredible scenes, this heartbreaking anniversary documentary can’t help but offer up a huge serving of nostalgic bliss

There’s a theory that the world spun off its axis with the passing of David Bowie, 10 days into January 2016. It was also two days after his final, death-infused album Blackstar appeared from nowhere. As an artistic statement it was prophetic and impeccably theatrical. A feature-length documentary now shines a black light on that album’s recording, which some call Bowie’s creative resurrection. What does it reveal? And do we want to revisit that place, emotionally?

Thankfully, Bowie: The Final Act (Saturday 3 January, 10pm, Channel 4) does not live solely in the catacombs. It begins at the zenith of Bowie’s pop fame: the 1983 Serious Moonlight tour, where the Thin White Duke turned American soul hero. This MTV-approved, Pepsi advert-inducing stardom was the onset of a career-stalling ennui, Bowie’s artistic voice drying out under the bright lights he sought. It then ricochets back to the start of his musical journey, pinballing us through its highlights. With a mythology this seismic it would be a crime not to. David Bowie invented serving looks, you know. They just happened to come from another planet.

How did an Aussie, a Texan, an Irishman and three Cumbrians find themselves on the road on the Ukrainian frontline? For classic rock collective Hardwicke Circus, it was a no-brainer: ‘We thought they’d like to hear some rock’n’roll’

It is late October and, 10 kilometres from the frontline in Donetsk, east Ukraine, the inhabitants of a reconditioned ambulance are completely lost. While opening your phone and logging on to a maps app might appear the obvious solution, this would be extremely unwise here: Russian drones are overhead and hunting for any signals.

Inside the van are a motley crew: an 81-year-old Irish music industry veteran; a 72-year-old Texas rocker; an Australian keyboardist; a Ukrainian saxophonist; and three twenty-something musicians from Carlisle, Cumbria. Their destination is a military base where they are to perform for Ukrainian troops.

Brian King Joseph claims the rapper and actor was ‘priming’ him for ‘sexual exploitation’. Smith’s lawyer has called the allegations ‘false, baseless and reckless’

Will Smith is being sued by a violinist from his 2025 tour, who claims the rapper and actor exhibited “predatory behaviour” and was “deliberately grooming and priming” him for “further sexual exploitation”. Brian King Joseph is also pursuing the performer and his company Treyball Studios Management for wrongful termination and retaliation in a suit filed in the superior court of California.

Joseph alleges that he was hired for the tour in support of Smith’s new album, Based on a True Story, after first appearing on stage with Smith in December 2024. The suit claims that Smith once told Joseph, “You and I have such a special connection that I don’t have with anyone else.”

(Blue Blood International/Cooking Vinyl)
The four-piece try to tap into modern pop’s deep well of nostalgia but come off like Westlife on a bad day

‘Blue’s in the house / Oh it’s party time!” muse the fortysomething man-band on Souls of the Underground, the penultimate song on this seventh album, and the fourth since their 2011 reunion. The British four-piece are keen to take us back to their early 00s heyday, a time of Met bar table service, where the ladies have “a little prosecco” and the guys have a “nice cold beer”. Musically, it’s a clunkier approximation of their (comparatively) harder-edged hybrid of pop, hip-hop and R&B; think 2002 “low ride” anthem Fly By II but on a Megabus budget.

It makes sense that they would want to tap into modern pop’s deep well of nostalgia, but rather than recalling what made Blue originally stand out, Reflections often feels like a tribute to other evergreen boybands. For most of the album’s 13 tracks, the tempo is mid, with the dreary, Westlife-on-a-bad-day Candlelight Fades a particular nadir. The windswept One Last Time and The Day the Earth Stood Still are attacked with gusto, but both feel like Patience-era Take That, while the pleasingly epic opener The Vow is hindered by very un-Barlow lyrics: “You’re a sweet child of mine / You’re like a grape to my vine.”

From CMAT and the Carpenters’ fresh starts to the Beatles’ Here Comes the Sun and Nina Simone’s Feeling Good, starting again is a rich theme in pop. Here are some of the best examples

It’s hard to imagine anyone’s heart not being lifted a little by Right Back Where We Started From: the euphoric rush of new love rendered into three minutes of cod-northern soul (performed, unexpectedly, by various ex members of ELO, the Animals and 60s soft-poppers Honeybus). Avoid the 80s cover by Sinitta at all costs.

(4AD)
The standout act in the sprechgesang wave, the four-piece’s newly expansive sound carries singer Florence Shaw’s distinctive tales of mundane lives spiralling out of control

Dry Cleaning’s third album features a lot of strikingly odd lyrics. Take your pick from “alien offshoot mushroom, going the gym to get slim”; “my dream house is a negative space of rock”; or, indeed, “when I was a child I wanted to be a horse, eating onions, carrots, celery”. But it’s an ostensibly more straightforward line, from Cruise Ship Designer, that seems destined to attract the most attention. “I make sure there are hidden messages in my work,” says vocalist Florence Shaw as the track draws to a conclusion, the muscular guitar riff that’s driven it along devolving into a janky, trebly scrabble.

Initially, the lyric appears to characterise what Dry Cleaning do, and Shaw in particular. From the moment they first appeared with the 2018 EP Sweet Princess, the south London quartet have attracted adjectives such as “surreal”, “enigmatic” and “inscrutable”. Most of the British bands who emerged around the same time bearing a roughly equivalent blend of post-punk guitars and spoken-word vocals sounded angry or sarcastic or straightforwardly comedic. Dry Cleaning, on the other hand, seemed mysterious. Shaw’s lyrics were collages of overheard remarks, recycled YouTube comments, lines from adverts and non sequiturs, delivered in a voice that was too icy to sound whimsical. It’s variously been characterised as “anhedonic” and “achromatic”, but might more straightforwardly be described as sounding politely bored. She occasionally shifts from speaking into singing in an untutored voice that brings to mind Stuart Moxham of Young Marble Giants’ line about their understated vocalist Alison Statton sounding “as if she was at the bus stop or something”. It was all intriguingly confusing: here were songs that could indeed contain hidden messages, that seemed like puzzles to be unpicked.

Dying is a process and in a person’s final hours and days, Nickie and her Threshold Choir are there to accompany people on their way and bring comfort. Through specially composed songs, akin to lullabies, the choir cultivates an environment of love and safety around those on their deathbed. For the volunteer choir members, it is also an opportunity to channel their own experiences of grief and together open up conversations about death

With thanks to onscreen contributor, Lindsey, who died since the making of this film

Full interview with Nickie Aven, available here