The infamously fraught American tour concluded with John Lydon announcing the band’s break-up

As modern music’s most entertaining chameleon embraces pop chaos once again on her new album ‘Mayhem’, Adam White has ranked every song she’s ever released (but not the ones she did with Tony Bennett because, with all due respect, no one has time for that)

Wiggins founded the hit R&B group with his brother, Raphael Saadiq

Ayers’ genre-bending jazz-funk sound produced one fantastic album after another – and then found a new lease of life in hip-hop sampling

• Roy Ayers, jazz-funk pioneer behind Everybody Loves the Sunshine, dies aged 84

There’s a sense in which Roy Ayers was blessed from the start. Aged five, the son of two musicians – and by all accounts already showing talent as a pianist – he was famously presented with his first set of vibraphone mallets backstage at a gig by Lionel Hampton. If you wanted to take a romantic view, you could look on that as an act of benediction: the man who had more or less singlehandedly popularised an instrument that had previously been viewed as a novelty passing on the mantle along with his mallets. Hampton had broken racial barriers in the process: at a time when jazz bands were almost entirely segregated, Hampton and pianist Teddy Wilson’s work with Benny Goodman’s quartet was subtly acclaimed by one critic as “the most beautiful example of men working together to be seen in public today”.

For a time, it looked as if Ayers was following in Hampton’s footsteps. By the time of his debut album, 1963’s West Coast Vibes, Ayers was clearly carving out a space for himself in the jazz world. Running through versions of Charlie Parker’s Donna Lee or Thelonious Monk’s Well You Needn’t, he was already his own man: a little hotter in his approach to the vibraphone than Milt Jackson, less inclined towards the avant than his friend Bobby Hutcherson.

Eurovision is back after a chaotic competition last year, with some brand new artists

Jazz-soul vibraphonist and band leader best known for his laid-back summer track Everybody Loves the Sunshine

When Ruby Ayers, a piano teacher, took her five-year-old son Roy to a concert by the Lionel Hampton Big Band in California in 1945, the boy showed so much enthusiasm for the performance that Hampton presented him with his pair of vibe mallets. Roy Ayers, who has died aged 84, would go on to blaze a trail as a vibraphonist, composer, singer and producer.

A genre-bending pioneer of hard bop, funk, neo-soul and acid jazz, Ayers was most famous for his feel-good track Everybody Loves the Sunshine, from the 1976 album of the same name.

From collaborating with Parton and Orville Peck to viral TikToks and, of course, the Tree of Wisdom: for their 63rd album (yes really), the Wiggles mean big business

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When the Wiggles first started touring the US, there was one question they were asked again and again.

“People were coming up and saying, ‘Oh, so you’re friends of Dorothy?’” veteran Wiggle Anthony Field says. “I didn’t even know the other meaning – I went, ‘Yeah, we are!’”

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‘Why is there a Taylor Swift song on this Lady Gaga album?’ asked one shocked fan

(Domino)
The US artist segues from industrial metal to radio-friendly pop most memorable for its vividly relatable lyrics

Sasami Ashworth’s gentle indie rock debut, Sasami (2019), felt reasonably familiar to fans of her previous band, Cherry Glazerr; the bracingly industrial metal of 2022’s Squeeze less so. Now the California musician has moved into sprightly, shiny pop for her third solo album, picking over matters of the heart. And the groin – apparently, Lana Del Rey-alike Nothing But a Sad Face On is about Eve’s mixed emotions after being “banished from the Garden of Eden for fucking a snake”. Don’t fret if you can’t recall that precise bible story; Ashworth has plenty more relatable tales of compromised, messy modern-day dating.

Pop may not always come naturally to her. Most of Ashworth’s choruses linger on the ear no longer than a lost ladybird, and the deft Taylor Swift via Grimes-sounding production can’t conceal a dearth of durable material. But Slugger is surefooted, summery pop with a shock opening, when she calls herself “a cancer”. Honeycrash and the marvellous The Seed introduce intriguingly metallic textures. “I’ll come if you lick my scars,” she promises/warns on Love Makes You Do Crazy Things, and that sort of memorable weirdness adds a welcome tension to the radio-friendly aesthetic.

The star has spent a decade in a jazz and soft-rock haze, her newer pop efforts oddly anonymous for an artist once so electrifying. Her new album ‘Mayhem’ does feel like a return to form – but it’s her recent comments on her regained confidence as an artist that sound most promising, writes Adam White

Gaga’s sixth studio album hails the return of your Mama Monster to all her shock-horror-bop glory

US country singer says If You Hadn’t Been There is tribute to her husband of nearly 60 years, who died this week

Dolly Parton has dedicated her new song If You Hadn’t Been There to her husband, Carl Dean, who died this week aged 82.

The songwriter shared the tribute on Instagram earlier today, posting a picture of the couple in their youth, Parton with her arms wrapped around Dean.

The north-east London rapper’s new album mines his family’s past and society’s present to explore what it means to call a place home

Over the past two decades, Wretch 32, real name Jermaine Scott, has established himself as a pioneering figure in British rap. From his rise in the underbellies of an early-millennium rap and grime scene, to his mainstream success and songs with the likes of Ed Sheeran and Emeli Sandé, Stormzy and Giggs, he is among the handful of UK rappers who have scaled the heights of the British music scene while maintaining a deep connection to their communities.

At 39, Scott is ready to release his seventh album, Home?, a soul-searching record that reflects on his relationship with that word. “I feel like it always moves. I feel like it always changes,” he says of his relationship to “home”. “I’m still trying to put an exact location on it but as it stands it’s more who I’m with. I feel like I could make a home in any house.”

This is a full-scale production, full of fun and flair, with dramatic piano crescendos, squalling guitar riffs and bombastic blasts of synth

She’s the finger-picking blueswoman whose life was changed by the punk band Crass – and went viral for busking while homeless. She talks about ghosts, her ‘smelly’ childhood and fighting the far right

Sunny War is calling via video from her home in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The house belonged to her grandma, then her father; he died during the making of her last album. After War and her brother moved in, she became convinced the house was haunted. She would see people and hear noises at night. “It sounded like someone was walking around, to the point that I would jump out with a machete in my hand, thinking someone had broke into the house,” she says. “It was happening all the time. I thought I was going insane in here.” It was confusing, “because I have been crazy before. And I was also drinking a lot and sometimes that makes me hallucinate.”

But the apparitions weren’t ghosts, or the result of a mental health crisis, or indeed a drinking binge: “I didn’t have any money, so I couldn’t get the house inspected or anything,” says War, 35. “I was kind of squatting for a while. So I didn’t find out until after a year that there were really bad gas leaks in the heating system – that’s what was causing it. The people who inspected it were like: ‘How long have you been here? This is really dangerous.’”

(ACT)
With bassist Tim Lefebvre and drummer Eric Schaefer, the German pianist’s unpredictable live album nimbly traverses the genre’s history

More than a century ago, jazz’s early improvisers rarely strayed far from the secure consensus of a tune. That is, until the bebop revolutionaries of the 1940s started blowing impromptu ideas that often sounded better than the pop songs whose chords they borrowed. Post-1960s, free improvisation took themes and variations on epic, extemporised journeys that sometimes never returned to their starting point. Michael Wollny, the 46-year-old German pianist/composer, has long been familiar with the implications of that rapid evolution, and his powerful decade-old trio with David Bowie’s Blackstar bassist Tim Lefebvre and punk-to-postbop drummer Eric Schaefer has become one of the world’s most skilfully free-thinking contemporary jazz groups.

Now comes the exceptional Living Ghosts, a live recording of one night on tour in Germany in 2024 that shows just why Wollny refers to the group’s recent concerts as “seances where the ghosts of the trio’s songbook visit us at their will”. There’s no setlist, no agreed arrangements or forethought about which tunes might be made to segue into each other or for how long. Two night-themed miniatures by Alban Berg and Paul Hindemith are recast in racing solo piano streams, bowed-bass sweeps, a tramping rock-drums pulse, and then flat-out postbop over Lefebvre’s fast bass-walk.

There’s plenty here for die-hard completists who will marvel at owning Neil Young’s original 1977 mixes. For the rest of us, this release edges into self-indulgent territory

‘Many more acts and attractions still to be announced’ said the Festival

British rock band The 1975 and pop star Olivia Rodrigo will each make their debut as headliners

Musician said she never claimed to be Canadian, following an investigation that called her purported Indigenous heritage into question

‘There were over 10 jokes about musicians taking cocaine,’ said Oliver

Parton announced Dean’s death at 82 on Monday

Ticket prices range from $1,400 to $25,000

Monarch shares soundtrack to his life, including disco, reggae and Afrobeats, to celebrate Commonwealth Day

Kylie has a legion of fans around the globe, but it might come as a surprise to many that the king is one of those who can’t get her out of his head.

The princess of pop, alongside Bob Marley and Grace Jones, are among the music artists beloved of Charles, it was revealed on Friday as part of Commonwealth Day celebrations, which falls on Monday.

Calls for more support as study finds musicians in England and US have among highest rates of suicide

Musicians have one of the highest suicide rates in the world because the music business contains so many difficulties such as intense touring, performance anxiety and low earnings, researchers have suggested.

The finding that unusually large numbers of musicians take their own lives show that “the music industry is a profoundly dangerous place”, according to a co-author of the study.

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org.

MJ the Musical has already made millions for Jackson’s estate. But as the Broadway hit opens in Australia and the estate prepares to face two of Jackson’s alleged victims in court, fans may ask: is buying a ticket OK?

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There’s a moment in MJ the Musical where the King of Pop tells a prying reporter: “I want to keep this about my music.”

Over the last four years, as the jukebox musical has swept through the US, London and Hamburg, netting four Tony awards and more than US$245m to date on Broadway alone, the debate that has followed it has mirrored that which followed the bombshell allegations aired in the Emmy-winning 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland: can we separate Michael Jackson’s impeccable musical legacy from his deeply tarnished public image?