When the Leicester band were forced to drop their old name after a legal threats from a certain budget airline, it could have been curtains. But frontman Murray Matravers’s trip to Japan has prompted a bold new outlook – and an upbeat new album
When writing songs, “95% of the time” Murray Matravers starts with the title. It’s a tactic he picked up from Gary Barlow: a producer once told him the Take That man tends to arrive at sessions touting a load of prospective song titles “cut out on little pieces of paper, and he’d put them on the table and you could just choose one. I was like: that’s fucking brilliant. Ever since I’ve always had loads of titles in my Notes app. It actually changed the way I wrote music,” he says with genuine enthusiasm. “Shout out to Gary Barlow!”
Names are clearly very important to the 29-year-old – but in recent years they have also caused him untold stress. By 2023, Matravers’ band Easy Life was thriving, having scored two No 2 albums on the trot by fusing upbeat, synthy bedroom pop with wry emo-rap. But that same year, his career came to a screeching halt when easyGroup – owners of the easyJet brand name with a long history of taking legal action against businesses with the word “easy” in their branding – decided to sue the Leicester band for trademark infringement.
Le couperet vient de tomber pour Anthem, le jeu multijoueurs de BioWare et Electronic Arts. L'éditeur vient d'annoncer sur son site que les serveurs fermeront début 2026.
A subtle, intriguing sequel revisits two girls as they grow into adults and question the impact of their unconventional upbringing
Esther Freud’s childhood on the Moroccan hippy trail inspired her 1992 debut Hideous Kinky. That novel was told through a young child’s limited perspective, so daily life was described vividly – almond trees and coloured kaftans – while bigger issues, such as why she didn’t see her father, remained vague and mysterious.
Some 30 years later, Freud has returned to the same narrator, Lucy. But in this accomplished new novel, she explores how Lucy grows up and starts to question the impact of her unconventional upbringing. My Sister and Other Lovers opens with teenage Lucy, her mother and sister once again on the move. It’s the 1970s, her mother has a new son from another failed relationship, and they are on a ferry to Ireland, as they have no money and nowhere else to go.
Ahead of the first tour date tonight, the poet laureate explores the ‘brotherhood and chemistry’ that forged the band, repelled the Gallaghers and brought them together again
In retrospect it all seems so obvious. Form a band, plunder the Beatles’ back catalogue for riffs, guitar tabs, chord changes and song structures, then bang it out in a key that a stadium crowd could put their lungs into but which suited the subway busker, too.
The resulting success now looks so inevitable. In 1994, dance music flooded the UK charts but not everyone thought a rave DJ wearing oversized headphones and playing records counted as a gig. Some people – a vast number, it turned out – still yearned for meat-and-two-veg pop-rock with guitars and drums, and for songs played by groups. Throw in some Manc bluster, the death throes of a Tory government that had occupied Downing Street since for ever, and the first glimmers of a cooler Britannia, and hey presto: Oasis.
The drummer says he met with director Sam Mendes to clarify the depiction of himself and his then wife Maureen
Former Beatles drummer Ringo Starr said that he personally intervened in the script of the forthcoming four-film Beatles biopic directed by Sam Mendes to clarify the depiction of himself and his then wife Maureen.
In an interview with the New York Times, Starr said that he had met Mendes in London in April and spent two days discussing the script for the section of the project focusing on him.
When Werner Heisenberg travelled to Helgoland in June 1925, he surely couldn’t have imagined that more than 300 researchers would make the same journey exactly a century later. But his development of the principles of quantum mechanics on the tiny North Sea island proved so significant that the crème de la crème of quantum physics, including four Nobel laureates, attended a five-day conference on Helgoland in June to mark the centenary of his breakthrough.
Just as Heisenberg had done, delegates travelled to the German archipelago by boat, leading one person to joke that if the ferry from Hamburg were to sink, “that’s basically quantum theory scuppered for a generation”. Fortunately, the vessel survived the four-hour trip up the river Elbe and 50 km out to sea – despite strong winds almost leading to a last-minute cancellation. The physicists returned in one piece too, meaning the future of quantum physics is safe.
These days Helgoland is a thriving tourist destination, offering beaches, bird-watching and boating, along with cafes, restaurants and shops selling luxury goods (the island benefits from being duty-free). But even 100 years ago it was a popular resort, especially for hay-fever sufferers like Heisenberg, who took a leave of absence from his post-doc under Max Born in Göttingen to seek refuge from a particularly bad bout of the illness on the windy and largely pollen-free island.
Where it all began Quantum physicists gather at the top of Helgoland’s main island to view a plaque installed in 2000 by the Max Planck Society near the spot where Werner Heisenberg said he formulated the principles of quantum mechanics in June 1925. (Courtesy: Matin Durrani)
More than five years in the making, Helgoland 2025 was organized by Florian Marquardt and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light and Yale University quantum physicist Jack Harris, who said he was “very happy” with how the meeting turned out. As well as the quartet of Nobel laureates – Alain Aspect, Serge Haroche, David Wineland and Anton Zeilinger – there were many eager and enthusiastic early-career physicists who will be the future stars of quantum physics.
Questioning the foundations
When quantum physics began 100 years ago, only a handful of people were involved in the field. As well as Heisenberg and Born, there were the likes of Erwin Schrödinger, Paul Dirac, Wolfgang Pauli, Niels Bohr and Pascual Jordan. If WhatsApp had existed back then, the protagonists would have fitted into their own small group chat (perhaps called “The Quantum Apprentices”). But these days quantum physics is a far bigger endeavour.
Helgoland 2025 covered everything from the fundamentals of quantum mechanics to applied topics such as sensors and quantum computing.
With 31 lectures, five panel debates and more than 100 posters, Helgoland 2025 had sessions covering everything from the fundamentals of quantum mechanics and quantum information to applied topics such as sensors and quantum computing. In fact, Harris said in an after-dinner speech on the conference’s opening night in Hamburg that he and the organizing team could easily have “filled two or three solid programmes with people from whom we would have loved to hear”.
Harris’s big idea was to bring together theorists working on the foundational aspects of quantum mechanics with researchers applying those principles to quantum computing, sensing and communications. “[I hoped they] would enjoy talking to each other on an equal footing,” he told me after the meeting. “These topics have a lot of overlap, but that overlap isn’t always well-represented at conferences devoted to one or the other.”
In terms of foundational questions, speakers covered issues such as entanglement, superposition, non-locality, the meaning of measurement and the nature of information, particles, quantum states and randomness. Nicholas Gisin from the University of Geneva said physics is, at heart, all about extracting information from nature. Renato Renner from ETH Zurich discussed how to treat observers in quantum physics. Zeilinger argued that quantum states are states of knowledge – but, if so, do they exist only when measured?
Italian theorist and author Carlo Rovelli, who was constantly surrounded in the coffee breaks, gave a lecture on loop quantum gravity as a solution to marrying quantum physics with general relativity. In a talk on quantizing space–time, Juan Maldacena from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton discussed information loss and black holes, saying that a “white” black hole the size of a bacterium would be as hot as the Sun and emit so much light we could see it with the naked eye.
Quantum pioneers Helgoland 2025 featured talks, posters and discussions in the island’s Nordseehalle, where the four Nobel laureates in attendance signed a book marking the occasion (from left to right – Anton Zeilinger, Alain Aspect, Serge Haroche and David Wineland). (Courtesy: Matin Durrani)
Markus Aspelmeyer from the University of Vienna spoke about creating non-classical (i.e. quantum) sources of gravity in table-top experiments and tackled the prospect of gravitationally induced entanglement. Jun Ye from the University of Colorado, Boulder, talked about improving atomic clocks for fundamental physics. Bill Unruh from the University of British Columbia discussed the nature of particles, concluding that: “A particle is what a particle detector detects”.
It almost came as a relief when Gemma de les Coves from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona flashed up a slide joking : “I do not understand quantum mechanics.”
Applying quantum ideas
Discussing foundational topics might seem self-indulgent given the burgeoning (and financially lucrative) applications of quantum physics. But those basic questions are not only intriguing in their own right – they also help to attract newcomers into quantum physics. What’s more, practical matters like quantum computing, code breaking and signal detection are not just technical and engineering endeavours. “They hinge on our ability to understand those foundational questions,” says Harris.
In fact, plenty of practical applications were discussed at Helgoland. As Michelle Simmons from the University of New South Wales pointed out, the last 25 years have been a “golden age” for experimental quantum physics. “We now have the tools that allow us to manipulate the world at the very smallest length scales,” she said on the Physics World Weekly podcast. “We’re able for the first time to try and control quantum states and see if we can use them for different types of information encoding or for sensing.”
One presenter discussing applications was Jian-Wei Pan from the University of Science and Technology of China, who spoke about quantum computing and quantum communication across space, which relies on sustaining quantum entanglement over long distances and times. David Moore from Yale discussed some amazing practical experiments his group is doing using levitated, trapped silica microspheres as quantum sensors to detect what he called the “invisible” universe – neutrinos and perhaps even dark matter.
Nergis Mavalvala from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, meanwhile, reminded us that gravitational-wave detectors, such as LIGO, rely on quantum physics to tackle the problem of “shot noise”, which otherwise limits their performance. Nathalie de Leon from Princeton University, who admitted on the final day she was going a bit “stir crazy” on the island, discussed quantum sensing with diamond.
Outside influences
Helgoland 2025 proved that quantum physicists have much to shout about, but also highlighted the many challenges still lying in store. How can we move from systems with just a few quantum bits to hundreds or thousands? How can quantum error correction help make noisy quantum systems reliable? What will we do with an exponential speed-up in computing? Is there a clear border between quantum and classical physics – and, if so, where is it?
By cooping participants together on an island with such strong historical associations, Harris hopes that Helgoland 2025 will have catalyzed new thinking. “I got to meet a lot of people I had always wanted to meet and re-connect with folks I’d been out of touch with for a long time,” he said. “I had wonderful conversations that I don’t think would have happened anywhere else. It is these kinds of person-to-person connections that often make the biggest impact.”
Natural beauty Helgoland’s main island is a popular tourist spot, with attractions including beaches and the 47m sea stack known as Lange Anna. (Courtesy: Matin Durrani)
Occasionally, though, the outside world did encroach on the meeting. To a round of applause, Rovelli said that physicists must keep working with Russian scientists, and warned of the dangers of demonizing others. Pan, who had to give his talk on a pre-recorded video, said it was “with much regret” that he was prevented from travelling to Helgoland from China. There were a few rumbles about the conference being sponsored in part by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the Army Research Office.
Quantum physicists would also do well to find out more about the philosophy of science. Questions like the role of the observer, the nature of measurement, and the meaning of non-locality are central to quantum physics but are philosophical as much as scientific. Even knowing the philosophy relevant to the early years of quantum physics is important. As Elise Crull from the City University of New York said: “Physicists ignore this early philosophy at their peril”.
Towards the next century
The conference ended with a debate, chaired by Tracy Northup from the University of Innsbruck, on the next 100 years of quantum physics, where panellists agreed that the field’s ongoing mysteries are what will sustain it. “When we teach quantum mechanics, we should not be hiding the open problems, which are what interest students,” said Lorenzo Maccone from the University of Pavia in Italy. “They enjoy hearing there’s no consensus on, say the Wigner’s friend paradox. They seem engaged [and it shows] physics is not something dead.”
The importance of global links in science was underlined too. “Big advances usually come from international collaboration or friendly competition,” said panellist Gerd Leuchs from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light. “We should do everything we can to keep up collaboration. Scientists aren’t better people but they share a common language. Maintaining links across borders dampens violence.”
Leuchs also reminded the audience of the importance of scientists admitting they aren’t always right. “Scientists are often viewed as being arrogant, but we love to be proved wrong and we should teach people to enjoy being wrong,” he said. “If you want to be successful as a scientist, you have to be willing to change your mind. This is something that can be useful in the rest of society.”
I’ll leave the final word to Max Lock – a postdoc from the University of Vienna – who is part of a new generation of quantum physicists who have grown up with the weird but entirely self-consistent world of quantum physics. Reflecting on what happened at Helgoland, Lock said he was struck most by the contrast between what was being celebrated and the celebration itself.
“Heisenberg was an audacious 23-year-old whose insight spurred on a community of young and revolutionary thinkers,” he remarked. “With the utmost respect for the many years of experience and achievements that we saw on the stage, I’m quite sure that if there’s another revolution around the corner, it’ll come from the young members of the audience who are ready to turn the world upside down again.”
Tracy Northup and Michelle Simmons appear alongside fellow quantum physicist Peter Zoller on the 19 June 2025 edition of the Physics World Weekly podcast
How the publisher of Vogue, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker redefined high culture
Samuel Irving “Si” Newhouse Jr became chair of Condé Nast, the magazine group owned by his father’s media company, Advance Publications, in 1975. Under his stewardship, Condé’s roster of glossy publications – titles such as Vogue, GQ and Glamour – broadened to include Architectural Digest, a revived Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. Newhouse spent big in pursuit of clout, and his company’s extravagant approach to expenses became the stuff of legend. Condé positioned itself as a gatekeeper of high-end living but, as Michael Grynbaum explains in Empire of the Elite, its success in the 80s and 90s was down to its willingness to embrace “low” culture.
Condé brought pop stars, television personalities and tabloid intrigue into the highbrow fold, reconstituting cultural capital to fit the sensibilities of an emerging yuppie class with little interest in ballet or opera. Several moments stand out, in retrospect: GQ’s 1984 profile of Donald Trump, which paved the way for The Art of the Deal; Madonna’s 1989 debut on the cover of Vogue; and the New Yorker’s coverage of the OJ Simpson trial in 1994. Tina Brown, appointed editor of the New Yorker in 1992 after a decade at Vanity Fair, said she wanted “to make the sexy serious and the serious sexy”. Purists bemoaned what they saw as a slide into vulgar sensationalism, but Grynbaum maintains Brown “wasn’t so much dumbing down the New Yorker as expanding the universe to which it applied its smarts”.
From distinctive dot paintings to ‘unflattering’ portraits of billionaires, via bloodstained reindeer skulls piled up outside parliament, the diverse work of Indigenous artists is thrilling the art world
Seemingly out of nowhere, Indigenous art is everywhere. We’ve gone decades – centuries, really – in this country with barely any exhibitions dedicated to the work of Indigenous artists, but recently, everything’s changed. Galleries, museums and institutions across the UK are hosting shows by artists from communities in South America, Australia, the US and Europe at an unprecedented rate.
Tate Modern in London is putting on its first-ever major solo show by a First Nation Australian artist in July, with a Sámi artist from Norway taking over the Turbine Hall in October. There are shows by Native American artists at Camden Art Centre in London and Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery, while painters and weavers from the Amazon and Argentina are coming to Manchester’s Whitworth and Bexhill-on-Sea’s De La Warr Pavilion.
Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. This weekend I was at Glastonbury reviewing the bands with the Guardian’s music team; it was my second year at the legendary arts and music festival, and I’ve become a total convert, preaching the glory of Worthy Farm after years of assuming that an event like it wasn’t for someone like me.
Coppola said his masterpiece Apocalypse Now ‘is not about Vietnam; it is Vietnam’ – this superb film shows how little he was exaggerating
The greatest ever making-of documentary is now on re-release: the terrifying story of how Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam war masterpiece Apocalypse Now got made – even scarier than Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, about the making of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. The time has come to acknowledge Eleanor Coppola’s magnificent achievement here as first among equals of the credited directors in shooting the original location footage (later interspersed with interviews by Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper), getting the stunningly intimate audio tapes of her husband Francis’s meltdown moments and, of course, in unassumingly keeping the family together while it was all going on.
With his personal and financial capital very high after The Conversation and the Godfather films, Coppola put up his own money and mortgaged property to make this stunningly audacious and toweringly mad version of Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness from a script by John Milius; it is transplanted from 19th-century Belgian Congo where a rogue ivory trader has gone native in the dark interior, to south-east Asia during the Vietnam war where a brilliant US army officer is now reportedly being worshipped as a god among the Indigenous peoples and must have his command terminated “with extreme prejudice”. Marlon Brando had a whispery voiced cameo as the reclusive demi-deity, Martin Sheen was the troubled Captain Willard tasked with taking Kurtz down and Robert Duvall is the psychotically gung-ho Lt Col Kilgore, who leads a helicopter assault.
Dolly Parton adds star power to this formulaic music documentary about Ed and Dean Roland’s band
Unless you are a big fan of what the American charts call “mainstream rock” and entering late middle age round about now, you may never have heard of 90s outfit Collective Soul. And yet this clearly band-endorsed documentary hypes them so much, you may question your own remembrance of things past. For instance, much is made of Collective Soul’s first big hit, Shine from 1993, which first broke out via airplay at an Atlanta college radio station, with the film giving the impression that everyone was humming this tune back in the day. This may not in fact have been the case: you might associate the time more with the likes of Whitney Houston, Nirvana and dancefloor fillers like Rhythm Is a Dancer.
It turns out that Collective Soul, named after a phrase in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, is a classic rawk outfit with a guitar-heavy, chunky-riff and wailing-vocals sound, somewhat generic but enjoyable. The group is built around Stockbridge, Georgia, brothers Ed Roland (the lead singer and songwriter) and his rhythm guitarist brother Dean; they are the sons of a preacher man and father figures and old friends feature very heavily in their story. The film works its way through the band’s pre-history and story methodically, with Ed Roland dominant throughout as literally and figuratively the group’s loudest voice.
5 June:I am somewhat relieved Professor Born accepted my request for leave at short notice. The hay fever in Göttingen seems worse this year than last when I returned from Copenhagen. Even when not coughing, sneezing or stemming tears from my eyes, I am barely able to string two thoughts together. My thinking jumps from place to place with no sense of continuity, place or direction. I leave for Helgoland immediately.
6 June:The journey has been long and less than pleasant, but I have arrived. Seeing my puffed-up face and eyes swollen shut, the landlady of the guesthouse said, “Oh my, what a state! Who did this to you? I have a quiet room on the second floor where you may recover from your fight. Peace and rest is what you need.” I did not correct her observation for she meant well.
7 June:Sunday has been a day of rest and recovery. This treeless island already offers better relief than my usual attempts at medication. The air is fresh and I am drawn to wander in the sunshine rather than hide from it.
9 June: The sea air has brought with it a new perspective. While we cannot deny that the assortment of observations, equations and ideas we have support a quantum view, it is generous to call their sum a theory. They are parts in loose association. While we can observe the intensity of hydrogen’s spectral lines, we cannot observe all that we believe we need to know in order to explain their intensity. My island perspective, being so close to the stuff of water, is that perhaps it is our belief that is at fault? What if we can let those unobservables remain that way?
10 June:Yes, this thinking has momentum, although I am uncertain where it will lead. Perhaps we must give up the demands of our lingering Newtonian worldview and give ourselves over more fully to the mathematics.
There is a before and an after: we know where the electron is on either side of a transition, and that should be sufficient. We need not trouble ourselves with the story in between – the mathematics is untroubled, it is only our previously held beliefs that cause difficulty!
14 June: I am a little distressed by possible asymmetries in what I have formulated. I am not yet ready to abandon causality and conservation, as Bohr and colleagues so boldly – and unsuccessfully – attempted last year.
15 June: I wandered out in the middle of the night and headed to the south shore where I climbed a rock to sit in thought. I have found no contradiction within this theory or in its relation to other truths – energy is conserved! Within the consistency and coherence of the mathematics, I also see beauty and a wealth of possibility. There is a lingering asymmetry in the operations, but I made peace with that as I watched the sun rise and observed the waves. Wave on wave may be commutative, but wave on shore is not. Such noncommutativity seems also to be the case with the tabular system of numbers I have used.
16 June: I leave for Hamburg. I wish to share these insights with Pauli ahead of my return to Göttingen. Before sharing my insights with Professor Born, I need for Wolfgang to confirm what I have unearthed is not wrong and that this theory is not some sea madness.
Göttingen
5 June: I am somewhat aggrieved that Professor Born did not grant my request for leave. Admittedly, the notice was short, but the hay fever is most wretched. I am barely able to string two thoughts together, let alone a theory for electron transition. The problem of hydrogen’s spectral lines eludes me, as does any coherence during much of the day or night. The lushness of Göttingen’s parks and gardens is a curse in summer. If I am to make progress on this problem of physics, I must first address this problem of my own biology.
6 June: Chemistry is today’s pursuit. I have secured medication in a greater dose than before.
7 June:Empirically, I appear to have determined that a more generous ingestion of cocaine is not the solution to my hay fever problem. I shall instead switch to increasing my intake of aspirin.
11 June: I am feeling most sorry, both for myself and the state of our discipline. It is as though my own ills are entangled with physics as a whole. There is little certainty or clarity, only contradictions and incompleteness. Whether at the scale of the atom or the galaxy, our understanding contradicts our intuition and our progress out of this darkness is pitiful.
Even Professor Einstein’s magnificent general theory of relativity has its difficulties. Without a fix that lacks any theoretical origin, it predicts an expanding universe! There are evensolutions that permitted dark stars whose gravity would be so large that nothing could escape! We are mired in questions and nonsense, all the while I am little more than coughs, sneezes and reddened eyes. What I might generously call my mind is barely deserving of the name.
I am consoled, at least, that in mathematics the story is not the same. Russell and Whitehead have shown that mathematics is complete and consistent – although I know of no one who has managed to read the whole proof. This result offers a firm bedrock I am sure mathematicians will continue to celebrate a hundred years from now.
15 June: I was en route to the department this morning when I entirely lost my bearings after taking a wrong turn from my usual route. Imagine knowing where I was going but not knowing where I was!
Just last week I had the opposite experience. My landlady accosted me just in front of the Friedhofskapelle Stadtfriedhof. I was as surprised to see her as we was to see me. “Good day, Professor Heisenberg.” I long ago stopped reminding her that I was no professor, merely a Privatdozent. She means well. “Where are you heading?” And do you know, I had no idea! How I wish, though, that Born had let me travel to Helgoland.
16 June: As I walk – and sneeze – into the university this morning, I am caused to wonder from where answers to our quantum troubles might emerge. Bohr has great insight, so will it be from Copenhagen that an interpretation will appear? Or perhaps it will from Cambridge — Paul Dirac’s thinking is particularly fresh.
For now, I wish an end to summer and the fog it has brought to my thinking, yet I also wonder whether we are asking more of nature than she is prepared to share with us. Perhaps it is our dearly held beliefs that hold us back. Perhaps nature and mathematics do not share those beliefs. Perhaps. There is an uncertainty within me that I find hard
to articulate.
To hear the author read an extract from the diaries and reflect on the power of “flash fiction”, check out the Physics World Stories podcast.
A deeply researched history that examines colonial and post-colonial faultlines, from Aden to Myanmar
Earlier this summer, amid renewed tensions between India and Pakistan following a terrorist attack in Indian-administered Kashmir, Donald Trump remarked that the two countries had been fighting over Kashmir for “a thousand years”. It was a glib, ahistorical comment, and was widely ridiculed. Shattered Lands, Sam Dalrymple’s urgent and ambitious debut, offers a more comprehensive rebuttal. Far from being a region riven by ancient hatreds, the lands that comprise modern India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar – as well as parts of the Gulf – were divided up within living memory from an empire in retreat.
“You can’t actually see the Great Wall of China from space,” Dalrymple begins, “but the border wall dividing India from Pakistan is unmistakable.” Stretching more than 3,000km and flanked by floodlights, thermal vision sensors and landmines, this is more a physical scar left by the hurried dismantling of British India than a traditional geopolitical divide. What might now seem like natural frontiers were shaped by five key events: Burma’s exit from the empire in 1937; the separation of Aden that same year, and of the Gulf protectorates in 1947; the division of India and Pakistan, also in 1947; the absorption of more than 550 princely states; and, in 1971, the secession of East Pakistan. Neither ancient nor inevitable, these lines were hastily drawn in committee rooms, colonial offices and war cabinets.
Twenty years on, this heart-racing four-part series reconstructs the terror attacks and the vast investigation that followed, without losing sight of the survivors. The detail about the bathtub is astonishing
Netflix is not always known for its restraint in the documentary genre, but with its outstanding recent film Grenfell: Uncovered, and now Attack on London: Hunting the 7/7 Bombers, it appears to be finding a new maturity and seriousness in the field. There have been plenty of recent documentaries on the subject of the attacks and the sprawling investigation that followed – no surprise, given that it is the 20th anniversary this week – but there is still real depth to be found here.
Over four parts, this thorough series unravels the initial attacks on the London transport system, which killed 52 people and injured more than 700, then follows that febrile month into the failed bombings of 21 July, and then the police shooting of the innocent Jean Charles de Menezes, a day later. The first 25 minutes or so simply recount those first attacks, compiling the story using phone pictures, news footage, occasional reconstructions, the infamous photographs of the injured pouring out of tube stations and accounts from survivors and the families of victims. Though it is by now a familiar story, this evokes the fear, confusion and panic of that day in heart-racing detail.
Attack on London: Hunting the 7/7 Bombers is on Netflix now.
At the Phoenix Arts Museum, a new exhibition displays different approaches to comedy within photography
Humor stands in a strange relationship to the art world. Often ranked as a lesser aspiration for the work of a true artist, when humor does find its way into the graphic arts, it’s as more of a condiment than the main dish.
How refreshing then to see the Phoenix Art Museum’s substantial new exhibition, Funny Business, which boldly and decisively leaps into the realm of comedic photography. Showcasing humor from a wealth of angles, including slapstick, whimsical, acid, surreal, ironic, parody and so many more, the show offers ample opportunity to consider just what purpose laughter serves – and to enjoy a hearty laugh or two on a summer’s day.
Twelve-member jury in New York starts to deliberate following closing arguments from both sides
After seven weeks of testimony from more than 30 witnesses, jurors in the high-profile federal sex-trafficking and racketeering conspiracy trial of Sean “Diddy” Combs have begun deliberations, but ended their day with no verdict.
The 12-member jury – made up of eight men and four women – began deliberating on Monday, following closing arguments from both sides that concluded on Friday and lengthy instructions from the judge.
The festival reaches its final day, featuring a crowd-pleasing afternoon of legends on the Pyramid stage, plus Prodigy, Wolf Alice and Kate Nash
It is mercifully overcast at Worthy Farm today, without the heat that’s been oppressing festivalgoers so far this weekend. That makes for a pleasant setting at the Pyramid stage to see Mercury prize-nominated and Brit rising star award-winner Celeste. She is preparing to release her sophomore album Woman of Faces, nearly five years after her debut Not Your Muse instantly topped the UK album charts. She says that she did not expect it to take this long for her follow-up, but that“everything happens when it’s supposed to”.
With her brilliantly smoky, soulful vocals, Celeste invokes the likes of Billie Holiday, Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin, yet her distinctly English lilt provides a girl-next-door entry point to her magnificence. The emotion in her voice and in her songs is so overflowing that she repeatedly flaps her arms, as if shaking out the mood before it swallows her. On With the Show, a formidable, high-octane ballad, reaches big, orchestral moments of brilliance before Celeste transitions into more minimalist tracks with contemplative piano.
Actor and musician Joe Keery made his name on the Netflix hit as lovable jock Steve Harrington, but he never stopped making music. He discusses anxiety, his earnest new record and why he and his castmates are ‘bonded for life’
“It was a crazy situation – this song that I wrote was being linked to the head of the Catholic church!” Joe Keery sounds incredulous as he recalls his latest viral moment. The track in question was End of Beginning, the wistful indie anthem from his 2022 album Decide. It first became an online hit last year, taking on a new life soundtracking TikTok users’ videos of their home towns. As it happens, the home town – or university town, in Keery’s case – that he sings about in the song is Chicago. Fast forward to this May, when Illinois native Robert Francis Prevost was elected as the new pope. The song began to do the rounds all over, with fans overlaying the lyrics (“And when I’m back in Chicago, I feel it!”) over videos of the new pontiff.
It was just the latest surreal chapter in the 33-year-old’s career, which has seen him juggle musical success with acting megastardom, thanks to his breakout role as villainous jock, and later beloved fan favourite, Steve Harrington in Netflix’s retro sci-fi smash Stranger Things. Performing under the name Djo, he has released two albums of hazy psychedelic rock and angular electro respectively, plus that aforementioned, absolutely inescapable viral hit, which peaked at No 4 in the UK charts. He’s now on tour in support of recent third album The Crux, aptly named as he reaches the end of a nine-year stint in Stranger Things, whose extremely long-awaited final season will be released on 26 November.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new building has been a decade in the making and has long vexed critics, but its CEO hopes to turn things around
As Los Angeles county’s new $720m art museum building nears completion, it’s still haunted by a single, vexing question: how do you hang art in a gallery where every single wall is made of massive slabs of concrete?
Designed by Peter Zumthor, a prizewinning Swiss architect, the new building at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) has sparked controversy in the art world since its initial designs were made public in 2013.
With a four-decade career beginning at Capcom in the 8-bit era, Shimomura is one of the most acclaimed names in gaming. She recalls her early struggles – and explains why her beloved classical music fits best with RPGs
Alfred Hitchcock, David Attenborough, Harold Pinter, Stanley Kubrick, Ridley Scott, Hideo Kojima – these are just a few of the recipients of the Bafta fellowship, the highest honour the academy can bestow. Japanese composer Yoko Shimomura is the latest to receive the accolade; one of only 17 women and four Japanese people to have done so. She is also the first video-game composer to be recognised by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, and the first composer recognised at all since John Barry in 2005.
It is with good reason that the academy has honoured her. Shimomura is an icon. You’ll know her music from Street Fighter, Final Fantasy, Super Mario, Kingdom Hearts, Legend of Mana, Streets of Rage and more than 70 other games she has contributed original compositions or arrangements to. Her 37-year-long career has seen her record at Abbey Road Studios, have her music played by symphonic orchestras around the world, and work in genres ranging from rock to electronica, ambient to industrial, pop to opera. And yet Shimomura seems unchanged by her success.
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