Scottish rock band says image ‘meant to provoke debate, not hate’ after many at concert accuse group of antisemitism

The Scottish rock group Primal Scream has defended displaying an image of a swastika inside a Star of David during a London gig, in response to accusations of racism and antisemitism.

During a performance at the London’s Roundhouse, a video was shown on stage of a swastika in the centre of a Star of David that was then superimposed over eyes of images of political figures, including the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the US president, Donald Trump.

Rock star admits she hadn’t heard of the show before agreeing to make a guest appearance during the second season

The singer’s tears over the Islamic State terrorist plot against her show and Southport attack make this behind-the-scenes docuseries about her world-conquering tour more moving than anyone could have anticipated

Swifties had long guessed that there would be a documentary going behind the scenes of Taylor Swift’s blockbuster Eras tour. The 2023 Eras Tour concert movie didn’t show any of the inner workings of this three-and-a-half-hour behemoth, which ran for 149 dates from 2023-24. Fans put some bits together, such as how Swift arrived on stage being pushed inside a cleaning cart. Plus, given the two albums she wrote during and about the Eras tour – 2024’s The Tortured Poets Department and this year’s The Life of a Showgirl – it wouldn’t be Swiftian to overlook another lucrative IP extension.

What fans could never have imagined was that Disney was set to start filming as the Eras tour was due to hit Vienna on 8 August 2023 – the first of three shows in the Austrian capital that were cancelled owing to an Islamic State terrorist plot. We learn this in episode one of the six-part docuseries The End of an Era, when Swift and her longtime friend Ed Sheeran are backstage at Wembley, hours before he guests at her first concert after the thwarted attack. “I didn’t even get to go,” Swift tells him of Vienna. “I was on the plane headed there. I just need to do this show and re-remember the joy of it because I’m a little bit just like …” She can’t find the words.

Hip-hop has a difficult relationship with gay culture – could a raft of new club nights fix that? Lemma Shehadi reports

Unhurried trippy bass lines and poet Iona Lee’s commanding, velvety voice conjure a glamorously unhurried sense of hypnosis

From Edinburgh
Recommended if you like Dry Cleaning, Massive Attack, Nick Cave
Up next Warm Days in December out now, new EP due early 2026

As fixtures of Edinburgh’s gig-turned-performance art scene, Acolyte’s eerie, earthy psychedelia is just as likely to be found on stage at the Traverse theatre as in a steamy-windowed Leith Walk boozer. Their looped bass lines and poet Iona Lee’s commanding, velvety voice conjure a sense of slow-burn hypnosis – and just like their music, Acolyte are glamorously unhurried. They’ve released only a handful of songs in the seven years since Lee and bassist Ruairidh Morrison first started experimenting with jazz, trip-hop and spoken word, but now the group (with Daniel Hill on percussion and Gloria Black on synth, also known for throwing fantastical, papier-mache-costumed club nights with her former band Maranta) are gathering pace.

Just as lullabies send babies to sleep, so songs can help those at the other end of life on their way. The leader of a Threshold Choir reveals what they do – and the personal tragedies that convinced her we need to get better at dealing with death

It’s a brisk November afternoon in the village of South Brent in Devon and, in a daffodil yellow cottage, two women are singing me lullabies. But these aren’t the sort of lullabies that parents sing to their children. They are songs written and sung for terminally ill people, to ease them towards what will hopefully be a peaceful and painless death.

We are at the home of Nickie Aven, singer and leader of a Threshold Choir. Aven and her friend are giving me a glimpse of what happens when they sing for people receiving end-of-life care. These patients are usually in hospices or in their own homes being supported by relatives, which is why 67-year-old Aven – who is softly spoken and radiates warmth and kindness – has asked me to lie down on the sofa under a rug while they sing. She says I can look at them, or I can close my eyes and allow my mind to drift. In fact, my eyes settle on Lennon, Aven’s large black labrador retriever who squeezes himself between the singers and is as gentle and well-mannered as his owner. The pair sing a cappella and in harmony. Distinct from elegies or laments, the songs are gently meditative, written to provide human connection and foster feelings of love and safety. They are not just for the benefit of the dying but for friends and relatives caring for them or holding vigil. Their singing is simple, intimate and beautiful. It is also utterly calming.

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

Pop star was emotional as she spoke ahead of meeting families and survivors of the 2024 attack, before going onstage to perform

The Scottish group were reported to the police after a video shown during a gig appeared to show the Star of David entwined with a swastika

First two episodes of new six-episode docuseries has premiered on Disney+

Not long ago, artists such as Lil Nas X and Olly Alexander were ruling pop. But success has stalled as acts face industry obstacles and rising homophobia. What now?

At the turn of the decade, gay male and non-binary pop stars seemed poised to take pop music by storm. Lil Nas X broke out with Old Town Road – which blew up on TikTok, sold about 18.5m copies and remains tied with Shaboozey’s A Bar Song (Tipsy) and Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is You as the longest-running No 1 single in US history – and artists such as Sam Smith, Troye Sivan and Olly Alexander from Years & Years were all singing about gay love and sex.

But the initial promise has stalled. Lil Nas X’s attempts to build on his smash debut album have fizzled, and he is publicly dealing with mental health issues. In October, Khalid released his first album since being outed by his ex last year but only sold 10,000 copies in the first week in the US. A previous album, 2019’s Free Spirit, sold some 200,000 copies in the first week and led to him briefly dethroning Ariana Grande as the most listened to artist on Spotify.

Roundhouse apologises after animation projected behind band appears to show Star of David entwined with swastika

A music venue in London has apologised after antisemitic imagery was allegedly displayed on stage during a Primal Scream gig.

A video appearing to show the Star of David entwined with a swastika was said to be screened during the Scottish band’s show at the Roundhouse in Camden on Monday.

‘Clear conflict’ between Eurovision ideals of ‘inclusion and dignity for all’ and decision to let Israel compete, says 2024 winner

Nemo, the Swiss singer who won the 2024 Eurovision song contest, has said they are handing back their trophy in protest over Israel’s participation in next year’s event.

The 26-year-old, the first non-binary winner of the contest, said on Thursday there was “a clear conflict” between the Eurovision ideals of “unity, inclusion and dignity for all” and the decision to allow Israel to compete.

The historian is set to lead a ‘stellar’ 2026 panel featuring the Pulp frontman and other acclaimed writers, as the search begins for next year’s standout work of fiction

Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker will feature on the 2026 Booker prize judging panel that will be chaired by the classicist and broadcaster Mary Beard.

Novelist Patricia Lockwood has also been named as a judge, along with the poet Raymond Antrobus and Rebecca Liu, an editor at the Guardian Saturday magazine.

Star turns from Helen Mirren, Andrea Riseborough and Toni Colette can’t stop cartoony sentimentality smothering this film directed by Winslet and written by her son Joe Anders

Kate Winslet’s feature directing debut is a family movie, scripted by her son Joe Anders; it’s a well-intentioned and starrily cast yuletide heartwarmer, like a two-hour John Lewis Christmas TV ad without the logo at the end. There are one or two nice lines and sharp moments but they are submerged in a treacly soup of sentimentality; in the end, I couldn’t get past the cartoony quasi-Richard Curtis characterisation and the weird not-quite-earthlingness of the people involved. Having said this, I am aware of having been first in the queue to denigrate Winslet’s Christmas film The Holiday, that is regarded by many as one of the most successful films of all time.

Helen Mirren is the June of the title, an affectionate but sharp-tongued matriarch who is diagnosed with terminal cancer in the run-up to Christmas, and her entire quarrelling clan will have to assemble in her hospital room. June, with a kind of benign cunning, realises that she can use her last days as a cathartic crisis that will cure her adult children’s unspoken hurt. They are a stressed careerist (Winslet), a stay-at-home mum (Andrea Riseborough), a hippy-dippy natural birth counsellor (Toni Collette) and a troubled soul (Johnny Flynn), plus all their various kids. There is also June’s daft old husband Bernie, played by Timothy Spall, who likes a drink and can’t talk about his feelings, and whose scatterbrained goofiness has a sad origin. Stephen Merchant plays Riseborough’s lovably useless husband and a gentle hospital nurse, played by Fisayo Akinade, is the ensemble’s self-effacing guide to a wiser future.

‘I no longer feel this trophy belongs on my shelf,’ they announced

Musician was killed in an electric scooter accident

Opera may be conspicuous by its absence, but the brilliance of Berlin Philharmonic’s Schoenberg and the exceptional South Korean Yunchan Lim gave us plenty to sink our teeth into this year

The survey of the new releases that my colleagues and I have enjoyed most in 2025 differs in one significant respect from the lists of previous years. This year’s top ten contains no operas. There has been a profound change in record companies’ policies of how and what they record. The glitzy, studio-based opera recordings of the last century now seem impossible to contemplate, and even releasing audio-only recordings taken directly from live opera-house performances often seems less viable than issuing DVDs of the same productions.

Some specialist labels devoted to specific areas of the operatic repertoire continue sterling work: operas feature prominently in Bru Zane’s mission on behalf of neglected French composers, while Opera Rara continues to crusade for forgotten, mostly 19th century, mostly Italian, scores which this year included the original 1857 version of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra. Other companies continue to find treasures in Europe’s apparently inexhaustible baroque archives, while, on its own label, the London Symphony Orchestra has continued to release Simon Rattle’s Janáček series taken from his concert performances with the orchestra at the Barbican, the latest release being Jenůfa. If full-length operas are notably scarce in the schedules of the major companies, two exceptions this year were Decca’s release of the Oslo-sourced Flying Dutchman, with Lise Davidsen and Gerald Finley, and Deutsche Grammophon’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, part of Andris Nelson’s Boston-based Shostakovich series, both of which proved less than overwhelming.

La plateforme de streaming musical Spotify a annoncé le 10 décembre 2025 une nouvelle fonctionnalité baptisée « Prompted Playlist ». Le concept : vous pourrez précisément décrire le type de playlist que vous souhaitez via un prompt, et l'IA se chargera du reste.

‘Big Boys’ artist is the latest star to condemn U.S. government for using music without consent in videos promoting Trump’s agenda

The Pretenders bandleader answers your questions on her friendship with Morrissey, her love of Van Gogh and why her cameo on Friends ruined her school run

Wondering if you saw the [music-filled 1996 comedy drama] film Grace of My Heart and whether it influenced your decision to record an album of duets? GiniMarie
I didn’t see the film – Duets Special came about after a conversation with Rufus Wainwright’s husband when I impulsively suggested doing an album with Rufus. Rufus wanted to do Always on My Mind, and I looked at the list of nine other songs I’d sent him and thought: why don’t I ask some other people? Like, Low are one of my all-time favourite bands and when I first met Mimi Parker she immediately seemed like someone I’ve known all my life. I told her I’d done one of their songs with Debbie Harry and she looked at me and said: “Why didn’t you ask me?” I thought: touché, Mimi. I suggested [Cass McCombs’s] County Line but she wasn’t well. I told Mimi I’d wait as long as it takes. Then she died. Alan [Sparhawk, Parker’s husband] sang it instead and it’s absolutely amazing.

The Pretenders covered Morrissey’s Every Day Is Like Sunday and now Duets Special features The First of the Gang to Die. As one of Morrissey’s oldest friends, how often do your conversations reach a philosophical, political or moral impasse? McScootikins
My relationship with him started because we were both vegetarian and he sent me a postcard asking to meet for tea. Thirty-five years ago most of my mates – Linda McCartney and so on – were friends because of vegetarianism. Morrissey does stuff for Peta and he’s an amazing songwriter. A few nights ago I had dinner with a couple of girls he’d worked with. I sent him a picture of the three of us and he immediately sent back a picture of three women from Coronation Street. He’s always true to himself and no, we’ve never reached an impasse.

The mashup Satisfaction Skank was unofficial for years but band allow Norman Cook to remake it using original stems of their 1965 hit

A classic bootleg recording by Fatboy Slim which samples the Rolling Stones’ (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction has finally been released, as the band give it their blessing after 25 years.

Satisfaction Skank was a familiar track on turn-of-the-century dancefloors, as Fatboy Slim mashed up his own 1999 hit The Rockafeller Skank with the Stones’ 1965 classic, hurling Keith Richards’ iconic guitar riff into the “big beat” sound of the late 90s.

British guitarist has faced number of health issues in recent years