The Kiss frontman said the hefty cost of being his tour roadie for the day is worth the experience
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Rapper died on his 39th birthday after fleeing from police
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The ex-member of Brother Beyond now writes chart-toppers for stars. Why has he decided to make a musical of seedy, gutter-life classic Midnight Cowboy, a film he can’t bear?
Troop into Eg White’s living room, past the bright, spacious kitchen and the yapping terriers (“Meet the unwelcoming committee!”), then descend into the snug basement studio with its underfloor heating and you will have reached the place where pop bangers are born: hits for Adele (Chasing Pavements), Will Young (Leave Right Now), Duffy (Warwick Avenue) and countless others. The Ivor Novello award-winning songwriter, born Francis White, sits in front of a desk cluttered with screens and consoles and thingamajigs. In T-shirt, jeans and trainers, he looks as lean as the neck of a Stratocaster. When he is in quizzical mode, as he very often is, four deep grooves appear on his forehead like the strings on a bass guitar.
White’s newest project is the music for a stage version of Midnight Cowboy, the Oscar-winning 1969 buddy movie with Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman as deluded outsiders adrift in New York, adapted now by Bryony Lavery. Most of its 15 songs – from sanguine ballads to Latin-tinged stompers – were composed not here in White’s west London home but on a family holiday to Colombia. For two hours each morning, while his wife and children were still in bed, he wrote on a cheap baritone ukulele, which he plucks off the wall from between rows of guitars to show me. “You can take it in the hand luggage,” he says cheerfully. “If your kid sits on it, which happened a few times, it lives.” Presumably he means the ukulele, not the kid.
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© Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian
© Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian
‘Remember Freedom of Speech?’
The artist and musician is a brilliant subject for an epic, in-depth biography, but this is merely hagiography
In 1966 a woman sat down at the Destruction in Art Symposium at London’s Africa Centre and invited people to cut off her clothes. It was an era when Yves Klein used naked women as paintbrushes and Allen Jones made sculptures of fetishistically dressed women posed as furniture. But Yoko Ono was in control of her own self-sacrifice. It was the third time she’d performed this paradoxically passive action, and each time it was the audience who exposed themselves as they took scissors to her clothing.
This was also the beginning of a sojourn in London for the Japanese-born New York artist that would catapult her from avant garde obscurity to global fame. Her exhibition at the Indica Gallery that same year was visited by John Lennon, who climbed one of her artworks, a ladder to the ceiling. At the top he used a magnifying glass to read the tiny word “YES”. The love kindled that day would be blamed for breaking up the Beatles.
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© Photograph: Koh Hasebe/Shinko Music/Getty Images
© Photograph: Koh Hasebe/Shinko Music/Getty Images
The singer hit out at his previous band’s ‘dirty deeds’
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Rare intimate performance will take place a week before the release of the band’s first album in nine years
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The US-Canadian dual citizen speculates he may be ‘barred or put in jail to sleep on a cement floor’ after his European tour, after years of speaking against Trump
Neil Young has shared his concerns of being barred from the US after his European tour later this year, thanks to his outspoken critiques of Donald Trump.
On Tuesday, on his website Neil Young Archives, the 79-year-old musician – who has dual Canadian-American citizenship – wrote of his fears after the recent spate of people being detained and deported upon entering the US. These incidents have been credited to vague or unspecified visa issues, but have frequently affected individuals who have criticised the Trump administration either publicly or in messages on their phone read by immigration officers.
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© Photograph: Gary Miller/Getty Images
© Photograph: Gary Miller/Getty Images
Exclusive: The Grammy-winner tells Caitlin Hornik what inspired her forthcoming music and shares an update on her next Broadway-aimed musical
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The President has enraged Canadians with his calls for the country to become America’s 51st state
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It could be that you really dislike a song, or perhaps the person who sings it. Either way, your DJ needs to know
Name: “Do not play” lists.
Age: It’s probably been a thing for pretty much as long as playlists have been a thing, but it’s now more officially a thing because there was just a New York Times article about them.
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© Photograph: Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images (Posed by models)
© Photograph: Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images (Posed by models)
So Sam Mendes has cast his Beatles tetralogy, but none are from Merseyside. Don’t worry, I’ve just invented the Beatles Cinematic Universe
Sam Mendes has announced the cast for his colossal four-film Beatles extravaganza: Harris Dickinson as John, Paul Mescal as Paul, Barry Keoghan as Ringo and Joseph Quinn as George – and to tumultuous acclaim he brought his Fab Four on stage at the CinemaCon event in Las Vegas, a now well-established affair in the film world, incidentally, satirised in a forthcoming episode of Seth Rogen’s TV comedy The Studio.
I’m sorry to say, however, that Sam has almost entirely ignored the casting suggestions that I made in February last year. For what this is worth, I went with Leo Woodall as Paul, Finn Wolfhard as George, Harry Melling as Ringo and Barry Keoghan as John (though Barry got Ringo in the end). But I like to think that Sam Mendes and his producer Pippa Harris were thinking on more or less the same lines as me. Interestingly, there are no American actors doing Brit accents – just the kind of well-trained British or Irish actors who can fabricate perfect American accents for American roles elsewhere.
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© Photograph: John Russo/REX/Shutterstock
© Photograph: John Russo/REX/Shutterstock
The British-Guyanese singer topped the reggae chart with 1978’s Walk Away, but despite work with Robert Plant and others, she’s rarely returned to the studio. This interview might change that…
In December 1978, Marie Pierre was at No 1 in the UK reggae chart with the lovers rock classic Walk Away, a beautiful tearstained lament on a troubled relationship. Her 1979 debut album Love Affair, powered by another enduring scene song in Choose Me, remained one of Trojan’s best-selling albums well into the 1980s; Pierre, with her crystalline multi-octave voice, seemed destined to follow her contemporary, Silly Games singer Janet Kay, into mainstream pop-reggae success.
But in the 46 years since, Pierre has never released another album. A career that promised so much has – despite TV work and successful backing singing gigs with Robert Plant, Donna Summer and Chaka Khan – been one of frustration and thwarted ambition. Misfortune, mistrust and mistreatment, personal and professional, have sidelined her. “I feel as though I’ve been in chains,” she says on a video call. “I’ve been anchored for no good reason.”
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© Photograph: Courtesy: Marie Pierre
© Photograph: Courtesy: Marie Pierre
Whether you’re a parent or not, you should be able to talk candidly about how tough it is having kids
A few weeks ago I told my friend – a good friend – that I was considering having a third kid. The colour washed from her face, and before her filter could kick in she said: “Please don’t.” She corrected herself. “You don’t really want to, do you?” I realised she thought I was unhappy. She thought I regretted it all. She was wrong on both accounts, but I didn’t blame her for coming to such a stark conclusion.
That friend was not Chappell Roan. But the pop star is being pelted with the internet equivalent of soiled nappies for saying “all [her] friends who have kids are in hell” and “she doesn’t know anyone who’s happy with children at her age”.
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© Photograph: Gilbert Flores/Billboard/Getty Images
© Photograph: Gilbert Flores/Billboard/Getty Images
Screaming girls. Puppy-love songs. That haircut. As the Canadian superstar’s first record turns 15 – the same age he was when he became internationally inescapable – Mark Beaumont takes a look at his fast rise and often overlooked legacy
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All four Beatles biopics, focusing on each member of the band, will be released in cinemas in April 2028
“The Beatles changed my understanding of music,” the film director Sam Mendes told an audience at CinemaCon 2025 in Las Vegas on Monday. “I’ve been trying to make a movie about them for years.”
And it seems the long and winding road will reach its destination in April 2028, as the James Bond and American Beauty director confirmed four biopics of the Fab Four – one for each member.
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© Photograph: Alberto E Rodríguez/Getty Images for CinemaCon
© Photograph: Alberto E Rodríguez/Getty Images for CinemaCon
The novelist was just 12 when the ex-busker stunned a mammoth crowd at the Free Nelson Mandela concert – and sent everyone racing to Woolworths for her astonishing debut album. Its simple, honest, perfect songs of protest have mesmerised the writer ever since
On 11 June 1988, I was 12 and sitting with my family watching the Free Nelson Mandela Concert on TV. As a clan, we were old hands at trying to free Mandela, having done our fair share of marching and boycotting over the years, and this concert felt like the culmination of all that. There was a lot of excitement in the room: we squeezed on to the sofa and opened the windows wide. (If the wind’s blowing in the right direction, you can hear a Wembley audience roar from Willesden.)
Many world-famous musicians played that day. Most of them I don’t remember, but one I will never forget: Tracy Chapman. I think a lot of people feel that way, though when you rewatch the footage you realise what she was up against at the time. Nobody cheers as she takes the stage. In fact, the crowd seem hardly aware she’s arrived. People are chanting, chatting or just partying among themselves.
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© Photograph: William Campbell/Getty Images
© Photograph: William Campbell/Getty Images
‘It’s become a sort of folk song. It’s played at weddings and funerals. Dundee United play it when we win. I’ve met people who’ve told me, “I was a worker for the council for 20 years” – just like the guy in the song’
I was a teacher in Glasgow but I wanted to start a band and write songs that meant something to people. Dignity began life during a holiday in Crete in 1985. I bought Sounds magazine at the airport. Morrissey was on the cover and the headline “Home thoughts from abroad” got me thinking about Glasgow. I was living in a tenement flat in Pollokshields, from where I’d see the cleansing department guys sweeping the road. So I started writing about a “worker for the council, has been 20 years” who dreamed of sailing away on a “ship called Dignity”.
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© Photograph: Terry Lott/Sony Music Archive/Getty Images
© Photograph: Terry Lott/Sony Music Archive/Getty Images
A revelation at Pontins fuelled the producer to avant garde acclaim. But with ‘sublime’ sounds came struggles with substances. Her intense new album peels back the plaster
‘Kissed by a witch, I got hexed!” Aya howls through a storm of screaming electronics and bass groans on I Am the Pipe I Hit Myself With. The song revisits a time before Aya Sinclair was one of the UK avant garde’s most exciting talents – when she was still a Huddersfield teenager, newly into Christian rock. The music gave her “this tingly, bubbly sensation”, she says. “And someone said: ‘This is the holy spirit.’” The experience led her to join a Pentecostal congregation for a couple of years, but after confiding in a church friend about some “feelings” – Sinclair would later come out as a trans woman – she was “kicked out for being queer, essentially. I was given an ultimatum, to either closet myself or leave.” As she whispers in this track, over the quickening click of a Geiger counter, “they had me out on a witch-hunt, when I found myself”.
It’s a suitably vulnerable, conflicted opener to her new album Hexed!, which plays out in a lurching mix of heavy metal and hardcore electronics. The record sounds twisted and contorted, wincing at the pain of “peeling back the plaster”, she says over a video call. She is warm, funny and seemingly at peace – following the traumas and battles with substance abuse that she revisits on this nightmarish, alien album.
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© Photograph: Dee Iskrzynska
© Photograph: Dee Iskrzynska
The Martin D-18E, played at renowned performance five months before singer’s suicide, sold for £4.8m in 2020
The world’s most expensive guitar, which Kurt Cobain played in one of Nirvana’s most acclaimed performances – the MTV Unplugged in New York show – is to be displayed in the UK for the first time.
The Royal College of Music in London has been loaned the Martin D-18E by its owner, Peter Freedman (the chair of Røde microphones), who bought the guitar for $6m (£4.8m) in 2020, making it the most expensive guitar ever sold at auction.
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© Photograph: Frank Micelotta Archive/Getty Images
© Photograph: Frank Micelotta Archive/Getty Images
St George’s Bristol
The consummate vocal ensemble beautifully highlighted symbolic connections between the 16th-century Italian composer and soon-to-be 90 Arvo Pärt
This year marks the 500th anniversary of the birth of Palestrina, the Italian composer who took the name of his native town, just east of Rome, now part of the metropolitan city. In director Peter Phillips’s inspired pairing of Palestrina with the music of Arvo Pärt in the year of his 90th birthday, there was a particular frisson in knowing that in January, the Tallis Scholars had sung this very programme in the cathedral of Sant’Agapito Martire in Palestrina, where the young Giovanni Pierluigi may have been a chorister and was certainly organist from the age of 19.
Phillips has described Palestrina as the “most consummate of renaissance composers”: it may surely be said that the Tallis Scholars are the consummate vocal ensemble. Opening with his motet Surge Illuminare, the 10 Scholars immediately brought a shining warmth to the St George’s auditorium, the clarity of the polyphonic lines as notable as their impeccable diction. This was followed by the Missa Brevis, only marginally shorter than the hundred plus others and exemplifying the infinite care with which Palestrina set the words of the Ordinary, the Scholars’ use of dynamic and tonal colour, as well the attention to changes of metre, vividly achieved. After the Kyrie’s gentle plea for mercy, the Gloria was indeed gloriously rich. Three solo voices – soprano, alto and tenor – brought a serene calm to the Benedictus, contrasting with the then full-bodied and joyous Hosanna, before the heartfelt plea for peace of the Agnus Dei.
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© Photograph: Hugo Glendinning
© Photograph: Hugo Glendinning
Don’t live like everyone else! Angela Jaeger met every act going in punk, in New York and London – and had crushes on them all. Now 65, she talks us through her thrill-filled diaries
There is nothing new to discover, surely, about the birth of punk. But perhaps it depends where you look. Written between 1977 and 1981, the teenage diaries of Angela Jaeger crackle with life. Published as the book I Feel Famous, the New York and London punk scenester’s writing gives us a real-time immersion, with zero revisionism, into not only what happened and who was there, but how it felt to a musically fanatical teenage girl.
Diary entry for 9 May, 1977, about a Bryan Ferry/Talking Heads gig being sold out: “Shit, damn, piss forever!! What can you do but kick and curse cause you CAN’T GO! It shits bricks solid!!” By 27 June, she’s a dedicated anglophile, a Sex Pistols and Clash obsessive, searching for an identity and asking the big questions: “Why should we be expected to live like everyone else does? What are the reasons behind TEENAGE REVOLUTION!”
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© Photograph: Photo: Julia Gorton
© Photograph: Photo: Julia Gorton
The singer was a young fan of Mariah and pretends she hates one 70s musical classic, but which aquatic power ballad can she genuinely no longer stand?
The first song I fell in love with
Samson by Regina Spektor, when I was 16 and falling in love for the first time. I got introduced to her music when I was working in Virgin Megastore in Aberdeen. Then I met someone in a club.
The first single I bought
All I Want for Christmas Is You by Mariah Carey, from Asda. My dad had played me the Music Box album from when I was about seven, so I loved Mariah. I saw it in the bargain section for £1.99 and thought: “Let’s get it.”
© Photograph: Jack Alexander
© Photograph: Jack Alexander
The music from Zach Braff’s seminal comedy drama took centre stage for one special night bringing back artists from Imogen Heap to The Shins
It’s been two decades since the release of Garden State, Zach Braff’s film about an alienated young actor’s struggle to find meaning in life. But while the movie itself became a cult classic, perhaps its biggest legacy is its soundtrack, which went platinum, won a Grammy and became a cultural touchstone among a certain subset of the American population.
So it was no surprise that, when Braff announced a 20th-anniversary concert celebrating the album, at which each of its dozen or so artists would perform, tickets were going for hundreds of dollars. This was Woodstock for elder millennials – at least a certain swath of us who, when the soundtrack came out in 2004, found an outlet for our big teenage feelings in bands like the Shins, Frou Frou and Iron and Wine. All three were among the performers at Los Angeles’s Greek Theater on Saturday evening (technically nearly 21 years after the album’s release). The concert raised money for the Midnight Mission, a century-old LA charity fighting homelessness.
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© Photograph: Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for Garden State
© Photograph: Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for Garden State
The Guardian journalist’s tender account of how music became a bridge between him and his autistic son, James, is full of wit and wisdom
Halfway through Maybe I’m Amazed, there’s a photograph of John Harris’s son, James, with one of his heroes. James is a young-looking 10 in knee-length shorts decorated with stars. Ian Hunter of 1970s rock band Mott the Hoople stands beside him, a hand gently around his shoulder. “Sixty-nine years separate them,” Harris writes. “Here is proof of how songs and their creators find fans in the most unlikely of places.”
Maybe I’m Amazed is the story of a growing child’s love of music, but it’s more than that: it’s also about how songs provided a whole world for James, and his family, after his autism diagnosis. It marks a departure for Harris, whose previous journalism, aside from his political work for the Guardian, has involved editing magazines and writing columns, reviews and other books about music.
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© Photograph: courtesy of John Harris
© Photograph: courtesy of John Harris
As the indie singer-songwriter and Boygenius star releases her latest, highly personal solo record, she talks of her weariness of AI and digital art, the pressures of being in a public relationship, and her anger and fears in Trump’s US
In the shadow of a Hogarth painting, accompanied by guitar and violin, Lucy Dacus is singing about disappointment. The painting depicts Thomas Coram, founder of the Foundling Hospital in London’s Bloomsbury district. A shipbuilder by trade, he is portrayed in full baroque garb, a style usually reserved for the aristocracy. But amid the classical architecture and rich fabrics, he is shown as he was: the thread veins on his face, his feet not quite touching the ground. The setting is apt for Dacus’s disquisitions on life and love, and the ways they can exceed, or fall short of, the expectations we place upon them: the moments that feel exalted, idealised, as well as the times when reality intrudes on the fantasy.
The Foundling Museum, the setting of tonight’s intimate show, also holds a deeper meaning for the singer-songwriter, who was raised in Mechanicsville, Virginia by adoptive parents; the mother who raised her was herself adopted from an orphanage at a young age. “I had nothing like this growing up,” says Dacus to the assembled crowd. “We don’t have the concept of a foundling in the US. It would have been cool if the other kids at school had known that was fine.” The previous day, after her photoshoot in the museum’s grand-looking court room, she is visibly moved upon learning about the building’s history, and its current work training care-experienced young people. She asks the organisers about inviting some of the trainees to the concert: it would, she says, be a way of showing them “hey, I’m doing cool shit – you can do cool shit.”
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© Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Observer
© Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Observer
Ono was blamed for splitting the Beatles and taking John Lennon from his true calling. Let’s hope things are getting easier for women who date famous musicians
More than 50 years after John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1969 bed-in, protesting against war, Ono finally gets her love-in. David Sheff’s biography Yoko, published last week, seeks to put the record straight about her stellar achievements as an internationally renowned conceptual artist.
In recent years there have been retrospectives, including one at London’s Tate Modern. Kevin Macdonald’s docufilm, One To One: John And Yoko, is released in the UK next month. Ono, 92, is seeing reputational rehabilitation on a global scale, and all a long time coming.
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© Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy
© Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy
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