Womadelaide 2025: Róisín Murphy, Khruangbin and others lead a blissful, sweltering weekend

Botanic Park, AdelaideDespite the heat, this year’s festival was full of magical moments and big sounds, with musicians making fascinating genre connectionsAs the sun set on day three of Womadelaide, under the bat colony at Tainmuntilla (Botanic Park), the audience were in a trance. The Brooklyn-based Colombian musician Ela Minus mixed her voice with synthesisers, prompting a roar from the crowd; strobe lighting pulsed over the moving mass of bodies. The surrounding pine trees somehow seemed to make the reverb echo even stronger, lifting us up through the canopy to the open stars above.Minus’s music is complex and expansive, pop music meets house. We were all hypnotised, dancing as one, slick with a day’s worth of sunblock and sweat

Art with Cantona and puppet animals lined up for Manchester international festival

A giant herd of puppet animals raising awareness of the climate crisis and artwork inspired by footballers including Eric Cantona are part of the 10th edition of the Manchester international festival (MIF), whose organisers want visitors to have “a moment to reflect”.The former Manchester United footballer Juan Mata, the art curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and the writer, filmmaker and curator Josh Willdigg have put together the event’s “set piece”, a celebration of the beautiful game where artists and footballers collaborated on purpose-made artworks.The England Lionesses midfielder Ella Toone, the former Netherlands and Juventus enforcer Edgar Davids, and the Manchester United great Cantona are among the footballers taking part in Football City, Art United, which will take place in Aviva Studios and include sculpture, sound installations and animation.It was inspired after a conversation between MIF’s artistic director, John McGrath, the poet Lemn Sissay, Obrist and Mata, who saw MIF’s Poets Slash Artist show, where visual artists and poets collaborated, and asked if something similar could be done with footballers. Mata also featured in 2023’s edition of the festival, working with Obrist and Tino Sehgal

#MeToo movement ‘began to catch up’ with Noel Clarke, court hears

Women began discussing Noel Clarke’s past sexual misconduct in response to the #MeToo movement, the high court in London has heard, as he began giving evidence in his libel claim against the Guardian.Cross-examining Clarke for the Guardian, Gavin Millar KC told the actor he had begun to panic because the movement “began to catch up with you”.But during often combative cross-examination on Monday, the former Doctor Who star, said his female accusers were variously “lying”, “seeking attention” and had “jumped on the bandwagon”.He said the Guardian had “smashed my life for four years with this rubbish, this nonsense … I did not do this, I would not do this. I have got children, this is not true

‘It sounds terrible but I listen to it 30 times a day’: how the Lumineers made Ho Hey

‘We were moving away from bar band covers to doing our own songs. So shouting “Ho hey!” from the stage got people’s attention. We were doing it to be heard. Then suddenly everyone started listening’After growing up in Ramsey, a small town in New Jersey, we moved to New York to try to make it in music but found it a very difficult circuit to break into. Bars would let you play because they wanted your friends to buy drinks, but then they’d kick everybody out to get the next group in

Long live Joyce Carol Oates’ Twitter account: the only pure space left on this hell site

The 86-year-old author’s social feed might be her greatest contribution to literature – with philosophical musings on everything from US politics to an infected footAt the centre of most things is a skeleton. So it is for the online infamy of Joyce Carol Oates. In 2021, the award-winning novelist delivered her most significant contribution to literature: a diabolical tweet ruminating on the existentialism of Halloween.(you can always recognize a place in which no one is feeling much or any grief for a lost loved one & death, dying, & everyone you love decomposing to bones is just a joke.) https://t

Flamboyance, creativity, club culture – and no smart phones: why the 1980s are all the rage again

A series of major exhibitions focusing on the era has unleashed a wave of nostalgia for those who were there and curiosity from the young who envy its freedomIn the future everyone will blame the eighties for all societal ills, in the same way that people have previously blamed the sixties,” Peter York, the quintessential observer of 1980s’ style and cultural trends, said recently. He was referring to what he called the “big bangs” of monetarism, deregulation and libertarianism which “have been working their way through the culture ever since”.Curiously, he did not mention one of the eighties’ equally enduring, but more positive “big bangs” – the “style culture”, which began in that much-maligned decade and continues to echo through contemporary culture in an altogether less malign way. It is currently being celebrated in three exhibitions across London.At the National Portrait Gallery, the walls of several rooms are filled floor to ceiling with bright, glossy images from the Face magazine, which its press release describes as “a trailblazing youth culture and style magazine that has shaped the creative and cultural landscape in Britain and beyond”