Albums: The Script - The User’s Guide To Being Human
The Script has never been shy about wearing their hearts on their sleeves, but The User’s Guide To Being Human feels like the Dublin band have ripped the sleeves off altogether.
Albums: Brandon Flowers Thraser
The Killers frontman’s connection with country runs deep, rooted in childhood journeys through Utah with his father, soundtracked by the likes of Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings. That history gives the album an authenticity that goes beyond simply adding pedal steel and acoustic guitars to a rock record. Flowers understands the storytelling tradition at the heart of the country, using it to revisit memories, places and experiences while giving them his own unmistakable voice.
Albums: Fletchr Fletchr On The Island We Call Home
Fletchr Fletchr On The Island We Call Home Tracks: Passenger, Fucking With My Head, For You, Karma, Streetlights Label: FF Records Fletchr Fletchr has been building towards this moment for some time.
Albums: Sparks - Live On The Moon
There are few bands in popular music capable of making a live album feel like an event before the first note has even been played. Sparks, naturally, has found a way. Live on the Moon arrives wrapped in a typically absurd piece of Sparks mythology: a concert supposedly staged at Taruntius Crater, with Cate Blanchett serving as lunar emcee
Wade Bowen: ‘Good Songs Don’t Really Have Expiration Dates’
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Texas red dirt country singer-songwriter Wade Bowen is finally letting go of an album that has been sitting quietly in the vault. His eleventh studio album, The Version Of Me You Get, arrives on 25 September 2026 via Thirty Tigers, with ten tracks that reveal a grittier, more vulnerable and soulful side of the artist.
Dr Richard Shepherd Chats To Clair Woodward About His Theatre Tour Time Of Death – More Unnatural Causes
You toured with Unnatural Causes in 2022/3 and in 2025 with Time of Death - More Unnatural Causes which was so successful that you are taking it out again in autumn 2026 - what is it that you like about touring? I have always enjoyed talking to people and explaining what I do and why.
Contemporary Music: Premieres
Aspen itself, now in its 77th year, remains one of the great American summer institutions for performance and training — and this recording is a reminder that its commitment to new work is more than a slogan.
Albums: Paul Heaton Jenius
Heaton Jenius Tracks: Can't Get Next To You, Favourite Kind Of Idiot (ft. Rianne Downey), I Want The Job (ft. Rianne Downey), Sad Songs and Lawsuits, She Ain't Pretty (ft. Rianne Downey), One Eye Open, Send In The Clowns, Do Not Ask Me (ft. Rianne Downey), Don't Lean On Me (ft. Rianne Downey), Jet Black Sky, The Whisky Did (ft.
Classical Music: Verdi Requiem
There is an obvious risk in committing a live Verdi Requiem to disc: strip away the theatre of the hall and a performance can shrink. Not here. Captured in spatial audio during three January 2026 performances at Severance Music Center, this new Cleveland Orchestra release loses none of the immediacy of the room, and gains something the audience in the stalls never had — the chance to sit inside the balance itself, with strings and voices arriving from every direction rather than simply from the front.
Classical Music: Grieg Lyric Pieces, Volume 2
Grieg, born in Bergen in 1843 and long celebrated as Norway's National Composer, turned to the piano throughout his career but had little appetite for the German sonata, preferring instead the short forms he called Lyriske stykker — published across ten volumes and steeped in the folk idiom of his homeland. Donohoe has resisted the temptation to record them in sequence, instead ordering the pieces to his own design.
The gamble pays off. This second volume is every bit as delightful as the first, with poetry springing from Donohoe's fingers with a delicacy that borders on illusion — his left hand so controlled you barely notice its work until you try to imagine the music without it.
Teenage Fanclub: Why You Should Not Dare To Dream
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There is something wonderfully un-rock-star-ish about Norman Blake. Sitting down to talk about Teenage Fanclub’s 13th studio album, Do Not Dare to Dream, he is just as happy discussing Joy Division, holidays in northern Spain and a fantasy Come Dine With Me line-up as he is the mechanics of making another record after nearly four decades in the business.
Vicky McClure & Jonny Owen - Day Fever: The feel-good phenomenon that has Britain dancing again
There aren’t many live events where strangers become friends before the first song has finished. Fewer still, where the dancefloor is full by mid-afternoon, generations mingle without a second thought, and everyone is home in time for the evening. Yet that’s exactly what has happened with Day Fever.
Gruesome, Grisly, Gory : The Silence Of The Lambs
I always like to digest theatre performances on a full stomach, my favourite pre-show meal being thinly sliced steak and frites at a local French bistro. However, due to the cannibalistic nature of The Silence of the Lambs I swapped red meat for fish pie and mashed potato to avoid bouts of nausea - or worse.
As Music GCSE Results Roll In, What Does The Next Generation Of Musicians Need Across The North?
As teenagers across the country eagerly – or perhaps apprehensively – await their GCSE results, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra’s latest research finds that more than eight in ten parents across the North East (86%) and Yorkshire and the Humber (82%) say more could be done to engage their children in classical and orchestral music.
Thousands Attend First Symphonic Ibiza Concert At Great Yorkshire Showground
Thousands of people attended the Great Yorkshire Showground on Saturday night for the first staging of Symphonic Ibiza, an outdoor concert combining DJ sets, live vocalists and a full orchestra in the venue's Main Ring. It was the first outdoor music concert held at the Showground since Sir Elton John performed there in 2012.
Harrogate Comedy Festival Celebrates 17 Years Of Bringing Britain's Biggest Laughs To Yorkshire
Harrogate Theatre is preparing to welcome some of the biggest names in comedy as Harrogate Comedy Festival returns this autumn with another outstanding programme of stand-up, improv, storytelling and family entertainment.
British Police Symphony Orchestra To Perform In Aid Of Bradford’s ‘Home From Home’ Appeal
The British Police Symphony Orchestra (BPSO) will perform at Price Hall, Bradford Grammar School on Saturday 10 October to raise funds for Bradford Hospitals Charity's flagship ‘Home from Home’ Appeal.
Piece Hall Glamour, Bradford Beat: A Weekend Of Sold-Out Sounds Across West Yorkshire
Two venues, two cities, one bumper weekend for live music — Halifax's Piece Hall hosted a pair of sold-out celebrations while Bradford's new Darley Street Market courtyard found its voice. Halifax: Jimmy Eat World Celebrate In Style When Arizona pop-punk band Jimmy Eat World released their 2001 album Bleed American, it followed on the bac…
Music Rated Highly By Business Leaders - New Research Finds
Business leaders rate music highly for workplace skills - yet fewer young children in the UK have the opportunity to study it at school than at any point in a generation. This comes at a time when almost half of British adults (49%) rank music as the UK's greatest export to the world, ahead of scientific research (28%), technology innovation (24%) and manufacturing (18%).
Albums: The ReytonsA Love Letter To A Broken Town
While plenty of guitar bands spend their careers trying to escape the streets that shaped them, the Rotherham four-piece keep running back towards them, armed with loud guitars, sharp observations and a chorus designed to be screamed back by several thousand people.
"We Didn't Destroy The Songs": Tania Doko On Bachelor Girl's Bold Reinvention
I first met Bachelor Girl in person back when I lived in Melbourne, an experience that, if I'm being completely honest, excited my inner teenager rather more than was probably necessary. It was wonderfully surreal sitting down over coffee with Tania Doko and James Roche, having spent years knowing their music, while also photographing them for the interview.
The Suitability Of Love: No Fond Return Of Love By Barbara Pym
This book came recommended to me by another lover of reading. It is so good to be offered something you might not pick up yourself.
Albums: Wine Lips TV Dinner
There are nods throughout TV dinners to some of the originators, like The Ramones, and Leech sounds like a track that’s a love child of The Runaways. Wine Lips may have taken a good swig from some of these early punk and garage bands, but they have updated things from their own world view and produced a thoroughly modern, whip-smart album of chaotically infectious fuzzy punk. The album should come with a word of warning, however – don’t listen to TV Dinner whilst having a TV dinner; things are likely to get messy very quickly.
Classical Music: Donna McKevitt O Vos Omnes
Nearly five minutes is all it takes. Donna McKevitt's new single, released yesterday on Delphian Records, takes a single motet and turns it into something entirely its own.
Few Renaissance composers still speak to us as urgently as Carlo Gesualdo, whose harmonic daring and emotional rawness sound startlingly modern four centuries on. That is exactly the quality McKevitt has tapped into with O vos.
Classical Music: Phillip Cooke Organ Music
Regent's new disc of Phillip Cooke's solo organ music, recorded on the celebrated organ at Blackburn Cathedral, is rich in colour and atmosphere. Cooke, who grew up amid the fells and changeable light of the Lake District, writes music that seems to capture that landscape rather than describe it, and Ed Jones, at the console, treats the Blackburn organ less as an accompanist to that memory than as its co-author.
Studio Doors Open: Rochdale Scheme Offers Emerging Artists Space, Funding And A Stage
A new initiative launched this week could prove the turning point that early-career artists in Rochdale have been waiting for. Breaking Barriers CIC and Richard Street Studios have joined forces to offer three visual artists free studio space, exhibition funding and professional support — the kind of infrastructure that so often eludes creatives just starting out.
In That Pen There Is Great Power — Hannah Khalil On Writing The Farmer's Wife
Ahead of the world premiere of The Farmer's Wife at Theatre by the Lake, playwright Hannah Khalil talks to Andrew Palmer about writing three generations of Cumbrian farming women into being. When Theatre by the Lake asked Hannah Khalil whether she might make a stage version of Helen Rebanks' The Farmer's Wife, her first instinct was to say no.
Whitby Lit Fest Unveils Star-Studded Programme
John Boyne, Ann Cleeves, Si King, Joanne Harris, Mark Billingham, Greta Scacchi, Corinne Bailey Rae and Dr Sian Williams are heading to Whitby The town that inspired Bram Stoker's Dracula and has fired the imaginations of generations of writers is preparing to welcome some of the biggest names in books for the 2026 Whitby Lit Fest.
Mari Wilson: Girl About Town
With a career spanning four and a half decades, Mari Wilson has done rather a lot. There have been chart hits, jazz clubs, musical theatre, a skyscraper beehive, a twelve-piece band, and more than a few famous faces along the way. Now, the Neasden Queen of Soul is back with Girl About Town, her first album of original material in more than a decade.
Pet Shop Boys' Neil Tennant Leads Star-Studded Durham Book Festival Line-up Celebrating Stories Forged In The North
Durham Book Festival’s 2026 line-up features some of the UK's most exciting writers, thinkers, performers and broadcasters exploring literature, politics, history, music, and poetry.