He was courted by Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, toured with Tina Turner and the Rolling Stones and was idolised by everyone from Aretha Franklin to Dr Dre. British pop’s nearly man tells his astonishing story

‘There are only three things happening in England,” Aretha Franklin announced to the world’s media during a visit to Britain in 1968. “The Rolling Stones, the Beatles and Terry Reid.”

I mention this to Reid and the 74-year old musician laughs. “See, I was playing a club in London,” he says, “and, down front, a young woman was really enjoying herself. I thought, ‘she certainly looks like Aretha Franklin’. But I discounted the possibility that it could be. Well, it was!”

Relations between Morrissey and Johnny Marr seem at their lowest ebb following disagreements over trademarks and reissues. But fans will hold out hope nonetheless

One of pop’s longest, coldest wars flickered with heat again this month, as Morrissey fired off a series of messages on his personal blog .

First, he claimed that concert promoters AEG offered him and Johnny Marr “a lucrative offer” for a world tour, saying that he agreed to it but Marr ignored it. Then he claimed that Marr had blocked the release of a new Smiths best-of and reissue programme proposed by Warner Music , who had approached Morrissey and a sleeve designer “to assemble artwork for all four releases, all of which were rejected and halted out of hand by J Marr”. You can understand why Marr might have demurred, given the cover art featured the words Smiths Rule OK! in bright faux-painterly daubs above a photo of the band, and thus looked like a flyer for a soft play centre themed around 80s indie.

Watford Palace theatre
Stage version of TV movie offers impressive impersonations of the Beatles stars but is more like fan fiction than drama

What went down during the penultimate face-to-face meeting between John Lennon, then a stay-at-home dad in granny specs and dressing gown, and Paul McCartney, back at No 1 with Wings, in New York in April 1976? And how close did they really come to reuniting musically that evening in Lennon’s apartment?

Mark Stanfield pared back this real-life scenario in 2000 for the TV movie Two of Us. (Most accounts have Linda McCartney and Yoko Ono also in attendance.) For the new stage version, Stanfield, Richard Short, and Barry Sloane (who also plays Lennon) have streamlined it even further, removing an incognito walkabout sequence on the advice of director Scot Williams. The action now stays within Lennon’s apartment, with its white piano and its view of the Manhattan skyline. Only once do the duo venture outside. “Remember the last time we were on a rooftop together?” sighs McCartney.

At Watford Palace theatre until 21 September

Sonic Youth’s frontman pays homage to the otherworldly New York City artist who turned graffiti into a futurist art weapon and used experimental linguistics to escape definition

The New York artist Rammellzee was, without a doubt, one of the most intriguing visionaries of hip-hop culture from its mid-70s origins. Raised in the remote beach front outpost of Far Rockaway, Queens, the final stop on the storied A train, Rammellzee discovered the art of graffiti while noticing another teen spray-painting his tag, “Sonic Bad”, at 57th Street station. Already engaged in his own personal investigation of calligraphic writing, Rammellzee was instantly fascinated. He soon found himself descending into the dark underworld of subway tunnels where train cars stood motionless, throwing up his tag across the metal shells with only a haze of visibility to focus, anxiously aware of being nabbed by transit cops.

Rammellzee, a tall, lean Black and Italian-American mixed-race kid, bounded about with a distinctive style: a mélange of hip-hop flash and vintage soul musician funk – a look he would play with for his entire life. As a youngster in the mid-70s he joined the graffiti renaissance and invested in it a personal and wholly other critical perception, one that was entirely esoteric, if not otherworldly.

Upmarket Kreuzberg club blames economic pressures, a pandemic hangover and Berlin’s dated image as factors leading to end of 22-year party

Berlin’s Watergate nightclub, one of the institutions of the German capital’s nightlife, is to close down after 22 years, with its owners saying the night-time economy still hasn’t recovered after the pandemic.

In a statement, the club’s management said it had made the “difficult decision” not to extend its lease and close its premises after a New Year’s Eve party at the end of the year.

Keith Richards and Mick Jagger’s 1967 raid and trial caused a national storm, seeming to pitch old against young, Establishment against counterculture. But was the real story overlooked? We return to the 60s at their most swinging

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’ 1967 trial for drug possession at Chichester crown court is one of the most notorious incidents in the history of 60s rock. Everyone with even a passing interest in the Rolling Stones knows the salient details: the grim role of the News of the World in setting up a police raid on Richards’ country pile, Redlands; the entirely apocryphal rumours about Mars Bars and Marianne Faithfull ; the band’s brief attempt to escape the press attention by travelling to Morocco, where Richards began a long relationship with guitarist Brian Jones’s then-girlfriend Anita Pallenberg; the unexpected intervention of the Times’ editor William Rees-Mogg, protesting against the severity of the sentencing in an editorial headlined Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel? ; their subsequent release, Mick Jagger’s appearance on a hastily convened edition of the TV show World in Action , debating the whole business with Rees-Mogg, former home secretary Frank Soskice, the Bishop of Woolwich and Fr Thomas Corbishley (“a leading British Jesuit”).

But when playwright Charlotte Jones was reading up on the Redlands bust and trial, it was another, more overlooked aspect of events on which she alighted. Michael Havers was an intriguing choice of defence counsel for Jagger and Richards. He was not a barrister like John Mortimer , who seemed to delight in taking on the establishment on behalf of everyone from the editors of Oz magazine to the Sex Pistols to the publishers of Hubert Selby Jr’s Last Exit to Brooklyn. Havers was the establishment, a Garrick Club member who helped wrongly convict the Guildford Four, became a Conservative MP and ultimately lord chancellor under Margaret Thatcher.

Combs had been arrested in New York, months after federal authorities raided his homes in Los Angeles and Miami

Sean “Diddy” Combs has been charged with sex trafficking and racketeering, according to a federal indictment unsealed Tuesday.

Combs had been arrested late Monday in Manhattan, roughly six months after federal authorities conducting a sex trafficking investigation raided his luxurious homes in Los Angeles and Miami.

Darkly comedic, frequently naked and with fans in Kurt Cobain and Henry Rollins, the quartet burned a bloodstained trail through the alt-rock scene. They explain how they’re staying dangerous after 26 years away

Sweaty, unhinged and with one of them frequently naked, few underground rock bands remain as revered as the Jesus Lizard. The US band’s early 90s albums Goat and Liar inspired awe in American alt-rock royalty such as Kurt Cobain, Steve Albini and Henry Rollins, and the band’s live sets cemented their status: guitarist Duane Denison, bassist David Wm Sims and drummer Mac McNeilly locked into near-ritualistic rock’n’roll while frontman David Yow, his genitals flapping, careened into the audience, surfacing like a pink dolphin fighting against a net of hairy arms and plaid shirts.

Hatched in Texas before relocating to Chicago, the band’s initial run lasted from 1987 to 1999. Since 2008 they have periodically reconvened for live “re-enactments” (Yow’s term), but their new album, Rack, is their first fresh music in 26 years: a tense, teeth-bared sewer rat of a record. “We had to be brutal and blunt with our assessment every step of the way so nothing came off flat or dull,” says Denison – dapper, charming, occasionally distracted by the whims of his cat – from his Nashville home. “I checked out other people’s old-guy reunion albums and made mental notes about what was good and what wasn’t. One thing I noticed is that they seem overly mature: really trying to show how wise they are and how they’ve grown. But that’s not fun. We want mindless mayhem along with an element of sophistication – that was always our thing.”

Charity says band are a perfect example of an act that rose through the grassroots circuit and their support ‘really will stop venues closing’

Coldplay are to donate 10% of the band’s proceeds from their 2025 UK dates in London and Hull to the Music Venue Trust, the UK charity that supports grassroots music venues.

Earlier this year, parliament’s culture, media and sport committee heard from promoters, artists and industry body representatives about the “crisis” facing the country’s smaller venues, nearly all of whom backed the idea of a £1 levy being placed on tickets from concert arenas to be distributed to smaller venues.