Tickets go on sale today for this year's Teenage Cancer Trust benefit concerts at the Royal Albert Hall in March. The Who's Roger Daltrey, a patron of the Trust, has been the driving force behind the concerts since they began in 2000. Having failed to find any willing younger rockers willing to take on the job, he has assembled another stellar cast for this year.The Who will deliver the climax on March 30 with a performance of their 1973 Mod-themed rock opera Quadrophenia. They'll be preceded by Them Crooked Vultures (March 22), a reformed Suede (March 24), Arctic Monkeys (March 27), boyband Read more ...

The animated band Gorillaz have revealed their new HQ in the South Pacific - a floating island atop a pile of trash at Point Nemo, the furthest place, they inform us, from land on Earth. It's all very, very Tracey Island from Thunderbirds. See the remarkable video below. Meanwhile, Point Nemo Pirate Radio sessions can be heard here, including a few tracks from their forthcoming album Plastic Beach, released March 8th.

My abiding memory of The Foundry is being held aloft by my throat by the landlord, Falklands veteran and notorious band manager Alan "Gimpo" Goodrick, as he accused me of stealing a Shirley Bassey album. I had been DJing for a book reading by Mark "Zodiac Mindwarp" Manning, and there was a lot of absinthe being drunk thanks to some fellow from The Idler. I knew at that point I shouldn't have begun the evening by playing the line "there may be trouble ahead" from Bassey's version of "Let's Face the Music and Dance" over and over on a loop. It's a dreadful cliché to say knowingly of a bar "it Read more ...

It's not every literary festival which unites around a single idea. Jewish Book Week is an exception. Not that every one of the 130 speakers who appear on the podium at the Royal National Hotel between 27 February and 7 March will necessarily be Jewish. Guests include the controversialist Tariq Ali, Oxford professor of maths and freshly anointed OBE Marcus du Sautoy, historian Niall Ferguson, children's writer Anne Fine, novelists Will Self and Jonathan Safran Foer, the author of the sublime Everything Is Illuminated, writer and shrink Oliver James, Diana's divorce lawyer Anthony Julius Read more ...

According to award-winning film-maker Tony Palmer, the London Polish Daily newspaper has gone "ape-shit" over the re-release of his dramatised Chopin film, The Strange Case of Delfina Potocka, accusing it of maligning the good name of Chopin/Poland/The Polish Daily. They were planning to interview him tomorrow but cancelled, accusing him of "more or less anything you can think of", Palmer tells me.The paper was apparently incensed that Palmer's 1999 film accused Chopin of being anti-Semitic, of being a political revolutionary, and that it cast aspersions on the truth of the romance between Read more ...

Although the UK Film Council lost no time in firing out the usual self-congratulatory press release, it has been a thin year for British nominees at this year's Oscars. And, as Kim Newman, my colleague from the London Film Critics' Circle, points out, there is worse, much worse: home-grown talent is virtually absent from the list of nominees for the Razzies, or Golden Raspberries, the parallel event dedicated to celebrating the very worst of the cinematic year. Only Robert Pattinson, from the Twilight films, is bravely flying the flag for Blighty at the 30th Razzies which are announced Read more ...

Original Cultures is an artistic collective with bases in the UK, Italy and Japan, dedicated to audiovisual collaborations inspired by street art, graffiti, hip hop and electronic music. It is staging its first London event over the course of a week from 27 February to 5 March this year, in which artists Ericailcane, DEM, Will Barras, Hiraki Sawa, Om Unit, Tatsuki and Tayone will be joining to create new works in a series of public events and workshops in and around the Old Truman Brewery, Brick Lane, London.The schedule of activities for Original Cultures London 2010 is as follows: Original Read more ...

Jerusalem was bound for Broadway from virtually the moment the raves poured in for Jez Butterworth's career-best play and leading man Mark Rylance's career-defining star performance.  So why isn't Ian Rickson's glorious production headed to New York the minute the curtain comes down on its 12-week West End run, which opens Wednesday at the Apollo?It turns out that Rylance is intending an interim London and New York booking in the form of a hoped-for revival of American writer David Hirson's verse play, La Bête, which was a Broadway flop the first time round, in 1991. (Its Read more ...

The V&A has made a small concession to the musical outcry over its plan to substitute musical instruments with fashion galleries - an outcry you read first on theartsdesk. It is opening the instruments gallery for extra days before the closure on 22 February.Today, the first Wednesday of the month, would have been the only usual February opening day. But now there are six extra days to see the instruments, tomorrow, the weekend of 13-14 February, and the long weekend 19-21 February, before the collection is closed.Our item reported the petition to Downing Street protesting at the musical Read more ...

The Guardian's theatre blog has been buzzing with responses to critic Lyn Gardner's post asking why so many of the great and the good in the theatre world are Oxbridge grads? When I last looked, there were more than 120 responses to what at first seems to be a platitude: er, it's Britain, it's a class society, so who do you expect to be running the show?But maybe it's time to return to basics - we live in an unfair society. Okay, that's clear; but what do we do about it?

On April 30 2010 award-winning folk artist Jim Moray will pre-release his new album exclusively through the June issue of Songlines magazine.Never a musician to stick to the prescribed routes, Moray’s world-exclusive partnership with Songlines will see him join only a handful of artists to pre-release albums in this way including Prince & McFly (the Mail on Sunday) and The Kinks’ frontman Ray Davies (The Sunday Times). From June 11 In Modern History will also be available to buy once Songlines is off-sale. Following three albums that have inspired controversy as well as critical Read more ...

The huge upsurge in interest in the Austrian author Stefan Zweig continues at the BFI Southbank when Letter from an Unknown Woman is revived next week. Shot by Max Ophüls in 1948, it beautifully captures the spirit of Zweig’s post-Hapsburg, pre-Freudian Vienna, where bourgeois lives are fired by romantic ardour and obsessive longing.The novella on which it is based first appeared in 1922 and is published in this country in Selected Stories. It stars Louis Jourdan as a feckless concert pianist who, as he is about to leave Vienna to avoid a duel, hears from a woman (Joan Fontaine) who professes Read more ...