Scenius, Cliffs Pavilion, Southend-on-Sea, 2 Jun – Sticking very close to the 1980s synth-duo formula, ironically while they were supporting Midge Ure if anything they tacked closer to the solo sound of his Ultravox predecessor John Foxx. Very enjoyable and very 1980.

Midge Ure, Cliffs Pavilion, Southend-on-Sea, 2 Jun – I think Midge had done himself a disservice with the way this tour was sold as featuring a musical journey and instrumentals because essentially it was all hits, the odd deep cut, and if your instrumentals are the Top of the Pops theme and the epic opening Astrodyne from the Vienna album it is hardly niche. I danced all night, without tears in my eyes, despite him playing the track Lament and reminding me it is 42+ years since I first saw Ultravox tour that very album.

Kraftwerk, Royal Albert Hall, London, 4 Jun – I’ve seen this show many times over the years now since I first saw them in 1991, and it never gets old. This time I was pleased to be able to introduce my son and my partner Melanie to it. We got last-minute standing tickets and then when we were at the venue got upgraded to stalls seats right by the side of the stage, one of the times I’ve been closest to them. They played a couple of things I’ve never seen before — Ätherwellen in full and a version of Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, dedicated to Ryūichi Sakamoto — but mostly it was just the unique sound and presentation of Kraftwerk. The men machines forever, regardless of who is in the line-up.

When I saw them in Brixton in 2004, I did not know it would be the last time I’d see Florian Schneider live. But I guess, on this, my twelfth Kraftwerk show, I know it is sadly probably my last time giving Ralf a standing ovation at the end.

The Nightshift, Trades Hall, Walthamstow, 6 Jun – For my sister’s birthday party she and lots of my family went to the Trades Hall to have a jolly good bop to a very sparkly 80s cover band who were great fun and who, unlike Joanne Joanne, do play Rio.

Sparks, Royal Hospital Chelsea, London, 12 Jun – Easily the most Tory venue I’ve ever been to — there’s a Margaret Thatcher infirmary for Christ’s sake — and then support act the Chelsea Pensioner Singers freaked us all by opening their set with the fanfare It’s a Sparks Show, making me panic I had missed the beginning of the main event.

And what a main event it was. I got to introduce my partner to experiencing my favourite band live, they dug out some choice deep cuts, Russell had to do impromptu stand-up when the power failed during Beat the Clock, it was a gorgeous sunny evening, and the cocktails and beer flowed.

And we won bucket hats.

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Maxïmo Park, Chalk, Brighton, 17 Jun – God I love them now, and when I saw they were doing another round of their 20th anniversary tour calling in for a matinee show in Brighton ahead of England’s opening World Cup match I was just always going to be there. The venue was having a nightmare, with all the draft beer seemingly off for a while and having to be pulled through the lines, making it chaos. But I found a nice spot in the upstairs bit with a direct view of singer Paul plus a TV screen of the whole stage plus a speaker plus somewhere to rest my bottle of beer …

… and once the gig finished they put on the big screen …

England v Croatia, Chalk, Brighton, 17 Jun – GO ON THE ENGLAND!

Trueno, Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, London, 20 Jun – Not my bag at all — Latin-infused hip-hop — but they certainly went at it with some gusto and I quite liked the energy.

Sparks, Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, London, 20 Jun – Awwwwwwwwww, my boys in front of maybe the biggest, definitely one of the biggest, crowds of their lengthy career. I even splashed out for gold circle tickets to be close to them.

Gorillaz, Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, London, 20 Jun – I just don’t get Gorillaz. I’ve always seen it as Damon’s side-project when Graham doesn’t want to make Blur records but people really, really love it? I felt like I was standing out like a sore thumb as the only dude in the golden circle standing there a bit bored, so I left early.

But I didn’t leave before the bit when Sparks guested, of course.

The Twilight Sad, Blackweir Fields, Cardiff, 24 Jun – Algorithms are constantly pushing them at me, and this is the third time I’ve seen them as a support act, I think, and still … it just doesn’t do it for me, sorry.

The Cure, Blackweir Fields, Cardiff, 24 Jun – The first of two Cure gigs for me this summer, it was so blazing hot but once the sun dipped behind the stage we had a blast. What a back catalogue, even when they dip into some of the less-favoured quarters of it — I’m sure we can all live without any songs from Wild Mood Swings — and I can’t wait to see them again. They didn’t play anything off the latest album though, which was odd given how well received it was.

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Canon’s Marsh Amphitheatre, Bristol, 26 Jun – Boundless energy and unlimited hits as ever, in a beautiful setting.

I didn’t get to see either Barbados 99 or Dog Race at Paper Dress Vintage in Hackney on 27 June because as I went to activate the QR code as we arrived we found it had been cancelled. Surely not? So I went to their socials and found this …

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm …

Molten Modular, The Lower Third, Soho, 29 Jun – I only found out about this show because this guy, who I’ve met at the Norwich EMOMs, was bringing his suitcase of modular bits to make mad acidic-tinged techno.

Globo, The Lower Third, Soho, 29 Jun – A somewhat weird 90s electronic band who I was obsessed by, suddenly and unexpectedly doing a gig in London? I had to be there. And I loved it — kind of hard to describe though. Art-prank-tronica?

If you think this year was packed, twelve months ago I was also seeing Sparks twice at the Eventim Apollo, Kraftwerk at Milton Keynes Bowl, and was down the front at an absolutely sweat-drenched, rapturous set by LCD Soundsystem (I’m 54, IDGAF), plus helping host an incredibly packed An Evening with the Fall night at the Walthamstow Trades Hall to raise money for Eat or Heat, and witnessing Nastazia Basil genuinely make hummus live on stage at the Windmill in Brixton as part of her act. You can take a trip down memory lane and read all those June 2025 reviews in full here or find all my one-line gig reviews here.

[Picture caption: LCD Soundsystem at O2 Academy, Brixton, last year]

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This month featuring: spooky basements, cursed wishes, alien conspiracy and plenty of John Waters and Divine (plus one of the queerest sci-fi cartoons in history).

Repo Man (1984), Alex Cox – Bar Trash at Beer Merchant’s Tap, Hackney Wick – I didn’t know anything about this except that Alex Cox was the Moviedrome guy, and so thanks to the time trumpet effect this was like watching a load of GTA cutscenes and was an absolute riot.

Bar Trash, run by Token Homo, presents “Queer cult & curious cinema” in relaxed screenings with alcohol, a raffle, a quiz and lots of laughs – find out more at tokenhomo.com/bar-trash.

Polyester (1981), John Waters – Bar Trash at Genesis Cinema, Bethnal Green – This is just such a funny movie and Divine is deliciously over-the-top in it, actually, scrub that, everybody is deliciously over the top in it, and it was being presented in the original scratch’n’sniff Odorama format, whereby you got to experience various indistinct but unpleasant smells at key moments.

[Picture caption: Token Homo explains how Odorama works]

Backrooms (2026), Kane Parsons – I took my kid to this and was worried my lack of knowledge of the internet lore behind it would be a hindrance but I thought it was superb – creepy, suspenseful, incredible production design (like Alice in Wonderland meets Willy Wonka except wrong), brilliant performances by the leads, and most importantly now I know what it is like for my arms to feel like a couple of fortnights in a bad balloon after a clarky cat.

Erupcja (2025), Pete Ohs – I enjoyed the lo-fi aesthetic and the stridently bored voiceover guy doing the linking narrative, and also came away thinking god it must be exhausting to date someone like Charli XCX’s character in this.

Ghost in the Machine (2026), Valerie Veatch – Does anything make a man feel older than watching a documentary where events you lived through – say the dotcom bubble and Web 2.0 – are explained as if to a 12-year-old because presumably most of the audience will have no recollection of these ancient things? No, is the answer.

I’m not sure that I learnt anything new, just had my idea that the whole US tech/AI sector is a massive environmental disaster/clusterf*** confirmed, along with the crushing feeling that inevitably we are all trapped on the same planet with it.

[Picture caption: An AI-generated still from Ghost in the Machine]

Pink Flamingos (1972), John Waters – “Please, Babs, come in and give me some eggs”. God, this notoriously ends with that scene but along the way is just a riot of colour, fun and absolute filth.

There is a fantastic essay about the film here on You Remind Me of the Frame:

“Take the scene where Divine eats dog shit. Divine does something that is perhaps the epitome of bad taste but enjoys it, sort of. It’s a mixed enjoyment, which overlaps the terms good and bad. That also plays into the audience’s reaction, as they are watching something bad, but they can’t stop watching. The bad tastes good. This challenges a note Susan Sontag makes in her famous work on camp: that ‘the connoisseur of Camp sniffs the stink and prides himself on his strong nerves’. Walters’ film suggests that one sniffs the stink because one enjoys it, not to find out if one can endure it.”

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Dracula AD 1972 (1972), Alan Gibson – Bar Trash at Genesis Cinema, Bethnal Green – An oddity that manages to neither particularly work as a vampire film, nor work as the erotically-charged on-screen fuckfest it is clearly yearning to be. No bewbs, for a start.

Time and Water (2026), Sara Dosa – Lots of beautiful footage and archive gems in this, which was a treatise not just on how the climate crisis is affecting Iceland’s glaciers, but on family, memory and grief.

Disclosure Day (2026), Steven Spielberg – My kid wanted to go to see this based off the trailer and then gave it a 4/10. I enjoyed it much more than that, although it does have one of the most ludicrously improbable chase/escape scenes ever committed to celluloid.

Harold and Maude (1971), Hal Ashby – Bar Trash at Beer Merchant’s Tap, Hackney Wick – What a life-affirming joy this film is, laugh out loud with a poignant ending for the ages. A truly deserved cult classic.

Obsession (2025), Curry Barker – This was obviously going to have something of the monkey’s paw about it, the glee of which was aided by the fact that Michael Johnston’s main character was quite an annoying whiny dweeb whose predicament you didn’t feel that sorry for.

Lesbian Space Princess (2025), Emma Hough Hobbs and Leela Varghese – This was an animated scream with lots of genuine laugh out loud moments, off-colour jokes, and was very, very, very queer, although felt more like three pilot episodes of a TV show smooshed together than a movie experience.

Read more of my one-line spoiler-free reviews of everything I’ve watched in the cinema in the monthly archive. Last time out I wrote about The Wicker Man, Romería and watching 13 Ghosts with the recreated the ‘Ghost Watcher’ gimmick of its original theatrical run (pictured below).

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One of the things I really like as I’ve grown older is seeing people enter a field and start thriving. One of the things that the festival does is give an audience to student film projects, and also open up the stage to allow them to introduce their films. The likes of Xaymaca Awoyungbo came across as super-confident introducing their work on a day that took in animations, student projects, documentaries and experimental work.

On the animation side I enjoyed Jamie Harry Scrutton’s Phantasmajoric, which featured Salvador Dalí and Marilyn Monroe among others emerging on a canvas before a bemused artist, while Humanity in Dark Times by Aliaksei Rodzik was a suitably dark and smudged animation about conflict and war.

[Picture caption: A still from Humanity in Dark Times by Aliaksei Rodzik]

Another war-based film was In Illo Tempore by Romania’s Alfred Schupler. Visually it was incredibly evocative, documenting a project that superimposed photos found in the wreckage of broken Ukrainian buildings with images of the sites of the Russian strikes. However, it was accompanied by a curiously unemotive voiceover that felt like ChatGPT platitudes rather than really delving into the stories and locations of the images.

[Picture caption: A display of the In Illo Tempore project by Alfred Schupler]

We caught a couple of fake adverts, one for Otterly Pure – the chance to become an otter, which had been created by Michael Taylor to send as part of an “am I being ghosted?” revenge txt exchange – and a bizarre promo for Tommy’s Tuck Inn by Fletch Fletcher, which also included Keir Starmer and King Charles III imploring Wetherspoons to open in Walthamstow for some reason.

One of the intros mentioned that Peadair Duggan had originally been intending to make a documentary about “an emo friend training to be a priest”. They said the film they ended up with – about a teenager called Harri who lives with cerebral palsy – was superior. But I still desperately want to see “an emo friend training to be a priest”.

There were a couple of features that had their focus on what we might term “local characters”—both of whom I know. My Golden Body (It’s 50) by John Renney saw Paul Stone deliver his deadpan poetry about being gay on the cusp of your 50s, while The Eye was about Seán Sexton, a local collector of vintage and antique photography. He has had a documentary about him made by RTÉ in his native Ireland, but what I liked about Aleks Golis’s film were the brief interviews by fellow collectors going “Oh yeah, Seán is always there” like an absolute stalwart of the scene. I used to know a lot of people like that in my record-fair dealer days.

If I was going to make one niggly gripe it was that I did find the programming a little lopsided. It seemed to have been done by playing films in the alphabetical order of their titles, rather than grouping them by theme or programming them by style. So there was a lucky-dip feel, but it also meant there were some awkward handbrake turns between something really deep and professionally produced and a student project that maybe didn’t shine by comparison.

Charlotte Bracegirdle took the top prize, and appropriately enough introduced My Paper Bag Life while wearing the titular device that gave the piece its charm. Liza and Fletch Fletcher have been running the event since 2010 – I previously went to the 2024 edition – but have announced they are “passing the baton” and looking forward to “handing over the festival to a new generation of film curators, programmers, and screen exhibition organisers”. It is an event I hope to continue to visit and support for many years to come.

[Picture caption: Charlotte Bracegirdle being interviewed by Liza]

“The 2005 revival worked because Davies threw away the continuity baggage, only gradually reintroducing old elements. Assuming a new production company wants a clean slate – a new showrunner, Doctor, companions and a reimagining of the concept – the end of The Reality War and the lingering question of: ‘Is or isn’t Billie Piper the new Doctor?’ feel like a poisoned chalice. Part of the problem remains that the BBC is unclear as to what it wants the show to be.”

You can read the piece in full here: ‘A poisoned chalice’: will Doctor Who survive Russell T Davies’s exit?

Ninush, The Lexington, Islington, 6 May – A quite nervous singer-songwriter with a great voice, and very textured backing including flute, cello etc. Worth checking out.

Modern Woman, The Lexington, Islington, 6 May – Brasher and louder than I remember, Sophie claimed her voice was going and then was absolutely flawless with her incredible range. Frantic version of Achtung but sadly Ford seems to have been memory-holed.

Matt Green, Red Imp comedy club at YORAC, Walthamstow, 7 May – Is this the first time I have seen someone who had a cameo role in Doctor Who doing stand-up in Walthamstow? It is a niche claim to fame, but it belongs to Matt, who I enjoyed very much.

Milton Jones, Red Imp comedy club at YORAC, Walthamstow, 7 May – Awkward, isn’t it… when you are sitting in the front row of a comedy show and nearly give yourself an aneurysm laughing at Jones’ relentless barrage of surreal one-liners.

[Picture caption: Matt Green (L) and Milton Jones]

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Honeyglaze, O2 Academy, Brixton, 22 May – When I first arrived they were quite shoegazey and then I went on a long quest for draught lager and came back and they had morphed into something spikier, reminding me of Wolf Alice and Modern Woman. I approved.

Super Furry Animals, O2 Academy, Brixton, 22 May – I first got exposed to SFA when The Chart Show relentlessly played the video for If You Don’t Want Me To Destroy You, saw them live a billion times and over-played their records to the point where I stopped listening to them. This was a superb show, great set, and a delight to reconnect with a real favourite after a self-imposed hiatus on both sides. Fuck me it was hot though.

Also I can’t quite work out the chronology, but as the opening samples hit, it suddenly came back to me that I feel sure there were a couple of times I saw them play Slow Life before it was released and I couldn’t work out the lyrics – “Rocks are stolen”?, “Rock star solo”? – neither implausible for SFA.

Unknown band, 33 Green Bottles, Gosport, 29 May – I was waiting with my other half to get an Uber back to the hotel after a night out in Gosport and there was a band here doing covers of 90s/early 2000s alt-rock/skinny-indie-guitar boys and I wish we’d gone in and checked them out!

Find all of my one-line gig reviews here. Last time out I wrote about snagging a last-minute ticket on Twickets to see Pet Shop Boys play an emotive but claustrophobic Camden archive set, failing to learn my lesson about earplugs right at the front for Haircut 100 (pictured below), and a trek to the gents at Manchester’s Albert Hall that felt like being Danny Torrance in the corridors of the Overlook Hotel.

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Power to the People: John & Yoko Live in NYC (2026), Simon Hilton – To be honest I didn’t have high expectations of this, and it is difficult not to want to say, come on mate, you were in the Beatles, why the hell are you playing washed-up pub boogie-woogie like It’s So Hard and Well Well Well? But Instant Karma and Cold Turkey are great, I *loved* the Yoko bits, and then Stevie Wonder’s vocals steal the show.

Hokum (2026), Damian McCarthy – This had a great set-up and some creepy moments but went increasingly off the rails for me.

The Wicker Man: Final Cut (1973 and 2013), Robin Hardy – It is just perfection, isn’t it? Every scene, every performance, the songs, the masks, the feral horniness, the ending.

Lost Highway (1997), David Lynch – I’d never seen this before, just remember the soundtrack making a stir at the time. I couldn’t say I didn’t enjoy it, but then equally I couldn’t really tell you what it was about. Couldn’t help feeling that all this unpleasantness could have been avoided if they’d just put the “big light” on in the house during the first section rather than constantly walking around in moody darkness.

Romería (2025), Carla Simón – Saying this was a gentle watch feels like I am damning it with faint praise, but I enjoyed it, even as it washed over me like the sea that made up so much of the imagery and location.

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The Early Bird Dood It! (1942), Tex Avery – We got treated to this at the lovely Kennington Cinema Museum, and I will never tire of those ridiculous Tex Avery / Fred Quimby slapstick sequences even if I was mostly introduced to them by Rolf Harris.

This was the bonus animated feature before…

Act of Violence (1948), Fred Zinnemann – A fairly straight ahead bit of American noir, with pleasingly great lighting but less pleasingly a little bit of moral ambiguity about it on whether snitching to Nazis during the war was bad, when I think it is a little more clear-cut than that.

13 Ghosts (1960), William Castle – Bar Trash at Genesis Cinema, Bethnal Green – This was an entertaining romp of a haunted house thriller, and for Bar Trash, Token Homo had recreated the “Ghost Watcher” gimmick of its original theatrical run. The movie uses blue and red filtering so you can choose whether to see the ghosts on screen, or to be squeamish and hide them. Great fun.

Bar Trash, run by Token Homo, presents “Queer cult & curious cinema” in relaxed screenings with alcohol, a raffle, a quiz and lots of laughs – find out more at tokenhomo.com/bar-trash.

Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026), Jon Favreau – An enjoyable enough kids’ Star Wars movie, basically one long action sequence after another, and lots and lots of scenes of a man in a suit punching CGI monsters. Kind of annoying that they always have to find a reason for the Mando to have his helmet taken off to make it worthwhile actually casting Pedro Pascal though. Grogu soooooooo cute.

Cabra Marcado Para Morrer or Man Marked For Death, Twenty Years Later (1964 and 1984), Eduardo Coutinho – This was an error. I hadn’t really understood what it was. I thought they had finished the movie twenty years later, not made a documentary about failing to finish the film two decades previously. Some of the interviews were interesting, but with little understanding of the contemporary politics in Brazil I didn’t last the full running time.

Passenger (2026), André Øvredal – This has a really taut tense first hour where it threatened to say something interesting about homelessness or mass road casualties and then just veered off into semi-religious formulaic nonsense.

Incidentally, I cannot get over that Jacob Scipio used to be the Kerwhizzitor in Kerwhizz (the quiz with added whizz).

Read more of my one-line spoiler-free reviews of everything I’ve watched in the cinema in the monthly archive. Last time out I wrote about But I’m A Cheerleader, L’Etranger (pictured below) and Mother Mary among others.

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From today I am starting a stint splitting my time between writing First Thing – the Guardian’s summary of the top stories from the US, plus the day’s must-reads – and covering (from London) the 2026 Fifa men’s World Cup. It is my third time covering a World Cup for the Guardian, and fourth overall. The boy who frantically collected the España 82 sticker album would be well chuffed.

I’ve had a great time working on First Edition, writing about some things I really enjoyed and that are close to my heart, like the 2020s space race, the battle to keep grassroots music venues funded and running, the prospects for British theatre, the Easter egg outrage (the real one about prices, not the confected one about words on packaging by culture warriors), and everything that is wrong with modern football.

I’ve also covered things that are important to the state of the nation, including the decline of our high streets, the restrictions the media face in reporting court cases and high-profile crimes, racial discrimination in maternity care and the assisted dying debate.

On the political side of things, I wrote (probably) too many newsletters about the slow-motion car crash of Keir Starmer losing his grip on power, aided and abetted by local and national election and by-election results coming through on the days I was writing.

Two newsletters I am particularly proud of are, firstly, one where we put the spotlight firmly on the harrowing stories of the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein, and avoided just gawking at the famous men – who deny all wrongdoing – mentioned in the Epstein files. Secondly, one of the privileges of being a journalist is you sometimes get to speak to amazing people doing incredible work, as I did when I interviewed Jenny Stirton, chair of the Dunblane Centre, to find a positive way to mark the 30th anniversary of the terrible tragedy there, that I remember so vividly myself from the time.

I was also able to have fun – not least when going on a pub crawl in St Albans with my colleague Sammy, or buttonholing Toby Hadoke about the hunt for missing episodes of 1950s and 1960s television.

[Martin Belam with a beer, as ever]

So sign up for First Thing here for the continuing adventures of my byline at the Guardian…

I’m interested in journalism, media, technology, and nerdy things found down the back of the world wide web’s sofa. Most weeks I publish a handful of things that caught my eye – regardless of what the algorithms were pushing at me. You can subscribe to get it by email here. And if you read something odd and wonderful you think I’d enjoy, feel free to send it my way.

“Here is where the boundary between pr0n and politics goes from blurry to non-existent. No longer are people just applying a politicised narrative to their pr0n, the political narrative itself has become the pr0n. What becomes apparent is that essentially every foundational narrative for the modern right is part of this pr0n ecosystem.”

Maybe I shouldn’t have found this piece funny, but the idea that there is something billed as a “36-minute read” by Cameron Cummins-Smith called The Interracial Cuck Porn Theory of Everything was irresistible to me.

And it is so quotable and made me feel better about my conviction that nearly everything wrong with politics in the UK can be boiled down to either the Thatcher government or right-wingers realising #GamerGate was going to work as a playbook on a lot more flood-the-zone topics.

That quote, by the way, was about a graph of population demographics overlaid with some anime-style cartoon “hottie”. See also “Amelia”.

[Right-wing obsession with racial purity and hot anime chicks]

Having laughed at all of that, there is something horribly disquieting about this interview by Amelia Gentleman with an OnlyFans star who has essentially been an on-camera “child influencer” their entire life:

“The story of her self-monetisation is also the strange story of a teenager who has spent most of her life being filmed. She thinks there has barely been a day since she was seven – when she inherited her mother’s old iPhone – that she hasn’t filmed herself and uploaded content. She has thought more than most people about the merits or otherwise of exposing children to smartphones and social media. She would avoid letting her own children have smartphones too early, she says, and discourage them from posting about their lives on the internet.”

Read more here: Amelia Gentleman, The Guardian – The strange surveilled life of Piper Rockelle: why did a former child influencer decide to go on OnlyFans?

The phrase “AI-generated time-travellers vlogging from history” had me retching, but there is at least one historian in this piece by Priya Bharadia trying to convince me that, actually, it is a great learning tool and A GOOD THING™.

“We’ve been pushed our entire lives to get our diplomas. Then you pulled the rug out from underneath us, and said: ‘Oh, you know those four years you spent learning how to do very specific things, you don’t need to do it any more, we can get a computer to do it for two-thirds the price.’”

US students on why they booed their pro-AI graduation speakers.

Emma Graham-Harrison in Jerusalem writes on how Israel’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has made abuse of detained Palestinians something of a macabre calling card, celebrating cruelty publicly and often on video. These people don’t care if you don’t watch Eurovision.

This week’s Guardian Thursday news quiz: A shooting pooch, avatar anger and a collective noun for ‘Derren Brown’.

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Nat Guest absolutely skewers – see what I did there? – what she calls ‘the worst variety of social event’, the great British garden BBQ.

“There’s something appallingly physical about the language that’s used to describe the radical changes that are affecting every aspect of our culture. AI slop. Enshittification. It’s all rather revolting. From our perspective, the acts of making music and writing about it are in fine fettle, but the systems that support and nourish them are in danger of being broken on a wheel. AI is at the root of this crisis.”

The Quietus is offering discounted subscriptions to “Fight the AI-pocalypse”

Paul Hanford spends time at a 30-hour music/arts festival in Berlin that comes complete with beds.

From the insane but intriguing files: a film about Hitler but it is entirely shot by a dog, coining the phrase “cinemadographer” along the way.

Part of the problem, of course, is internet fandom, which wants everything to be bold, fresh, new, exciting, and more of exactly the same of what they remember from when they were a kid.

“Is Star Wars now the impossible franchise, at least on the big screen? Because actually, Jon Favreau’s film is perfectly fine. Without giving too much away, there are callbacks to villains from decent TV episodes, Mando processes hapless stormtroopers into white-armoured landfill more efficiently than ever, and Grogu shimmies down all-new rabbit holes of cuteness. So what is the problem?”

I found it a perfectly fine way to pass the time, but Ben Child suggests that with The Mandalorian and Grogu Star Wars has shown it is a cursed franchise

I treated Alan Davies playing Jonathan Creek in the 90s as surrogate Earthbound Doctor Who while the latter was (mostly) off air [See point 2 in the six sentences I hate writing about Doctor Who]. Davies is very candid about the trauma in his life in this interview by Sam Wollaston.

This is going to be the last episode of this season of Friday Reading. I’ve really enjoyed bringing it back for the first time since 2022, and you’ve probably seen over the course of these last couple of months how it has changed and adapted as I’ve got more newsletter experience now. But I’ve got a new shift pattern coming up, and with the prospect of having to watch seventy-one billion group stage matches in the World Cup, I thought I would rest it over the summer and bring it back in the autumn. Thank you for reading!

Friday Reading is a (usually) weekly series of recommended reads from Martin Belam, covering journalism, media and technology, and other interesting nerdy things found on the internet. It is now in its fourteenth season. Sign up here to receive it by email.

I’m interested in journalism, media, technology, and nerdy things found down the back of the world wide web’s sofa. Most weeks I publish a handful of things that caught my eye – regardless of what the algorithms were pushing at me. You can subscribe to get it by email here. And if you read something odd and wonderful you think I’d enjoy, feel free to send it my way.

“He spent that money on a subscription to an app from Apple’s App Store, called Movely, and allegedly used it to put five of his female classmates’ faces onto nude bodies and make sexual images of them. The boy who used the app and made the videos didn’t show up to school the next morning. But the girls did. And so did his friends.”

After five teen girls were targeted by AI-generated child sexual abuse material, Radnor Township High School in Pennsylvania has become a case study in how schools and police around the US grapple with how to respond to deepfake crimes involving children.

“With a hammer, he snapped open the latch guarding the radar’s million-watt power supply. There were control panels, switches, meters. He destroyed them all. Content that the tower had been disabled, he walked around the facility systematically destroying each security camera. The group believes that the latest generation of weather radar towers are ‘directed energy weapons’ that the military have ‘pointed at the American people.’”

A long read by Wyatt Williams about weather modification technology, which along the way he describes as one of “the oldest and least successful human projects”:

“For thousands of years, we have sacrificed children, sung songs and danced, brewed alchemical concoctions, chanted prayers, fired cannons, and made many other futile efforts in the attempt to somehow change the weather a little more to our liking. Stubbornly, the weather persisted.”

“There’s all sorts of bullshit going round about a known idiot using AI to make profiles of RPG luminaries and how there’s nothing you can do about it. I’m not going to discuss the ‘is it worse to be on the list or to not be on the list’ but as either of those feeds the plagiarism machine, it’s best to ignore that aspect and, instead, strike at actual misuse.”

Jared Earle on Facebook discussing shenanigans. Or should that be shenan-AI-igans? It’s OK, I’ll get my own coat.

“The Guardian is concerned by the recent publication on Nigel Farage’s social media pages of the professional credentials of a photographer working on behalf of the Guardian while he was working lawfully in a public space.”

A statement from the Guardian on Nigel Farage’s social media posts. And that was before Zia Yusuf, Reform’s home affairs spokesperson, appeared to offer a peerage to a van driver who told Rachel Reeves to “Get Keir Starmer fucking out”.

For Dazed, Cassidy Sollazzo looks at celebs like Charli xcx leaving public internet trails as taste signalling.

This week’s Guardian Thursday news quiz: Eurovision winners, Tesla swimmers and Strictly zingers. Guest animal: Momo. I met her in an Irish pub in Vienna.

Bonus quiz content: Fast five daily quiz is still fun.

Enjoying Friday Reading by email? Feel free to forward it to a friend – they can sign up here. And if you’ve recently read something you think I would enjoy, do send it my way.

My boy and I featured in the Guardian’s Pushing Buttons newsletter, racing each other at the excellent Four Quarters East in Hackney Wick. Some solid caption writing from the desk too.

“Located at 449 Oxford Street opposite Selfridges, Passport Photo Service was a local institution from an era when foreign embassies dotted Grosvenor Square.”

The London passport picture studio that became an unexpected repository of 20th-century stars.

You can vote for the UK’s favourite butterfly. Obviously I went for the most goth option – the Ringlet.

Two eye-catching tales in this round-up of recent science papers: ‘Scientists discover strange new crystal formed by nuclear blast’ and ‘Neanderthals performed dental interventions at least 59,000 years ago’.

Some cracking rediscovered photos of New York’s legendary counterculture epicentre the Chelsea Hotel.

“Many of these worlds sit outside mainstream visibility, not because they’re peripheral, but because they’re often overlooked or sometimes simplified in how they’re represented. What interested me was the richness within them – the kinship, humour, pride, devotion and rawness that exists inside these gatherings.”

Sophie Green has spent over a decade documenting the rituals, subcultures and social gatherings that form the collaged fabric of the UK’s society.

Easily one of the best things to come out of the most recent run of Doctor Who was Mr Ring-a-Ding, and this fanart comic continues his adventures.

It will not have escaped your attention that I went to Vienna to attend the Eurovision Song Contest Grand Final. I wrote about it here – tremendous experience, awful geopolitics.

Also worth reading about Eurovision: Michael Hogan on the UK’s 10 biggest Eurovision flops of all time, and the ever-knowledgeable Ewan Spence on Nine things we expect from Bulgaria and Eurovision 2027. Bangaranga!

“I didn’t mean to miss the gig but part of me was genuinely pleased about it. Despite being bruised, dizzy and dehydrated I found myself coming back to consciousness during ‘The Girl Who Wanted To Be God’ and when I looked down, padding my own body as if reconvening with existence, I saw that my T-shirt was covered in Nicky Wire’s feathers.”

The lovely Anna Doble writes for the Quietus about 30 years of Everything Must Go.

Nostalgia fully triggered by this deep dive into playing European Club Soccer for the Sega Mega Drive by Gary Heneghan.

Bless him, Stephen Smith has recreated ZX Spectrum classic Atic Atac – BUT IN 3D!

I had a riotous time at Bar Trash on Wednesday as Token Homo launched his new season with a screening of 13 Ghosts complete with a recreation of the red/blue Ghost Watcher gimmick that accompanied the original theatrical run.

Friday Reading is a (usually) weekly series of recommended reads from Martin Belam, covering journalism, media and technology, and other interesting nerdy things found on the internet. It is now in its fourteenth season. Sign up here to receive it by email.

I’ve spent the last few days in Vienna where I was attending the Grand Final of the Eurovision Song Contest, a bucket list item of mine for years.

I was lucky enough to be invited out there by the Vienna tourist board as part of a programme called Vienna Soundcheck, which showcased the city and Austria’s culture. And provided almost too much free booze, a sentence I never thought I would write.

On Friday morning we were able to have a backstage tour of the Eurovision venue. It was quite surreal, to be honest, having on Thursday evening watched Rylan and Scott Mills Angela Scanlon being quizzed on Eurovision history at an international watch-party in a Vienna rooftop bar…

…and then the next day be standing behind the podium where it had actually happened, with Michael Ostrowski’s script still casually sitting there.

And I got a photo of definitely the closest I will ever get to being on stage at Eurovision anyway.

The scale of the production is incredible, and watching it live I was in awe of the technical work of the stage crew and camera crews, who have to be just as, if not more, precise than the artists in their timing and movements.

[Stage crew frantically cleaning glitter-cannon detritus off the stage in the 42 second reset between acts]

It also answered a long-standing query of mine when covering the contest, that surely there are some entries that look amazing on the tellybox but absolutely suck to watch live – Daniel Šiška and your Czechia hall of mirrors I am talking about you.

There are screens in the hall so you can see what is being shown on telly in the video inserts, but they aren’t always on through all of the performances.

I realise there is more politics involved in Eurovision than ever before, and that several of my friends no longer watch it because of the continued participation of Israel. I totally understand and respect that decision.

I know there were protests in Vienna, although the only one I directly encountered was someone had hung a Palestinian flag from a window in a building on the corner of Vogelweidplatz that would be seen by some people entering the venue on the night.

Personally? The Guardian continues to cover the event and so I continue to cover it for work, just as I’ve covered Russian and Belarusian athletes competing under “neutral flags” at the Olympics. And I’m a stubborn bastard and unwilling to cede ground and vacate the space. The atmosphere in the hall at the conclusion of the voting was getting toxic and ugly, and the behaviour of some Israeli fans near me was intimidating and very much not in the spirit of the event.

[Despite security making people unfurl flags before being able to take them in and a ban on political symbols, someone managed to bring in and display this half-and-half Israel-Spain flag. Spain boycotted Eurovision over Israel’s participation this year]

Dave Keating wrote very eloquently for the Guardian before this year’s contest about why he wouldn’t be watching:

“In Vienna, we are not bonding over a common joy, but rather over our shared sense of sadness about the politicisation of the contest. This sadness pales in comparison to the trauma and grief experienced by the people affected by the wars fuelling this politicisation, but it is there nonetheless. The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) has found no evidence of hacking or cheating, but it seems implausible that Israel’s unremarkable songs of the past two years so entranced the public that they garnered some of the highest public voting records in the history of the contest. I won’t be tuning in. I’m not boycotting Eurovision. I simply no longer enjoy watching a contest that feels preordained and no longer about the music.”

ESC Insight tested the new system that the EBU introduced to counter the suggestion of deliberate state-sanctioned vote manipulation, and claim they managed to vote 90 times in one of the semi-finals.

“Our results were that we were able to cast a total of 90 votes during the period for the same two countries, by one person utilising one device. The only visible constraints were the requirement to use nine unique bank card numbers and nine unique email addresses.”

Rory Carroll was also good in explaining how this all came about and how in some ways it isn’t all that new: How did Eurovision go from sequins and flares to geopolitical slugfest?

Eurovision is of course a lightning rod for opinions. Very few people call for boycotts of the Champions League or Fifa World Cup or the Olympics and so on which also have Israeli participation. The relentlessly negative “Why oh why doesn’t the UK do well?” gnashing of teeth each year from people who don’t actually watch the contest is also an annual grind.

My tuppence? Look Mum No Computer got a raw deal in the voting this year, I thought it was a quirky attempt for us to try something different. One of the factors of us getting low scores is that we don’t have to go through a semi-final. We probably wouldn’t have made it through this year or last year, sparing blushes on the big night, though Sam Ryder definitely would have. At least in some respects, the contest is still all about the song.

Another interesting aspect is the environmental impact of events like this. The EBU is keen to stress that the competition is a green event and that the back-up generators and batteries in case of a power-failure are all eco-friendly and so forth. And yet the event will have generated tonnes of carbon as people – including me – fly there, and an estimate given to me by a tour guide that the contest uses the electrical equivalent of 10,000 households doesn’t sound very green.

I had an absolute blast in Vienna though, which also included a really enjoyable walking tour around the district near the Wiener Stadthalle led by Jascha Novak of Hidden Vienna, who was very interesting and personable, and also touched upon some awkward chapters of Austria’s history, notably a church built and decorated in the often-overlooked period where Austria was ruled by its own fascists in the 1930s before they were ousted in the Anschluß. He also does tours that focus on the city’s incredibly central role in cold war espionage, which I’d love to go on one day.

And then there is just the joy of walking around somebody else’s amazing capital city and thinking, hang on, you called your café … that?

Because I was in the arena I couldn’t do the live blog for the Guardian, which I have done since 2021, where I have just delighted to find that I introduced myself like this…

“Just so you know where we are coming from, I unashashedly love Eurovision, watched it as a kid, watched it with ironic post-modern detachment when I was a pretentious twentysomething, and then have grown to truly love it and introduce it to my own kids as the wonderful, glorious and absolutely ridiculous celebration of music that it is. But I don’t take it too seriously, so if you are here for the latest betting tips and an accurate inside track on what is going to win, I’m not your man. If, on the other hand, you are here for stupid jokes, instant social media reaction, and me occasionally getting over-enthusiastic about things and SHOUTING ABOUT THEM IN ALL CAPITALS BRIAN BLESSED STYLE then we are going to get along famously.”

Heidi Stephens stepped back into the role and did a sterling job while I was frantically trying to chip in some bits from the venue via WhatsApp. Hilariously I only knew what the interval act was from Heidi’s blogging because I was too busy in queues for the loos and drinks.

I did manage to write my traditional Eurovision quiz though: Take the ultimate Eurovision quiz! Can you avoid nul points?

I had an absolutely brilliant time in Vienna, and even with the politics and voting shenanigans, being at a Eurovision Song Contest Grand Final is an experience I had wanted for years, and it absolutely lived up to how incredible I always imagined it would be. Chatting to people from all over Europe. Laughs and jokes with strangers and people dressed up beyond the nines. And Vienna is such a beautiful city—really the kind of place that inspired the “Parks, hotels and palaces, promenades and avenues” and “Tragedies, luxuries, statues, parks and galleries” lyrics of Europe Endless and I Travel.

Anyway, here’s hoping I get to write a similar blog post from Sofia (or maybe Plovdiv or Burgas?) next year. Consider this my application.

[Most delegations celebrate Bulgaria’s victory in the contest after a tense voting finale]