Woodsies
Lorde resembled Patti Smith as she introduced her entire new album, but the lack of well-known hits let the energy drop

It would be misleading to call Lorde’s performance at Glastonbury a “secret set”. Though listed on the schedule only as the mysterious “TBA”, playing the Woodsie stage for an hour shortly after the festival’s kick-off on Friday morning, the anonymous artist’s identity was seemingly widely known weeks before.

Ella Yelich-O’Connor herself had not been exactly subtle, meaningfully flashing her eyes at Radio 1’s Greg James when he pointed out that the release of her fourth album, Virgin, coincided with Glastonbury’s first day. On Thursday, ahead of Virgin’s release, she provided confirmation by posting an aerial photo of the Woodsies tent on Instagram.

It’s a bold move, to debut a new album to a crowd who won’t yet have had a chance to listen to it, let alone form any impressions – but Lorde has that kind of clout. Since her precocious debut, Pure Heroine, she has enjoyed a devout fanbase, many of whom look on her as a big sister figure: worldly and warm, but only intermittently available. With 2017’s critically acclaimed Melodrama , too, she secured her status as a pop star who is only more attention-grabbing for having only sporadic releases.

With Virgin – it’s been made clear, from the three singles and pre-album press – Yelich O’Connor is taking a different tack to music, attempting something looser, more immediate and more off-the-cuff. She debuted first single What Was That with a guerilla performance in New York City’s Washington Square Park, and has since played a series of small pop-up gigs to only the most connected fans. Second single Man of the Year and opening track Hammer both have a suggestive, half-finished yet considered quality, as though Lorde was gently attempting to warn fans: she is not the same star that they remember.

Arriving on stage to strobe lighting and a huge cheer, Lorde is dressed simply in a white baby tee and cargo pants, resembling, with her shock of dark hair, Patti Smith – and also her younger self. For Solar Power – her uncharacteristically sunny third album, which received faltering reviews – Lorde experimented with bleach-blond hair and variously sexy and/or smooth brain’d personae. Today, accompanied by a low-profile band, she appears minimalistic, uncomplicated, direct: recognisable as the teenager who burst out of nowhere with a sharp-eyed satire of celebrity excess, known for her big hair and idiosyncratic dance moves. And the crowd is glad to be reunited.

But when it becomes clear Lorde is playing the new album in full, with a seamless transition from What Was That into a new song, Shape Shifter, the crowd’s energy visibly begins to flag. Yelich-O’Connor has always been a fully fledged performer; here, she kneels on the stage, hoiks up her T-shirt to caress her stomach, and plays to the camera with her face, smizing and snarling to impress upon us the personal nature of the lyrics. Like many songs on the album, Shape Shifter deals with Lorde’s desire not to be pinned on to any one evolution or identity, and reflects on those she’s lived so far: the siren, the saint. “I’ve been up on the pedestal, but tonight I just wanna fall.”

Stara Rzeźnia, Poznań
This outdoor offering, part homage and part reimagining of Shakespeare’s text, has visual spectacle, a magnificent score and a cast undeterred by an actual storm

Outdoor theatre is by nature vulnerable to the weather, but there is a sense of a grand coincidence when an almighty storm whips up around this Poznań street performance of Shakespeare’s play, threatening to upstage its tumultuous drama. Teatr Biuro Podróży ’s production at the Stara Rzeźnia, a former abattoir turned into a cultural space, was delayed by half an hour. But the elements provided a sublimely atmospheric accompaniment to the drama.

Thunder within the soundtrack became indistinguishable from the real thing. As lightning cracked across the shipwrecked boat carrying Antonio, who fetches up on this enchanted isle, it seemed like part of the lighting design. The company, which has long staged outdoor works across the world , spun its own magic, the actors sodden but heroically undeterred.

Spielberg, 78, has announced he’ll keep making films till he dies – and he’s a spring chicken next to Coppola, Scorsese, Werner Herzog and Ridley Scott, all still working in their 80s. What makes directing a job for life?

If life behaved in the same way as movies, then The Fabelmans would have been Steven Spielberg’s last film. He spent the previous five decades writing the rulebook of modern cinema, and then The Fabelmans was the rare work of art that wrapped everything up with a neat little bow. Part autobiography and part tutorial, it was like the work of a man looking back on his life with a sense of satisfied completion.

But real life doesn’t behave like that, and Spielberg has just announced that he is never going to retire. In fact, he announced it twice. In a speech he gave during a star-studded event unveiling a new Steven Spielberg Theater on the Universal lot last night, the 78-year-old said: “I’m making a lot of movies and I have no plans … ever … to retire.” And then, talking to the Hollywood Reporter afterwards, he added that he has “an appetite for a western which I will someday hopefully do. It’s something that’s eluded me for all of these decades.”

The music mogul could face life in prison for racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking and transportation to engage in prostitution

A lawyer representing Sean “Diddy” Combs began delivering the defense’s closing arguments on Friday morning in the music mogul’s federal sex-trafficking and racketeering conspiracy trial, marking the final chapter in a case that has drawn global attention over the last seven weeks.

Marc Agnifilo, a defense attorney, is expected to push back against the government’s allegations that Combs coerced women into participating in drug-fueled sex marathons with male sex workers and that he ran a criminal enterprise that engaged in crimes such as sex trafficking, drug distribution, kidnapping, forced labor, arson and bribery.

As a season of events celebrates the life of the city’s most famous son, Dale Berning Sawa revisits the region central to his art, where she, too, grew up

When I was 12 years old, my parents moved my sister and me to Aix-en-Provence, the birthplace of and inspiration to Paul Cezanne. In truth, Cezanne had nothing to do with their choice of destination. But his mountain was the one thing my father knew of the region. He was three years into a four-year fine art degree (he painted portraits of the two of us daughters for his finals), steeped in painting and its history.

When we landed at Marignane airport in nearby Marseille on 29 August 1989, a wildfire was ravaging the Sainte-Victoire, that celebrated mountain subject of so many of Cezanne’s works. In the tumult of the days that followed – our family unhoused, the mountain unrecognisable – my father hustled between estate agents with the sound of sirens ringing in his ears. “Cezanne must be turning in his grave,” he remembers one saying.

The festival’s hedonistic late night area has been reimagined as an eco-conscious wonderland. David Levene went for an exclusive early look

Stars, cowboys, village kids and drag queens – they all flock to La Churascaia, the bullring-like nightspot in the Camargue marshes. As it notches up 60 years of freewheeling hedonism, we celebrate an unstoppable rollercoaster

Hidden in a copse of pine trees, in the southern French region of Camargue near Arles, sits the legendary nightclub La Churascaia . For 60 years, nothing has stopped this nightlife institution partying till dawn – not even a power cut. When a storm knocked out the electricity one night in the mid-1970s, the French news presenter Yves Mourousi simply drove his car into the venue, and the dancing continued to the sound of its stereo.

La Chu, as it’s known, opened in June 1965, making it one of the longest surviving discotheques in the world – behind Los Angeles’s Whisky-a-Go-Go, Paris’s Chez Castel and Rome’s Piper Club. It’ll be celebrating this feat of nightclub stamina on 29 June with a huge shindig at this most unlikely of venues smack-bang in the middle of the Camargue marshes. With 4,000 guests expected, the event will unite the three or four generations who’ve passed through its hallowed doors.

This imaginative sci-fi survival game is a work of art. But looking after the needy clones of myself I’d made to help run a space base, I was reminded all too clearly of my limitations and failings

Other than during that golden period when they were old enough to play games and watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer but hadn’t yet become evil teenagers, I don’t think I’m very good at parenting. When my kids were babies I felt unnecessary and useless, a feeling I have been reminded of most days since. That’s OK. We can’t be good at everything. I can read words backwards and upside down but I can never find my house keys. I am brilliant at dancing to the Cure’s The Lovecats on Dancing Stage MegaMix but terrible at DIY.

Don’t get me wrong: I love my children. I like hanging out with them socially as young adults because they are smart, funny and entertaining, but then they remember I am their dad, and everything is ruined as they ask me to do stuff then blame me for everything wrong in their lives.

Glasto is back! And the Guardian will be liveblogging all day every day, bringing you reviews, news and weird sightings. Up first, sets from Supergrass, Fabio & Grooverider and more

Hello from Worthy Farm! It’s Glastonbury’s final outing before taking a fallow year in 2026 in order for the site to recuperate, and if Thursday night’s merriment is any indication, the crowd will absolutely be making this one count – here’s hoping we’re not all burnt out by Sunday evening. Today is starting off with a bang: Lorde, who released her fourth album Virgin today, just confirmed via social media that she’s the “TBA” artist opening the Woodsies stage today – and, naturally, that tent is already at capacity. We’ll have a review of that set – and the rest of the day’s acts, including the 1975, Alanis Morrisette and more – very soon.