Royal Festival Hall, London
Closing out a Simz-curated Meltdown festival, and with a host of star guests helping out, these songs gain extra nuance as orchestra and star meld perfectly together

Not many can say that they’ve reloaded a symphony orchestra. But as the Southbank Centre erupts after the opening horns of Gorilla, Little Simz has to run it back, starting the track again in the manner of a rowdy club set.

Backed by the majority Black and ethnically diverse Chineke! Orchestra and her own live band, Simz – closing out the 11-day Meltdown festival which she curated this year – performs a set that is equal parts genuine and genius. The energy in the room is overwhelming, overcoming any misgivings about performing to a seated crowd.

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Despite controversial new ownership for the local landmark, Sheffield’s vibrant network of staunchly independent spots is bucking the crisis facing Britain’s small music venues

‘I’ll never set foot in this venue again,” Richard Hawley proclaimed from the Leadmill stage last week, as he bowed out with his final shows there. Hawley first played the much-loved Sheffield music venue in 1984, four years after it opened in 1980. This week, it’s closing its doors – at least in its current incarnation. Miles Kane will give the final performance on Friday. “I feel honoured to be closing it,” says Kane. “It’s the end of an era and we have got to do it justice.”

While these closing gigs indicate a venue going out on a triumphant high, there’s no ignoring the fact that the end of the Leadmill has been clouded by a hugely acrimonious, bitter, prolonged fight and accompanying legal battle – one that isn’t as clearcut as some headlines around the crisis facing Britain’s small venues.

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This is a mystifying and provocatively slow-paced game with more celebrities than you would find on a Cannes red carpet
PS5; Sony / Kojima Productions

What is Death Stranding 2 trying to say? It’s a question you will ask yourself on many occasions during the second instalment of Hideo Kojima’s hypnotising, mystifying, and provocatively slow-paced cargo management simulator series. First, because during the many long and uneventful treks across its supernatural vision of Mexico and Australia, you have all the headspace in the world to ponder its small details and decipher the perplexing things you just witnessed. And second, because the question so often reveals something profound.

That it can stand up to such extended contemplation is a marker of the fine craftsmanship that went into this game. Nobody is scribbling down notes to uncover what Doom: The Dark Ages is getting at or poring over Marvel Rivals’ cutscenes for clues, fantastic as those games are. It is rare for any game to invite this kind of scrutiny, let alone hold up to it. But Death Stranding 2 is a different kind of game, one with the atmosphere and narrative delivery of arthouse cinema, light of touch in its storytelling but exhaustive in its gameplay systems, and the tension between the two makes it so compelling. At first you brave one for the other; then, over time, you savour both.

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Robert Schwartzman examines how five friends from the home counties ended up as part of the British invasion of the US music scene

The happy-sad story of 60s band the Zombies is recounted in this very watchable documentary from actor, film-maker and Coppola family member Robert Schwartzman, younger brother of Jason. Keyboardist Rod Argent, singer Colin Blunstone, guitarist Paul Atkinson, drummer Hugh Grundy and bassist Paul Arnold were the amazingly talented group from the English home counties who, in this film, look heartbreakingly like a five-man team on University Challenge.

The Zombies became a hugely prominent part of the British invasion of the US, while at the same being royally manipulated and exploited. Their eerie and sublime harmonies, topped off by Blunstone’s beautiful, plangent and weirdly vulnerable lead vocals, were the foundation of iconic songs like She’s Not There, praised by George Harrison on Juke Box Jury (the equivalent of getting a simultaneous OBE and papal blessing). Then there was the mysterious, psychedelic and weirdly unwholesome masterpiece Time of the Season from 1968, although sadly Schwartzman doesn’t ask the band to walk us through those groovy lyrics: “It’s the time of the season for loving / What’s your name? What’s your name? / Who’s your daddy? Who’s your daddy? / He rich? Is he rich like me?” It stormed the US charts after the band had made the gloomy decision to break up, exhausted and demoralised and, above all, needing money to pay the bills.

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As her latest film Words of War is released, now is your chance to ask about anything from Myra Hindley to Twinkle in Dinnerladies

Maxine Peake’s film career took off as Stephen Hawking’s nurse and second wife in 2014’s The Theory of Everything , in a role that the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw said she approached “with delicacy”. It was a far cry from Twinkle the snarky dinner lady from Victoria Wood’s sitcom Dinnerladies, but not the first time she portrayed a real-life person. She played Myra Hindley in the 2006 ITV drama See No Evil: The Moors Murders, and the titular 19th-century Yorkshire lesbian landowner in the 2010 BBC period drama The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister.

Peake has done a ton more TV: she played Veronica Ball in Channel 4’s Shameless, Martha Costello in BBC One legal drama Silk, and Grace Middleton in BBC One drama series The Village. She’s in that really weird (even for Black Mirror) black and white episode about the robotic dogs. She wrote and starred in a BBC Radio 4 play about Anne Scargill, who was married to Arthur. She used to play rugby for Wigan Ladies. And she pulled on a pair of hose to play Hamlet .

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Like a sleep divorce, where couples sleep in separate beds, separating screens means that you both get to watch what you want on the TV

Relationships are all about compromise, but there are some areas where it’s simply impossible. Then it becomes about a mutually beneficial workaround instead. A poll has revealed that 55% of couples regularly argue over which TV show to watch: hot on the heels of the sleep divorce (different bedrooms) are we headed for the screen divorce (different tellies)?

Don’t mean to boast, but my husband and I are one step ahead of this trend – screen separated, if you will. In the Venn diagram of programmes we enjoy, the intersection is big enough to fit the words Taskmaster and The Traitors, and that’s about it. He’s tried to lure me into his televisual world, I’ve tried to tempt him into mine, but no dice. Eventually, we realised one of us was always watching through gritted teeth, while the other felt guilty. And so, just like the courageous pioneers of the sleep divorce, who made the decision to prioritise healthy rest above convention, we needed to take action. To divide and conquer.

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Michael Grimmett’s documentary, which focuses on a lower-limb amputee’s struggle to gain approval from boxing authorities, will leave you furious

This hour-long documentary about disabled life and ableism co-directed by campaigner Michael Grimmett isn’t merely “inspirational”; it’s also an articulate catalogue of persisting prejudices against disabled people in the UK today, thanks to contributions from influencer Isaac Harvey, Tanni Grey-Thompson and Grimmett himself. What’s ironic about the many instances detailed here of how daily life still excludes them is that being part of daily life is exactly what most disabled people wish to be; not visible, not exceptional.

That said, Fighters does choose a focal point: the struggle of lower-limb amputee boxer Matt Edwards to gain approval from sport’s authorities to take part in amateur boxing bouts. Training and sparring have been a lifesaver for him; after losing a leg aged 19 in a road traffic collision, he fell into addiction. But with the boxing authorities refusing to let him compete, Edwards is forced to sweat it out – elegantly pivoting on his prosthetic limb – in white-collar bouts.

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There are more than 3,000 performances to choose between at this year’s giant pan-genre jamboree. From pop A-listers to underground ones-to-watch, here are our picks

‘Not a vintage year,” came the usual grumbles about the Glastonbury lineup when it was announced in March – and it’s perhaps only in England where people would moan about the lack of quality on offer at a festival with more than 3,000 performances across five days. In reality, Glastonbury remains stacked with varied, progressive, boundlessly vital artists, and the real challenge is picking your way through them: here are some of our tips.

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A generous and warm ecofeminist vision of the labours of motherhood

The Song of Arachnid

Webs are small and spacious as simplicity,
See-through as a summer’s day, old-fashioned as
A slip of butter-muslin, girlhood’s own, or
A cotton hanky.

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