As they embark on a UK tour, the band’s frontman recounts how terrible dates, struggles with OCD and a family tragedy all fed into their new record

‘Most of the songs were written in the midst of a breakdown,” says Owen Williams, lead singer with indie rock group the Tubs . “My long-term relationship had ended, so I was drunk constantly and being kind of obsessive about the people I was dating.”

Williams doesn’t really need to tell me that he was in a difficult place while writing his band’s second album, Cotton Crown – the evidence is in the lyrics. Tubs songs might jangle deceptively with intricate riffs and Teenage Fanclub-style harmonies, but the words are loaded with self-laceration. Manipulative, irritating, sycophantic, unreliable: these are just some of the ways Williams portrays himself on record.

The Snow White actor, whose mother is Colombian-American, said ‘when I was in the running for María, they kept calling to ask if I was legit’

Rachel Zegler, star of the forthcoming Snow White, says she repeatedly had to “prove [her] identity” as a Colombian-American to “a bunch of white executives” during the casting process for her first high-profile film, West Side Story .

Zegler was speaking to Allure in the run-up to Snow White’s release, and discussed her “cultural identity” with writer Patricia Alfonso Tortolani. Zegler commented that “there’s confusion because I don’t have a single ounce of Latin in my name”, adding: “When I was in the running for María in West Side Story, they kept calling to ask if I was legit. I remember thinking, Do you want me to bring my abuelita in? I will. I’ll bring her into the studio if you want to meet her.”

Soho theatre, London
UK-specific jokes land well as Sloan shapes the energy in a packed room with a slightly incoherent show held together by her charisma

Dulcé Sloan, a seven-year veteran of The Daily Show, feared that that pedigree would leave her with an audience of “three white people who listen to NPR” for her first appearance at Soho theatre. The US comic needn’t have worried: the room is full and she opens with local material for the London crowd. Why do we add an “s” to “math”? Why are Black people living here – “you knew it was cold”? Nothing in the capital scares her, she says, because we don’t have guns: “Give me your wallet!”

Sloan’s CV spans acting and improvising, too, and that shines through as she masterfully shapes the energy in the room. She avoids The Daily Show’s topical comedy, instead sharing vignettes from her life as a 40-something Atlanta-raised artist who has recently bought a house in LA for herself and her family. We’re treated to impressions of her “insane” mother and brother arguing, a “goofy” ex-colleague, and men trying to propose to her in Spanish. Punchlines are punctuated with sidelong looks, confident pauses left for the crowd to keep laughing after each joke lands.

At Soho theatre, London , until 22 March

I swapped my drab clothes for charity-shop nightdresses, highlighted my hair with Sun In – and realised I didn’t need to apologise for being angry

I had no tribe during my first three years of high school. Desperate to be accepted by the in-crowd, but sick with anxiety if I was invited to one of their parties, I had no idea who I was. I had spots, wonky teeth and my hair was lank. I was kind of gangly and excruciatingly shy. I didn’t fit the mould, and I had no idea you could carve out your own space in the world.

Bombarded with TV shows such as Beverly Hills 90210 and Baywatch, while poring over teen magazines, I compared myself with the glossy, wholesome models that I saw – and felt that I was failing.

The award-winning Nigerian author and Beyoncé-sampled essayist is back with her first novel in a decade, which makes now a great time to get to know her work

She’s won multiple awards for her novels, had her Ted talk sampled by Beyoncé, and was named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2015. Now, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is back with her first novel in 10 years – so if you haven’t read anything by the Nigerian author yet, it’s a good time to catch up. Writer and critic Maya Jaggi suggests some good ways in.

***

Boy George bought their provocative furniture; fashion giant Martin Margiela embraced deconstruction after visiting their loose change-strewn shop. So why is the groundbreaking 80s design collective so little known?

How do we tell histories, particularly queer histories, when they are ignored by the establishment? In 1986, a loose design collective of around eight people named the House of Beauty and Culture started a shop in Dalston, east London. At the time, Dalston was a desolate area, nothing like the fashionable neighbourhood it is today. The House of Beauty and Culture was so unconventional, it barely ever opened.

Its output included shoes, furniture, garments, jewellery and art. Much of the work was made from salvaged materials, for both aesthetic and financial reasons: the collective were all broke. The floor of the shop was scattered with loose change, as a joke on their collective lack of money. Their romantic, fragile work was made against the backdrop of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, in the shadow of the Aids crisis.

He went from San Diego’s DIY scene to mega-budget albums and Top of the Pops. Now, grieving late bandmate Rick Froberg, he explains why he’s still punk’s hardest worker

John Reis has lived as if there’s no tomorrow. Over the last 35 years, the hardest-working man in punk rock has recorded more than 25 albums and an avalanche of singles with groups including Rocket from the Crypt, Drive Like Jehu, Hot Snakes, the Night Marchers, Sultans and more; as Swami John Reis, he’s about to put out a blistering new LP, Time to Let You Down. But lately, the 55-year-old has been particularly haunted by the finite nature of existence.

It began when the pandemic forced Hot Snakes off the road mid-tour early in 2020. “It came at a time in our lives where, even though it was just a couple of years we couldn’t tour, we could feel how precious those years were. We’re getting older, and we’re already thinking, ‘How much longer will I be able to do this?’” Reis pauses. “And then my friend Rick went into the other realm.”

A new documentary explores how the pioneer of the ‘modern primitive’ subculture used painful BDSM practices to access new spiritual planes – outraging conventional society

In the opening moments of A Body to Live in , a documentary by American film-maker Angelo Madsen, we are confronted with two black-and-white photographs. Taken in 1944 by the teenage Roland Loomis, they show him stripped to his underwear, his waist heavily restricted by a leather belt, a rope wrapped several times around his neck.

Loomis later renamed himself Fakir Musafar and became one of the founders of the modern primitive movement – a subculture that revolves around body modification practices including branding, suspension , contortion and binding. A Body to Live in, which premieres internationally at London’s BFI Flare film festival this week, dissects Musafar’s body of work, which explored the tension between masculinity and femininity, pain and pleasure, spirituality and S&M.

This is a powerful story of debt and obligation set against the tourism boom in post-colonial Tanzania

A storyteller of understated brilliance, Abdulrazak Gurnah was awarded the 2021 Nobel prize in literature for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”. Born in Zanzibar, Gurnah, now 76, moved to Britain in 1968 as a refugee of the Zanzibar revolution. His books often feature people who leave what they know and arrive “in strange places, carrying little bits of jumbled luggage and suppressing secret and garbled ambitions”, to use the words of a character from his 2001 novel By the Sea. Theft, Gurnah’s first book since his Nobel win, is in part a continued inquiry into familiar themes of exile and memory, home, longing and loneliness. It is also a poignant portrait of love, friendship and betrayal, set against Tanzania’s tourism boom during the 1990s.

The novel follows Karim, Fauzia and Badar, chronicling their uneasy passage into adulthood. Karim’s story begins on Pemba Island, where his mother, Raya, leaves her joyless marriage while he’s a toddler, first returning with him to her parents in Unguja and later relocating without him to Dar es Salaam, where she remarries. When Karim enrols for university in the city, he stays with her and her husband, Haji Othman. He returns to Zanzibar once he finishes his studies to take up a position in development. There, Karim crosses paths with Fauzia – once a sickly, epileptic child, now a confident young woman training to become a teacher. The two fall helplessly in love.