Abstract expressionist’s mysterious painting joins portraits by Warhol, Bacon and Hockney in Bath exhibition

The image of the young boy is so faint that it is easy to miss – but if you gaze long enough he gradually materialises through the warm shades of orange, red and ochre.

This is the first view of a previously unexhibited painting by the great abstract expressionist Frank Bowling showing – just about – an image of his son Richard Sheridan Bowling, better known as Dan.

Iconic: Portraiture from Francis Bacon to Andy Warhol opens on 24 January and runs until 5 May

He has notched up tours, albums, books and a sitcom. Why is he tortured by feelings of under-achievement? As Fellows hits the road, he pops an aniseed ball and discusses his new song – about an audience member falling off a cliff

When Graham Fellows first performed in character as amateur singer-songwriter John Shuttleworth , Margaret Thatcher was PM and A-ha were storming the charts. Fellows was 25; his beige vocalist and organist alter ego was in his late 40s. “I started doing it when I was very young,” recalls Fellows, not a little wistfully, when we meet at his agent’s office in London. “And I had to put makeup on: crow’s feet, white stuff in my hair.”

He goes on: “I remember doing a Lily Savage special in Blackpool for TV. And in the dressing room I was sat next to the lead singer of Showaddywaddy.” It never takes long for a Fellows/Shuttleworth anecdote to tend towards bathos. “He looked at me a bit askance and said, ‘This is odd. You’re there being made to look older, and I’m here being made to look younger.’” But the years roll around, and on the eve of his 40th anniversary tour as Shuttleworth, Fellows says: “I might have to start doing that now too.”

Bon Iver asked him to cover his new material and he’s teaching Mescal and Josh O’Connor to sing. But the interpreter is more interested in songs than stardom

Sam Amidon grew up in the 1980s, but his Vermont childhood was “almost like a refuge” from the gaudiest decade. His hippy parents were folk-singer educators who frequently travelled south to work with Sacred Harp shape-note singers. “We were still eating granola and tofu stir fry, growing veggies and having potlucks,” he says. “Nobody had a television. I remember seeing a picture of Michael Jackson on somebody’s notebook, but I had no idea what he sounded like.” The family had one Talking Heads cassette, one Cyndi Lauper cassette and one Bob Dylan cassette, albeit of traditional songs. “The idea of the singer-songwriter model just wasn’t in my life.”

Amidon followed his parents into music, becoming a fiddle prodigy and noted folk singer, releasing acclaimed albums for Nonesuch, and collaborating with jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, and folk-pop songwriter Beth Orton, whom he married in 2011. The couple live near the London cafe (incidentally, where Fleabag was filmed) where I meet Amidon in December to discuss his beautiful new album, Salt River, his first for Rough Trade imprint River Lea.

The newly announced console enters a crowded market making some wonder that without a radical rehaul will loyal customers feel the need to get the new one?

Well, it happened: Nintendo announced the Switch 2 the day after last week’s newsletter went out. And a strange announcement it was.

The short trailer ( which you can watch here ) tells you everything we know at this point: everything about the machine except for its appearance remains a mystery. Nintendo has scheduled a reveal event for April that will presumably be more fulsome. This was likely Nintendo’s plan all along, and the trailer was released early following a flood of leaked information about the console. They provided no release date, no details – and no games.

Video posted by top gamer shows what he says is X conversation in which billionaire admits ‘account boosting’

Elon Musk admitted he cheated at video games to get high scores, a transcript of a private online conversation he had shows, seemingly concluding a fiery scandal over the billionaire’s outlandish claims to be a globally-ranked player.

Musk has regularly bragged about his gaming rankings. He told the podcaster Joe Rogan last year that he was in the top 20 players in the world for the fiendishly difficult action role-playing game Diablo IV.

Here are some of your tributes to the celebrated director of Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive

• David Lynch dies aged 78
• David Lynch – a life in pictures

I live in a forested part of the UK that has a dreamlike quality to it. The sound of the owls and the trees resonates deep in the soul. Sometimes violent, sometimes tender, always beautiful. David Lynch has been one of my favourites since my late teens. I was first made aware of Twin Peaks as a child when my mother shooed me away from the living room so she could watch it. I’ll never forget the ghostly music creeping up the stairs into my bedroom. Jay Stephens-Wood, 42, Forest of Dean

Opera House, Manchester
A meandering musical based on the Doris Day movie delivers the sure-shot showtunes in style with a whipcracking lead in Carrie Hope Fletcher

The 1953 film Calamity Jane is quick on the draw. Doris Day’s romcom western gets under way with lickety-split rhythm and irresistible whip-crack-away refrains. This stage adaptation takes its sweet time to get going, with a bit of tomfoolery from a grizzled, banjo-twanging barfly and the denizens of Deadwood opening with a ballad, The Black Hills of Dakota.

That is indicative of a show that ambles through the same storyline, adding half an hour (including a handful of extra songs) to its running time. Some of the material passes by like tumbleweed but the song Men! features Calamity ribbing the opposite sex, redressing the barrage of feminine ideals she faces in the film. Another catchy addition, Careless With the Truth, reinforces the frontierswoman’s taste for self-mythologising.

At Manchester Opera House until 25 January. Then touring until 27 September.

★★★★★/★★★★★
Drawing on hardboiled US fiction, as American film had fed on his own Seven Samurai, the director brings unforgettable intensity to his anxious noir

Akira Kurosawa’s scalding 1949 cop thriller Stray Dog (★★★★★), with its extended closeup shot of a mad dog snarling into the camera over the opening credits, is about a stolen gun; as with De Sica’s stolen bicycle the year before, the resulting search leads us on a tour of the city, scene by scene into a world of poverty, cynicism and violence.

It is a gripping, drum-tight picture, a panoramic drama of crime revealed over one sweltering summer in postwar Tokyo which culminates in an ominous monsoon downpour and it stars two alpha-dogs of Japanese cinema, both stalwarts of Kurosawa. Takashi Shimura is veteran police officer Detective Sato, tolerant, good-humoured, realistic about the prospects for containing, if not eradicating crime, and Toshiro Mifune is his partner, rookie cop Murakami, part of the new, thoughtful postwar generation concerned with upbringing and psychology. Murakami teaches the older man the unfamiliar term “ après-guerre ” to describe his new attitudes, although he has to be reminded that the police is different from the army, less regimented and more about initiative. Mifune is still a young man of 29 in this film, although he clearly shows that amazing natural severity and martial nobility.

Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow
The Glasgow singer-songwriter’s voice has got even better with age – a shame, then, that the crowd just want to hear his 80s hits

Lloyd Cole is singing songs of love and pain, and singing them very well. But, ach, you can’t please everyone. “Lost Weekend!” shouts a fan in the balcony, requesting a hit from 1985. Cole, dapper in a white suit, takes a moment before replying: “I’m definitely too old to play Lost Weekend.”

“But that’s why we’re here,” comes a second voice, across the room.