Ahead of the band’s first album in 16 years coming out on Friday, superfans can test their mettle with this trivia spanning their entire career

It is a wonderful week for those of us with a gothic persuasion. Not only is it Halloween on Thursday, but on Friday we’ll be in love as the Cure unveil their first new album for 16 years – Songs of a Lost World. Why not whet your appetite with our fiendishly difficult quiz about one of the most consistently brilliant British bands? There are no prizes, it is just for fun, but if you do score badly then the spiderman is having you for dinner tonight …

Take the quiz!

Steven Spielberg, Yo-Yo Ma and Chris Martin contribute to this fascinating if fleeting glimpse into a remarkable career that also encompasses Jaws, Indiana Jones and Harry Potter

Seventeen thousand people in the Hollywood Bowl cheer as an unremarkable-looking man in a white jacket with a neat grey beard and bright blue eyes walks on stage. John Williams raises his baton and the Los Angeles Philharmonic begin the theme for Star Wars’s Imperial March. Thousands of lightsabers beat time along with him. The atmosphere crackles.

Williams’s music is part of our collective psyche. Superman, Harry Potter, ET, Jaws, Indiana Jones, Schindler’s List – how many other films are so instantly recognisable from a few notes of their soundtracks? Laurent Bouzereau’s documentary celebrates the legendary film composer, now 92. The music, with its lush orchestral richness and unashamed emotion, is front and centre. Musicians Chris Martin and Yo-Yo Ma and directors including George Lucas, Ron Howard and Chris Columbus are among the stars offering paeans, while interviews with his most famous collaborator Steven Spielberg (a co-producer here), are the film’s backbone, the affection between the two men manifest. Williams himself is a benign, wry and unassuming figure. He is always scribbling away, says his daughter Jennifer. “He expresses himself through his music,” his grandson Ethan Gruska says.

Gate theatre, London
Sanaz Toossi’s intimate play follows a group of friends during the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and beyond as they get married, have children and experience loss

Two dramas by Sanaz Toossi premiered in the US in 2022. English , about friends in an Iranian classroom, won the Pulitzer prize. But it is the other one, Wish You Were Here, that seems like the real love letter to friendship by the American Iranian playwright.

You do not see or feel the love for a while. Directed by Sepy Baghaei, the drama begins in 1979, with the Iranian Revolution as the backdrop, and plays out over the years of the Islamic Republic until 1991.

At the Gate theatre, London , until 23 November

It started as a spooky suburban attraction – and ended up leaving visitors injured and deeply traumatised. A new podcast takes a deep dive into the darkness

It all seemed like an innocent bit of fun. In the early 2000s, Russ McKamey and his then wife Carol went on TV to explain that they were spending $30,000 to make Halloween at their home bigger and better than anyone else’s. Fans queued around the block of the quiet San Diego suburb to experience fake blood, spooky props and teenage actors giving them jump scares. Until, that is, things got much, much darker.

By 2012, participants were being waterboarded, chained up in boxes and almost buried alive after McKamey decided to make McKamey Manor a more extreme, kid-free zone. “I was seeing people come out shaking uncontrollably … one guy, it looked like his nose was broken; another burst a blood vessel in his eye – it was full of blood,” says Mercedes Ann, a certified lifeguard with basic first aid training who was there to deal with the fallout. “People would have psychotic breakdowns – that’s the only time they would stop the tour. Then they would bring me in to calm them down.” She was 15.

My father’s old radio inspired a place where we can show Black life in all its textures. Plus: Jamaicans on Kamala Harris’s final push for the White House, and Mati Diop follows the return of Dahomey’s looted treasures?

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Hello and welcome to the first edition of our new weekly newsletter dedicated to Black life and culture around the world. I’m Nesrine, and I’m excited to bring you all the best stories, features and reports from the diaspora. For our first issue, I want to tell you about how The Long Wave came about, for which I’ll be taking you way back to my childhood in Sudan. But first, here’s our roundup of top stories.

Hackney Church, London
She may confess to impostor syndrome, but these tender studies of the latest stage in her life show a remarkable artist in full bloom

When Laura Marling finishes her piano-led performance of No One’s Gonna Love You Like I Can, a tender love song for her daughter, she claims to feel shy. “That was the biggest impostor syndrome I’ve ever felt singing at that piano,” the 34-year-old says. It’s both charming and ridiculous coming from this relaxed and instinctive live musician, who, half a set in, has commanded the venue with understated power. You’re struck with the sense that she is probably the closest artist her generation has to a Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez or Patti Smith – at least here in her home of England.

Marling’s guitar playing is intricate, blending lead and sitar-like tones, while her vocals – still angelic – have taken on a richer, oaken quality since she emerged a clear victor from the “stomp-clap” folk-pop landscape in her teens. She opens and closes with songs from her earlier albums, including the earthy first four tracks from 2013’s Once I Was an Eagle performed in their entirety, just with her voice and guitar.

Lowriding cars are synonymous with rap, but their Chicano drivers prefer sweet soul music. The scene’s movers and musicians explain how they went from being police targets to esteemed cultural cornerstones

‘Low rider knows every street,” chanted War on Low Rider, their 1975 hymn to the customised cars of east and south central Los Angeles whose suspension had been chopped down to allow them to run “slow and low”. Later, Black LA films (Boyz n the Hood) and music videos (Snoop Dogg, Dr Dre) prominently featured lowriders, the camera passing lovingly over the cars’ customised paint jobs and hydraulic systems that allowed them to bounce. But the lowrider was actually invented by LA’s Mexican-American Chicano community after the second world war – and their drivers didn’t listen to rap, but “lowrider soul”, elegiac R&B songs that remain their preferred soundtrack for cruising.

Lowrider soul constitutes a paradox: lovelorn ballads aren’t what you might expect these often extremely macho drivers to listen to. “Well, these lowrider guys were tough dudes, many street-and-prison hardened, but they were also notoriously ‘romantic’,” says Luis J Rodriguez, the celebrated Chicano poet and author who grew up building and driving lowriders. “I think many of us hung on to the illusions of family and home because we didn’t have good families or homes. Those old R&B songs spoke to our depths.”

The Buddha of Suburbia author’s wildly inspiring memoir of illness and defiance

‘All day, all night the body intervenes,” wrote Virginia Woolf in On Being Ill. It “blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane – smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body.”

On Boxing Day 2022, in Rome with his Italian partner Isabella, Hanif Kureishi felt dizzy while sitting at the table. He fainted, landing on his neck and becoming tetraplegic as a result. He spent 2023 in Italian and English hospitals, being prodded, rearranged and invaded while sending dispatches to his fans (dictated to Isabella and to his son, Carlo) via his popular Substack . “I will never go home again. I have no home now, no centre. I am a stranger to myself. I don’t know who I am any more. Someone new is emerging.” Now, those dispatches have been collected, edited, and expanded into a memoir .

In Otavalo the men, as well as women, see their long hair as integral to the beliefs and culture of the Kichwa people

• Words and photographs by Irina Werning

In a country beset by gang warfare , the Ecuadorian city of Otavalo stands as a haven of safety, where the Kichwa community thrives with its rich cultural heritage, vibrant traditions, distinctive clothing – and long hair.

Since 2006, I have been seeking out and photographing women with long hair across South America. In Otavalo, I found that men also embrace the tradition of wearing their hair long.

Yuyak Santillan, 14, and Naupak Santillan, 13, with their father. Only a family member is granted the privilege to touch someone else’s hair