Holmes Chapel to hold day of auditions for tour guides after thousands of fans make pilgrimage to Cheshire village

A Cheshire village that has been swamped by young visitors has appealed for tour guides with a very specific skill set: an expert knowledge of Harry Styles.

More than 5,000 fans – known as Harries – have descended on the quaint community of Holmes Chapel in the last year in a pop pilgrimage to the singer’s home town.

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She’s the ex-hairdresser who turned Bowie into Ziggy Stardust, then set off around the world in his entourage. Ronson relives those wild days – and recalls seeing a darker side of David

One Saturday morning early in the summer of 1971, Suzi Ronson was busy at work at the Evelyn Paget hair salon on Beckenham High Street when a couple walked past pushing a pram. The woman was wearing black jeans and a furry jacket, the man was in a flowing gold midi dress. “Everybody rushed out to have a look,” recalls Ronson, who then went by her maiden name Fussey. “Everyone was like nudging, poking each other, asking, ‘Who’s that?’ Then someone whispered, ‘It’s David Bowie.’”

Ronson had vaguely heard of Bowie: the success of his Space Oddity single had made him a local celebrity and the singer’s mother was a client. But she recalls: “He was in an arty clique, not my world.” However Ronson would end up becoming part of Bowie’s world, the only working woman in his touring party – as her new memoir Me and Mr Jones relates.

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Lulu has revealed that, when she’s performing, she doesn’t speak before noon. It might sound tricky – but could have benefits

Name: Speech fasting.

Age: Ancient.

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For all her declarations of being authentically country, Cowboy Carter arrives on the back of booming business for the genre and is all about the star, not the roots music supposedly at the project’s heart

On the first track of Beyoncé ’s new album, she seems to state the impetus behind the project: “They used to say I spoke too country / Then the rejection came, said I wasn’t country ’nough.” That rejection was an unnamed experience in which she has said she “did not feel welcomed”, assumed to be her performance of her song Daddy Lessons with the Chicks at the 2016 Country Music awards. It prompted a racist backlash from parts of the country establishment, as well as outrage at Beyoncé giving a platform to the Chicks, who had been in exile from the industry since singer Natalie Maines criticised George W Bush’s handling of the Iraq war in 2002.

Cowboy Carter is Beyoncé’s 27-track response. On the album’s cover, she is on a horse, holding an American flag, draped in US flag apparel, with her long blond tresses flowing and a cowboy hat atop her head. In the few details she has shared about the album, she said she “did a deeper dive into the history of country music and studied our rich musical archive”. As she became the first Black female artist to have a US country No 1 and top the Billboard Hot 100 with a country song and debate over her place in the genre reigned, no greater a country luminary than Dolly Parton lent her support. Later it was revealed that she and outlaw legend Willie Nelson were to feature on the album, cementing its country bona fides.

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Marble Factory, Bristol
Ferreira’s attitude towards fame is conflicted, but her anger and relatable brittleness only add to the cravings for her long-awaited next album

S ky Ferreira reaches for her mic stand as though she intends to kill it, holds it in a white-knuckle grip and ascends into the monster chorus of 24 Hours. Amid the song’s grinding bass and crashing synths this brief movement is magnetic in a way that it shouldn’t be – a shot of pop-star presence given extra stakes by the false starts and tortuous diversions that have led her to this point.

It has been almost 11 years since Night Time, My Time introduced the then 21-year-old Ferreira’s blend of pillowy electro-pop and dead-eyed cool. Label spats and interminable delays have made the wait for its follow-up Masochism – originally planned for release at least two years ago – into a yawning chasm. (In November, it was reported that Ferreira and her label Capitol appeared to have parted ways.) True to form, while the name of that near-mythical album is emblazoned on T-shirts at the merch table, there’s no new material debuted here. Instead, there is a punishingly loud reintroduction to songs that feel like they have been kept in suspended animation.

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The Colombian pop star – and mother of two boys – disliked the global blockbuster, saying its message robs men of chance to ‘protect and provide’

In an unlikely dissension from what has become a critical and commercial consensus, Colombian musician Shakira has said that the Barbie movie is “emasculating” and suggested that it “rob[s] men of their possibility to be men”.

In an interview with Allure magazine that focused on the “she-wolf feminism” behind her work, Shakira said she had watched the Greta Gerwig-directed satire and said: “My sons absolutely hated it. They felt that it was emasculating. And I agree, to a certain extent.”

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Independent venues struggle to survive amid low footfall as disposable incomes fall

Independent nightlife venues across the UK are struggling to survive amid a cocktail of high costs, low footfall and oppressive regulation that is squeezing them out of city centres.

Last week, the Night & Day bar in Manchester won a partial victory in a legal battle over a noise abatement notice that began when a neighbouring flat complained about gigs and DJ sets going on late into the night.

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MPF is a progressive punk festival that plays to a younger crowd. It promotes startup/DIY bands led by women, people of colour and LGBTQ+ people by putting them on the same stage as more established acts

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Best known for her work in 1950s sci-fi, the actor also took supporting roles in films including Bigger Than Life and Magnificent Obsession

Barbara Rush, the female lead of 1950s sci-fi horror It Came from Outer Space, has died aged 97. Her daughter Claudia Cowan, a reporter for Fox News, told Fox News Digital : “My wonderful mother passed away peacefully at 5:28 this evening. I was with her this morning and know she was waiting for me to return home safely to transition.”

Born in Denver in 1927, Rush grew up in Los Angeles and, after studying theatre at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was signed to Paramount Pictures . After making her screen acting debut in The Goldbergs – a big-screen spinoff of the popular radio and TV series – Rush’s breakthrough role came in 1951 in the Oscar-winning sci-fi picture When Worlds Collide , as the daughter of an astronomer attempting to warn humanity they are doomed by a rogue star on a crash course with Earth.

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