City Hall, Newcastle
Blossomsmania is in full force at this cheery, beery gig, which has something of the atmosphere of an indie Last Night of the Proms

In the 11 years since they began rehearsing in the bass player’s grandfather’s scaffold yard , Blossoms have completed a metamorphosis from bowl-cutted indie psychedelic types to dewy-eyed keyboard-driven bouncing pop. The Stockport quintet’s four No 1 albums position them somewhere between early Arctic Monkeys and a poppier New Order. They’ve built up a loyal and loud fanbase, who hold two-pint glasses of lager aloft tonight and have clearly come for a cheery, beery sing-song.

The audience bellow every line of opener Your Girlfriend and even yell along with the instrumental bits of I Can’t Stand It. Vocalist Tom Ogden doesn’t bother with the first verse of The Keeper, knowing the crowd will sing it for him. The atmosphere is something like an indie-pop Last Night of the Proms, although sonically, with the musicians almost inaudible at times, it’s more like hearing a pub full of people singing to a jukebox.

With his distinctive narration, the author-actor brings warmth and humour to his retelling of Homer’s epic, the last in his Greek myth series

We are not short of modern retellings of the Greek myths: Natalie Haynes, Costanza Casati, Pat Barker and Madeline Miller are among those to have done it with style. But in audio, it’s hard to beat Stephen Fry’s book series which began with 2017’s Mythos , about the history of the Greek gods, and continued with Heroes, featuring the adventures of Jason, Perseus, Oedipus et al, and Troy, about the Trojan war. Now comes Odyssey, the fourth and final instalment characterised by the same accessible storytelling of its predecessors.

With Troy having fallen and a decade of war over, the Greek fleet, with its kings, princes, commanders, is keen to return home. Chief among them is Odysseus, king of Ithaca and hero of Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, who longs to be reunited with his wife Penelope and who encounters violent storms (at the behest of Poseidon), angry Cyclopes and the witch-goddess Circe. Meanwhile Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and commander of the Achaeans, is to be reunited with his wife, Clytemnestra. But there is a question over how he will be received since, 10 years prior, he sacrificed their daughter, Iphigenia, in return for safe passage to Troy.

JMW Turner faces off against fellow observers of nature, Constable is contextualised, and the Romani community are represented in textiles – all in your weekly dispatch

Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and Colour
The subtle and sensitive paintings of this Bloomsbury Group stalwart prove modernist art doesn’t have to be explosive to be interesting.
• MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, from 19 October until 23 February

The Drowned by John Banville; The Blue Hour by Paula Hawkins; Midnight and Blue by Ian Rankin; A Case of Matricide by Graeme Macrae Burnet; The Burning Stones by Antti Tuomainen

The Drowned by John Banville (Faber, £18.99)
The latest in Banville’s series set in 1950s Ireland begins with a Mercedes, engine still running, abandoned in a field by the sea in County Wicklow. It’s discovered by the reclusive Denton Wymes, who shortly afterwards encounters the “mad, or drunk, or both” Ronnie Armitage, who claims that his wife left the car abruptly and may have drowned herself. The behaviour of the couple in the nearby cottage, where the two men go to phone the police, is no less bizarre. When a search by the coastguards fails to recover a body, Detective Inspector Strafford is sent from Dublin to investigate. Strafford has problems of his own to contend with – his wife wants a divorce (possible only because the Straffords were married in England, but still no simple matter) and his lover Phoebe, daughter of the lugubrious pathologist Quirke, is pregnant. A beautifully written and intriguing slowburn of a book, in which the various quandaries in the main characters’ private lives are as absorbing as the central mystery, The Drowned is narratively connected to its predecessor but certainly works as a standalone.

The Blue Hour by Paula Hawkins (Doubleday, £22)
The missing spouse in Hawkins’s latest novel is the philandering husband of famous artist Vanessa Chapman; he disappeared without trace 20 years before a bone in one of her “found objects” sculptures was identified as human by a visitor to the Tate. Vanessa herself is now deceased, having spent her last years in virtual seclusion on the Scottish tidal island still inhabited by Grace: old friend, carer, and keeper of the flame. When an art historian arrives with the twin aims of averting a scandal by “clearing up this bone business” and prising the remainder of Chapman’s work, willed to the foundation that employs him, from Grace’s reluctant hands, long-buried secrets are uncovered. With an intricate plot and multiple timelines and perspectives, The Blue Hour is a complex, atmospheric study of ambition, loyalty and betrayal.

(Secretly Canadian)
Emotions run high on the Brighton band’s fourth album as frontwoman Dana Margolin exorcises past relationships

There comes a point in many Porridge Radio songs when the intensity ramps up, repetition of a key line or chorus thunders in and the Brighton quartet unleash fury with their jagged, weirdly euphoric indie rock. Frontwoman Dana Margolin has spoken recently about how the band’s work takes a toll on her. Still, she continues to scour her recent relationships on Clouds with a passion that can be exhausting – although it’s carefully structured so you wade through emotional heavy weather before emerging into something like sunlight by the last track, air-punch anthem Sick of the Blues.

Their music becomes euphoric because the repetition doesn’t just signal monomania. It’s survival, constancy, a refusal to back down or be beaten by heartbreak. Anybody, God of Everything Else and In a Dream I’m a Painting are exquisite examples of this. A vibe shift occurs in the album’s latter half as the combative guitars recede, leaving more space for Margolin’s spiky poetry, contemplative brass and some quieter, prettier moments. You’re left thinking it must be slightly terrifying to be the object of Margolin’s affections, but also deeply pleasing to have songs this fervent written about you.

Royal Albert Hall, London
Accompanied by a 53-piece orchestra and 14-strong choir, the pop superstar forsakes many of her biggest hits to perform the entirety of her coolly received new album

After an opening medley of End of an Era and Houdini, Dua Lipa starts telling the audience about the many legendary performers who have preceded her on the stage of the Royal Albert Hall. There’s certainly plenty of pivotal moments in musical history to choose from – it was here that Bob Dylan and his Fender Stratocaster faced down a mob of baying folkies in 1966 and the Jimi Hendrix Experience ended their last European show amid the wreckage of smashed equipment – but it turns out that the singer has rather more august figures in mind: “Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Albert Einstein,” she offers. “But I bet none of them had a dress as nice as this.”

Presumably not: she’s clad in a floor-length red Gaultier gown, complete with a train, a look befitting what she calls “a show unlike any I’ve done before”. In front of cameras filming for a forthcoming TV special, she’s performing accompanied by a 53-piece orchestra and a 14-strong choir. It’s impressive in scale and ambition, her voice is strong enough not to be swamped by the instrumentation, and there’s absolutely no reason why her brand of dance-pop shouldn’t work laden with strings and brass – it is, after all, ultimately rooted in disco, a genre seldom noted for its minimalist approach to arrangements.

(FFRR)
Featuring Kylie Minogue, Jacob Lusk and more, the American producer and DJ’s solo debut offers something for everyone

For the best part of the past decade, Chicago DJ Marea Stamper, AKA the Blessed Madonna, has built a reputation for whipping dancefloors into a euphoric frenzy with her crate-digging mixes of house, techno and disco. As a producer, she has channelled this high-octane sensibility into remixes for the likes of Dua Lipa and Robyn. Now, on her debut album, Godspeed , Stamper presents a sprawling odyssey that ranges from radio-friendly features to darker, bass-heavy tracks.

At the commercial end of the spectrum are pleasing if unoriginal numbers such as the piano house party-starter Edge of Saturday Night with Kylie Minogue; James Vincent McMorrow breakbeat feature Brand New; and Jacob Lusk disco roller Mercy Pt 2. Godspeed grows more distinct when Stamper delves into the murkier corners of the dancefloor – the hammering techno bass of Somebody’s Daughter; the gritty, jacking house of Blessed Already and chopped fractal vocals of Strength (R U Ready).

The Norwegian author on the magic of Ursula K LeGuin, returning to Virginia Woolf, and the insight of Jorge Luis Borges

My earliest reading memory
One of the most intriguing books, when I was around six years old, was Gangles by Ronald McCuaig. The main character, a wild girl from Australia, could stand on top of fountains and travelled around with a whale by balancing on the water spray the whale exhaled. Reading that book was one of the great experiences of my childhood. That is completely impossible to understand when I leaf through it now: how could something so small grow into something so huge? Pure magic.

My favourite book growing up
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K Le Guin . No one above, no one beside. I must have read it 10 times in my youth. A young boy with wizard abilities goes too far out of hubris and lets an evil creature into the world. From then on it chases him, until he faces it and calls it by its true name, which is his own – what more could an 11-year-old desire to speculate over?

Live theatre, Newcastle
Brogan Gilbert gives an extraordinary performance as the troubled nurse caring for a terminally ill dancer in a compelling adaptation of the 2019 horror film

With its extreme closeups and eerily distorted faces, Rose Glass’s 2019 horror film Saint Maud has no shortage of scenes to make you flinch. But in Glass’s screenplay, words also jab like the desperately devout nurse Maud’s injections, starting with the blunt expletive used to describe terminally ill Amanda by her departing employee. After Maud takes over, a series of caustic voiceovers reveal her own surprisingly sharp tongue.

This compelling adaptation by novelist Jessica Andrews (Saltwater) and Jack McNamara, who also directs, keeps the wounding exchanges between characters but adds a sensory warmth that deepens their relationships. Andrews and McNamara don’t just capitalise on what a tale of body horror can obviously gain in live performance – including the moments of religious ecstasy that Glass dubbed “ godgasms ”, here movement-directed by Roberta Jean. They also repeatedly linger on their characters’ descriptions of taste, touch and smell, all reinforcing the physicality. “You’ve got soft hands,” Amanda (Dani Arlington) tells Maud (Brogan Gilbert) in their first meeting. She later smells Maud’s scalp as if she is a newborn baby and even licks her hair.