The Turner prize-winning artist on a glorious Italian painting, his favourite horror novel, and why he finally started to like podcasts

Born in Birkenhead in 1964, the artist Mark Leckey came to prominence with 1999’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore , which documented British nightclub culture. He won the 2008 Turner prize for the exhibition Industrial Light and Magic; in 2019, he recreated an M53 concrete flyover at Tate Britain. His most recent project, In the Offing , opened at Turner Contemporary, Margate in October 2023. He lives in London with his wife, curator Lizzie Carey-Thomas, and their two children. Leckey has created the sound for Oona Doherty’s Wall , performed by National Youth Dance Company at Sadler’s Wells, London on 13 July, then touring.

Aviva Studios, Manchester
The flawlessly classy US singer, actor – and so much more – unleashes costumes, speeches and body-positive party tunes in a virtuoso set spanning two decades of shapeshifting

Not all superheroes wear capes. This one does, though. Janelle Monáe arrives on stage two nights into a three-show residency at Factory International’s well-appointed new(ish) home resplendent in a giant robe made entirely from fabric flowers, paired with blooming boots and headdress. It’s the same outfit she wore at Glastonbury, and the one she has been wearing as support act to Coldplay in European stadiums. The wow factor is, though, undimmed – a tropicalist take on pagan that presages a series of eye-catching costume changes. Monáe asks us to lift up our cups, and we toast “the dreams we chase”: an apposite invocation for election eve.

She, and we, are on our “ Champagne Shit ” tonight. It’s the title of a party-forward track semi-inspired by political Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti’s Expensive Shit . Monáe’s most recent album, The Age of Pleasure , is just over a year old, and it bumps and grinds the message home that life is for living, that pleasure is both a personal “birthright” and a political necessity, and that “the most abundant and sustainable resource is our love”.

The singer, 51, on making memories, disliking therapy, and a terrifying meeting with Grace Jones

I used to ask my dad if I could marry him. He was my hero. My first memory is being devastated that he had to go to work, I couldn’t understand why he couldn’t stay at home with me. He wasn’t perfect. He made a mess of things in some ways. But he remained iconic to me, and showed me how to appreciate life. He made friends with everyone.

Dad died a few years ago and I was surprised. He once saved a monk falling down an escalator at Heathrow airport and they all blessed him afterwards. I thought it was impossible for him to die.

I always loved adults more than other kids. I grew up in a tribe of incredibly flawed people. People who made mistakes. But I could always see that they were amazing, too. I was patient with adults in a way that I wasn’t with other children, I think because I always had an interest in adult things.

My upbringing was cultured and exciting. I was surrounded by poetry and books and live music. One day, Dad came home with the cockpit of a Second World War bomber. It stayed in the living room for ages. That was my life growing up.

I’ve got a temper. I’m Irish. But it comes out much less than it used to. I guess that’s growing up. I’ve done therapy, it wasn’t great, it felt like a waste of time. I’m very good at talking people round to my side of things. The last therapist I had agreed with me too much. I put on a good show. I’m a performer.

I think our culture is too hedonistic. People really party now, it’s not like it was in the 90s, going out once in a while. The dance scene in the 80s and 90s was so wonderful, but I always thought that pure hedonism was a dead end. I was never interested in that. I was interested in adventure.

I mourn the passing of that time I knew. No phones, genuine freedom, actual connection with other people.

My biggest fear is losing my memory. Losing memories of the culture I grew up in. Losing history. I’m always trying to capture memories, to remember them. The fear is in me that I won’t be able to find them, I won’t remember these things any more.

The last time I cried was at Christmas. I was sick and coughing in the middle of the night and it wouldn’t go away. I didn’t have cancer, though, just a chest infection. I’m a bit of a hypochondriac. It’s a guilt thing. I think to myself, “You can’t be having this much fun and not pay some kind of price for it.”

I love Grace Jones, but I was petrified of meeting her. A few years back a friend and I went to see her in Florence. She’s one of my biggest influences and she was brilliant that night. We ended up back at the hotel she was staying in because we knew the gig promoter. She walked in, took one look at us, turned to her people, and said, “Get these people out of here.”

I like getting older. I hesitate to call it wisdom, because you can think you’re wise and then very quickly life can remind you that you’re not. But I’m proud of what I’ve done as an artist.

Hit Parade Remixes by Róisín Murphy is out now. Róisín plays London’s Love Motion festival on 26 July

Garsington Opera, High Wycombe; Queen Elizabeth Hall; Wigmore Hall, London
A top cast and young local chorus share the honours in Netia Jones’s stylish new Britten staging; Finnish live wire Pekka Kuusisto and friends conjure Shostakovich in the dark. Plus, Bruckner’s 6th for 10 players…

“Darkly bright, are bright in dark directed.” Who wouldn’t want to pass that line off as their own? Shakespeare’s Sonnet 43 , full of shadows, sleep and dreams, has an affinity with his A Midsummer Night’s Dream , in which human mystery speaks more powerfully than sweet fairy magic. When Benjamin Britten made the play into an opera in 1960 for the reopening of Aldeburgh’s Jubilee Hall, he and his partner, Peter Pears, chopped and reordered the text but introduced only six words (apparently) that were not Shakespeare’s own. Directors have mined the opera’s hints of eroticism and deviance, setting it in ink-splattered schoolroom, country house nursery and Cabaret -style Berlin with Thisbe memorably twirling her nipple tassels .

Garsington’s new staging, conducted by Douglas Boyd and directed and designed by Netia Jones, has returned it to a wood. It revels in the darkly bright. Boyd and the Philharmonia Orchestra, playing superbly, kept the pace swift and flowing; it was hard to imagine that this work can, usually does, sag. (Oh no, the rude mechanicals. Oh no, the lost lovers. But no oh-no-ing here.) The sinister clatterings of harpsichord or xylophone, the glissando swoops of double bass and two harps, the lurching solo trombone: all always ear-catching, were especially vivid.

(Delphian)
No sound is left unturned as the soprano-composer-musician and friends range from Barbara Strozzi to Errollyn Wallen and Werner’s own work

The multitalented Héloïse Werner , a singer, cellist, composer, narrator, verbal acrobat and linguistic chameleon, can hardly be summed up in a short phrase. Close-ups , her second disc for Delphian, recorded at SJE Arts, Oxford, brings together a group of like-minded musician friends: Max Baillie (violin, viola, fiddle), Julian Azkoul (violin), Ruth Gibson (viola), Colin Alexander (cello), Marianne Schofield (double bass) and Kit Downes (cello).

Werner is preoccupied with the many aural ways of expressing emotion: through the convention of vocal beauty (as in Barbara Strozzi’s Che si può fare, arranged by Richard Birchall) or through the adventure of spoken text, tongue-twisting, riddles or lip-smacking noises (Werner’s own compositions, Les Leçons du Mardi, Close-ups, Unspecified Intentions). For a more lyrical mood, there’s Tree by Errollyn Wallen and O vis eternitatis by Hildegard of Bingen, as well as Werner’s Lullaby for a Sister.

Pricey deals on the Eras tour shows are part of a growing trend – but some acts offer more for less cash

Complaints from Taylor Swift fans who paid £660 each for premium concert seats but say their views were blocked by stage equipment have thrown the spotlight on “VIP” tickets and exactly what you get for your money.

While some will be surprised that anyone would pay more than £600 for a ticket and a few items of “merch”, particularly in a cost of living crisis, pricey packages offering a supposedly once-in-a-lifetime experience are becoming increasingly common.

The singer on sleeping like a log, a very special recording, and being told by a manager that everyone hated him

Born in Staffordshire, Fran Healy, 50, grew up in Scotland. In 1991, he enrolled at the Glasgow School of Art and joined the band that became Travis. In 1999, they released their second album, The Man Who, securing best album at the 2000 Brits as well as best group, an award they also won in 2002. Their hits include Why Does It Always Rain on Me? and Sing, and Healy has two Ivor Novellos for his songwriting. LA Times, Travis’s 10th album, is out on 12 July; the band’s headline tour begins in December. Healy is separated, has a son and lives in Los Angeles.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
I’m incredibly patient with a lot of stuff, but incredibly impatient with other things. I deplore the impatient side.

Former Oasis guitarist describes festival, which has long championed political causes, as ‘kind of preachy and a bit virtue-signalling’

Noel Gallagher has decried Glastonbury festival, long a champion of leftwing political causes such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, as “getting a bit woke now”.

Speaking to the Sun, the former Oasis guitarist said: “It’s getting a bit woke now, that place, and a bit kind of preachy and a bit virtue-signalling. I don’t like it in music – little fucking idiots waving flags around and making political statements and bands taking the stage and saying, ‘Hey guys, isn’t war ­terrible, yeah? Let’s all boo war. Fuck the Tories man,’ and all that. It’s like, look – play your fucking tunes and get off.”

As the Police’s 1983 classic Synchronicity is reissued, their drummer will take on your questions

Bands like to end on a high, but few did it with as much panache as the Police. Having amassed increasing success since they formed in 1977, in 1983 the band issued their final album, Synchronicity – which was their biggest and, many would argue, best. It topped the charts in the UK and US, as did the single Every Breath You Take, and as well as being named one of the 500 greatest albums of all time by Rolling Stone, Synchronicity was selected last year by the US Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.

On 26 July it will be reissued in multiple formats with varying degrees of lavishness, most notably a six-CD box with 55 previously unreleased tracks including demos, alternate mixes and unheard originals, and a live album recorded in Oakland in 1983.