Music review - Natalie Merchant, Brighton Dome

It's not often that a gig is set in motion by the click of a slide projector but then we have come to expect something more from Natalie Merchant, the 46-year-old singer-songwriter who has long left behind the folk-pop proselytising of her 10,000 Maniacs days and settled into her role as a solo artist of rare maturity and depth
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It's only rock'n'roll but are you prepared to die for it?

As Ian Curtis is remembered 30 years after his death, Fiona Sturges looks at the myth of the tortured artist and asks why fans reserve their reverence for the stars who suffer
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Circolombia: Urban, Freerange, Brighton

Circolombia are a youth troupe from Cali in Colombia who met at the Circo para Todos ("Circus for All") school, a collective set up by the British ex-circus performer Felicity Simpson in order to get adolescents from deprived backgrounds off the streets.
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Sarah Blasko - The star from down under

Sarah Blasko, the daughter of missionaries, has three top-selling albums in Australia but has struggled to be heard in the UK. Her latest album has changed that. She talks to Fiona Sturges
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Theatre review - Electric Hotel, Brighton

In Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, a helpless James Stewart glimpses the goings-on in the opposite apartment block, his relentless curtain-twitching leading him to conclude that a murder has been committed
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Theatre review - I, Malvolio, Pavilion Theatre, Brighton

A man stands in a horned headdress and sagging, stained undergarments. His shoulders droop, his limbs hang as if dragged downwards by invisible weights and his face is clouded with defeat. "I am not mad," he murmurs, and sets about making the case for his defence.
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Ronson, Winehouse and that special chemistry

Artists from Amy Winehouse via David Bowie to U2 have had musical masterminds in the control room. Fiona Sturges looks at their influence
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Theatre review - Before I Sleep. Old Co-op Building, Brighton

There's a sign at the end of Dreamthinkspeak's new work, a promenade piece in a defunct department store, which implores the departing audience not to tell others about the contents of the show lest they give too much away.
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24-hour room service: The Colonnade Hotel, Boston, US

With its Seventies concrete façade, you could mistake it for a car park. But look again, because The Colonnade fancies itself as one of the smartest hotels in Boston
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American drama: Hit the road, Jack

They outclass their British counterparts, but some American drama series are starting to lose their lustre, says Fiona Sturges
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Out of Africa: David LaChapelle's strange visions of a continent

David LaChapelle made his name with mash-ups of trashy glitz, Old Masters and portraits of Angelina Jolie, Courtney Love and Madonna. But on the eve of his first seriously political show in the UK, he tells Fiona Sturges that he has put commercialism behind him
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Albums for children

Moulding a three-year-old's musical taste is utterly impossible, says Fiona Sturges
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Book review: Popcorn, by Garry Mulholland

It doesn't take a great leap of imagination to see why film directors find rock bands so compelling. Their stories invariably take in the crucial components of drama – rebellion, egotism, money, sex, drugs and, in the more extreme cases, death.
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Rufus Wainwright: 'Our family is a battered ship...'

Back with an album, a tour and an opera, the Canadian singer reveals how a series of births and deaths forced him to grow up
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A singer after a fashion

Karen Elson is the latest model to try her hand at making a pop album. Fiona Sturges looks at the successes and, more commonly, the failures of models-turned-would-be rock stars
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