dÉbruit, Auntie Flo at The Boiler Room

Online music television, live and sweaty

Club culture has always had a tension between democratisation (“come one, come all!”) and exclusivity (the thrill of being in the know about the newest or most underground thing). The best clubs have always been the ones that find ways of short-circuiting this seeming opposition, and a great part of the success of The Boiler Room is the way they have harnessed technology to perform the same trick.

Pippin, Menier Chocolate Factory

Stephen Schwartz musical risks self-immolation in high-concept revival

Should the people who made Tron - or for that matter James Cameron - ever decide to take on a Broadway musical, they owe themselves a trip to the Menier Chocolate Factory's ludicrous production of Pippin to find out how not to do it. Just because this long-running New York entry was the first Broadway show to advertise on American TV nearly 40 years ago, that doesn't mean it also needs to be the first in my experience to be transformed into a video game so as to accommodate contemporary tastes.

Pete Townshend: the internet is killing music

The Who's main man bemoans the death of 'John Peelism' at the hands of iTunes

Earlier this week Pete Townshend asked whether “John Peelism”, the ethos of supporting and celebrating small, independent artists at a grass-roots level, could survive the internet. His implied answer was clearly "no". Townshend levelled the accusation that Apple, the owner of iTunes, is “a digital vampire Northern Rock” which doesn’t support or invest in the musicians whose work they sell, particularly the more independently minded ones, but rather sucks them dry before moving on.

CD: Björk - Biophilia

Whistles, bells and universal ambition - but is it any good?

An album that encompasses pan-global collaborations, iPad/Phone apps, internet jiggery-pokery, art installations, live multimedia shows and even a tuning system, with the “Ultimate Edition” of the album coming complete with a set of tuning forks to demonstrate this. As ever, Björk Guðmundsdóttir is showing no shortage of ambition. But is it any good?

Interview: Peter Gabriel

On the state of the internet, WOMAD, being easily distracted and his new album New Blood

One of the problems with Peter Gabriel’s back catalogue for me, I tell him, as he is reclining in an office at EMI in London, is the sounds - some of them really are very dated. Gabriel would often pioneer a sound like the reverse-gated drum sound - others would imitate, it becomes trendy, over-used, and then hugely unfashionable.

Page One: Inside the New York Times

PAGE ONE - INSIDE THE NEW YORK TIMES: An old-media empire's struggle to survive

Documentary details an old-media empire's struggle to survive

As an elegiac score plays, bails of early editions of the New York Times are bundled and tossed into a fleet of vans, which roll out into the dawn city streets, to distribute the news. The conviction shared by many in this documentary about the paper is that the vans will soon look as quaint as the last of the horse-drawn hackney cabs. The ritual of late-night editorial agonising over stories before the presses roll, and newspapers themselves, are equally under threat. The New York Times’ possible death, as much as daily life there, is director Andrew Rossi’s theme.

Misfits: Vegas Baby!, 4oD

The ultimate test - how to kill off a character you made immortal. Simple answer

Question. How do you kill off a TV character whom, just a few episodes ago, you and your fellow scriptwriters went out of your way to render immortal? How… and why? Over two short seasons and one Christmas special, the writers of the BAFTA-winning Misfits (Best Drama Series 2010), marshalled by Howard Overden, have proved themselves singularly adept at coming up with plot devices that justify, narrative-wise, well, pretty much anything, and thereby leave the field wide open for their surrealist brand of comic pikey super-heroism.

Little Dragon, The Boiler Room at Corsica Studios

Gothenberg quartet melt away clichés of Scandi cool

“It's like an advert for American Apparel,” said my companion a song into the set – and she had a point. The elegantly poised electropop of Little Dragon is so sharp, so cool, so impeccably internationalist in its outlook and presentation that, taken in small doses, it would be perfect for any brand targeted at affluent hipsters. But while their antics on stage, and especially those of singer Yukimi Nagano were admittedly a brand manager's dream at any given moment, over time they proved to be something much more interesting.

Trust

Evil on the internet makes for a gripping film from director David Schwimmer

Do you know where your teenagers are? If they're smart, they'll be somewhere watching Trust, the sophomore directorial effort from actor David Schwimmer that turns out to be as deftly compelling as it is unnerving.