The best-known book about motorcycle gangs is Hunter S Thompson’s Hell’s Angels, a classic foundational text of the so-called “New Journalism”. It was published in 1966, two years before Danny Lyon’s The Bikeriders, the source material for Jeff Nichols’ new movie. Lyon (now 82) was primarily a photographer, but in this case accompanied his pictures with interviews with his subjects.

Lincoln Center’s Bartlett Sher is back in town to direct the Barbican’s latest summer blockbuster, Cole Porter’s classic Kiss Me, Kate. It’s an energetic, largely intelligent production of what is at base a screwball comedy with great songs. 

Almost exactly five years ago, I was transported by Singing It All Back Home, the third album from Naomi Bedford and Paul Simmonds. I gave it four stars, which in retrospect was perhaps a little ungenerous. Now at last comes a new opus from the duo, Strange News Has Come to Town, the making of which was “a long march across hard ground”, obstacles including the pandemic, as well as personal health and money issues.

Benjamin Brewer’s post-apocalyptic, Nic Cage-starring creature feature finds a sombre interest in fatherhood and growing up in screenwriter Michael Nilon’s bleak scenario, after Paul (Cage) gathers up two abandoned babies with black smoke blooming, and a city falling into catastrophe.

The mournful, lonesome voice of John Moreland from Bixby, Oklahoma, will be known by a few, but not many, in this country. The 12 songs on his latest album, Visitor, released on the Thirty Tigers label, should help to remedy that.

There’s a category of movies that are best seen having read nothing about them. Susquatch Sunset falls into that blood group as its main pleasure comes from working out quite what's going on. Free of any dialogue, it functions as an oddball parody of a nature documentary as it follows an elusive family of mysterious bipeds over the changing seasons.

Viggo Mortensen has parlayed film stardom into the life of a hard-working, bohemian-minded gentleman scholar. His Lord of the Rings fees financed Perceval Press, which publishes books of poetry, photography and anthropology by himself and others, and Mortensen’s extensive discography as a musician.

“I feel ashamed because I couldn’t become the man that you always hoped I’d become.” The line is repeated during “Father,” The Art of the Lie’s third track. After this, there’s “Mother and Son,” “Daddy” and the allusive “The Child Catcher”. Parent-child relations, from either perspective, are key to John Grant’s sixth solo album. Specifically, how these have rippled through his life to form his present-day self.

Alice Childress’s Wedding Band has arrived at the Lyric Hammersmith like an incendiary bomb, a weapon that casts a bright light over its target even as it ferociously burns it. 

At 81, John Cale, an immensely prolific, wide-ranging and innovative musician, continues to take risks, making music that may not always be instantly appealing, but always true to an artist’s authentic path.  Hot on the heels of Mercy (2023), in which he collaborated with a number of off-centre cutting-edge talents, he has produced another album full of surprises and yet immediately recognisable as his own work.