In a fair few bars around the world tonight, bands will be playing “That’s The Way (I Like It)”, “Give It Up” and so many more of KC and the Sunshine Band’s bangers. They’ve filled dancefloors for half a century and Harry Wayne Casey (KC to you and me) has a claim to having written the first ever disco hit with George McCrae’s “Rock Your Baby” – Benny and Bjorn’s inspiration for “Dancing Queen” no less!

That difficult second documentary – or if you will, “rockumentary” – seems to have been especially challenging for Spinal Tap, since it arrives no less than 41 years after its predecessor, This Is Spinal Tap. The latter has become renowned as a definitive artefact in rock’n’roll history, a smartly deadpan portrayal of a deeply cretinous British heavy metal band in the throes of a shambolic American tour.

What a delight it is to see the director, the star, even the marketing manager these days FFS, get out of the way and let a really strong story stand on its own two feet. Like a late one at the Brixton Academy itself, this is a helluva night out.

Do we need any more Beatles books? The answer is: that’s the wrong question. What we need is more Beatles books that are worth reading. As the musician and music historian Bob Stanley pointed out, in his 2007 review of Jonathan Gould’s Can’t Buy Me Love, probably the best biography of The Beatles to date, “the subject is pretty much inexhaustible if the writer is good enough.”

Maria

Since Yesterday: The Untold Story of Scotland's Girl Bands is one of those films that, perhaps embarrassingly, feels very necessary. An examination of the history of solely all female bands in Scotland since the 1960s, it is a great demonstration of how little seems to have changed, particularly when it comes to the industry’s perceived "risk" when backing these groups.

We meet Joe first at the keys, singing a pretty good song, but we can hear the pain in the voice – but is that the person or the performance? When Ellie walks in, he leaps up like a cat on a hot tin roof, nervous as a kitten, and we know – it was the person.

In the 1960s, Cilla Black was rescued from hat check duties at The Cavern and made a star. In the 1980s, Rick Astley was whisked away from tea-making at the Stock-Aitken-Waterman studios to launch, 30 years later. a billion RickRolls. In the 2020s, Frankie Taylor is spirited away from a Milton Keynes cinema popcorn stand to the bright (and I mean bright) lights of Bollywood. 

Sam Taylor-Johnson’s biopic Back to Black, written by Matt Greenhalgh and starring Marisa Abela (Industry) as Amy Winehouse, has been criticised for its soft-focused approach.

And its sympathetic portrayals of Blake Fielder-Civil (a punchy Jack O’Connell) and Amy’s dad Mitch (Eddie Marsan) are very different from those in Asif Kapadia’s damning 2015 documentary Amy. The possibility of the famously protective Mitch having any editorial control is denied by Taylor-Johnson, but one wonders.

Art makes for unexpected bedfellows, and so it proves in Jez Butterworth's moving if meandering The Hills of California. Butterworth's first play in seven years owes a lot more to as unexpected a source as the musical Gypsy than it does to such previous successes from this same author as The Ferryman and his mighty Jerusalem.