When director Chris Columbus decided he wanted to use 671 Lincoln Avenue in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka as the setting for Home Alone, he described the stately five-bedroom Georgian house as “warm and menacing.” This came as a surprise to John Abendshien, who owned it.

“I thought, what on earth does he mean by ‘menacing’!” Abendshien recalled with a chuckle to The Independent. “I always thought it had a warm vibe! But when I saw the completed film for the first time, and the scene where Kevin is preparing to do battle with the Wet Bandits, with John Williams’ soundtrack in the background, and those eerie lights coming out of the house, I thought yes, I get the ‘menacing’ bit now!”

Home Alone was released in 1990 and immediately became a smash hit, topping the box office for three months. In the 35 years since, the tale of eight-year-old Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) defending his home from a pair of dim-witted robbers by any means necessary has cemented its status as a beloved Christmas staple. It is rewatched by millions of fans every year, for whom the grand McCallister house has become as familiar as their own homes.

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In 2023, Dick Van Dyke appeared on the season premiere of The Masked Singer. Hidden inside an ornate gnome costume, the veteran performer sang a rousing version of Louis Armstrong’s “When You’re Smiling” that had the studio audience up on their feet. When he was unmasked later in the episode, the emotional reaction was even stronger.

As the crowd exploded and judge Ken Jeong thanked Van Dyke for inspiring him to get into comedy, Nicole Scherzinger simply burst into tears.

“I love you so much… we love you… The whole world loves you so much,” she exclaimed. “I can’t believe you’re here… I’m trying to play it cool, but you look so gorgeous… You look so handsome.”

Before bursting into a rendition of Mary Poppins classic, “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”, Van Dyke replied: “Oh, thank you… I’m 97 years old!”

Scherzinger wasn’t exaggerating. Over 60 years since he first shared his dodgy cockney accent with the world as Bert “the chim-er-nee” sweep in Mary Poppins, Van Dyke is more beloved than ever. As he turns 100 today (December 13), he has become that rare unifying pop culture figure able to bring together fans from multiple generations and across cultural and political fault lines.

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Jimmy Cliff had one of the sweetest, smoothest voices ever to come out of Jamaica, but to think of him only as a reggae star would be to understate the breadth of his talent and ambition. The pioneering singer and actor — who has died aged 81 — was a restless soul constantly in search of unexplored territory.

Some questioned whether his life would have been easier if he had just stayed in Jamaica making reggae albums instead of journeying around Europe and Africa or traveling to Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Alabama to record soul and rock music.

“I felt, ‘If I put me in this one little bag, I’m going to be suffocated. How am I going to say what else I want to say?’” he told The Independent in 2003. “And that has been a big struggle in my career. They say, ‘You’re a Jamaican, you’re known for reggae,’ so you’re supposed to do that. But I won’t… Looking for the new, that’s fundamental to me.”

I first fell in love with Cliff’s rich, mellifluous voice when I was a schoolboy, after his laid-back but infectiously cheerful cover of Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now” became an international hit in the early Nineties. The song was a three-minute dose of sunshine breaking through our gloomy British skies.

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I wasn’t sure if I’d make it to see David Byrne tonight. My grandmother died this morning, half a world away. It turned into a day of high emotion spent remembering a woman who loved me and my siblings selflessly and unreservedly. Los Angeles seemed to know how I was feeling: the grey skies wept, turning the streets into rivers. At first I didn’t feel much like leaving the house, but when the evening came I was determined to set sail for Hollywood Boulevard. I am, after all, a professional, and perhaps someone “burning down the house” would take my mind off things.

Byrne turned out to be just what was needed: a life-affirming salve delivered in the form of an awe-inspiring spectacle. The 73-year-old has been experimenting with the art of stagecraft since Talking Heads first took the stage at CBGB, dressed like accountants, in 1975. Fifty years on, he’s promoting his new playful, occasionally goofy, solo record Who Is the Sky? It manages somehow to live up to the high bar set by Talking Heads’ groundbreaking Stop Making Sense tour in 1983 (immortalised in the concert film by Jonathan Demme) and his own acclaimed American Utopia run in 2018 (given similar treatment by Spike Lee). Byrne is a professional. The only unknown variable is the audience. About five minutes before the show starts, he makes an announcement to those in attendance that the venue owners have confirmed… it will be OK to dance.

The production for the Who is the Sky? tour in many ways picks up where American Utopia left off. Byrne is once again joined by a large backing group comprising five dancers and seven musicians, all of whom move freely around the stage in a routine by choreographer Steven Hoggett.

Some things, however, have been refined. The grey American Utopia uniforms have been replaced by rich blue suits designed by Veronica Leoni for Calvin Klein. There are vast, high-definition projections capable of transforming the stage in an instant. On opener “Heaven”, for example, Byrne and his band appear to be standing on the surface of the moon, with the Earth rising behind them. “There she is,” says Byrne, pointing to the blue planet. “Our heaven. The only one we have.”

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John C Reilly eyes me warily as I approach him at the deli in the San Fernando Valley where he’s suggested we meet for lunch. He’s standing near the door, dressed in a tan fedora with black suspenders holding up his slacks, looking like a man out of time. His shirt sleeves are rolled up in acknowledgement of the Southern Californian heat, and he appraises me with a cagey look that seems to ask: Is this the writer sent to interview me, or just some crazed fan wanting a selfie and to “shake and bake” with the guy from Talladega Nights?

A few moments later, after we slide into a booth and order matzo ball soup and pots of tea, Reilly confesses he’s become uneasy with his level of fame. When his career first took off in the mid-1990s, Reilly’s humanity and emotional authenticity made him one of America’s finest character actors, beloved by auteurs including Paul Thomas Anderson and Martin Scorsese. Then came a string of big-budget comedies: his aforementioned Will Ferrell Nascar romp in 2006 was followed in quick succession by sublime music spoof Walk Hard and Step Brothers, his reunion with Ferrell that cast the pair as rival step-siblings. It was those films that made Reilly a different kind of recognisable.

“That part of it I didn’t see coming, and I don’t especially like it,” he winces. “I’m much more shy and private than fame allows. I’m not one of those performers that has a hole deep inside that has to be filled by the audience’s anonymous affection.” That shyness marks our time together. On topics he’s keen to talk about, Reilly will happily hold court for 20 minutes uninterrupted. That verbosity, though, is a sort of defence mechanism, a means of keeping the conversation on safe ground; when we veer towards subjects he’s not interested in discussing, he has no qualms about letting a silence hang in the air.

Lately, Reilly has been wondering what it is that motivates him. In recent years, he’s enjoyed blockbuster success voicing the title character of Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph films, and critical acclaim leading an ensemble cast in the HBO basketball drama Winning Time. When the latter was cancelled in 2023, he allowed himself a moment to ponder what he wanted to do next. “I was trying to find meaning for my own life,” he says. “I’m 60 years old. I’ve done over 80 movies, a whole bunch of plays. I’ve made a lot of money and got pretty famous for a kid from the south side of Chicago. I asked myself: what gets you up in the morning now?”

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Several years ago, while visiting the Roman Baths in Bath, I found myself overwhelmed by a profound feeling of existential insignificance. Standing beside the spring water in the remarkably well-preserved bath house, I started picturing the humans, not so unlike me, who had come to wash themselves at that exact spot almost 2,000 years earlier. Each of them doubtless had hopes, dreams and everyday worries that seemed vitally important, yet all of them had long since been rendered flatly meaningless by the same indifferent march of time that would one day relieve me of my own trivial ambitions. It was almost enough to put me off my souvenir fudge.

That same disorientating sensation rushed back to me as I watched How to Shoot a Ghost, a short film by Charlie Kaufman that screened last Friday at AFI Fest in Los Angeles. Kaufman has often explored the big questions of life, death and memory in surreal and astonishing screenplays, including Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Synecdoche, New York, but here he directs from a lyrical script written by the Canadian-Greek poet Eva HD.

The new short follows a translator (Josef Akiki) and a photographer (Jessie Buckley) who have both recently died of unrelated causes in Athens, a place already teeming with the ghosts of various eras. As the spectral pair wander through the ancient city snapping pictures, Kaufman cuts their narrative together with street photography, historical footage and old home videos. The wistful film invites us to wrestle with our own doomed attempts to preserve or capture our fleeting, ephemeral existences. “[Buckley’s] character is trying to hold on to life,” Kaufman tells me the morning after the screening. “I think that’s her motivation in photographing everything, and she can’t. No one can, but certainly after you’re dead you can’t.”

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On the morning of 1 October 1975, Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier stepped into a boxing ring in the Philippines to duke it out for the heavyweight championship of the world. The “Thrilla in Manila”, which Ali won after 14 punishing rounds, caused shockwaves around the planet – not just because of what happened in the sticky heat of the ring, but because of the revolutionary way it was being watched.

Some 9,000 miles away in Vero Beach, Florida, it was still the evening of 30 September when 150 senators, congressmen and television executives gathered to witness HBO become the first television network in history to deliver a continuous live signal via satellite.

“You could not have picked a better event, in all the world, to demonstrate the power of satellites for a new industry than the Thrilla in Manila,” remembers Kay Koplovitz, who was there in the room. What had seemed like a science-fiction fantasy just a few years earlier was suddenly a reality. Television would never be the same.

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This luxurious modern resort is nestled around a secluded bay on Costa Rica’s Pacific coast, and offers cascading pools, exceptional spa facilities and a tranquil escape.

Location

A 35-minute drive west from Liberia International Airport through lush hills and fields of sugar cane brings you to Punta Cacique, a verdant headland on Costa Rica’s Pacific coast. The Waldorf Astoria sits near the tip of the promontory, curled around the small but idyllic Playa Penca.

The sleepy beach town of Playa Hermosa is a short distance away, while the Rincón de la Vieja volcano and its surrounding national park are a couple of hours drive to the north. Public transport options are minimal and Uber is unreliable so it’s worth hiring a car or arranging transport through the hotel if that’s an area you want to explore. At least traffic won’t be an issue: the northwestern province of Guanacaste is the most sparsely populated area in the country.

The vibe

Having only recently opened in April 2025, the first Waldorf Astoria in Costa Rica pulls off a smart trick by feeling both completely modern and like it has been there for decades. The property’s many buildings are neatly terraced within the natural contours of the bay, so although there are 148 rooms and 40 suites here the hotel never feels imposing or like it overwhelms the natural beauty of its setting.

At the centre of the complex are no less than 10 separate pools, spread across various levels so you often feel as if you’re swimming alone. There are adults-only areas as well as a kid-friendly pool complete with a water slide (okay, adults may well enjoy this too). As pristine as the pools are however, none can really compare to the welcoming warmth of a dip in the ocean off Playa Penca. The hotel can provide snorkels, and within moments of setting out from shore you’ll likely find yourself surrounded by inquisitive pufferfish and angelfish.

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Raphael Bob-Waksberg knows how to tell a joke. This comes as no surprise: the 40-year-old American writer was the creator of BoJack Horseman, one of the funniest TV shows in recent memory. The Emmy-nominated Netflix animation ran for six seasons between 2014 and 2020, and was crammed with jokes – visual gags, Hollywood satire, ornate wordplay – and cut with raw, human pathos. His favourite joke, however, Bob-Waksberg inherited from his father.

A Nazi,he begins, is driving down the street. “And when I say Nazi, I mean an actual, classic, German Nazi. The whole shtick. The sort of guy who would murder me for saying the word ‘shtick’.” Bob-Waksberg, dressed casually in a checked shirt and baseball cap, is getting into the setup, gesticulating. “Anyway, this Nazi is driving down the street and he sees a Jew with a long beard and the hat. He rolls down his window and says: ‘You, Jew! Who is the enemy of the German people?’ And the Jew knows the answer, so he goes: ‘The Jews and the bicycle riders.’” He pulls a puzzled expression. “The Nazi says: ‘Why the bicycle riders?’ And the Jew says: ‘WHY THE JEWS?’”

I laugh. Bob-Waksberg smiles shrewdly. This particular joke, he says, explains something fundamental about his comic sensibility. BoJack was, on one level, a daffy comedy about a washed-up TV star who happens to be an anthropomorphic horse. But it was also deeply sincere – a Sopranos-influenced character study of its depressed, substance-abusing antihero. Bob-Waksberg’s new animated series Long Story Short, is a very different sort of show, but one that’s similarly concerned with finding light in the dark (or vice versa). “What I love about that joke is, first of all, I think it’s funny,” he says, speaking today from Los Angeles. “I think it plays with expectations, but I also think there’s real pain there. A lot of what I think the best comedy is, and a lot of the comedy that I write, comes from pain. It is an intermingling of humour and sadness and real cathartic laughter, and I hope this show can be that for some people.”

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In the early 2010s, it seemed as if everyone in indie rock wanted to be Mac DeMarco. The Canadian was the ultimate slacker success story, traversing the globe playing sold-out shows with a guitar in one hand, a half-drunk whiskey bottle in the other and a cigarette dangling from his lips. These days, at 35, DeMarco is already encountering a new generation that just doesn’t see the appeal. “It’s frustrating for me when I meet these young musicians who are like: ‘Oh, touring is so hard and exhausting,’” he says. His tone, at first incredulous, turns lightly mocking. “Maybe there are just too many nepo babies now that are used to sunning themselves in the south of France every summer going: ‘Oh Papa, this venue is so dark and stinky. I’d rather be on the shores of Marseille…’”

Much has changed for DeMarco since those debauched days in 2012 when he first sauntered onto the scene with his sleazy and subversive mini-album Rock and Roll Night Club and its laidback, hook-filled follow-up 2. Today he has a bigger fanbase than ever, with over 20 million Spotify listeners each month, but he’s left his hard-partying lifestyle behind. In conversation, he now cuts an altogether more contemplative figure – without the slightly frayed, nicotinic air of old. One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is his zeal for life on the road. “I tell those young musicians: ‘Don’t you see? This is why!’” he says, his voice rising with the verve of a religious proselytiser. “You get to go on vacation with your friends indefinitely, hang out with new people every night and you’re getting paid to do it! It’s the ultimate adventure!”

Today he’s talking to me down the line from a farmhouse on British Columbia’s Gulf Islands, where he’s decamped with his girlfriend Kiera McNally to grease the wheels for his own next world tour. He recently helped his mother Agnes move to a new home in Victoria, and bought his own tumbledown place a couple of hours away to enjoy the tranquillity of what he calls “a summer cabin kind of vibe”. Soon, his bandmates will join him to start rehearsals. There’s also a new album, Guitar, which he recorded alone at his home studio in Los Angeles in a fortnight and was initially just a pretence to get back touring. “I just wanted to go out and perform,” he says. “We could do that without releasing something, but I think that would make me feel like it was a reunion or greatest hits tour.”

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The sprawl of Los Angeles is dotted with superb restaurants, happening bars and myriad other attractions, all of which are determined to get their hands on your hard-earned dollars. The good news is that one of the best ways to make your visit to one of the world’s most expensive cities easier on your wallet is by booking a stay at one of these excellent hotels, all of which are eminently affordable without sacrificing quality.

The trouble with most of LA’s budget-conscious hotels is that they’re located close to the city’s main airport, LAX, but these come with a catch as they tend to be a long way from the aforementioned attractions so you’ll end up spending significantly more time and money on transport.

Here’s our pick of the best hotels in Los Angeles that offer the chance to stay at a prime location without breaking the bank.

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Los Angeles is a playground for all ages. Where else can you tour a film studio, ride a rollercoaster and hit the beach all in one day? Beyond the famous sights of Hollywood and Venice Beach, the sprawling city is home to a mind-boggling array of family-friendly attractions. For film fanatics there’s Disneyland, the Universal Studios theme park and the Paramount Pictures studio tour. Sports nuts won’t want to miss catching a Lakers or Dodgers game, and you’ll also need to budget some time to explore the city’s museums, beaches and entertainment-packed piers.

If you’re keen to make your time in the City of Angels truly unforgettable, the key is choosing a place to stay that manages to keep the magic going even when bedtime finally rolls around. Here’s our round-up of some of the city’s most unique and inventive hotels that will appeal to children both young and old.

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Given that it’s home to more celebrities per square mile than any other city on Earth, it’s no surprise that Los Angeles does luxury well. Whether you’re keen to soak up some old-school Hollywood glamour or just want to chill out and let your troubles drift away at an exclusive Malibu hideaway, there are a wide and varied selection of high-end hotels and resorts scattered around the city ready to make you feel like an A-lister even if your name isn’t likely to ever appear on the Walk of Fame.

Many of the city’s best hotels are clustered around Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, but if you’re hoping for Pacific views then there are also excellent options in Malibu and Santa Monica. You’d also be remiss to overlook Pasadena, a gorgeously landscaped and historic neighborhood with a landmark hotel to match. Here’s our pick of the most luxurious places to stay in Los Angeles in 2025.

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Los Angeles is more than a city: it’s 10 cities wearing a trench coat. What’s most remarkable is that each of these contrasting areas has its own mood, often seeming to exist in an entirely different era to the next. Down a shot with the statue of Motörhead frontman Lemmy at the Rainbow Bar & Grill before swaggering down the Sunset Strip to catch a show at the Whisky a Go Go and you could be back in the heyday of ‘80s hair metal. Just a few miles away in Hollywood you can watch an old film at Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, opened in 1922, and then cross the street for a Martini at Musso and Frank’s, which hasn’t changed all that much since 1919. Time travel is just a ride-share away.

There’s just as much variety on offer when it comes to choosing somewhere to stay. Many of the most storied and fascinating hotels in the city cluster around West Hollywood and Beverly Hills, and they’re a wise choice if you want a central base from which to explore the full extent of the city’s sprawl. There are also great options east in the grittier Downtown area, while you’ll need to head west if you plan to wake up with a view of the beach in Santa Monica or Malibu.

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I thought Val Kilmer was a superhero from the first time I laid eyes on him. He was my first big-screen Batman, stirring some note of excitement in my soul that had remained untroubled by Adam West’s shark-repellent-bat-spray-wielding TV version. I was nine years old when Batman Forever arrived in cinemas, which was probably exactly the right age to be awed by its schlocky, larger-than-life charms. There was Tommy Lee Jones, seething as the terrifying Two-Face, Jim Carrey stealing scenes as the demented Riddler, and, at the heart of it all, there was Val himself, a superhero who looked like a matinee idol. At least he did when you could see his face. As Kilmer once remarked to the Orlando Sentinel: “Really, in that Batsuit, it wasn’t so much about acting except with your nostrils.”

At the time, it would never even have occurred to me that Kilmer – who died yesterday at the age of 65 – wasn’t having the time of his life strutting around in black rubber and flaring his nostrils at Nicole Kidman. In Leo Scott and Ting Po’s 2021 documentary Val, which was born out of thousands of hours of home video, Kilmer revealed that starring in Joel Schumacher’s comic book romp left him feeling like little more than a tiny cog in a giant machine. He had always seen himself making high art – he went to Juilliard after all – and years earlier had turned up his nose at Top Gun’s “silly script”, before being contractually obliged to play Iceman. He had no such obligation with Batman, though, so he turned down reprising the role for Batman & Robin, passing the poisoned cape to George Clooney, and made The Saint instead.

If, by some unlikely turn of events, I had been a child career adviser to Kilmer at this point, I’d have told him to make exactly that move. The Saint was even cooler than Batman. Based on a literary series by Leslie Charteris, The Saint had already been turned into a TV show in the Sixties starring Roger Moore, so naturally it was expected to provide Kilmer with his James Bond role. Here was a different type of superhero for him to embody: suave, sophisticated and with the top half of his face entirely unobscured.

Things did not work out as planned. Kilmer’s Simon Templar is apparently a master of disguise, but the outlandish costumes and not-great accents just don’t really work in the context of a film trying to play things straight. (It didn’t help that Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery came out in the same year, 1997, spoofing the sorts of films The Saint was indebted to and making it appear even more old-hat by comparison.) What had once been talked about as Kilmer’s chance for his own globe-trotting franchise turned out to be his final appearance as a leading man.

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By his own admission, Carlos Santana has led a charmed life. In 1999, he walked into the studio to record “Smooth” only to find that a team of two dozen people had already figured out the bridge, the chorus and the verses. The song became an international smash hit, winning multiple Grammys and catapulting the virtuoso guitarist back to the top of the pop charts three decades into his career. “All I had to do was just close my eyes and play my guitar,” recalls the 77-year-old contentedly. “I’m happy to say that it’s been like that with my life since I can remember. I just show up, the great spirit orchestrates the scenario, and all of a sudden Carlos Santana looks and sounds really, really good!”

Today he’s at home at his $20m, 8,000 sq ft retreat overlooking Hanalei Bay on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. I can’t attest to how he’s looking, but the great spirit certainly has Santana sounding pretty well. When I ask over the phone how he’s doing, he purrs: “I’m grateful, how are you?” Well, you would be, wouldn’t you? “Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die,” he tells me when I ask, redundantly, what attracted him to life in Hawaii. “When you’re in Kauai, you’re in heaven and you’re more alive than ever.”

Santana is fond of these sorts of metaphysical allusions. He speaks much like he plays guitar, never more than a few moments away from drifting off to some distant cosmic plane. His habit of talking in abstract platitudes is entertaining if occasionally frustrating. Attempting to pin him down to a firm answer can feel like trying to drive a nail through a sunbeam.

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The year is 1996, and a psychedelic rock band with revolution in their ears and methamphetamine in their veins are in full flow at the Viper Room in Los Angeles. The Brian Jonestown Massacre, led by their mercurial, messianic frontman Anton Newcombe, believe they are on the verge of breaking big. A gaggle of music industry power players have been invited to bless their ascension, yet instead what they witness is a chaotic onstage brawl that culminates in smashed instruments and tattered dreams. Newcombe, ejected into the night by security, seethes: “You fucking broke my sitar, motherfucker!”

This scene plays out early in Dig!, perhaps the most rock’n’roll documentary ever made. Ondi Timoner’s 2004 film revolves around the contrasting fortunes of the Jonestown and their more industry-savvy friends and later rivals the Dandy Warhols. The camera travels from grimy bedsits to lavish video shoots and sold-out festival appearances, capturing the grit, the debauched determination and the righteous fervour required to believe your music really might change the world. The actor Jonah Hill has declared it to be a landmark work comparable to Goodfellas. Dave Grohl called it “the most honest, warts-and-all description of what it’s like when you and your friends join a band, jump in a van and try to start a revolution”.

Twenty years on from its release, a new extended cut of the film, dubbed Dig! XX, is back in cinemas and set for digital release. The additional footage adds depth and context, including the backstory to Newcombe’s oft-quoted sitar line. More than that, thanks to the additional perspective offered by the last two decades, the film now plays as a fascinating snapshot of music industry excess just before the business was kneecapped by streaming. In 2025 it can’t help but pose questions about whether joining a band, jumping in a van and trying to start a revolution is even a dream anyone entertains anymore.

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I’m standing at the bar talking to Jon Hamm about Anora sweeping the Oscars (“The right film clearly won,” the Mad Men star is telling me) when we’re both distracted by a vision in white. Lauren Sanchez literally pirouettes into our eyeline, wearing a strapless bridal dress with a mermaid skirt and a train trimmed with feathers. She has an emerald necklace around her neck, while her hair cascades in waves. She looks, to put it bluntly, like a quintessential Bond girl.

As an accessory, Sanchez is accompanied merely by the world’s third richest man, Jeff Bezos, who stands watching her spin in a black satin jacket paired with a white bow tie. At a guess, I’d say his outfit cost several times my monthly rent. Still, I spy a rare opportunity to lean over and ask the question a good proportion of the planet has wanted to put to him for the last week and a half. “Jeff,” I say, “What are you planning to do with James Bond?” Bezos scans the vicinity, as if checking for clandestine listening devices, before delivering a succinct answer. “We’re going to make great movies,” he says.

This is the Vanity Fair post-Oscars party, in full swing at a purpose-built venue next to the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills. Hollywood’s biggest awards show wrapped up a little over two hours ago and now the A-list are here, rubbing shoulders with the whatever-comes-before-the-A-list. Chris Rock is on the dance floor, chatting to Olivia Wilde and slapping palms with Diplo. Sofía Vergara is ordering tequilas with Michelle Rodriguez. Sacha Baron Cohen is hanging out with Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom. On the other side of the room, Timothée Chalamet has just arrived with Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian in tow. Their presence has created a sort of celebrity vortex, a huge traffic jam that forms as the free-flowing party gets sucked inexorably into their orbit.

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They may have spent their whole lives preparing for this moment, practicing their acceptance speeches in front of the mirror while clutching hairbrushes like statuettes, but for those who emerged victorious from the Academy Awards, the reality of actually being handed an Oscar clearly takes some getting used to. Backstage in the press room, we got a front-row seat as winners staggered through, looking like deer caught in headlights coming from every direction.

Even the first winner of the night, Kieran Culkin, who made his film debut aged seven in Home Alone, looked like he was levitating over the stage. “I’m not fully inside my body right now,” he murmured through a wide grin. “I’m trying my best to be present.” Despite his dazed look, Culkin characteristically still cracked jokes, making fun of the numbers journalists had to hold overhead to get the moderator’s attention: “Number two-thousand eight hundred and sixty-four… what’s your question?”

There weren’t quite that many of us, even if it seemed like it from the stage. I was one of around 175 journalists from 40 different countries and territories who made it through the barriers that cordon off a long stretch of Hollywood Boulevard and past the bomb-sniffing dogs to be the first to greet actors and filmmakers as they celebrate what may well be the high water mark of their professional lives. “This is the pinnacle of my career,” said Paul Tazewell, the first Black man to ever win the Oscar for Best Costume Design for his work on Wicked, before movingly describing his journey through an industry without role models. “The whole way through, there was never a Black male designer that I could follow, that I could see as inspiration,” he said. “To realize that that’s actually me, is a Wizard of Oz moment. There’s no place like home.”

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The Brutalist begins with a squalling maelstrom of sound. In the mesmerising opening sequence of Brady Corbet’s epic Best Picture frontrunner, we see Adrien Brody’s László Tóth fleeing the Holocaust in the dark hold of a ocean liner before he eventually stumbles out into the light, elated but unbalanced, as the Statue of Liberty veers into view upside down. Staggering piano arpeggios and siren-like tubas fill the score, landing us disorientated and dazzled in Tóth’s shoes.

For composer Daniel Blumberg, who’s up for a Best Original Score Oscar this weekend, that’s the point. “That’s my approach to filmmaking,” he explains over a video call from his London flat. “I want people to be in the world of the film, so it’s about trying to find a sonic language that’s specific to the piece.”

There’s an oft-quoted adage that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, but Blumberg – once best known as the frontman of indie bands Yuck and Cajun Dance Party – found himself in the novel position of actually having to write music about architecture.

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On Saturday, 4 May, 1974, Jimmy Carter took the stage at the University of Georgia School of Law to address an audience that included lawyers, journalists and the Democratic Party luminary Ted Kennedy. At the time, Carter was Governor of Georgia but could not run for reelection, so was starting to mull a longshot bid to become the next President of the United States. He used his speech to tear into the justice system in his own state and other parts of the country, arguing bluntly that it favored the rich and powerful at the expense of everybody else. Carter explained he got his understanding of justice from two sources. One was the work of the American Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. “The other source of my understanding about what’s right and wrong in this society is from a friend of mine, a poet named Bob Dylan,” said Carter. “After listening to his records about ‘The Ballad of Hattie Carol’ and ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and ‘The Times, They Are a-Changing,’ I’ve learned to appreciate the dynamism of change in a modem society.”

Half a century before Kamala Harris embraced “brat summer”, it was pretty unusual for a prospective American president to align themselves with a musician in such a prominent way. Yet Carter – who died at the age of 100 on Sunday (29 December) – wasn’t shy about declaring how much he’d learned about American society listening to Dylan records. “I grew up as a landowner’s son,” he continued. “But I don’t think I ever realized the proper interrelationship between the landowner and those who worked on a farm until I heard Dylan’s record, ‘I Ain’t Gonna Work on Maggie’s Farm No More.’”

While Carter’s forthright declaration of love for rock’n’roll would have surprised the veteran lawyers listening on, it caught the ear of a younger generation. One of the journalists present that day was Hunter S Thompson, reporting for Rolling Stone. He was supposed to be covering Ted Kennedy’s run for President, but wrote later that as soon as he heard Carter mention Dylan he fetched his tape recorder. “It was a king hell bastard of a speech,” wrote Thompson, “and by the time it was over he had rung every bell in the room.” In December of that year, Carter officially announced his run for the Presidency and he was swept to office two years later.

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At the start of December, out of the blue, author Elijah Wald received an early Christmas present from Bob Dylan. In a message posted to social media, the legendarily elusive singer-songwriter praised the casting of Timothée Chalamet as his younger self in the upcoming biopic A Complete Unknown and then took a moment to salute Wald’s book Dylan Goes Electric!, which helped inspire the new film. “It’s a fantastic retelling of events from the early Sixties that led up to the fiasco at Newport,” wrote Dylan. “After you’ve seen the movie read the book.”

When I catch up with him at his home in Philadelphia, Wald sounds as if he’s barely recovered from the shock. “It was astonishing,” he says. “Completely unexpected. Historically, he simply hasn’t done that. I had asked his manager at some point whether he had seen the book, and the response was: Bob doesn’t read Dylan books. So this was a very pleasant surprise.”

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It’s hard to overstate what a cultural phenomenon The Lion King soundtrack was in 1994. Of the five songs written by Elton John and lyricist Tim Rice, three were nominated for Best Original Song at the Oscars (with ballad “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” triumphing over the epic “Circle of Life” and the exuberant “Hakuna Matata”). Two were nominated for Song of the Year at the Grammys. The soundtrack album was the biggest-selling record of the year in the US, holding off competition from the likes of Nirvana, Green Day and TLC. The songs form the basis of the highest-grossing musical in the history of Broadway. Thirty years on they remain embedded in our collective consciousness, so Lin-Manuel Miranda could be forgiven for feeling wary about being called on to provide the tunes for follow-up Mufasa: The Lion King. “Well, when you list it like that, it’s terrifying!” he says, a sly grin breaking through his black goatee. “I didn’t think about any of those stats!”

Miranda, of course, knows a thing or two about creating cultural phenomenons himself. The 44-year-old New Yorker made his Broadway debut in 2008 with his Tony Award-winning musical In the Heights. A few years later came Hamilton, the hip-hop-inspired historical musical about one of the founding fathers of the US that became a bona fide pop culture juggernaut. It’s been a fixture on Broadway since it debuted in 2015, and in London’s West End since 2017.

Given his track record, Miranda didn’t feel the need to seek counsel from his predecessors John or Rice. “I’ve spoken to them about other stuff. This hasn’t come up,” he demurs. “He’s been very busy,” he adds of Elton. “He’s got Devil Wears Prada and Tammy Faye.” The former, a musical based on the 2006 fashion comedy, began its run in the West End in October. The latter, about the life of evangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, opened on Broadway in November, although it has since announced its closure. “We’ve almost switched,” says Miranda. “He’s like the Broadway baby right now and I’m writing this movie music.”

Growing up in Manhattan in a middle-class Puerto Rican family, Miranda had his sights on the bright lights of Broadway from an early age. He started writing In the Heights while attending Wesleyan University, setting the story in the Washington Heights neighbourhood where he still lives with his wife Vanessa Nadal, whom he’s known since high school. They have two sons, 10 and six, with the eldest named after Sebastian the crab from The Little Mermaid. Clearly, Miranda’s love of Disney runs deep. Today, we’re sitting in the shade at San Diego Safari Park, with giraffe, rhino and Somali wild ass grazing on an ersatz savannah behind us. In a separate enclosure nearby, an impressively maned African lion named Bo lazes in the sunshine. The location has been chosen by Disney for its long association with The Lion King franchise: legend has it that animators visited the park ahead of the 1994 original for inspiration and promptly added Timon to the script as comic relief after falling in love with the meerkats.

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Next time you hear Gala’s rave hit “Freed From Desire”, spare a thought for Danny Dyer. When the Rivals actor’s beloved West Ham won the UEFA Europa Conference League last year, the team’s star winger (and Dyer’s future son-in-law) Jarrod Bowen scored the winner in the 90th minute and sparked euphoric scenes all the way from Prague to East London. The stands were quickly reverberating with a crude folk anthem set to the song’s tune. “Bowen’s on fire,” sang the fans. “And he’s shagging Dani Dyer!” Luckily, Dyer was able to see the funny side. “I think there’s a bit of romance in it,” he told an interviewer later. “Think about it: It’s a compliment. They’re saying Bowen is on fire, which is unreal, and he’s also shagging Dani Dyer. So if you think about it, they’re saying it can’t get any better. So there’s a compliment in there. Listen, sometimes I’ll start the song off.”

Dyer isn’t the only one to get caught up in the irresistible surge of energy sparked by “Freed By Desire.” In the last few years, the song has become a ubiquitous presence everywhere from football terraces to darts tournaments and protest marches around the world. Last year striking teachers sang: “My pay’s no higher, Rishi Sunak is a liar…”, while countless football fans have adapted the lyrics to fit their favourite players, a trend that began in 2016 when Newcastle United fans sang it in tribute to Aleksandar Mitrović and a Wigan Athletic fan went viral after recording himself singing about striker Will Grigg.

The song, which has just been re-recorded and released, was an international hit and peaked at number 2 on the UK charts back in 1997. Its resurgence may have come as a surprise to some but not to its creator, Gala Rizzatto. “The people brought the song back,” she says over Zoom from her home in Brooklyn. “People say to me: ‘How do you feel about it? It’s so random!’ It’s not fucking random. It’s energy, energy, energy. You put in energy, and somehow it comes back.”

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A quarter of a century ago, it seemed like nobody wanted Dogma. Kevin Smith’s subversive comedy about a pair of disgraced angels (played by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon) was met with fierce protests soon after it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival. Writer-director Smith, riding high off his 1997 romcom Chasing Amy, received 300,000 pieces of hate mail, including several “bona fide death threats”. Religious campaign group the Catholic League picketed outside cinemas. Critics also sharpened their knives, with The Independent’s Gilbert Adair among those who crucified the film. “Nothing, absolutely nothing, not a single idea, not a shot, not a camera movement, not a performance, not a gesture, not a gag, nothing at all, I repeat, works in this movie,” he sneered.

Some of us, though, couldn’t get enough of the film, which celebrates its 25th anniversary on 12 November. I was a Sunday School-attending teenager when I first stumbled across Dogma on late-night television, and I was hooked from the moment Linda Fiorentino’s beleaguered abortion counsellor Bethany set upon Alan Rickman’s Metatron, the flaming voice of God, with a fire extinguisher. He had appeared in her bedroom to recruit her on a quest to stop Bartleby and Loki, Affleck and Damon’s fallen angels, from making it to a church in New Jersey. There they intend to use a doctrinal loophole known as a “plenary indulgence” to wash away all their sins and sneak back into heaven. What they don’t realise is that in doing so they’ll disprove the fundamental concept of God’s omnipotence and immediately wipe out all of existence.

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They were supposed to be real-life fountains of youth. In March 2000 the term “Blue Zone” was first used to describe Sardinia, an Italian island that appeared to be home to a statistically improbable number of people living past the age of 100. In the decades since, four more areas have been identified around the globe where locals apparently have an increased chance of becoming a centenarian: Okinawa in Japan; Nicoya in Costa Rica; Ikaria in Greece and Loma Linda in California. These so-called Blue Zones have inspired countless studies, cookbooks, travel stories and even their own Netflix documentary series (2023’s Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones). The trouble is, the outlandish claims about the life-giving properties of these regions just don’t stand up to close scrutiny.

Last month, Dr Saul Newman of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize for his work debunking Blue Zones. Newman’s investigation into serious flaws in the data about the world’s oldest people saw him take home an award that has been handed out since 1991 for scientific research that “makes people laugh, and then think.” Newman says that when he looked into the claims about Blue Zones he found a pattern of significant data being routinely ignored if it didn’t fit the desired narrative, and statistical anomalies that could be better explained by administrative errors or cases of pension fraud. “It’s as if you gave the captain of the Titanic nine goes at it and he’s smacked into the iceberg every time,” Newman tells The Independent of the research. “What’s most astounding is that nobody in the academic community seems to have thought it’s ridiculous before this. It’s absurd.”

Take Sardinia, the original Blue Zone. While it was purported to be home to crowds of centenarians, EU figures show that the island only ranks around 36-44th for longevity in the continent. Many of those who were supposed to have reached very old age in their Italian idyll turned out to in fact be dead, they just hadn’t been reported as such to the authorities. “Sometimes the mafia is involved, sometimes it’s carers,” says Newman. “There’s a lot of cases in Italy where younger relatives have just kept claiming the pension even though granddad’s out the back in the olive garden.”

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Bill Gates didn’t see the conspiracy theories coming. The Microsoft co-founder built one of the most immense fortunes the world has ever seen with his foresight about the personal computer revolution, but he never predicted so many people would end up using those machines to cast him as a baby-guzzling, shape-shifting lizard who puts microchips in vaccines and plans pandemics for profit. “I thought the internet, with the magic of software, would make us all a lot more factual,” he laments, a wry smile playing beneath his black-framed spectacles. “The idea that we kind of wallow in misinformation… I’m surprised about that.”

Not that he’s complaining. “I don’t care how I’m perceived,” the 68-year-old assures me over a video call (Microsoft Teams, naturally) from his office in Kirkland, on the banks of Lake Washington, opposite Seattle. So even when “a woman came up and yelled at me that I implanted stuff in her, that I was tracking her” he took it in his stride. “My life is fantastic,” he says. “I’m the luckiest person alive, in terms of the work I get to do.”

Online misinformation troubles Gates not because of his personal reputation, but because it’s the rare problem he doesn’t have an answer for. In his new five-part Netflix documentary series, What’s Next? The Future with Bill Gates, the multibillionaire shares his optimistic vision of a world where scientific innovation rolls back climate change and eradicates deadly diseases while advances in artificial intelligence leave us all free to enjoy perpetual leisure time. It’s just the conspiracy theories that have him stumped. “I feel a bit like we’ve handed that to the younger generation,” he says. “Both to face up to and to figure out: ‘Okay, what’s this boundary between free speech and incitement to violence, or harassment, or just craziness that gets people not to take health advice?’”

Gates is well aware that one reason grotesque and outlandish rumours about him capture the public imagination is because, as he puts it in the show, “extreme wealth brings with it questions about your motives”. He stepped down as CEO of Microsoft in 2000 to establish the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with his then-wife, aiming to give away “lots of money to save lots of lives”, yet he remains one of the world’s richest people (seventh on the real-time Forbes list, with an estimated net worth of $138bn).

I ask him directly whether he can reassure me that billionaires do have the best interests of the rest of us at heart. His answer doesn’t exactly set my mind at ease. “I’m a huge believer in the estate tax [the American equivalent of the UK’s inheritance tax] and more progressive taxation,” he replies. “I don’t think we should generally generationally let families whose great grandfather, through luck and skill, accumulated a lot of wealth, have the economic or political power that comes with that.”

Not a ringing endorsement of the billionaire class, then. Would he agree that he is too rich? “If I designed the tax system, I would be tens of billion dollars poorer than I am,” he nods. “The tax system could be more progressive without damaging significantly the incentive to do fantastic things.”

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Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence has reacted to Vince Vaughn’s comments about R-rated comedies, saying that producers don’t know what they want until they see a formula become a success.

Vaughn recently said Hollywood producers “overthink it” and have become too risk-averse to gamble on R-rated comedies that aren’t based on a pre-existing IP.

Lawrence wrote and produced Vaughn’s new crime comedy series Bad Monkey, which arrives on Apple TV+ on August 14.

An adaptation of the 2013 New York Times bestselling novel by cult Florida crime writer Carl Hiaasen, Lawrence describes the series as the sort of show “you don’t see anymore… banter-driven, R-rated comedies that actually have some real stakes.”

“I hope it works,” Lawrence told The Independent. “Because the second one works, everyone wants it.”

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Jonathan Jacob Meijer says he didn’t mean to become The Man with 1000 Kids. For a start, the Dutch sperm donor at the centre of Netflix’s unsettling new three-part docuseries disputes the figure in the title, claiming the real number of donor children he’s helped bring into the world is closer to 600. In the show, the 42-year-old former high school teacher and Crypto trader is portrayed as a zealot determined to spread his seed as far and wide as possible. Mothers from all over the world, who have been having his children since 2007, speak out against him. “I never had the idea to have 100 children or 500 children,” he tells me, speaking down the line from the Netherlands. “It happened step by step. Many donors want to be in the news, but for me if nobody knew about me that would be absolutely fine. Now they do know about me, so I want to explain my side of the story.”

Meijer’s journey to become one of the world’s most prolific sperm donors began when he was at college, where he got talking to a friend who was unable to have children of his own. “He was the first person to put the idea of sperm donation in my mind,” recalls Meijer. A period of introspection followed, as he weighed up how becoming a donor could change his life. A year later in 2007, aged 25, he signed up at a sperm bank. “At first it was really great,” he remembers. “I knew that the people who got my sample would be super happy, and they’d create a family. That’s something meaningful and real.” As he became more at ease with the idea of being a donor, he began to see it as a shame that he had to remain anonymous. “I thought it was a pity I couldn’t meet people and see the smiles on their faces,” he says. “Then I read about websites where you could donate privately, and I realised it was something I wanted to do as well. It felt more complete to me.”

He posted adverts with photographs showing off his long, blonde hair, on Dutch websites where women sought out sperm donors, explaining who he was and his motivations. Right from the start, he says the response was overwhelming. “From the moment I put up the advertisement, an hour later there were four or five emails already. That would go on the whole day,” he explains. “People think I had this plan from the start, but I thought I’d maybe help one or two people.” Instead, he says he found himself filtering through masses of responses. “I know people think I’m crazy and that I help too much, but in my opinion I was super selective,” he says. “People really don’t understand the shortage of donors.”

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When Kiefer Sutherland announced the death of his father, Donald Sutherland, at the age of 88, he called him “one of the most important actors in the history of film”. If the claim sounds hyperbolic, it is borne out by celluloid history. The elder Sutherland’s film career began in the early 1960s and spanned seven decades and more than 150 features to the present, with his final performance coming in last year’s western series Lawmen: Bass Reeves. His CV includes classics across several genres, including the 1970 anti-war satire M*A*S*H, the 1973 thriller Don’t Look Now, and his more recent appearances in The Hunger Games. At 6ft 4in, he was a towering presence on screen and cast a lengthy shadow.

Donald McNichol Sutherland was born in the Canadian east coast seaport of Saint John, New Brunswick on July 17, 1935. His parents were Dorothy and Frederick, who ran the local gas, electricity and bus company. His first word, he once told Esquire, was “neck”. “My mother turned around and said, ‘What did he say?’” Sutherland recalled. “My sister said, ‘He said, neck.’ My neck was killing me. That was a sign of polio. One leg’s a little shorter, but I survived.”

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Joan Baez was 28 years old and six months pregnant when she walked out on stage to headline Woodstock in August 1969. It was late enough that Friday had become Saturday, so she greeted the tired and tripping masses with a bright: “Good morning everybody! Thank you for hanging around.” Over the next hour she held them spellbound with songs written by the likes of Willie Nelson, The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, having helped to usher Dylan into the limelight just a few years earlier when she invited him on stage with her at Newport to duet on the protest anthem “With God on Our Side”.

Only one song, “Sweet Sir Galahad”, was a Baez original. “It’s the only song I’ve ever written that I sing anywhere outside the bathtub,” she announced over the mud. “Because I’m just smart enough to know that my writing is very mediocre.”

Baez no longer thinks her writing is mediocre, but this revelation came to the 83-year-old only recently. “I started getting more confident about three months ago,” she says, with a musical laugh that lets me see the diamond embedded in gold in one of her teeth. It’s easy to think of Baez as the original long-haired folkie, but these days, with her silver pixie cut and twinkling tooth, there’s a touch of the rock’n’roll pirate about her. “People said to me so many times, ‘But they’re good songs!’ So I went back and listened… and they’re good songs!”

Baez released the last of her 25 albums in 2018, and retired from touring the following year. Today, she’s at her rural home in Woodside, outside Palo Alto in northern California, speaking to me over video call from in front of an antique wooden organ in her kitchen, surrounded by copper pots and candles. She is about to publish her first collection of poetry, When You See My Mother, Ask Her to Dance, which offers further evidence that Baez’s vivid, expressive soprano and unerring ability to fuel her activist politics with song are far from the sum of her talents.

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Jon Bon Jovi takes a sip from a bottle of water and flashes that unblemished smile. The stadium-filling rock star has somehow always managed to retain a reputation for clean living. He may have come of age amid the excess of Eighties hair metal, but the 62-year-old has resolutely steered clear of at least the narcotic element of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. As he tells me via video call from London, it was a bad experience in his youth that kept him on the straight and narrow over the next four decades.

“It was smoking something that was laced with something else, and I remember feeling out-of-body high and thinking, ‘I don’t like this. I don’t feel comfortable with this,’” he explains, leaning forward in his chair. “It was scary, and I was so young that I was glad I had that sort of ‘scared straight’ moment.” At least, when his vocal cords atrophied catastrophically in 2022, he knew it wasn’t due to any drug habit. “I couldn’t blame it on putting anything up my nose,” he laughs. “The only thing that’s ever been up my nose is my finger!”

Years of living healthily have served Bon Jovi well. His heartthrob grin is still intact, and his hair, albeit now a shock of white, has retained its famously tousled “run your hands through it” look. Dressed in a tight black T-shirt, he exudes a youthful ebullience, slipping comfortably into the role of raconteur. There is, though, a touch of pathos to his laughter. The last tour by his group Bon Jovi, one of the world’s most successful rock bands with over 120 million albums sold, came to a grisly end in April 2022 with the singer collapsed on the floor of his dressing room in Nashville, his voice shot. That summer he underwent cutting-edge surgery to repair his vocal cord, fully understanding the risk that he may never tour again.

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Wim Wenders’s new film Perfect Days is perhaps the only Oscar nominee in history to be based on a series of Japanese public toilets. Just when you thought we’d exhausted every conceivable type of intellectual property, here comes the German auteur to offer a whole new definition of IP. In 2022, Wenders was approached by the Tokyo Toilet art project, which had commissioned leading architects and designers to create 17 toilets spread across the city’s fashionable Shibuya district. They hoped Wenders might make a documentary about their sparkling new facilities. Instead, he envisioned a simple drama about a man who cleans them.

We get to know Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) through his daily routine: the toilets he cleans thoroughly and methodically, the public baths where he does the same to himself, and the frequent commutes where he listens to his favourite music on cassette tapes that intrigue and baffle the film’s younger characters. These tapes are the key to unlocking his character, so when Wenders decided to open the film with Hirayama sliding in a battered cassette of The Animals’ eerie 1964 recording of “The House of the Rising Sun”, he worried it might not be the right choice.

“I felt I was imposing myself, and that this was cultural appropriation,” says the grey-haired 78-year-old thoughtfully from a hotel room in London, eyes twinkling behind blue-framed glasses. “I said, wait a minute. This is a Japanese character a few years younger than me, can I impose my musical taste? This is not a good thing!”

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When Hollywood needs a bad guy, Ben Mendelsohn will answer the call. The 54-year-old Australian was on hand to help Darth Vader develop the Death Star in 2016’s Rogue One, and stomped his way around Sherwood Forest as the Sheriff of Nottingham in 2018’s Robin Hood. His filmography is stacked full of scummy, shady characters who’ll menace your grandmother as soon as look at her, but that’s all a far cry from the thoroughly charming bloke I find myself in conversation with one sunny Friday morning.

“Do you mind if I smoke?” he asks as we settle in. “Does it bother you?” Given that we’re speaking over video call from opposite sides of Los Angeles, I figure I’m probably safe from second-hand smoke. Still, it’s polite of him to ask. He grins impishly as if to say, well, you can’t be too careful these days. “You know,” he says, with a wave of his soon-to-be-lit cigarette, “2024!”

Mendelsohn is at home in Silver Lake, in a navy blue sweater and a pair of black-framed glasses that he habitually removes to gesticulate with, as a sort of counterweight to the cigarette in his other hand. He’s eager to tell me about his latest role, which isn’t a baddie at all. He’s playing the wildly influential French fashion designer Christian Dior in the Apple TV+ series The New Look, which premieres tomorrow. The show looks tailored to debut as the perfect date show for Valentine’s Day: part haute couture biopic, part Second World War thriller. “Dior is a beautiful guy to play, with his reserve of strength, his fragility and integrity,” says Mendelsohn. “We all know his name, but no one knows anything about him, really.”

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George Clinton reflected on the highs and lows of his seven-decade career in music as he was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Friday (19 January).

The funk pioneer, 82, was honoured with a ceremony that featured speeches from Red Hot Chili Peppers singer Anthony Kiedis, legendary Motown songwriter Janie Bradford and civil rights lawyer Ben Crump.

Hundreds of fans thronged down Hollywood Boulevard outside the Musician’s Union to witness the unveiling of the 2,769th Walk of Fame star.

“This feels good as shit,” Clinton announced. “I’m proud as hell.”

Clinton, who grew up in Plainfield, New Jersey before becoming a songwriter for Motown Records in the 1960s, pointed out that he hasn’t always received such plaudits.

“I learned early on in this journey that you are only as big as your latest hit,” said Clinton. “So you had to keep things in perspective, to keep from getting a big head. I found out that there would be times when it seemed like everyone knew your name. Then were times when no one knew you. I learned to respect the balance.

“If I needed to hear my name spoken out loud, I would go to the airport and page myself! That’s how fickle the ego is. Sometimes, I might be alone in the mirror and think: ‘I’m all that, I’m a bad motherfucker!’ Then I go ahead and flush the toilet along with the rest of the shit!”

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From the moment he first laid eyes on it, Steven Donziger knew he had to do something about the oil. It was 1993, and the newly graduated human rights lawyer was in Ecuador investigating allegations that Texaco had dumped billions of gallons of toxic waste in the Amazon rainforest.

“I expected to see pollution, but I was shocked at the level of it,” he remembers now. “It was just blatantly out there on the floor of the jungle. Olympic swimming pool-sized lakes of oil that had been placed there deliberately by Texaco, then left and abandoned. They were leaching into the soil. There were pipes draining into the streams and rivers that people were drinking out of. It was obvious it was an apocalyptic nightmare.”

That moment lit a fire in Donziger that still burns to this day, 30 years on. Beneath swaying palm trees in a hotel bar in Santa Monica, the 62-year-old is speaking passionately about the case that consumed his life. At 6ft 4in, with close-cropped grey-white hair, he cuts a commanding but good-humoured figure, especially considering that until a few months ago an ankle tag had kept him confined to his Manhattan apartment for 993 days.

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Luna Luna, like a dream, almost vanished from memory. In 1987, in Hamburg, the Austrian pop-star-turned-artist André Heller threw open the gates of a one-of-a-kind fairground. Inside, wandering circus acts performed in front of carousels and carnival rides designed by a crew of the greatest artists of their time. Some were already world famous, like Salvador Dalí, David Hockney and Roy Lichtenstein. Others were eccentric Europeans or the rising stars of the New York street art scene: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf and Keith Haring. That summer, 300,000 lucky visitors swarmed into the park, immersing themselves in colourful, radical, witty, sometimes scatological art. Then, like a circus leaving town, Luna Luna packed up and disappeared.

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Himesh Patel began his acting career in a state of panic. It was 2007, and on the morning of the then 16-year-old’s final GCSE exam, he received a phone call asking him to audition that afternoon for a role on EastEnders. The moment he finished the test, his dad rushed him to the casting. It was only as Patel read the character description that his nerves subsided. He was up for the part of Tamwar Masood, a somewhat geeky, studious boy with an older sister, whose parents ran a post office. All of that was true of Patel, too, and he aced the audition. He was a working television star before he’d even started his A-levels, but his real-life parents weren’t going to let him get swayed by glitz and glamour.

“I did the paper round until I was 21,” remembers Patel now, a little incredulously. “For five years of doing EastEnders, I was still doing the paper round. I hated it at the time, but looking back it kept me in check and stopped me getting carried away with being on telly and being mildly famous.”

Patel spent nine years on the long-running BBC soap, taking Tamwar from a bit-part character to a much-loved fan favourite who unexpectedly became a stand-up comic and married Danny Dyer’s onscreen daughter. Since leaving the show, he’s continued to confound expectations: first, by landing the lead in Danny Boyle’s Beatles-inspired romcom Yesterday, then by popping up as a suave fixer in Christopher Nolan’s Tenet and as Jennifer Lawrence’s journalist boyfriend in the end-of-the-world satire Don’t Look Up. In some ways, his rise is a remarkable one; in others, it is perfectly comprehensible. Patel is a natural everyman, with a quiet charisma and an earnestness that acts as a sort of narrative lightning rod. No matter how unfamiliar the world or outlandish the plot twist, Patel can ground it, make it real.

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This June, when Tupac Shakur belatedly received his star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, a crowd of hundreds turned out for the occasion. Pressing up against steel barricades, they rapped his songs and chanted his name. Almost three decades after his death, Shakur still feels powerfully alive. He was a star for just five years, from the release of debut album 2Pacalypse Now in 1991 to his death in 1996 at just 25 in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas, for which nobody was charged until a few months ago. Despite the brevity of his time in the spotlight Shakur released four albums – three of which went platinum – and appeared in six films. That work – and the 75 million record sales that followed – have ensured a kind of immortality. It’s no coincidence Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg brought him back as a hologram for Coachella a decade ago. Apparently untroubled by death, Shakur has always stayed relevant.

While Shakur may now be an icon to millions, when Staci Robinson first met him he was just an incredibly confident 17-year-old with a notepad full of ideas. They attended the same high school, a few years apart, and Robinson went on to become a novelist and screenwriter. They kept in touch, with Shakur inviting Robinson to join a scriptwriting group he was planning to put together out of a desire to create female characters with authentic perspectives and voices. The first meeting was scheduled for 10 September 1996, three days after Shakur was shot and fatally wounded.

A few years later Shakur’s mother Afeni, who died in 2016, asked Robinson to write a book about her son. After months of interviews with those who knew him best the project was put on hold, where it remained until Robinson’s involvement in last year’s museum exhibit Wake Me When I’m Free and this year’s documentary miniseries Dear Mama. As with those projects, her newly published Tupac Shakur: The Authorized Biography takes Shakur off his pedestal as one of the greatest rappers of all time and instead lets us see him as a mother’s son, shaped first by Afeni’s revolutionary politics and then often again by the women he spent time with.

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In the gloomy grandeur of a Spanish Gothic theatre in downtown Los Angeles, singer Ian Astbury and guitarist Billy Duffy are reaching into the deepest recesses of their back catalogue. As the songwriting partnership at the heart of The Cult, the pair helped pioneer the first wave of Gothic rock and went on to become one of the decade’s biggest and most influential bands, filling stadiums and in heavy rotation on MTV. But before any of that, they were a post-punk band called Death Cult, making raw, impassioned music that howls viscerally about the plight of Native Americans and the horrors of war. Tonight is a resurrection of sorts, a one-off American show ahead of a UK tour. Before the set closes with the majesty and mass euphoria of 1985’s “She Sells Sanctuary”, Astbury pauses for just a moment. “Thanks,” he says, his face smeared with white make-up and sweat, “for the rebirth of Death Cult.”

A week later, Astbury meets me for a curry at a hole-in-the-wall Indian restaurant in Hollywood beneath the Capitol Records Building. Dressed head-to-toe in black, the 61-year-old may have mountains of stories – from rock’n’roll hijinks to seeking spiritual enlightenment among the monks of Tibet – but he maintains a healthy aversion to nostalgia. “I don’t really live in a time machine,” he tells me, digging into a plate of saag chicken, rice and vegetables. “If you come to my house, I don’t have any discs on the walls or photographs and memorabilia. Actually, in 1995 I put it all on the barbecue and set it on fire.”

The decision to return to Death Cult after 40 years might seem counterintuitive, then, but for Astbury it felt like too poignant and auspicious an opportunity to pass up. “The 25th anniversary? Whatever! 30th? No. But this time I felt something different,” he says. “For Billy and I, it’s been incredible, because we go, ‘Oh, this is our DNA, where we came from.’”

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Pete Townshend had a vision. In 1970, in between writing Tommy and Quadrophenia, the then 25-year-old guitarist and songwriter started work on a rock opera set in a Britain suffering ecological collapse. With pollution choking the air, an autocratic government keeps the population docile with a constantly streaming entertainment network known as “The Grid”. Townshend called this ambitious project Lifehouse, but when plans for a movie version fell through and it became clear that even his bandmates were struggling with the convoluted plot, he admitted defeat and repurposed the bulk of the music for a conventional rock album, Who’s Next. Bookended by a pair of indelible anthems, “Baba O’Riley” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again”, the record, born of compromise, is often considered The Who’s finest work.

Now, over half a century later, the band have released an expansive 11-disc box set, showcasing not just the majesty of Who’s Next but also a trove of Townshend’s home demo recordings that sketch out what Lifehouse – now called Life House – might have been. The timing seems apt. On the day Townshend and I speak over video call, the prime minister has just announced the rollback of a swathe of key environmental policies across the UK. As miserable as the news is, I can’t help but ask whether Townshend gets some sense of vindication from knowing he saw this future coming all those years ago.

“Fuck!” he replies, gloomily. He’s at home in the English countryside, wearing a black beanie and some serious-looking headphones. His white goatee is neatly cropped, and he has the air less of a veteran rock star than of a particularly curmudgeonly academic. “I don’t know about Rishi Sunak,” he continues. “I don’t know about the Tory party, per se. They say, when you get older, you drift from being on the left to on the right. I suppose there was a gentle drift with me. I’m 78, and between 60 and 70 I think I was starting to drift slowly to the right, but… fuck!” That expletive is followed by a reckless outburst of anger: “I would line them all up and shoot them.”

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Making wine in California is a competitive business. While the north of the state is home to some of the most celebrated grape-growing regions in the world, in the last few years many young winemakers who’ve found themselves priced out of Sonoma and the Napa Valley have instead been flocking south to the Santa Ynez Valley. Centrally located in Santa Barbara County, this up-and-coming area has established itself as a cooler, more boutique and (somewhat) more affordable alternative to its powerhouse northern neighbours.

It helps, too, that Santa Ynez is just a couple of hours’ drive from Los Angeles. This prime location has helped the area attract a host of creatives drawn by the more relaxed pace of life and the temperate weather. The Santa Ynez Valley benefits from a geographical quirk: in California, most mountain ranges – and thus valleys – run north to south. In Santa Barbara County, however, the valleys run east to west due to shifts in tectonic plates some 20 million years ago. This means that every morning the area is cooled by a sea breeze, creating a highly desirable climate – and making it a world-class location for growing grapes like Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.

The valley comprises six hamlets, each with its own distinctive character. There’s the quaint, Danish-inspired village of Solvang; the historic town of Santa Ynez; the tiny, tasting-room-filled Los Olivos; the growing towns of Ballard and Buellton; and Los Alamos, which is steeped in real-life cowboy heritage. The way the surrounding land is used is another thing that sets the Santa Ynez Valley apart from the more well-known northern Californian wine regions.

“In Sonoma, you have farm country,” explains Daisy Ryan, executive chef and co-owner of Michelin-starred foodie destination Bell’s in Los Alamos. “Down here, it’s ranch country. That history runs deep.”

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In August 1971, Stephen Stills arrived in Berkeley for the final dates of his first ever solo tour to be greeted by a surprise visitor: David Crosby. Just a year earlier their pioneering folk rock supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young had imploded in a blizzard of booze, cocaine, rampant egos and lopsided love triangles. That night, however, there were no hard feelings. “He came to see me in the dressing room before the show,” remembers Stills, who promptly invited his old friend to join him on stage. “I said: ‘Let’s do “The Lee Shore”’ and he said: ‘Alright!’ We didn’t run through it that many times – and it shows! But that’s the way we rolled back then. It was marvellous.”

Their heartfelt duet appears early on Stills’s new album Live at Berkeley 1971, which is drawn from recordings the former Buffalo Springfield guitarist recently unearthed during a deep dive into his archival vault. Now 78, Stills is speaking to me over a video call from his airy home in the hills above Los Angeles. The snowy white beard sprouting in a tuft from his chin may give him the appearance of a medieval friar but in conversation he’s mischievous and puckish, with an irreverent attitude towards his own music.

“There are some rather strange vocals,” he says of the live album, which features a solo-acoustic set followed by a full-throated electric performance backed by legendary Stax musicians the Memphis Horns. “I remind myself of… well, the term ‘barking mad’ comes to mind. We were very enthusiastic, and by the end of the shows I was literally barking because I couldn’t make the notes and everything was too fast!”

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Lately, Ian McEwan has found himself reading a lot of Ian McEwan. It’s not that the 74-year-old author has been struck by a sudden attack of solipsism; rather, he’s deep in preparation for a one-off performance with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican. Backed by 80 musicians, the Booker Prize winner will deliver extracts from a career that stretches over 16 novels, from the psychological horror of 1978 debut The Cement Garden to bestselling tragic romances such as Atonement and On Chesil Beach. Most recently, he published Lessons, a sprawling, semi-autobiographical look back at the sweep of history in his lifetime. Selecting which passages to perform from that rich material has been a revealing process. “It was like a review of a big chunk of my adult life,” says McEwan. “There were moments when my fingers twitched around an imaginary blue pencil and I thought: ‘I wouldn’t punctuate that like that now.’ Other times I was thinking: ‘Wow, that was good. Have I declined?’ It was a fascinating thing to do.”

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Silver Lake has something of a reputation. Dubbed the “Williamsburg of the West”, this hilly Eastside neighbourhood is known as LA’s foremost hipster hangout. Don’t let that put you off, however; the area’s plethora of bustling bars, inventive restaurants and boutique shops make it the perfect place to while away a sunny afternoon and, unlike many parts of Los Angeles, it really lends itself to being explored on foot. Seemingly a world away from the intensity of Downtown or the boisterous energy of Hollywood, Silver Lake encourages you to slow down, take it easy and drink the city in.

The area is centred around the reservoir from which it takes its name, built in 1907. The historic Vista Theater, which sits on the border of Silver Lake and Los Feliz, opened in 1923 before sadly becoming an early victim of the pandemic nearly a century later. Thankfully, the cinema has since been bought by Quentin Tarantino, who is reportedly adding a bar before it reopens. Among Silver Lake’s other cinematic claims to fame is that it was home to Walt Disney’s first LA studio in 1926 (the site is now the location of a slightly less glamorous Gelson’s supermarket).

To get your bearings, head to Sunset Junction. This busy hub is the meeting point of two of Los Angeles’ major arteries: Sunset and Santa Monica Boulevards. It’s also the perfect place to start your Silver Lake adventure.

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When it comes to food, the United States are a land of plenty. Great meal options abound, from lobster-filled sea to shining sea, with portion sizes tending towards the gluttonous. Those hoping to eat their way across America would be wise to travel with their most loose-fitting trousers – and a taste for adventurous new cuisines.

From farm-to-table fine dining and innovative vegetarian dishes to comforting fast food staples like cheeseburgers and hot dogs, you never have to travel far in the States to find temptation. There are certain places, however, that have developed a culinary world all their own; here are the US cities no true foodie should miss:

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The National Park System is one of the crowning glories of the United States. Signed into creation by President Woodrow Wilson in 1916, there are now a total of 63 national parks spread across the country. From sprawling landscapes straight out of classic Westerns to towering mountain ranges and lush wetlands, they offer a diverse range of opportunities to explore the country’s unspoilt wilderness.

Last year America’s National Parks welcomed a grand total of 312 million visitors, up 5 per cent from 2021, although still some way short of the record 331 million visitors who flocked to the parks pre-pandemic in 2017. If you’re planning a visit this year, here are some of the best places to enjoy America’s Great Outdoors:

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It’s the turn of the century. New York’s music scene is flatlining. Enter The Strokes, all surly insouciance, torn denim and tattered Converse. Theirs is an electrifying din; mixing distorted vocals with spindly guitars, it’s the defibrillator that the rock ’n’ roll scene so badly needs. From grimy graffiti-covered toilet stalls in dingy dive bars, these five New Yorkers stumble bleary-eyed out onto the biggest stages on the planet.

In Meet Me in the Bathroom, a new documentary based on journalist Lizzy Goodman’s 2017 book of the same name, directors Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace journey back to this strange and distant land. They return with a treasure trove of grainy archive footage capturing the creative upheaval that produced era-defining bands, including Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD Soundsystem, Interpol, TV on the Radio, and The Moldy Peaches. “Those bands built a scene in a really DIY way, without the access to millions of people that the internet gives you, and without this notion of self-promotion that happens on social media,” explains Southern, speaking over video call from London. “We wanted to put it on the screen for people who were there, and also for a new generation of aspiring musicians.”

The film picks up the story in 1999, at a time when the idea that New York could return to its place at the centre of the musical universe seemed far-fetched. Much of the Lower East Side was boarded up, and almost three decades had passed since legendary Manhattan punk club CBGBs had fostered the likes of Television, Patti Smith, Blondie, Talking Heads and the Ramones. “I remember thinking, maybe New York wasn’t the kind of city anymore that produces iconic bands,” Adam Green of The Moldy Peaches says in the film’s archive footage.

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