The Guardian Entertainment

Jason Orange does not believe that I am a Take That fan. We've only just met and he is interrogating me to that end. 'Of course you say you like us,' he says. 'But that could be a tactic.' He is somewhat playful, somewhat serious, very compelling: a feline, considered creation in a razor-sharp suit, with a broach of plastic butterflies attached to his left lapel. 'It's a good tactic; but I've seen it before.' But I am a fan, I say. 'Prove it,' he says. Around us, an improbable quantity of people make themselves busy on the former set of BBC2's Dragons' Den, ... Read Full Story

In the early Sixties the young George Ivan Morrison briefly played saxophone in a Belfast showband called the Olympics. Once, before a gig in Derry, the band's minibus pulled up outside his house on Hyndford Street, east Belfast and lead singer Alfie Walsh knocked on the door. Van's mother, Violet, answered, and after a few seconds of banter Walsh returned to the minibus alone. 'Yer man can't play,' he told the other band members. 'His ma says he's not coming out... He's upstairs in his room writing poetry.' Though this anecdote may have grown in the telling, it illustrates the adolescent Van Morrison's otherness. ... Read Full Story

If the rumours are true, there may be a new Eminem album before Christmas, the Howard Hughes of hip hop returning from a four-year absence to raise a middle finger to the season of goodwill. Since the release of Encore in 2004, there has been speculation that Marshall Mathers III, 36, has lost his way - devastated by the murder of his best friend, DeShaun 'Proof' Holton, outside a Detroit club two years ago, and piling on the pounds after a short spell in rehab to fix an addiction to prescription pills. In this last respect, his fate echoes that of Elvis who, like ... Read Full Story

Boris Godunov Coliseum, London WC2, until 1 Dec Berezovsky Trio IndigO2, London SE10 Where would Russian opera be without Alexander Pushkin? The author of Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades, from which Tchaikovsky fashioned two of his finest works, he also wrote the poems upon which Rimsky-Korsakov based his The Golden Cockerel and other operas, and the play from which Mussorgsky adapted his morbid masterpiece, Boris Godunov . Unabashedly nationalist in both style and content, but neglected after his death, the piece was later reworked by Rimsky and Shostakovich; English National Opera has opted for his original 1869 version, a sequence of seven ... Read Full Story

Beyoncé Knowles' third solo album has a pretty enticing pitch. Short enough to fit on one CD, it's nevertheless split over two. The second, ... Sasha Fierce, contains the usual pop-R&B, but the first is being sold as offering a rare insight into Knowles' real psyche: "I Am ... is about who I am underneath all the makeup, underneath the lights, underneath all the exciting star drama." It sounds intriguing. In interviews, Knowles is guarded to the point of banality. Were she any nicer, she'd have to dole out Gaviscon during interviews to stop journalists bringing up their lunch. Just occasionally, however, her music ... Read Full Story