On this experience the Van Morrison live show is akin to a religious experience – it’s lots of older people sitting in near silence having an occasionally transcendental experience.

When I was about seven years old, I remember being sent out of class for sobbing uncontrollably. Why? Because I was wearing woolly tights.

IT’s been a good week for gay rights. Plans for equal marriage in England and Wales made it through the House of Commons (although they still need to get past the House of Lords) and the Church of Scotland voted to admit gay ministers.

Scottish Opera’s new season is short on big productions, but in revisiting its roots it’s hoping for a ‘leaner, fitter’ fresh start

THERE MIGHT not be the kind of ructions associated with its premiere in Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on 29 May, 1913, but punters at Edinburgh’s Jazz Bar should certainly sit up and take notice next Wednesday night when pianist David Patrick and a top-notch Scots-German assembly of jazz musicians pay a centenary tribute, 100 years to the day, to Igor Stravinsky’s explosive pagan ballet score, The Rite of Spring.

Camera Obscura didn’t look far from home when writing their new album, but they did travel continents to get the right sound

Crowdsourcing, popular among musicians, is now shaping the EIF, discovers David Pollock

With its Twitter references and electronic music, Dundee’s degree show is the work of a generation at ease with the digital world, but also reacting against it. These young artists knit, sew and make models too

The foibles and mores of the past are a rich seam from which to mine humour, as a revival of Patrick Barlow’s Buchan adaptation amply demonstrates

House music and voguing are more politically radical than you might think. Kirstin Innes on a festival where clubbing rubs shoulders with transgender theory and the avant garde

The Coen Brothers’ new film, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival this week – far, far ahead of its UK release date of 24 January, 2014.

Alistair Harkness reviews the rest of this week’s film releases

Inspired partly by his own youthful idealism, Oliver Assayas’s new film is a poignant meditation on protest and disillusion

Alistair Harkness welcomes the chance to revisit an indie auteur who was as important as Quentin Tarantino or Richard Linklater

A remarkable collection of Scottish mountaineering memorabilia is housed in cardboard boxes in a barn near Fort William. Roger Cox meets the man who has put it all together and hears his dream of one day housing it in a purpose-built museum

KATE Garraway, her off Daybreak who is married to Derek Draper, is fronting a new campaign called Get Britain Fertile. It features Garraway made up to look like she’s about 102, sporting an enormous baby bump.

Tim Day took this picture while flying over Tantallon Castle near North Berwick in a Bucker Jungmann biplane

A SAXOPHONIST who tours the globe with pop star Beyonce is among the highlights of this year’s Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival as organisers seek to open up the ten-day event to a younger audience.

Douglas Hood’s photograph of Liathach and Beinn Eighe was taken from a rowing boat in the middle of Loch Clair

Only 500 copies of the first edition of the first Harry Potter book were published, and a very special one is up for auction, crammed with notes and drawings by JK Rowling, writes Martyn McLaughlin