He's done acting, he's done hanging on the arms of pretty girls, and now the Welsh wonder that is Rhys Ifans is turning to music. Teaming up with Daf Ieuen from the mighty Super Furry Animals to create The Peth, the band have just released their debut single and have sent it to us for you to have for free. If you like it, you can catch them live on Saturday at Push at Astoria......

If you were out and about on the Underground this weekend you might have caught sight of one of these guys on TfL's latest 'don't be a selfish bastard' campaign. Together for London employs a gang of unthreateningly rounded cartoon figures, The Londoners, each promising to be a better traveller: I will offer my seat I won't play my music out loud I won't drop litter There's even a short split-screen film by Mike......

Ken and TfL launched a new, united scheme for 11-18 year olds who qualify for free travel today. From June, they'll need a snappily titled Zip card which is a free Oyster photocard that must be beeped - a la 'pay as you go' - for them to get around town for nothing. Lurking beneath the shiny revamped scheme though lies the dark beating heart of Big Brother. Compelling kids to beep their Zips......

Dusting off the snow from last year, every day this month the Londonist team will be pointing you in the direction of a Christmas present that (with a bit of luck) you won't already have on your list. Climb up onto our collective lap and we'll see what we can move from our sack to your stockings.. Even seasoned Londoners like learning more about their home city. We're proof - we put our own......

The fifth in our series of interviews with potential candidates for next year's Mayoral election. Previously: Victoria Borwick (Tory), Andrew Boff (Tory) and Warwick Lightfoot (Tory), Sian Berry (Green). Today: Liberal Democrat candidate Fiyaz Mughal. He's competing with fellow LDs Brian Paddick and Chamali Fernando to represent his party in next year's elections. Would you vote for him? Read his ideas below. Where do you live in London and what do you like best......

Good news from the groundswell Music Free Buses… and Trains Campaign which has been lobbying Transport for London to impose a blanket ban on the use of mobile phone MP3 players without headphones on buses. TfL recently incorporated a modest "Keep your music down" sign on the Central Notice on every bus (see here because we bet you’ve never noticed it before) but suddenly they’ve upped the ante and are going to scare the......

After coming a lowly third in the danger-to-hearing stakes we are happy to report that we came first in the holy-crap-we're-all-going-to-die-and-die-horribly stakes (or maybe just get mugged): London is the most dangerous capital in the European Union in which to live, a survey of crime in the EU has found... The survey, conducted by a consortium including Gallup and UN agency Unicri, asked 1,200 citizens in each country about their experiences of crime, rather......

Londonist stumbled across DeathBoy a while ago now through numerous mentions over on Warren Ellis dot com (you can read our interview with Warren here) and have been meaning to sit down and have a natter with the band for ages. We finally got the chance to have a few beers with Scott Lamb (vocals) and Jason Knight (guitars) ahead of their FuturePunk gig tonight and found them to be disarmingly self deprecating and......

A Napster-style music sharing service for the London Underground is reported to be in development, aiming to increase social interaction down below by encouraging commuters to swap music files on their way around the city. The cleverly named Undersound project is accompanied by a very tech-philosophy heavy website - visit here - but has some interesting ideas. 3 million people each day travel through London by means of the Underground, the oldest subway system in......

If our coverage of the latest terror-alertage has seemed a little light the reasons are two-fold. 1) We got the nod from Downing Street early last week that this would be a good time to get out of the country so a small percentage of Londonists missed all the kafuffle by braving the dangerous skies just prior to the balloon going up or by relaxing on Eurostar with more hand luggage, reading material and......

So welcome to the second instalment of our new column on the techy aspects of London life. This time, we’re plugging in our ipods and enjoying a new way of exploring the capital: online audioguides. The idea of being guided round an area of interest – usually a museum – by an audio track is, of course, nothing new. We’ve all used those bulky museum players with big red buttons, which the Kids from......

In debates about abortion, there is one voice that usually goes unheard - the women who have their pregnancies terminated. Tomorrow evening, Abortion Rights is hosting a screening of excerpts from a new documentary that tells the stories of women who've exercised their right to choose, and don't regret it in the slightest. Access to birth control and abortion is crucial for women's equality. But while most people in the UK identify themselves as......

DCist is screwed in the event of an oil crisis. Not that we're not all screwed in the event of an oil crisis, just D.C. is more screwed. Don't sell your car yet, District resident, a cabbie can kick you to the curb if he doesn't like your address. Not even Metro can save you now. Torontoist has got a guy that's going for the world karaoke record. Fifty hours straight. Damn. That is stupid.......

It's been a staple for science fiction movies for sometime that when cars become fully automated some wise arse always wants to turn the auto pilot off and show the machine what a real driver can do - this is usually caused by the potential organ donor being a Neanderthal (see Sylvester Stallone in Demolition Man) or suffering from an overdose of product endorsement (see Will Smith in I Robot). We're finally taking the......

It all started with a wedding. Sitting at a table, comfortably shooting the breeze with complete strangers and you go and say something stupid about writing music stuff for this London blog. All of a sudden you're reminiscing about Radiohead gigs and defending accusations that The Smiths suck. Then you talk about this band someone knows from Leeds who had been building a reputation for great live shows over the past few years. A......

For me, the ideal Sunday starts as a carry on from Saturday, as when the clock strikes midnight I'll probably be found dancing happily to all things smelling of cheese at Wig-Out at Ghetto. Hopefully though, upon leaving the club, a cab will miracously appear and I'll be tucked up all snuggly in bed by about 4am. With no reason to wake up early, I'll gradually arise from my slumber about 1pm whereupon my hunky......

I like nothing better than spending the day down a disused mine shaft under Northmoor trying to work out what happened to my daughter... oh hang on that was Bob Peck's perfect Sunday. Like Ken I'm not constrained to living for the weekend - although sometimes the problem with working freelance and from home is that I have to spend the occasional Sunday working through a soon to be released DVD box set of......

Ever wondered what the Koran would sound like if it were read in an East London accent? Well, if you head over to the always interesting Audio Books For Free site then you can download exactly that: an "audio recording of English translation of the Koran in East-London accent". According to an ABFF.com spokesperson "This is our bit for World Peace and mutual understanding. Hopefully, now more East-Londoners of different cultures and backgrounds will......

Occasionally at Londonist we like to grow our hair long and not shave the various body appendages that any sane person should do in urban environment. 'Jesus sandals' become a mainstay in the footwear department, Janis Joplin an iPOD favourite and lentils start to be all flavoursome. We do this because Londonist cares. That is right - Londonist cares. Londonist cares how polluted our urban environment is. And Londonist wants to do something about......

Who cares about the lowly car radio anymore? Any street hoodlum worth his white powder these days has his eyes on something altogether more high tech. And guess what - its the iPod. Apple's little musical box of tricks is single handedly blamed for the 15% rise in muggings throughout London over the past year. It is old news that the iPods' distinctive white headphones allow criminals to easily target the owners. So logically......

In case you hadn't noticed yet, Resonance FM is, by far and away, Londonist's favourite radio station. Seriously, if you don't have 104.4FM preset on your stereo then you really are missing out... unless that is you're all technologied up and you're listening to their podcasts. Yes, that's right, Resonance have recently begun to offer a selection of their shows as MP3s which can be subscribed to and downloaded automatically to your iPod (or......

News of more free stuff here at Londonist, this time for those of you who can't actually be arsed to go out. Anyone with a passing acquaintance with BBC TV or BBC Radio may have noticed they've gone a bit Beethoven barmy. Between BBC Four, BBC2 and BBC Radio 3 Beethoven's entire body of works will be broadcast, allowing you to get acquainted with some of the more obscure gems in the canon. Londonist......

A New Hairdo by The Tailors is the third release on the indie label Trash Aesthetics. The previous two singles on the label were by Bloc Party and The Rakes, which tells you something about the quality control at the label. A New Hairdo is reminiscent of The Rockingbirds, in the very obvious country influence. Let's be clear, though: we're not talking Shania Twain commercial country-pap, but a more relaxed, slacker kind of country......

Londoonist can confidently predict a good few feet of snow for Christmas Day this year. How do we know? Because ex-weatherman Michael Fish has bet against it. According to the papers Fish "has put his reputation on the line again – betting £1,000 that it will not snow on Christmas Day" Hmm, not much of a reputation really is it? We are talking about the same Michael Fish who told viewers back in October......

As with the weekly TV review, we're trying to come up with a good title for our regular gig alerts. Londonist loves a good pun. Actually, we like an awful pun, too, so any ideas are welcome. Please do your worst in the comments section. We said in a previous post that we'd try to avoid writing about the obvious bands, so in that spirit here are a couple of reasons why you should......

Would you queue in a train station to download music? Londonist thinks it's hard enough to queue in a train station to get train tickets, so we doubt we'd have the patience or the time to use one of the new 'music download kiosks' which are set to appear in Waterloo and King's Cross next month. The kiosks are manufactured by a company called Inspired Network Broadcasting and apparently hold "a 2 million track database"......