The Old Queens Head on Essex Road is home to one of the very first solo gigs from ex Pipette Rosay tonight. Now performing as Rose Elinor Dougal, we're told she's ditched the retro vibes of the polka dot princesses and created a year zero for herself using the music of Broadcast, Penguin Cafe Orchestra and The Silver Apples as a base. Rose plays at 8.30 as part of The Cool Fun Club alongside French......

Every month, the folks at Fancyapint? get together to vote for their top ten favourite pubs. These are recently visited pubs that for one reason or another (the ambience, the booze, the company) stuck in their collective memory. Kindly, these booze-savvy Fancyapinters have decided to share their latest picks with Londonist and all our readers. Cheers! Here’s the current list from Fancyapint? in no particular order of merit. They assure us that all ten......

Swanning About Not one, but two Swan Lakes swim into town this week. Take your pick from The Russian State Ballet of Siberia's version at the New Wimbledon Theatre, or the Moscow City Ballet at The Hackney Empire. Expect world-class dance interpretations this classic love story to Tchaikovsky's sublime score at both. Topsy-turvy Theatreland Liverpool comes to Hampstead (in 3 Sisters on Hope Street), Hollywood hits Stratford (Marylin and Ella), and an Asian Tempest......

Hang on to your TLSs. Literary London is a lioness roaring in a few weeks ahead of her regularly scheduled appearance in March. With both the London Word Festival and Jewish Book Week launching this week, we’ve got enough events in our diary to keep us busy until spring. Keep an eye on this space as we highlight our favourites from these festivals over the next couple of weeks. Monday: You want poetry? RADA’s......

Last night, we learned to mix a good drink with a few shakes of the wrist as part of a Valentine's Day dinner date at Cookbook Cafe in the Intercontinental Hotel and wanted to share the mixology secrets to making a romantic cocktail so you can impress your sweetheart by extending Valentine's Day to the weekend, woo your stalking obsession or soothe your poor lonely heart as you watch The Notebook over and over again......

This is the story of a very strange Sunday that started with eight audience members sitting in shop doorways and concluded at a dining table set up on the busy St John’s Road near Clapham Junction. We went through a lot together – a phonebox, a cashpoint, a wedding in a piss-sodden alleyway, a funeral in a car park and then this surreal Sunday lunch. We were family by the time Barry broke his......

As we noted yesterday, art fair season is upon us in full force this weekend. With so many events happening around the capital, it would be hard work to take it all in, and the best advice one can offer is to try to see as much as you can without making it all a rushed annoyance of cab rides. Possibly even better advice, however, would be to make a point to check out......

Part 2: "Let's all go down the strand"...Music Hall. "The music hall is dying, and with it, a significant part of England. some of the heart of England has gone; something that once belonged to everyone, for this was truly a folk art." John Osbourne - 1957. Music Hall helped to shape the entertainment scene in London. It's even had a bit of a revival of late, with music and supper clubs like the......

We first heard of Uptight earlier this week when the great Retro To Go blog mentioned it. Checking it out, the music policy sounded great, and the clubnight is celebrating it's 7th birthday this weekend so if there's ever a time to try it out, this Saturday would be it! We took 5 with DJ and promoter Wayne Gooderham. When and why did you set Uptight up? Uptight was born in the summer of......

Over 270,000 people have signed a Christian petition to oppose the proposed building of a supposedly enormous mosque in Newham. The petition, which closed this week, stated: We the Christian population of this great country England would like the proposed plan to build a Mega Mosque in East London Scrapped. This will only cause terrible violence and suffering and more money should go into the NHS. Human rights organisation Blink lobbied the No. 10......

If you played video games in the 90s, chances are that you also read Digitiser, Channel 4's Teletext games magazine. It was renowned not only for its incisive, honest gaming news, but also for the surreal humour of lead writer Mr. Biffo, which was responsible for breaking the brains of teenagers all over the land. Snakes in hoodies would "cuss each other bad" alongside the letters page, Insincere Dave analysed the day's news, and......

5. Animal Apparitions: horses Throughout the UK, one of the most commonly sighted animal ghosts is that of the horse. Reports of spectral coach and horses are pretty common throughout folklore. On Bayswater Road, along Hyde Park, a horse-bus is regularly sighted. Near Beddington, south London, the gallop of an invisible mare was often heard during the early 1930s. The phantom horse would apparently trot to the gates of Orchard House and then stop.......

Holy smokes! Giant fish on the MTA, Paris Hilton in jail, then out, then in again, Al Gore, goatses, blumpkins, Matt Damon, and baby art critics! It's been a busy week across the Ist-A-Verse, and here's a smattering of what's been going on. In Gothamist's neck of the woods, they found out that many things are possible: A man caught a 40+ pound fish off the Rockaways and took it home on the subway. Graffiti......

With all that went down this week, we thought we thought we'd cheer everyone up by giving everyone a double dose of dogs. It was a rollercoaster ride of emotions this week at DCist. Like the rest of country, we were floored by the news of so many dead coming out of Virginia Tech, and with so many of the victims and their relatives from the D.C. area, we felt it important to pay......

Saturday saw the return of the (not-quite-as) good Doctor, sticking his nose in more London-set alien shenanigans: Ahh the good old Good Hope hospital - or is it St Thomas'? We forget. Anyway, before you can say 'Touch Up London': Off to the moon it goes. Love the shocked throngs of people there. All six of them. There's actually only one actor in that shot. He was then painstakingly reproduced digitally and given a new......

Londonist loves a good protest; they're excellent for the constitution. Nothing like a nice amble all the way from Speaker's Corner to Trafalgar Square with 60,000 (or 2,000, or 100,000, depending on who you listen to) of your fellow Londoners, while carrying an "amusingly" modified placard expressing your outrage about something or other. Yes, Saturday was Stop Trident/Troops Out Of Iraq/Don't Attack Iran marching day, and so march we did, from that symbolic home......

Eurovision season is well and truly on. While in the UK we're all still waiting on the BBC to get on with Making it's Mind Up about this year's entry, there are songs being chosen all around Europe. 11 songs have been chosen and heard so far, and it's a very mixed bag. Here's Londonist's preview of what we'll be seeing, hearing and cheering in Helsinki. Belarus are sending Russian Dmitry Koldun with Work......

We've walked past a lot of cupcakes over the last year. Walked past, hesistated for a very long time, and then kept walking, pulling a sad face while thinking of our waistline. But like it or not, ditch the knitting - cupcakes are the latest essential accessory to make yourself look cool, or at least to make your friends love you long time. With that in mind we caught up with one of London's......

A tribute to the capital’s alleys, ginnels and snickleways. 15. Lazenby Court Where?Short alley connecting Floral Street to Rose Street, Covent Garden. Please mind your head. What?Perhaps one of the shortest short-cuts we've yet featured, this alleyway is nevertheless a relative heavyweight historically. The Court was constructed in 1688, becoming one of the first areas to be built upon in this area. It soon gained a reputation as an excellent place to catch cholera, syphillis,......

Londonist went to see Caroline, or Change at the National Theatre -- Happy 30th N.T.! -- on Monday night and was slightly less entranced than the rest of the London critics. If it's a rave you seek, you can find plenty over at What's On Stage's round-up. While we appreciated the human elements of Tony Kushner's tale of Caroline, an African-American maid to a Jewish family in 1963 Louisiana, and Jeanine Tesori's inventive motown/gospel/klesmer......

This week - Sofia Coppola tells the story of the French queen, (Marie Antoinette), a tale from British ASBO land (The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael) and a family is torn apart by bigotted attitudes to immigration, (Gypo). When writing this column, reading all of the reviews side by side, it becomes clear to us that some homework copying goes on. Either that or great minds (and let's be straight about this this -......

More news of a plot intended to strike terror into our hearts that seems to have been thwarted at the last possible moment: Plans for a Doctor Who spin-off show starring Billie Piper were scrapped at the last minute, series producer Russell T Davies has revealed. Davies later decided the programme, Rose Tyler: Earth Defence, was "a spin-off too far" and called it off. As if turning on the TV wasn't risky enough with......

If you can dare to drag yourself away from the Big Brother final tonight and aren’t whisking yourself away to V, then these are our top recommendations for this week. Friday Stylish Riots Weekender Part I :If you’ve ever been down to Notting Hill Arts Club on a Wednesday night, then you’ll be well aware of the YOYO boys. Now instead of trekking all the way down the Central Line, the hip hop party......

Axl Rose has been visiting London's teenage cancer wards! Guns n' Roses frontman Axl Rose has made a surprise visit to the Teenage Cancer Trust Ward at the University College Hospital in London. Simon Davies, the CEO of the Teenage Cancer Trust Ward, commented: "We were so touched that Axl wanted to visit the Teenage Cancer Trust ward in London." Now, this is great and everything, but it seems to us that letting Axl......

Every one these days seems to have a MySpace page - Kelly Osbourne, Chuck Norris, Bruce Campbell, the Winner / Sinner guy... Of course you're never 100% sure that the tripe written on these pages has really come from the person in question, but then again is there really someone with that much time on their hands that they'd stoop to impersonating Philip Howard? Well yeah probably. The photos he's uploaded all seem to......

This week - A swashbuckling adventure sequel (Pirates of the Caribbean 2 : Dead Man's Chest), a futuristic crime movie featuring 'le parkour' (District 13) and a Beastie Boys concert film with a hilarious title (Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That!) First up, Pirates of the Caribbean 2 : Dead Man's Chest. The Guardian, Times and Independent all award it three stars. It is individual performances that lift this film. Of course, the wonderful Johnny......

Anyone over the age of five still watching Doctor Who? We do of course, but only out of a morbid sense of curiosity to see exactly how bad it can get. The one light at the end of the time tunnel was the upcoming death of Rose. We were hoping she was going to get slowly beaten to death by a Cyberman using Mickey as a club or suffocated in her mum's cleavage, but......

Inspired by our fab night out last night at Do Dirt, we had a quick look about to see what else is going on this weekend and this is the best we could come up with. Tonight we aren't leaving our sofa. Sorry Big Brother! Secret House! Aisleyne crying! Susie being patronising. What more could we want. Tomorrow is where it's at though with the launch party of Good Luck Studio, a new night from......

As we reported yesterday, A rather rain-soaked Nick was on Resonance 104.4FM's show The Big Issue last night, with fellow political blogger James Graham of Quaequam and Alex Runswick of One Perfect Rose. The show was hosted by Mark Hanson. As soon as last night's programme is put up on the website, we will let you know. In the meantime, here is Nick's other appearance on the show, back in March.......

Did you know that ‘London has been the home of the largest, most extensive decorative tiling project ever undertaken in Britain’? And it’s nothing to do with Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen. For their openings around a century ago, over 90 Piccadilly, Bakerloo and Hampstead (Northern) platforms were festooned with decorative and distinctive tile patterns. Every one of them unique. Sadly, many of the ceramic murals are long-vanished. But one man is on a mission to unearth......