Penulis: Agus S

After a ‘quiet little break’ of 20 years, the band is back to celebrate their 2000 debut Reflector – then the fastest-selling Australian album in history

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In 2022, Ella and Jesse Hooper, siblings and bandmates in Australian rock band Killing Heidi, lost both of their parents in the space of two weeks. Their father, Jeremy, died first after a shock cancer diagnosis and a quick decline; a fortnight later, their mother, Helen, passed away after a long struggle with breast cancer.

The grieving siblings took the weekend off, then went straight back out on to the road.

“It did remind me a bit of the early days: we would work through everything and anything,” Ella says. “It gives you a shitload of grit: growing up in rock’n’roll and having a band to shepherd through success and post-success and trauma, then success again.”

Life, in all its surprise and sorrow, has happened to the siblings from Violet Town, Victoria in the decades since they tookAustralian musicby storm at the turn of the millennium. Gone are the dreadlocks – Jesse, now 44, removes his cap to reveal a bald head when asked if the controversial hairstyle will ever return – but their youthful spirit remains. This month, they will hit the road to play their chart-topping debut album, Reflector, in full, marking its 25th anniversary.

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For many Australians, Killing Heidi is the sound of growing up. “It’s like sunscreen, cut grass, those things that have a time recall … Are we one of those? Are we sunscreen?” Ella, 42, quips.

The Hoopers were teenagers when they won Triple J’s Unearthed competition in 1996. Radio veteran Myf Warhurst met them a few years later when she was starting out at the station, and immediately noticed their “magic dust”.

“I just remember how gorgeous and delightful they were, these little country kids who were clearly bursting with talent and charisma,” Warhurst says. “I don’t know if we knew they were going to go as big as they did at that point, but you could certainly tell they were going to make something happen.”

And they did. When Reflector was released in March 2000, it became the fastest-selling Australian album in history at the time. Its major singles, Weir and Mascara, were inescapable. As a preteen, I was struck by the sight of a girl not much older than me – Ella was 17 then – rocking colourful hair, piercings and a don’t-care attitude. Killing Heidi was a perfect crossover act: friendly enough for mainstream radio, with an edge that appealed to the alternative crowd.

For the siblings, it was all a whirlwind. “I remember performing at the Big Day Out for the first time … When you see it in people’s faces in the crowd, the sea of people going, ‘this is the set we’ve been waiting for’ – I was deeply complimented by that,” Ella recalls. “There were other things that happened [that festival], like the Red Hot Chili Peppers mentioning us on stage … That really blew my mind. It still does, that we did that on our first album.”

The nature of local success has changed since, as streaming and social media has homogenised music consumption worldwide. “I don’t know if anyone [in Australia] can be successful in quite the same way as we were – I don’t often see those white-hot moments where it’s just everywhere,” Ella says. “I can’t think of any that have gone through that since [the likes of] Silverchair and Jet … It was different.”

Over the next few years, the Hoopers and their bandmates – drummer Adam Pedretti and bassist Warren Jenkin – released records and toured relentlessly. “We were always looking to the next thing,” Jesse says. Then, in 2006, they suddenly disappeared.

Ella and Jesse both laugh when I ask what actually happened.

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“My thinking was, I don’t actually even want any attention on this breakup, so we’ll just stop and see if anyone notices – which worked remarkably well,” Ella says. “I can’t believe we got away with that.”

“We wanted it to be a quiet little break,” Jesse says. “We’d been doing it since we were 15.”

It was technically an indefinite hiatus – but, Jesse says, “We never really spoke about when, or if, we were going to put Killing Heidi back together.”

The Hoopers stayed busy in those years. They formed a new acoustic duo, The Verses. Ella began her solo music career, appeared on TV shows like Spicks and Specks and hosted radio programs. Jesse started working in music education and mentoring. In 2013, Ella proclaimed that Killing Heidi would never get back together: “I don’t think I could sing such youthful and youth-based songs convincingly any more,”she saidat the time.

So what’s changed? “Our stories were so teenage, so young and so connected to a version of me … When I said that in 2013 I was still probably trying to distance myself,” Ella says. “I needed to mature, to be able to go back and put my hand on 15-year-old Ella’s shoulder … I don’t think you can do that just a few years out from being that age. It takes a little longer to become an adult that can hold different phases of yourself.”

Killing Heidi started performing again in 2016, when they were invited to headline the Queenscliff music festival, and have played festivals almost every summer since – with no plans to record new music. Pedretti is still behind the kit, and Clio Renner (keys) and Phoebe Neilson (bass and backing vocals) add “a lot more feminine power”, Jesse says.

The band was billed to play Reflector in full at Good Things festival last year, but due to technical difficulties they never got through the whole set. The upcoming tour will be the first time the record has ever been performed in its entirety. “I had to put on the CD to remember,” Ella jokes.

Playing this music together is particularly meaningful for the siblings these days – as Ella points out, they are each other’s only remaining immediate family. “[The music] tells the story of our teenage times, which connects us to who we were when our family was different,” she says. “It’s very special.”

The 25 Years of Reflector touris in Adelaide 20 June, Perth 21 June, Brisbane 26 June, Sydney 27 June and Melbourne 28 June

The hugely popular reality competition series has led to a string of similarly devious yet undeniably lesser copycats

This is a punt, but Fox might have started to commission new shows via the power of online thesauruses. Take its new reality show The Snake. It’s a game of secrets and betrayal, of feigning one emotion to gain trust while you stab your new friends in the back. In other words, it’s basically The Traitors.

I don’t know whether any of you have ever searched Merriam Webster for synonyms of ‘traitor’, but ‘snake’ is literallysecond on the list. And this laziness is indicative of the show itself, which is such a painfully halfhearted retread of The Traitors that it ends up being exhausting to watch.

Hosted by Jim Jeffries, presenting in the style of a drunk guy shouting through his letterbox at 3am, The Snake gathers contestants from the most easily stereotyped professions – detective, ex-con, pastor, Onlyfans model – and has them connive at each other until only one remains. The runtime of the first episode is almost exclusively given over to letting these people describe exactly how unpleasant they are. Subsequent episodes involve gross-out challenges, like drinking meat smoothies or being relatively close to some insects, so in that regard a direct comparison to The Traitors is slightly unfair, because it’s actually ripping off The Traitors and Fear Factor in equal measure.

But perhaps this isn’t such a surprise, because at the moment you could wade through television blindfolded and stumble into any number of shows that desperately want to be The Traitors. Maybe you saw Netflix’s Million Dollar Secret, which was a version of The Traitors set in a luxury hotel. Or Netflix’s The Trust, which was a version of The Traitors hosted by someone from CNN. Or maybe you saw the USA Network’s Snake in the Grass, or ITV’s The Fortune Hotel. Perhaps you even accidentally found yourself watching Amazon’s 007: Road to a Million, which was a version of The Traitors explicitly designed to make you feel depressed about the future of James Bond.

None of these shows are shy about their inspiration. They are all about people encouraged to screw over their peers for a quick buck. But the problem is that, as a format, The Traitors is unbeatable. It is beautifully simplistic. People move into a castle. Some of them have to secretly undermine everything. Everyone goes crazy with paranoia. That’s it. It’s bulletproof. A monkey could understand it.

But the networks can’t just produce a straight remake of The Traitors, because that would be cheating. And so every new iteration has to add some new element, a gimmicky format point that differentiates it just enough to be legally distinct. With The Fortune Hotel it was a sunny location. With The Snake it’s adding too many unnecessary insects. But this sort of tinkering can easily overwhelm a format.

In the UK, ITV recently produced a Traitors knock-off called Genius Game that was so absurdly convoluted – every episode was full of endless tedious explanations about bags and tokens and codes and zombies and garnets – that it quickly felt like the worst kind of hungover Boxing Day board game imaginable, the kind where everyone gives up halfway through and just ends up eating Twiglets in silence. It was like watching The Traitors, but a version of The Traitors that had been loaded with so much superfluous paraphernalia that its ankles shattered under the weight.

And, true, television has always done this. We’ve already lived through the Pop Idol phase, where civilians were alternately encouraged to either sing or cry on command. And then there was the Love Island phase, where we found ourselves inundated with an infinite number of nimrods copping off in villas. The Great British Bake Off formula has been variously transposed to sewing, pottery, dressmaking, glassblowing, flower arranging and, probably before long, bereavement counselling. Now it is the turn of The Traitors. A year or two from now another show will get its time in the test tube.

That said, maybe The Traitors deserves this fleet of copyists. After all, The Traitors is not a new idea. It’s based on Mafia, a game devised in the halls of Moscow State University in the 1980s. It’s also incredibly similar to the board game Secret Hitler, not to mention a BBC showthat was literally called Traitorand ran for five episodes in 2004.

Even so, The Traitors stands as the perfect refinement of the idea; it is thrilling and accessible in equal measure. None of its copycats have even come close to replicating it.

Still, the night is young, and there are still 41 perfectly unused synonyms for “traitor” left in the thesaurus. Coming soon: The Rat (The Traitors but organised crime), The Quisling (The Traitors but wartime Scandinavia) or The Stool Pigeon (The Traitors but everyone eats cold chicken bones out of bins).

Chaos, distrust and so many sex scandals … Ahead of his epic new series Shifty, the great documentarian charts the UK’s slide towards Whitehall’s worst nightmare

The mood is very fragile. There is a feeling of global disorder and growing chaos. The threat of war edges ever closer. Some people are even predicting revolution in the UK. Two weeks ago,Dominic Cummingsgave an interview to Sky News prophesying violent uprising, then wrote on his blog that there is “Whitehall terror of widespread white-English mobs turning political … Parts of the system increasingly fear this could spin out of control into their worst nightmare.”

I think something much deeper is going on beneath the surface of Britain today. Two years ago, a historian called Christopher Clark wrote a book that makes you look at your own time in a completely different way. Called Revolutionary Spring, it tells the story of the unrest that swept Europe in 1848. In a few weeks, uprisings spread like ferocious brushfire – from Paris to Berlin to Vienna, Prague and Milan. Thousands of demonstrators stormed national assemblies and kings fled their countries, caught up in a wave of violent upheaval never seen before. Clark’s book inspired me to make Shifty, my new series of films, because the world he describes feels so similar to today. One in which “the political horizon was dark. Neither nations nor governments knew where they were going.

“Everyone had surrendered to doubt and anxiety. All forms of belief were enfeebled, all forms of authority shaken, social bonds had reached breaking point. The political horizon was dark. Neither nations nor governments knew where they were going. There was a sense of being ‘on the eve of bloody wars and internal strife’.”

All the revolutions failed in their original aim. But out of them came the bourgeois class that was going to run society in the future. Fascinatingly, Clark showed how from that came all the ways of ordering the world that we today accept as eternal – not just the political structures of left and right but fundamental ideas of our time, like social class. But he is clear that they may be temporary. “They belonged to the world that had not yet encountered the great disciplining identities of modern politics. We belong to one in which those identities are swiftly dissolving.”

I wanted to make a series set in Britain over the past 45 years that shows how all our political certainties dissolved. It is built of hundreds of moments that try to evoke what it has felt like to live through this age. The mood is that strange twilight zone between history and memory; fragments that have not yet been fixed into a formal version of the past. From intersex dogs and fat-shaming ventriloquists to avant-garde hair. Leeks by moonlight. Ken Dodd’s suitcase. Nuns playing ping pong. Margaret Thatcher’s handbag. A scanner from Maplin. Netto. And dark moments – racist attacks, suspicion of others and modern paranoia about conspiracies in Britain’s past.

Above all, I wanted to trace the rise of the thing that has destroyed the confidence of our age: distrust – not just of those in power, and of “truth”, but of everything and everyone around us and, ultimately, of ourselves.

It didn’t start like that. Thatcher believed that if you liberated people from state control they would become better and more confident. But to do this, she turned to radical rightwing economic thinkers – some of whom were very odd. About 15 years ago, I went to see a US economist called James Buchanan. I had to drive for hours deep into the mountains of Virginia to his farm. He told me that you couldn’t trust anyone in any position of power. Everyone, he insisted, is driven by self-interest.

We sat in a darkened room, with a thunderstorm raging outside, as he told me firmly that human beings didn’t just follow their own self-interest when they were buying and selling stuff; they were driven by it all the time. So when people in power talked of being motivated by “public duty”, they were lying.

He called this “public choice theory”, and it had an enormous effect on the advisers around Thatcher. It explained to them why all the bureaucrats that ran Britain were so useless. The economists invented a system called New Public Management (NPM) to control them. NPM said it was dangerous to leave people to motivate themselves through fuzzy notions such as “doing good”. Instead, you created systems that monitored everyone through targets and incentives. Constantly watching and rewarding or punishing. It was the birth of modern HR. Anyone who has ever dealt with HR and their monitoring systems knows instinctively that they don’t trust you. There is a very good moment that was captured on adocumentary about London Zoo in 1993made by Molly Dineen. The zoo had brought in a new HR expert who explains to the mild-mannered zookeepers how incentives and targets work. “Once you do that,” he says, “you’ve got them in the Grinder.”

That’s Buchanan’s theories at work. And it was a terrible virus that was going to spread.

But the roots of distrust didn’t just come from the right. The patrician liberals in Britain were completely shocked that large sections of the working class voted for Thatcher. They had always drawn their influenceand prestige from the idea that they cared for the “little people” and the “less well-off”. Now they turned on them in fury. I found a clip of the novelist Martin Amis promoting his book Money. Dripping with disdain, he says the working class have been seduced by the vulgar allure of money. They are, he said, stupid.

It was at that moment the influence of liberal intellectuals began to slip. Power was shifting.

There was one institution Thatcher still trusted, though: the security services. Even that crumbled with the case ofGeoffrey Primewho worked at GCHQ. It started when Prime’s wife came home to find him being questioned about the assault of a local girl. After the police left, he told her that he was the man they were looking for. She asked him if there was anything else she should know. He said yes: he’d also been spying for the Russians for the past 17 years.

Thatcher was stunned. MI5 had vetted Prime five times and hadn’t noticed anything. Even the Russians knew he was a paedophile. It became clear MI5 was hopeless. And when it failed to prevent the siege of the Libyan embassy in 1984, she ordered the home secretary, Leon Brittan, to reform it. MI5 fought back – spreading rumours through journalists that Brittan was a predatory paedophile, part of a secret ring of paedophile MPs in Westminster. Thirty years later, those rumours would burst to the surface as part of Operation Midland. None of it was true.

By the end of the 80s the belief that you couldn’t trust anyone in public life, which Buchanan started, finally came round to the politicians themselves. It was basic logic. If you believed public duty was a fiction, and all public servants were lying when they spoke of public duty, weren’t the politicians also public servants? Which meant they must also be lying when they proclaimed they were working for the public good.

One of the key figures in this process was the infamous publicistMax Clifford. He had picked up on the groundswell of distrust and found a way to monetise it. Clifford specialised in putting two or three of his clients together and cooking up stories from which they all benefited.

He started in the late 80s with a famous radical leftwinger called Derek Hatton. He took him to a nightclub – which Clifford also represented. He photographed Hatton next to an heiress of the Baring bank family – whom he also represented – and cooked up a passionate romance between them. Then he turned to the Tories. When a government minister called David Mellor was revealed to be having an affair, his mistress – Antonia de Sancha – came to Clifford. He took her to meet the press in restaurants he represented, then told them stories about Mellor making love in a Chelsea shirt while toe-sucking and spanking. All invented.

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Clifford had opened the floodgates. In the early 90s, MP after MP was revealed to be a sleazy hypocrite who seemed far more concerned with his own weird sex life than governing the country and serving the people. The one I love is the story of David Ashby MP. He sued the Sunday Times in 1995 when they accused him of being a homosexual. He admitted he hadshared a bedwith another man, but said it was purely to save money on holiday. He admitted that his wife did call him “Queenie” and “Poofter”, but said that was only because she was lonely in the marriage. He had bought her a dog to make her feel better. But it didn’t work. Ashby told the court she threw plates and kitchen knives at him. She threatened to “kick him in the bollocks to stop him having sex with anyone”, and broke his glasses. Ashby lost the case, which put paid to his career. Soon, he was deselected by his local Tories as their parliamentary candidate. He later said of his ex-colleagues, on live radio: “They’re a bunch of shits, aren’t they, and we know they are.”

The early 90s saw an extraordinary collapse in trust in politicians. Created not just by Clifford, but also by Mohamed Al-Fayed, who said that heregularly paid MPswithcash in brown paper envelopesto ask questions for him in the Commons. It seemed to prove everything Buchanan had been saying: you couldn’t trust anyone in public service.

After I interviewed Buchanan in the Virginia mountains, I asked him about his life. He told me about how when he was training as an officer in the US Navy, he was constantly patronised by pompous officers from posh Ivy League universities. He was still angry about it – he knew they were all phoneys, he said, you could feel it. As I drove back I wondered if that was his real motivation. Dressed up in academic language, but beneath it was simply revenge. He was going to destroy that smug patrician class. And he succeeded. Big time.

By the second half of the 90s, even the politicians came to believe they were bad. And they did the most extraordinary thing: they gave away power. They did it partly because they knew they couldn’t fight against the rising tide of public doubt. But they were also persuaded by another force they felt they could no longer fight against: the markets. The first to go was Bill Clinton. His secretary of the treasury, Robert Rubin, persuaded him to pull back from public spending. Instead, he should cut the deficit and allow the markets to create a financial boom. Clinton agreed – and the US boomed throughout the 90s. But it also led directly to the global crash of 2008.

And behind the markets was a whole academic industry that had taken Buchanan’s ideas and run with them. They wrote articles that bluntly said the role of politicians in society should be marginalised because so much of what they did was “sub-optimal”. Journalists picked up these ideas and put them in simpler terms. Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek Internationalwrote: “What we need in politics today is not more democracy – but less”.

In the face of this undermining of politics, New Labour also gave in. The day after their victory in 1997, the new chancellor, Gordon Brown, dramatically announced that he wasgiving power overthe setting of interest rates to the Bank of England. It was an extraordinary move. Labour MPs were aghast. Bryan Gould, once a candidate for the party’s leadership, exclaimed: “What then is the role of the chancellor? Or more simply, what is the role of democracy?”

Brown later admitted the truth: that it was because politicians were now seen as dangerous. We did it, he said, “not for any fundamental economic reasons”, but because we weren’t trusted. Born out of a weird self-hate, that single act was largely responsible for the present powerlessness of politicians. It was also helped on by a new phenomenon – because liberal culture too caught the disease.The Thick of Itwas a comedy series based around a government minister and their advisers. They live in a constant state of self-interested hysteria. Reacting to events and having no control over the real world outside. It was seen as liberal satire – but it can also be seen as a very powerful expression of Buchanan’s idea that all politicians are completely venal, driven only by dark emotions.

But that wasn’t the end of it. Because a new kind of politician rose up, bred in the swamp of distrust. They saw that playing bad in an over-the-top way would give you a great deal of power. Because in a world of disenchantment, where no one believed that politicians could be good, being bad meant you must be authentic. I give you Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Donald Trump: pantomime villains who are locked together with us in a feedback loop of shock-outrage-badness repeating endlessly.

Outside this theatre, really bad people do really bad things – but we are distracted by the pantomime. Meanwhile, the classes that once made up society fractured. The liberals turned on those who voted for Brexit, using with one voice the word Amis had spat out 30 years before: “stupid”.

It may be that Britain – and much of Europe – is in a similar moment to that described by Clark just before 1848: on the edge of a new kind of society we don’t yet have the language to describe. It feels frightening because without that language it is impossible to have coherent dreams of the future. To build a better world, you need an idea of what should change and how.

And one of the things preventing that may be our obsession with constantly replaying the past. In the present age, the fog of experience has been thickened by the mass of recorded data that allows the recent past to be endlessly replayed, refusing to fade away. A constant loop of nostalgia – music, images, films and dreams from the past. It is another block to the future. And it is also the way this series is made. My bad.

Shifty in on BBC iPlayer fromSaturday 14 June.

Jai Courtney eats up his role as the crazed captain of a tourist boat – but he can’t quite wrestle this creature feature from its straitjacket

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For a long time, serial killer and shark movies were separate forms of cinema; never the twain did meet. In Dangerous Animals they’ve been blended into one foul fishy stew, theoretically delivering the best of both worlds: a Wolf Creekian adventure with a creature feature twist. But, sadly, this collision of genres hasn’t resulted in any real freshness or flair, playing out with a stinky waft of the familiar.

Jai Courtney gets the meatiest and most entertaining role as Tucker, the owner of a Gold Coast business that ferries thrill-seekers out into shark-infested waters, where they observe the great beasts from inside an underwater cage. After they’re hauled back on to the boat, Tucker kills them and feeds them to the sharks, while filming their grisly deaths on a camcorder for his personal collection of VHS snuff films.

The director, Sean Byrne (who previously helmed two more impressive horror movies: The Devil’s Candy and The Loved Ones), doesn’t follow the Jaws approach of making us wait to see the villain. Tucker appears in the first scene, even before the person who’ll challenge and perhaps even defeat him: the free-spirited US surfer and vagabond Zephyr (Hassie Harrison). Her strategy of dealing with locals seems to be avoiding them – and who could blame her? Perhaps she’s seenWake in Fright,Welcome to Woop Woop,Wolf Creek,The Surferor any of the zillion other Aussie films in which foreigners get flayed by life down under.

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“There was nothing for me on land,” Zephyr tells a young man, Moses (Josh Heuston), when he asks why she got into surfing. The point is stressed that she’s a solo operator and no pushover – but, once kidnapped by Tucker, Zephyr doesn’t have a lot to work with, being chained and immobile for much of the movie.

Dangerous Animals is quite sharply made, and for a while I was with it, enjoying the midnight-movie vibes. But its adherence to formula and sheer predictability stifle the fun. From early on Moses’s trajectory is obvious: he’ll be the only person who notices that Zephyr is missing, goes searching for her and plays a role in the final act. It’s also clear that if Zephyr defeats the villain (partly a question of whether the producers envision sequels) it’ll only be after a few failed escape attempts.

Sometimes the dialogue feels prefabricated: after Tucker tells Zephyr she’s “hard as nails, like me”, you just know the protagonist will issue a curt rejection (she fires back: “I’m nothing like you!”). And moments that shouldpop don’t quite land. A scene in which Tucker coaxes a couple of tourists into a rendition of Baby Shark could have been legendarily strange and meme-able, comparable perhaps to a sledgehammer-wielding Nicolas Cage singing the Hokey Pokey inMom and Dad; instead it falls flat.

Moments with the villain monologising fare a little better. The first occurs when Tucker recounts how, as a child, being bitten by a great white resulted in a quasi-religious experience: “I’ve been wide awake ever since,” he says, like a crew member onthe Nebuchadnezzar. Later he argues that sea predators protect the fabric of the universe: “The shark brings order and, without this, chaos reigns.” This dude really likes sharks.

It’s a funny thing to want a villain to be morehammy, especially when the performance is as good as Courtney’s (as his foil, Harrison is also strong, albeit in a blander role). But I did crave more scenery-chewing, more flamboyance, more chutzpah – anything to free Dangerous Animals from the straitjacket of formula.

Dangerous Animals is in cinemas now

Drugs, gun-runners, fridge-freezer maintenance … Netflix’s look at the wild life of the one-time Toronto mayor Rob Ford – and the lessons it tries to learn about our current politics – is gripping viewing

Canadians make bad decisions too. For proof, see this schadenfreude-fuelled documentary aboutRob Ford, the bellicose former conservative mayor of Toronto. Ford’s rolling scandals in office include public drunkenness, smoking crack with gun-runners, and lying about everything. Talking heads in the documentary, sensitively titled Trainwreck: Mayor of Mayhem (Netflix, from Tuesday 17 June), remember him as “an everyman … without a shred of credibility … who turned city hall into a circus”. That seems unfair. Circuses aren’t that bad, and I refuse to believeevery mansmokes crack cocaine.

Most documentaries wring every ounce of lurid detail from their subjects. This guy has more chaos than fits inside 49 minutes. We do get thrillingly grainy footage of him twirling his crack pipe, slurring first-degree murder threats with Mortal Kombat-levels of specificity, and making bizarre rants in Jamaican patois, against what or whom I’m not sure. First-hand sources are film-maker’s gold, and Ford is happy enough to spend his lowest points around people who video everything. These people never have good phones though, do they?

There isn’t space to do more than mention Ford’s extensive legal and domestic troubles, nor critique his executive choices, which included voting against grant money for HIV programmes, removing bike lanes and declaring transit workers an emergency service so they couldn’t strike. In one council meeting, Ford reportedly stated: “Those oriental people work like dogs.” He later apologised for the remark, which he had intended as a compliment.

Shamelessness and emotional dysregulation are fantastic traits for reality TV; at some point they became necessary for public office too. Trainwreck feels like a rear-view mirror on that turning point. Ford swings between joking around, puce-faced outrage and meek apology. He resembles a baby, which makes strange sense. If it’s unfair to attack appearance, let’s just say he was a voluptuous blond, and voters in the western world have a type. It is impossible to imagine a woman or an ethnic minority candidate getting away with one of the bad decisions Ford compulsively makes. Those folks can’t even wear tan.

The story – and our glee in watching it – is complicated by the fact that Ford is a casualty of addiction issues. The question of who, how and when we forgive is a live one. Does it make a difference if the wrongdoer demands we move on, as Ford does? His popularity remained high. He would have been re-elected but in 2014, was diagnosed with an aggressive abdominal tumour anddied in 2016. That same year Trump was elected president. There’s a sick familiarity to the way controversies bounce off the Canadian mayor. The way he demonises the media as liars when he knows another scandal is about to break. The way he is able to position himself as a victim, and voters eat it up.

There is an attempt at balance. “I’m proud to show this side of the story, and … why I stood by him through thick and thin,” says his former head of security. The Rob-Ford-was-a-good-man argument here hinges upon a story we’re told about a time the mayor was buying himself a Subway sandwich. Upon learning there was another order waiting but no driver, Ford delivered the stranger’s sub himself. Doesn’t make him Nelson Mandela, does it? By his own reckoning he made $35 plus three bucks as tip. Why does he have that much time in the day?

Trainwreck shows Ford going door to door, asking people if their fridge freezers are working correctly, and taking a water-jet to graffiti. That’s not governing; that’s being a handyman. We all need to be more serious about public office. While politics will always be about public perception, it shouldn’t be reduced to entertainment, and ideally should be distinguishable from true crime. Otherwise the only winner is social media clips and documentaries.

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No point pretending it isn’t watchable, though. I was gripped by this grainy footage, of a mayor fighting the public, or ploughing into an elderly female councillor, while barrelling across the chamber floor in a state of agitation. He might have been on his way to the Speaker’s podium, to rip off his shirt and yell: “Are you not entertained?” I was. I’m not proud of it.

In the last few years, the singer-songwriter has weathered divorce, grief and false allegations of sexual assault. Now, he’s back writing, performing – and rediscovering his political rage

In the mid-90s, Omaha made a pretty decent tour stop for up-and-coming bands. Nebraska sits near-plum in the US’s middle, and in its most populous city, once famed for its fur trade, stockyards and railroads, there had grown a thriving subculture that centred largely on a book and record store named the Antiquarium and a small venue named the Cog Factory.

Conor Oberst spent much of his early teens puttering between these locations, filling his young brain with music and literature. By 12, he had begun writing his own songs, and by 13 he had recorded his first album, releasing it on his older brother’s label and selling it in the record store. Sometimes he would take to the stage at the Cog Factory, a small, pale boy with an acoustic guitar and a lot of words.

He had already begun recording asBright Eyesby the time the Texas band Spoon came through town. Oberst and his friends were huge fans, and turned up to the venue early to see the band arrive. “We loved Spoon,” he says. “But we didn’t know what anyone in the bands looked like, never seen their pictures. These vans pull up outside the club and you’re like: ‘I wonder which one’s the singer?’ There was a lot more mystery and fun to it then.”It would be another five years or so by the time Bright Eyes found success – by now a band rather than a solo project, they were widely feted for their fourth album, 2002’s Lifted Or the Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground, followed by their twin 2005 records I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. By that time, the world was a very different place. Music and media were growing increasingly digitised, and the US was grappling with the presidency of George W Bush and the controversies of the Iraq war.

Oberst, whose songs were heartfelt and literate and politically engaged, carrying titles such as When the President Talks to God, became the poster boy of a new generation. His face was everywhere. When Bright Eyes’ tour bus pulled up at the venue,everyoneknew he was the singer. “What happened to me wasn’t at all overnight because I had been touring since I was 15 years old, and at this point I’m 25,” he says. “But still, I think when that big push of fame or public persona, identity thing happened to me, it definitely affected me. I definitely felt the insanity of it.”

In many ways, the last 20 years of Oberst’s career have been an attempt to shake off that intensity and find the mystery and the fun of music again. “It is a hard thing to hold on to, that innocence, and what you loved about music sometimes,” he says.

Nevertheless, he has tried to grip tightly to that feeling; to remember what music is to him beyond a career. He learned the hard way, he says, that there is not much music in the music business. “But what I will say is music is consistently something that gives my life meaning, and is a source of solace and happiness – not just making it, but listening to it, and seeing people I love doing it,” he says. “Besides family and friends and loved ones, I would say it’s the most consistent thing in my life. There’s nothing else. I’m not religious, I’m not really a member of too many clubs or anything, it’s kind of just music that’s gotten me through it.”

The past few years have not always been easy for Oberst – there has been a divorce, the sudden loss of one of his brothers and, in late 2013, an allegation of sexual assault by a female fan. By the following summer,the allegations had been dropped, and the accuser had apologised both to Oberst and to “actual sexual assault victims”. It is not a time the singer is keen to revisit.

He speaks steadily, carefully, and gently declines to go on the record about the specificities of what happened. But one gathers that it led to the period he refers to now as “a time when I wished I never had made music, and wished no one had ever heard it. And that’s about the saddest feeling in the world when that’s your whole life, just wanting to not exist.”

What he will also say is that music played an integral part in helping him back out into the world again. “I go into music as a place to understand what’s going on. That’s a place that I know I can go that’s just for myself,” he says. “But it’s all in your mind, so it’s up to you to take care of it and tend the garden. And sometimes if you’re not feeling well physically or otherwise, or the world’s got you down, you stop weeding the garden and the next thing you know your mind’s just overrun and snarled. The forest takes over the grounds, and it’s pretty dark.”

Across the screen, Oberst looks small and bleary and slightly disoriented in his hoodie. “But you know, things tend to come back around and get better, and worse, and better again,” he says. “So it’s just trying to stay alive through those parts that seem insurmountable. And next thing you know I’m out here with some of my oldest, best friends in the world and everyone’s having fun,” he says, with a nod to the room behind him, a grey backstage space at the MegaCorp Pavilion in Newport, Kentucky, where Bright Eyes are on tour with fellow Omaha natives, Cursive. “This particular leg of this tour is probably the most old-school touring situation I’ve had for decades. It has been a relief of sorts to be travelling on tour buses again, hanging out till 4am, just fucking smoking weed in parking lots. Playing music. It’s great. It’s like nothing changed.”

Last autumn, Bright Eyes released their 11th album, Five Dice, All Threes. It is their most limber record in some while, capturing a kind of musical camaraderie between Oberst and his longstanding bandmates Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott. For Oberst, the record “definitely captures that sort of youthful punk rock spirit that maybe I’d forgotten about”.

He credits this rekindling in part to his friend Alex Levine, who helped in the writing of the songs at a point where the singer had “definitely lost interest in kind of everything”. “He was working at other studios with other people, and he’d come back and I’d still be sitting there on the porch, and he’d be like: ‘Why don’t we work on something?’ The first few times I was like: ‘Oh I’m good, man, let’s just sit around, I don’t care.’ And then he wore me down, and next thing we know we’re making demos. I think I really do have him to thank for lighting the fire.”

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The fire is not only musical. Oberst today seems once again politically ignited, railing against Elon Musk, the anti-immigrant crackdown, the dismantling of academic centres and legal processes, the attack on trans rights and the funnelling of public money into private contracts, against an administration he describes as “the greatest grift of all time”. It is a return of sorts to his earlier self: “I feel there might have been a period in maybe my early 30s where I was like: ‘I should, like, grow up. You shouldn’t be angsty towards the world. You should turn into this real acceptable thing that a lot of people can get behind,’” he says. “Because people like the idea of anger more than they like anger. They like the performative aspect. But the thing is, I really feel it. I really fucking hate these things and I always have, and it’s hard because I can’t not show it.”

Lately, at the band’s live shows, he has been encouraging his audiences to speak up. “The world is more fucked up and keeps getting more fucked up so I don’t think it’s time to act measured,” he says. “What I’ve been saying to the kids at the shows every night is you can’t wait. By the time you realise how bad it is, it’s too late, and that’s just something we know from history. Don’t wait till it’s cool to go down to the park and protest. There’s an alarm bell going off above our heads right now and we should all be screaming at the top of our fucking lungs.”

He thinks back sometimes to those teenage years in Omaha, when Rage Against the Machine were pretty much the only common musical ground he could find with the high-school jocks, and wonders whether any of them were aware that they were essentially listening to the communist manifesto. “But it slipped into suburban houses, and it did a public service ’cos it influenced all these people. It turned a bunch of them into political activists,” he says.

Each night, Oberst looks out from the stage into the crowd and sees a whole new audience before him, from little kids to an eightysomething woman there with her grandson, via people his own age, and “straight-up teenagers that could’ve been at a Bright Eyes show in 1999”. Somehow, amid all the darkness, he finds a hope in this crowd – perhaps even evidence of the role that music has to play in resistance. “I think music is magical,” he says, “I think it can cross all political lines.”

Bright Eyes tour the UK and Ireland from16to 25 June; tour starts Nottingham.

They were impossibly glamorous, fatally flawed and turned up at every significant moment of the 20th century, but underneath it all is a highly relatable family drama – without the infamous friends

The rise and fall of the Mitford sisters is like one of those earthquakes we’re due on a regular rotation: eight years out from Gucci’s much-documented Never Marry a Mitford jumper, four years after the BBC drama The Pursuit of Love, a new TV show appears fortuitously to bring them back into the public consciousness again.

Here they come, out of the mists of time, the seven children of a minor member of the House of Lords: Nancy, of course, the author of Love in a Cold Climate and The Pursuit of Love and probably the most famous in her own right; followed by Pamela, the least famous and fond chiefly of chickens and horrible men; then Tom, the only boy, with a weakness for the Nazis and, as far as history is concerned, no personality.

Then Diana, Mrs Oswald Mosley (Lady Mosley, please, you oik). Then Unity Valkyrie, conceived in the little Canadian town of Swastika, and led presumably by nominative determinism to Hitler’s side; and her best friend and closest sibling, Jessica (Decca), an ardent communist from childhood. Their shared room, famously, had a line down the centre: swastikas and eagles on one side, hammers and sickles the other. The baby of the family, Debo, loved horses and dogs and looking pretty, and became a duchess.

A big, splashy, high-budget period drama, Outrageous is just the latest flowering of Mitford mania. But why do we care? What could possibly be so compelling about six aristocratic women (plus one drippy Nazi-affiliated brother)? As a cast member said in an interview ahead of the show, they are the Kardashians of history, each with their own recognisable brand.

In Charlotte Mosley’s 2007 collection, Letters Between Six Sisters, each sister is given a little symbol: a coronet for example, or a swastika. Even among the family (for of course Mosley is a relation), the sisters cannot escape themselves. Or, perhaps, especially among the family. Who among us is unfamiliar with this feeling? The messy one! The wild card! The golden child! The black sheep! . The beauty? The runaway? The dud? There’s a Mitford for that.

There is, in fact, a Mitford for every possible persuasion: every permutation of political thought, up to and including “eat the rich”, is catered for by this array of blue-blooded, impossibly well-connected women, who are somehow there at every moment of historical significance throughout the 20th century.

We can offer you Churchill’s cousins (both the sisters, through Churchill’s wife Clementine, and Decca’s first husband were Churchill-adjacent); and Hitler’s “angels” (Diana and Unity, described as such by the Fuhrer); forming a band with Maya Angelou (Jessica), or getting tangled up with the curse of the Kennedy clan (Debo), or married to Mosley (Diana’s secret wedding to the leader of Britain’s Blackshirts took place in Goebbels’ Berlin residence in 1936 with Adolf as guest of honour) and Mr Guinness of Guinness fame (Diana again, whose first husband was heir to the Barony of Moyne); or – as the 2013 show Psychobitches put it in song form: “a Naziphile, a commie bore, a personal friend of Mr Evelyn Waugh.”

Settings for their extraordinary lives range from the slums of Limehouse; the glittering prewar palaces of Mayfair; Paris, post-civil war Spain, Nazi Berlin, the Isle of Mull (the family owned Inch Kenneth, an island off its west coast,and it was one of the places Unity was sent to live after a second world war-induced suicide attempt); Versailles (Nancy lived there and wrote about The Sun King, Louis XIV); Oakland, California (Jessica’s home for 40 years with her second husband, American civil rights lawyer Robert Treuhaft); the Cotswolds (the Jacobean Asthall Manor was the sisters childhood home); to F Block, Holloway prison, where Diana spent much of the war behind bars.

And who sent Diana to prison for fascism? Why, Nancy, of course. Or at least, that’s what Debo believed, though Nancy always denied it. Was Nancy’s first husband gay? Did Hitler really play Unity off against Eva Braun? Every book, every biography, every autobiography tells a different story.

And there are dozens of books, including Mary Lovell’s excellent The Mitford Girls on which the show is based. There are biographies of each sister; autobiographies by most sisters (sorry Pam); and Nancy’s novels are never out of print. There are even retellings of Nancy’s novels: India Knight’s Darling, released just last year, updates The Pursuit of Love for the 21st century. One singular family – so unlike, and yet so like, all families in their chaos and commitment, passion and frustration.

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The Mitford sisters love each other; hate each other; betray each other; write to each other daily for the best part of a century. They forgive the unforgivable and hold tiny slights for almost a hundred years. They know each other so deeply, and can never see eye to eye. We see and we don’t see; we understand and misunderstand; we know the story of the Mitfords, and yet – like the Kardashians and the royals – we don’t know them at all.

We know our own families deeply, and yet there’s so many things they think and do that have nothing to do with us at all. In all our simple silhouettes, there’s a wild everything bubbling underneath. This is the Mitford magic, but it’s our own magic, too. For all the ways they say, like the late Queen, “ears” instead of “yes” and “hice” instead of “house”; for all their grand houses and extraordinary behaviour and terrible entanglements with the great names of history – it turns out that the Mitfords: they’re just like us.

But more fun to watch on TV. And with more famous friends.

Outrageous will be available to watch on U&DRAMA and U in the UK and Britbox in North America on 18 June 2025.

Chartered spaceflight for India, Poland and Hungary’s first astronauts in decades delayed indefinitely

A chartered spaceflight for India, Poland and Hungary’s first astronauts in decades has been delayed indefinitely because of leak concerns at theInternational Space Station.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa)said on Thursday that it had postponed the Axiom Mission 4 to the ISS to monitor the cabin pressure on the Russian side of the orbiting lab before accepting visitors. Officials stressed that the seven astronauts currently at the space station were safe and that other operations up there would not be affected.

The Roscosmos space agency said on Friday that a leak on the Russian segment had been repaired, the Interfax news agency reported. A new launch date has not been set.

SpaceX was supposed to launch four private astronauts this week on a 14-day space station mission from Cape Canaveral, Florida, but bad weather and SpaceX rocket trouble delayed the flight. Then the station leak issue cropped up.

The three Russians onboard the space station recently inspected the inside walls of the ageing Zvezda service module, which launched in 2000, as well as a connecting tunnel. They sealed some areas and measured the current leak rate.

“Following this effort, the segment now is holding pressure,”Nasasaid in an online update.

The private mission’s delay provides extra time for Nasa and the Russian space agency “to evaluate the situation” and determine whether more repairs are needed.

The chartered flight was arranged by the Houston company Axiom Space, and was to be Axiom’s fourth trip to the space station with paying customers since 2022.

“This is the right thing to do,” said Kam Ghaffarian, Axiom Space’s executive chairman in a written statement. “We will continue to work with all of our partners to finalize a new launch date.”

The four astronauts – led by retired Nasa astronaut Peggy Whitson, now an Axiom Space employee – will remain in quarantine in Florida. Also scheduled to be onboard the mission is Shubhanshu Shukla, an Indian air force pilot and one of four astronauts-in-training picked by the Indian Space Research Organization to fly on India’s own debut crewed mission, the Gaganyaan mission planned for 2027. Shukla, 39, will be the first astronaut to go to the ISS from India’s astronaut corps.

Tibor Kapu is slated to join the Axiom mission from Hungary; Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski from Poland. The former could be the third person born in Hungary to ever visit space. The latter is set to become the second person from Poland to do so. The previous Polish astronaut, a general, took part of a Soviet mission in 1978.

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The Russian space agency has been dealing with cracks and air leaks in its station compartments for more than five years – “a top safety risk”, according to Nasa’s office of inspector general. Recent repairs resulted in what Nasa calls “a new pressure signature”. Additional details were not immediately available.

Nasa wants to keep the space station operating until 2030 before dropping it out of orbit. The goal is to replace it with a number of privately owned stations; Axiom Space is among the companies looking to fill the gap.

The US sends its astronauts to the ISS onboard SpaceX spacecraft, but Elon Musk, CEO of the rocket maker, posted on X early on Friday morning that the huge orbital base should be decommissioned within two years.

“There are potentially serious concerns about the long-term safety of the Space Station. Some parts of it are simply getting too old and obviously that risk grows over time,” Musk wrote. “Even though SpaceX earns billions of dollars from transporting astronauts & cargo to the ISS, I nonetheless would like to go on record recommending that it be de-orbited within 2 years.”

RJ May, who used screen name ‘joebidennnn69’, charged with 10 counts and ordered to remain jailed until his trial

A Republican member ofSouth Carolina’s state house whom prosecutors say used the screen name “joebidennnn69” has been arrested and charged with 10 counts of distributing sexual abuse material involving children.

RJ May was arrested at his Lexington county home after a lengthy investigation and was ordered on Thursday by a federal judge to remain jailed until his trial.

The three-term Republican is accused of using “joebidennnn69” to exchange 220 files of toddlers and young children involved in sex acts on theKiksocial media network for about five days in spring 2024, according to court documents that graphically detailed the videos.

During that timeframe, Joe Biden was in the final year of his presidency before May’s fellow Republican Donald Trump won the November 2024 election to return to the White House in January.

Each charge against May carries a five-to-20-year prison sentence upon conviction. Prosecutors suggested May could spend more than a decade in prison if found guilty.

The files at the center of the case were uploaded and downloaded using May’s home wifi network and his cellphone, prosecutors said. Some were hidden by the use of a private network, but others were directly linked to his internet addresses.

At his arraignment, May’s lawyer suggested someone could have used the wifi password that was shown on a board behind a photo May’s wife may have posted online. Attorney Dayne Phillips also suggested investigators did not link each Kik message directly to May.

Prosecutors asked that May, 38, not be given bail because he lives at home with his wife and young children, and some of the files he is accused of sharing feature children of about the same age as his.

Prosecutors said they also investigated whether May had used a fake name to travel to Colombia three times after finding videos on his laptop of him allegedly having sex with three girls or women. An agent from the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) testified the three appeared to be underage and were paid. Agents have not been able to locate the three.

Prosecutors said May created a Facebook account with his fake name, and his internet history showed him switching between his real account and the fake one – and even searching his primary opponent from the fake login.

Phillips, May’s lawyer, told the courtroom that no sexual images of toddlers or young children were found directly on his laptop or cellphone.

After spending the night in jail, May appeared in court on Thursday in shorts and a T-shirt with his wrists and ankles in cuffs. After being ordered to stay in jail, he appeared to blow a kiss to his wife, who was at the hearing.

After May’s election in 2020, he helped create the Freedom caucus, a group of the house’s most conservative members who say mainstreamRepublicansin the chamber are not the true conservative heart of their party. He also helped the campaigns of Republicans running against the party’s house incumbents.

“We as legislators have an obligation to insure that our children have no harm done to them,” May said in January 2024 on the house floor during a debate on transgender care for minors.

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His son charmed the house in April 2021 when May brought him to visit for his third birthday, and the boy practiced his parade wave around the chamber.

The Freedom caucus released a statement on Wednesday night saying they had kicked May out of their group after his arrest.

Many of his one-time friends distanced themselves from May as rumors of the investigation spread through theSouth Carolinastatehouse. During the current session, he could largely be seen at his corner desk in the back of the 124-seat chamber, mixing with very few colleagues.

The house speaker suspended May from his seat after the indictment.

May’s lawyer suggested he could have been framed and asked the DHS agent if she knew that May had a lot of political enemies.

“There are a fair amount of people who don’t like me either, Mr Phillips,” agent Britton Lorenzen replied.

In the US, call or text theChildhelpabuse hotline on 800-422-4453 or visittheir websitefor more resources and to report child abuse or DM for help. For adult survivors of child abuse, help is available atascasupport.org. In the UK, theNSPCCoffers support to children on 0800 1111, and adults concerned about a child on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adult survivors on 0808 801 0331. In Australia, children, young adults, parents and teachers can contact the Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800, orBraveheartson 1800 272 831, and adult survivors can contactBlue Knot Foundationon 1300 657 380. Other sources of help can be found atChild Helplines International

Tait posted on Instagram days ago that for 20 years he lived a ‘double life’ but is working on ‘repentance and healing’

The Christian music legend Michael Tait, whose hit song God’s Not Dead became an anthem for Donald Trump’s Maga movement, has been accused of sexually assaulting three men, two who believed they were drugged by the rock star in the early 2000s, according to a months-long Guardian investigation. Four other men have alleged that Tait, a founding member of DC Talk and later a frontman for Newsboys, engaged in inappropriate behavior such as unwanted touching and sexual advances.

The Guardian is publishing these allegations days after Tait posted an extraordinaryconfession on his Instagramaccount, admitting that for 20 years he had been “leading a double life”, abusing alcohol and cocaine, “and, at times, touched men in an unwanted sensual way”, according to his statement.

The statement appears to be a response to aseparate report published earlier this month by the Christian media outlet the Roys Report, which also investigated Tait and revealed similar allegations of drug use and sexual assault against young, male musicians.

In the Instagram statement, Tait wrote: “I am ashamed of my life choices and actions and make no excuses for them. I will simply call it what God calls it – sin.” He added: “While I might dispute certain details in the accusations against me, I do not dispute the substance of them.

“Even before this recent news became public, I had started on a path to health, healing, and wholeness … I accept the consequences of my sin and am committed to continuing the hard work of repentance and healing – work [which] I will do quietly and privately, away from the stage and the spotlight.”

The allegations about Tait’s behavior revealed today starkly contrast with the public image that he cultivated for nearly four decades. The 59-year-old native of Washington DC has sold 18m albums, containing songs that often encouraged young Christians to stay sober, abstinent and straight. But sources who spoke to the Guardian claimed Tait’s alleged drug use and alleged abusive behavior were the “biggest open secret in Christian music”.

The Guardian has interviewed 25 people in the Christian music industry, most of whom say they had prior knowledge of allegations that Tait had engaged in abusive behavior. The men who have come forward and shared their alleged experiences – two agreeing to go on the record with their names, while the rest spoke on the condition of anonymity – were aged 13 to 29 at the time of their alleged experiences.

All grew up in evangelical churches where Tait’s music was the premier soundtrack of their youth groups, summer camps and mission trips. Having taken the message of Tait’s songs to heart, they were naive about sex and drugs throughout their youth. All were starstruck when meeting their childhood hero, but quickly saw their image of him as a role model of Christian piety dissolve as they were taken on a bumpy ride of rock’n’roll debauchery.

Shawn Davis, who was a lifelong fan and troubled youth who had immersed himself in Christian music, claims Tait pushed him to consume alcohol and cocaine on multiple occasions. He also says he believes Tait once secretly drugged him and then molested him in 2003, while he was still a minor.

“This man destroyed my life,” Davis now claims.

Gabriel (not his real name) also claims Tait pushed him to consume alcohol and cocaine before asking to join him in a hot tub in 2003, where he claims Tait repeatedly groped his penis while attempting to kiss him. “To this day I jump whenever someone touches me unexpectedly,” Gabriel says. “When something like that happens to you, you feel like the worst person, you feel dirty, worthless. It’s heartbreaking to think someone you look up to could do something like that.”

Adam (not his real name) claims he believes he was drugged by the singer while he was visiting Tait’s home in Nashville, and later woke up to find Tait allegedly molesting him. “This person has stolen a little piece of our souls,” he says.

Tait did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about the allegations contained in this report.

Over the last 38 years, Tait has emerged as one of the most iconic names in Contemporary Christian Music (CCM). The genre and industry often exists in its own commercial and cultural ecosystem – yet mimics popular trends of mainstream music – creating multi-platinum superstars who are marketed to teens (and their parents) as wholesome alternatives to the “sinful lifestyles” of mainstream rock stars.

Tait was one-third of the rap-rock group, DC Talk, which formed in 1987 while its members were attending the evangelical Liberty University, whose founder, Jerry Falwell, launched the Moral Majority, the political organization that first galvanized evangelical voters around the Republican party in 1980, forever changing the American political landscape. Falwell was a mentor to young Tait – whom hereferred to as“my white daddy” – and helped boost DC Talk to stardom.

Blending MTV aesthetics with Christian right talking points, DC Talk instructed generations of teens to stand against the liberalism of the Clinton era, namely abortion rights and sex education. Songs such as I Don’t Want It (a rebuttal to George Michael’s I Want Your Sex), That Kind Of Girl and The Children Can Live shaped the moral landscape of a generation of young evangelicals, mandating sexual purity until marriage.

“They used the sounds often associated with teen sexuality – like hip-hop, rock and pop music – to combat teen sexuality and adolescent desire,” says Leah Payne, author of the book God Gave Rock and Roll to You, an academic critique of CCM history. “In 1994 the True Love Waits organization asked DC Talk to perform at their concert on the National Mall promoting virginity among young evangelicals, which resulted in the signing of 200,000 chastity pledges by the teenage fans.”

In 1995, their Nirvana-flavored smash hit, Jesus Freak, championed being a social outcast for the Lord’s sake; a book companion to the album celebrated the violent histories of Christian martyrs around the world, encouraging young people to follow in their footsteps.

The fight for Christian nationalism was also a premier theme of DC Talk’s music – as well as the book Under God, co-authored by Tait – claiming the US is suffering a collapse of moral values because of the secularization of government and public schools. This was underscored with frightening urgency by their songs warning of the coming rapture. Asrecently as 2021, Tait warned: “I believe we are living in the last days [before the rapture].”

The CCM industry has been primarily headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee, where Tait and most of his colleagues work and live. While it is not affiliated with the country music scene of Nashville, it typically shares the same conservative politics. While DC Talk addressed racism in several songs – with Tait as the sole Black man performing with two white guys (one of whom rapped) – their narrative typically placed racism as an unfortunate touchstone of the past that the US must repent for, but never as a contemporary, systemic problem.

DC Talk went on a hiatus in 2000 and for nearly a decade Tait performed as a solo artist until he became the frontman of the legendary CCM supergroup Newsboys. In 2011, their rock song God’s Not Dead became a rallying cry for disaffected evangelicals in the Obama era. In 2014, Tait and Newsboys appeared inGod’s Not Dead,a movie centered around the fictional story of an atheist college professor who threatens to fail his students if they refuse to sign a form declaring “God is dead”. Tait would make an appearance in four subsequent sequels, becoming a recognizable face in the fight against perceived anti-Christian discrimination, a central theme of Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns.

Taitendorsed Ted Cruzin 2016, but shifted his allegiance to Trump after the Florida pastor Paula White – chair of the evangelical advisory board for Trump’s 2016 campaign and leader of the White House faith office in 2024 – invited him to pray over Trump before a Florida campaign stop. Tait soon became a key bridge between the candidate and white evangelical voters. Newsboys performed for Trump at the White House in 2019, and the following year Tait sang at evangelical “Let Us Worship” events, which were centered around the false claim that President Joe Biden was using Covid lockdowns to repress church attendance in the US.

“I love you, I support you, and I’m one of the growing number of African Americans who love you,” Tait said ina 2019 videopraising Trump’s efforts at prison reform, before adding: “I’m looking forward to hanging out, and eating some Big Macs!”

On 5 January 2021, Newsboys’ God’s Not Dead was sung in unison during the “Jericho March” at the US Capitol, the event that preceded the violent insurrection at the US Capitol the following day.

The Guardian’s investigation has revealed an alleged pattern of manipulative behavior by Tait. Most of the alleged incidents described in this article are alleged to have occurred between 2001 and 2009.

Young and sometimes naive male musicians say they believe they were targeted by the star, with Tait allegedly dangling the possibility of career or artistic opportunities before them and then cutting off all contact once it became clear that sex was off the table. According to four people who were interviewed, some of them on the condition of anonymity, Tait would allegedly invite them to parties at his house in Nashville, encouraging them to drink alcohol and use drugs before making sexual advances.

Two of the men who spoke to the Guardian claim they believe they were secretly drugged, which left them floating in and out of consciousness, unable to consent to sexual acts. They claim Tait assaulted them by touching them sexually without their permission. Three others claim they awkwardly rebuffed his advances and left.

“I wore out my Jesus Freak CD as a kid, and so when I met him I was starstruck,” recalls Gabriel, who was 19 when he was introduced to 38-year-old Tait in 2004. “And then he started calling me to hang out, it was just crazy.”

Gabriel was ambitious to become a CCM musician, and now his childhood hero was inviting him out to bars, buying him drinks even though he was underage and taking him to parties at his home in Nashville. Tait often mentioned the possibility of them jamming together, but that never materialized.

Gabriel felt a little uncomfortable at first when Tait would rub a hand on his shoulder and constantly hug him, but attributed the feeling to the fact that he had been abused a few years earlier by a serial child molester. In fact, Gabriel was testifying in a court case about that incident during this same time, an emotionally taxing experience that he confided in Tait about.

“He was very sympathetic,” Gabriel says, “and then he betrayed that trust.”

Tait started inviting Gabriel over alone, when the house was empty. When Tait introduced him to cocaine, “it was a huge shock”, Gabriel says, partially because he had no experience with drugs, and because it was being served by the man whose music informed his moral universe. “But I was too excited to be there, and didn’t want to screw up this opportunity.”

The two used cocaine together a number of times over the next few weeks. One night, while they both were high on the drug, along with a couple of vodka and Red Bulls, Tait proposed they jump in the hot tub.

It was there that Tait unexpectedly “grabbed my crotch and tried to kiss me at the same time”, Gabriel claims. “It wasn’t subtle, and it was out of nowhere. I asked him, ‘What the hell is going on?’ He said he was just joking, but then he did it again. I jumped out of the pool and drove home, which I shouldn’t have done because I was more intoxicated than I’ve ever been, but that’s how scared I was.”

Gabriel didn’t tell anyone for 15 years, when he confided about it to the same friend who had introduced him to Tait, Shawn Davis.

Shocked, Davis told him he had his own bad experience.

Davis says he was 16 when he met 37-year-old Tait in 2003 at a Nashville party that was loaded with mainstream celebrities. But Davis’s attention remained only on his childhood idol, Michael Tait. A mutual friend introduced them, and Tait took down his number, calling Davis to hang out a few days later.

“DC Talk were my heroes in a lot of ways,” Davis recalls. “They were Christians, but they rocked out, and I thought that was so cool.”

Looking back, both Davis and Gabriel realized that while they spent time together with Tait at bars and parties, at some point they were only invited to his house separately and alone, which began when he allegedly introduced them to cocaine.

According to Davis’s claims, months passed with Davis and Tait hitting the Nashville bars (Tait was able to get Davis, a teenager, drinks), before going back to Tait’s house to smoke weed and cigarettes, and snort coke along with the opioid Lortab, which Tait would crush into a powder.

Like Gabriel, Davis confided to Tait that he had been molested when he was eight years old. “Tait made me feel like, and seem like, he was my only friend,” he says.

Davis says that Tait always mixed their drinks, and claims he often felt pressured to drink heavily. One night he recalls the drink tasting strange, and Tait insisting he finish it. “Suddenly, I felt super sick, dizzy, nauseous, going in and out of consciousness,” he says. “I woke up in the closet, and he had my pants down, and was giving me a blowjob. I pushed him off as best as I was able in that state, but he pushed me down, and then I punched him twice and left.”

Davis says he believed he was drugged by Tait. He was 17 at the time.

In the months that followed, Davis claims, Tait aggressively pursued a reconciliation. “He was relentlessly love-bombing me, trying to talk his way back in the door,” alleges Davis. “He apologized to me for what happened, but never got into specifics, it was more of a broad statement.”

Davis was attempting to get a CCM label off the ground, and forgave Tait’s behavior with the hope that he would help him get a foothold in the industry. He claims that “Tait had convinced me that what happened that night was my fault, he was very manipulative. And I was trying to give him the benefit of the doubt.”

All of this came to a head one night in 2012, when Davis was in Tait’s kitchen, and Tait texted him from his bedroom, sending him a picture of what Tait described as $5,000 in cash. “He said something to the effect of ‘this could be yours if you let me suck you off and cum in your ass’,” Davis claims.

After that, Davis called his mother and asked her to quickly come pick him up; Davis snuck out quietly without alerting Tait. On the drive home, Davis says he told her everything he had allegedly experienced with Tait. He and Tait never spoke again.

Davis’s mother, and a friend he had confided in at the time, confirmed the details reported in this story. Davis has had one run-in with the law. When he was a teenager he stole his mother’s debit card to rent a limo for prom. He got probation but was then found guilty of violating his probation in connection to drug use, which occurred at a time when he was friends with Tait. He served about five months in prison. He is now married, has a 12-year-old son and owns his own construction company in Nashville.

Both Davis and Gabriel express regret today for not speaking up sooner, believing they could have prevented other people from suffering the same experience. At the time, they each thought their experiences were isolated incidents.

Another young man who got to know Tait, Abraham (not his real name), claims Tait rubbed his thigh and caressed his ear minutes after meeting for lunch in 2006. Abraham was a 22-year-old musician in an up-and-coming band. “He said, ‘At Liberty University, we weren’t allowed to let our hair touch our ears,’ and then he brushed my hair back with his hand, which was weird,” Abraham recalls.

Zach (not his real name) was a 29-year-old aspiring DJ with little experience when, he claims, Tait invited him to his house after they met in a Nashville dance club in the summer of 2008. “He was doing a solo tour and said: ‘What we need is a DJ who can come on the road with us,’” Zach alleges. “And I asked: ‘That would be so cool! What would I need to do?’ And he said: ‘You need to hang out, come around [my house] a lot.’”

But when Zach arrived at his house, and was brought to Tait’s studio, he noticed the only furniture in the room was a bed, and Tait kept encouraging Zach to sit close to him.

“I was a virgin until I was 37,” Zach recalls. “And I’d always thought to myself: ‘Michael Tait’s been single his whole life, and if he can hold out so can I.’”

Feeling uncomfortable, Zach made up an excuse to leave early. Afterward, he sent Tait several messages to follow up on the DJ opportunity, but Tait never replied.

Adam (not his real name) was another young and ambitious musician in a Christian rock band that was slowly gaining steam in 2004 when he met Tait in Nashville. The 22-year-old was ecstatic when Tait texted him a few days later, inviting him out for some bar-hopping. “Tait was like the Christian Elvis, the GOAT,” Adam recalls.

Adam was dropped off at the bar to meet Tait by some friends, one of whom said “don’t get molested!” as he was exiting the car, a comment he found strange but dismissed.

A wild night out concluded at Tait’s home, where Adam was awed by “his trophy room, where he keeps all his Dove awards, Grammys and other accolades”. At one point they needed to buy more booze, and Tait showed him his collection of cars in the garage, telling him to “pick one”. Adam selected a white MG convertible.

It was nearly dawn when they got back to Tait’s house, which was empty but for the two of them. They drank more, and Adam recalls suddenly feeling profoundly sleepy. That’s when, Adam says, Tait told him, “‘It’s OK, just go to sleep,’ and then he laid my head on his lap.”

Adam’s next memory of that night is “waking up in his bed, my pants unzipped, and [Tait] was jerking me off. I passed out again, then woke up, wondering: ‘What the fuck is happening?’ I went to the bathroom and had a panic attack, asking myself, ‘Am I supposed to go there and beat him up? Or am I supposed to play it cool?’”

Like Davis and Gabriel, Adam had been abused as a child. “It made me a lot more insecure, wondering, ‘Why me? Am I weak? Too innocent? Was this my fault?’ I didn’t ask for this, I was just hanging out with a superstar.”

Adam says he believes Tait drugged him that night. He shared the story with his girlfriend at the time, and a couple of fellow musicians who were close with Tait, and recalls that “some of them stopped hanging out with me after that, which hurt, and made me afraid”.

A close friend of Adam’s at the time confirmed to the Guardian that Adam told him about what he says happened.

Many sources we spoke with also feared reprisal, and would only speak on the condition of anonymity. Several people who were interviewed said they recall Tait stripping down to his underwear or naked at parties and backstage at a concert, often exposing himself to young musicians touring as his opening act.

Jacob (not his real name) was a 21-year-old musician when he met 40-year-old Tait in the winter of 2004. The two were both performing at a church concert, and Tait invited Jacob to fly out to Nashville and stay a few nights at the home of his childhood hero. Once there, Jacob was surprised at the amount of cigarettes and alcohol Tait and his friends consumed, as he had never had a drink in his life. One night, the two of them alone in Tait’s kitchen, Jacob claims, “Tait somehow brought up that he had a huge urethra. And then he just whipped it out and showed it to me.”

Jacob had been sleeping on the floor of Tait’s house, as he didn’t have a spare bed, and when Tait offered to share his king-sized bed with him, Jacob didn’t think anything of it, as this wasn’t uncommon among touring musicians. He wasn’t sure what to think of the massages Tait kept giving him in the hot tub earlier that night, and then in his bed. When Tait’s hands “moved lower and lower and lower, until he was massaging my butt-cheeks, I didn’t know what to do, because I looked up to him, and didn’t want to make him mad”.

Jacob tried his best to delicately rebuff Tait’s advances, saying, “‘Hey man, I’m not into that.’ Tait said OK and went to sleep.” (Jacob’s girlfriend at the time, who is now his wife, corroborated the details of his story, which he shared with her at the time.)

Israel Anthem was only 13 when Tait allegedly exposed his penis to him in 2001. Anthem descended from the Rambo family, who were legends in the field of gospel music. His grandmother Dottie Rambo (whose songs had been recorded by Elvis, Johnny Cash and many other musicians) was being honored with a lifetime achievement award, and the members of DC Talk were in attendance. Anthem and his family took pictures with the band, and a few weeks later they were eating in a Nashville restaurant when “Michael walked in, and came by our table to say hi”.

Anthem was “a huge, lifelong DC Talk fan”, he recalls. “Some kids sleep with teddy bears, I slept with DC Talk cassettes.” He says he was stoked when the two happened to be in the restaurant bathroom at the same time later that night, sharing side-by-side urinals.

“He was still at the urinal when I was washing my hands, and as we were talking [about a CD that had just come out] I noticed his penis was out, and he was facing me, turned away from the urinal. I thought he was putting his penis away, but then he was rubbing his penis, and making eye contact, while I was talking.”

Anthem recalls this lasting anywhere from 30 to 60 seconds, with Tait “visibly aroused” and “fondling himself”. Back at the table, a family member recalls, Anthem looked “white as a ghost, absolutely terrified”. Anthem later described the alleged bathroom incident to that family member, who corroborated his story to the Guardian.

Tait’s career was on a stable trajectory until January of this year.

Last Christmas he madehis debut at the Grand Ole Opry, and the previous Christmas heplayed Carnegie Hallwith Amy Grant and others. That all came to a halt on 15 January, when the host of the Yass, Jesus podcast, Azariah Southworth, claimed Tait was gay in a viral TikTok video that received more than 250,000 views before it was removed for violation of TikTok guidelines.

“I felt he was fair game,” Southworth says. “Some people disagreed with the ethics of [outing someone against their will], but this deserved to be said out loud. Keeping quiet would allow a false narrative to continue, fueling a movement that is hurting myself, as a gay man, and my trans brothers and sisters.”

Southworth – who grew up in a strict evangelical household, and was traumatized by five years of “conversion therapy” – was the host of a Christian reality TV show in 2004-05 that featured Tait. During that time, he claims to have seen Tait gambling, smoking and cursing, behavior that would’ve scandalized Christian audiences.

Within days of Southworth publishing his video, Tait announced ina social media postthat “it is time [I] step down from Newsboys”, offering fans little explanation as to why.

Shortly after this, the remaining members of Newsboys released a statement addressing the allegations, insisting that it was only last January when “Michael confessed to us and our management that he ‘had been living a double life’”, the band wrote, adding: “But we never imagined that it could be this bad … Our hearts are with the victims who have bravely shared their stories.”

In the closing of Tait’s “confession” on Tuesday, he offers understanding to those who lost “respect, faith and trust in me”, later citing the story of King David’s prayer for forgiveness after he had committed adultery and murder. Though he is quick to add that “it crushes me to think that someone would lose or choose not to pursue faith because I have been such a horrible representative of him”.

This was Gabriel’s experience, saying he had “blamed God” for the trauma he allegedly endured that night. “Tait was presented as the pinnacle of godliness,” he says, trembling with tears in his eyes. “I get that all people sin, but to use the facade of his righteousness to commit sin, that made me walk away from my faith for a while. He took something from me I’ll never get back. In time, though, I found my own way back to God.”