Sadlers Wells Sampled is a brilliant format that brings you a 'tapas' of top notch professional dance for just £10 (or a fiver if you're prepared to 'prom' it.) It's the perfect introduction to dance and an great opportunity to sample new styles in one night. We tried to tempt you with brand new dance at The Place last week. Well, this week we're being a bit more forthright, tooting a big red horn......

Advent is upon us. Hanukkah starts on Wednesday. Office parties are already everywhere. Tis the season to be jolly, jolly, jolly but we know this can be draining, emotionally and financially. Don't let the state of your wallet throw you over the edge. We can't afford to buy tickets to the BFI IMAX all-nighter next weekend and we're not allowed to enter our own competition. But we can do the following splendid things for......

It really does seem like the Osbournes are taking over the world, doesn't it? You can't turn on the telly without seeing Sharon on The X-Factor and America's Got Talent, Kelly on Project Catwalk or Jack on one of those extreme sports adrenaline addict shows he seems to be so fond of. Kelly's released three albums and starred in the US teen drama Life As We Know It. Jack's written an autobiography of his......

Ice cream and live music are two of Londonist's favourite things. Imagine our excitment when we realised there was a festival that had both! Yes. Both! Well, that's just the kind of event that'll send our blood pressure through the roof. So what's the event are we so excited about? It's the Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream Sundae. Over July 28th and 29th the Gods of ice cream take over Clapham Common (so that's......

Londonist enjoys a glass or two of Australian wine every so often. Probably not often enough, given the number of Aussies Londonist knows. What better way to fix this than by shelling out 35 quid for an evening of Antipoedean adventure on Wednesday the 31st? The marketing literature for The Great Australian Wine Experience 2007 claims a hefty evening showcase of over 1,000 wines, definitely giving our friends over at The Walkabout a run for......

People have started buying tickets for Di-Aid. Other people want to buy tickets for Di-Aid. Touts have now set up base camp on eBay creating a kind of virtual Dodo island where the weak minded and musically challenged are being clubbed in the face with inflated prices: Barry Osborn, from Hythe in Kent, thought he was in with a good chance as he works from home. "I hit that button just seconds after 9am......

The Londonist Literary List appears every Tuesday. If you'd like to bring an event to our attention, please email londonistlit@gmail.com. If you haven't seen the blog, or spotted them in the Guardian, Post Secret's conceit is simple - send a postcard airing a single piece of your dirty laundry. Now there's a book and an accompanying exhibition at Foyles till December the 10th. The new Smoke - a London Peculiar is out too. Here's......

Here at Londonist, we like Eat Your Own Ears - a promotions company who always seem to put together really good lineups. And their gig this week featuring King Creosote, Larrikin Love, Hot Chip's Alexis Taylor, and Peter Bjorn and John is absolutely no exception. If we weren't going to be dancing round to Betty Boo songs at Cosmic Fury then this gig would tickle our fancy no end. So instead, we're going to......

The Londonist Literary List appears every Tuesday. If you'd like to bring an event to our attention, please email londonistlit@gmail.com. It's a busy old week, so let's get on: Tonight May Contain Graphic Content poses the question "Are graphic novels a complex and creative new literary form – or just glorified comic strips?" and they have some interesting speakers to debate the topic including Dan Franklin of Jonathan Cape, publisher of Ghost World, Jimmy......

If you're running on a high of cultural experiences having been along to Carnival this weekend, then stay on that high, and spend an evening checking out the final UK date of what sounds like a cool and unusual night out tonight Moana & the Tribe are a Maori collective who bring song, Maori chants and haka together with film. The emphasis is on vocal harmonies and melodies and the mixture of indigenous instruments......

The Londonist Literary List appears every Tuesday. If you'd like to bring an event to our attention, please email londonistlit@gmail.com. August is a quiet month for book launches and the like, so lucky there's a good old fashioned book brawl to hot things up! Yes, it's Greer versus Rushdie. The two have famously never seen eye to eye (Greer went to Cambridge University in the late '60s with Rushdie, and have had several reported......

No not the latest customer service policy from the Met, but a strange photographic treasure hunt, now in its second year. Rather than running around EC2 looking for chocolate eggs or cryptic clues, registered teams of 2 to 4 people, will be given a list of 10 locations to photograph in as inventive a way as possible. Prizes will be given at the end of the day for the best entries. So you'll probably......

We said we'd try to concentrate on less rock based gigs this week, and then we found out that Foo Fighters are playing Hyde Park on the 17th June. Nothing that special there until you add Motorhead and Queens Of The Stone Age to the bill, and suddenly you have a very strong bill that should keep rock fans across the board polishing their bullet belts in anticipation For Motorhead alone, it'll be well......

Re-reading this before putting it live, we're struck by how many very fine gigs and events there are on this week (as well as how bad our spelling is) and that's just the ones we know about. Promise us you'll go to at least one of them. We're sure you'll have a good time. Tonight: LA singer / songwriter, and one half of folk duo the Les Shelleys, Angela Correa will be at the......

The Londonist Literary List appears every Tuesday. If you’d like to bring an event to our attention, please email londonistlit@gmail.com. This part of the world is doing quite well in literary circles these days, what with all of the praise heaped on the Booker Prize nominees and Harold Pinter winning the Nobel Prize. Heck, we've even noticed some American publications musing over their readerships' envy of British literature. And to really drive the point......

At the end of last month we previewed Ducktastic the new play from the same team (i.e. Kenneth Brannagh and The Right Size) that created the brilliant That Play What I Wrote. However those of you who rushed out to buy tickets might want to check the dates because according to What's On Stage the show has been postponed for a couple of days. The reason? The ducks aren't quite up to scratch yet.......

Any Sonic Youth fans in the audience? Thought so... you probably already know about this then, but here's a heads-up for everyone else: Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon steps into uncharted territory in a provocative collaboration with video artist Tony Ousler and filmmaker Phil Morrison. Expect a critique of advertising, automobiles and gender stereotyping, washed down with lashings of noise, SY-style. The band includes glitchy Renaissance man Jim O'Rourke, ex-DNA drum machine diva Ikue......

As week eight of the nine-week Proms festival begins, perhaps your endurance is beginning to flag a bit. Perhaps the Royal Albert Hall is becoming a bit over-familiar, the queues are starting to seem a bit more torturous, and you're beginning to look forward to things like having to buy tickets in advance, and paying more than £4. If that is the case, one name should help keep you going through this week: Bo......

The Polyphonic Spree - Kokos, Monday 15th August In our time we've probably seen enough stage divers and crowd surfers to pack out a Coldplay video. We've seen stage diving singers, we've even seen a crowd surfing guitarist. But only now can we say that we've finally seen a crowd surfing drummer. Playing a drum. One of those big military marching things. Or at least trying to - we guess it's not that easy......

Sharon Stone was pretty cool in Sam Raimi's The Quick and The Dead and erm... Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol, but that's about it. More famous for her undercarriage than her ability to deliver a line, she's about to rekindle her career with Basic Instinct 2, which has just finished filming in London. That must bring back fond memories of her time with Steve Guttenberg as she's playing across from acting behemoth Stan......

The Magic Numbers are to play Cecil Sharp House, home of the English Folk Dance & Song Society on 5th August. Capacity is very limited and you're not likely to be able to see The Magic Numbers in venues like this for a while, so get in there quick. The Numbers' album was a little too polished and over-produced for us, but we absolutely love the live version of them. If you're one of......

It rained very heavily at Glastonbury last night, apparently, so our hearts go out to the Londonist staff camping out there. There is in no way a smirk on our face or any semblance of schadenfreude. Mwahahaha. Ahem. For the rest of us, there's still a chance to risk getting rain in our plastic pints of watered-down lager by going to the Wireless Festival at Hyde Park. Tickets are now ten pounds cheaper at......

Million-volt bolts of lightning. Cages shaped like coffins. Restraints. Tesla coils. The risk of instant death. All the ingredients which go into making a great West End show we think you'll agree. Theatre of Science is a new 'comedy' show, which contains all these ingredients and will be performed at the Soho Theatre starting in July. It stars "BAFTA winning, Emmy nominated, ghost-busting real life scientists Simon Singh and Richard Wiseman" who will be......

The Croydon Yoda, Derren Brown, has announced a 44 date UK tour, in anticipation of a West End run in the summer. Interestingly, the star of Mind Control, Trick of the Mind, Séance and Messiah eschews any dates in the London suburbs, apart from one, that is, at Fairfield in Croydon on 24th March. Presumably he couldn't resist playing a home town gig on Good Friday, taking him home for the Easter hols. Speaking......

The shock of being back at work after the torpor of the Christmas holidays is a little bit like a cold that won't quite go away, you can't quite shift that nagging horrible feeling that's stopping you feeling 100 per cent. To blast away the last vestiges of evil, try these gigs: As usual we've only listed gigs where tickets are still available as far as we know. To get your gig or event listed......