The genre-hopping bass virtuoso has backed Ariana Grande and Herbie Hancock, appeared in Star Wars and become a dedicated boxer. Ahead of his fifth album, Stephen Bruner explains his polymath mindset

It is an overcast Thursday afternoon at the end of January, and Thundercat is telling me about the time he tried to interest Snoop Dogg in the mid-70s oeuvre of Frank Zappa. He wasn’t Thundercat then, he explains. He was still Stephen Bruner, bass player for hire, who had fetched up in what he calls a “stupid-as-hell, Rick James-level band” backing the venerable rapper, packed with Los Angeles jazz luminaries who would later contribute to Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly: Kamasi Washington, Josef Leimberg, Terrace Martin. Alas, their jazz chops were sometimes deemed surplus to requirements. At one point, while Bruner was playing an expansive bass solo on stage, Snoop sidled up to him and flatly announced: “Ain’t nobody told you to play all that.”

So perhaps it was in the spirit of horizon-broadening that Bruner took it upon himself to play Snoop the song St Alfonzo’s Pancake Breakfast, a knotty, marimba-heavy slice of jazz-rock from Zappa’s 1974 album Apostrophe, which switches time signatures three times in less than two minutes, and features lyrics about a man stealing margarine and urinating on a bingo card. “Yeah, I hit him with the rollercoaster,” Bruner chuckles. “He was smoking, and he almost ate his blunt, saying: ‘What the hell is going on?’ I said: ‘My sentiments exactly.’ I think I did a cartwheel after that and left the band: I played Snoop Dogg St Alfonzo’s Breakfast, my job is done here, I have no more work to do.” He thinks for a moment. “Or maybe I got fired: ‘Get out of here dude, you’re too weird.’ I forget. It was a great moment.”

What comes next for Europe with the transatlantic alliance in tatters? Guardian Europe editor Jon Henley will be answering readers’ questions live here from 12pm GMT. Join us then and post your questions and comments now

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Today’s opening of the Munich Security Conference marks a year since JD Vance’s blistering attack on European leaders signalled the start of a new world order – and huge questions for Europe about its future.

Writing in the This Is Europe newsletter this week, Jon described this as Europe’s moment of reckoning as it faces what Emmanuel Macron called a “tsunami” of competition from China and a US that is “openly anti-European”.

Munich Security Conference: Rubio flies in amid testing times for US-Europe ties – live
German chancellor Friedrich Merz among key figures to speak as three-day security gathering opens

Democrats at Munich security summit to urge Europe to stand up to Trump
European leaders divided over how far to accommodate Trump’s ‘wrecking ball’ politics and foreign policy

‘Made in Europe’ – an industrial strategy: an idea whose time has come
Defending European strategic interests must be a priority to level the economic playing field in an increasingly volatile world

A debating society didn’t want to invite two figures connected to the party to speak. Cue an authoritarian response

It must have seemed the easiest offer in the world to refuse. Would students at Bangor University enjoy a question-and-answer session with Sarah Pochin – the Reform UK MP famous for saying it “drives me mad” to see TV adverts full of black people – and Jack Anderton, the 25-year-old influencer who helped send Nigel Farage’s TikTok account viral among teenagers? No, the university’s debating society decided, it would not.

And had it filed the request in the bin, you wouldn’t be reading this. Until now, Anderton’s A New Dawn campus tour – a homage to the “debate me bro” style of the American rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, killed last year, who was famed for inviting liberal students to take on his arguments and live-streaming the results – hadn’t exactly set the heather alight. Reform is actively pushing to recruit inside universities, but in Cambridge, according to its student newspaper Varsity, only about 30 people turned up to hear Anderton argue that migrants are taking the part-time jobs students once used to do.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

Guardian Newsroom: Can Labour come back from the brink?
On Monday 30 April, ahead of May elections, join Gaby Hinsliff, Zoe Williams, Polly Toynbee and Rafael Behr as they discuss how much of a threat Labour faces from the Green party and Reform – and whether Keir Starmer can survive as leader of the Labour party
Book tickets here

Kremlin’s repeated targeting of infrastructure has left thousands without heating, reliant on shelters and desperate home hacks

Natalya Pavlovna watched her two-year-old son, Danylo, play with Lego. “We are taking a break from the cold,” she said as children made drawings inside a warm tent. Adults sipped tea and chatted while their phones charged. The emergency facility is located in Kyiv’s Troieshchina district, on the left bank of the Dnipro River. Outside it was -18C. There was bright sunshine and snow.

“Russia is trying to break us. It’s deliberate genocide against the Ukrainian people. Putin wants us to capitulate so we give up the Donbas region,” Natalya said. “Kyiv didn’t use to feel like a frontline city. Now it does. People are dying of cold in their homes in the 21st century. The idea is to make us leave and to create a new refugee crisis for Europe.”

Natalia and Danylo near the ‘resilience point’ in Troyeshchyna district

From 80s punk hangouts to celebrity hotspots to good old community boozers, readers reveal their much-loved locals

I started working at the Windmill in the Surrey Hills when I was 14 and the landlord, Cecil Baber Brendan Holland – Dutch to the locals – became my second father. My second son’s second name is Brendan, after him. Several photographers, entrepreneurs, sportspeople and musicians lived in the area – Eric Clapton’s house was just around the corner. Although I never quite got over answering the phone to someone asking for Mick and I made the mistake of asking “Mick who?”

Everyone should get their eyes tested every two years, but there are other ways to optimise your vision, say ophthalmologists – and yes, eating carrots may help

Eye health is often something that we take for granted until we encounter problems. But lifestyle choices such as screen time and smoking can affect your vision. Here, ophthalmologists share their tips on maintaining healthy eyes, from sight tests to sunglasses.

Protest group’s co-founder wins legal challenge against decision to proscribe it under anti-terrorism laws

The co-founder of Palestine Action has won a legal challenge to the home secretary’s decision to ban the group under anti-terrorism laws.

The proscription of Palestine Action, which categorised it alongside the likes of Islamic State, was the first of a direct action protest group and attracted widespread condemnation as well as a civil disobedience campaign defying the ban, during which more than 2,000 people have been arrested.

City analysts say financial market investors will be worried if cost is deducted from budget surplus

Rachel Reeves is under pressure to reassure MPs over the state of the UK’s public finances, amid concerns that the rising cost of special educational needs and disabilities (Send) could leave a significant hole in the government’s financial buffer.

Meg Hillier, the chair of the all-party House of Commons Treasury committee, said the chancellor should make clear her long-term plans for the £6bn-a-year Send bill as uncertainty grows over how it will be accounted for at the end of the decade.

German chancellor Friedrich Merz among key figures to speak as three-day security gathering opens

If you need a primer on what’s on the agenda for the next three days, I spoke with the MSC’s head of policy Nicole Koenig, the author of the European part of their security report published ahead of the meeting.

I asked her what is most likely to be the focus of this year’s forum, will Rubio deliver a “JD Vance 2.0” speech or say something more (nomen omen) diplomatic, and what other topics are likely to come up.

“We have had years, decades of complaints by the US about the fact that in Europe, we were not spending enough on defence. That has changed since the summit in The Hague.

The shift in mindset is that yesterday in the room, what we felt, all of us, there was a clear coming together of vision and of unity.

“They want [us] to perceive the Russians as a mighty bear, but you could argue they are moving through Ukraine at the stilted speed of a garden snail, so let’s not fall the trap of the Russian propaganda.”

PM says country’s discourse is being poisoned and polluted by rhetoric ‘pitting communities against one another’

The leadership crisis that hit Westminster at the start of this week may not have been very good for the governance of the UK, but it has produced some good journalism. The New Statesman and the Spectator this week have both published impressive long reads this week about what has gone wrong for the government. Although not explicitly billed as such, they both read like first drafts of an obituary for Keir Starmer’s premiership.

In his essay in the New Statesman, Tom McTague, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, focuses on the ideas influencing the Starmer project. Here is an extract.

The tragic irony for [Morgan] McSweeney [Starmer’s chief of staff until Sunday] was that Starmer’s 18 months as prime minister have only vindicated Blair’s central analysis of their project. McSweeney and Starmer might have identified what they disliked most about the excesses of New Labour, but they never developed an alternative political economy of their own that might replace it. In place of Blairism there was no theory of political reform or coherent critique of British state failure, no analysis of Britain’s future place in the world or any kind of distinct moral mission. All there was was a promise to “clean things up” as Starmer put it to me. The mission became, in essence, conservative: to protect the settlement erected by Blair and eroded over the 20 years since his departure. Britain could thrive if it could only begin to live within its means, attract more foreign investment, reassure the bond markets and return a sense of “service” to government. After years of chaos, mere stability would be change. And this would be enough.

Where there was distinct radicalism – from McSweeney’s Blue Labour instincts – there was no mandate. McSweeney and Starmer had not fought an ideological battle to bring Blue Labour to government, as Wilson had done for socialist modernisation in the 1960s and Blair for liberal progressivism 30 years later. This was largely because Starmer never really believed in it in the first place and McSweeney, though a reflective thinker, was always more of an operator than political theorist. And so, the pair offered a programme without a programme, a government without ideas or the mandate to enact them.

Another of those who worked for [Stamer] adds: ‘He’s completely incurious. He’s not interested in policy or politics. He thinks his job is to sit in a room and be serious, be presented with something and say “Yes” or “No” – invariably “Yes” – rather than be persuader–in-chief.’ Even before he fell out with Starmer, Mandelson told friends and colleagues that the Prime Minister had never once asked him ‘What really makes Trump tick?’ or ‘How will he react to this?’.

Others dispute the claim of incuriosity. ‘There are subjects when he drills down and he’s really, really good,’ says another aide. ‘The idea he can’t think politically is also wrong. He will often think ahead.’ But even these loyalists admit Starmer lacks a ‘philosophical worldview’.

Yet again our country’s discourse is being poisoned and polluted by the racist rhetoric coming from Reform - pitting communities against one another and sowing division to suit their own ends. They should be apologising, not doubling down.

You only have to look at the toxicity flowing from their candidate for Gorton and Denton to know what they are about - dangerous ideas that pull at the fabric of who we are in Britain. They don’t have solutions to the challenges we face as a country. All they can offer is a smokescreen of hate and division.