A date for your diary: On Tuesday 25th September the band will be heading back to the BBC Maida Vale studios to perform a Radio 1 Live Lounge special.

Lest you not be familiar with the Live Lounge show format, this means that they’ll be performing a mystery cover of a chart track, as well as some of their own from new album and they’ll most likely be engaging in a bit of chat too. Details of how to listen coming soon. But, if you feel like a bit of a warm up, you can in fact listen to one of their previous Live Lounge interviews recorded in March 2010 here.

And UK fans: if you want to apply for the free ticket lottery to be in the audience you can do so up until 3.15pm on Saturday 15th September. See here for the full details.

Tuesday 25th September is one whole day after Monday 24th September which means that by then the new album Babel will have been out in the UK for one whole day – and even longer in some other places. Very exciting.

M&S HQ x