Highlighting the best of London's arts in the month ahead, David Waters picks out the glittering gems from the cultural rock face...

Can't get through October without...

…  reviewing the artist as a young man. In May this year, a Lucian Freud portrait, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, sold for £17.2 million, the largest sum ever paid for work by a living artist. But what was Freud's art like in the beginning? His assistant and long term model, Dave Dawson, curates a show of Freud's earliest paintings. Not so much a survey, more an excavation of Freud's life-long relationship with paint and people.  From October 9 – December 12, Lucian Freud early works, 1940-1958.

Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, 38 Bury Stgreet, St James's, SW1

… dusting off your guilty pleasures. Okay, so we all agree celebrity culture is about as edifying as three week old cheese, but who would pass up the chance of rummaging through the inside stories of Camilla Wright - editor of Popbitch, the internet's sleaziest slebs on the slab website? We couldn't possibly reveal the book's title, of course. That would be telling.

Popbitch 2009, the book, will be released on the unsuspecting public October 16.







… puzzling over the answer. Complicite's award-winning A Disappearing Number comes to the Barbican Theatre through furious demand. A woman collapsing on a train in Bangalore. An English mathematician, G.H. Hardy, tries to unravel the genius of an Indian maths prodigy in 1914. What's the answer, dammit?! The play weaves these stories together while tantalising us with their meaning in true Complicite style. Genius.

The Barbican October 10 – November 6. 

… hanging out with Warhol's Superstars. The Hayward Gallery's Andy Warhol: Other voices, Other Rooms, presents one of the largest Warhol exhibitions London has seen (October 7 – January 18).  Alongside screen prints and paintings, expect films, television programmes, screen tests and videos. Beyond the exhibition, however, there are a series of talks, performances and events which promise to conjure up a true Warhol 'happening'.

I can't wait for Life along the Borderline: A Tribute to Nico, hosted byVelvet Underground co-founder, John Cale (11th October, 7.30pm Royal Festival hall) among others.

… shaking your money maker with New York-based Stephen Petronio dance company, who spin into town under Dance Umbrella's, erm, umbrella. With a  triple bill - Beauty and the Brut, BLOOM and This is the Story of a Girl in  a World, danced to music by Fisherspooner,  Rufus Wainwright, Antony Hegarty and Lou Reed - expect sharp moves, slick threads and the dirty glamour of a sexy downtown world 

Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, SE1, (October 7-8)

by DW

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Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.