FAIRPORT CONVENTION PRINCESS ROYAL THEATRE PORT TALBOT

Jaco Pastorius hailed himself the greatest bassist in the world. He was also manic depressive and he died forgotten and alone. But was this the inevitable price of his brilliance?

Ten years ago, this reviewer risked his life and gave Lemmy's band a bad press. Now Motorhead are back, and its time for Glyn Brown to meet them face to face

New Order may have sunk into almost irreversible hibernation, but you can hear shades of their style in Monaco, built around their bassist, Peter Hook. The dates follow the release of new single "Shine (Someone Who Needs Me)", which sees Hooky leaving vocal duties to David Potts this time around.

"It was a fabulous time, a golden age for jazz," the bassist Eddie Jones said of the ten years he spent in Count Basie's band which began in 1953. "It was a good time to be in that band and a good time to be alive. Working for Basie was a pleasure: all he asked was that you show up, do your job, look good, and play well." A job in the band was much to be prized. "You couldn't afford to get sick in that band - if you didn't show up you disappeared."

Jazz legends Pat Metheny and Charlie Haden have journeyed into the mid-West. Phil Johnson listens in

Faust The Garage, London

You are being interviewed by Mr Big Cheese. Nervous? Just remember that it's odds on that he was once the spikey haired bassist in some two- bit pub band

The Dublin Castle pub in Camden helped launch the likes of Madness and Blur. But of the hundreds of bands who; play there each year, most will sink without trace. So why do they do it? Well, you never know your luck, say one week's hopefuls

Teenage Fanclub The Junction, Cambridge

IT WAS a Blur and Pulp gig, so someone had to mention the Mercury Music Prize that both bands came so close to winning. That someone was Pulp's Jarvis Cocker: 'Just one question: are there any M People fans in here tonight? Right. I should 'ope not.'

Lutoslawski: Symphonies 3 & 4. Los Angeles Philharmonic / Salonen (Sony, CD only). Confirmation that Lutoslawski is an alluring symphonist, Los Angeles a world-class orchestra, and Salonen one of the finest younger MDs in the business. Michael White

CIGARETTE advertisements these days are not so much wise as positively devious. You don't even see cigarettes in them, for a start. You might get clever punning references to the name of the cigarette as in campaigns by Silk Cut and John Player Special, but you don't get a picture of a long white thing with a filter on the end. It has become so that if you see an ad that you can't understand, or in which you can't spot a product, you automatically assume that it's a cigarette ad.

THE OTHER day I wrote that, apart from one exception, I couldn't think of any word in English that could be pronounced two different ways to yield two different meanings. I should have known better than to try to outsmart the Independent readership. Hardly was the print dry on the page than I got a letter from Mr Sandford in Sturminster Newton pointing out that simple words like row, read, lead and sow can be pronounced two different ways with quite different meanings. (Or, in the case of read, different tenses.) He added ominously: 'What's the betting other committed addicts will add to these?'