Field Day celebrates its sixth birthday on 2 June with its unique formula of pioneering line-up coupled with village fete mentality.

Royal Tunbridge Wells may be the traditional voice of Middle England’s morality but the busybodies are in danger of being drowned out after one of its nightspots was named the best small music venue in the UK.

Cutesy covers of classic songs are marketing gold, says Rhodri Marsden

There are several eye-watering anecdotes in this memoir by Tim Burgess of The Charlatans, though one in particular stands out. It involves a straw, a paper cone, a Rizla paper and two willing participants, and offers the seasoned cocaine user a novel method of ingesting their drug of choice. Suffice to say that this chapter is called "Cocainus".

When a band reforms after a long hiatus, their comeback album can be seen as an afterthought amid the ensuing cash-in, so credit is due to Cast. After a 10-year break, the Scouse four-piece choose to perform three-quarters of their latest release rather than rely on back-catalogue safety.

Where are you now and what can you see?

They were the “future of music”, the band with a quote for every occasion who would revive Britpop’s stadium-filling glory days.

When running the country gets him down, it's an Irish drinking song that gets David Cameron playing air guitar. The Prime Minister has revealed that Thin Lizzy's "Whiskey in the Jar" boasts his favourite riff of all time.

Bands like The Cranberries must beware of cashing in on nostalgia, says Elisa Bray

Imoved to Manchester in 1998, two years after The Doll Princess is set. While I recognise the areas – and accents – in Tom Benn's debut novel, the immediate aftermath of the 1996 IRA bomb is something I never saw; nor the grimy Northern gangland he portrays in this swaggering book. Whether Stockport lad Benn (born in 1987) has seen much of the latter, given his tender years, really doesn't matter. He gives such an adrenalin-soaked expedition to the seedier side of suburbs such as Wythenshawe, Hulme and Rusholme, and to the nightclubs and penthouses of Deansgate and central Manchester, that I was just pleased to be along for the ride.

The first line of the first song on the first Smiths album contains, like some fractal, the essence of their entire oeuvre.

Four years after she got back together with the Spice Girls, Melanie Chisholm is stalking much smaller venues.