A legal battle has broken out over who owns the rights to the disco classic "YMCA" and who is due the money the Village People anthem still generates more than 35 years after it conquered the charts.

Bruce Springsteen has paid tribute to saxophonist Clarence Clemons, who died aged 69 over the weekend.

In 1975, the rock photographer Eric Meola took nearly a thousand photographs of Bruce Springsteen and his E Street Band for the cover of the album, Born To Run.

It is a measure of how far voice-control technology has come that you have just read this sentence. The original idea was that your correspondent would speak a line into a machine that turns what you say into text and then open with the gobbledygook the machine had "recognised". Sadly, the ugly facts rather killed the beautiful theory (or, as the machine, still not quite perfect, would have it, "the beautiful scenery").

Collecting together Bruce Springsteen's first seven albums in a handy slipcase box, The Collection 1973-84 reveals how his career development went in emotional waves, with the wordy urgency of his debut supplanted by the growing ebullience of his R&B street-opera style on The Wild,the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, which then crested on Born to Run, before his three-year recording exile incubated the flintier, more thoughtful cast of Darkness on the Edge of Town, whose burgeoning interest in social duty and blue-collar honour bore abundant fruit on The River before hardening into a more bitter medicine on the solo Nebraska.

You probably know this already, but for those of us who've previously suffered a blind spot on matters of the Boss, this is a timely reminder of just how good his first seven albums, collected here, are.

They say you should never meet your idols and they (whoever they are) are probably right. Lucky for me, then, that Bruce Springsteen has never meant that much to me. He does now.

A new documentary, The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story provides an insight into the working methods of Bruce Springsteen, and his relationship with E Street band members. Made by Grammy and Emmy Award-winning film-maker Thom Zimny, it features candid interviews with Springsteen, E Street Band members and the singer's manager, record producer Jon Landau.

The sum of their parts: a rock band so in love with rock form that they're prepared to wear their loot on their sleeves.

"Drama on BBC Radio 4 is in rude health," wrote the station's controller Mark Damazer on his blog last month as he sought to reassure listeners over his contentious decision to decommission the Friday Play. No other network, he told them, could rival Radio 4's output of 650 hours a year of original plays and readings.

Pam Ayres' stated aim has always been to write "something with which the audience would identify", which tells us two things. First, these poems were never meant to be written down, but to be performed – and they do work better when one imagines Ayres reading them out. Second, that Ayres doesn't want to challenge her audience, or make them think again. She doesn't want to defamiliarise existence, but to familiarise it.