Super Furry Animals frontman and solo artist extraordinaire Gruff Rhys released his latest album Hotel Shampoo to critical acclaim earlier in the year. Gruff took time out from his North American tour to answer some teasers for Music Magazine.

Gwen Stefani felt so "gross" after giving birth, she couldn't write music.

The Selecter are the forgotten band of the 2-Tone movement. The group, fronted by the striking-looking, strong-voiced Pauline Black, embodied the label's multi-racial ethos as much as The Specials, and appeared with them and Madness on Top of the Pops in November 1979. Within days, teenagers all over the UK were rifling through jumble stores to find black suits and pork-pie hats.

What Katy did next was sadly lacking a grain of substance

When Gwen Stefani walked into the Anaheim house she shared with her brother and bandmates, she heard Eric Stefani playing a tender piano figure that stopped her in her tracks. The pair immediately set about writing the song that would become "Don't Speak". Gwen gushed out some lyrics: "I can see it all in an eye blink/ I know everything about how you are/ I can understand exactly how you think/ Between you and me, it's not very far." The verses celebrated Gwen's long-standing relationship with her bassist, Tony Kanal. It was a pretty, if lyrically unexceptional, love song; unusual for a band more noted for an energetic ska-pop. Melodically, though, it sounded like a hit. "The vibes were there, the chorus was almost exactly perfect," said the band's guitarist, Tom Dumont.

American hip-hop troupe the Black Eyed Peas are set to pass a UK recording industry milestone this week by becoming the first band to sell one million copies of a single purely on the strength of downloads.

No Doubt is suing video game maker Activision for putting words in band members' mouths.

A pram isn’t just a practical piece of equipment. It’s also a status symbol, a fashion statement – and a moral choice, finds mum-to-be Clare Dwyer Hogg

As always, it is the details that are the most poignant. A family-sized bag of peanuts on the dashboard, a toy tractor dangling from the rear-view mirror. It adds a layer of recognition among parents to the at-first bewildering, unbearably sad story of the Puttick family: no one sets out for a family jaunt without snacks in the car, or fails to find said car embellished with toys, stickers, Lego bricks and other juvenile ephemera.

Senegalese R&B star Akon may be currently the world's most successful African performer, his own eight million album sales augmented by hit collaborations with the likes of Gwen Stefani and Leona Lewis.

A decade ago, they made the album of the year, after drugs and in-fighting had taken their toll. Now Mercury Rev have mellowed, they tell Elisa Bray

Stand by for fireworks between Jack Straw's Ministry of Justice and members of Britain's "exotic" artistic community.

"I really did come here last time I was meant to play," says Santogold, by way of explanation for the rescheduling of this date from a little over a month ago. "I just couldn't talk!"

The queen of pop subdivides and rules