Thirty years after his first festival, Chris Blackhurst rocks and rolls away the years with his grown-up daughter Daisy

There are sites full of undiscovered gems emerging online all the time

"In another life I would have been out on the road DJing and dragging a record box around in the middle of the night in some shady club," remarked Mary Anne Hobbs at the start of her new weekend breakfast show on BBC6 Music.

A celebrity entertainment presenter with no radio experience has been chosen to co-present a new show in Radio 1’s late night "specialist music" slot made famous by John Peel.

Stella Creasy tells of the anguish of unrequited love that an indie rock album was able to heal

When Jo Dunne and her sister Maggie made their live debut with Vickie Perks and Tina O'Neill in their home town of Birmingham in 1985, they could barely play their instruments. They had three songs and a band name that was both memorable and a statement of intent: We've Got A Fuzzbox and We're Gonna Use It!! Yet, after only their second gig, Robert Lloyd, frontman of the post-punk group the Nightingales, was impressed enough by their irreverent attitude and short, sharp, strident tunes like "X X Sex" and "Do I Want To?" to sign them to his label Vindaloo, already the home of the stand-up comedian Ted Chippington.

Arts bodies will have to broadcast performances and exhibitions live on a new digital arts “channel” in return for receiving government money, under a radical funding shake-up proposed by Jeremy Hunt.

Notebook

It is a record collection that any vinyl enthusiast would covet. From obscure German techno to Appalachian folk music, to the latest sounds in the rock and pop world; the thousands of carefully catalogued albums owned by the late DJ John Peel literally have something for everyone.

Steve Lamacq wiped tears from his eyes before he walked on-stage and recalled the “emotional three months” when it seemed the radio station he works for would never reach its tenth birthday, which was celebrated tonight, as the BBC planned 6 Music’s death.

Darren Hayman, who bears more than a passing resemblance to “McLovin” in Superbad, welcomed the New Year in with an intimate (approximately 70 people, some of whom even pointed out tiny discrepancies in Hayman's anecdotes), stripped-down, free and upsettingly stunted set, in which the singer-songwriter didn’t even perform on stage, but to the side of it.

In 2002, John Osborne won a competition on John Peel's Radio 1 show. The prize was a box of records from the DJ's shed, including such gems as Oizone – a punk Boyzone covers band – and Atom and his Package's "Pumping Iron for Enya".

Further to Pierre Pierrone's obituary of Gerry Rafferty (6 January), while it is natural that the huge hit songs such as "Baker Street" and "Stuck In the Middle" feature largely in his obituaries it should not be forgotten that his songbook at least until the late 1970s included a series of beautifully observed songs featuring wry observation, true emotions and winning melodies, writes Thom Hickey. Songs such as "Patrick" and "Steamboat Row" are models of the songwriter's art. His song "Her Father Didn't Like Me Anyway" is a classic song of real poignancy which became iconic in the Irish folk world through the magnificent performance of it (much revered by John Peel) by the Furey Brothers: