The future of the Middle East probably lies with the likes of Rachid Taha.

After his 1980s comeback, Jones spent two decades milking his kitsch appeal. Now, he wants us to take him seriously (and turn a blind eye to his participation in BBC1's execrable The Voice). 

“It’s been a while,” Willy Mason confesses. “It’s nice to see y’all.” The low-fi, alt-folkie has returned after a lengthy absence (five years, give or take the occasional low-key UK gig) to finally showcase new material.

Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller has released a record in collaboration with a London busker to coincide with his Joy in People show at the Hayward Gallery.

Wow. On record, the slender Canadian comes across as a fairly conventional country singer, lamenting her achy breaky heart (“Dying of Another Broken Heart”) and her own dirty deception (“Little Lie”). It’s not material designed – unlike Bonnie Prince Billy and Jim White – to scare the horses.

With musicians who could scarcely play their cheap and battered instruments, took drugs and drank heavily, fired guns and made bombs, Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two sounds like a punk band from the mid-1970s, but they were the most seminal of the country groups from 20 years earlier. Marshall Grant played bass and can be heard on all their early records including the famed "Folsom Prison Blues" and "I Walk The Line". "We didn't work hard to get that boom-chicka-boom sound," he later admitted, "It was all we could play."

The most rewarding part of this double-disc is the first quarter.

On 4 December 1956 the ultimate jam session took place. Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis gathered at the Sun studio of their mentor Sam Phillips to make music and conversation. What is remarkable is that there haven't been innumerable plays, films and TV documentaries about this seminal moment in pop history.

Geldof has, it seems, found a novel way of composing songs which may or may not be popular or sell well: imitate other people's.

From Long John Baldry to Jarvis Cocker, beanpole pop stars seem to inspire a special kind of affection, and from the sensational performance he gave here, Hamilton Leithauser is worthy of being – as it were – right up there with them.

Now in his eighties, the former Louvin Brother's latest album confronts military matters in ambivalent American manner – redemption and regret may loom as large here as in Johnny Cash's late work, but the inner-sleeve photo of a chippy-looking Charlie with his revolver tucked into his belt indicates the hawkish cast of a song like "Smoke on the Water", with its original villain Hitler joined by Saddam and Bin Laden.

Steve Earle’s lanky boy’s fourth album. It’s a bluecountry gospel-rockabilly grunge record with soul inflections (well, horns).

Casey Affleck has admitted to what many critics suspected all along - that his documentary about Joaquin Phoenix is a fake.