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When Adele sings "Someone Like You" it is a moving piano ballad. But too many ham-fisted renditions by amateur ivory-tinklers has forced a Dublin music shop to ban customers from playing the hit tune.

Those Dancing Days were recommended to me by a friend last year, but when the Swedish, all-female five-piece sauntered onstage, each looking about 17 years old in their short-shorts...well, it was easy to mock him for why they might just happen to be his new favourite band.

As prolific as he is profound, Philip Ball weaves science into culture with a dexterity and virtuosity that avoid any sense of overstretch. This book, learned while never less than absorbing, could so easily have fallen victim to a glib reductionism as Ball explores the possible roots of music in Darwinian "sexual selection".

In which Robert Plant's bandleader gathers to himself a supergroup of über-string-benders – Marc Ribot, Greg Leisz and, yep, Bill Frisell – and gets down to "messing up" a small canon of country songs in one room, live.