Crooner Engelbert Humperdinck has unveiled the "soaring ballad" that he hopes will restore the UK's reputation at this year's Eurovision Song Contest.

'It was like a dance where I knew I could lead her, but she could lead me, too'

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The gritty blues-rock duo have sold out their British tour. Andy Gill meets them at their studio in Nashville

A kind of pathological localism lies at the heart of the American ideal of Christmas, and they don't get any more local than Joey and Rory, a husband and wife duo from Tennessee.

Drums - John Bonham
For the fact that he was such a musical badass, inventive, intense and our drummer, Matt, will have a real problem with me if I pick another drummer that's not Bonham.

Wilma Lee Cooper was an important link to the traditional sacred music of the Appalachians. Best known for her long-time partnership with her fiddle-playing husband, Stoney Cooper, she was a dynamic rhythm guitarist and banjo player and led her band, The Clinch Mountain Clan, for over half a century.

The lure of Laurel Canyon stretches far and wide – to Iceland in Karl "Kalli" Henry's case, though he actually travelled to Nashville to record Last Train Home, surmising that top sessioners like Buddy Spicher, Hargus "Pig" Robbins and "Gentleman" Lloyd Green were best equipped to realise his country-rock dream.

There's something immensely gratifying about rockin' country music like this: the songs, the wit, the playing, the production values, the crackle of atmospheric enjoyment which accompanies such certainty of purpose.

Nashville's "garage-rock lounge lizard extraordinaire" is given to bouts of Beefheartian lyricism on his latest collection, bawled with sinister charm over grinding riffs whose function is surely to keep his muse on the rails.

Recorded over six days in Nashville with Dave Stewart, the debut release on Joss Stone's own label is, she claims, the first on which she has exerted total creative freedom.

Gwyneth Paltrow makes the most unconvincing substance abuser since Zammo took up cocaine in Grange Hill in this hokey tale of achy-breaky hearts in the land of country and western.