Flying solo again following several recordings with his sister Julia, Angus Stone delivers what may be his masterpiece in Broken Brights, an album that seamlessly inhabits the resurgent Laurel Canyon sound.

Serene surroundings for an Americana feast

"Americana" is everywhere, of course.

“I’m tremendously proud of this album,” Rumer demurely claims about her impending new record, Boys Don’t Cry.

John Mayer continues mining the California singer-songwriter vein of 2009's Battle Studies.

If you're going to quit your day job as drummer in the world's premier folk-rock band, you'd better have something special up your sleeve.

'We'd get Bootsy Collins to dress the band...'

Who lives in a house like this? There's dirty laundry all over the floor, piles of records strewn around, life drawings hanging in the bathroom and war medals displayed on the walls. Why, it's Pete Doherty, of course, the free-spirited scamp. In a video recorded for NME's website, the 33-year-old musician gives viewers a tour of his cramped Paris apartment.

Toby Leighton-Pope, 35, is vice president of music for Live Nation. He's been promoting Hard Rock Calling since it began seven years ago

Drums - Picasso

I've always wondered what he could do with a pair of sticks.

Sir Paul McCartney paid tribute to the other "three boys" in the Beatles as he unveiled his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

“Love it is an apple core, before the fruit was beautiful, now it is a circle, life and death a circle, the circle is a cadence,” Jonathan Wilson maintains on the languid hippie anthem “Gentle Spirit”. You dig? He digs us. He tells us so.

Scorsese shot this film of the The Band's farewell gig at the San Francisco Wonderland in 1976 while he was still working on New York, New York, a very different sort of musical.

Featuring concert recordings from his 1984-5 tour, this shows that even while his studio releases were adrift in genre-hopping chaos, Neil Young could always cut the mustard with a crack band behind him – in this case, a star-studded country ensemble of Spooner Oldham on piano, Ben Keith on pedal steel, and the fiddler Rufus Thibodeaux adding a cajun drive.