Not a blues album, but an album borrowing heavily from the bank of blues tonality: minor keys, draggy tempos, undecorated structures, an implicit sense of what it is to be enslaved.

The sun was the perfect way to show off the springtime wisteria on this building in London, where temperatures soared to 25C yesterday. The warm weather is set to continue for much of the UK over the Easter weekend, according to weather forecasters, and with a couple of weeks still to go there is already speculation that this month could prove to be the warmest April on record.

Mature is for cheeses. His new band do deranged gonzo garage rock and hypnotic voodoo blues

Tales of the City

Rummaging through a bag of old cassettes, singer/guitarist Cypress Grove came across one mysteriously marked "JLP Songs".

A "tribute" album of sorts, to the late Jeffrey Lee Pierce of the Gun Club; except that in place of individual artists doing new interpretations of JLP songs, a coterie of friends combine to finish a batch of tunes demoed roughly by Pierce with one Cypress Grove.

"Not what you expect. McCarthy's book is heavy on gloom and punishing to the last. Cave and Ellis's score, though, seems fixated on those thin shafts of sunlight... it could have been bleak, monochromatic even – but in the hands of Cave and Ellis, hope springs eternal." - bbc.co.uk/music

Cave and his beardy Bad Seeds/Grinderman sidekick Warren Ellis have become prolific soundtrack composers of late, as shown by 2009's White Lunar, a retrospective collection that has, to be frank, probably been heard more often than the accompanying films were seen.

Nick Cave's cult classic has been published in a 20th-anniversary edition, to coincide with the release of his second novel. And the Ass Saw the Angel has been, reads the press release, "completely revised... cut down and reorganised by the author so the plot is clarified and the characters stand out more clearly. The book retains all its brilliance but is more accessible to the general reader." It is Cave's inaccessibility and strangeness which is so attractive, yet there is something about this material which seems so alive that it struggles out of the confines of the page.

Nick Cave's musical career is easily summarised: 20 years of musical and lyrical excellence - first with The Birthday Party and then the Bad Seeds - each album an improvement on the last, reaching a high point with The Boatman's Call in 1997, a record that sits happily alongside Bob Dylan's Blood on The Tracks or Neil Young's On The Beach as one of the greatest rock records of the 20th century. Then a four-year hiatus during which he cleaned up and got married, followed by a sequence of records which have received near unanimous acclaim, yet are far more scattershot. Cave has moved from the chiselled perfection of his earlier lyrics to an anything-goes approach, as he notes in a lyric from "We Call Upon the Author": "Prolix! Prolix! Nothing a pair of scissors can't fix!"

As their work with the Bad Seeds and Grinderman has turned increasingly visceral, Cave and Ellis have given an outlet to their contemplative sides by composing soundtracks.

Writing his first novel almost killed Nick Cave, the rock'n'roller says. He is in a better place now: Hove. But that has only served to make his work darker

The Arctic Monkeys play their first UK show in two years with an ease confirming their special status.

If Favourite Worst Nightmare was a sketchbook of Arctic Monkeys' responses to their vertiginous success then Humbug seems to represent the more considered comedown after a few years pursuing alternative diversions.