Scottish chamber-folk artist Jo Hamilton spent a peripatetic childhood shuttling around the Middle East, Cambodia and Sri Lanka, during which time she clearly soaked up a range of musical influences.

When American showbiz lawyer Steven Machat entered the family business, he dealt with Michael Jackson, James Brown, Sam Cooke and many more. In this exclusive extract from his memoir he gives some of his recollections

He is a No 1 star in France, but Charlie Winston is virtually unknown back in his native Britain, writes Nick Hasted

Hamilton is that rare thing: a female pop act who is neither electro-pop poppet nor the sort of artist you simply can't write about without using the word "kooky".

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As one of the biggest British groups ever, Genesis have sold in the region of 130 million albums worldwide. Both the original vocalist Peter Gabriel and the drummer-turned-lead-singer, Phil Collins, have enjoyed hugely successful solo careers, while the keyboard player Tony Banks and the guitarist Mike Rutherford, the two mainstays of the group, have also reaped the benefits of the work the band did in the late Sixties and throughout the Seventies. The drummer John Mayhew was only with them between August 1969 and July 1970, but he contributed to the recording of Trespass, the group's pastorally tinged second album, and their first for the Charisma label.

Musician furious at decision to shorten his performance to a little over a minute

The World is a mini-festival that is the brainchild of Toby Gough, who brought young Sri Lankan survivors of the 2004 tsunami to the Royal Botanic Garden three years ago. Now he has enlisted the help of Brian Cox as patron, and Peter Gabriel and Kylie Minogue as backers, to celebrate international culture, from dancers from Brazil's favelas, to musicans from West Africa, to salsa dancers from Cuba.

Britain's best world music festival takes place this month – and we've got 50 pairs of tickets to give away. Sound good? Then tackle our quiz...

They say you should never go back. Not least because you might not recognise anyone. This is especially so at top-flight sports clubs. 'What Happened Next: The Rugby Club' (BBC4, Tuesday) looked back at David Stafford's series about Bath's first season as a professional outfit. Few if any of the original protagonists are still there. After the decision to go pro, most of them found themselves heading for an early bath.

Nine Lives continues in the vein of 2003's About Time, with Steve Winwood still mining a catalogue of bland homilies regarding such things as hope, faith and persistence for songs such as "I'm Not Drowning", "Fly" and "We're All Looking".

More happily, the album also extends his association with the jazz guitarist José Pires de Almeida Neto, whose neat, interior-sprung figures furnish the hooks to many of these songs, lending a cyclical, desert-blues feel to "I'm Not Drowning", a Pablo-style soukous tinge to "Hungry Man", and a samba-pop flavour to "Secrets" and "At Times We Do Forget". Lyrically, Winwood is more effective on the dystopian social unease in pieces such as "Hungry Man" and "Dirty City", but the album's too awash in new-age blather: the effect is to skew the arrangements too much towards dinner-party blue-eyed soul, somewhere between Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins, particularly when the flimsy, fusion-lite sax appears. He can still deliver even the limpest of lines with compelling conviction, for all that.

The mighty English roots duo Show of Hands attracted a loyal audience of cutthroats, crooks and conmen to their show at London's Bloomsbury Theatre. "Is there anything left in England that's not for sale?" blasted the band's front man and singer-songwriter, Steve Knightley, flanked by the multi-instrumentalist Phil Beer and the pair's regular guest, the fiery-haired Miranda Sykes, on double bass.

Here Is What Is is the soundtrack to a documentary in which the acclaimed producer of Dylan, U2 and Peter Gabriel tries to reveal “the source of the art, rather than everything that surrounds the art” – an impossible task, but one he comes close to fulfilling at various points here, most notably in enabling “Lovechild” to blossom into a complete song from the initial root of Garth Hudson’s piano improvisation.