Beyoncé’s booty-shaking self-assertion often veers into self-entitlement – thank goodness, then, for Birmingham’s stripped-down soul sensation …

Slum roots of the best PM we never had

Gilmore returns from the maternity ward to deliver a batch of songs pregnant with metaphor and abstraction, and a soft new production gloss.

Her 2010 album of Glass, Tavener and Nyman pieces was a more effective showcase for Amy Dickson's soprano sax than this collection of popular classics and classic pop. Fauré's “Pavane” works fine – her sleek , pure timbre, closer to clarinet or even oboe at times, floats weight-lessly over the gentle pizzicato and swish of strings; but the sax lacks the emotional flexibility of the human voice when taking the vocal line to “Casta Diva”, from Bellini's Norma.

Nicki Minaj and her mentor, Lil Wayne, will join forces for a performance at the Billboard Music Awards, to be presented 19 May in Las Vegas.

Complexity has been ironed out from the footballer's legacy

N-Dubz rapper Dappy, who was found guilty of assault and affray, lost a challenge against his conviction today.

If filmmakers make biopics, then Neon Neon are music’s foremost makers of biodiscs. With 2008 debut Stainless Style, the electro-pop duo of Boom Bip and Super Furry Animals’ Gruff Rhys imagined the inner life of disgraced car magnate John DeLorean. Now they turn to Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, the Italian Communist allegedly killed by his own explosives in 1972.

The fact that Matthew E White resembles the baby Jesus – that is, if you superimposed the adult Christ's facial hair on a giant baby – has doubtless encouraged the enthusiasm with which he is, in some quarters, being hailed as a new messiah. The 30-year-old Virginian is a bespectacled and benign presence, like Mama Cass with a ZZ Top beard. And his debut album, bearing the dreadful, punning title Big Inner, sounds like the work of a man who bypassed youthful things and headed straight for the music the grown-ups were listening to in 1976 while the kids were getting punked and discoed.

LG Arena, Birmingham

This second collaboration between Gruff Rhys and Boom Bip is, like the John DeLorean-themed Stainless Style, another biographical concept album, this one based on events in the life of left-wing Italian Giangiacomo Feltrinelli who published The Leopard and Doctor Zhivago.

For their follow-up to 2011’s acclaimed Buffalo, New Zealand psych-poppers The Phoenix Foundation chose to ignore the “short-form game” of contemporary pop and make “Test Match music” – an indication of the double-album length of Fandango which, alas, also  hints at its yawning longueurs.

If you want your house painted orange, Peter Andre is your man.

"The singing is no problem," Edwyn Collins maintains. "[But] the talking is a bit dodgy, to say the least."