Hip-hop and commercial pop music have long dominated the MTV Music Video Awards, but this year it was guitar-led bands including The Killers who were celebrated at the glittering Miami bash.

Dr Solomon Eagle reflects upon the tides of our artistic times

Transmaniacon, DRAG CITY

THE NEW year starts in cracking style, with Jupiter and Saturn high in the south-west and a total eclipse of the moon thrown in for good measure.

BASS has decided not to bid for Allied Domecq's pub estate, leaving Whitbread the strong favourite to secure the 3,600 premises, writes Dan Gledhill.

Badly Drawn Boy is challenging pop's establishment. He's that hard, is Damon.

WHAT Howard Byron thinks of as folk music is really "pop goes melodic" ("What the folk's going on?", Real Life, 22 March). His definition is just the latest appropriation of this much-abused term to revitalise the bland fare of the indie scene. Radical singersongwriters such as Robb Johnson, Brian McNeill and Steve Knightly are far more authentic than the brigade which makes alienation palatable so that it can be sold back to the public.

Goodbye to the tortured artist. Kristin Hersh is trying hard to be normal.

From inhospitable shingle swept by east winds the film-maker Derek Jarman created a strikingly original garden. Since his death, his partner has lovingly extended it. But, as Michael Leapman discovers, not everyone admires it

Nicholas Timmins previews new rules to tackle incompetent medics

IT'S A summer song of pervasive dread, a wedding hymn riven with sexual anxiety, an epochal composition which routinely functions as background muzak for the keep-fit class (if you don't believe me, dig out Diana Moran's album Get Fit with the Green Goddess). Contradiction only bolsters the enigma of 'A Whiter Shade of Pale'.

The potential energy of theatre on the page requires performance to make it kinetic: there is always something beyond what text supplies, or else why perform it at all? Authors - even dead ones like Samuel Beckett - attempt to control performance, but the trick for a director is to release the text from the page. The director Lucy Bailey worked with Beckett early in her career and has also directed opera, a dramatic medium in which music fractures narrative linearity. Something similar occurs in Bailey's latest production, Beulah Land.