‘There’s a fair chance that this line-up would be a train wreck’

Wherever she may have been – presumably enjoying her rock n’ roll family life at her new home in glamorous New York - the ghost of Louise Mensch pervaded the cavernous municipal chill of Corby’s Lodge Park sports centre.

Although voters in every part of  England and Wales outside London have the chance to go to the polls tomorrow to elect 41 police and crime commissioners, Labour and Conservative strategists will privately be more interested in the parliamentary by-election in Corby.

African musicians take to Britain's railways

Can a corporation be evil?

It's business as usual, but with diminishing returns, on I'm With You – the result, perhaps, of sticking with the producer Rick Rubin for six albums.

Warner Music Group Corp., the world's third-largest recording company with such artists as Eric Clapton, Michael Buble and Paramore, is being sold for about €3.3 billion (£2bn) as a global decline in CD sales weighs down the industry.

Intertwined, interchangeable even, Parliament and Funkadelic, the flamboyant funk outfits led by the crazy, visionary genius George Clinton, mixed soul, rock, psychedelia, satire and black power and made some of the most memorable and most sampled records of the 1970s and early '80s. They also played spectacular live shows, and influenced a range of musicians from Prince and the Red Hot Chili Peppers to rap acts like Ice-T and Public Enemy.

The bass guitarist Paul Gray was a founder member of Slipknot, one of the scariest-looking, most brutal sounding bands to come out of the US in recent years.

Bono's back injury means that U2 has been replaced by the far less comforting letters "TBC" on the Glastonbury website. Speculation on an act to fill this sudden hole at the top of Friday night's bill has fixed on the Rolling Stones.