'I'm good with a water cannon'

Unlikely as it seems, Simply Red's "Holding Back the Years" has now provoked two very successful jazz versions – Jimmy Scott's tearjerker and the excellent opener to this, nu-jazz diva Parlato's latest album.

When Tony Blair published his memoir, I was able to fill at least half a column with his celebrity anecdotes, which featured such notables as Madonna, Duran Duran and Bono, whom Blair suggested would be a better PM than Gordon Brown.

One of modern life's stranger phenomena is the weird paradox of knowing that the majority of people do something, but finding that you don't know anybody who does it. For instance, I don't know anybody who won't move down the carriage when there is plenty of room and people are trying to get on the train, and yet when I am on a train (or, more likely, trying to get on it), most people don't move down the carriage. Who are they? What is their thinking? I'd love to know. Likewise, I have never met a man who admits to honking his car horn at women in the street, so I can't ask what it is that motivates them, and why they can never think of anything to say once they've got the woman's attention.

Simply Red star Mick Hucknall has issued "a public apology" to the hundreds of women he slept with at the height of his fame.

In the late 1970s and early '80s, Gregory Isaacs, the Jamaican singer with the plaintive, soulful, vulnerable voice and the laid-back delivery – best heard on his signature tune "Night Nurse" – was considered the natural heir to Bob Marley's reggae crown. Yet he never quite managed to cross over to the mainstream.

The Great Britain Special Olympics team has returned home triumphant after winning a total of 88 medals at the European Summer Games in Warsaw, Poland.

Among the guests at the Big Chill Festival last weekend was ex-Joy Division bassist Peter "Hooky" Hook. During a Q&A, Hook was invited to name the "biggest pillock" he'd ever met during his days as a regular at the legendary Hacienda Club in Manchester. "The crown would have to go to Mick Hucknall," he replied. "At the end of each night [at the club], everyone used to congregate by the front door, and there was one wonderful night when we heard this voice saying 'Mick Hucknall coming through, Mick Hucknall coming through!' It was Mick Hucknall coming through. So one of the Salford gangsters who was in the club turned round and lamped him. And everyone just ignored it." Considering the relish with which he recounted this tale, I can't imagine Hook will be hob-nobbing with the former Simply Red singer (who now fronts The Faces) when the two appear on the same bill at the Goodwood Vintage Festival this weekend. Hook is due to close the event with a full rendition of Joy Division's 1979 album Unknown Pleasures.

Seventies chart stars The Faces are to reunite, with Mick Hucknall taking Rod Stewart's role, it was announced today.

Were the here and now of the title sunny California rather than ice age London, one might feel rather more inclined to this debut album from Sam Brooker and his Ghanaian singing partner Ruby Amanfu.

Veteran rock star Rod Stewart, famed for his skin-tight leopardskin trousers and sandpaper singing voice, is being sued for £2m in unpaid legal bills by one of the most powerful entertainment law firms in the United States after it represented him in a series of courtroom battles dating back nearly a decade.

Good news at last for Gordon Brown. David Abrahams, the mega-bucks property developer and (very) generous party donor has, it seems, returned to the fold.