After a promising start at the end of 2010, the ski season in the Alps and Pyrenees stalled for two months with little fresh snow. That's changed now, with big falls – up to a metre in 48 hours – in recent weeks. So the last two months of the season are looking excellent. Snow depths at Engelberg ( engelberg.ch) in the Swiss Alps are above 3.3 metres and touching 2.5 metres at the snowiest resorts in the French Alps, such as Flaine ( flaine.com).

"Ordinary Life" is a somewhat ironic choice of opener for Amy Macdonald. The Glaswegian sings: "I don't care about the spotlight" in a voice that matches Dolores O'Riordan for stridency and adds KT Tunstall's huskiness. Amy, there is a spotlight 40 feet above your head, pointing right at you. It is not the only odd moment in a slick but ultimately underwhelming set.

Keane's Tim Rice-Oxley has shown a commendable desire to break new ground in recent months, with the African and Japanese elements of Night Train now followed by this debut album from the country-rock project he's hatched with Jesse Quin and members of The Killers, Mumford & Sons and Noah And The Whale.

The fantasy of starting again made Paul McCartney turn up on college campuses asking if his new band Wings could get a gig, and Stephen King publish books as Richard Bachman. Keane's songwriter Tim Rice-Oxley hasn't quite gone that far with his new country band Mt Desolation. Still, he is stretching himself beyond Keane's stadium confines.

It is a strange thing, watching one of the very biggest pop stars in the world mere metres from the stage at one of London's smallest venues. And yet, it is happening: Brandon Flowers, sometime of the Killers, is performing his new solo album for the very first time to at most 500 people.

It's blindingly obvious, from first hearing, that the material on Brandon Flowers's solo debut was originally intended for the next Killers album.

The niche eroticism of the Japanese never ceases to amaze, does it? Given the historic vulgarity of the professional British horizontale, the weirdness of Nipponese sexuality has always intrigued us. The 17th-century shoguns set up "pleasure quarters" where gentlemen could visit prostitutes (and wives were OK about it) but Japanese girls kept dragging the arts into the basic eroto-financial transaction, until male visitors could hardly find a genuine harlot anywhere among the dancers, singers, lute-fingerers and exponents of calligraphic skill.