Old-fashioned musicianly blues-rock, as practised by lank-haired individuals around the turn of the 1970s, with some of the virtuosity of Led Zeppelin but a fraction of the imagination. 

Fresh-faced they may be, but new talents are turning to the songs of bygone eras.

Who lives in a house like this? There's dirty laundry all over the floor, piles of records strewn around, life drawings hanging in the bathroom and war medals displayed on the walls. Why, it's Pete Doherty, of course, the free-spirited scamp. In a video recorded for NME's website, the 33-year-old musician gives viewers a tour of his cramped Paris apartment.

Remember Once, the charming, low-budget film about an Irish busker and a Czech cleaner who meet and make beautiful music together?

In their determination to go out on any limb, regardless of taste or safety, Lazarus and the Plane Crash – a collaboration between Guillotines singer Joe Coles and Stephen Coates, grey eminence behind The Real Tuesday Weld – display the kind of risk-taking absent from The Maccabees' album.

For a while, real stardom seemed to beckon Ed Harcourt. His debut EP in 2000, Maplewood, introduced a Tom Waits-worshipping, 23-year-old prodigy.

Ever since his elaboration of a tramp’s rendition of ‘Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet’, Gavin Bryars has been a master of the re-use of what one might call ‘musiques trouvees’, sometimes ranging as far as Japanese gagaku.

If Coldplay are a music critic's kryptonite, then Tom Waits is critical catnip, applauded as the true one-off he undoubtedly is even when his music sounds like sandpaper being scratched over dropping dustbin lids.

Joe Henry uses T-Bone Burnett's favoured drummer Jay Bellerose on his latest album, along with Americana stalwarts like guitarist Marc Ribot and bassist David Piltch.

An audio soundtrack for Glen Duncan's novel The Last Werewolf, this offers plenty of scope for songwriter Stephen Coates to indulge his love of period musical combinations.

With his mid-Eighties masterpiece Rain Dogs, Tom Waits somehow re-routed the entire history of R&B, jazz, folk and popular song through his peculiar junkyard sensibility, American pop culture re-emerging bolted together in oddly beguiling new shapes, within whose whiskery strains lurked an engaging cast of scufflers, low-lifes and bad boys.

Keyboards - Sly Stone

There is nobody like him. You have to check out old YouTube clips of him. It doesn't matter if he's playing organ or acoustic piano, it's all totally unique. Our bass player jammed with him quite recently and he's most definitely still got it.

Had enough of silly love songs?

After the most successful anti-PR campaign since Godspeed You Black Emperor! (interviews refused, no web presence), mystique-cloaked Mancunian collective Wu Lyf have gone legit, made a website, and even released a record.