Vince Power's Music Festivals group yesterday warned that economic woes are hitting sales at its Hop Farm Music Festival in Kent and its Benicassim event in Spain.

1. Benidorm

Love is "the price that had to be paid for bringing a child into the world," according to one character in David Park's new novel. Here, love is not an unalloyed joy, or a great benefit which happens to carry baggage. It is indivisible, negative as well as positive. Parents suffer unrequited love for their children, a wife tortures herself with fear of her husband's adultery, and a single mother finds that the past is not dead; it is not even past. Like Park's earlier novels The Big Snow and The Truth Commissioner, The Light of Amsterdam tells separate stories which touch and cross. Alan, Karen and Marion don't know one another, though their names seem to chime along with their stories. They are all middle-aged, living in Belfast, and travelling to Amsterdam in December 2005.

On her first album in seven years, Bonnie Raitt divides her efforts between fiery slide-guitar blues recorded with her own band, and a handful of tracks recorded with producer Joe Henry's bespoke band of specialist players including expressive drummer Jay Bellerose and omni-talented guitarist Bill Frisell.

1. "Home-Thoughts, From Abroad", by Robert Browning.

Books: I've just finished Russell Banks's Lost Memory Of Skin, which has its flaws, but the man can really write and he's passionate about social justice in America. He chose his country's most marginalised group [sex offenders] as his focus and continued with courage, for which he has my thanks. I've also been reading Daniel Simpson's A Rough Guide to the Dark Side – it's all about why he left The New York Times and the jaw-dropping realities of modern journalism. Great, funny, passionate stuff.

The bass guitarist Michael Davis was a member of the incendiary and influential Detroit band the MC5 between 1965 and 1972. Alongside their Detroit friends and contemporaries the Stooges and New York's Velvet Underground, the MC5 formed the holy trinity of late '60s groups who lit the long, slow, simmering fuse of punk rock and inspired the Ramones, Nirvana, Rage Against The Machine and the White Stripes. The MC5 didn't just make hard-edged, highly-charged music; they were managed by the activist John Sinclair, aligned themselves with the Black Panthers and attracted the attention of the FBI. Kick Out The Jams, their seminal debut recorded live at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit in October 1968, and the title track, briefly made the album and single charts in the US when issued on Jac Holzman's Elektra the following year.

Greil Marcus records that, in 2010,listening to the radio on a regular car journey around San Francisco revealed that The Doors got more airplay than anyone else of their era, and with a greater number of songs - though they weren't a Bay Area band. As Marcus tells it, this drove him to re-assess their work and to reconsider the grotesque fetish status the 1960s have acquired as the enviable Neverland of stalled possibility, used to render impotent all that comes after.

Few bands divide opinion like Jim Morrison's seminal Sixties outfit. As a commemorative DVD and album are released, two of our music critics offer opposing views

An obscure outpost of psychedelia is about to get some exposure. Light in the Attic's latest discovery is South Korean visionary Shin Joong Hyun.

Number of incidents make police believe that a gang or copycat arsonists may be responsible

The Christmas album still stutters on in mainstream America for the likes of Beyonce (who recorded one with Destiny’s Child) and Justin Bieber.