Interpretative dance and Swedish folk music aren’t mutually exclusive concepts, but nor do the twain often meet. But when Kristian Matsson - The Tallest Man on Earth -  plays live the two *almost* collide like cultural proton beams.

Winter bedding is not the most glamorous of ideas. Especially when it comes to those acres of monocolour pansies. It's sort of an amazing achievement to ruin the pansy – they are this great, characterful little flower, in bright colours, with spirited little markings on their faces, which they hold up high to the sun. But ruin them people consistently do: stroll into your local DIY shop in the next few weeks and there will be polystyrene trays of them by the hundred, stacked and ready for non-gardeners to progressively kill over the coming months.

One is inclined to ask, "What unfinished business?" Jackson's 1950s rockabilly records are whole unto themselves: the opposite of unfinished.

Focusing on a single band over a weekend is a tricky business on the radio. Get it wrong and you risk provoking the ire of the music police, who are a bit like the fashion police only more militant. They will rain hellfire and damnation down on you on Twitter, picket outside your office and very likely follow you home, barge into your house, skim through your record collection and locate the copy of Kylie and Jason's "Especially for You" that you had studiously hidden from your family, and hold it up as evidence of your abominable taste.

The mother of a four-year-old boy lost at sea after falling from a seafront jetty has spoken of the moment he disappeared under the water, saying she knew immediately that she would not see him again.

In his Eighties pomp, Jackson contributed a superb arrangement of "Round Midnight" to a Thelonious Monk tribute album, but this new homage to Ellington works as superior adult-pop rather than jazz.

This relaxed port city is full of rhythm. Linda Cookson heard it ... all along the watchtower

What to do when your lean, mean rocking machine (in this case, the Black Crowes) becomes a bloated behemoth?

Plan B is being hailed as the voice of his generation, spokesman for the dispossessed. But not by me...

Former Black Crowes singer Chris Robinson's heart has always been spiritually in the early Seventies, and with his new Brotherhood, he's finally found the ideal vehicle to indulge his taste for "Cosmic California Music".

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.

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.