Killing in the name of light entertainment. Hollywood's latest franchise begins...

Public Image Ltd. officially kicked off the build-up to this year's Record Store Day last night (March 19), playing a basement gig in London to mark the announcement of the special releases for this year's event, set for April 21.

Jack White has announced his first UK solo headline date at London's HMV Hammersmith Apollo on June 22.

Neil Young has announced that he will be releasing a new album in June with Crazy Horse.

An amazing vernal equinox morning here in London, and a fine walk through the city: down St John Street, into Smithfield, past St Paul’s and the rat-run of old streets down to the river, and over the Millennium Bridge.

The groaning noise behind me is coming from shelves that have recently started to buckle from the almost daily addition to them of new music books, the majority of them typified by their common bulk, a shared enormity of pages, as if no band’s career can be documented in less pages than might otherwise be devoted to the history of mankind itself, from the beginning, with footnotes, anecdotal asides and a brief biography of everyone who’s ever lived.

Pete Doherty is set to perform at an elite French Royal Ball later this week.

Blur and Gorillaz mainman Damon Albarn has unveiled a trailer for the studio album of material composed for his Dr Dee opera.

Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood has scored his first Top 10 album in the Official Specialist Classical Chart, with his collaboration with Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki.

The announcement came at the very end of last week that the novelist Alan Garner has written the third instalment of a story he began in 1960 with The Weirdstone Of Brisingamen. To anyone raised in the Seventies like me, the news might have prompted a sudden, sharp reconnection with their childhood; The Weirdstone, and its 1963 sequel The Moon Of Gomrath, were touchstones of my adolescent reading.