This was 1999, and I was a little smitten by the Buena Vista Social Club – an album of son music orchestrated by the Cuban bandleader Juan de Marcos González and the American musician Ry Cooder, released a couple of years earlier, and that year made into an award-winning documentary by Wim Wenders.
As the chairman of a well-regarded arts organisation that lost its state funding in the past 12 months, the musician understands where the money is coming from: state cuts in the arts.
I admire Aaron [Jerome, producer], a musician coming from an electronic background, writing what is fundamentally a pop record without compromising any edge along the way.
Dry, a little impudent and just terrifically frank, musician James Blake thinks he knows what will happen when his second album is released tomorrow: the majority of us will download it for free.
Ray (2004) The late Ray Charles is conjured up in all his playful, lustful, anguished glory in this otherwise stolid, respectful biopic of the legendary musician.
Among them is musician and social activist Paweł Kukiz, now polling 9%, and behind him on 5% is Janusz Korwin-Mikke, whose party has lent support to Ukip's grouping in the European parliament.
Intriguingly, Frank Sidebottom was never seen in the same room at the same time as the musician and comic Chris Sievey.
The muscular bass lines played by Louis Johnson as a session musician on Michael Jackson's Off the Wall and Thriller albums are known to millions – in particular his classic, driving bass part for the Jackson song Billie Jean.
The album, which racks up its 11th week in the No 1 spot, has shifted over 214,000 copies in the past seven days, giving the flame-haired musician the biggest one-week sales tally of any artist album this year.
That must make him the most successful musician on there by a mile.
Growing up on the farm, surrounded by animals and cared for by those he still refers to lovingly as "Mother and Father", he became a voracious reader, excelled in school, travelled to Buenos Aires to study music and finally returned to Olavarría to become a successful music teacher and professional musician with his own band, the Ignacio Hurban Grupo.
