Etta James has died at the age of 73.

The National's frontman Matt Berninger has spoken out about the band's inclusion on the longlist for the Academy Award for Best Original Song.

Fleet Foxes' drummer Joshua Tillman has announced that he is leaving the band.

Leonard Cohen has said that people have asked him for a moratorium on the usage of covers of his classic song, 'Hallelujah'.

The Cure have announced three further festival appearances for this summer.

“David Byrne, all neurasthenic nettles pointing inward. He looked like someone who’d just OD’d on Dramadine – all cold sweat clammy and nerve net exoskeleton… just looked like some nut just holidayed from the ward with a fresh pocket of Thorazine, that’s all. There was something gentle, shy, reflective and giving about his hideous old psychosocial gangrene.” That’s Lester Bangs, in full flow, recalling the first time he saw Talking Heads live, around 1976, in a rambling, sometimes flashing essay written in 1979 as a review of the Fear Of Music album, but only published for the first time now, as accompaniment to this superbly conceived DVD.

MC Taylor, a songwriter and a student of folklore, is not a declamatory man. His songs are compressed and poetic, with nary a syllable out of place. You will hear echoes of familiar things – a bit of Van Morrison’s mystical warmth, or John Martyn’s angst, and the language will be unfussy, and derived from the folk tradition.

It would be nice – and indeed, it’s sometimes professionally expedient – to pretend that we all work in splendid isolation, following our own idiosyncratic paths in directions that no other journalists travel.

Patti Smith cancelled a planned private performance at New York's Hotel Chelsea after coming under fire from a group of residents.

The Shins have announced plans for a five date European tour, which will include one stop off in the UK, on March 22 at London's HMV Forum.