The other day we had a meeting in which Mark asked "is there a website that..." and before he could complete the sentence we said "yes".

That's because no matter how outlandish your idea might be, the chances are that somebody's had it before you and put it on the web. It's taken me a while to get round to the Black Cab Sessions, but then it seems so blindingly obvious that somebody should seek to film bands playing live in the back of a cab I can't believe it's evaded my attention this far.

Which makes me think of other examples of people singing in cars. Like this one.

But I still think you can do better.

He's 60 today.

Young Brian has done more than most and hardly any of it has been boring, from starting Roxy Music to inventing ambient music, producing U2 and doing those records with David Byrne which anticipated trip hop by about twenty years.

Of all the million things Eno's said and done, what have been the most remarkable?

If anybody needs further encouragement to see Richard Thompson's solo show at the Royal Festival Hall on May 24th, Mary Gauthier is the special guest. I'm away that weekend (thought you'd be interested) but if I wasn't I'd turn up to see her alone. She's the one whose "I Drink", a Bob Dylan favourite, has been on one of our "Now Hear This" CDs. This is pretty good too.

Maximum marks for enterprise to The Get Out Clause for getting the local councils and police authorities of Britain to shoot the video for their single. They turned up and mimed in front of various traffic cams and then demanded access to the footage under the Freedom Of Information Act. Neat.

Here's a couple of radio things you shouldn't miss – and no longer have to miss – thanks to Radio 4's Listen Again service. This is Sue McGregor's meeting with the cast of "Withnail and I", as enthused about by Mark Ellen on this week's podcast. And this is the latest programme in Matthew Parris's excellent "Great Lives" series featuring Peter Hook and poet Simon Armstrong talking about Ian Curtis.

The story of the award that Ant and Dec shouldn't have got is a collectors item because absolutely nobody wins. Let's go over the main points.

In order to secure the services of Robbie Williams as a celeb presenter the producers assured him that he would get to give the gong to Ant and Dec, because he liked them. But then they found that all the actual awards had been decided on by an actual jury and obviously they couldn't change them.

So they decided that Ant and Dec should be The People's Choice because that was a phone vote that was going on during the evening. Only one problem there. Catherine Tate was the actual winner. So let's just count up the scores and see who's most embarrassed.

Ant & Dec - they only won because it was fixed. Boo.
Robbie Williams - he'll only come if he gets to choose the winners. Boo.
ITV - all this in the same week they've been fined nearly £6 million for stealing the money of viewers voting on the phone. Quite funny when you think about it.
Catherine Tate - You want her to accept second prize? Click. Brr.

Brian May is one of the people trying to rescue digital radio station Planet Rock. The owners say it will close if they don't find a buyer soon. I wrote a column about the retreat of digital radio a few months back when The Arrow decided it could do without DJs and all the companies who'd been bidding big for digital licences were desperately trying to give them back.

Since then we've had the station formerly known as Jazz FM trying to get permission to stop playing jazz altogether and 6Music trying to broaden their appeal via the controversial George Lamb. Which leads me to wonder: is the UK radio market big enough to be able to sustain any kind of genuinely specialist music station (if it's not paid for out of the licence fee)?

Classic FM is basically an orchestral easy listening station, jazz fans can't agree on what they consider to be jazz, all those stations like XFM that started out bold and adventurous have gone into the middle of the road and I can't see Brian May's vision of a station that plays Jimi Hendrix and the Who turning on many advertisers.

Is it the case that the people who are passionate about music prefer to do their own programming and the mass audience is largely happy with what they've got?

I got these two in the mail this morning. One is the new Aimee Mann album, which appears to be called "@#/&! Smilers". Catchy.

The other is, well, we've looked at it every which way, stood on our heads, tried it through half-closed eyes and, well, we finally worked out what it said but the question remains: how many people browsing in record shops are going to be intrigued by this sort of inscrutable, deliberately amateurish packaging and investigate further? And how many people are just going to think "if they can't be bothered, nor can I".

I don't think Ian McEwan has a lot of say in how his new novel is packaged and they don't hand Gwyneth Paltrow some crayons and say "tell you what, love, why don't you knock up a poster for Iron Man?" Only in the music business is the packaging of albums still left to the lead singer's best mate. Have you seen slacker than these?

Now they have Primark and the web I suppose there's no longer any need for kids in small towns to send a postal order to a faraway company and then wait 28 days in order to be the only one around the war memorial who's the owner of a music note jumper or pointed side buckle shoes "as supplied to The Jam".

But back in the early 80s companies like Melanddi and Danilo were the core advertisers of magazines like Smash Hits. And they advertised a lot because it worked. Did anyone ever send off for something from a small ad at the back of a music magazine? Did you come home from school every day hoping desperately that it would have arrived? Did it bring you the happiness it promised?

Click the pic for the full-size version.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Georgia Satellites. Beat this for a twelve-bar dandruff-dislodger.

Here's a short film about the occasion that Mark talked about on a recent podcast.

Brilliant clip of Wille Nelson performing in Holland a few nights ago with special guest Snoop Dogg! It's sound only at first but the picture kicks in after a while. Stick with it. It's rather good.

Humphrey Lyttelton died yesterday at the age of 86. Here's what Smash Hits would have said about him.
* He played the trumpet on the streets of London on VE Day and can be heard on some newsreel footage.
* He had one hit called "Bad Penny Blues". The Beatles pinched the arrangement for "Lady Madonna".
* He presented the Radio Four panel game "I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue" for 35 years.
* He never gave out his home number to anyone, not even close colleagues.
* Somebody has just hacked into his Wikipedia entry to claim he wrote the intro to Led Zeppelin's "Moby Dick".
* That wasn't you, was it?

It has been kidnapped and passed off as one of their own by lesser sites but this remains the one true home of THE RANDOMIZER, the only music survey that isn't just an exercise in making yourself look good.

These are the rules, arrived at by the board of management and rigorously enforced. You take your iPod or iTunes or the MP3 software of your choice, put it on "random" or "shuffle" and then read off the first five (5) tunes that appear. I shall begin:
Clarence Carter: Soul Deep
Girls Aloud: Sound Of The Underground
Blind Willie McTell: Running Me Crazy
Psychedelic Furs: Pretty In Pink
Sufjan Stevens: Romulus

Cheat and we will know. Everyone will know. Small children will refuse to smile at you. Urchins will openly laugh at you in the street. Your hard drive will crash.

The English have got such a complex about patriotism nowadays that it takes a Scot like the Prime Minister to suggest that we should make more of our national day. There are lots of songs that celebrate England but they tend to do it in a quiet, sad and often sardonic way. I was trying to find YouTube clips for my three favourites but as far as I can see they don't exist. Maybe you can find them. Anyway, here they are:
England 3 Colombia 0 by Kirsty MacColl.
This bloke takes her to a pub in Belsize Park to watch England beat Colombia. Then she finds out he's been cheating on her. "Now it's England 3 Colombia 0 and I know how those Colombians feel..."
Vincent Black Lightning 1952 by Richard Thompson.
This is a rare song in praise of England's engineering past. "Nortons and Greeveses and Indians won't do/They don't have a soul like a Vincent '52".
When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease by Roy Harper.
Dedicated to John Snow and Geoffrey Boycott. "There'll be one mad dog and his master, pushing for four with the spin...." Then the brass band comes in and, oh, I believe I have something in my eye.

The release of the Rolling Stones' much-trumpeted Martin Scorsese film "Shine A Light" triggers a lot of the same old talk. Have they had facelifts? Shouldn't they retire? Is this a dignified way for a load of old men to go on? Haven't they got enough money? Should Keith have done that luggage commercial? Christina Aguilera, for God's sake.

What nobody talks about is the fact that the "greatest rock and roll band in the world" don't actually deliver what it says on the tin anymore. In fact you could go further and say that not since 1981 and "Start Me Up" have they actually done that thing for which they're supposed to be famous. Rock.

At some point in the mid '80s something went wrong in the engine room of the Rolling Stones. They no longer made anyone want to dance. And believe it or not their reputation was made on hit singles that people danced to. You can hear them intermittently struggling to get their groove back but by the end of the '80s they'd given up altogether, probably encouraged by the fact that the audience kept on getting bigger and nobody seemed to care. They couldn't work out that later tunes like "Rock And A Hard Place" didn't have what what was clearly there even on "It's Only Rock and Roll" and was present in vast quantities in "Jumping Jack Flash": to wit, the tail-dragging traction of Keith Richards' guitar, the cocky precision of the way Jagger sang and above all the divine rightness of Charlie Watts's drums. What happened to turn it into the mush that they've been ladling out for the last twenty years?

And it's nothing to do with production trickery. If you don't believe me here they are doing "Jumpin' Jack Flash" on stage in New York in 1969. I'm no musician but that sounds to me to right on the money.

And here they are doing the same song last year, millions of dollars and thousands of gigs later with presumably better technology available to them and to my ears they just don't rock any more.

Can anyone suggest why one rocks and the other one doesn't?

You need headphones but it's worth it.

I've just been listening to a new album of covers of Randy Newman songs and it struck me that "Simon Smith and His Amazing Dancing Bear" contains one of those lines that communicate a deep truth about the chosen profession of its author. It goes as followss:

"They'll love us, won't they?
They feed us, don't they?"

There you have it in one line, the true driver behind all artistic expression, the actual need to put bread on the table. What are the other throwaway lines in famous songs that communicate the real nature of the showman's life?