I've Winnie The Pooh, with Stephen Fry as Pooh. Which is superb. My little 9 month old loves it. What others can anybody recommend?

I'd prefer ones with different voices and the like for different characters. But anything that sounds good.

I'm at home (with chickenpox - urg) and watching the music channels. There's some good little pop/rnb things around, but then I've always been a little chart head.

And then there's things like this, which sit more squarely in the Word arena...

Mr Hepworth made an interesting point in the Joanna Newsom thread:

"Another good reason not to have star ratings
One of the sad consequences of giving records five stars is that most people approach it in a spirit of "go on - prove it" which is no way to listen to music."

To look at that from the other side, should an artist be 'proving it' to us? Do we want artists to just create at their leisure music that we just sit back and relax and let soak into us. Or do we want somebody to fight for their place in our listening space?

I was at an acoustic night recently and the host made sure there was no talking when an artist was performing. Some of you here might like that, but from a musician's point of view, whenever I've performed I've felt if I'm not holding people's attention then I've failed.

My musical heroes as I grew up were the likes of Strummer and Rowland and Costello - no shrinking violets they. And 30 years on from when I started listening to them they still hold a major place in my heart. I want people like them, passionate and grabbing at me. I want people who want to be noticed, who feel they have to prove it to me with everything they release.

I don't want musical semolina.

So go on, tell me something is brilliant, the best thing you've ever heard. Give it five stars. That's fine, but yeah, I do want the artist to prove it, even though they have nothing to do with the review. Go for great art, not a career. That way lies accountant pleasing albums. And that I don't want!

Of all time? What's yours? It might not be the place where you saw your most memorable live performances, but the place that was always a decent night out, with good music.

For me it was the Kashmir, a tiny venue under a pizza restaurant in Marylebone in London.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kashmir_Klub)

I used to go at least once a week, because it was a) free so a good place to drink, but because of the music better than the pub and b)it was local to where I was living at the time.

There was a lot of good music there. One of my favourite performances of all time was actually there, and I realised later it was KT Tunstall, in what I've since found out was her first London gig. She did some jazzy Patti Smith sounding thing, that she segued into Sexy MF. It was smoky and sexy and to be frank much better than the things she has done since.

The original by old Billy Bragg himself is one of my favourite songs ever. This version by The Redskins is pretty damn good in it's own right.

Any favourite covers, especially if you feel the original is a hard one to forget...?

From 1967, Sweden's The Jackpots with Jack In The Box. I'm hearing Blockbuster, Queen and Sparks, and possibly Mica's tribute to the same.

I've been listening to a lot of 60s pysch pop, having been fortunate enough to have been given the Rubble series recently.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubble_series

Anyway, given the nature of the music, late 60s psychedelic pop and garage you would expect a lot of Beatles influences. But their influence is only really apparent in the chemical mood, and occasional Indian influence. For the most part these tracks are more on the heavy side, sounding like Townsend or later Small Faces. It's weird, because for a moment you see an alternative 60s to The Beatles dominated scene, and it's one where The Who were gods apparently!

It's not that dissimilar to Punk. The sound of The Sex Pistols in hindsight isn't that influential, whereas the garageband simplicity of the first Clash album would appear to be the sound of Punk.

Here's a little taste of what I'm on about. This is a band called The Living Daylights, with a tune that sounds like a collision of Hollies pop and Who heaviness, called Always With Him.

(And for those who relish rock family trees and making connections between different eras, The Living Daylights feature one Norman Watt-Roy, one of the best British bass players of all time, most notably in The Blockheads...)

I've been listening to this a lot this weekend, to the point of obsession. Took a while to find it on YouTube because the uploader called it Easy To Love.

Anyway, it's a cracker from the 60s, the type of organ groove that Graham Day has made a career out of. Can anybody tell me anything about the band? I know they came from Oxford or thereabouts, but that's all.

...is it just me or do the guys look like Dot and Patrick from Eastenders?

When did they get so old?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8278073.stm

Guess what my next upgrade is going to be?? Spotify here I come...

I bought some of these a few weeks ago, and I'm loving them. They sound great, feel comfortable on a long journey, and are the first headphones I've ever used with the iPod that I've had to turn DOWN.

But there's one thing about them that's doing my head in, and that's the little rubber adapters that come with them. You see, while they fit perfectly, which some in ear headphones don't for me, due to small ears(!!), they don't always stay on the headphone.

So I've lost at least three single adapters. I'm running out of spares. And, can I find replacements to buy? No I can't. Do they even exist? Or am I going to be forced to buy another set of headphones purely to get the adapters?

I know there's a few people around these parts who use them. Any ideas?

A huge sub-category in this time of Beatles reflection is the bands who are influenced by them.

(Unfortunately I'm at work, otherwise this lot I would include a Spotify link. I'll pop one in when I get home, unless somebody else wants to do the work!)

The Direct Hits:

A South London based Trio from the early to mid 80s The Direct Hits were unashamedly Mod. They sounded like what you imagine a cross between The Jam circa All Mod Cons, The Who and Beatles in 1966 would sound like, with more than a passing nod to those other Beatles influenced bands XTC and Squeeze. Two albums, Blow Up! and House Of Secrets and then they were gone.

Blow Up! is one of my all time favourite albums, full of lovely melodies and whimsical psychedelic pop. I'm especially fond of A Place In The 80s and My Back Pages (not that one...)

(I could talk at length about The Jam and Weller's Beatles thing, but I won't!)

Give me more, especially some less obvious ones!

Been listening to this today, and it never fails to get me. Slightly dubious typically tinny 80s production (nicely fixed by setting the EQ on the iPod to RnB) aside it's wonderful. Brilliant lyrics, tunes, sounds and singing. But...how the hell do you categorize it?

A mix of indie and stadium rock moves, but never played too heavy on the guitar, synths and drum machines and layers of percussion, gospel style female backing vocals, jazz influences - trumpets and double bass, an influence from the newly minted hip hop on the programming and earnest heartfelt personal and political ideas mixing in and around.

The only comparisons I can make are with some of the things that were going on at the time like Mick Jones in Big Audio Dynamite, although that was more humorous, and That Petrol Emotion, who I think shared a producer. At a push it's quite Bowie-esque for want of a better word. But apart from that I've nothing.

I turned 40 this year. As a music fan I expected my tastes to be preserved in amber at a particular point in time, with only the odd middle of the road hit coming onto my radar occasionally. Just like my parents.

I didn't expect to still be getting excited by a record, like I have been lately with the Jamie T album, or to have bands I count as favourites being things I got into later than my teens!

I became a teenager in the early 80s so bands from those times are the ones that mattered and still mattered as I got older. Like Paul Weller for instance, I grew up with him and still like (some of)his music now. But one of my favourite bands of all time has turned out to be Super Furry Animals who I didn't really get into until their third album which came out when I was 30. I love Doves - although they're pretty much my peers as far as age is concerned - and it was their second album that got me, and that was within the last five years. And Goldfrapp (again peers in terms of age)continue to thrill. I absolutely adore Boards Of Canada and they, after years of listening to the Warp label, didn't loom into view for me until the past couple of years.

I don't catch things before they're even born these days, not like I used to, but being first to get into something no longer matters to me. But I am still surprised by how much I still love music.

Although the run up to 40 saw me burying myself in old music, perhaps out of protest that I was becoming 'middle aged'!

What bands and albums do you count in that list that most of us have, that you got into as an 'older'?

You know what I mean, the bit of a film that just makes you respond.

Like:

The opening scene in Star Wars, when the Star Destroyer goes overhead. My jaw hit the floor, the hairs on the back of my neck went up and I just went WOW.

The moment in Grosse Point Blank where John Cusack's character Martin Blank is looking into the baby's eyes while Queen And David Bowie's Under Pressure plays.

I have hundreds, but I'm sure a lot of mine are a lot of yours....