The 20th anniversary of the death of Serge Gainsbourg is an important milestone, but it has overshadowed the fact that 10 years have passed since the death of an another significant French singer and songwriter, Gilbert Bécaud. The release of Et Maintenant marks the anniversary in fine style, uniting singers across generations, a couple of whom aren’t even French.

I almost feel duty bound to make a declaration of interest here. I have done several pieces of paid writing for the Red Bull Music Academy, including a piece of course material for this year's Academy, and a few days ago I went to Madrid to see the Academy for the first time on their tab.

Without Hubert Sumlin there would have been no Yardbirds, Captain Beefheart, Led Zeppelin, T-Rex or White Stripes. He was also an essential ingredient for The Rolling Stones. As Howlin’ Wolf’s guitarist, his straightforward power was the perfect foil to Wolf’s guttural vocal roar. The combination of Sumlin’s razor-wire distortion and bouncy riffing was irresistible and prefigured – influenced – the hard rock which evolved in the late Sixties. It also gave Marc Bolan his electric guitar style when Tyrannosaurus Rex became T-Rex.

There are many reasons to love the music of Randy Newman, who turns 68 today. For starters he’s a renowned ironist and a caustic wit who is nevertheless capable of being as emotionally straight as any heart-on-sleeve singer-songwriter. The man who wrote “I Think it’s Going to Rain Today”, now a bona fide American standard, “I Miss You” and “Real Emotional Girl” could hardly be said to be all surface and no feeling.

“My first album was a personal love letter to God,” Josh T Pearson tells me, looking like a cross between Johnny Cash and Moses. No wonder, then, that it took him 10 years to record another. On this year's release, Pearson had moved on, talking failed love like a punk Leonard Cohen stranded in the wilderness. Face to face, Pearson is, however, quite the Southern gent: the Last of the Country Gentlemen, as he calls himself in the title of the new album. In a west-London café, he recounted how he got here, and why he is nervous about this Saturday’s big gig at the Barbican.

What the hell is wrong with Bob Dylan? As the Sage of Minnesota rolls back into London with Mark Knopfler in tow, I took a detour round YouTube to see what they've been up to on their recent European dates. Of course, we've all grown used to Dylan's habit of mashing his lyrics to a formless pulp and turning what used to be tunes into a sequence of hiccups and barking noises, but the time does seem to be approaching when medical professionals will have to be ordered in to escort him from the microphone. 

The passing of Jackie Leven, who died last night from cancer, comes with a sense of real sadness. One of our most distinctive and original singer-songwriters, the Fifer maintained a doggedly low commercial profile throughout almost four decades spent weaving his rich, rather brave musical tapestry.  

Spinal Tap’s hapless manager had a great phrase for it. “Their appeal,” he said, “is becoming more selective.” There are other words which cover more or less the same waterfront: “stripped back”, “scaled down”, “raw”, “intimate”. All tend to be euphemisms for the plain fact that an act is no longer shifting the kind of units they used to. In the accelerated career arc (swift rise, even swifter descent) which has become typical in the current industry climate, how to shrink with dignity and ingenuity is a question more and more musicians have to face.

Not only was Channel 4's Top Boy a brilliant slice of TV drama, but it delivered a neat little pay-off over the closing credits with Charles Bradley's track "The World (Is Going Up in Flames)".  An anguished chunk of classic soul, sung by Bradley in a gutsy James Brown-style rasp, it sounded at least 40 years old, but in fact it was only released in 2007 on Daptone Records' subsidiary, Dunham.

Earlier this week Pete Townshend asked whether “John Peelism”, the ethos of supporting and celebrating small, independent artists at a grass-roots level, could survive the internet. His implied answer was clearly "no". Townshend levelled the accusation that Apple, the owner of iTunes, is “a digital vampire Northern Rock” which doesn’t support or invest in the musicians whose work they sell, particularly the more independently minded ones, but rather sucks them dry before moving on.