“The human body is extremely limited. I would love to upgrade myself” says Kevin Warwick, one of the boffins interviewed on screen in Three Tales, the “video opera” from composer Steve Reich and his partner - they live as well as work together- video artist Beryl Korot, their “meditation on 20th Century technology.” When I met them the morning after the launch party in Amsterdam I could have done with an upgrade myself.

I meet Corinne Bailey Rae upstairs at Ronnie Scott’s in Soho – she wanders into the room and a couple of record company types intercept her. I hear phrases like “consumer segmentation”, “demographics”, “functionality of streaming” floating across the room – it sounds like someone has a new type of iPhone app they want her to sign up to. She looks polite, if a bit bemused. But in a depressed record business, Corinne Bailey Rae is a really big deal.

Last night's BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards ceremony was a surprisingly glitzy affair at the Brewery, near the Barbican in London. Winners included Bellowhead for Best Live Act and Lau for Best Group. Steve Knightley's recession sing-a-along "Arrogance, Ignorance and Greed" won Best Original Song, Cara Dillon won the best album for Hill of Thieves and Martin Simpson won the Best Traditional Song for his version of "Sir Patrick Spens". Sam Carter won the Horizon Award for up-and-coming artist, but one consensus of the evening was that 26 year-old Jackie Oates, who had three nominations in the Folk Awards – for best singer, album and traditional song - is on the verge of becoming a major folk star.

Last night's BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards ceremony was a surprisingly glitzy affair at the Brewery, near the Barbican in London. Winners included Bellowhead for Best Live Act and Lau for Best Group. Steve Knightley's recession sing-a-along "Arrogance, Ignorance and Greed" won Best Original Song, Cara Dillon won the best album for Hill of Thieves and Martin Simpson won the Best Traditional Song for his version of "Sir Patrick Spens". Sam Carter won the Horizon Award for up-and-coming artist, but one consensus of the evening was that 26 year-old Jackie Oates, who had three nominations in the Folk Awards – for best singer, album and traditional song - is on the verge of becoming a major folk star.

Amongst all the musical benefits for the victims of the Haiti earthquake, one club event which took place on Wednesday night in London stands out as a small, but powerful, beacon of hope. Not because it could rival Jay Z and U2 for levels of funds raised, but because it represented levels of commitment, self-motivation and unity among the capital's multi-ethnic youth subcultures that flies in the face of scare stories about gang violence, drugs, educational failure and all the rest of it. Raising well over £10,000 for Haitians, the entire event on Wednesday night at the club Den/Centro was pulled together in a mere three days by journalist and activist Chantelle Fiddy, promoters SOMEnight, and DJ Stanza of the Watford-based dubstep and grime label True Tiger, and went without hitch despite featuring on its diverse bill many grime rappers and DJs who find it difficult to perform in London due to police pressure on promoters. theartsdesk spoke to a dazed but happy Chantelle Fiddy yesterday to discuss the ramifications of the event.

Nashville is much more than the Grand Ol’ Opry, big hairdos and rhinestones, and I was looking for something beyond the occasionally enjoyable kitsch.

The career of Andy Serkis tends to point in one direction: darkness visible. Onstage, more recently on screen, he has inhabited a series of characters for whom violence is second nature. His Bill Sikes was utterly deranged, though a pussycat next to his Ian Brady in Longford (pictured below), whose ghastly charisma he seemed intuitively to understand. Serkis’s performance-captured Gollum gave global audiences the creeps. And that was him somewhere under the computer-generated fur as the ultimate unreconstructed he-man Kong.

The received opinion is that the music of the 2000s has been characterised by fragmentation, discontinuity, faddishness and a lack of coherent identity.

The point at which the, ah, Noughties revealed themselves to me as a decade in search of more than just a decent name arrived when Sky News' showbiz gofer phoned up to ask me to come on and blah about this exciting new band that everybody was talking about, Arctic Monkeys. I'd only heard their first single, “Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor”; but that was OK with the gofer because what really interested Sky was how the band had achieved their popularity.

The girls have produced the best pop of the Noughties: Kylie’s “Can’t get you out of my Head”, Missy Elliot's “Get Ur Freak On”, Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love”, Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab”, Duffy’s “Warwick Avenue” and Lady Gaga's "PokerFace" were just way better and more innovative pop music than that produced by the legion of blokey indie types (with a few honourable exceptions, like the Arctic Monkeys). This is without even mentioning M.I.A.