At the Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds show this week, having finished giggling as a hapless roadie rushed on to replace the singer's malfunctioning microphone only to become coiled up in a nightmarish jungle of wires, my thoughts turned to high-minded subjects. Watching Cave dally around the stage, bellowing biblical imagery, I turned to David Smyth and wondered: "do you think it bothers Nick Cave that he's not quite a great?" And my implied answer, which David refuted, was: yes, it does.

Of course, it was a silly question, churlish in the face of the raucously entertaining show we were witnessing and the consistent high calibre of Cave's last decade of work. But even so: I have always sensed that the Australian, one of the cleverest and self-aware men in rock, with his high-minded references to Leviticus and Orpheus and low-minded references to "New York City, man" and everything, is struggling for great status that bit too hard. I admire him hugely, from the lovely Murder Ballads to the lovelorn And No More Shall We Part to the rude Grinderman album; I want him to be great. However, put it this way: if he wants to be mentioned in the same breath as Tom Waits, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, he's trying a bit too hard to convince.

What is greatness and who cares? A status in rock that's really of interest only to geeks; but as its discussion is the whole raison d'etre of the main rock monthly mags and some kind of key to posterirty, it's worth something (Q, for example, revolves around the issue of conferring greatness, constantly seeking to turn "popular" into "great", Keane and Coldplay being the latest laughable candidates). There are certain names in the canon that most people could agree on as greats - from Elvis and the Beatles to the likes of Led Zep, Radiohead and Madonna, influence, importance and trancendence the defining qualities. In Cave's particular field of clever white males, we might identify Dylan, Waits and Cohen, and perhaps Neil Young and Lou Reed. All still alive, incidentally. And its their dominance that Cave hasn't quite found a way past.

"Only Dylan and Tom Waits people their music with such a rich cast of characters", said the Guardian of Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, Cave's latest. "Like Johnny Cash, Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen, artists with whom he can be seriously compared, Cave has nothing to fear from old age", opined our own John Aizlewood. Hard to argue with Aizlewood's last point - he's certainly at the peak of his powers at 50 - but more generally, I think his music lacks the warmth and integrity of Cash, the weirdness and sentiment of Waits and the poetry and intensity of Cohen. It is true his rich casts of biblical, classical and trailer-park characters are comparable to those of Dylan - and this is largely because that's where they are derived from, with a few refugees from Waits and Reed. In short, Cave has never really astonished me; I can imagine the thought process that leads to the songs; his world is a fascinating place of reflections and revisions rather than the truly terrifying vistas of, say Dylan's It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) or Waits's What's He Building In There?

But then, watching the gig I felt mean for making this point, and compelled to explain that this is only the difference between Cave making that top 25 greatest artists ever or merely the top 50. And then the Bad Seeds (no one could ask for a better backing band, incidentally) struck up We Call Upon the Author and I had to concede - no, concede is to negative; I had to affirm that damn, he's good and yes, no one else could have come up with a song like that. It turns his pretensions in on themselves, making a kind of hyper-literary meta-song, burlesquing authorial responsibility and mis-readings, in a lyrical groove that allows his word play to work at its best.

Perhaps the greatest curse is coming after all these greats, who have farmed off the most fertile areas of words and melody, so the only thing left to do is re-plough the same furrows. Of course, it is increasingly hard to do something suprising and effective with a rock set-up. Ultimately, though, I think it's the public who are the best barometer of greatness - and it's no coincidence that Cave doesn't really make those Q polls, has never had a great hit (excluding for a minute that duet with Kylie Minogue) and, come the encore, didn't really have that one unifying song. He does manage to be intelligent, inspiring and entertaining which is more than most. I'd give him another five years.

As views go, it probably wouldn't have stopped Constable in his tracks.

Soggy old newspapers are strewn in the scrub, which stretches out towards the factories, substations and warehouses of Tottenham. A thin drizzle falls on a field of half-built houses. There's a low hum of electricity overhead. A child's push-along car is half-immersed, nose down in the filth of the river, as if Noddy was driving along the riverbank one day and decided to commit suicide here.

This is the point where the River Lea Navigation meets the A104, in a backwater of Hackney. It would be eccentric to call it beautiful, but it is undeniably poignant, rich in detail and suggestion.

You can imagine a perverse sort of father climbing the bridge with his son, pointing out the landmarks on the horizon. "That, son, is the High Maynard Reservoir. And if look yonder, you just might make out the regional distribution depot for Safeways".

Or you could map out the social history of east London, take a glimpse into the future. This is one of the sites currently being redeveloped for the London Games in 2012. Almost £10 billion is being spent on reclaiming this polluted land, building new homes and facilities. But some people seem to be happy with things as they are. "F**k the Olympics", someone has written on the construction hoardings.

I was inspired to explore this patch - which I had not realised was so close to my doorstep - by the marvellous book, Derelict London, the springboard for hundreds of urban walks.

It's the work of the amateur photgrapher Paul Talling, who was inspired to keep an archive of ruin when he witnessed the demolition of a once-glorious candle factory down his road in 2003. He began to snap crumbling buildings all over London and filed them on his wonderful website, which now forms a wonderful catalogue of the capital's social history. Shots of the old Crystal Palace, the ill-fated Tobacco Docks development and Victorian pubs giving way to Starbucks are richly evocative.

The website devotes a whole section to the Lower Lea Valley regeneration - and exploring the area, it's not hard to see why Talling is in two minds about it. These waterways were labelled a "corridor of dereliction" by the Olympics developers; however, the GLA designated them as a vital area of urban conservation. Indeed, as you turn the corner from the scene described above, you come across a haven of water birds and plants and a quiet you do not often encounter in London. A Haywain for the 21st century, perhaps.

SECOND OPINION The Minotaur Covent Garden
By: RICHARD GODWIN

HOW startling the reading matter of strangers on the Tube can be. While most commuters content themselves with free papers, selfhelp books and bibles, you can usually find one buried in something improbable: a Neruda reader; a Mahler score; a Semiotics journal, perhaps.

I have often wanted, but never quite managed, to strike up conversation with someone buried in such an esoteric tome — so I was happy to oblige when a sweet old couple did just that to me and my fiancée as we journeyed home from the Opera House last Tuesday night, both scanning the programme of The Minotaur. Not because we wanted to look smart, I should add, rather because we were trying to fathom the horrors we had just seen.

"Was it any good? My husband and I were thinking of going," smiled the lady.

I didn't know quite what to say.

Opera is only a recent pleasure of mine, and only because my fiancée sometimes comes by free tickets. Sir Harrison Birtwistle's take on the minotaur myth is by far the least remitting and most demanding thing I've seen at Covent Garden. It's the operatic equivalent of Joy Division or Scott Walker at their bleakest: all dense rumbling brass and woodwind, hardly any air, still less tunes — and blood. Lots of blood, screeching crows, craws of gore and human tripe.

Its impact is undeniable — the libretto is delicious, John Tomlinson is remarkable, Antonio Pappano's baton makes sense of the hardest bits, the critics mostly loved it and I have not quite been able to get it out of my head since.

But was it enjoyable? Who, exactly, is this sort of entertainment for? A rich, masochistic, gothic aesthete with a classics degree? There is something perversely amusing that the pinnacle of high art should be quite such torture.

I quite like the thought of some flash banker stumbling into the stalls by mistake. But did I advise a kindly old opera-loving couple to queue up at the box office for cheap returns for it? No. They looked way too nice.

In rep until 3 May (020 7304 4000, www.roh.org.uk).

The bald gentleman sitting behind us had had enough.

"I would rather be castrated with a cheese grater than listen to any more of this rubbish", he said, and with that he breathed one last waft of halitosis in our direction, picked up his fancy lady and made for the exit, leaving three quarters of a bottle of Moet undrunk on his table. We all breathed a sigh of relief.

  The scene was legendary jazz club Ronnie Scott's, last week, where two young jazz groups - the delightful Curios and the bracingly avant-garde Polar Bear - were making their debuts. The departure of said gentleman, who spent Polar Bear's set emitting burps and such comments as "cheer up you miserable bastards", felt like a victory for the forces of jazz-good against the forces of jazz-bad - and Lord knows there have been few of these in recent years.

It is generally agreed that Ronnie Scott's has lost its mojo ever since Sally Green took it over in 2005 and gave it an expensive refurbishment (£2.38 million to place a pillar in front of every table).

The Standard's jazz critic, Jack Massarik, was briefly banned after he wrote a piece compaining about its high prices, loss of atmosphere and disastrous bookings policy. Under Greene's owneship, and the artistic directorship of Leo Green, who departed at the end of last year, Ronnie's has pitched itself at people like our bald friend, who spend lots of money on champagne and talk over the jazz as they try to seduce their secretaries. The fact that the well-known jazz legend Craig David played there says a lot.

But the booking of two young English bands for three nights last week seemed a welcome step back in the right direction, even if playing a cymbal with a violin bow (as Polar Bear did) wasn't to everyone's tastes.

However, the front of house staff were off-message, scarcely disguising their disgust at the younger, less flash clientele the bands brought in; on point of principle, Polar Bear only agreed to play if Ronnie's reduced their standard ticket price of £35.

In the old days - when I actually didn't have much cash but enjoyed £10 student tickets, now discontinued - I remember being thoroughly charmed by the maitre d', who would reward everyone simply for having the good taste to drop by.

By contrast, last week, the front-of-house staff tutted us in the direction of the worst table in the place, nearly exploded when we moved without asking permission, then again when we failed to order anything very expensive.

Making them listen to a cymbal being played with a violin bow for three consecutive evenings seems a good way to begin their punishment.

You may have read that some blinged up gangsta wonk has been given a prestigious headline slot at Glastonbury, the glamorous Somerset music festival - and now, due to this booking and this booking alone, they're having trouble shifting tickets.

"I'm not having hip hop at Glastonbury. It's wrong... Glastonbury has a tradition of guitar music", said Noel Gallagher, whose brilliant band Oasis I remember lighting up the Pyramid Stage in 2004. "Glastonbury is contaminated", wisely put in Alexchil on the NME website. "They needed some huge band to headline, not some hip-hop wank", opined MAD_FER_IT. ("Keep Glastonbury White" said mosley666, though this post has since been deleted).

As for Glasto's "summer season" credentials, they have taken a serious hammering. "Harumph!" declared posh_totty: "I never believed those proles who claimed Glasto was good for a jolly. That fact that they're letting nig-nogs onto the main stage rather proves my point - let's leave it to the middle orders this year, what? Who's up for Henley?" (This post has also been mysteriously deleted).

So what was Emily Eavis, who has taken over most of the running of from her father Michael, thinking? Compare Jay-Z (rhymes with 'lazy') with the other Pyramid Stage headliners, The Verve and Kings of Leon. The Verve are a groundbreaking band whose continued relevance is proved by their appearance at every single other festival in the world this summer. That Glastonbury chose to give them the prestigious headline slot where other festivals have only seen fit to stick them on the second stage is just proof of the groundbreaking spirit that makes Glastonbury the world's most groundbreaking music festival. Likewise the Kings of Leon; the piddling Werchter festival in Belgium only puts them fourth down the bill - but perhaps those Europeans do not realise the true majesty of the fact that not only do they have one guitar in their line up - they've got two. Three if you count the bass. Jay-Z probably doesn't even know what a guitar is.

Even I can't keep up the narky sarcasm for much longer, though really, in the face of the idiocy being spouted about Jay-Z's headline slot at Glastonbury, it is hard to remain composed. But let's get this straight: the fact that Glastonbury has not yet sold out this year has very little to do with Jay-Z. Though I'm no special fan, it's pretty clear to anyone with half an ear that his acheivements make The Verve and Kings of Leon's careers look like the sideshows that they are. His booking is by no means out of keeping with Glastonbury's history ("We've booked Cyprus Hill [sic] before" chirped Emily in yesterday's Independent) and indeed, before this idiotic brouhaha, Jay-Z may have attracted as many first time ticket buyers - now likely to be put off by the prospect of lynch mobs.

In reality, the poor sales are perhaps something to do with the fact that Glastonbury last year was a horrible, overcrowded, poorly organised misery-fest, an environment so bleak that for the first and only time in my life I found the music of the Editors striking a chord. Every single one of my friends who went vowed it would be their last. I gave it four stars only through a combination of residual nostalgia and relief (don't tell anyone, but I snuck away on Sunday morning and watched the rest on telly).

What the Jay-Z storm does emphatically prove is that the mainstream rock audience, as epitomised by Noel Gallagher, has never been quite so cloth-eared, narrow-minded and parochial as it is now. And to link the two points together, this is why Glastonbury has gone way downhill in the relatively short period since I first went in 2003 - and the reason why people don't want to go back. I've no doubt those who were regular attendees before then would argue that the rot set in before 2003, but still, five years ago a visit to Glastonbury genuinely felt like a step outside society; the acts themselves didn't matter nearly as much as the spirit of the thing, the heady mix of philosophies and characters. I barely looked at the line-up (though I do remember a pretty enjoyable set form De La Soul), barely took any drugs and did the whole thing on £5.37 - and it was still one of the best weeks of my life.

Now the "alternative" music that seemed to Glastonbury's ostensible point from the outside, but never was from the inside, has been co-opted into the mainstream, the average festival-goer is far more likely to be the kind of bonehead with fast broadband who only thinks music is real if it has a guitar behind it. And once they've turned up to Glastonbury, hoping for some kind of polite rock'n'roll adventure, they find everyone is a bit like them, it's raining, overcrowded and there's no real escape beyond, say, listening to the Editors.

Which leaves us in a paradoxical position: if this kind of festival-goer is genuinely not going to go to Glastonbury because of Jay-Z - and the thousands who have bought their tickets already are the sort of game old stager who'd make it to the festival whatever the line-up - then 2008 could be a vintage year. Less crowds, sunny skies (surely after three rainy festivals a scorcher is due?) - and a gloriously entertaining Pyramid Stage set from a genuine musical pioneer to crown it. And I'm not talking about the Verve or Kings of Leon.

Carla Bruni - No Promises
(Dramatico)

"Cor, this foreign bird's got a way with words", you think, as Mme Bruni-Sarkozy wraps her breathily seductive tones around the line "I carry the sun in a golden cup, the moon in a silver bag" on the opening track of her first album in the English language. Released in January, No Promises has topped the European chart, and amid the clamour of Madame and Monsieur's presidential visit, its dozen songs offer a potential goldmine of insights into the French First Couple.

However, once you've managed to stop looking at the aspirational front cover (Bruni kneeling over a book in a small cotton dress), a leaf through the booklet reveals that these aren't Carla's words, but those of W.B. Yeats.

In fact, all of Carla's songs on No Promises take their lyrics from English language poets, Emily Dickinson, W.H. Auden and Christina Rossetti among them. So she's well-read, and pretty tasteful too - though anyone hoping for tell-all revelations about Nicolas' nocturnal habits will be frustrated. But then good French girls, or Italian-born ex-models who happen to have bagged the French president, never reveal this kind of stuff anyway.

What No Promises does reveal is that Bruni has a pretty, lambent, peculiarly accented voice that occasionally recalls Brigitte Bardot's. Her own gently plucked guitar melodies are hazily effective. The vibe is not a million miles away from Madeleine Peyroux, or the Icelandic singer Emiliana Torrini. Not for nothing has Bruni sold close to a million records in Europe. Only a genuinely revolting harmonica solo, springing like paparrazzo out of nowhere, troubles the calm.

There is a more honourable history to models turning into singers than you might think. Grace Jones and Nico are the ones to aim for, though it's hard to picture Carla winding up a dead junkie like Nico (not impossible), or making music halfway as interesting.

In truth, No Promises has no higher ambition than being a superior dinner party soundtrack, and this it acheives with elegance and savoir-faire. But then what did you expect from the French President's wife?

HARD not to be saddened by the impending demolition of the Astoria to make way for the new Crossrail station at Tottenham Court Road. Not only will it deprive the capital of one of its most likeable arenas - and possibly the only one built on the site of an old pickle factory - but it will put an end to one of the all-time classic London gags. "Doors, 7pm?" I never tire of noting as I pass the ever-present sign outside, "Why, I thought Jim Morrison was dead!"

Ahem.

Live music is booming - a glance at the profit margins of the O2 Arena confirms it. So it's depressing to see yet another historic venue go the way of the Spitz, the Hammersmith Palais, Turnmills and, soon, the Electric Ballroom.

There's a mysterious formula to gig venues: the volume in cubic feet divided by the aggression of the bouncers must equal the the volume in decibels multiplied by the viscosity of the sweat on the walls. Having inhaled acts from Asian Dub Foundation to Lily Allen within the Astoria's walls, I'm pretty sure it gets the equation right, to at least a couple of decimal places.

By way of consolation, we will get a brand new concert hall in the new station development, no doubt safer, cleaner, more fragrant. But let's hope it doesn't ape the last venue to open in such a complex, the Islington Academy, which has all the atmosphere of the Wagamama next door.

Likewise, I wonder whether The Garage in Highbury will retain its old charm when it reopens later this month after its £1 million revamp. Once I spent a raucous gig there with Eugene Hutz, the demented frontman of Gogol Bordello, standing on my shoulders. This kind of transgression is what rock'n'roll is supposed to be about. It is unlikely to occur when thousands have been spent on state-of-the-art equipment.

The venues that have disappeared altogether have all offered something unique. The Spitz had a programme that found time for one-man band festivals and lesbian electronica nights (sample act: Ten Minutes With My Dad). The Electric Ballroom kept goths off the street. The Hammersmith Palais was a vital melting pot, the first venue to bring jazz and, later, reggae to a London audience. It's just not profitable for the O2 Arena and its like to take such risks; they are principally money-making enterprises.

Indeed, such is my aversion to that ghastly hangar, I am in an agonising dilemma. Leonard Cohen has just announced his first London dates in 15 years this summer - in the O2. You must file down its ersatz high street, lined with fast food outlets to hear him sing Famous Blue Raincoat under that clammy gray canopy. I would kill to see Leonard Cohen live. But I'm not sure I'd travel to the O2. Can't he sing the Astoria's swansong?

"Old man take a look at my life, I'm a lot like you" sang Neil Young in 1972.

When he sings it again in 2008, he could be channelling his younger self, peeping from the past at his own 62-year old frame. Despite the monkish bald patch, the years etched on his owlish face, the rich man's guitar collection that now surrounds him, Neil Young the old man is a lot like he was back in 1972.

I arrived at the Apollo last Thursday pre-disappointed by experience of watching ageing legends, of Bob Dylan's wheezing and Brian Wilson's jittering. The merchandise stalls and grey heads that attend these events never put me in the best frame of mind. So how glorious to hear just how well preserved Young's voice remains as he struck up From Hank to Hendrix. It's the same keening treble that it ever was, still conjuring highways and horses, heartache and heaven.

He's not the most technically adept guitar player, but that's never what counts. Neil Young knows what a guitar is for. He's never afraid to conclude a phrase on an unmoored minor chord where most songwriters would opt for the happy resolution of a major. And now, even when he stretches out Down by the River to a 20 minute squall in the electric second half, it's never lazy noodling, seems like a sort of quest.

Shambling bear-like around the stage, warming up his harmonica, barely uttering a word, Young still cuts a fascinatingly outsider-ish figure. It's a position that allowed him to bypass the coked-up pomposity of his former cohorts, Crosby, Stills and Nash; that earned him the respect of the first wave of punks in the late Seventies and the grunge in the early Nineties; that makes his strung-out 1973 album Tonight's the Night my favourite ever, despite being recorded eight years before I was born.

So: a triumphant return? Young always hated the idea of a comeback. In 1992, he looked at his contemporaries cashing in a wave of Sixties nostalgia and shuddered: "The music the Stones and the Who play now has nothing whatsoever to do with rock'n'roll. Spiritually, it's all Perry Como. But I never went away. I just did other things." When you're out of time in the first place, you don't need to worry about things like relevance.

Andrew Lloyd Webber may have won a lifetime achievement bauble at the weekend's Olivier Awards, but there's no denying that he does not have the hold on London that he used to. And if the affirmation of this fact hasn't made you run down the tube carriage, high-fiving your fellow passengers with glee, I admire your restraint.

My first experience of the musical Lord was an outing to see Philip Schofield in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, aged 11. How I mourned the absence of Gordon the Gopher - anything that might have given the show some edge.

My displeasure continued when I met a putative Joseph from the reality TV show, Any Dream Will Do, at a party last year. I urge you to type "Seamus" and "Any Dream Will Do" into YouTube if you want a giggle: now imagine that curly-haired Care Bear of a man quizzing you on your love life for an hour. Joseph is a deluded drip of a part that seems to attract the insane. As for the tunes, they are surely the most invidiously banal ever to have graced the West End.

So it's fair to say that I wasn't relishing seeing the show performed by a cast of pubescents last Friday, in my fiancée's little brother's school play. I was relieved to hear that young Harris had turned down the lead - good lad! - opting instead to play Reuben, the brother who wisely sells Joseph into slavery.

However, from the moment the front row were nearly gassed to death by the dry-ice machine, it proved the most enjoyable night I've had at the theatre in ages.

Teenagers are completely fascinating. They attempt not to give anything away and yet, in their very self-consciousness, reveal their entire souls. What you are really watching is an entire year group's social dynamic presented in a pseudo-Biblical tableau.

And how fun to map out their futures: the gangly joker in a head-dress, sure to be a stoner in a few years; the mincing young chap on the end, a future drag queen? How hard it must have been to drill this disparate chorus into line - and aside from the narrators reading from the New Testament(!), I couldn't fault the direction. As for the Joseph, a feather-haired, blue-eye-shadowed slip of a boy, he brought rare dignity to the part.

The nursery rhyme simplicity of the songs is actually a good fit for a school show (who does not remember being forced to sing: "Naphtali and Isaachar and Asher and Dan/Zebulum and Gad took the total to nine!" in music lessons?). Then again, the West End version is really a school play writ large, the audience presumably seeing the reality TV winner Lee Mead as one of their own.

But that's indulgence enough. Now, to rearrange the famous song: go, Joseph. Go. Go. There's a good boy.

In the best musical news story of the year, it has emerged that Rostam Batmanglij, the keyboardist with Ivy League worldbeat hipsters Vampire Weekend not only has the word "Batman" in his actual name, but quite literally defined "crunk". On an internship at the Oxford English Dictionary! Before he formed the band he spent the summer writing the actual definition of the musical form, along with the entries for "mash-up" and "partyfoul". Not only that, he reveals that his former boss sent him an email shortly after the band's debut album was released. "I for one do give a fuck about an Oxford Comma". Genuis. Here's his handiwork:

CRUNK, adj. and n.(2)

A. adj.    Exciting or fun; (of a person) extremely energized or excited, esp. as a result of listening to (usually hip-hop or rap) music. Freq. in to get (it) crunk and variants.

    B. n.²    A style of hip-hop or rap music originating in the American South, characterized by repeatedly shouted catch phrases and elements usually found in electronic dance music, such as prominent bass, handclaps, and beeping or buzzing synthesizer noises. Freq. attrib.