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.

Second opinion
U2 3D
Selected cinemas

I hate Bono. Preening twerp. The very act of entering the cinema and donning the 3D specs to watch him and his band prance through their latest marketing ploy made me want to spoon my eyes out in protest. But perhaps, I thought, this unique opportunity to see the Irish supergroup perform a South American concert in three dimensions - so close you can actually reach out and touch Bono's ego - might give me an insight into the ire I share with at least as many people as buy his silly records.

Why do we so dislike Bono, or Paul Hewson to give him his actual name? There are many reasons. He wrote the song Beautiful Day. He wrote the song Vertigo. He wrote the song... you get the idea - his music is a derivative sports-soundtrack only redeemed, if at all, by the fact that his friend The Edge has a neat rack of guitar-effects pedals and had a couple of OK ideas in 1985.

"Freedom has a scent like the top of a newborn baby's head", Paul Hewson sings on Miracle Drug, conjuring the image of the millionaire star sneaking into maternity wards to sniff slimy tots as their new mothers look on in exhausted horror.

But then again The Kooks make rubbish music and I don't hate them nearly as much.  Here Paul Hewson is again using the plight of the Third World to promote himself as some sort of Gandhi figure even as his private equity firm, Elevation Partners, became a major shareholder in Forbes magazine, an organ devoted to celebrating the super-rich. Here he is again giving a shout out to Ireland, despite the fact that he transferred U2's business assets to Amsterdam to avoid paying tax in the nation that spawned him and threatens to build a huge, gaudy hotel in Dublin despite overwhelming local opposition.

How fitting, incidentally, that having made a speech at January's Davos conference confessing his "eco-sins" to Al Gore and promising to be better in future, he should now allow U23D to sponsor an American Nascar team.

It's a pity that the genuinely impressive photography here should have been trained on such an unworthy subject. The only defence of U23D is this: hearing these songs in a multiplex, mingling with the smell of stale hot-dogs and popcorn, you feel they have never found a more apt setting.