Guardian Music — Nine sunny songs to get you through a grey dayEach week, we invite someone to share a playlist of songs they've been listening to recently. Rose Clark is a history of art and english graduate who lives and works near London. Follow her on Twitter. T... more info

Detroit Free Press — Almost 25 years have passed since Cowboy Junkies recorded the indelibly languid version of the Velvet Underground's "Sweet Jane," which launched the band's career. Many more songs, sessions and tours have followed since then, but the Canadi... more info

Guardian Music — Viva Brother's split and Samantha Brick's Daily Mail article provoked torrents of abuse. Why? Can't we separate a person's worth from the quality of their workIt's a commonplace in consideration of art: separate the work from the person. Larkin's poe... more info

Aquarium Drunkard — Alright, enough of the pretty. Switching gears, this has been scratching that Royal Trux itch of late – say, if paired with Spacemen 3′s Forged Prescriptions and the Velvet Underground’s ’67 Gymnasium bootleg. The three tracks below hail from... more info

Topix — After weeks of voting, impassioned campaigns, comment-section arguments, and matchups that seemed nearly impossible to come down on one side of, Sound of the City's take on March Madness - in which we set out to crown the quintessential New York musi... more info

Aquarium Drunkard — It might have seemed just a bit too obvious to ask Dean Wareham to work on a project scoring screen test films done by Andy Warhol, but really it was all too perfect. Wareham has received his fair share of comparisons to the Velvet Underground over t... more info

Guardian Music — Hackney Empire, LondonIt's a bit of a caricature, but in the world of art, there are two types of practitioners: first, the artist who leaps from one subject to another, mixing media, restlessly looking for the next new thing. Then there are those wh... more info

Guardian Music — The Duchess, YorkPop is reinventing so many old sounds that it was only a matter of time before groups got round to what John Peel called the "shambling bands" – a strand of 1980s indie indebted to the Velvet Underground and Orange Juice. Veronica ... more info

Guardian Music — Sage, GatesheadThis year marks the 100th anniversary of John Cage's birth, the 20th anniversary of his death, and 11 years since the commencement of the longest concert in history – a performance of Cage's ASLSP (As Slow As Possible), played on the... more info

Panda Toes — So I'm watching Moneyball for the first time. And yo. Why is Brad Pitt lifting weights and jogging and doing pull-ups and working out in general throughout the entire friggin' movie? Are you serious? Dude's out there getting paid to get even more han... more info