It will remain one of the most unforgettable times of my life - the privilege of spending four hours alone with the curator in the house of Jean Sibelius outside Helsinki, deep in a snowbound March scene. In fact, I just couldn't stop writing about it once the initial commissions had been put to bed, so vivid had the impression been that the composer might walk into the room at any moment. Slowly, the images of the composer working or relaxing at home, sometimes in the company of his long-suffering but devoted wife Aino, are coming to light. Now the film company Aho & Soldan has produced a book of 50 photographs punctuated by essays.

I once passed up the chance of meeting Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson, who - it was announced by his Throbbing Gristle bandmates on Twitter - died in his sleep last night aged 55. In the late 1990s I was invited to interview him and his long-term partner Geoff Rushton aka John Balance at the country house where they recorded their ritual electronic music as Coil, but being a young and inexperienced writer at the time, I got scared off by their reputation as exploratory occultists and opted instead for a phone interview with Rushton. He proved to be a spectacularly charming and fascinating interviewee, and I quickly regretted my cowardice; Rushton died after a fall in 2004, and now that Christopherson has passed away too I will never get the chance to make up for it.

From Rufus Wainwright's first album, which featured the dirgey "Damned Ladies" wherein he sings to Desdemona and "brown-eyed Tosca", his operatic musical tendencies - indeed, his whole operatic self-conception - have never been latent. He has always been a diva trapped in mortal form.

Musical luminaries including Mick Jagger, Paul Weller, Ray Davies and Liam Gallagher are lending their support to a campaign to save The 100 Club, the historic music venue in London’s Oxford Street. Soaring business rates of £4000 a month and an annual rental bill of £166,000 have driven the club to the brink of bankruptcy, and unless the savethe100club campaign proves successful, it faces closure by Christmas.

“Hot sweaty tight jammed in can’t breathe heart pumping centre of the universe Monday night action in town. Racing down to Bar Rumba at midnight through the blaring siren wailing darkness of south London to the tinsel town wet streeted fakeness of the West End and the That’s How it Is sessions, Gilles Peterson, James Lavelle, UFO, Patrick Forge, Roni Size spin…” [sic] Peter Williams, London, 1994.

The National Portrait Gallery is a national treasure. Not because it has nice pictures (although it does have that too), but because it has the most amazing archive. An archive that is, almost literally, a treasure trove. It is, of course, out of sight and therefore out of mind to the casual visitor. But for a history buff, there is a visceral thrill knowing that there are a million or so objects (the number is give-or-take), many of them only superficially catalogued. Anything may turn up.

She did more to make Prokofiev remembered and reassessed than most of the great performers.

London’s world-famous experimental pub-theatre has secured its future with a move into Shepherd’s Bush old library. Church and council permission were given yesterday for conversion of the library (owned by the Church of England) to be ready for curtain-up in 2011 when the lease on the Bush’s space in O’Neill’s pub, Shepherd’s Bush Green, expires.

Grime music, following its emergence from (mostly) East London clubs and pirate radio stations in the very early 2000s, was archetypical music of urban disaffection. Although it produced characters like the rambunctious Jammer and the oddly melancholic Trim among its legions of young rappers, its fundamental mode is of straight-up combat and threat – of gunplay and postcode rivalries, of “slewing” (killing), “murking” (killing) and “duppying” (go on, have a guess) rivals, of fury at unspecified “haters” – and the jagged rhythms and harsh tones of the music tended to back this up.

Cider, bulls and a beautifully restored cathedral which hosts the annual Three Choirs Festival are probably the key elements used to brand Hereford. But for 20 years, the city has also been home to the UK’s first photography festival. This month, its anniversary is being celebrated in several venues with the focus on Twenty, an exhibition at the charmingly old-fashioned Museum and Gallery where 20 significant photographers share wall space with a gigantic stuffed pike.