The death of Davy Jones is a surprise. A horrible surprise. Less than a year ago he was on stage at the Royal Albert Hall in the reunited Monkees, full of life, hogging the stage, hamming it up and celebrating the wonderful songs of America’s manufactured answer to The Beatles.

He was English of course, born in Manchester, and brought into The Monkees to add some British sparkle. Good-looking, cheeky and mop-topped, he always got the girl. His pop voice and maracca-shaking were the focus for American girls looking for a Beatle type on their home soil.

Tonight on Channel 4, a new music series begins with a fantastic premise. A group of music obsessives drive around the USA in a London black cab, finding interesting musicians and recording them performing and talking in the back of the cab. Sounds a little bit like the 2008 Stephen Fry in America series, doesn't it? Well maybe, except Black Cab Sessions has been broadcast online since 2007.

Watch the Black Cab Sessions trailer:

Silent movies are currently the rage of Tinseltown, so what better moment to brush up on one of the treasures of the pre-talkie era? Top movie-ologists now contend that FW Murnau's 1926 film of Faust is a neglected all-time great ("one of the most beautifully crafted films ever made," according to Theodore Huff in Sight & Sound). It's an opinion shared by Greek composer Aphrodite Raickopoulou, whose painstakingly wrought new score for the film was premiered at the Royal Festival Hall last night.

Londoner Yemi Olagbaiye is the model of a new generation musician for whom the dissolution of genre categories means not homogenisation but an opportunity for greater individuality.

First it's Golden Globes, then Oscars, or it's Grammys, then Brits - you can hardly go by a Sunday this time of year without another set of awards. But which ones count? Who are the judges?

Superficially it's the very picture of innocence. A boy clings to his wooden steed, one hand clutching the neck, the other flying free. Few Fourth Plinth commissions will be more easily co-opted for official public duty. Hope, youth, the exultation of the ordinary: the state will be able to do plenty with this. Already Boris Johnson has tried to make an Olympic mascot of the boy. Joanna Lumley, who unveiled the work earlier today, hoped his gold-plating boded well for the Summer.

Classical music and sport: should they spend more time together? The idea was posited more than 20 years ago that football and opera made for ideal bedfellows, so long as the football was being played in Italy and the operatic aria was Nessun Dorma, sung by Pavarotti. Since then no major tournament or Olympiad passes by without the BBC making the effort to hoik improving classical sounds into the broadcasting mix.

It's awards season for the music industry, and no amount of complaining, ignoring or pointedly watching BBC Four in protest is going to stop the BRIT Awards from ordering in a few thousand servings of homemade tomato chutney and crostini to be laid out for the insider guests gathered at the O2 Arena. It's their once-a-year big chance to let their stars try and demonstrate their USPs in their winner's speeches, for starters. However in 2012, it seems that there's all too little that's unique about many of them - in particular their "love" for their fans. 

Sudden and disconcerting news from English National Ballet where it's just been announced that artistic director Wayne Eagling is to step down this summer. The company gives no reason for this exceedingly short notice, which leaves them having to advertise the third most significant job in British ballet within the next few days, and a precipitate appointment procedure only weeks after the departure of their managing director.

He played chess with Death in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, was crucified as Jesus in George Stevens’s The Greatest Story Ever Told and diced with the devil in William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. There’s something magnicent and elemental about the life and work of Max Von Sydow. Born in 1929, he has looked like a craggy old monument for at least 30 years.