If you’re not French, there are probably two things you know about Claude François: that he wrote “My Way” and that he died from electrocution when fiddling with a lighting fixture while in the bath. In France, however, he’s been part of pop-cultural furniture since the mid-Sixties and has remained so since his death in 1978. He’s even more ubiquitous right now due to a biopic, DVD box set and TV specials dedicated to the constantly dancing dynamo known as “Cloclo”. Posters for Cloclo line Paris’s streets.

“If James Bond actually worked in MI6 today,” said “Anna”, “he’d spend a large amount of time behind a desk.” Fair enough, since he’d also be about 110. And besides, the days of the Oxbridge “tap” having gone the way of Bernard Lee, most of 007’s work has long been outsourced to Johnny Foreigner.

Norman Lebrecht, the seasoned and ever-alert musical commentator, thinks he and his readers may have uncovered someone making a very good stab at being Mozart. Three pieces have been discovered on the internet DIY-video channel being played by a pianist whose face can't be seen, all purporting to be new or obscure works by Mozart, Haydn and Mendelssohn.

If there was a holy trinity of rock'n'roll iconography, it would be guitars by Fender and Gibson, plugged into amplifiers bearing the unmistakeable Marshall logo. Merely to be seen using Marshall amps and loudspeakers became an obligatory badge of rockingness, to the extent that many acts just did it for show.

"Jimi Hendrix used three 100-watt amps and three stacks," Marshall supremo Jim Marshall commented. "KISS go a lot further, but most of the cabinets and amps you see on stage are dummies. We once built 80 dummy cabinets for Bon Jovi. They all do it - it's just backdrop."

Attention! Required viewing: Jon Shenk’s Maldivian climate-change documentary, The Island President, starring one Mohamed “Anni” Nasheed in the title role.

The organisation that channels public money to generate today's new classical music has been resoundingly condemned this week by all of Britain's most important composers. In an open letter, signed by Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Colin Matthews, Nicola LeFanu, Julian Anderson and 250 more, the British contemporary music-making establishment accuses Sound and Music - set up by the Arts Council three years ago - of having alienated virtually all the composers it was set up to work with.

Welcome to theartsdesk's first radio show with Peter Culshaw and Joe Muggs, recorded with the extremely able help of Brendon Harding at Red Bull Studio London.

The Moscow girl punk band Pussy Riot say their impromptu performance inside Russia’s major cathedral of their song “Holy Shit” was a prayer. They were replying to the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Kirill who called it “blasphemy”.

Speaking at a liturgy in Moscow’s Deposition of the Robe Cathedral, the Patriarch condemned Pussy Riot’s actions at Christ the Saviour Cathedral as “blasphemous” saying that “the Devil has laughed at all of us.”

Norway’s bouncy electropoppers Casiokids release their new single “Kaskaden” next week. They’ve chosen to premier the video on theartsdesk. Directed by their long-term collaborator Blank Blank, the fantasia takes in Kung Fu films and the Hollywood of the Eighties, mixing them with a Norwegian flavour.

A couple of nights ago I went to a book launch at Waterstone’s, Notting Hill, for a collection of un-illustrated short stories (Household Worms) by a visual artist (Stanley Donwood) perhaps best known for his work in the music industry (producing iconic record covers for Radiohead).