Dorian Lynskey

Three decades and 11 albums in, the Pet Shop Boys still feel like they are renting their place as unlikely pop stars.

Dance floor pioneers Robin Gibb and Donna Summer may have died, but the beat goes on and disco remains the foundation of all modern pop.

Sombre prophet, mordant wisecracker, ­repentant cad: Leonard Cohen is back with a great new ­album, old ideas and more wit and wisdom.

Posthumous albums are troubling entities, and Amy Winehouse's "new" album is no exception.

Scowling, paranoid and up for a fight - That's the image with which Tricky is saddled. Dorian Lynskey in London finds out if the rumours are true.

The first sound you hear is a bright, solitary trumpet. Then comes a rumbling tuba, rattling drums and the familiar refrain of John Philip Sousa's Stars and Stripes Forever. A behemoth of a guitar riff lumbers in with a flurry of banjo, a skirl of bagpipes, a battery of percussion and squeals of brass overlaid until they sound like a stampede of panicking elephants. And on it goes, like the devil's own mix tape.

Music today defies labelling and looks can be deceiving -- not all reggae artists are black, Dorian Lynskey takes a closer look.

in could be hip-hop's first Asian-American star -- if racism doesn't stop him. ''For the most part people think I'm like a myth, not a real person,'' he says. He talks to Dorian Lynskey in New York.