Sunshine man

Leader of north Wales rockers The Alarm and beyond, Mike Peters left us on April 29.

Wendy Rigg is planning a summer of festival fun – but what is it about nostalgic music that makes us feel so good?

The teenage prodigy who helped define the sound of Stax, BOOKER T JONES continues to bring wisdom and peerless Hammond grooves to a new generation of musicians. Yet his path from “Green Onions” and Otis Redding to Willie Nelson and the Drive-By Truckers has not always been clear. “The events in Memphis in 1968 were too much for me,” he tells Stephen Deusner

The groundbreaking LA band’s much-sampled path through rock, soul, jazz, funk and beyond

For 60 years, HERBIE HANCOCK has taken the bonnet off music, hacking its valves and gears, forging a future as yet unseen. He shaped jazz and funk and synth-rock; Miles and Joni felt the benefit. Now he's a Polar Music Prize laureate. "I've always been this geek, this nerdy guy,"

SLY STONE, WHO DIED ON June 9 at 82, wrung greatness out of the American abyss. Early in his career, Stone was an avatar of a more peaceful future, forming Sly and the Family Stone as one of the count