If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. That’s one of the many mottos passed down to us from our fathers who subsequently had the same advice given to them from their own decaying parents.

And with this firmly drilled in to her mind, it’s good to see Leona Lewis has taken the same advice. As her appearance on X Factor 2006 dragged on, her singing style never really changed that much. Any song with a BPM over 40 was totally inappropriate for her. Instead she belted out ballad after ballad keeping grannies, young children and people in comas extremely happy. After boring us all silly with her hit Bleeding Love she’s now done the same to our American chums. She’s only ruddy gone to number one in the album charts!

Calvin Harris may be a lot of things but a good musician slash DJ is not one of them.

So it comes as very good slash nice news that, on route to the UK from the US, baggage handlers lost the baggage that happened to contain a laptop on which the only copy of his second album was stored.

If God existed we would thank him right now.

Axl Rose has been working on Guns N' Roses album Chinese Democracy for 14 years now, and in the absence of a release date, the big guns have been brought out.

OK, not really the big guns as such. The fizzy syrup that rots your teeth and tastes a bit like metal. Lots and lots of the fizzy syrup that rots your teeth and tastes a bit like metal. That instead of the big guns.

Fizzy drink company Dr Pepper has promised a free can of Dr Pepper to everyone in America if Guns N' Roses release Chinese Democracy in 2008. What people do with it is up to them - they can either immerse themselves in the exhilarating complex effervescence of Dr Pepper or pound the unopened can against their temple until they're unconscious because they'd rather suffer blunt force trauma than hear what a letdown Chinese Democracy is.

Believe it or not, there's more to Facebook than becoming friends with people you never really liked and playing games of Scrabble that last for three months.

Because now Facebook is getting in on the free music revolution, by letting REM stream their new album Accelerate through Facebook application iLike a full week before it gets physically released.

The implications for this are huge - if the REM experiment works it might become normal for bands to use Facebook as pre-release tools, changing the face of music forever. Although, let's not forget that we're talking about an REM album that wasn't released in the early-to-mid nineties, so perhaps the only real implication involves millions of Facebook uses updating their status to 'underwhelmed.' 

This Christmas, families around the world will be united by one thing - the sound of a crack-addled hasbeen croaking out pale imitations of her best-loved hits.

Amy Winehouse? Don't be silly - we're talking about the queen of substance-deranged power-ballads here, not the scabby-faced pretender to her crack-addled throne, here. That's right, Whitney Houston is back.

Well, sort of back. Whitney Houston's comeback album - her first for six years - will be released in time for Christmas. It'd be ready sooner, but it's going to take nine months of round-the-clock labour to photoshop the album's artwork so it looks like Whitney Houston's pupils are the same size and that she's got teeth and generally looks a bit less identical to Samuel L Jackson in Jungle Fever.

These days it seems like you're not a real band unless you give your music away free for a fortnight and then triple the price of your concert tickets for the privilege.

Radiohead did it, The Charlatans are doing it, and now gloomy old Nine Inch Nails are sort of vaguely doing it a bit as well. Sort of. A bit.

Nine Inch Nails are releasing their 36-tack instrumental album Ghosts I-IV on the internet for free, with the option of spending more to upgrade to something a touch swankier. Truly, historians will look back on this day as the moment when Nine Inch Nails really shook up the long-established Miserable Ambient Wank That Nobody Would Have Paid For Anyway industry. That's right Trent! Stick it to the man!

When Maxim gave two and a half stars to The Black Crowes' new album Warpaint, suspicions everywhere were raised pretty quickly.

Because, come on, two and a half stars out of five for an album by The Black Crowes? That's a bit bloody generous by anyone's standards.

Anyway, now that The Black Crowes have kicked up an almighty stink about Maxim's fake Warpaint review, the magazine has been forced into issuing a humiliating apology that's bound to harm its readership. After all, how are horny teenage boys expected to wank themselves into a sticky mess over pictures of Megan Fox in a bikini now they know that a blues-oriented hard rock jam-band got given an invented but probably accurate review in a previous issue?

Madonna - centuries-old empress of reinvention that she is - has decided to name her new album Hard Candy, but how will that affect her image?

Using our always dead-on powers of deduction, we've been able to work out that this means Madonna is ditching her purple leotard for Hard Candy to either dress up as an unnerving sweet-shop lady or she'll base her look on that film where Juno tries to cut a paedophile's balls off.

What's that? Pharrell has produced much of Hard Candy for Madonna and it features several guest spots by Justin Timberlake? Well in that case we're completely wrong - Madonna's new look will be that of a 50-year-old woman at a nightclub desperately trying to look three decades younger than she actually is and fooling nobody. So no real change, then.