Between them, they have shrugged off criticism for ramming a 300-year-old chestnut tree, sipping gin and tonics at the wheel of a car and dashing to the North Pole in a gas-guzzling 4x4.

Williams, 27, is a member of the R&B group Destiny's Child. In 2002 her debut solo album was the biggest selling gospel album of the year. Her new album, 'Unexpected', is released next month.

It's one of the great music events of the year – and you could be there if you can answer these 15 questions. Email your entry to competitions@independent.co.uk by Wednesday night – the winners will be chosen at random from the best responses.

Today is 4 July, and there is no more fitting a date to hijack for the purpose of celebrating our independent musical history than the American Declaration of Independence. After breaking from the British, the Americans enshrined a constitution so all-encompassing in its vision of law, governance and society, that it has provided stability to a diverse and massive geography and population for more than 200 years.

An evening of overindulgence can often end with drunken boasts, flights of fancy and grandiose business plans for global domination. But for frustrated musician Neil Claxton, his alcohol-fuelled rant with a friend about the state of the music business struck such a chord that, in the cold light of day, he phoned his friend David Wood with a proposition.

The first record I bought was?

I don’t honestly remember. There was no place to buy records where I was living, so I used to tape songs off the radio and listen to them on my Walkman.

Micachu (real name Mica Levi) is a precociously talented newcomer. The punk experimental songwriter from East London studies composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and recently the London Philharmonic Orchestra played one of her avant-garde pieces at theRoyal Festival Hall.

It’s not that Florence Welch has a machine; rather, she is the machine. The 20-year-old London singer twirls onto the stage, arms held high, and storms through 13 songs in her short set like a whirling dervish, knocking her audience sideways with a soul blues voice that can rival Sixties Motown singers, never mind her peers.

Clive Hornby - Emmerdale's flat cap-wearing Jack Sugden - died last night at the age of 63, it was announced today.

Sir Charles Wheeler, one of the BBC's longest-serving and most popular foreign correspondents, has died, the corporation announced today. He was 85.

Following the disastrous conclusion to Gatecrasher’s Summer Sound System event in May, when a rainstorm forced Hot Chip and The Chemical Brothers to cancel their sets on the Sunday evening, organisers of similar large-scale dance parties this summer will be nervously watching the skies. Yet there’s also a feeling that dance promoters are facing other, less elemental pressures.

Chris Blackwell is often regarded as synonymous with Bob Marley and rightly so: it was Blackwell who saw in him the potential to grow from a relatively small-time Jamaican artist into a worldwide superstar.

The Fourth of July is, of course, Independence Day, when America celebrates the occasion, back in 1776, when it declared its independence from Britain. As of this year, however, it is also Independents Day, a worldwide celebration of a different kind of liberty: that from Sony BMG, Warner, EMI and the Universal Music Group, who together constitute the major record labels. It didn’t even take a revolutionary war.

Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin

We didn't do many supports other than on our first US tour in 1969 when we opened for Country Joe and the Fish. When we got to the East Coast, we were scheduled to open for Iron Butterfly, but we only played one show with them because the crowd were still shouting for Zeppelin when they started their set. Iron Butterfly bottled out after that and Peter (Grant, Led Zeppelin's manager) played it in the press. Other bands seemed intimidated by what we were doing.

Meeting Irvine Welsh on his home turf in Edinburgh, it is hard to know whether he has changed, is still the same, or was never what people thought he was in the first place. He now lives in Dublin, via London and Miami, but manages to make it back "home" at least once a month. He has a Hibs season ticket. He's still pals with the boys he knew when he was six. And, yet, something about him is definitely different. "When you're kids you do things like burning insects with magnifying glasses," says the man whose books have mainly dealt with smack, scatology and the sordid sides of life. "But now if I see a snail walking across a path I've got to go and pick it up... I seem to get very emotional about suffering. If there's a cheesy romantic comedy on a plane, I'm the one with tears rolling down my face. Oh God," he laughs, "what am I saying?"

It's not hard to warm to Jaime Winstone. One minute, she's pumping my hand, calling me "babe" and greeting me in her Cockney songbird voice, the next, she's dashing out for a "moment of toilet", as she gleefully calls it.

Opines Winston Fletcher, advertising boosts the economy. No enemy of cliché, Fletcher was born. Appearing in the same sentence, "torrid" and "riven by strife" are expressions he uses. Not averse to annoying constructs, his book is written like this. With offices in London Auckland, Taipei and Madrid, it is published by Oxford University Press. A peerless academic publisher, I wonder what they were thinking of.

Seventy summers ago, Spain versus Germany meant more than the final of a football tournament. The outcome differed, too. When the forces of the Spanish government made their last-ditch push on the Ebro against Franco's rebels in July 1938, ferocious bombing by the Nazi planes of the Condor Legion helped to halt the advance. Within months, Madrid fell and a 40-year ice age began.

Some people sit on their butts/ Got the dreams, yeah, but not the guts," sang Ethel Merman, playing the mother of all stage mothers, in the original Broadway production of Gypsy. Although this motto is strangely exhilarating and can provide good early-morning motivational ballast, everyone knows stage mothers of this sort are - well - bad. They distort personalities and ride roughshod over childhoods, leaving unhappy adults to pick up the pieces. Each frenzied Mrs Worthington, stage-lore has it, equals at least one brattish, traumatised tot. Drugs and alcohol, we're so often shown, soon replace the lustre of applause once the awkward age looms. Is that the sort of future you want for your child?

If the Roman and British experiences are anything to go by, the literature of American decline has only just begun. Fareed Zakaria has started us off with a thoughtful, reasoned and hopeful sketch of global power and politics in the 21st century. He is not, however, talking to you and me. One key element of the post-American world is that we – the Europeans – will be marginal players. We will be rich and stable but demographically in terminal decline, unable successfully to absorb African and Asian migrants on our peripheries. As events in Ireland show, we are also unable to stomach the creation of federal European institutions that might allow the continent to be a real player. So be it. Europe has done more than enough shaping of the world as it is, and look where it got us.

The train from Wolverhampton to Aberystwyth stuttered along its journey, reversed twice, and eventually expired at the second-last stop. On the way, I had passed a wild rollercoaster of hills and valleys, a grassy chaos which this trainline seemed to have been punched through. When the emergency bus chuntered over the hill to Aberystwyth, the Irish sea seemed to tower over the town like a frozen tsunami, luminous and gray.

What can it be like to face the end of the world? The closest I came was in 2003 when I interviewed a doctor outside the Prince of Wales hospital, Hong Kong. Almost all the patients had fled and the doctor insisted we sat outside, six feet apart, wearing surgical masks. It was the height of the Sars outbreak and there was no knowing then how far or how long it would run.

Deftly and sensitively narrated, this first novel is the story of three generations of a Bengali family and Mukunda, the illegitimate child of a tribal woman, who became from the age of six a part of their lives. The events span the first 50 years of the 20th century; and in the three sections of the book, the last spoken by Mukunda, the narrative is punctuated with key dates which link loosely the family's history with that of modern India.

Few subjects divide women as much as childbirth. The happy-clappies who insist it is a natural process rendered painful only by fear are in stark contrast to Rebecca Abrams's observation that it is "one of the riskiest events in a woman's life". I'd like to line up the people who persuade women to do it without an epidural and wrench their teeth out without anaesthetic. In late 18th-century Aberdeen, there was no question that women would do anything other than suffer a home birth; the question was whether they and their babies would survive it. Alexander Gordon may have a beautiful wooden model of the pelvis to persuade midwives to get women onto hands and knees during labour, but they have never heard "vagina" and "rectum" uttered. "He'd make farmyard brutes of good Christian women!" one exclaims.