His recording of Gurney's music Severn & Somme is due to appear shortly on the Somm label

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His recording of Gurney's music, Severn & Somme, is due to appear shortly on the Somm label. Featuring several unpublished and unrecorded "new" songs, it is a celebration of a composer whom Williams feels has been unjustly overlooked. "Gurney has a gift of producing incredible textures," he says. This is not music about disablement; it's about a disabled person making music."Thursday, 1pm (0191-443 4661; www.thesagegateshead ). When the 90th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme is commemorated this year, there will be the chance to remember those who experienced the carnage The poet and composer Ivor Gurney was one such soldier. "'The White Cascade', his unpublished setting of a WH Davies poem, seems to me to evoke the sound of Rachmaninov: it's the same kind of aesthetic, the same sound world.. I have no doubt that Gurney is an important song composer. "Each person's difficulty is different, but what's true of all is the need to communicate on a level that's not simply verbal."Brass-players, he adds, inhabit a world full of its own lore, "and when I started working with Clarence in this way, we were just a couple of brass-players again The disablement was not an issue.

Gurney has always been respected as a war poet, but few of the 300 or so songs that he composed are well known. "He will have a 'third eye' in the form of an electronic beam in the centre of his forehead, which he'll project on to a mouse-cursor for those keyboards. He will also have a drinking straw fixed in the mouthpiece of a smoker's pipe, through which he will direct streams of air that will dictate rhythm, volume and sound duration."In other words, with his eyes he will select the type of sound, and with his head he will select everything else a trumpeter would normally do with his instrument."The Headspace could have commercial mileage, as it can be played by anyone rendered quadri-plegic through illness or accident, Kenny says. Its next sighting will be at the Sage Gateshead, but the instrument it will be accompanying, which Kenny has helped to devise, is even more remarkable. The Headspace is essentially a laptop, but no laptop ever did what this will do for the man who "plays" it, the trumpeter Clarence Adoo, who is paralysed from the neck down after a car accident, and who is now making a comeback. "He'll stare at the screen, which shows four miniature keyboards, each key being about the width of a matchstick," explains Kenny. Outside the scrum, the hierarchy have drafted in the Clermont Auvergne wing Aurelien Rougerie and the Biarritz centre Damien Traille. EAT UP YOUR GREENS Leafy greens are nature's antidepressants.

They're an excellent source of folic acid, a lack of which has been linked to depressed mood. It is nevertheless extraordinary that all those decisions went in favour of England.Honiss obstructed the Welsh defenders from stopping Lawrence Dallaglio's try by getting in the way himself, though if he had disallowed it he would have caused a riot among the Twickenham faithful. For his recital at Dartington Summer School last year, Professor John Kenny picked up in turn an alphorn, a conch, an ocarina, three recorders, three types of trombone, sundry stones and the instrument he'd brought back into circulation after it had been silent for 2,000 years: an Iron Age Celtic war horn known as the carnyx. Roger is a tough guy from the 'hood, I've gotta write songs about fighting.". I know I've cried wolf a few times, but this time I have committed."Townshend's girlfriend, the singer-songwriter Rachel Fuller, will perform her show, In The Attic, before every gig.Townshend and Daltrey, who appear to have overcome their legendary rivalry, are now working together on the album, which will feature songs inspired by the Beslan school massacre.In an interview with Mojo, Townshend said: "I find it very hard to please Roger It's as narrow a brief as it was when we were 17 .. when I used to look at Roger and think ...