Marca: FORD Modelo: KA Año: 13/10/2000 Combustible: diesel Kilometraje: 95370 kms Equipamiento: versión 3 puertas autorradio talabartería tejido 4 plazas sentadas asiento...

http://www.last.fm/music/I%27m+From+Barcelona

He's straight, he tells the Sunday Times:

"Over the past 18 months, the actor has been linked to countless models and actresses, and recently appeared to confirm the rumours that he was dating Stewart, but then mysteriously claimed that he was 'allergic to vagina'. Er, what was that about? Is he dating Stewart then? Or is he, in fact, gay? I heard his two older sisters used to dress him up and call him Claudia when he was a boy. Actually, he’s 'straight', he says. He found the male-on-male sex scenes he had to perform in a film, Little Ashes, last year 'strange. I played Salvador Dali. We were both straight, but he was Spanish, so much more confident about being naked and stuff, although when it comes down to it, it’s just as awkward with a girl, especially if you are straight and with a girl you don’t like... Anyway, Javier was really cool. After we had been pretending to have sex on this balcony in Barcelona, he was like, ‘We have such a strange job...’'"

Cristiano Ronaldo was to the fore as Real Madrid came from behind to defeat Sporting Gijon 3-1 on Saturday night and move three points clear of Barcelona at the top of Spain's La Liga.

Group of wealthy investors plans to take club back from Glazers and distribute shares to fans

Manchester United supporters spearheaded by a group calling themselves the Red Knights are poised to table a £1.25bn bid for the club by June that will involve fans owning a majority stake.

Under proposals being studied by the bidder's financial adviser, Nomura, around 30 wealthy Red Knights investors would take control of United by setting up a new company that would later invite fans from around the world to subscribe to new shares.

The structure of the bid is designed to wrest control of United from the US Glazer family as quickly as possible and to meet legal requirements that determine how firms can be run under collective ownership. "The takeover would be in two stages but the objective is to give the fans a central role in the club's future," said a City source.

Jim O'Neill, Goldman Sachs's chief economist, who is one of the founding members of the Red Knights, is keen to distribute equity as widely as possible among millions of supporters globally.

The idea is for United to resemble Spanish rival Barcelona, which is owned by its fans and where profits are ploughed back into the club. At the moment, United's profits are having to be used to service huge debts drawn down by the Glazers when they acquired United in 2005.

Barcelona relies on the same revenue streams as British clubs, but experts say its model could be adopted by Premiership teams with a strong sense of their own identity.

Japanese bank Nomura last week met with wealthy supporters of the Red Knights campaign, which is backed by investment banker Keith Harris and Paul Marshall, founder of London-based hedge fund Marshall Wace. The man in charge of negotiations is Guy Dawson, who set up financial advisory boutique Tricorn before it was recently acquired by Nomura.

Dawson has already held talks with the Manchester United Supporters Trust (Must) to demonstrate that the Red Knights are serious about giving fans a major say in how United is run.

Duncan Drasdo, Must's chief executive, said: "We want a big stake in the club although the exact size will depend on any take-up of shares in the event that supporters are invited to subscribe to new equity."

Drasdo adds: "It's important that as much of the debt is paid down as quickly as possible so that the club has maximum headroom to invest in new players and to ensure affordable ticket prices."

As a symbol of opposition to the Glazers, Must has been encouraging fans to forsake United's traditional red colours and wear green and gold scarves – the colours of the club, then known as Newton Heath, until 1902.

But a spokesman for the Glazers, who reiterated that the family had no intention of selling, said: "There is no dress code printed on the tickets, people are entitled to wear what they like. The important thing is that they show their support for the team."

Drasdo said "the amount of money flowing out of club to service the Glazers' £700m debt pile is quite astonishing. "United needs to invest a lot of money in new players in the next couple of years as well as eventually find a replacement for manager Sir Alex Ferguson. He is going to be a very hard act to follow and his successor will not come cheap."

United's chief executive, David Gill, has defended the Glazers, saying that funds are available for Ferguson to use in the transfer market this summer. Gill maintains the £80m received last year from the sale of Cristiano Ronaldo to Real Madrid is still part of the club's budget. Gill said: "The money from Ronaldo is sitting in the bank account."

Sources close to the Red Knights say that offers of financial support continue to pour in, with several sovereign wealth funds expressing an interest. Five British individuals are said to be willing to invest £10m apiece. It is understood they have also won the support of former United chairman Sir Roy Gardner.

• Manchester United
• Investing
• Mergers and acquisitions

Richard Wachmanguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Charles Arthur investigates how the ways in which we watch sport, read magazines and do business with each other could change for ever

Don't act too surprised if, some time in the next year, you meet someone who explains that their business card isn't just a card; it's an augmented reality business card. You can see a collection and, at visualcard.me, you can even design your own, by adding a special marker to your card, which, once put in front of a webcam linked to the internet, will show not only your contact details but also a video or sound clip. Or pretty much anything you want.

It's not just business cards. London Fashion Week has tried them out too: little symbols that look like barcodes printed onto shirts, which, when viewed through a webcam, come to life. Benetton is using augmented reality for a campaign that kicked off last month, in which it is trying to find models from among the general population.

Augmented reality – AR, as it has quickly become known – has only recently become a phrase that trips easily off technologists' lips; yet we've been seeing versions of it for quite some time. The idea is straightforward enough: take a real-life scene, or (better) a video of a scene, and add some sort of explanatory data to it so that you can better understand what's going on, or who the people in the scene are, or how to get to where you want to go.

Sports coverage on TV has been doing it for years: slow-motion could be described as a form of augmented reality, since it gives you the chance to examine what happened in a situation more carefully. More recently cricket, tennis, rugby, football and golf have all started to overlay analytic information on top of standard-speed replays – would that ball have hit the stumps, the progress of a rally, the movement of the backs or wingers, the relative flights of shots – to tell you more about what's going on. Probably the most common use is in American football where the "first down" line – the distance the team has to cover to continue its offence – is superimposed on the picture for viewers.

But those required huge systems. AR took its first lumbering steps into the public arena eight years ago: all that you needed to do was strap on 10kg of computing power – laptop, camera, vision processor – and you could get an idea of what was feasible. The American Popular Science magazine wrote about the idea in 2002 – but the idea of being permanently connected to the internet hadn't quite jelled at that point.

"AR has been around for ages," says Andy Cameron, executive director of Fabrica, an interactive design studio which works with Benetton, "maybe going back as far as the 1970s and art installations that overlaid real spaces with something virtual." He mentions in particular the work of pioneering computer artist Myron Krueger.

What's changed in the past year is that AR has come within reach of all sorts of developers – and the technology powerful enough to make use of it is owned by millions of people, often in the palms of their hands.

The arrival of powerful smartphones and computers with built-in video capabilities means that you don't have to wait for the AR effects as you do with TV. They can simply be overlaid onto real life. Step forward Apple's iPhone, and phones using Google's Android operating system, both of which are capable of overlaying information on top of a picture or video.

Within the small world of AR, one of the best-known apps is that built by Layar, which – given a location, and using the iPhone 3GS's inbuilt compass to work out the direction you're pointing the phone – can give you a "radar map" of details such as Wikipedia information, Flickr photos, Google searches and YouTube videos superimposed onto a picture you've taken of the scene. For Americans, it will also pull in details from the government's economic Recovery Act – so that if you're on Wall Street and want to see how many billions went into which building, it will show you.

Or, more usefully, Yelp offers an augmented reality application that will show you ratings and reviews for a restaurant before you walk in – the sort of thing that could make restaurants quiver with delight, or shudder in horror.

Or maybe it wouldn't need to know where it is; only who it's looking at. A prototype application demonstrated at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February took things a little further again. Point the phone at a person and if it can find their details, it will pull them off the web and attach details – their Twitter username, Facebook page and other facts – and stick them, rather weirdly, into the air around their head (viewed through your phone, of course). "It's taking social networking to the next level," says Dan Gärdenfors, head of user experience research at The Astonishing Tribe, a Swedish mobile software company.

And there are fabulously useful applications: at Columbia University, computer science professor Steve Feiner and PhD candidate Steve Henderson have created their Augmented Reality for Maintenance and Repair (Armar) project. It combines sensors, head-up displays, and instructions to tackle the military's maintenance needs: start working on a piece of kit, and the details about it pop up in front of you. Imagine if you could put on a pair of special goggles when you needed to investigate your car's engine, or a computer's innards, and the detail would pop up. That's the sort of idea that Armar is trying to implement, though for the military at first..

Yet it's fashion which seems to have leapt quickest into this technology. The T-shirt with AR in London Fashion Week was developed by Cassette Playa, a label that has been worn by Lily Allen, Rihanna and Kanye West. Carri Munden, who designed it with the Fashion Digital Studio at the London College of Fashion, described it as "mixing reality and fantasy". Adidas, too, has launched trainers with AR symbols in the tongues: hold them to a webcam and you are taken to interactive games on the Adidas site.

The process by which the strange symbols get translated into images is simple enough: the website takes the feed from your webcam (you have to explicitly allow it to do so, so there are no security worries) and analyses it for the particular set of symbols that the program is looking for. (Some easy calculations mean the symbols can be detected whichever way up you hold the item.) Videos and pictures are then sent back to you.

Andy Cameron says that the arrival of an open-source, hence free, AR tool kit has let companies build their own AR applications, using Flash – the pervasive animation and video technology used for many online ads and YouTube's videos – "which immediately meant you had huge penetration, because Flash is everywhere". (Something like 98% of all computers are reckoned to have Adobe's Flash Player installed.)

"If you build your AR application with Flash, then you can get it out to everybody in the world with a computer with a webcam," says Cameron.

Benetton is using AR in its latest campaign, called "It's My Time" which aims to get members of the public to put themselves forward as potential models, and uses AR to show more details about existing models. But its first most visible use of AR was last year in issue 76 of Benetton's Colors magazine, a quarterly fashion product. Dozens of pages have AR symbols: hold the page up to a webcam, and you see film and more photos of the person on the page. "The Colors editor and the creative director of Fabrica got very excited about it," says Cameron.

Cameron can see huge potential which could even revive the fortunes of print advertising. "Think of a commercial page, an advert, in a fashion magazine. It's pretty expensive. With this – and this is the way that the more hard-nosed people in Benetton saw the advantage – it means that you can get more products on the page." Print an AR code, get people to come to the site, and you can show them so much more, while measuring the return from your effort.

The technical cost is a tiny part of the overall effort. "The printing and photography cost [of the advert] is the same. And the development cost is pretty small."

And of course where advertisers go, the publications that house them are sure to go as well. Esquire magazine in the US and Wallpaper* in Europe have done "augmented reality" editions, with Robert Downey Jr coming to life on the cover of the former, and AR text providing videos and animation in the latter. But there are more possibilities for journalism using AR: for example if you "geotag" newspaper articles (so that you say that an item relates to a particular place) then someone visiting a site could learn about events relevant to the area via their smartphone.

Book publishers too are leaping in: Carlton Publishing will release an AR book in May, featuring dinosaurs that pop out of the pages when viewed, yes, through a webcam. Future releases include war, sport and arts titles which will also have extra AR elements.

Yet in media it's the advertisers who are most excited. The possibilities of geotagged, targeted adverts – which in effect hang in the air until someone comes along to find them with a smartphone – or of AR adverts which open up a whole new world of opportunities (and perhaps discounts or loyalty bonuses) when you follow them through – are yet another glimpse of the holy grail ofads that know exactly who and where you are.

Is there a risk that we'll all become AR'd out – that it will become boring as advert after advert invites us to hold it up to a webcam? "What's hot today is ancient history tomorrow," says Cameron. "There have been a lot of bad uses of this technology with a rush to use it. We have had the chance to reflect on what it means and how to use it. The key is that it should be an enhancement of the stuff on the printed page."

Even so we're still in the early stages, he argues. "It's very primitive – having to use a webcam, holding a magazine up to it. Obviously we're really interested in the opportunities with handheld devices. It's very frustrating that the iPhone doesn't allow access to the live video stream." (Nor does it run Flash, another problem for would-be AR designers.) "People in design are very annoyed with Steve Jobs," he observes. "We don't really understand why Apple won't allow that."

Given that access, he says, "you could hold your iPhone up to a billboard and get something amazing right there". What about the alternative, such as Google's Android-based Nexus phone? "It looks like you could do it on that," he says. But of course the iPhone is a target market. "Maybe Apple wants to keep that for itself," Cameron says. "Maybe they're lodging patents. Or maybe the processor on the iPhone isn't fast enough."

Yet there are some who think that AR has already had its brief time in the sun. At the Like Minds conference in Exeter at the beginning of March, Joanne Jacobs, a social media consultant, described an AR application that demanded you buy a T-shirt and then go and sit in front of your webcam – so you could play Rock, Paper, Scissors. By yourself.

"It's hopeless," Jacobs said.

Cameron admits to some uncertainty about AR's measurable impact. "I don't know if it sells more things, but it seems clearly a good thing if we can get people who may be customers to participate in the adverts." But, he adds: "If people start to play with the adverts in a way that exposes them to more products, that's got to help bring a commercial return."

• Augmented reality
• iPhone
• Social networking
• Advertising

Charles Arthurguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Dramatik in Frankfurt: Die Bayern verlieren in Manchester-Manier bei der Eintracht. Die meisten Tore des Samstags fallen, natürlich, in Bremen. Freiburg feiert einen Sieg gegen Mainz. Und Stuttgart zeigte sich erholt vom Barcelona-Debakel. FAZ.NET - Homepage | Politik | Gesellschaft | Wirtschaft | Finanzmarkt | Sport | Feuilleton | Reise | Wissen | Auto | Computer

Los MTV Europe Music Awards tendrán este año su sede en España. El evento, que goza de una gran fama desde 1994, es seguido por más de 590 millones de hogares a nivel global y este año estará organizado desde Madrid por Hamish Hamilton, realizador de la última ceremonia de los Oscars. Tras Barcelona en 2002, volvemos a hospedar los premios de la cadena musical más conocida del mundo, pese a haber tornado su parrilla en aras de una nueva cultura televisiva basada en lo teen, el pop y las celebrities.

Personalmente estoy bastante descontento con esta nueva política televisiva de MTV, pero de cualquier forma es una buena noticia que la cadena haya decidido celebrar aquí los EMA, aunque al parecer existen pequeños incentivos desde varias organizaciones de Madrid para que la ciudad patria haya sido elegida. Este tipo de eventos no sólo suelen ser únicos por distintos motivos y cosas que pasan durante las galas, sino que al generar tanta expectación, y esta vez a nivel europeo, muchos artistas internacionales se plantean seriamente asistir a un gran espectáculo.

Artistas en los que quizás España no estuviese en su plan de giras mundiales según cada caso, aunque esto no es un festival de música. Quizás lo más positivo de todo esto es que para nosotros y especialmente para Madrid, estos premios suponen una enorme campaña de promoción turística mundial, cuando todas las afiliadas a MTV y demás temáticos de Viacom comiencen con las autopromociones del evento.

Vía | El País
Más información | EMA ’09 Berlin

Como era de temer, el viernes 20 de marzo el Gobierno ha aprobado la ley Sinde que permite el cierre de páginas webs con contenidos, o enlaces a contenidos, sujetos a derechos de autor o que alguien diga que están sujetos.

 

Esto se produce a pesar de la reciente sentencia absolutoria a un sitio de enlaces por parte de un juez de Barcelona, en la que se recoge que las redes P2P “no vulneran ningún derecho y que facilitar enlaces no supone distribuir ni reproducir ni comunicar públicamente obras protegidas”.

 

La reacción de los internautas no se ha hecho esperar. Varias webs de links a redes P2P han cerrado sus sitios y enlazan automáticamente con “No la cierre de webs”, plataforma creada con el objetivo de apoyar las iniciativas tendentes a garantizar el derecho de expresión en el Internet español”.

Musicians, DJs and authors to reveal their favourite hangouts

Have your say on the Travel blog

HiFi, New York

HiFi is the best rock'n'roll bar in NYC.The room is covered with empty album sleeves and the juke box is hands-down the best in the city – I believe there are about 3,000 albums on it, so you can't complain about them not having your song. There is a fantastically affordable happy hour and a great local crowd. Like the rest of the East Village, it can get a bit much on weekend nights, but most of the time it's my favourite bar in town.
· 169 Avenue A, +1 212 420 8392.
Craig Finn, lead singer of the Hold Steady

Pegu Club, New York

The entrance to the Pegu is an unassuming doorway on the south side of West Houston Street. It's only when you are up the stairs that the glory of this place hits you. It is like going back to the great clubs of the 20s, when the staff were pretty and jazz and cocktails ruled. On a recent visit, two amazing Django Reinhardt-style guitarists were swinging through 30s classics. Cocktails are taken seriously here – the art of proper, classy drinking is almost a motto. At the weekend it can get pretty busy as it is becoming the "in" place.
· 77 West Houston Street, +1 212 473 7348.
James Pearson, artistic director, Ronnie Scott's, London

Po' Monkey's, Mississippi

It was a balmy night in September when I visited Po' Monkey's juke joint. It's a ramshackle hut powered by a single cable in the tiny town of Merigold, deep in the Mississippi delta. A poster on the door warned: "Bring your liquor inside but not your beer." The walls were cluttered with posters and age-old postcards, while toy monkeys swung from the rafters. It was low lit – smoky but inviting, with beer and whiskey flowing freely. Terry "Harmonica" Bean took to the tiny stage, elbow to elbow with the crowd, and delivered a mind-blowing, foot-stamping performance that will stay with me forever. Delicately soulful cries came from his ageing gruff voice, while stupendous bluegrass melodies oozed effortlessly from his antique steel guitar. This was raw blues at its authentic and spine-shivering best.
· +1 662 514 7488, 15km from Cleveland.
Dan Hipgrave, co-founder of Original Music Company (originalmusictravel.com), which launched this month and specialises in music-themed holidays

The Spirit Store, Ireland

The Spirit Store in Dundalk, County Louth, is on the edge of town beside a small harbour. There's a small, friendly bar downstairs which opens around 4pm, but it is the live music upstairs that is the main draw. You would be hard-pressed to find anywhere as welcoming to an artist and more genuinely music-driven in its programming of events. That's why I keep going back there to play, and why many other artists who have outgrown the 120- or so capacity venue keep returning. So many venues and promoters are about the money but Derek Turner, who books the music, is driven by something much more.
· +353 42 9352697.
Duke Special, musician. His DVD box set, The Stage, A Book & the Silver Screen is out now

The Hideout, London

Not exactly a venue, not exactly a bar, entrance to Trishas/The Hideout/that door on Greek St (as it is variously known), is obtained by boldly knocking on what appears to be the entrance to a flat above a shop, striding through a starkly lit corridor and down a flight of stairs, before mumbling an explanation to the owner as to why you don't appear to be in possession of a membership card – having accidentally put it through the washing machine normally does the trick. Inside, you'll find a cupboard-sized, candle-lit cavern which can be hired out for private music showcases. But stumble in unannounced after hours on a weekend and you might also find a doo wop or jazz band sandwiched into the corner between the usual crowd of transvestites, metropolitan hipsters and veteran Italian locals.
57 Greek Street, Soho, London.
Krissi Murison, editor, NME

The Shed North Yorkshire

I first played at this blink-and-you'll-miss-it shed in the tiny village of Brawby back in 1998. It only held 64 people and we scraped our legs on the front row's knees. It has since moved to Hovingham village hall, though it retains its name. The man behind The Shed, Simon Thackray, has presented events from the Fish and Chip Van Tour with a trombonist, to mixed media knitting installations – saxophonist Lol Coxhill playing free jazz in a skip to coach trips for folks in knitted Elvis wigs touring sites of Elvisian interest in Ryedale. My own band, Hank Wangford and the Lost Cowboys, started a tradition of Christmas gigs at The Shed, where we play morose songs and have a riotously miserable time. The Shed was the inspiration for my village hall tour around Britain, which I am currently writing up as a book. And, after 235 villages, The Shed is still the loony best.
· 01653 668494.
Hank Wangford, writer and musician. His CD, Whistling in the Dark, is out now

A38, Budapest

For me, the greatest gig of 2009 was at A38, a huge old ship that used to lug coal up and down the Danube. The lower deck is now a state-of-the-art live music venue, but bits of engine room equipment are still there. Even though the boat is held down in dry dock by 100 tonnes of concrete, the bottles still jingle on the shelves of the bar when the parties get wild. The booking policy is great – they've had cutting-edge electronic artists such as Ikonika, Dorian Concept and Foreign Beggars play recently. And nothing compares with the signature dish of the restaurant on the upper deck: rooster stew, complete with the crest and testicles of the bird.
· +36 1 464 39 40.
Mary Anne Hobbs, Radio 1 DJ. Her show is broadcast on Thursdays 2-4am

Wild At Heart, Berlin

Wild At Heart is a whisky-soaked, no-nonsense rock'n'roll joint in Berlin's old anarchist district, Kreuzberg: a seven-nights-a-week venue painted blood red, crammed with Elvis memorabilia, Hawaiian gods and a lifetime's supply of hard liquor. For 15 years it has presented bands from all over the world – mostly punk, rockabilly, psychobilly, 60s garage and surf. I spent a memorable evening there talking to TV Smith from the Adverts and another with Wreckless Eric, both of whom started out with punk label Stiff Records in 1977, and I've played there with my band, the Flaming Stars. The music's loud, but the welcome is friendly, and the club also runs the Tiki Heart cafe and clothes shop next door, where you can eat, drink and kit yourself out in a spectacular variety of rock'n'roll clobber.
· Wienerstrasse 20, +49 30 610 747 01.
Max Décharné, singer in the Flaming Stars and author of A Rocket in My Pocket: The Hipster's Guide to Rockabilly, to be published by Serpent's Tail in June

Mesa de Frades, Lisbon

Mesa de Frades in Alfama, the oldest district of Lisbon, is the sort of place you dream of hearing fado, the traditional soulful Portuguese music. A tiny converted chapel with tiled walls, it is full of locals and quality performers booked by owner Pedro Castro, a great guitar player. You can come for the music, which starts late – around 11pm – or book a table and come for an excellent dinner beforehand. A couple of years ago I sat here watching Carminho, the amazing young fado singer who is now the talk of Lisbon. When the music starts, the doors are shut to enclose the tiny performing space. It's what fado in Lisbon should be, but so rarely is.
· Rua dos Remedios 139A, +351 91 702 9436, mesadefrades.com. Booking is essential.
Simon Broughton, editor of Songlines magazine (songlines.co.uk/musictravel)

Il Folk Club, Turin

In the heart of Turin, off Piazza Statuto, you'll find the best of all worlds: from Wednesday to Saturday Il Folk Club plays host to Italian and international jazz, folk and world musicians. How this Italian institution – legendary in Turin for over 20 years – has remained generally unknown to travellers and music junkies outside Italy is a mystery. Alongside its regular programme, Il Folk Club is also the launching point for Radio Londra, a monthly mini-festival which fuses British musicians such as Jim Mullen, Kit Downes, Brandon Allen and Quentin Collins Quartet, with local stars such as Mario Pozza, Enzo Zirilli and Dado Moroni. The bar is simple – one central room with space for about 150 people, exposed brick walls, and a stage – so the focus is always on the incredible music.
Via Ettore Perrone 3, Turin.
Sam Sollai, buyer and events coordinator, Ray's Jazz at Foyles

Gerbard, Barcelona

This little neighbourhood bar used to have a green door with panes that rattled when you opened it, but it has now been replaced with something more solid, partly to keep the sound in. It's run by Mar and Nacho, both dyed-in-the-wool culés (Barcelona supporters), and nights there are long and loud. You can hear Sam Lardner, an American resident who plays his own fusion of flamenco and bossa nova, or wonderful classical and flamenco guitarists like Daniel Figueras and Pedro Javier Hermosilla, or the Covers Project, with frontman Philip Stanton. The eating and drinking are delicious too – Galician-style octopus, traditional meatballs, pimientos de padron (small green peppers), and wine for not much more than a euro a glass. A great night out in the Alta Zona.
· C/ Ivorra 24, Sarria, Barcelona, +93 203 4988.
Rupert Thomson, author living in Barcelona. His latest book, This Party's Got to Stop, will be published on 8 April

La Casona del Molino, Salta, Argentina

Salta, in north-west Argentina, is well-known for its folk music heritage. This has given rise to the creation of pena, which roughly translates as a place where musicians and music lovers come together. Seven nights a week you can experience this at La Casona. The venue's five colonial rooms are filled to the brim with musicians, professional and amateur, folk, jazz and others, locals who come down from the Andes bearing pan pipes and drums, and some foreign visitors, all coming together to jam the local tunes. As a musician, I found great comfort in the fact that this kind of place exists in the world. And of course, many people come simply for the music.
· La Casona del Molino, Caseros.
Lizzie Ball, violinist and singer. She will be performing – and launching her album – with Machaca at La Linea Festival in the Purcell Room on London's South Bank on 27 April

Salón Rosado de la Tropical, Havana

The first time I asked a taxi driver to take me to Havana's Salón Rosado de la Tropical back in 1989 he said it was a place for Cubans, not foreign tourists – and certainly not lone women – and I'd better watch out as it could be rough. He'd obviously never been inside this mecca of Cuban dance music, where all the top bands play regularly, testing their latest material in front of the sexiest dancers on the island. In Cuba, most music venues are geared to tourists and too expensive for ordinary Cubans, who are often not allowed in anyway. Not so the Salón Rosado. This is the closest you can get to hanging out with a Cuban clientele. Dedicated to the memory of Beny Moré, Cuba's touchstone band leader of the 1950s, it started out life a Spanish cultural centre at the beginning of the 20th century. These days there's a balcony reserved for tourists overlooking the dance floor where, if you're lucky, you may rub shoulders with the musicians as they gather for the gig. Although today reggaeton and hip-hop dominate street tastes, Salon Rosado continues to offer a window on to the latest music scene and is a dancer's dream.
· Avenida 41 esq. 46, Nicanor del Campo, Marianao, +53 7 203 5322.
Jan Fairley has been travelling to Cuba since 1978 and is writing a book on women and music in Cuba

Liquid Room, Tokyo

Leading Japanese venue Liquid Room has been going for about 15 years and hosts weekly bands and DJs from Japan and around the world. The website may say it closes at 12, but the last time I played there, as The Orb, they didn't let us out till 6am. There's a beautiful cafe upstairs and the friendly enthusiasm of Tokyo clubbers has to be experienced to be believed. The last time I played there I took a bag of Space Dust (the sweet!) which made me very popular.
· Higashi, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, +81 3 5464 0800, liquidroom.net.
Alex Paterson, co-founder of The Orb and HFB, his new project. HFB's first three EPs are available from 12 April on Malicious Damage Records

New Africa Shrine, Lagos, Nigeria

Lagos is not your classic tourist destination; it's a prohibitively expensive city of 14 million people and a crime record to frighten even the toughest traveller. But Nigeria's notorious capital does have one musical landmark worth going the extra mile for: the New Africa Shrine. It's named after the legendary club run by the late musical activist Fela Kuti, which was razed by soldiers. Fela's daughter Yeni and her musician brother Femi have built up a nightclub that can hold thousands and has live music throughout the week. It's not for the faint-hearted, but the Shrine is probably the safest place in Lagos: it has its own police force. You'll get a warm welcome, and hear some of the best live music in the region.
· Pepple Street, Ikeja.
Rose Skelton, music and travel journalist specialising in West Africa

• Bars and clubs
• United States
• New York
• Ireland
• World music
• Budapest
• Hungary
• Berlin
• Germany
• Lisbon
• Portugal
• Yorkshire
• Argentina
• Havana
• Cuba

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds