IN the week when the Radio Times has compiled a light-hearted list of the Top 40 TV eccentrics, it is good to report that rock oddballs are still sending down the odd boulder to flatten the walls of conservative pop.

From London comes (The Real) Tuesday Weld, who is not the real Tuesday Weld (the American actress and Dudley Moore squeeze) but dapper musical magpie Stephen Coates.

He has composed I, Lucifer as a dark and decadent companion piece to a Glen Duncan novel, setting the story of a fallen angel in the second-chance saloon to a baroque music box of doo-wop, Al Bowlly romance, French pop, Morricone country and modern beats and samples.

A more bitter version of Lemon Jelly, the nifty Coates is so insidious that the insanely jocund tune of Bathtime In Clerkenwell quite hides the tale of suicide that lurks underneath.

From left-field America comes Sufjan Stevens, a singular folk talent whose fourth album, Seven Swans, was released in Britain ahead of his third, Michigan. More significantly, Michigan is said to be the first in a series of portraits of all America's states. One down, 49 to go in his "quinquanology", and wherever his spirit ventures next beyond his state of birth, may he take his sparse and beautiful banjo, his antique piano and his brass band and find more magic amid the mundane.

Updated: 08:57 Thursday, July 29, 2004