Radio listener

Four musical moptops and a couple of passionate souls this week. On Tuesday Marc Almond, no shirk himself in the popular culture stakes, starts his three-part look at the music and unorthodox lifestyle of Jacques Brel, the Belgian-born French singer-songwriter in BEHIND THE BREL.

Revered in the French-speaking world more than in Britain, yet still selling more than 25 million records world-wide and covered by artists as diverse as David Bowie, Joan Baez and Frank Sinatra, Brel could deliver his own, often introspective lyrics permeated by Gallic intensity and the cigarette smoke that would ultimately kill him.

He led a life as determinedly individualistic as his music, living alone in Paris while his wife and three children remained in Brussels. In 1973, at the peak of his career, he embarked on a world yachting voyage and died in 1978 on the Marquesas Islands, where he is buried near the painter Paul Gauguin.

Another wanderer was the piano maestro Fryderyk Chopin, the bicentenary of whose birth is prompting a mazurka or two, and not just on the music stations. Radio 4's Book of the Week is Adam Zamoyski's biography of the tortured genius, CHOPIN – PRINCE OF THE ROMANTICS. Among other things, it deals with Chopin's tumultuous relationship with the proto-feminist writer Georges Sand, who became as much nursemaid as mistress to the ailing composer.

And this morning ALI – WHEN CASSIUS MET THE BEATLES recounts how in 1964, at the peak of Beatlemania, when John, Paul, George and Ringo were about to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show, they paid a call on Cassius Clay – yet to become Muhammad Ali and still a relative unknown fighter, training in a Miami gym for his impending fight with the reigning world heavyweight champion Sonny Liston.

The Beatles went on to knock out American audiences, while Clay left Liston lying in the ring as he famously yelled "Get up and fight."

Chopin – Prince of the Romantics

Monday-Friday, Radio 4, 9:45am

Behind the Brel – The Story of a Musical Genius

Tuesday, Radio 2, 11:30pm

Ali – When Cassius Met the Beatles

Today, Radio 4, 10:30am

• This article was first published in The Scotsman, Saturday March 13, 2010