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SHORT OF illicit substances, music is the most effective anaesthetic to the pain of long- or short-term incarceration. Most prisoners these days have CD players and a decent collection of albums to listen to and to share with their neighbours. Many forward-thinking prison governors are aware of the power that music has to touch damaged and broken lives. The more enlightened invite musicians in to gig in their prisons, and many accept.

The Irish singer-songwriter Foy Vance, for example, who writes the most hopeful songs I've ever heard, played in a number of English prisons last year, including New Hall women's prison and Full Sutton maximum security prison, a men's prison described on the HM Prison Service website as "among the most difficult and dangerous in the country".