Natasha Khan is ending this intimate UK tour where her dreams first took shape. Study at the University of Brighton began 12 years in the bohemian town, and her twice Mercury-nominated, mythology-minded pop life. She could sometimes be found here in St Bartholomew’s, a vaulting Victorian temple with the supposed dimensions of Noah’s ark, all sunken shadows and glinting gilt, tucked just off London Road’s grubby shopping bustle.

In the liner notes to the new reissue of 2001’s All is Dream, Mercury Rev’s Jonathan Donahue says it is “a weird astral album musically, and yes the symbolism lyrically runs many layers down and deep – different coloured layers of rock, soil and ash on an archaeology dig.”

“Are you ready to do battle with us?” bellows Johan Hegg, Amon Amarth’s imposing yet cheery frontman, immediately prompting an enthusiastic roar from the packed-out Brixton crowd. “GOOOOOOD!” He’s the most genial Viking you could imagine - six-foot plus with a gigantic beard and massive hair, a drinking horn holstered on his thigh, and a huge smile plastered across his face.

Grimes, the Canadian art pop performer, made headlines last week when she predicted the end of musical performance as we know it on a podcast interview with theoretical physicist Sean Carroll. Live music, she said, would be “obsolete soon”, while she gave a window of a couple of decades in which artificial intelligence would become “so much better at making art” than human creatives.

If this is what Sam Fender can provoke on a Monday night, then Lord knows the reaction he generates at a weekend. A chart topping album and sold out tour may mean the Geordie is firmly at pop’s top table now, but it was still impressive the sheer delirium his arrival onstage appeared to generate, a status that lasted throughout the brisk hour or so that followed.

A 55-minute set without an encore. Songs bleeding into each other. No announcements, no talking from the stage. A constantly moving frontman seemingly channelling a yen to merge Merce Cunningham moves and tai-chi. A band who, barring the odd grin from one of the guitarists, focus on what they are doing without expression. An absence of “please-like-me” posturing.

Whether performing with the ground-breaking Jazz Warriors big band (which he co-founded in the 1980s) or Marque Gilmore and DJ Le Rouge in Project 23, taking the lead roles in Julian Joseph’s jazz operas Bridgetower and Shadowball, or emceeing one of the legendary Metalheadz nights at Blue Note, Hoxton Square, Cleveland Watkiss has been one of the most unfailingly creative, daringly protean artists on the UK jazz scene.  

If the prices fetched by original pressings are a guide, Mighty Baby are notable. Their eponymous first album, issued by the fittingly named Head label in November 1969, sells for at least £150 and has changed hands for over £500.

It’s always good to be among friends and it’s safe to say that everyone gathered at Islington Assembly Hall on Saturday for the third and final North London gig of Billy Bragg’s One Step Forward, Two Steps Back Tour was left of centre. The tour began in July on the south coast, planned long before Borrissey, as Bragg calls the PM, conned the country in going to the polls but events have certainly given it a new urgency.

There was something fitting about the Lumineers entrance in Glasgow. As “Gimme Shelter” blared around the SSE Hydro, lights pulsating over the crowd, it was drummer Jeremiah Fraites who took the stage and started the opening beat of “Sleep On The Floor”, an array of phones quickly whipped out to act as a welcoming committee from the crowd. The rest of the band followed in due course, but this is a group for whom the drums are at the heart of their stomping songs, no matter what.