Óttarr Proppé, the stylish chap pictured above, was appointed Iceland’s Minister of Health in January this year. Last Saturday, when the shot was taken, he was on stage in his other role as the singer of HAM, whose invigorating musical blast draws a line between the early Swans and Mudhoney. At that moment, at Reykjavík Art Museum, it was exactly a week on from the declaration of the first results in the country’s Parliamentary election, the second within 12 months.

In early 1965, Birmingham’s The Moody Blues topped the British charts with a forceful reinterpretation of Bessie Banks’ R&B ballad “Go Now”. In early 1968, after some line-up changes and a radical musical rethink, they hit 19 with “Nights in White Satin”. Although as moody as “Go Now”, this was a different Moody Blues.

Pat Metheny recently described quite how much he enjoys just being on stage: “As Phil Woods used to say, the concert, that's for free. What the promoter is paying for is getting on the plane, getting off the plane, to pack your suitcase. The actual gig – you can have that for nothing.”

A strange and wonderful moment: the standing area at the rear of The Lantern, the smaller venue at Bristol’s Colston Hall, is suddenly transformed into a corner of Southern Albania.

The autumnal release deluge is upon us. Vinyl’s thriving and writhing. Raise a glass to it. Do it. However, records that, in another month, would have been reviewed here, music that would have been in the ALSO WORTHY OF MENTION section, has been unfairly passed over.

These days Peter Perrett doesn’t rely on the songs of his late Seventies/early Eighties band, The Only Ones, to hold his audience’s attention. At 65, looking and sounding healthier than he has done in years, he’s on a vital late-career creative roll. At the start of his first encore he even plays a new, unreleased song, “War Plan Red”, giving vent to fiery infuriation with global politicking, his band shadowed in ominous scarlet lighting. He may be renowned, primarily, for songs of romance and dissolution, but with lyrics such as “The so-called free world stands for evil incarnate” he clearly feels that in 2017 there’s also much else to sing about.

Perrett fronts a five-piece band consisting of his sons Jamie (guitar) and Peter Jr (bass), alongside their girlfriends Jenny Maxwell and Lauren Munisamy on backing vocals, violin and keys, with drummer Jake Woodward holding steady at the back. This is a family affair and they’re musically tight to a fault, Jamie Perrett’s lively fret-wrangling showpieces the perfect foil to his father’s stationary stage persona. Peter Perrett himself is black clad in a white shirt and Ray-ban-style shades, his hair in a classic Seventies rocker cut. His words are perfectly enunciated, that distinctive nasal voice cutting through everything. He was ever about the words.

Its starkness emphasises what an undersung master-songwriter he really is

Most of the set is drawn from Perrett’s recent album, How The West Was Won, a comeback of sorts for a man who spent chaotic decades since The Only Ones mostly mired in a dark underworld of crack and heroin. It’s a fine album and even better live. The title track is introduced with a rare and dry aside, “This song is a eulogy to a country that’s become great again.” Full of lyrical pith, the band really work its “Sweet Jane”-ish riff, and also cut loose spectacularly on “Living in My Head” with a squawling, invigorating violin vs guitar jam. The set is peppered with Perrett’s raw, self-scathing odes to his wife of many decades, Xena, and an emotive highlight is the new album’s superb “Home”. Its existential longing is simply heart-rending.  

Perrett also dips into his solo back catalogue, from the better known such as “Woke Up Sticky”, which fires thought-provoking allegories off in all directions, to the more obscure “Baby, Don’t Talk” from 1994, with its cutting couplet “You ain’t learned nothing, from the cradle to the grave”. And, yes, The Only Ones are in there too, with fine versions of “The Big Sleep” and “Flaming Torch”. Surprisingly, given the song is something of a mixed blessing as it’s the only Perrett song most people know, tonight’s encore take on “Another Girl Another Planet” is a scorcher, Jamie Perrett nailing the famously tricky guitar solo with showy aplomb.

And at the evening’s very end, Perrett pushes towards the curfew on his second encore. He closes proceedings with a band-free take on The Only Ones’ “It’s The Truth”. Its very starkness emphasises what an undersung master-songwriter he really is. Given tonight’s performance it seems his return is only gathering pace.

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In terms of cinema history, 1969’s Les Chemins de Katmandou is a footnote. Directed by André Cayatte, whose most interesting films were 1963’s interrelated marital dramas Jean-Marc ou la Vie Conjugale and Françoise ou la Vie Conjugale, it was a period-sensitive immersion into the world of a group of Nepal-based hippies. Though ostensibly a crime drama, a focus on drugs and free love brought an exploitation allure.

Forty years ago Whispering Bob Harris made a documentary about Queen. He eavesdropped on them as they recorded the album News of the World and then followed them around America on tour. The film was never broadcast but the footage was exhumed for this anniversary and stapled together in Queen: Rock the World (BBC Four), the latest in the BBC's prancing cavalcade of recent documentaries about the band (see sidebar).

After more than 35 years of subterranean bootleg life, Bob Dylan’s incendiary gospel shows and sessions from 1979 to 1981 are seeing the light of day as volume 13 of the Official Bootleg Series.

Following the recent death of the band's co-founder Walter Becker, it seemed faintly remarkable that Steely Dan went ahead with this O2 show at all – it was the closing night event of Bluesfest 2017 – but Becker’s absence wasn’t allowed to detract from the sustained brilliance of the performance. The Dan’s surviving guru, Donald Fagen, has announced that “I intend to keep the music we created together alive as long as I can with the Steely Dan band”, and surely it has never sounded better.