Adam Ant was one of the few who saw Sex Pistols’ first live show. On 6 November 1975, his band Bazooka Joe was playing Charing Cross Road’s St Martin’s School of Art. They found an uninvited support band had gatecrashed the evening. The impact of the interlopers on the then Stuart Goddard wasn’t instant, but he would go on to form The B-Sides and, then, Adam and the Ants, whose manager became Jordan, who worked at Malcolm McLaren’s King’s Road shop SEX. Adam was hotwired into what became codified as punk rock. But his music was never defined by templates.

“Are you enjoying Wales, John?” shouts a fan, eventually. Our returning hero has remained taciturn and all but static at his keyboard throughout an epic show that spans one of popular music’s most interesting and influential careers. Cale affects to have misheard. “Am I rejoining Wales?” he ponders. “I certainly hope so. I feel like I’m rejoining every time I’m here.”

Rob da Bank’s Faustian pact with the weather gods continues apace with the second year of Common People, which takes place simultaneously in Southampton and Oxford. The forecast for days beforehand had predicted a cold front bearing relentless drizzle but, in the event, wellies were left packed away as the elements chose instead to offer blazing summer sunshine for the 30,000 revellers who attended the festival's second day at Southampton.

Beth Orton’s sparsely ethereal new collection Kidsticks has been well received for marking an interesting change of direction. Last night’s Brighton Festival gig gave audiences the best of both, beginning with most of the new songs, then climaxing with some old favourites that evoked her rockier past.

Last May, Malmö trio Death and Vanilla issued the To Where the Wild Things are album and it seemed they had arrived as a fully formed post-Broadcast proposition, harmoniously fusing vintage influences like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Italian giallo soundtracks and The United States of America. With its cover imagery evoking the British Ghostbox label, To Where the Wild Things are could have been dismissed as havng thumbed a ride on a musical excursion begun by others.

News just in that the vinyl soundtrack to Star Wars: The Force Awakens will feature holograms that can seen as the record is played, if a light is shone upon it. It seems that every month there’s a similarly bizarre development in the many ways that vinyl is returning to the public eye. It’s now commonplace for Graham Norton to introduce the musical guests on his TV show by waving about a vinyl copy of their new album, something unthinkable even a year ago.

“We’ve been visiting libraries on this tour and it’s a lot of fun learning people still read.” The words of The Burning Hell’s main man Mathias Kom before launching into “Give Up” stress he and his band are not typical rock‘n’rollers. “Give Up” itself is the rollicking song-story of a call-centre worker who goes to a library, finds inspiration in Herman Melville and then meets a mysterious woman who rings in. She gives him a poster of a kitten captioned “Never Give Up”. In the song’s pay off, Kom’s protagonist declares “when the going gets tough, I give up.”

Of all the nostalgia-fests, of all the retro events, those that involve rave culture have the wildest sense of glee. The atmosphere in the Dome tonight, before a note has even been played – just as when The Prodigy hit this city last year – dials the anticipation levels up to delirious. The crowd is mostly fortysomething and fiftysomething, but many are already dancing as the hall fills, while Peter Hook, ex of New Order, spins quarter century-old dance tunes that once graced the speakers of the long-closed, now-mythical Mancunian club mecca, The Haçienda.

“Over the horizon they come; the anniversaries; joyous, arduous, remorseless.” The opening words of Stuart Maconie’s fine, nuanced essay in the book accompanying this 20th-anniversary reissue of Manic Street Preachers’ fourth album acknowledge the inescapable fact that today’s heritage rock industry is indeed largely about anniversaries and their close cousin the reunion. Bands tour to air one of their past albums in track-by-track order. Others reform to run through their catalogue of 20, 30 years ago.

Brighton Festival’s guest director speaks in a sort of rapid-fire drawl, ideal for her debut as a stand-up comic, which she claims was tonight’s Plan A. This half-century veteran of performance art is more slippery than that, proffering a discursive, unreliable, funny and profound master-class in shaggy-dog philosophy, with the festival’s theme of home at its arguable core.