Barry Adamson has recently moved to Brighton and is clearly delighted with his new home town, which he refers to, shortly after starting his set, as a “dressing-up box by the sea”. Later in the evening he introduces the Hammond organ-laden “The Sun and the Sea” by telling his audience it was written about Brighton a few years ago, before he moved there, dryly informing us that he couldn’t fail to be drawn to somewhere that has “hail in the springtime and pebbles on its nudist beach”.

When the Sixties-inspired The Prisoners released their second album Thewisermiserdemelza in 1983, the decade they looked to for their musical and sartorial style was closer to the album itself than it is to today. Now, the half-century remove from what the Medway band drew from then ought to be as distant as, say, the minutiae of 1916 are from those of 1966. Yet this is not the case.

The Gloaming’s return to the Union Chapel in north London is a packed-out affair – and with good reason. Their British debut here, before the first album was released back in 2013, was a revelation. Few knew what to expect as Clare fiddler Martin Hayes, New York pianist Thomas Bartlett, Dublin-born viola and hardanger fiddle player Caoimhin O Raghallaigh, Sean Nos singer Iarla O Lionaird and Chicago guitarist Dennis Cahill launched into the epic "Opening Set" from that debut album.

“I can’t believe it. Free jazz in Old Street tube, how cool is that?” It’s a relief to hear this kind of thing from passersby, because Empirical’s attempt to bring jazz to the people, to reach new audiences and develop their music through an experimental, week-long residency in a London tube station, could so easily have gone wrong.

With Peter Andre butchering Frank Sinatra on the one hand ("Reality TV swing", as Ray Gelato aptly put it) and Annie Lennox massacring Billie Holiday on the other, it was heart-warming to hear two artists performing standards and originals with such care, insight and sensitivity.

Lizzy Mercier Descloux was an early adopter. In 1975, she travelled from her Paris home to Manhattan and saw The Ramones, Patti Smith, Television and the Richard Hell-edition Heartbreakers. Although the first issue of the New York fanzine Punk came out at the end of the year, punk rock was not yet quite codified. Nonetheless, there was a scene and something new was in the air. Descloux had to check it out and on her return to France, she co-founded the new music monthly Rock News.

Wayne Shorter and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra – that sounds like a dream pairing. Shorter, now 82, is one of the true greats, a saxophonist and composer with an enchanting and unpredictable approach that makes him instantly recognisable. He had a defining influence on Miles Davis’ Second Great Quintet and on Weather Report and, for many, his current quartet represent the pinnacle of modern small group performance.

In its former life as the Millennium Dome, the O2 housed a diamond collection which attracted one of Britain’s most spectacular heists. Last night featured something considerably more valuable – the composer Ennio Morricone on tour, celebrating 60 years of music, accompanied by the magisterial forces of the Czech National Symphony Orchestra, the Kodály Choir from Hungary and the Csokonai National Theatre Choir. In his 87th year Morricone is small, deliberate, but surprisingly youthful and snazzily dressed in black.

The Paris Sisters were a look and a sound. Slightly different but still peas in a pod, Albeth, Priscilla and Sherrell Paris united to make often moodily minor-key music always suggestive of angels stamping their feet. Otherwordly. Yet hard-edged. The defining vocalist was Priscilla, whose slightly husky, ever-intimate mid-tone evoked the wind whispering its secrets. No one had sounded like her before and, at her best, only Saint Etienne’s Sarah Cracknell has come close to Priscilla’s vivid union of the languorous and yearning.

For its 6 April 1985 issue, the NME chose The Long Ryders as its cover stars. The colour picture of the band was emblazoned “A Shotgun Wedding of Country and Punk.” The Los Angeles outfit attracted attention as part of a wave of California bands overtly drawing from the past. Local peers included The Bangles, The Dream Syndicate and The Three O’Clock.