Kenny Barron, revered as the best jazz pianist around, is a perfect gentleman and a master of “cool” – a quality once described in great depth by the American Africanist Robert Farris Thompson, in an article originally published in African Arts in 1973.

“Let's walk down memory lane the Magazine way. Let's regurgitate fifth-rate Low [the David Bowie album] period pieces. Let's plonk plonk plonk with ponderous sub-Pink Floydery. Let's do the wallpaper waltz. This is not pushing back the barriers. It's frighteningly bland conservatism.”

Will Bob Dylan’s Never Ending Tour ever come to an end? Two years on from the last UK tour, he’s returned, with substantially the same band, once again mostly featuring material from his brilliant album Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020). He’s a little less steady on his feet, but remains as present as ever, clearly enjoying being on stage and contact with an audience that welcomes him with love as well as uncritical adulation.

Picture this: framing the stage are two pearlescent clouds which, throughout the performance, gently pulsate with flickering light. Behind them on a giant screen is a spinning globe, its seas twinkling like a million stars.

Suddenly, this magical image is rent asunder. Thunder and lightning shake the heavens and torrential rain cascades down in stair rods. Spotlights flash and dance through billowing smoke while Laurie Anderson serenades the tempest on her violin and Kenny Wollesen lashes symbols and drums into a clamorous frenzy. The Apocalypse!

DEATHLY HUSH.

It appears Rachel Chinouriri has a good memory. “I remember you!” she yelled excitedly to one fan early on, highlighting that she currently sits in a nice position – popular enough to be playing busy shows in decently sized venues, but at a level where she can still see the eager faces looking back at her.

Amy Taylor and the rest of the Sniffers ambled onto the stage of Birmingham’s O2 Academy to a huge roar of approval from a packed and diverse audience on Sunday evening. With her Farrah Fawcett hairstyle, toothy smile, sparkly bikini, knee length boots and shorts she didn’t look the firebrand that her image suggests – but looks are frequently deceptive, as Birmingham was to find out.

“The last we had was a bit of a flop. I own up about it, it was quite bad.” Speaking to the BBC’s Brian Matthew on 4 April 1967, Yardbirds’ frontman Keith Relf is candid about the chart fate of his band’s last single, October 1966’s “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago.”

Tucker Zimmerman is singing a number called “Don’t Go Crazy (Go in Peace)”. At 83, he performs sitting down. Surrounded by support band Iji, who act as his pick-up, he approaches the song in a whispery, affable voice. At the start of his set he was assisted to his seat but, knees aside, he’s not frail. He’s just laid back, a Sixties original, strumming gently. “Don’t go crazy,” he sings, “Go with the flow, go in peace.” Although he’s advised us to not think about politics, it’s hard not to.

More than once during their barnstorming performance this weekend, Bobby Vylan, vocalist with Bob Vylan proclaimed from the stage of Birmingham’s O2 Institute that “We are the cutest band in punk rock. The friendliest band in rock’n’roll. The most important band in Great Britain”. He might just have been right.

Springs begins cooking with “Spaced Out Invaders - Part I Quirks,” its fourth track. A spindly, rotating guitar figure interweaves with clattering percussion and pulsating electric bass. Around three minutes in, a sax – which, until this point, has kept in the background – begins whipping up a maelstrom. Overall, the effect conjured is that of a space rock-inclined exotica, Martin Denny had he been an early Seventies freak.