Over the last couple of months Mumford & Sons have quietly become the biggest band in the world. If there was a coronation it came at some point between the headline-making second album, Babel, and this sell-out first arena tour. When the announcement came earlier this week that the folky foursome are to headline next year’s 20th anniversary T in the Park festival, I seemed to be the only one who was surprised.

Elbow are responsible for a remarkable conjuring trick. Earlier this year their song “First Steps” stirringly soundtracked the BBC’s Olympic credit sequence, and then at the Closing Ceremony they serenaded the athletes into the London 2012 stadium with “Open Arms” and “One Day Like This”. Their musical message of harmony and celebration - of higher, faster, stronger, cheerier - ought by rights to sound like the most grating of bromides.

Guitar virtuoso RM Hubbert is something of an unlikely champion of quiet music. In fact, if you haven’t yet heard the gorgeous Thirteen Lost and Found, the Chemikal Underground debut on which the guitarist invited friends including Aidan Moffat, Alex Kapranos and Alasdair Roberts to supplement the instrumentals with which he made his name, you might wonder what Hubbert - a heavily-tattooed onetime member of various Glasgow hardcore bands - is doing co-curating a festival with the unlikely label of Shhh!

Before Glasvegas took off James Allan played professional football in Scotland. He did not quite make the highest echelon in his soccer career and after a blistering start, when his band was championed as the Next Great Guitar Group, things haven't been looking too hopeful in his music career either. Glasvegas was dropped by Columbia Records after their second album, and when I heard they were playing this small club in the run-up to the 2013 release of their third album, Later...When The TV Turns To Static, I wondered if maybe their record label had a point.

The House of Love: The House of Love

Kieron Tyler

Nostalgia is not what it used to be. With kids who were not even born when Mick Jagger first shimmied across the stage singing the praises of the Rolling Stones, it was nice to see an audience at the Shepherds Bush Empire, give  or take a few young goths of no fixed hairstyle, almost perfectly fitting the expected Adam Ant demographic. Well-preserved women who loved the pop hits, bulkier men who liked the punk phase.

“It’s an expression of our collective souls coming together,” said The Beach Boys’ Mike Love of his band, in this celebration of their 2012 50th anniversary world tour and recent album That’s Why God Made the Radio. Subsequent to the making of Doin' it Again and during the ensuing global jaunt, Love announced he was ditching fellow Beach Boys Alan Jardine, David Marks and Brian Wilson, whom he had been sharing the stage with. Not much of a shelf life for this collective expression, with little chance of doing it again.

My, my, what a big arena. First ever time I’ve set foot in the O2 Arena. Never before made it down here to view New Labour’s hubris. Another cherry about to be busted involves seeing tonight’s band – I’ve listened to The Rolling Stones for about 40 of my 48 years but never been near a gig of theirs. OK, I once did buy a tout ticket to see Keith Richards at the Town & Country when he toured solo in the early Nineties. And I also caught Charlie Watts’ big band at Ronnie Scott’s a decade ago. Both were great. But the Stones in a stadium? Nah.

Twenty-first century rock bands have a problem, and it’s a problem that they’ve had for decades: how to stay focused on the rebel oomph of distorted guitars, rudimentary drumming, sorting-out-the-bottom-end bass guitar and – let’s face it – self-pitying, woefully inadequate but raggedly functional vocals without sounding like a relic from a bygone age? After all, if record shops still existed, most rock bands of recent years would eventually find themselves shelved under the demoralisingly dusty category of “Trad Rock”.

Seasonal appearances by The Human League have an air of Christmas panto about them, with halls packed with coach parties of devoted fans who all seem to know each other, but the group have quietly solidified into a great British success story. They made the jump from experimental beginnings to become darlings of early-Eighties electropop, but more remarkable still is their ability to produce modestly credible new music 30 years later.