We are in – it needs to be shouted from the rooftops every day – a golden age of British soul and jazz. It isn’t just about a few quality artists, either, but a movement. Londoner Yazmin Lacey is key within that: in the past year, she’s featured on stupendous albums by both Ezra Collective and that band’s keyboard wizard Joe Armon-Jones.

Their new album may have been born out of a deep dive into Quentin Tarantino’s cinematic reimagining of the post-Manson killings’ atmosphere of late 1960’s Los Angeles, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. However, Solar Eye’s intro music as they took the stage at the Hare and Hounds this weekend wasn’t Charlie’s “Look at your Game, Girl” or “Cease to Exist” but something far more triumphant – the theme from Rocky.

The Lemonheads were one of the original punk-pop outfits and have been an on-off going concern for 40 years. However, singer, guitarist, bandleader and loveable slacker, Evan Dando’s well-documented relationship with Class A drugs also made them the kings of underachievement – even if there is plenty of gold to be found among their recordings that did see the light of day.

Over 1965 to 1968 Brooklyn's Evie Sands issued a string of singles with classic top sides. Amongst them were “Take Me For a Little While,” “I Can't Let Go,” “Picture me Gone” and “Angel of the Morning.” For reasons which are tackled in the essay coming with I Can’t Let Go – the first-ever collection of Sands’ seven-inch A- and B-sides – all either charted low, or not at all.

Anxiety and self-doubt have been constant themes for Kevin Parker, the Australian musician who now finds himself among the highest echelons of modern music. With his project Tame Impala, these themes have provided an almost unending source of inspiration, even while musically the project has transitioned from pyschedelic/Indie rock, and into a pop and a dance-oriented sound.

A key part of Chrissie Hynde’s brilliance and longevity has always been her ability to keep multiple musical personas going at once. She’s the grizzled but urbane street poet in the Bob Dylan / Lou Reed mould. She’s the pop craftswoman, always in search of that three minutes of perfect sweetness, even through the punk years.

Before we get into it, reader, can you accept that The Last Dinner Party are a band born of privilege and high academic study? Of poshness, classical composition, private education, master’s degrees in music? No? Might as well stop reading then. That’s where they’re from. Let's have a valid debate somewhere else about the arts shutting out those with less money.

A mix of tradition and Afrofuturism, acoustic and electronic, east and west fumigating in a cauldron of rhythms, chants, solo explorations and full ensemble blow-outs, Saha Gnawa (on New York's Pique-Nique label) draws on the example of Essaouira’s annual Festival Gnaoua, which brings together jazz masters and Gnawa maalems on stage.

It’s seven years since the Belgian brothers Dewaele unleashed their fine, largely instrumental and foot-stomping Essential album on the world, but they’ve given short shrift to any ideas of sitting on their laurels in the intervening time. Their new album, All Systems Are Lying still points emphatically towards the dancefloor, but it brings plenty of new flavours to their sound and is considerably more song-based than its predecessor.

A month after Soft Cell’s "Say Hello, Wave Goodbye" single peaked at number three in the UK charts, Marc Almond issued a single credited to Marc and the Mambas. March 1982’s "Sleaze (Take it, Shake it)" / "Fun City" was produced by his Soft Cell partner Dave Ball, who also contributed drums and synth.