The thing about Wilderness is that it’s just so jolly decent. Acres of decadence, sprawled safely over the yawning magnificence of Cornbury Park, Oxfordshire, combine to create a scintillating country fair reverie – a heady mix of good music, high end food, luxury outdoorsyness and companionable folk.

There is every reason to celebrate Nile Rodgers. For his contribution to music as arranger, producer and performer over more than four decades. And also not least because he’s still around and still performing: he has, after all, pulled through after two bouts of serious cancer in 2010 and 2017.

Memória das Águas hasn’t figured in lists of great Brazilian albums. Its creator Fernando Falcão isn’t as celebrated as fellow countryman and musical maverick Tom Zé. The reissue of this arresting yet previously obscure album should help change these oversights.

The well-spring of certain musical genres and hometowns of certain influential musicians have long been a source of civic pride – and a boost to the tourist industry – in many clued-in parts of the world. One only has to think of the co-opting of Bob Marley’s life and influence in attracting tourist dollars to Jamaica or the raising of the Beatles to mythic status – bus tours and all – in Liverpool.

There is a video, part of Greenpeace’s laudable Save The Arctic Campaign, in which Ludovico Einaudi sits at a Steinway atop a small ice flow performing his Elegy for the Arctic. As he plays a descending scale, the camera pans slightly to the right just in time to see a chunk of glacier break away and crash into the sea. Perfect timing!

This was a year of superb musical standards, smooth organisation and a real sense of celebration. In the last couple of years, WOMAD being more liberal and internationalist than nearly anywhere else, there was a sense in the air of a collective political shock - maybe the future wasn’t with our tribe of happy cultural globalists after all. This year, even with the new PM, there was a more defiant sense that the WOMAD spirit will prevail after the current nationalist neurosis blows off some steam.

Rock ‘n’ roll. That’s what was promised. It was emblazoned on the organ for all to see. And if that visual guarantee was too subtle, the set began with “Rock 'n’ Roll Star”. Only, despite the swagger, Liam Gallagher doesn’t really live up to the promise live. It’s loud enough, and the songs talk the talk, but this balmy night in Malta appeared to be just another day in the office for the former Oasis frontman.

“I’m talking about these songs in more depth than I usually do, revealing a few secrets along the way,” says a black–jeaned, cowboy-booted Lucinda Williams after singing “Right in Time”, the achingly erotic first song on Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, her breakthrough, Grammy-winning, never-bettered album of 1998.

Britain’s musical eruption of 1977 wasn’t just about the now. As the new box set 1977 – The Year Punk Broke amply demonstrates, the flux allowed more than first-timers through the door. Seasoned gig-circuit regulars Stranglers got a leg up. A band called The Rings, featuring former Pink Fairies, Pretty Things and Tomorrow member Twink, issued their one single in 1977.

As this month’s edition of theartsdesk on Vinyl appears the sun is blazing outside, a heatwave hits, and our record collections must hide in the shadows or warp. Yet still we want more to join them in their sheltered rows and where better to seek the greatest new releases than the longest, most complete monthly round-up of new vinyl releases. As ever, we run the gamut.