Debates about whether 1964’s Marnie presaged Alfred Hitchcock’s downslide as a force will run and run. It is however certain that it was the director’s last film scored by Bernard Herrmann, who had worked on 1963’s The Birds, 1960’s Psycho, 1959’s North by Northwest and, before that, a run of Hitchcock’s films back to 1955.

Blessed with a red sunset and an adoring crowd, Noel Gallagher brought life to the ruins of Cardiff Castle. With support from fellow 90s alumnus Gaz Coombes, and Wales’s next-gen prodigies Boy Azooga and Buzzard Buzzard Buzzard, the evening provided a winning mini-festival affair.

They’re back and they’re looking and sounding good – and Spice Girls mania took over Dublin’s city centre for several hours before their concert yesterday. Hotels were booked out, every other woman I passed in the street was wearing a Spice Girls T-shirt or hat, and by mid-afternoon the whole city appeared to be moving as one towards Croke Park. 

Was it imagination or did The Waterboys’ audience at London’s Roundhouse, invited to sing along to “The Nearest Thing to Hip”, really sing extra-loud and lustily on the line “in this shithole”?

Oh Sees have long been touted of as the perfect festival band. Their racuous, high-tempo rock'n'roll always riles up the drunken swathes, even if no-one recognises the song. However, going to a headline show is a different prospect - these swathes are the loyalists, not ready to accept anything less than carnage. After witnessing a relentless sold out show in Cardiff, maybe it's time to remove "festival" from that opening statement.

Rokia Traoré’s passage through this year’s Brighton Festival has been central, binding it to her Malian identity in a series of gigs. This hands-on Guest Director’s pulsing Afro-rock Opening Night was followed by the first Dream Mandé show’s recasting of traditional sounds. A Malian Dance Night added FGM protest, Seventies s.f.-soundtracked myth and cheeky wit from young choreographers. But this show is surely Traoré’s cornerstone, supporting all the rest, as she takes on the role of griot to recast Mali as democracy’s secret rock.

Prufrock might have measured his life in coffee spoons but for many of us it’s rock albums, the money to buy them way back when scrabbled together from Saturday jobs and student grants  –  remember them?

Primal Scream have played in this city, in the recent past, at the 4,500 capacity Brighton Centre but tonight they’re in a venue which holds well under 400. A bananas atmosphere reigns when bands of their stature play intimate shows, and so it is tonight.

Musical odd couples don't come much stranger than Sting and Shaggy.

Much of Rokia Traoré’s set on Saturday night comprised folk songs about Mali’s warrior kings, connecting with her country’s fabulously wealthy, proudly powerful past. They suit this diplomat’s daughter’s regal stature, which she has put at the service of a nation still enviably rich in musical resources, but battered by civil war, poverty and terrorist attack.