Now going for over a dozen years, ever-busier since Live Nation took over its parent company in 2015, The Great Escape Festival is the annual multi-venue band showcase and music conference which sees Brighton swamped with music biz sorts.

Better Oblivion Community Center may be a supergroup of sorts, but the name still draws less recognition that its members (Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberst from Bright Eyes). Maybe it’s just too complicated to remember, because a packed Shepherd’s Bush Empire proved the band’s wide appeal – lairy lads and muso pensioners, side-by-side for a night of charm and angst.

Repackaging and resuscitating the catalogues of endlessly reissued bands is fraught. By their nature, completists already have everything and the casually interested are not fussed by alternate versions of obscure tracks or disinterred lo-fi live recordings. It’s challenging to freshen up or put new spins on predominantly familiar material by endlessly reissued bands. Preaching to the converted is frequently the best which can be hoped for.

Due to exciting matters beyond theartsdesk on Vinyl’s control there’s been a slight delay to this month’s edition but, never fear, to ensure we cover all that’s juicy, we’re doing a special two-volume version, with Part 2 coming next week. Watch this space.

“I hope you’re not only Wolverine fans or this is going to be a long night,” a grinning Hugh Jackman tells a screaming Glasgow crowd. The line – delivered in front of a giant screen on which Jackman, adamantium claws extended, is climbing out of a river with his shirt off – sums up a particular curiosity about the actor known to many as the Greatest Showman: how did an award-winning musical theatre actor end up playing a comic book mutant?

For a time, it looked like Catfish and the Bottlemen might finally be the next-gen guitar band with crossover appeal. Though that never quite came to pass, their new show promoting latest album The Balance proves why the indie faithful value them as Britain’s guiding light. 

The Nature of Why is not so much a concert as a multi-discipline happening. To assess it is to relate a human experience rather than just an aesthetic appreciation of the new orchestral work by Goldfrapp’s Will Gregory which is at its heart. On the surface, it’s an hour-long piece in nine short movements, interspersed with old BBC recordings of the Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Richard Feynman explaining how magnetism is unexplainable in layman’s terms.

The last time Sergio Mendes, the Brazilian bossa nova legend, played at the Royal Festival Hall was in 1980 when he opened for Frank Sinatra. He shakes his head in wonder at the memory, though it’s not so long ago in the scheme of things – his career started in the late 1950s.

The last thing many were expecting from Rokia Traoré’s opening appearance at this year’s Brighton Festival was an Afro-psychedelic head-fry, yet she and her four-piece band prove thoroughly capable of swirling our minds right off out of it. When she returns at the end of the concert and announces she’s going to play one last song. A voice shouts out, “Make it a long one!” Happily, it is.

In an alternate timeline, Olly Murs - runner-up on a TV talent show a full decade ago - would have faded into obscurity by now. This, as the relentlessly charming performer on stage delights in reminding us, is not that timeline. Some internet commenter remarked, on the release of his first single “Please Don’t Let Me Go”, that it was what Murs would be telling his record company after they dropped him.