Pat Metheny recently described quite how much he enjoys just being on stage: “As Phil Woods used to say, the concert, that's for free. What the promoter is paying for is getting on the plane, getting off the plane, to pack your suitcase. The actual gig – you can have that for nothing.”

A strange and wonderful moment: the standing area at the rear of The Lantern, the smaller venue at Bristol’s Colston Hall, is suddenly transformed into a corner of Southern Albania.

The autumnal release deluge is upon us. Vinyl’s thriving and writhing. Raise a glass to it. Do it. However, records that, in another month, would have been reviewed here, music that would have been in the ALSO WORTHY OF MENTION section, has been unfairly passed over.

These days Peter Perrett doesn’t rely on the songs of his late Seventies/early Eighties band, The Only Ones, to hold his audience’s attention. At 65, looking and sounding healthier than he has done in years, he’s on a vital late-career creative roll. At the start of his first encore he even plays a new, unreleased song, “War Plan Red”, giving vent to fiery infuriation with global politicking, his band shadowed in ominous scarlet lighting. He may be renowned, primarily, for songs of romance and dissolution, but with lyrics such as “The so-called free world stands for evil incarnate” he clearly feels that in 2017 there’s also much else to sing about.

Perrett fronts a five-piece band consisting of his sons Jamie (guitar) and Peter Jr (bass), alongside their girlfriends Jenny Maxwell and Lauren Munisamy on backing vocals, violin and keys, with drummer Jake Woodward holding steady at the back. This is a family affair and they’re musically tight to a fault, Jamie Perrett’s lively fret-wrangling showpieces the perfect foil to his father’s stationary stage persona. Peter Perrett himself is black clad in a white shirt and Ray-ban-style shades, his hair in a classic Seventies rocker cut. His words are perfectly enunciated, that distinctive nasal voice cutting through everything. He was ever about the words.

Its starkness emphasises what an undersung master-songwriter he really is

Most of the set is drawn from Perrett’s recent album, How The West Was Won, a comeback of sorts for a man who spent chaotic decades since The Only Ones mostly mired in a dark underworld of crack and heroin. It’s a fine album and even better live. The title track is introduced with a rare and dry aside, “This song is a eulogy to a country that’s become great again.” Full of lyrical pith, the band really work its “Sweet Jane”-ish riff, and also cut loose spectacularly on “Living in My Head” with a squawling, invigorating violin vs guitar jam. The set is peppered with Perrett’s raw, self-scathing odes to his wife of many decades, Xena, and an emotive highlight is the new album’s superb “Home”. Its existential longing is simply heart-rending.  

Perrett also dips into his solo back catalogue, from the better known such as “Woke Up Sticky”, which fires thought-provoking allegories off in all directions, to the more obscure “Baby, Don’t Talk” from 1994, with its cutting couplet “You ain’t learned nothing, from the cradle to the grave”. And, yes, The Only Ones are in there too, with fine versions of “The Big Sleep” and “Flaming Torch”. Surprisingly, given the song is something of a mixed blessing as it’s the only Perrett song most people know, tonight’s encore take on “Another Girl Another Planet” is a scorcher, Jamie Perrett nailing the famously tricky guitar solo with showy aplomb.

And at the evening’s very end, Perrett pushes towards the curfew on his second encore. He closes proceedings with a band-free take on The Only Ones’ “It’s The Truth”. Its very starkness emphasises what an undersung master-songwriter he really is. Given tonight’s performance it seems his return is only gathering pace.

• More live reviews on theartsdesk

Overleaf: Seven minute feature about Peter Perrett on Newsnight

In terms of cinema history, 1969’s Les Chemins de Katmandou is a footnote. Directed by André Cayatte, whose most interesting films were 1963’s interrelated marital dramas Jean-Marc ou la Vie Conjugale and Françoise ou la Vie Conjugale, it was a period-sensitive immersion into the world of a group of Nepal-based hippies. Though ostensibly a crime drama, a focus on drugs and free love brought an exploitation allure.

Forty years ago Whispering Bob Harris made a documentary about Queen. He eavesdropped on them as they recorded the album News of the World and then followed them around America on tour. The film was never broadcast but the footage was exhumed for this anniversary and stapled together in Queen: Rock the World (BBC Four), the latest in the BBC's prancing cavalcade of recent documentaries about the band (see sidebar).

After more than 35 years of subterranean bootleg life, Bob Dylan’s incendiary gospel shows and sessions from 1979 to 1981 are seeing the light of day as volume 13 of the Official Bootleg Series.

Following the recent death of the band's co-founder Walter Becker, it seemed faintly remarkable that Steely Dan went ahead with this O2 show at all – it was the closing night event of Bluesfest 2017 – but Becker’s absence wasn’t allowed to detract from the sustained brilliance of the performance. The Dan’s surviving guru, Donald Fagen, has announced that “I intend to keep the music we created together alive as long as I can with the Steely Dan band”, and surely it has never sounded better.

Dave Porter has a question. He wants to know where clouds go. “After they pass by, are they just like people, that go on and then die?” The figurative bit between his teeth, he wonders if small clouds “are lonely, like you and I? Do they just go to rain, or is that a tear from their eye? Sometimes I feel like a small cloud passing by, never knowing where I’m going and never knowing why.”

Sleaford Mods are not just those two sweary guys with a laptop from Nottingham. Their unique mix of acerbic, politically conscious lyrics and lo-fi earworm loops have rightfully earned them a growing and devoted following across the country. Indeed, the audience at Manchester Academy is packed with moody 20-somethings and middle-aged punks. Rather than appearing intimidating, however, the atmosphere is full of camaraderie and childish excitement, as everyone waits for these de facto voices of the disaffected to take to the stage.

First up, though, is Nachthexen, an all-female four piece whose guitar-less new wave takes as much from early synth-pop as it does from Gang of Four et al. It’s easy to see why they’ve been picked as support for Sleaford Mods. There’s something no-nonsense about their music, which lets the monotonously despairing vocals (think The Cure’s first album) soar above them. “Have You Seen The State” perhaps most perfectly unites the hard drums, cosmic keyboard, and guttural bass underneath the singer’s bleak vision. Their new single “Disco Creep” is similarly indebted to synth music. It wouldn’t sound out of place alongside early LCD Soundsystem or the darker side of Bronski Beat.

They’re smiling because Williamson is confronting an important issue head-on

After Nachthexen finish, we’re treated to a playlist of Eighties power ballads, dad-rock, and oddness, seemingly created by someone who’s never heard what the headline band sound like (Joe Esposito’s “You’re the Best”, anyone?), until Sleaford Mods enter to an atmosphere nearer to that of a football stadium than your average gig venue. Singer Jason Williamson greets the audience with a chipper “Awight?”, before beats programmer-cum-nodding dance icon Andrew Fearn, in his trademark snapback, quickly triggers the first track on his laptop. The noodling bassline of “I Feel So Wrong” starts winding its way through the audience, and everyone begins to move.

With the set largely consisting of songs from 2017’s English Tapas, Williamson’s energy is such that he seems to fizz and pop with spit, tics, and fury, strutting around the stage between songs like a peacock. The contrast between the wit of “The angel of the Midlands has flown away, probably south” and the frequent raspberries made into the mic are part of what makes them so much fun live. There are also singalongs a-plenty. From the marching “Army Nights” to the dance-punk tinged “Jolly Fucker”, the crowd is behind Sleaford Mods the whole way.

The band’s’s enduring centrepiece, “Jobseeker”, kicks off the encore and whips the audience into a frenzy. The joy on every face chanting, “I’m a mess, desperately clutching onto a leaflet on depression supplied to me by the NHS”, initially seems odd, until you realise that they’re smiling because Williamson is confronting an important issue head-on. They fly through the driving “Tied Up In Nottz” and finish on the twisted choral demon that is “Tweet Tweet Tweet”. 

The night is best summed up by Williamson himself in one of his pre-song titbits: “I know there’s a lot of fucks and cunts, but really it’s all about love.” It’s comforting to know that there are still bands like Sleaford Mods with something to say that matters.

• More New Music reviews on theartsdesk

Overleaf: Watch Sleaford Mods live on Seattle radio station KEXP