High hopes are riding on Dua Lipa. Tonight is the first date of her Self-Titled Tour, but it ends next April. In between, it will travel all over the world, culminating in a series of British stadium dates, the last one at the Alexandra Palace. Such confidence is born of a string of hits across Europe, culminating in this summer’s UK chart-topper, “New Rules”. When she kicks off her show at the Brighton Dome, the near-capacity audience is buzzing, and sing along to one of her bigger successes, “Hotter Than Hell”. This crowd really are onside. They’ve been chanting her name, on and off, for half an hour before she appeared.

Dua Lipa is a very 21^st century pop star. Of British-Albanian extraction, her teen years at Sylvia Young Theatre School, YouTube showcasing, and a brief modelling career, were followed by Warner Brothers “developing” her from age 19. She runs on to wild applause wearing a black bra top and high-waisted green Oxford bags that cover her shoes and touch the floor. With ironed straight hair, she is model pretty, yet still maintains something of the everygirl. Behind her a three-piece band of efficient young pros play synths, guitar and drums in front of a trapezium screen that tends to show misty, mysterious, fashionista art film of the singer.

If she can deliver on these beginnings, she has the makings of star

With only one album under her belt, a multi-producer affair featuring work by A-list songwriter/producers-for hire, her set still lasts an hour-and-a-half. The best numbers are snappy examples of the anthemic female self-empowerment phone-pop that currently rules chart-land. Before the acronymic “IDGAF” with its chorus of “I don’t give a fuck”, the screen dedicates it to all the “fuckboys who have done you wrong”, and asks that we raise our middle fingers to salute them. It’s spiky, electro-riffy, and very, very now, swiftly followed by the hit “Blow Your Mind (Mwah)”, its bangin’ 4/4 kick and title kiss turning the venue into a school disco rave-up.

Dua Lipa also wants to display her sensitive side so occasionally clambers down and stands aloft the front barricade. She sings the ballad “New Love” from here, “the first song I ever wrote”, accompanied by only her guitarist. In truth, she’s yet to develop the venue-encompassing charisma, quirkiness and imagination with which stars such as Lady Gaga and Beyoncé hold huge venues captive, and she doesn’t have enough memorable and varied songs to go beyond the I-like-it-because-I just-heard-it-on-the-radio-(but-will-have-forgotten-it-by-next-year) audience. However, she’s at the start of her career, and it would be crass – and very male music journo – to tear her down for this. After all, if she was rocking out in some sweaty cellar, playing bum notes at every turn, she’d receive a pass.

Dua Lipa may be at the start of a rise from current pop success to something bigger. Her individuality will eventually need amping beyond the pleasant-but-feisty everygirl schtick. For now, though, she has “New Rules”, one of the year’s most whip-smart pop songs, tight R&B electro-pop with that killer line – also on tee-shirts in the lobby – “And if you’re under him, you ain’t getting over him”. She saves it for last, of course, at the end of a triumphant three-song encore in front of a by-now baying crowd, multitudes of young women and men having a top night out. She leaves them on a high, wanting more. If she can deliver on these beginnings, she has the makings of star.

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Overleaf: watch the video for Dua Lipa "New Rules"

Immediately before recording their first album in 1977, Motörhead were on their last legs. They went into the studio after playing what was initially conceived as their farewell show. Appropriately, no one then could have predicted that the band formed by Hawkwind’s former bass player in 1975 would become integral to rock’s rich tapestry. It wasn’t even their first attempt to make an album: one begun in 1975 had been shelved.

It’s more than 40 years since Sparks appeared on Top of the Pops with “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us”, one of a handful of hits from the brothers Mael, Ron and Russell, who grew up in 1950s and ‘60s LA detesting the “cerebral and sedate” folk boom and grooving to such British acts as the Who and the Kinks.

When we were at peak Norah a decade ago, she looked rather intimidated by the large crowds at venues like the Forum. Having been suddenly catapulted into the limelight she looked nervous, lacked any real stage charisma and her so-so band looked like the kind of musicians you’d find in an average bar in Brooklyn, competent rather than anything remarkable. Her recent Day Breaks, was something of a return to the style of her first multi-million selling album 2002’s Come Away With Me, and to see her back playing a smaller venue like Ronnie Scott’s was a treat.

September and October see a deluge of new releases. Everybody and their aunt puts out an album as autumn hits, so theartsdesk on Vinyl appears this month (and next) in a slightly expanded edition. As ever, the fare on offer is as diverse as possible, from black metal to Afro-funk via film and TV soundtracks. All musical life is here, ripe and waiting.

VINYL OF THE MONTH

That this year is the 40th anniversary of 1977, the year punk rock went mainstream, shouldn’t obscure the pub rock foundations underpinning much of what was supposedly new. The Clash’s Joe Strummer had fronted pub circuit regulars The 101’ers. In 1976, the Sex Pistols regularly played West London pub The Nashville Rooms. The Damned came together after Brian James and Rat Scabies scouted the audience at a Nashville Pistols/101’ers show for potential members of the band they intended forming.

As pretty much everything but a plague of locusts is visited upon this grim old world, an evening in the company of Neil Sedaka is the greatest of pick-me-ups. At the Royal Albert Hall on Monday, as his UK tour drew to a close, the capacity audience clearly felt uplifted, borne aloft on a raft of enduring songs and the evident enjoyment of the man who wrote them.

Sixty years ago this year, Sedaka made his first appearance on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand and signed a recording contract with RCA. Since then he’s written some 600 songs, the latest so recent he needed the lyrics propped up on the piano. Not for him an autocue – Sedaka has it all in his head and under his hands. Here’s one man unlikely ever to suffer from brain fade. Only the knees and the hips have aged – when he gets up from the piano stool, occasionally for a little bop, you notice his stiff gait.

Sedaka's is still the voice of a young man, pitch-perfect and secure

In recent years, he has played with an orchestra. This time round he was completely solo, a man and his piano. Alone on stage, a screen projecting his image to those in what his friend John Lennon (for whom he wrote “The Immigrant”) would have called “the cheaper seats”, he cut a cheerfully unstagey figure. Sedaka is what an old-fashioned men’s outfitter would call “short and portly” – rather like Elton, who did much to rejuvenate his career in the mid-1970s, but the threads are more sedate: a blue sport coat atop an open-necked black shirt and slacks (as he’d surely call them) and comfy-looking shoes. His silvery hair is combed over and he has jowls – in other words, he’s happy to look onstage like the 78-year-old grandfather he is offstage. His eyes twinkle and when he refers to himself in the third person it’s mostly to poke fun.

The back projection offered close-ups of his hands and it’s fascinating to watch him play. For Sedaka is a real pianist, one who would most likely have pursued a classical career had he not heard the siren call of 1950s pop. He won a junior scholarship to the Juilliard when he was just eight years old, travelling to Manhattan from Brighton Beach for lessons. At 16 he played Debussy and Prokofiev for Arthur Rubenstein.

These days, he told us, his songs are written over a vodka martini or two, but those early hits which emanated from Broadway’s celebrated Brill Building were fuelled only by Coca-Cola and teenage effervescence as Sedaka teamed up with Howie Greenfield to write a string of hits that remain as fresh today as when they were written and which have been recorded by a roll-call of singers, from Frank Sinatra to Sheryl Crow via Elvis, Tom Jones, the Carpenters, Andy Williams, Peggy Lee, Rosemary Clooney and Connie Francis, and he’s featured in The Simpsons.

At the Albert Hall, the hits just kept on comin’: “The Queen of 1964”, “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do”, “Standing on the Inside”, “Our Last Song Together” (the last song he wrote with Greenfield following a 25-year partnership), “Solitaire”, “Where The Boys Are”, “Laughter in the Rain”, “Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen”, “Next Door to An Angel”, “Love Will Keep Us Together”, “The Hungry Years”, “Betty Grable” and of course “Oh Carole”, written for his high school sweetheart Carole Klein, who the world came to know as Carole King. During a brief comfort break, a Cinebox video of “Calendar Girl” was played, Sedaka in red jacket and perma-tan, “the girls” in bikinis and furs: the American 1950s preserved in aspic. Returning, jacketless, to the stage, he quipped that “Miss January” had recently reintroduced herself to him in an LA club. “She looked so old,” he joked, pausing for a beat. “Of course I hadn’t changed at all!”

And vocally he hasn’t, for Sedaka’s is still the voice of a young man, pitch-perfect and secure, the tessitura and timbre as distinctive as ever. The audience would have had him sing all night – and he looked as though he’d have been perfectly able to oblige. Long may he play on, his perfect miniatures bringing joy to our lives. Michael Eavis should book him for Glastonbury.

• Read more new music reviews on theartsdesk

Overleaf: Watch Neil Sedaka play a medley of his greatest hits on BBC's The One Show

Caressing the microphone, and gazing into the audience with winsome, soulful sincerity, tousled auburn locks glistening in the stage light, Mads Mathias looks like nothing so much as Ed Sheeran’s more handsome older brother. His voice has the softest of rasps, like being rubbed gently with velvet, and he has his saxophone on hand, as if threatening to shimmer phrases of Sanborn smooth into the night.

In February 1965, Melody Maker asked John Lennon about his personal enthusiasm for Bob Dylan material and Dylan interpretations. “I just felt like going that way,” he said about the new acoustic guitar-based material The Beatles were then recording at Abbey Road.

Every 21st birthday deserves a party, and the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester celebrated the anniversary of its opening with a weekend of fun and "access" events, ending with a recital by four pianists on its four Steinway pianos – playing them all at once, in eight-hand arrangements.