The big news as this year closes is that vinyl sales have brought more money in than downloads. They made £2.4 million compared to the £2.1 million from digital, the eighth consecutive year of growth in vinyl sales. Of course, to a large degree, this is because the youth market very suddenly transferred their affections from downloads to streaming. Which doesn’t make sense to me. If you can’t get a decent connection, you don’t have music. And that’s not even starting in on quality issues.

Anthologie 1953–2002 is a monster. A 20-disc set spanning almost 50 years, it tracks one of France’s most beloved singers and songwriters. Gilbert Bécaud died in December 2001, but songs from his posthumously released Je Partirai album are included. Fitting, as his music lives on and the release of this box set marks the 15th anniversary of his death.

Now the celebrity-drug-addict phase of Pete Doherty's career seems to be over the question remains as to what sort of artist he really is. After all, Doherty's best material always appeared to be inextricably woven into his chaotic lifestyle. The new album, Hamburg Demonstrations, on the other hand, was apparently recorded entirely drug-free. It's given fans pause for thought about where Doherty-the-phenomenon ends and Doherty-the-talent begins. 

Before Tuesday's show one punter gave me his opinion. "The drugs were really an irrelevance," he told me, "What matters is that Pete lives in a world of his own and his gigs give us the opportunity to join him." If this was the same world that Pete's guitarist Jack Jones also inhabited it sounded Bohemian, indeed: Jones warmed up proceedings with a quarter hour of performance poetry that sounded like John Cooper Clarke with a Welsh accent.

A figure emerged from stage-right dressed in black leather and wearing a hat. It was Carl BaratDoherty arrived, a little late, wearing a slightly-too-tight Blues Brothers-style suit. In tow were his backing band, the Puta Madres, who would go on to help create a loose Rive Gauche atmosphere whilst maintaining admirable musical discipline. Particularly notable, again, was guitarist Jones: now bare-chested and with a Welsh flag wrapped around his head, he looked more like the Doherty of old than Doherty himself did.

Through "I Don't Love Anyone (But You're Not Just Anyone)", "Last of the English Roses" and "Kolly Kibber" – three rather melodic solo songs – the main man meandered around the stage picking out notes with the air of a tuneful drunk: a woozy air which may have been partly put-on but, then again, possibly not. Then, halfway through track four, "You're My Waterloo", something happened to inject a hundred volts straight into the moshpit. A figure emerged from stage-right dressed in black leather and wearing a hat. It was Carl Barât, Doherty's sparring partner from the Libertines, and he was on fine guitar-playing form. But although Barât would return throughout the night – most notably for a barnstorming reading of "Gunga Din" – his presence was only incidental to the success of the evening. 

More pertinent was the warmth that came from the audience sharing the singer's alternative reality. As Doherty progressed from wearing a full three-piece suit to just a T-shirt, guest players came and went and speakers were knocked over. At one point Doherty even managed to trip up Jones, who finished the song flat on his back. Yet for those who bought in – apparently everyone here – these ragged moments felt less like unfettered chaos than a letting-go.

Maybe, at some level, Doherty was telling us to stop sweating the unimportant stuff and to connect with something higher? Or maybe everyone was just having a great time. What was undeniable though was the wave of euphoria that hit the room during two very spirited versions of "Killamangiro" and "Fuck Forever" from the Babyshambles era.

The most rock'n'roll moment, however, came at the end. As "Up the Bracket" wound down, Doherty launched into an improvised rendition of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah". Barât joined him, sometimes in harmony, occasionally in different keys. Miki Beavis waded in with her violin but Katia de Vidas's keyboard had already been knocked over. By the end Barât was tearing away at the drum kit. The song finished and Doherty threw his Fender Stratocaster into the crowd. The crowd erupted – they knew their hero hadn't really changed a bit.

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@russcoffey

Overleaf: watch Peter Doherty's video for "I Don't Love Anyone (But You're Not Just Anyone)"

Pictured above is Sweden’s Ralph Lundsten. He might look like a guru or mystic but is actually a multi-disciplinary artist most well-known on his home turf for his pioneering electronic music. His first album, 1966’s Elektronmusikstudion Dokumentation 1 (made with Leo Nilson), was issued by national Swedish radio’s own label and recorded at the station’s electronic music studio. Lundsten (born 1936) began making music for soundtracks in the 1950s and has issued at least 38 albums.

In 1970, The Who opened their Live at Leeds album with “Young Man Blues”, a hefty version of a song its composer Mose Allison recorded as “Blues” in 1957. Back then, it was the only vocal track on Back Country Suite, an otherwise instrumental blues-jazz album, the Mississippi-born pianist's debut long player. Allison had moved to New York in 1956 and a string of releases followed. The Who weren’t the only British band cocking an ear: in March 1965 The Yardbirds first recorded Allison's “I’m Not Talking”, plucked by them from 1964’s The Word From Mose.

At the Royal Festival Hall the cliché seemed complete. Milling around were white men, white men and more white men – all in their late thirties and older, most looking a little bohemian and a lot geeky, with a few of them a little more hardcore in black bomber jackets, black jeans, black trainers and black baseball caps.

The Damned peak early tonight. They never really top a tribalistic crowd sing-along to the song “Ignite” about two-thirds of the way through the evening. Dressed, as ever, like a cool rockabilly undertaker, in aviators with a black glove clutching the Shire Classic-style microphone, frontman Dave Vanian, his face painted cabaret zombie skeletal, prowls the stage, watching the crowd with a wry smile. Unreadable, his contained energy and rich bass voice is jointly at the heart of The Damned’s live appeal.

At 83, and with 60-odd years on the road, Wayne Shorter could be forgiven for, in a musical sense, getting the slippers and pipe out and knocking out comfortable versions of his hits, the classic tunes he wrote for Miles Davis among them, like “Footprints” and “Sanctuary”. But instead, he went full tilt into a largely improvised set consisting of only five numbers in 90 minutes, most of them recent, and then a new collaboration, given only its second outing at the Barbican.

In 1996, the NME ranked Super Furry Animals’ debut album Fuzzy Logic as the year’s fourth best. It sat between Orbital’s In Sides (number three) and DJ Shadow’s Entroducing. Beck’s Odelay took the top spot and Manic Street Preachers’ Everything Must Go was at two. Fuzzy Logic was on Creation Records and the Oasis-bolstered label’s only other album in the run down-was The Boo Radleys’ C’Mon Kids (15).

Behind and beside Canadian electronic noisies Crystal Castles are lines of strobes which they use relentlessly from the moment they arrive onstage. It’s hard to even look, such is the visual barrage, and when I do, for as long as my retinas can stand, I only see a manic silhouette, flinging itself around, long hair whipping about like a dervish having a fit. As opening song “Concrete” draws to a close, this proves to be pink-maned frontwoman Edith Frances who now, and throughout the whole gig, squirts bottled water over her head and on the front rows.

On one level, it’s surprising Crystal Castles are gigging at all. When the band’s original singer Alice Glass left a couple of years ago in a spume of animosity, she also announced it was the end of the band. Instead mainstay Ethan Kath joined forces with Iowan singer Frances, who first crashed into him, literally, in the mosh-pit at an LA concert by Detroit hardcore punkers Negative Approach. The pair’s recent album, Amnesty (I), from which all proceeds from physical sales go to Amnesty International, effectively continues Crystal Castles’ blend of industrial battering, bangin’ trance and twinkling, oddball electro-pop.

There’s a lack of light and shade, of nuance, but the crowd doesn’t mind

Kath is stage-left and at the back is drummer Christopher Chartrand who adds a very human energy to the raucous electronic onslaught. The focus is on songs from Amnesty (I) but they also chuck in Glass-era favourites, such as “Crimewave” and “Celestica” which receive a warm reception from the mostly 20-something crowd. Frances, in a choker, wearing black, appears to have done something to her right knee which is heavily bandaged, but it doesn’t stop her bouncing about in a way that honours her notoriously demoniac predecessor.

When Crystal Castles appeared around a decade ago, they brought something new to electronic music. Their albums, three with Glass, before the current one, combine edgy, glitched electronics with vitriolic punk attitude, the whole thing produced in a thoroughly original way that sometimes recalls video-game music (birthing a style briefly known as “chiptune”), as well as drawing elements from the cheesier fringes of dance music. The odd thing, especially given how Kath often distorts the singer’s vocals beyond recognition, is how emotive and lovely the end result is.

Live, the band maintain a raging dynamic interspersed with the occasional twinkly – albeit warped – synth motifs. There’s a lack of light and shade, of nuance, but the crowd doesn’t mind. After a while the venue simply becomes a stroboscopic electro-punk rave. The song lyrics are inaudible, chopped about, mostly treated as another sound in Kath’s armoury, fighting it out with gated synths and kick-drums. In fact, the night is really a sort of an enhanced Ethan Kath DJ/laptop set, with added drums and vocals, and Frances as a feral hype-person. And, for an hour and a quarter, Concorde 2 goes barmy to it. For me, although it was enjoyable, it didn’t feel as if Crystal Castles were offering enough that was new, or that they were entering a new phase, ripe for new heights. Their revamp, a chance to dive off the map, sticks instead to the “If it ain’t broke” credo, and offers an admittedly juicy extra helping of what came before.

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Overleaf: watch the video for "Concrete"