What a weekend for gigs. Morrissey on Saturday night at the Hop Farm Festival was going to take some beating, but last night Pulp got back together for the closing night of the Wireless Festival in Hyde Park and gave it their best shot. Jarvis Cocker and Morrissey are two great British lyricists who unquestionably know how to put on a show. So who came out top?

What a weekend for gigs. Morrissey on Saturday night at the Hop Farm Festival was going to take some beating, but last night Pulp got back together for the closing night of the Wireless Festival in Hyde Park and gave it their best shot. Jarvis Cocker and Morrissey are two great British lyricists who unquestionably know how to put on a show. So who came out top?

It cannot be easy being a veteran pop star on tour. All you want to do are your lovely new songs and all your fans want to hear are your golden oldies. Two weeks ago Ringo Starr showed that he has clearly got to an age where he has decided to give the fans what they want and last night in a sun-kissed field in Kent three more icons embraced their past and bathed in the golden glow of nostalgia.

Thursday 23 June

Haven’t left yet but someone sends me an email saying, "Not going to Glastonbury this year and feeling rather smug about it." What are they feeling smug about? The fact that they’re going to have a forgettable, normal weekend while this extraordinary event is going on? It is, of course, to do with ideas of rain. A lot of the pre-Glastonbury coverage focuses endlessly on rain and mud, as if home comforts are everything. When did comfort become the big cultural draw?

Paul Simon is now nearly 70 years old and as he walked onto the Hammersmith Apollo stage last night it struck me that he is beginning to look like the little old man he will eventually become: still nimble, enviably trim, but nevertheless, he was noticeably older and more fragile-looking than when I last saw him five years ago. The second thing that struck me was a certain weariness in the opening songs - a mechanical quality to the playing, and a concomitantly flat atmosphere. The opening song, “Crazy Love Vol II”, was ploddy, while “Dazzling Blue”, from his new So Beautiful or So What album, just seemed listless. It was not an auspicious start to a show that had been rescheduled from the previous night after an unwell Simon had been on doctor’s orders to rest his voice.

The prospect of seeing a band seemingly in thrall to peak-popularity Fleetwood Mac in a Shoreditch basement intrigued. Could San Francisco's Vetiver reproduce the glossy sheen of new album The Errant Charm live? The answer was no, and last night’s London show was all the better for that. As the guitars intertwined, the sonic swirl was more akin to a Seventies LA version of shoegazing than a recreation of the seductive West Coast sound.

Emmylou Harris once described to me the sibling harmonies of the Louvin Brothers as sounding like they were “washed in the blood”. The voices of Laura and Lydia Rogers, two twentysomething sisters from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, have that same haunting quality. When they sing they lock together so effortlessly it’s almost impossible to discern where one ends and the other begins.

While Michael Eavis’s fields were colonised by the solstice hordes, transforming a tranquil farmstead into a vibrant (and muddy) drop city, a very different and much smaller crowd assembled in the enchanting grounds of Dartington Hall in south Devon, for the second edition of Home, "a Festival with Acoustic Music at its Heart".

Brothers Caleb, Nathan and Jared Followill and their cousin Matthew Followill, better known as Kings of Leon, have come a long, long way from their humble Tennessee roots in the last 12 years. In London last night playing to a 65,000-strong crowd in the same week that a documentary charting their rise hits cinemas, the contrast between the life they were born into and the one they have carved out couldn’t be more marked.

Jon Allen and his support Josh Bray are two sides of a coin. Of the two folk-rockers, the smoother, more polished Allen’s the heads. Bray is rougher, more unknown. But last night they both showed the depth of quality that exists in contemporary commercial roots-influenced music. Allen is touring his second album, Sweet Defeat. Its beautifully crafted songs and refined production have impressed the likes of Jools Holland, and last night he took it to a new level.

This is where the delirium kicks in. Tired but happy, the attendees started the third day of Sónar festival slightly boggled by how to pick and choose from the strange delights on offer. Saturday was when the true musical variety of the festival was displayed: straight-up hip hop to eye-popping South African tribal dance displays, balmy ambient revivalism to apocalyptic techno, heartbroken electronica to deranged prog rock: it was all on offer...