Without doubt, the WOMAD Festival is a major international music institution and an annual landmark in the UK summer festival season. It has also been the major catalyst in the popularisation of non-western music in the UK and further afield from the 1980s onwards.

On the last weekend of July, as they have every year since 1965, when an enlightened city council decided that Cambridge – like Newport, Rhode Island – would have a folk festival, thousands of people trekked to Cherry Hinton to enjoy what is now Britain’s premier folk event. One of the biggest in Europe and celebrated throughout the world, Cambridge is a calendar fixture and its return after the inevitable Covid absence was clearly very welcome.

On the cover of The Hit Parade’s Pick Of The Pops Vol.1 it says “London’s No.1 Pop Group.” Underneath, a strapline states “File under: C86 twee Sarah Sixties pop.” Obviously, irony is at play with some of this – from the band name to the album title and the top pop group boast. The suggested categorisation might be nearer the mark.

Over the past few years, Joe Pera Talks With You has been one of television’s joys. Each episode finds the small-town American music teacher navigating life in Upper Michigan. Unhurriedly, with good humour, he deals with the day-to-day small things. The big things are more complicated, but he finds his way. Every programme is a warm bath in goodness.

FRIDAY 22 JULY by Caspar Gomez

“At all times, the film-makers have attempted to present an accurate portrait of the events depicted and the people involved.” The on-screen statement beginning each of Get Back's three parts acknowledges that definitions of accuracy can depend on points of view.

This one sounded implausible. Frida Kahlo, the great (and fashionable – collected by the likes of Madonna) Mexican painter interpreted by Indian classical music at the Elgar Room in the Royal Albert Hall. It was, however, entrancing, made a curious sense, and was a different way of immersing yourself both in the music and paintings.

Sweetness never lasts too long at a Haim gig. No sooner had Alana Haim, the youngest of the Californian siblings, finished a speech about her delight about being back in Glasgow by announcing she was going to “smell the f****** roses” then bass-playing elder sister Este piped up with “I’m smelling my armpits. They are ripe.” It summed up a chat-heavy show that at times felt like part gig, part stand-up comedy try-out.

As either a producer or songwriter Gary Usher worked with The Beach Boys and The Byrds, the two most consequential California bands of the Sixties.

Last weekend saw the long-awaited, post-Covid return of Birmingham’s urban festival of sonic strangeness, and yet again it was a time to wallow in the sounds of previously unknown or vaguely heard about artists, while trying not to melt as temperatures sent mercury levels into orbit.