Opening acts don’t always enjoy a full house, but at at the Royal Albert Hall at the end of a UK tour in support of Suzanne Vega and her acclaimed new album Flying with Angels, there was a warm and generous welcome for singer-songwriter Katherine Priddy’s opening five-song set, drawn from her first two albums, The Eternal Rocks Beneath and The Pendulum Swing, and featuring a preview from the third, These Frightening Machines, due in March.

Well, I wasn’t expecting a Dylanesque take on "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'" as an opening number and I was right. But The Zim, Nobel Prize ‘n all, has always favoured The Grim American Songbook over The Great American Songbook and writer/director Conor McPherson’s hit "play with music" leans into the poet of protest’s unique canon with his international smash hit, now back where it all began eight years ago.

So Billie Eilish’s new album has had its worldwide midnight release, dropping at midnight wherever you are kiddos, and taken as a whole it’s like some dark, heavy, low-hanging semi-forbidden, semi-erect fruit that you want to bite into, chew and swallow.

Indie national treasure Nadine Shah is back, which is excellent news. Not least because it might not have happened. She lands, this time, with extra baggage – divorce, rehab, death and near-death flavour this, her fifth album. It’s not an easy listen but it’s certainly a visceral and moving one.

You don’t expect a couple of septuagenarian contraltos, aided by a spring chicken of a soprano in her fifties, to sing naughty ditties about jacksies and titties. Then again, if you are a Fascinating Aida fan, you do. 

They called Noël Coward “The Master”, and Barnaby Thompson's 90-minute documentary marking 50 years since his death reminded us why. Though there was nothing here in the way of hitherto unknown revelations, the tale of how a boy who left school at nine and had no musical training yet became one of the world’s most prolific playwrights and composers undoubtedly has something fantastical about it.

When Ben Folds emerged in the mid-90s he was like Billy Joel’s snot-nosed little brother: another virtuoso pianist and songwriter but one whose style was sarcastic, subversive and a little bit punky.

Paul Simon is an ornery bugger. Full of awkwardness and perversity as a person, seemingly hugely detached, but as an artist capable of as much tenderness and directness as just about anyone out there. Capable of making world-changing artistic statements but queering his pitch with bizarrely, unnecessarily reactionary statements or actions. Really, a very weird man.

Reuniting with Russ Titelman, the producer of her eponymous 1979 debut and its follow-up 1981’s Pirates, Rickie Lee Jones approaches the great American songbook as if she was reuniting with an old flame, the thrill of it smouldering and concentrating itself in 10 elegant, soulful jazz-blues performances. 

Marina Allen’s singing voice fluctuates between the conversational and the flutingly melodic. In one song, she can be asking “Why do I sing my song for you” in a no-nonsense Randy Newman manner and then shift into a series of spiralling, ascending arpeggios. Centrifics, her second album, is about contrasts.