African Scream Contest 2 opens with a burst of distorted guitar suggesting a parallel-world response to The Chambers Brothers’ “Time Has Come Today”. Then, the song beds in and a James Brown groove plays off against spindly lead-guitar lines also evoking California in the psychedelic era: the extemporisation of Jefferson Airplane. At 3.06, the vocalist and percussionist are left to get on with it for 30 seconds. Next, a wheezy organ comes to the fore and injects some “Light my Fire” vamps.

The welcome to Glasgow audio-visual artist Robbie Thomson’s performance engenders a hefty sense of anticipation. It’s almost nervousness-inducing as we’re handed ear-plugs and warned about how very loud it’s going to be. Then, walking into the main hall from the bar, all is gloom. From 1849, for a century-and-a-half, this venue was a church and attached school, its claim to fame a dismissive mention in Jane Eyre. But this evening the stained glass windows are blacked out, blocking the evening sun.

Yes, she sang, with her trademark artistry from the very first notes – four numbers, including a duet with daughter Jacqui Dankworth, and all in close partnership with her consummate players, including son Alec on double bass.

There have been reports that as many as 50% of vinyl-buyers don’t actually listen to it. They keep records as a token of affection for the artist in question. This seems curious but, then again, most young people don’t own turntables and the idea is anathema to the way they consume music. However, while there’s a healthy market in reissues and older artists, the most cutting edge music imaginable is appearing on plastic. Check out our Vinyl of the Month! All musical life is reviewed below.

The venom with which Abiodun Oyewole spits “America is a terrorist”, the key repeated line to “Rain of Terror”, has startling power. The piece is an unashamed diatribe against his nation. Beside him his partner Umar Bin Hassan rhythmically hisses the word “terrorist” again and again while, behind, percussionist Donn Babatunde provides minimal backing on a set of three congas. “Take a black woman, a pregnant black woman, cut her belly open and let the foetus fall out, stomp the baby in the ground.”  Oyewole is raging and it feels good.

At the age of 18, Texan jazz singer Hailey Tuck cashed in her college fund for a one-way plane ticket. leaving a military boarding school in Texas for the Voltaire district of Paris, to immerse herself in jazz clubs and vintage markets. Nearly a decade on, which she’s divided between the performance spaces of Paris, France, and Austin, Texas, her old-school approach to learning her craft has paid off.

When Crazy Rhythms, the ever-fabulous first album by New Jersey’s Feelies was issued in April 1980 it seemed to have little local context. Although the band’s fidgetiness suggested a kinship with Talking Heads and there were a clear nods to The Velvet Underground, it felt more of a piece with contemporary British post-punk bands Josef K and The Monochrome Set than anything American. Fittingly, Eno's first two solo offerings also  fed into the album.

Problem is Brighton is down in the Festival programme as an “alt-rock/pop pantomime”, with actors involved and the inference it’s some sort of musical featuring “instruments specially created by David Shrigley for the performance”. This turns out to be seriously over-selling it. In fact, Problem in Brighton is a rock band put together to play an hour of songs created in league with the maverick artist and Festival Guest Director. Putting any expectations aside, it’s a patchy show.

The band – four men, two women – initially arrive on stage one by one, in regulation black cowboy shirts with white piping, lining up, side by side, po-faced, riffing. The guitars are also black-and-white, designed by Shrigley, with varying quantities of strings. They start in what will be their default setting throughout, Krautrock garage rock akin to The Fall. Two of them – keyboard-player Craig Warnock and drummer Ben Townsend – soon return to their own instruments. At the front, singing and performing, are Scottish actress Pauline Knowles and German actor Stephan Kreiss, both deadpan but the latter given to persuasively underplayed clowning.

Shrigley’s sensibilities are naturally to the fore in all the lyrics

The set has no narrative arc or general concept, the word "problem" written large behind them apparently an irrelevance. The songs are akin to musical versions of David Shrigley’s one-frame images, using surrealism, dry observation, mundanity and juxtaposition to create an often humorous effect. At first it doesn’t really work, although the venue is spotted with Brighton’s self-regarding bearderati who guffaw knowingly, keenly hip to every abstruse gag. As dryly smart songs about shoes, dancing and digging holes go by, it initially reminds of film director Wes Anderson’s least likeable work, in that it’s self-consciously kooky but to no particular end other than its own smug smarts.

However, it moves up a gear with a very funny song wherein Kreiss bemoans his mother’s attempt to join the band. It has a great sing-along chorus and is the evening’s most immediate number. Shrigley’s sensibilities are naturally to the fore in all the lyrics, especially in a song that keeps saying “Hey, huge man”. He has a wry way with a line. A ballad, sung by Knowles, is about a guest, possibly after a party, seeking a bed. “Don’t sleep in the entrance hall, there’s a drunk sleeping there, and it’s a fire risk,” she intones.

There are a couple of props brought on to entertaining effect, such as the exhaust pipe used as a didgeridoo (main picture), some projected images and film of Shrigley’s work, and entertaining digs at the Tories and the Queen. Sensibly, for something so lightly conceived, it does not outstay its welcome.

The musicians and actors deliver the whole thing well. They’re tight. But, in the end, possibly due to prep time issues, possibly for other reasons, there’s a sense that Shrigley bit off more than he could chew; that when it came to creating his “alt-rock/pop pantomime” (with moshpit!), he actually dialled it back to something else entirely.

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Overleaf: watch a trailer for Problem in Brighton

Pinkshinyultrablast might be a long way from their hometown of St Petersburg, but in recent years they’ve built themselves up in England as one of the more bizarre and original bands in today’s psych/shoegaze revival, and on the day their third album Miserable Miracles is released, they hit the north for a night of fuzz and electronic trickery.

In early March 1980, the weekly music paper Sounds dedicated their front cover to “the new face of punk” with a photograph of Stinky Turner, the singer of The Cockney Rejects. What had, in 1977, been widely interpreted as a challenge to musical orthodoxy and as a new broom which was sweeping clean had, in turn, become a default style for new waves of bands.