The music business is about to disappear on holiday wholesale and we won’t see hide nor hair of it until mid-January. There’s just time for one last 2017 vinyl celebration. Regular readers should be warned that theartsdesk on Vinyl becomes rather easy-going at this time of year – must be all the Baileys – and prone to making allowances for the odd sliver of cheese and office-party silliness.

A nineteen-minute adaptation of “Jack Orion” took up the whole of Side Two of Cruel Sister, Pentangle’s fourth album. It's the highlight of the smart but blandly titled 115-track box set The Albums 1968–1972. Up to this point in 1970, British folk rock had not spawned anything comparable to the epic “Jack Orion”.

“Back in the Sixties, before I was born…” Robert Plant has always been as amusing a raconteur as he is a deft weaver of different musical styles, and last night’s show at the Royal Albert Hall was no exception.

With December upon us theartsdesk on Vinyl has been kept busy with sacks full of fantastic plastic, so much so that we’re saving the poppier stuff for a pre-Christmas blow-out in a week’s time, so watch out for that.

Nothing beats a great singer-songwriter live and unadorned. So it was with Tom Russell at London’s 100 Club on the penultimate night of his UK tour. Accompanied by his faithful friend the brilliant Milanese Max Bernadino on guitar, the man whom Lawrence Ferlinghetti describes as “Johnny Cash, Jim Harrison and Charles Bukowski rolled into one” gave a brilliant performance which was a masterclass in audience engagement.

Until now, the easiest non-bootleg way to hear the early Rolling Stones live was via the various home cinema editions of October 1964’s T.A.M.I. show. Otherwise, although they employed backing tracks for broadcast, the American DVDs of their Ed Sullivan Show appearances caught the band in thrilling full flight.

In 1976, Polydor Records was actively considering signing the Sex Pistols. The label’s Chris Parry checked them out live in Birmingham during August. In September, he had a prime spot behind the mixing desk at the 100 Club’s punk festival from which to consider British punk rock’s figureheads. However, the band’s manager Malcolm McLaren signed them to EMI.

It really is quite something to be admired, the sheer longevity and staying power of the Jools Holland franchise. The TV show Later...With Jools Holland, with the same core team running it, has just celebrated its 25th anniversary and put its 51st season to bed. That takes us all the way back to October 1992, just after the summer of John Bryan and Antonia de Sancha, of toes and Chelsea strips. Meanwhile, another part of the franchise, Jools' Annual Hootenanny, with a similar format has been running since New Year’s Eve 1993. Holland and his team have been building all this since his mid-thirties. He will turn 60 in January.

Two Royal Albert Hall shows, with the huge venue completely packed, of which I saw the first, marked roughly the half-way point of a 35-date British Isles tour, which will end just before Christmas. It is an album launch tour for As You See Me Now, Jools Holland’s album with his Rhythm and Blues Band and José Feliciano.

By the end the entire audience was completely energised

The TV shows have shaped a set of audience expectations over time, and the live show duly gets on with the task of fulfilling them as closely as possible. As Gary Burton once wrote, remembering what he had learnt as part of George Shearing’s band, “no matter what the artist thinks, most people really just want to hear what they already know.”

So the trademarks are all there: Jools Holland and a succession of guests, the double-breasted pinstripe suit, the familiar patter. There are opportunities to feature members of the band and to give solo spots to fine singers Beth Rowley and Louise Marshall.

Musically there is much to admire. The focus, the talk is all about boogie and boogieland, but I like the way the door is open to other styles; the full band in ska mode is an envigorating delight. I also found my ears constantly listening out for the wonderfully subtle interventions from Chris Holland on Hammond.

José Feliciano is 72, his voice is strong, but his progress on to and off the stage did seem difficult and ungainly. On the album he is at his best in Stevie Wonder’s "Treat Myself" from the 1995 album Conversation Piece, but that didn’t make it into the live show. His mini-set started and ended with his familiar covers, “California Dreamin’” and “Light My Fire”. There is also a new song "New Year", performed against a visual backdrop of Big Ben and fireworks. Thus are franchises subliminally and subtly reinforced.

Feliciano also sang “Let’s Find Each Other Tonight”. Like everything else, the Albert Hall crowd was gleefully lapping it up, while I was in my own world, quietly troubled by the versification of the couplet “If you need some Company/Come and take a chance on me”, in which the word company is set as an anapest rather than a dactyl. It is the tiniest thing, but the more I hear it, sorry, the more it grates.

Earlier, the support set had come from Mo Zowayed (pictured above), a young Bahraini folk-rock singer-songwriter who has lived for four years in British Columbia. He ploughs a similar furrow to Ray LaMontagne and the Pariah Dogs but his songs don’t – yet – stay in the mind in quite the same way.

The show built to a final blazing, burning soul set featuring Ruby Turner and the band in full cry on songs like "Let the Good Times Roll" and an original "Roll out of this Hole". By that time the entire audience was completely energised and on its feet. 

• Jools Holland and José Feliciano play the Royal Albert Hall tonight, then touring the UK to December 22
• Read more New Music reviews on theartsdesk

@SebScotney

Overleaf: watch Jools Holland and José Feliciano in "Let’s Find Each Other Tonight"

“Precious to me” is a high-carat gold nugget. A guitar-pop song with cascading, lush Everly Brothers harmonies drawing on The Searchers’ version of “When You Walk in the Room”, its immediate tune instantly lodges itself in the head.

For a band as big as Depeche Mode, in a venue as big the 21,000-capacity Manchester Arena, on a tour as big as their current Spirit tour, it almost doesn’t need saying that the pre-gig atmosphere is buzzing.