Vinyl is not a cute, retro, style statement. Well, OK, it can be. But it’s also an analogue format that’s as current as its user wants it to be. Aiding this process, for those who are determinedly forward-looking, is the Love turntable (main picture). Created by Swiss design kingpin Yves Behar, working with LA-based Love CEO CH Pinhas, the tone-arm revolves around the record and, via infrared technology, is controllable from a phone, allowing listeners to traverse tracks as they please.

Pulling together a music documentary strikes me as a simple enough concept. Gather your talking heads in front of a nice enough backdrop, splice with archive footage in some semblance of a narrative order and there you go. There’s no need to, say, hire a minibus and attempt to recreate a near-mythological gig from 20 years ago. Especially if that gig happened in France.

On first pass, Beautica comes across as an exotic hybrid of 1991 school-of-Slowdive shoegazing and the fidgety music pre-Stereolab outfit McCarthy had perfected around 1989. But there’s something else; a lilting characteristic to the vocal melodies suggesting an inherent melancholy. Yet although the album’s makers were not bouncing with joy, the hymnal sense of reflection running throughout Bizarre’s Beautica is, contrastingly, uplifting.

The only British gig in Josh Ritter’s so-called work-in-progress tour took place in the somewhat unlikely venue of St Stephen’s Church, Shepherd’s Bush, a rather fine example of gothic revival style. It’s almost opposite Bush Hall, which would have been a more logical venue: an altar was not perhaps the most obvious setting for the Idaho-born alt folkie though the acoustics were splendid.

The idea of a heavy metal rock band for children might be somewhat lacking in appeal for some. Images of leather and chains, frightening make-up, Anthrax-style roaring into a microphone and satanic lyrics for dear little Jonti, all a bit overwhelming. But in Finland, where hard rock is a way of life, of course there’s a heavy metal group for kids.

Mention the name “Barbara Dickson” and everyone remembers “I Know Him so Well”, the duet with Elaine Paige which hit the top spot in 1985, the era of big hair, shoulders pads and dry ice. That song didn’t feature in Dickson’s concert at Union Chapel, but those who came to hear her other top 20 hits – “Answer Me”, “Caravans” and “January February” – weren’t disappointed. The last was the appropriate opener on a frigid February eve, but like everything she played, it was totally reinvented.

Quite deservedly, Dickson has enjoyed considerable commercial success and won awards for her acting (“Tell Me It’s Not True” from Blood Brothers was one of the evening’s many high points; “Across the Universe” from John, Paul George, Ringo… and Bert, another Willy Russell musical and the one which made her a household name, provided the encore) but her heart has always remained deep in the Scottish folk scene from which she emerged in the 1960s and ‘70s, along with artists such as Archie Fisher, Rab Noakes and Gerry Rafferty.

Nothing beats good musicians playing and singing their hearts out

Whichever Barbara drew people to Islington, no one would have returned home disappointed, for she touched all bases (“Some of you are nearly as old as I am”, she joked as the audience applauded the opening bars of golden oldies) in a generous performance: generous in what she gave of herself, generous to her band, and generous in her proper attribution of credit to those behind the songs. Her voice is impeccable still, a rioja gran reserva where once it was a tempranillo, and she’s gifted with astonishing vocal control, including an unexaggerated portamento that allows her to deliver a song in a slow tempo that brings forth all the emotion.

That enviable ability comes to the fore in the Scottish folk songs she performs with both reverence and deep knowledge – the poignant “Palace Grand”, for example, learned from the late Jean Redpath, the singer and collector who left Fife for New York as the 1960s revival drew a callow Bob Dylan to that city (Joan Baez recorded the song as “Lady Mary”.) Other traditional highlights included “MacCrimmon’s Lament”, sung a capella and seguing into an exhilarating Irish jig, which spotlighted Troy Donockley’s Uillian pipework, he riffing on them much as he does on lead guitar, and the majestic “Farewell to Fiunary”, all drums and drone.

There was also Brecht (“The Wife of the Solider”, with its Carthy/Swarbrick lyrics), James Taylor (“Millworker”, a song about sweated labour written before it made headlines for the Broadway musical Working), Dylan, Rafferty, and Felice and Boudleaux Bryant’s “Love Hurts”, a 1960 hit for the Everly Brothers who so captivated the teenage Barbara (check out her duet with Rab Noakes of "Sleepless Nights", overleaf).

Besides Donockley, who also played the Roland Aerophone, a versatile digital wind instrument, the band comprised Nick Holland on keyboards and vocals, Russell Field on percussion and low pipe, and Brad Lang on bass. Dickson occasionally swapped her trusty Martin guitar for the keyboard.

Nothing beats good musicians playing and singing their hearts out. The Union Chapel – where the lighting played on the stained glass, throwing up purple Scottish heather hues – was the perfect venue.

Overleaf: Barbara Dickson and Rab Noakes sing 'Sleepless Nights'

The equipment pictured above is the Powertran 1024, one of the first digital sequencers to hit the market. According to the May 1981 issue of Electronics Today International magazine, which unveiled it to the public, the British-invented “1024 composer is a machine which will repeatedly cause a synthesiser to play a pre-determined series of notes either as short sequence or a large compositions of 1024 notes: i.e. several minutes long.” The article was headlined “Treat your synth to this sequencer/composer.”

Erasmo Carlos got his break in August 1965 when the TV show Jovem Guarda (The Young Guard) began its run. Filmed before a live audience in São Paulo and broadcast nationally, it was pop as never seen before in Brazil.

The creative partnership between Ed Harcourt and Martha Wainwright is an intriguing one. He is an out and out showman, full of stage presence, bravado and tinged with thespiness. She is an introverted, quirky creative, flanked by the comfort of a full band. But there's no doubting that together they make beautiful music.

In the last week of September 1973, Guy Darrell peaked at number 12 on the British single’s chart with the catchy blue-eyed soul pounder “I’ve Been Hurt” and performed on Top of the Pops. His was a grassroots-driven success. “I’ve Been Hurt” was popular on the northern soul scene and initial sales were to fans hearing the song in clubs as it packed dance floors rather than on the radio.