There’s an odd duality about Brighton tonight. Post-election, it’s a righteous oasis, a green and red bubble amid a sea of blue. Most of Britain may have chosen to systematically destroy the NHS and the education system but Brighton stands fast. The mood, then, is one of victory – a brass band plays jauntily in the street outside the Dome and the streets gabble giddily of Caroline Lucas, the Green MP who held the city’s centre - but the celebrations are tempered by hurt and a sense of epic defeat. Squarepusher’s Brighton Festival gig encapsulates the dichotomy.

It was a strange atmosphere inside Camden’s KOKO last night, like a very particular nu metal subgroup of 2003 having a reunion. There was no one under the age of 20 but there were still dreadlocks and beards aplenty. First up on this nostalgia-fest were Alien Ant Farm, the American rock band who formed in 1995 in Riverside, California. By the time the band come out on stage, the crowd has had time to buy a few warm, over-priced beers and are ready to let loose.

The over-full O2 Academy is already like a sauna, with sweat dripping down the walls and clouds of condensation drifting above the audience, before the Prodigy even take to the stage in Birmingham. However, when a fur-coated MC Maxim leads the band out the atmosphere goes up several notches further and then positively explodes as Liam Howlett lays down the intro to 1997’s hit single “Breath”. Bodies are thrown around from the first beat, hands are raised and the temperature climbs even further.

The venues Laura Moody has played on this, her first national tour, have included a launderette, a lighthouse, and the philosophy section of a well-known Oxford bookshop – all, apparently, selected for their “intimate and unusual” quality. It's certainly been an odd couple of months. On the other hand Acrobats, the album she featured last night, seemed a little more mainstream than her previous material. 

The Warlocks are a psychedelic band from LA who dress not unlike the Velvet Underground in their prime and are clearly not given to star-like behaviour. They slope onto the stage at Birmingham’s Rainbow, tune up and burst straight into “Red Camera” from their 2009 album The Mirror Explodes. A heavy, dense mediation that comes on like a deep, Spacemen 3-flavoured drone, it whacks up the volume and sets the tone for the evening. It doesn’t get the audience moving around much but it certainly grabs their attention.

Various Artists: Building Bridges - Eurovision Song Contest Vienna 2015

San Fermin have enough brass to rock Mardi Gras and the vocal range to stretch an opera chorus, but they are, still, a pop group. The Brooklyn indie octet’s straight-through rendition of their second album Jackrabbit, released last week, inspired the Jazz Café on Monday night, their obliquely hyperactive compositions, by Yale graduate and Nico Muhly associate Ellis Ludwig-Leone, decked in the gaudy distractions of the carnival.

Dion: Recorded Live at the Bitter End August 1971

They begin with “My Door is Never” from 2007 album Reformation Post TLC, and close a little over an hour later with “Sparta FC”, from early in the century, and from a long-gone Fall line-up. In between, a flurry of blurred, brutal songs from the new and most recent albums set about pummelling a packed house at the Brixton Electric.

A band are doing well if they have their audience laughing and cheering before they’ve even hit the stage. Such is the case with Public Service Broadcasting who show a creaky public information-style animation, with a distinct 1970s feel, prior to their appearance. In it we’re presented with Calman-esque cartoons Ralph and Geoffrey who each have contrasting approaches to using their mobile phones at concerts. Suffice to say things don’t end well for Geoffrey, who spends the whole concert waving his iPhone about taking dodgy blurred footage and getting in everyone’s way.