Simple Minds: Celebrate – The Greatest Hits +

Long before Amy Winehouse, there was a north London retro soul'n'jazz girl with a beehive hairdo making inroads into the Top 40. However, after a short run of hits in the early Eighties Mari Wilson never achieved the epic popularity of her dark-haired successor. Thus we find her in a Brighton basement playing a cruise ship set to a chicken-in-a-basket audience.

"Noel. Noel." Damon Albarn had to shout twice before Noel Gallagher joined him onstage to strum his guitar during Blur's neo-bluesy "Tender". Maybe Albarn's former Britpop rival wanted their historic musical union to take just a little bit longer. Maybe he wanted Albarn to wait just to assert himself. Or maybe after all these years of standing between very loud bands and very loud audiences he is a little deaf. But it happened. At around 8.30pm on Saturday March 23 the Britpop War was officially over.

Stephen Stills: Carry On

Suddenly, it's raining Duke Ellington homages. Stateside, there's Terri Lyne Carrington's Money Jungle: Provocative in Blue, a brilliant reimagining of Ellington's classic 1963 trio recording with Charles Mingus and Max Roach that recently hit the top spot on the JazzWeek radio chart. Here in the UK, the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra's latest release In the Spirit of Duke – recorded on tour during October 2012 – features an all-Duke programme which captures the Ellington Orchestra sound down to the tiniest detail.

He looks the part: straggly, desert hair and haunted fizzog. He sounds the part: opening dry rhythmic strumming over unchorded strings; acrobatic trills; percussive attack. Flanked on the left by two singers, Kiki Cortinas and Simón Román, and a shadowy dancer, Paloma Fantova, and on the right by second guitarist El Cristi and percussionst Israel Suárez, this flamenco stalwart decked out the Sadler’s Wells stage with the requisite musical equipment.

How much more of a melancholy experience walking round this exhibition would have been if its subject hadn’t just sprung a new album on us that’s so suffused with energy and life. It’s meant that the exhibition's title - David Bowie Is – feels like a genuine statement of fact rather than just wishful thinking, at least in the literal sense.

Bernard Herrmann: Vertigo and Music From the Films of Alfred Hitchcock

Rick Redbeard has a pirate’s name and a voice like deep, dark water. Behind the colourful alter ego stands (or, as was the case last night, sits) Rick Anthony, singer of The Phantom Band, the Scottish six-piece whose two albums – Checkmate Savage and The Wants – have recently stretched the admittedly painfully limited parameters of contemporary rock music to thrilling extremes.

What fire and grace on display last night at what he and we assume will be Wilko Johnson’s final London gig. It’s been a while since ticket touts were out in force outside one of his gigs (£200 for you, sir) although his career has been floating upward in the last couple of years, partly due to Julien Temple’s excellent documentary Oil City Confidential. We came to pay affectionate tribute to one of the great guitar stylists, who announced a couple of months ago that he had terminal cancer.