If the three-day Songlines Encounters Festival got off to a rousing start with folk-punk rowdiness from Poland’s R.U.T.A, by last night things were decidedly more genteel. The Festival, anyway, was an exhilarating musical voyage. Spiro’s last album is called Kaleidophonica, and sports a dizzying cover. Rather than the lysergic rush that might suggest, their music is pastoral but as intricate as a Swiss watch, seemingly restrained but with visionary undercurrents.

In this self-sufficient age of laptops and loop pedals you have to admire the Werner Herzog-like vision and ambition of a singer-songwriter who decides his compositions deserve to be fully brought to life by an orchestra. After all, who has their own orchestra these days? Tony Bennett, perhaps, or Barbra Streisand? But certainly not someone who’s most recent video has so far only garnered 400 hits on YouTube.

David Bowie: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars 40th Anniversary Edition

Howard Male

Opened in 2007, the Prudential Center in Newark, 16 miles from Manhattan, is a cavernous indoors sports arena, the home of ice hockey’s New Jersey Devils and basketball’s Seton Hall Pirates and, temporarily, the New York Liberty. The arena’s capacity for concerts is 19,500 – perhaps 2,000 can stand on the floor in front of the stage, the remainder must take their seats in the tiers that rise and rise to a stratosphere that removes them, emotionally and spiritually, from the show below.

“Before I met James Yorkston, I used to write songs that had choruses in them - and here’s one of them.” Irish folk-inspired singer-songwriter Seamus Fogarty may be one of the newer additions to the legendary Fence Records label from which Yorkston sprang, but at the end of a clutch of dates on which the more established artist performed his 2002 debut Moving Up Country in its entirety he certainly isn’t over-awed.

I love the BBC. “Auntie Beeb” really is the appropriate nickname for the Corporation, at least when it comes to television, because you just know when they try and get involved with any kind of pop culture it's going to be with all the gaucheness of a very enthusiastic auntie trying to adopt kids' tastes. This goes double with Danny Cohen – a man who gives the impression that he starts every sentence with “hey guys” and thinks “mega” is the latest street slang – at the helm of BBC One. And it's precisely this which has made The Voice such compelling viewing.

Everything But The Girl: Eden, Love Not Money, Baby, The Stars Shine Bright, Idlewild

Jasper Rees

It's easy to forget exactly how successful Norah Jones is, but with over 50 million records sold, she is a modern success up there with the Jay-Zs of this world. To see her come on stage last night, though, you wouldn't have known it. There were no fireworks, no build-up of drama, no crazed intro tape, no MC on stage to announce her entrance, just a band and singer walking on stage to play.

“We didn’t have a real agenda. We just wanted to play some tunes and have a good time.” Thus spoke the immaculately suited but still mischievous-looking Mick Jones. And thank goodness he said it because, from the off - even before the off - I didn’t think anyone would. The interviewer (his ideological preconceptions crumbling) protested, so unfortunately Jones had to qualify his unguarded statement by saying he couldn’t of course speak for the other members of The Clash.

Sandy Denny: Sandy (Deluxe Edition), Like An Old Fashioned Waltz (Deluxe Edition), Rendezvous (Deluxe Edition)

Graham Fuller