I had a terrible fright last week. While listening to BBC London DJ Robert Elms introduce a track from the new Paul Weller album, Sonik Kicks. What I heard sounded remarkably like Oasis. It seemed that the man who once influenced Noel Gallagher was now so bereft of ideas he was reduced to ripping off Noel Gallagher. To my relief Robert Elms followed the track with an apology. He had pressed the wrong button and had played a Noel Gallagher track by mistake.

If you've got enough hair to make it stand up at 53, why not flaunt it?

In the age of Mumford & Sons we should recall that half a century ago, folk music wasn’t so much acoustic pop as agitprop, staunch leftwing propaganda. Singers such as Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger toured songs rife with witty, angry social discontent, incidentally setting in place the UK’s early gig and festival circuit.

Bringing together the most talented choirs, vocalists and musicians from across London and the UK, iGospel's two-day Sing Inspiration! Festival came to a close in spectacular fashion. Lurine Cato opened the concluding "Gospel & Soul" concert, showcasing her impressive five-octave range on “You Revive Me”, the first single from her forthcoming debut album. With one, ever higher, key change after another, Cato's deluxe pipes made some better-known pop singers sound like common-or-garden pub belters.

He has terrible tusks, and terrible claws, and terrible teeth in his terrible jaws… Ah wait now, that’s The Gruffalo. Mark Lanegan doesn’t have any of the above (although he does have tattooed fists and a considerable jaw, and past heroin addiction probably hasn’t played too well with the old teeth).

After a nine-month absence, during which Joe Muggs explored the world's largest natural bassbin in the Amazonian rain forest and Thomas H Green waited to receive his passport back from the Bolivian government, Singles & Downloads returns to celebrate the best in new music. From the ambient to the danceable, the glorious to the outright embarassing, we present the juiciest possible representative cross section of modern popular music.

There have been many Earths. Dylan Carlson has been the only constant, using the shifting line-ups as the vehicle for his vision of a music that is all about space, slowness, and repetition. As last night's concert made clear, he no longer needs a heavy metal framework to achieve his goal. Nowadays, understatement achieves heaviness. You could call it maturing.

Some people – a very few – just have it. Never mind whether her songs appeal, or the style in which she performs them, but Sinéad O’Connor’s presence is extraordinary - as, of course, is her voice. She sings “I Am Stretched on Your Grave” a capella, dedicating it to PC David Rathband, the policeman blinded by Raoul Moat who recently committed suicide. The Queen Elizabeth Hall falls to pin-drop silence; O’Connor’s singing, which flecks wrenching forcefulness with heartbreak vulnerability, is relentless - it brooks no doubt.

“I know what I was angry about when I wrote this,” Nanci Griffith told the crowd as she introduced “Hell No (I’m Not Alright)”, “but you can get your anger out about whatever you want.”

I must confess I wasn’t particularly looking forward to last night’s concert from the great elder statesman of South African music. This was largely because his most recent album Jabulani – recorded as a tribute to all the township weddings he went to as a child and youth – was marred by sentimentality and a lacklustre production. But then again one obviously shouldn’t be expecting the music of a 73-year-old to still be as fired-up as the work he produced in his prime.

I figured there were two solid reasons to attend last night’s Florence + the Machine gig in North London. The first was that I’d given Ceremonials a fair few listens, and was beginning to conclude that the chaps at Island Records had identified what they thought constituted, hitherto, the "Florence sound", and then simply produced an entire album of it. I found the result somewhat less invigorating, less wild and haphazard than Lungs, F+tM’s debut, and wanted to know if it would be better on stage.