The video for this Kansas fantasist’s new single shows Monáe in harshly lit close-up singing the adrenalin-charged “Cold War” directly to camera. But then halfway through the song her concentration goes and she starts laughing and then crying, leaving one wondering what the thinking was behind its release. Perhaps this “artist and business woman” (as she describes herself) deduced that such a curiosity would get people talking and therefore watching - and she was right: it’s had over a quarter of a million hits so far.

A drop of menstrual blood spatters the ground in the opening shot of The Runaways, an insolent enough metaphor for the unstaunchable female energy that drives writer-director Floria Sigismondi’s bracing biopic of the pioneering all-girl teenage 1970s rock band until it heads up a narrative cul-de-sac. The blood is leaked by future lead singer Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning), experiencing her first period while scampering to a club with her less innocent twin sister Marie (Riley Keough), who’ll soon be left in the slipstream of Cherie’s fame to become a drudge.

Shea Seger is a woman with a story. A story of a career interrupted. At the age of 20, the fragile and slightly dangerous-looking blonde from Texas came over here and made a record which sent ripples across the pond of the Americana scene. Shortly after, her father became crippled after a botched operation on an old Vietnam injury and she returned to Texas to care for him. During those 10 years she also brought up a little girl, Luna, and lived in a trailer. Now she’s back in the UK; and she’s pumped all the frustration, disappointments and anger from that decade into a new record, simply called Shea Seger.

Last night was the third and probably last time this 21-year-old Nashville songstress will grace the humble Windmill pub in Brixton with her charismatic yet down-to-earth presence. Not because the gig wasn’t a sell-out and an unqualified success, but because of the radio airplay and unanimous critical praise she has received for her debut album Own Side Now from everyone from the Daily Mail to the Independent. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if by this time next year she’s performing at the Union Chapel or even the Barbican.

It’s funny how things turn out. Of the four former members of Led Zeppelin, John Bonham is dead, John Paul Jones is an odd and unpredictable figure, popping up only occasionally with an album or a collaboration, while Jimmy Page is, according to Mick Wall’s definitive 2008 Led Zeppelin biography When Giants Walked the Earth, lost in a twilit world of his own creation.

The keyboard player usually associated with Paul Weller is "Merton" Mick Talbot, who, after leaving mod revival band The Merton Parkas, filled out The Jam’s sound in their twilight days and accompanied Weller’s journey through the Style Council. Andy Crofts of The Moons has made the journey in reverse: currently Weller’s live keyboard player, he also fronts and plays guitar with The Moons, a five-piece he formed in 2007.

Coming on stage in a gangsta bandana, wrap-around shades, and what looked like Saddam Hussein’s beard, Mr E was giving little away. There was no opening gambit, nor any indication of what direction the evening was going. Some had said the Scotland concerts hadn’t been so great. I heard one girl say that if Eels concerts had personalities they’d be as capricious as the fragile moods of the man simply known as E. But E stood there saying nothing.

The French have got serious form when it comes to twisting the determinedly uncool into something hip, a fact Phoenix illustrated so winningly last year with Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, a beautifully crafted album of mid-tempo soft rock which lounged dreamily in some critic-proof holding area between the mid-Seventies and early Eighties.

“One afternoon back in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, I met four scientists in a bar, they were on their way to West Africa to study a parasitic worm that attacks the eyeballs of human beings and turns them into blind men.” And so begin the sleeve notes of C W Stoneking’s second album, Jungle Blues. Last night this teller of tall and fevered tales washed up in deepest Brixton, to perform to a motley crowd in the gloomy but brightly painted Windmill pub. It was an unlikely juxtaposition which nevertheless worked rather well.

If there's one festival in Britain where people are ready for the rain, it's the Green Man. After all, nobody goes to the Brecon Beacons to sunbathe, right? The weekend, which began the spate of boutique and specialist festivals that dominate the summer season now, remains one of the most spirited in the UK, and its crowd seems to be one of the hardiest even when, as this year, the deluge is near-continuous.