The minister for culture Ed Vaizey has said that London 2012 isn't just about London, but showcasing Britain to the world. This may be true in the simple geographical spread of events leading up to the Olympic Games, but in Derry-Londonderry's case, it ís equally about instilling a sense of civic pride. In 1991, Irish poet and playwright Seamus Heaney adapted Sophocles' Philoctetes as The Cure at Troy.

It's a nervous beginning. This is the first ever presentation of the first proper album by one of the lynchpins of British underground music, and the soundsystem isn't right. Record label personnel and friends are flung across Paris to requisition new loudspeakers, while the invited audience drinks mojitos. After all this, it would be deeply embarrassing if the record turned out to be bad.

So here it is, our fourth show of new, rare, exclusive and peculiar music - as ever recorded at Red Bull Studios with Brendon Harding ably manning the machines.

There is film footage of those opening magical, transformative moments: of Brown intoning, “The time, the time is now. Do it now, do it now.” Film, however, could not capture the effect the band’s arrival had on the mood of the crowd; it was a jaw-dropping biblical reaction, of relief, amazement, worship and unadulterated joy. “It was like a massive pilgrimage to witness,” said Roddy McKenna, the man who had been instrumental in signing the band to Jive/Zomba.

With the yelling and posturing, R.U.T.A. are clearly a punk band, but it’s like no punk band you’ve ever heard before. The lyrics are in Polish, for one thing, and there are no guitars, but Middle Eastern lutes, archaic fiddles and a battery of percussion. They only formed last year, but already R.U.T.A. – a jokey acronym for the Movement of Utopia, Transcendence and Anarchy - have stirred up controversy.

It was already apparent from Melody Gardot's last album, My One and Only Thrill, that she harboured a more than passing infatuation with the music of Brazil and Latin America. "I love Brazilian music, it's one of my favourite genres," she said at the time. "I love the Stan Getz bossa nova years, I love Getz/Giberto, Jobim, Caetano Veloso... "

After a double set of live studio guests in our last show, it's just Joe and Peter this time, and thus a lot more music and discussion. Our intrepid explorers ponder whether there's anything new under the sun, looking at new-sounding folk and old-sounding electronica, angry British hip hop, Swedish jazz-punk, Mexican boutique hotels, murder blues and Crowley-referencing ambient music. 

A Salford lad who used to work as a bolt-cutter by day and sing in working men's clubs at night, Russell Watson started out in showbiz by singing popular hits by Elvis Presley, Neil Diamond or Simon & Garfunkel alongside a few belters from famous musicals. One night the patron of the Wigan Road Working Men's Club suggested he should have a go at Puccini's "Nessun Dorma".

My, what strange and wondrous treasures await the record producer given exclusive access to the private vaults of a Beatle. He will, for instance, find entire radio programmes preserved on multi-track tape, and recordings of F1 cars roaring past at some unspecified race track. He will stumble upon a humbled Fab being given his very first sitar lesson by Ravi Shankar, and be privy to a brief musical moment beamed in across the decades from a room at the Jaipur Palace Hotel. There will be a few decent songs, too.

Levon Helm, who died yesterday from cancer at the age of 71, was not only the drummer in The Band, one of the load-bearing beams of American roots rock. He was also an astonishingly soulful singer, whether as lead or harmony, with a voice that seemed to imbue everything he sang with an unfussy yet absolute truth, as inescapable and essential as the earth.

Helm’s distinctive crook-backed playing style and immersed singing, reaching up from his drum stool toward the microphone like a wolf howling at the moon, were marks of a true one-off.