Everyone keeps upping their game with what and how they’re presenting music in these unwelcome times, and this week sees a red hot selection on offer. Below is a cross section of the best that’s out there to see, hear and get involved with

Tomorrowland Around the World

Heart’s Ease is about more than the music. Through its songs, it also chronicles a life lived. Shirley Collins learnt “Barbara Allen” at school. She first encountered “The Christmas Song” when it was sung by her early influence and inspiration The Copper Family. “Merry Golden Tree” was originally heard in 1959, in Arkansas. One song takes lyrics by her former husband, Austin John Marshall, and sets them to music.

Coronavirus blah blah blah. Glastonbury cancelled. What to do? Didn’t go to the 2010 festival for reasons too tedious to go into. Suffered the worst FOMO of my life. This is different. There is no Glastonbury. But sitting around at home… we’ve all been doing that for months…

It’s 15 years since two schoolfriends with a passion for acoustic music opened Green Note in London’s Camden Town, their goal to create “somewhere friendly, comfortable, intimate, and with the best music on offer every night of the week”. It quickly established itself as the go-to club for talented musicians at the outset of their careers – Amy Winehouse and Ed Sheeran played early gigs, and Diana Jones made her UK debut on the Green Note stage. Leonard Cohen once came by for a private gig – his picture hangs on the wall along with other shape-shifting musical icons.

The lockdown may be loosening but we’re no nearer to gigs and festivals occurring so, for the foreseeable, online is where it’s at. Here, then, is the latest selection of musical happenings that you can wrap your eyes and ears around during the coming week. Dive in!

Make Music Day

In the series one finale of metal-detecting sitcom Detectorists, Lance fills in a hole he’s dug after unearthing nothing more than a rusted ring-pull. As the camera pans downwards, we see the riches that were hiding beneath. He was looking in the right place, it’s just that the good stuff lay tantalisingly out of reach.

Echo in the Canyon is a lamentably thin documentary about the vibrant folk-rock music scene that flourished in the bohemian Los Angeles neighbourhood of Laurel Canyon from 1965 to 1967.

Music, as the sociologist Simon Frith long ago pointed out, is “an experience of placing: in responding to a song we are drawn, haphazardly, into affective emotional alliances with the performer and with the performer’s other fans”. Music makes you feel things, it’s about shared emotional experiences. And while, since the invention of the Walkman, those experiences are possible in the isolation of one’s own headphones, nothing can begin to touch the communal concert experience.

For better or worse, the lockdown may be easing in the UK but there’s no sign of any gig action, even on the far distant horizon. So it’s back to our screens for all that, and here’s the latest, liveliest selection of concerts, conversations and virtual festival action for the coming week! Dive in!

The Other Songs/Brit School Festival

On Saturday there was a stark choice: BBC TV’s not-the-Eurovision special or Billy Bragg live on Facebook in support of The Leadmill’s campaign to raise vital funds for both the iconic Sheffield venue, 40 years old this year, and the Music Venue Trust Crisis Fund. So no choice at all, the canning of Eurovision being one of the few plus-points of lockdown.