There’s a gorgeous song on this album called “With Love”, on which singer Guy Garvey rhymes “dentures” with “adventures”. And there, in a nutshell, you have Elbow: juxtaposing grubby, prosaic earthbound reality with soaring romance, finding magic in the everyday. And what accentuates this gift of theirs is Garvey’s habit of singing in his native Lancastrian vernacular (why, apart from the Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner, don’t more English singers sound like English singers?); his accent summons up images of mottled northern townscapes and lowering skies, while lyrical flourishes such as the “simian stroll” of “Lippy Kids” add to the picture; his tenor delivery, by contrast, has a quality of sweetness and innocence. Grit and romance.

Build a Rocket Boys! treads a similar path to the one that Elbow have been following for the past 20 years, which is no bad thing – having produced just five albums in that time, they could hardly be accused of flogging a dead horse. The opening song, "The Birds", follows the familiar Elbow template, which was finally brought to a wider audience by the success of their 2008 Mercury Prize-winning album, The Seldom Seen Kid: a slow, solemn rhythm, the steady accretion of layer upon layer of instrumentation, a soaring melody, a sense of uplift, and finally a big moment of sunbursting ecstasy. Glorious. The remaining 10 tracks are a likewise familiar mixture of sweet, quiet, semi-acoustic tunes, darker guitar-driven numbers and widescreen epics, all densely textured, multilayered and packed with detail, supplemented by contributions from Manchester’s Hallé Youth Choir.

There’s always been a plaintive quality to Elbow’s music, but here it seems more pronounced, with songs such as "Jesus is a Rochdale Girl" (exquisite electric piano) evoking a powerful sense of nostalgia, a bittersweet yearning for the simplicity of youth. But there’s glory, too, in the form of “Open Arms”, a classic piece of singalong Elbow in the same vein as “One Day Like This” (from The Seldom Seen Kid) or “Grace Under Pressure” (from Cast of Thousands), and a song that will surely be swirling around the rafters of arenas on their forthcoming tour. Elbow: more power to them.

This isn't an awful album. It even starts really well. The opener, “Four Letter Word”, comes pounding in with the sort of jackbooted psychedelic rock attitude that Oasis always promised and so rarely delivered. Add a swooshy noise and it could almost be early Hawkwind, so fried-synapse rock'n'roll is it. Then comes “Millionaire”, which if you heard it blind you might accept as a lost track by The La's, so timelessly, northernly tuneful is it. But sadly, inevitably, comes “The Roller”, with all its excruciating Lennonisms leaking all over the place: a track that slams the face of creativity into the kerbstone again and again and again.

In contemporary British drama, kids are usually either suffering or doomed innocents. But Winterlong's Oscar is different. He is a loner who was abandoned by his schoolgirl mum and his scary dad at the age of four years old, and tries to make his way in a chilly world armed only with his small but powerful reserves of love. The writing throbs like an infected wound, so you can see why actor Andrew Sheridan’s debut play was joint winner of the 2008 Bruntwood Prize for playwriting, receiving its premiere at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester earlier this month, and now visiting the Soho Theatre in London.

When theartsdesk asked Simply Red’s PR company for some pictures of the band to accompany this review, the images sent were of Mick Hucknall – alone. Which is probably all you need to know about who Simply Red are. Last night’s audience at this, Simply Red’s final ever live show, needed no reminding that it was all about Hucknall, however he’s billed. For them, his arrival on stage after the band had set the groove drew more applause than the music.

Here, we present the exclusive first showing of a new video by the Brighton/London band Belleruche. This clip for “Fuzz Face” is highly arresting, an ingenious and slightly disturbing collision of hi and low-tech, made using thousands of photocopies, and its indicative of a band who are taking some very interesting ideas into the mainstream. But more importantly from theartsdesk's point of view, Belleruche's increasing profile is indicative of a broader cultural shift in the music world.

Howard Jacobson, fresh from his Booker Prize triumph, was on an admirable mission last night: to rescue the good name of the Victorians. He wanted us to stop caricaturing our 19th-century forebears as prudish, self-righteous, pompous and hypocritical - you know, the sort of people who were so repressed that they went about covering piano legs in case thoughts should turn to the sensual curve of a lady’s well-turned ankle, but who were also notorious for sexual peccadillos involving underage maidservants, and worse.

I Am Kloot are a band it’s hard not to like in an almost personal way. The Manchester-based trio exude warmth, northern charm and a sense of self-contentment, seemingly impervious to the fact that they still haven’t made it as big as everyone thinks they should. Maybe that’s unsurprising. With the band’s leader in his forties, maybe it would be odder if they weren’t making music for reasons other than pampering egos. And it shows.

A drama about Britain’s (and by the time Coronation Street reaches its 50th birthday in December, the world’s) longest-running soap starts with a huge advantage - its producers could just quote lumps of the brilliant original scripts, written by Corrie’s creator, Tony Warren, and be done with it. But Daran Little, himself a former writer on the show, resisted that urge (well, mostly) when penning The Road to Coronation Street, an affectionate and witty prequel that told us how the soap came about, or rather, how it almost didn’t.

Maybe it's a truism that most instrumental music, at least before World War One, aspires to the condition of song. Few have gone farther in that respect than the composers of the three purely orchestral works in last night's Prom. Add to the mix a conductor of impeccable operatic credentials who knows how to draw intimate vocalising from his players, a promising lyric-dramatic pianist and one of the most unusual great soprano voices of our time, and an evening of singing heartbreak was the result.

It’s not often you find yourself in an art gallery with the business end of a bullwhip whizzing inches from your nose. Wielded by a disconcertingly slight, black-haired woman who can barely be half its length, the terrifying instrument defines the dimly lit space with its whirling undulations and earsplitting crack, sending the gaggle of spectators cowering into adjacent rooms. Why there is also a grand piano present is probably only entirely known to the unnamed artist who brought this trickily titled exhibition into being.