Friday 7^th September

Sometimes, it doesn’t matter who you are. You might be a charismatic performer, or the most energetic band in the world. But some settings can’t be outperformed. Holding Berlin Festival at the city’s astonishing out-of-commission Tempelhof airport sets a challenge that’s almost impossible to rise to. Although it began working in the late 1920s, the surviving buildings were completed in 1941 and form a single block over a kilometre long, wrapped around an open quadrangle. The gleaming, pale buildings dwarf anything.

“There’re a lot of turds out there, ladies and gentlemen. But they’re not one of them.” It’s Friday afternoon in Larmer Tree Gardens, a wood-rimmed, laurel-trimmed, urn-decorated corner of Dorset, and thank yous are coming thick and fast for Bella Union, the indie label Simon Raymonde founded in 1997 with fellow Cocteau Twin Robin Guthrie.

It’s Sunday lunchtime and Swiss thrash metallers Battalion are hammering out jagged, smashed up riffage with gleeful ferocity. Indeed, every one of Bloodstock Open Air’s four stages contains bands playing the hardest metal. To aficionados this music breaks down into multiple sub-genres – death metal, power metal, prog metal, and on and on, ad infinitum - but to the rest of us it’s simply a fearsomely tough, ear-searing pummelling. Like all extreme music, it’s easy to dismiss as noise, and that’s both the point and missing the point.

East coast haar seeping into sun-drenched streets – familiar Edinburgh monuments disappearing dreamlike under blankets of mist, vibrant colour draining from the landscape as the city transformed into its more usual symphony in grey. The dramatic change in weather during the first weekend of the Edinburgh Art Festival has mirrored the overwhelming experience of one of this year’s major exhibitions.

FRIDAY 27 JULY

Whatever happened to roughing it? Camp Bestival is, famously, more an upmarket middle England fete than a festival in the Hawkwind-play-Stonehenge sense but, still, why would anyone queue two and a half hours for the “Posh Wash” showers? Barring a below-waist hygiene disaster, surely Wet Wipes and water are sufficient for a weekend?

You know, as someone tweeted, that the acid has kicked in when you see Prince Harry wearing a duck’s hat backstage, writes Peter Culshaw. For every newcomer like Harry or Channel 4’s Jon Snow, who raved about it, there were as many others others for whom WOMAD is an essential part of the British “summer” (although this year they were lucky with the weather). Now 30, which makes it an institution, the Peter Gabriel inspired Festival is a pretty well-oiled machine by now.

The vast Avignon Festival is not a neatly curated sequence of works which can be experienced - like certain art biennales or the Proms - as if on a conveyor belt. There are 50 productions in the official “In” during three weeks, and more than a thousand shows - mostly dross - in the “Off” fringe.

Iceland’s kings of heavy metal Momentum are launching into an assault called “The Creator of Malignign Metaphors”. It’s broad daylight and they’re playing about 10 meters from the kitchen window of a suburban-looking house. The stage is sited on an AstroTurf football pitch, with one of the goals pushed to the side of it. On the opposite side, kids are shimmying down a blow-up slide. Very little about G! conforms with the standard festival experience.

Way up in the mountains of northern Italy sits a small spa town called Porretta Terme. For many visitors it is the resort’s healing waters that brings them here. Yet for others it is the healing music – once a year the Porretta Soul Music Festival is held across the second to last weekend in July. Here veterans of American soul music take the stage, often performing their only European show of the year (and, sometimes, many years).