One effect of the film I Get Knocked Down, a playfully constructed journey around the life of Chumbawamba vocalist Dunstan Bruce, is to remind that socio-political rage was once woven into the fabric of popular music.

My friend George claims to have nightmares about The Great Escape. In them he’s standing in an endless queue, never reaching the front, never entering the venue, and never seeing the band he wants to see. That was his experience the only time he attended, and he consequently reckons The Great Escape is rubbish.

“I’ve been going for years and that’s never happened to me,” I said to him.

“Yeah, well, you’re press, aren’t you,” he responded, with only a smidgeon of bitterness.

“I s’pose so,” I replied, with only a smidgeon of smugness.

Onstage at The Old Market in Hove, New York’s Mykki Blanco has been waving around a knot of garlic bulbs as if it were a wand or occult aspergillum. At some point during Blanco’s punchy rendition of 2016 single “Loner”, or possibly the dizzier “Summer Fling”, they transfer it to the flies of their trousers, let it hang there, all mischief. They explain that this is the result of the band becoming obsessed with “a mad coven of witches in Italy”.

The gentleman in the centre of the picture above is Ivan Dorn. In Ukraine, he’s a pop star. A big pop star. His music, as he puts it on stage during the show opening Tallinn-Narva Music Week, is “pure Ukrainian house music.” Yep, there’s the bing-bong piano lines and cowbell beats of the pop end of house.

The latest edition of Peter Culshaw’s occasional global radio shows focuses totally on Ukraine, looking at music, art, culture and resistance.

Hilarious, potty-mouthed and mesmerisingly beautiful, Nadine Shah is on superb form at the Ramsgate Festival of Sound’s closing evening show. And aside from the banter there is, of course, that remarkable voice – hugely powerful and somehow perfectly suited to this enchanting outdoor venue. In fact, this is the first time the Winterstoke Sun Shelter has been used for a gig – I doubt it will be the last. It was simply magical.

Feet firmly planted on fertile native soil, but always open to the world, lyric-dramatic soprano Birgit Nilsson soared into realms no-one from the rolling hills and coastline of Sweden’s Bjäre peninsula, where she grew up, could possibly have imagined. The Met, Bayreuth, and all the other great opera houses of the world fell over themselves to acquire stakes in her special incandescence, but she always returned to her home region.

The popcorn on offer as you enter the Pleasance’s performing space at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre quickly fills the air with its rich, sugary scent. It’s a smell that sets the scene nicely for a show set in a cinema, but also an aroma that takes on increasingly heavy, cloying, sickly – and inescapable – connotations as Screen 9 progresses.

Ageing Mick wakes up on Portobello beach with two gold rings in his pocket, and embarks on the bender to end all benders in order to work out what or who they’re for. Young Gilly has a poorly pug named Mr Immanuel Kant, but can’t face having it put down. Gaynor has suffered from fibromyalgia for decades, but must put it aside if she’s to see her newborn granddaughter. Dougie and Ciara are preparing for their life-changing arrival with one last hedonistic night on the dance floor.

Fear of Roses Assembly Roxy ★★★