August is often a quiet month on the release front but theartsdesk on Vinyl came across a host of music deserving of attention. Now that even Sony, one of the biggest record companies in the world, are starting to press their own vinyl again, it’s safe to say records aren’t disappearing quite yet. On the contrary, the range of material is staggering in its breadth. So this month we review everything from spectral folk to boshing techno to the soundtrack of Guardians of The Galaxy 2.

According to Pete Frame’s book Rock Family Trees, Fairport Convention had 15 different line-ups between 1968 and 1978, the period covered by the new box set Come All Ye – The First 10 Years. Fairport Convention #7, extant from November 1971 to February 1972, featured no one from the first three iterations of the band, which had taken them up to June 1969. Evidently, the actuality of Fairport Convention is fluid.

The 1960s were “hilarious”, says one young character in this revival, starring Broadway icon Stockard Channing, of Alexi Kaye Campbell’s 2009 family drama at the Trafalgar Studios. How so? “Oh you know, the clothes, the hair, the raging idealism.” The thought of hippies marching for political causes, smoking Gauloises on the Left Bank or storming the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, and all the time wearing sandals and beads. Yes, to anyone under the age of 60 that must seem funny.

Like his smash-hit My Night With Reg, Kevin Elyot's first and last plays have a role to play in the history of gay theatre, but do they work? Emphatically not in the case of Twilight Song (★★), completed – one is tempted to say, sketched – shortly before his death in 2014, though four out of five actors at the admirable Park Theatre give it their best shot.

Between them, Marylebone Beat Girls and Milk of the Tree cover the years 1964 to 1973. Each collects tracks recorded by female singers: whether credited as solo acts, fronting a band or singer-songwriters performing self-penned material. That the two compilations dovetail is coincidental – they were released by different labels on the same day – but they embrace the period when the singer-songwriter was codified and when, as the liner notes of Milk of the Tree put it, “female voices began to be widely heard in the [music] industry.”

In media coverage of Woodstock, Santana always seems to be overshadowed by the oft-mentioned cultural significance of Hendrix’s “Star-Spangled Banner”. However, go check their performances, side by side, for pure visceral thrills, and it’s Santana’s amped Latin explosion that comes up trumps. If he hadn’t spent the better part of the Seventies and Eighties turning out tedious jazz-fusion (as Hendrix might well have done, had he lived), Santana would be on many more 21^st century posters and T-shirts.

1999’s collaborative Supernatural album famously rehabilitated him as a commercial entity and last year’s Santana IV, his fieriest effort in aeons, showed there’s still petrol in the tank. However, Power of Peace sounds like it was more fun to make than it is to listen to. Carlos Santana and his percussive powerhouse of a wife, Cindy Blackman, join Ronnie and Ernie Isley and their spouses, Kandy and Tracey (who sing backing vocals) for a church-scented family jam. They cover a range of classic soul, the predominant style an uninspired, often insipid wander in the footsteps of Marvin Gaye’s early Seventies output (“Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)” is even covered).

The Isley Brothers are themselves no slouches in the guitar department, and even once had a young Hendrix in their band, but things seldom catch alight, despite much fret-wrangling. The opening tracks get things off to a decent start. A version of “Are You Ready”, originally by psychedelic Sixties soul dudes The Chambers’ Brothers, bodes well, working up a groove, even if a rap section for Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground” doesn’t bear close inspection (“Crossing the River Jordan/Like spending time with Michael Jordan”). Unfortunately, after the passable opening trio, things slump into a bland string of slowies, including the only original song, “I Remember”.

There are other passable moments, such as a feisty take on Muddy Waters’ “I Just Want to Make Love to You”, and an impeccable pure jazz version of Leon Thomas’s “Let the Rain Fall on Me” – the album’s best number – but Power of Peace is certainly not going to end up among the essential back catalogue of any of those involved.

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Overleaf: listen to The Isley Brothers & Santana "Are You Ready"

Victim was released in 1961. Six years would pass before the passing of the Sexual Offences Act cautiously exempted from prosecution men over 20 who had consensual sex in private. Yet the Basil Dearden suspenser probably played an equally important part in de-stigmatising homosexuality by highlighting the ugliness of homophobia.

Baron Munchausen’s exploits have been filmed before. Terry Gilliam’s star-studded 1988 version floundered thanks to a sub-par script, and there’s an infamous 1943 German adaptation, commissioned by Goebbels. This one, Karel Zeman’s The Fabulous Baron Munchausen, is far better than both. Completed in 1961, it’s technically stunning.

The Time Has Come was issued in late 1971. Anne Briggs’ second album and her second to reach shops that year, it followed an eponymous set released that April. That was on the folk label Topic and produced by the pivotal A. L. Lloyd, who had been key to propagating Britain’s traditional music since the late 1930s.

To anyone other than Eighties and Nineties indie obsessives, the guitarist from The House of Love and Levitation and the singer from Adorable getting together in 2014 did not cause a stir. However, both had stylistically leapt away from their pasts, and the resulting album, Broken Heart Surgery, showcased rich, heart-worn songs, filtered through a sensibility somewhere between Lee Hazelwood and John Barry 1960s film scores. It brought them a new audience. Their second album is equally palatable.

Boasting great cover art by photographer Rosanne de Lange, featuring the now disappeared car graveyard in Chatillon, Belgium, We Are Millionaires is also appropriately rusted and battered-sounding, bringing to mind the broken junkie romanticism of Nikki Sudden or even late period Johnny Thunders (especially on the frail ballad “Over You”). Lyrically, it’s good, poetic stuff too. The lovely title song is a peach. “We both love downbeat movies,” it almost whispers, like a Byronic barfly at 3am, “Inhabit a monochrome world, where the beat-up hero never seems to get the girl,” before blossoming into a twinkling, longing Bickers guitar solo, with a hint of Dave Gilmour about its technical skill.

The finger-clickin’, Hispanic-flavoured “If the World Is All We Have” is a stoned, filmic rock’n’roll shuffle, a bit Chris Isaak, a bit Twin Peaks, while “Mary Celeste” is Lou Reed in melodically light “Stephanie Says” mode. Throughout the whole album, there’s a clear, world-weary thoughtfulness that’s most welcome in this age of heart-on-sleeve non-specific singer-songwriter vulnerability. There’s also a shining instrumental twang to it that lifts these nine songs, gives them added heft.

A life lived pursuing dreams on the fringes of the music business has given Pete Fij and Terry Bickers requisite experience to fill their work with a resigned charm, and also, more importantly, the ability to attach that feeling to songs of forlorn lusciousness. The pair may be heading into the most fruitful period of their career.

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Overleaf: Watch the video for Pete Fij & Terry BIckers's "Love's going to Get You"