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.

Sam Shepard came to live in London in 1971, nursing ambitions to be a rock musician. When he went home three years later, he was soon to be found on the drumstool of Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder tour. But in between, not long after he arrived in London, he was waylaid by the burgeoning fringe scene, and the rock god project took a back seat.

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.”

Production gloss and deliberation are not notions immediately springing to mind while pondering the 1976-era Ramones. Even so, this new edition of their second album, the ever-wonderful Leave Home, reveals that careful consideration was given to how they presented themselves on record.

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.

In February 1983, New Musical Express ran a cover feature categorising what it termed “positive punk”. Bands co-opted into this ostensibly new trend were Blood & Roses, Brigandage, Danse Society, Rubella Ballet, Sex Gang Children, Southern Death Cult, The Specimen, UK Decay and The Virgin Prunes.

The precocious Steve Winwood joined the Spencer Davis Group when he was 14, when the Sixties themselves were still young, and hasn’t really stopped ever since. True, it has been nearly a decade since his last album of new material, Nine Lives, but he has toured with Eric Clapton and Tom Petty, pops up at assorted festivals and live events, and has put together a highly capable live band that can bend his songs into shapes you might never have thought possible.

Peter Perrett is one of the most underrated songwriters. If people have heard of him, it’s down to The Only Ones’ classic, “Another Girl, Another Planet”, but The Only Ones made three albums (and an odds’n’ends collection) as the Seventies turned to the Eighties, all peppered with gems. Perrett also surfaced in the mid-Nineties as The One, with another album, Woke Up Sticky. However, since then, despite multiple false starts and an Only Ones reunion (teasing fans with unreleased new song “Black Operations”), there’s been no sign of new material until now.

Perrett’s career was famously derailed by drug use but, in his mid-sixties, he’s finally clean. Accompanied by his sons, Jamie (guitar) and Peter Jr (bass), he’s relaunching, and has a sturdy independent, Domino, behind him. The cheering news is that How The West Was Won is a good album, if not a great one. Much of it is, appropriately, devoted to loss and regret and, especially, his feelings for his wife, Xena, his partner in crime through thick and thin since they ran away together as teenagers.

“Epic Story” and “C Voyeurger” are heart-on-sleeve, almost teenage-sounding gushes of love, containing heart-wrenching contrition. He stares mortality in the face with a shrug on “Sweet Endeavour”, while “Hard to Say No” and “Something in My Brain” lay out wryly observed perspectives on addiction. The title track is incongruous but rather good, a wordy jam taking a poke at American cultural and imperial dominance (“We started out as a beacon of hope/But the dream of liberty quickly turned into a joke/The Indians and Mexicans were the first to feel the rope”). Jamie Perrett learnt guitar at the knee of Only Ones virtuoso John Perry, and he musters impressive work on the six-and-a-half minute “Troika” and others.

It’s an album that shows Peter Perrett’s unique voice on fine form, and his lyrical abilities undiminished since his prime. The shortfall is in memorable tunes, with only moving closer “Take Me Home” up there with his very greatest work. But that is, admittedly, a ridiculously high benchmark. As he sings, “At least I’m now capable of one last defiant breath,” I can only hope he has many more than that. There’s energized creativity here and it’s great to have him back.

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Overleaf: Watch the video for Peter Perrett "How The West Was Won"

Maurice Hatton’s 1978 Long Shot comes with the subtitle “A film about filmmaking”, a nod at what has practically become a cinematic sub-category in itself. But while other directors have used the genre for philosophical or aesthetic rumination, Hatton’s subject is far more immediate and down-to-earth – the perilous business of just trying to get a movie made.

Specifically, an independent movie: Long Shot is a glorious satire on the sheer rigmarole of attempting to stitch a deal together. It’s set against the backdrop of the 1977 Edinburgh Film Festival, which gives rich extra atmosphere, and has a range of cameos from various figures in the film world who were clearly in on the joke, happily sending themselves up in sympathy with the tribulations of would-be producer Charlie and his scriptwriter Neville as they try to get their Aberdeen oil adventure drama Gulf and Western off the ground.

Alan Bennett cameos as a hilariously diffident doctor

The two are played by Charles Gormley, the Glasgow director who moved from early documentary work – he had a production company, Tree Films (“Branches Everywhere”), with Bill Forsyth in the 1970s – to make features like 1986’s Heavenly Pursuits, and actor and television writer Neville Smith. Hatton gives it all a nicely sardonic verité touch, complete with elements of voice-over narration and Shandy-esque intertitles, along the lines of “On the dangers of not looking before you leap” or “Wherein ways are explored to keep the wolf from the door”. One simply announces, “Scene missing”. By definition a micro-budget project, it was shot in grainy black and white on a combination of short ends and some East German ORWO stock that was pushing its expiry date.

Charlie has a script – though the pains of rewriting are central to the film – and some funding promised, if he can get a name director on board. So it’s off to Edinburgh, in search of Sam Fuller (the director had a long association with the Film Festival there), but Fuller is nowhere to be found. “Is he press?” one assistant in the festival offices queries. Charlie tries to interest Wim Wenders, too, who's there to present his The American Friend (Wenders is credited as “Another Director”). John Boorman becomes another later candidate.

The duo becomes an unlikely trio with the appearance, for no particular good reason but very charmingly, of actress Annie (Anne Zelda). Various picaresque dashes around the Edinburgh streets follow, one in a car commandeered from Stephen Frears (credited as “Biscuit Man"). Gallerist Richard Demarco appears somewhat grouchily as himself, Alan Bennett turns in a brilliant cameo as a hilariously diffident doctor who, on being told that writing is a lonely profession, suggests meals on wheels. Susannah York gamely plays along: hearing that the female role is underdeveloped, she coolly replies, “So you came to me?”

Long Shot is a perfect fit for the BFI’s Flipside strand, a rediscovery that is absolutely worth making – as well as a snapshot of the times, it’s also a true reflection of the enormous struggles, not to mention ingenuity, that go into getting a film idea anywhere near the screen. Gormley simply had cinema in his blood – Glasgow surely deserves a memorial to the director – and the film's final scene transports him in glorious technicolour to Hollywood, cruising the boulevards in a stretch convertible. It's a lovely ending, the stuff that dreams are made on.

This release's three extras are right on topic, too. Ross Wilson’s 1986 Hooray for Holyrood celebrates the 40th anniversary of the Edinburgh Film Festival: it’s presented by Robbie Coltrane, who doubled as a driver for the event in his stylish vintage auto (Sam Fuller did turn up, and was among his passengers). Sean Connery's Edinburgh, from 1982, is exactly what it says on the tin, lavish in its production values. Maurice Hatton’s earlier Scene Nun, Take One, a 1964 26-minuter, is a London street comedy starring Susannah York and the adventures that follow when she dresses up as a nun. There's an affectionate booklet tribute to Gormley, "Long Shot to Hollywood", by Bill Forsyth. An enchantingly off-beat package.

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Overleaf: watch the new trailer for Long Shot

A well-known internet sales site currently offers seven previous home cinema editions of The Bird With the Crystal Plumage. Some are DVD or Blu-ray only, others are on both formats – increasing the amount of packages on offer. Only a brave company would enter such a crowded market with another version of the film to take the total to eight. Yet, here we are with a new dual format DVD/ Blu-ray edition.