If you weren’t already aware that the Guest Director of the 2012 Brighton Festival is acting royalty, the preponderance of fop fringes and artfully flung scarves at the Dome Concert Hall on Saturday night was a good clue. Vanessa Redgrave is the figurehead for this year’s reliably eclectic (if a little conceptually convoluted) programme. And judging by the opening Q&A, dotted with as many grassroots political activists as members of the Redgrave clan, she’s going to be a busy one.

So, Rizzle Kicks, teenybop pop-hop, right? So what we’re going to get is a bunch of over-excited tweens fobbed off with pre-recorded backing tracks, a bit of choreographed dancing and maybe some balloons? Certainly the support acts, Josh Osho and Mikill Pane, while passably entertaining, adhered to a minimal set-up and plenty of basic hype man call’n’response, but Rizzle Kicks didn’t. In fact, they firmly booted pre-conceptions into touch.

There's an unlikely comparison in the publicity material that accompanies my copy of In Time to Voices, the third release from Blood Red Shoes, in which the Brighton boy-girl duo are likened to Fleetwood Mac. While name-checking sound-alikes is the staple of the lazy music journalist, Nicks and Buckingham would probably have been the last place I'd have gone for a point of reference for Laura-Mary Carter and Steven Ansell's eerie harmonies.

Was it the players, or the play, that has made a phenomenon out of One Man, Two Guvnors, the prize-winning comedy now on its third London theatre and preparing to hop the pond to Broadway next month? Well, bacon and eggs(!), it turns out there’s life aplenty in Richard Bean’s Goldoni rewrite yet, even without the star wattage of James Corden and the insanely arched eyebrows of Oliver Chris.

My highlight was the sudden, last-gasp chance to see Mark Rylance as Johnny Byron in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, on its unexpected return to the West End. A cheap weekday matinee ticket found me in the front row, Rylance looming over me from the high stage, spewing alcohol; an unsteady, limping Lord of Misrule and, if he only could pull himself together, of a new Peasant’s Revolt against the unjust times we’re suffering. It seemed unbelievable he’d go through the whole thing again that night.

Example seems a most unlikely sex symbol but the four-fifths full Brighton Centre (capacity 5100) contains multiple gaggles of young women in their late teens and early twenties who want a piece of 29-year-old Elliot Gleave (EG = Example). My pal Don is bemused. “He looks like a bloke you’d see at a bus stop,” he exclaims above female screams. He does, albeit more stylishly dressed and with a hint of Edmund Blackadder (series one) about his severe fringed haircut.

It catches everyone out that Duran Duran’s version of the hip-hop classic “White Lines (Don’t Don’t Do It)” comes off so well. Not just affable entertainment but actually fiercely funky, raising a large section of the Brighton Centre to its feet. Duran’s 1995 covers album Thank You – from which the song comes - was once voted by Q magazine as the worst album ever, but looking around at the enthused reaction, including my own, that all seems rather irrelevant. Midway through their set, Duran Duran are a persuasive force.

“LSF” is unarguably a monster of a song. In fact, that whole of Kasabian's self-titled 2004 debut album was a cracker, but seeing the entire sold-out Brighton Centre, balconies and all, on their feet, hands aloft, as one, singing the wordless backing chorus of “LSF” is quite a thing. Even when they stop, and five of the six band members wander off, skinny rake guitarist Sergio Pizzorno stays back and conducts the crowd. He keeps walking away from the lip of the stage, teasing and then turning round and throwing his arms in the air, leading them onwards and upwards.

“Whose idea was it to do the gig in this shithole?” asks Captain Sensible towards the end of the night. He’s right. The East Wing is truly an atmosphere-free venue, a carpeted, low-ceilinged conference room that’s part of the much larger Brighton Centre complex. It’s easy to imagine it filled with municipal administrators milling about, the stink of coffee and the rustle of paperwork. Instead, it’s packed to the gills with men and women, mostly in their late forties and early fifties, mostly clad in black, lots of leather and badges.