Elf Lyons’ new show, Love Songs To Guinea Pigs, has moved away from her usual slapstick and absurdist mimicry into new realms of traditional stand up. She cites the reason as being unable to do mime on the radio, but there’s a more serious reason for the switch.

After ChifChaff, her Edinburgh show last year, and a string of shows involving ballet, hula hooping and ice skating, the comic found herself in bed, paralysed from the waist down. What came next was corrective spinal surgery, adoption of two guinea pigs, a bout of depression, a break up, and a return to the stage.

The Ol’ Black Eyes is Back Tour celebrates Alice Cooper’s 50 years using his stage name. He’d been around under other names before 1969 but Alice Cooper – originally the title of the band rather than the man – achieved success as the Seventies began by combining trash-glam drag with stompin’ riffy music. He’s famed for his theatrical shows but needed to be on especially fine form tonight to match support acts who are both riveting.

Kano’s lyrics often sound like a wake, mixing mournfulness and anger as they raise a toast to fallen friends on abandoned estates, casualties of crushing pressures alien to the authorities who pronounce on them in the tabloids and parliament.

One question springs immediately to mind on hearing that Romesh Ranganathan’s new stand-up show, The Cynic’s Mixtape, is touring: how does he find the time? Ranganathan has overtaken Jack Whitehall as Britain’s most media ubiquitous comic, with a deluge of TV shows and appearances, a column in the Guardian newspaper and even a recent autobiography. However, his TV CV is hit’n’miss, which leads to a second question: can he still cut it in the live arena?

It’s been a couple of years since Peter Perrett, the former frontman and creative force behind the much loved but commercially under-performing Only Ones decided that he’d had enough of being a mere legend and got back into the musical ring. He had made a brief reappearance in the mid-1990s under the guise of The One, but that was all very fleeting, and Perrett’s infamous bad habits soon reasserted themselves until a short Only Ones’ reformation tour 10 years ago.

This brilliantly conceived and executed show is about provenance in art. It’s also about our perceptions of the truth. However, it’s a show where it would be churlish to reveal too much of what goes on.

Maya Angelou’s iconic poem Still I Rise is a good starting point for many things in life. But it’s a particularly good beginning for a piece of contemporary dance choreography, and Victoria Fox has done a great job of bringing the poet’s words to life.

It’s a rigidly structured one hour work – definite sections of movement working to a contained pace and spacing, split up by sections of music ranging from intense strings and solo opera voice to upbeat club music.

Tonight comes with a caveat, delivered before proceedings begin by the one-woman show’s writer and performer Nicôle Lecky, who’s sitting in a chair centre-stage. She damaged her foot during Sunday’s matinee at the Brighton Festival, dancing about, and has since had to do the whole thing seated.

Primal Scream have played in this city, in the recent past, at the 4,500 capacity Brighton Centre but tonight they’re in a venue which holds well under 400. A bananas atmosphere reigns when bands of their stature play intimate shows, and so it is tonight.

Much of Rokia Traoré’s set on Saturday night comprised folk songs about Mali’s warrior kings, connecting with her country’s fabulously wealthy, proudly powerful past. They suit this diplomat’s daughter’s regal stature, which she has put at the service of a nation still enviably rich in musical resources, but battered by civil war, poverty and terrorist attack.