It’s been nearly 30 years since Gaz Coombes’s former band Supergrass released their first brash single “Caught by the Fuzz”, and he hasn’t stopped making great indie music since. His second solo album Matador received a Mercury Prize nomination in 2015, setting the bar high for World’s Strongest Man but, with its emotional complexity, melodic grace, and classically Coombes-ian soundscapes, it easily surpasses these expectations. 

Simon Napier-Bell’s film has a huge appetite for its subject, which is, of course, the half-century of gay history in Britain that followed the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality brought by the Wolfenden Report in 1967. 50 Years Legal barely slows for a moment over its 90-minute run, concentrating on the wealth of personal testimony of some four dozen interviewees, drawn predominantly from the worlds of entertainment and the arts, its perspective completed by a small rank of politicians and public figures.

Everyone was involved – in different ways, at different times – in the history that they talk about, their experiences coloured by a huge range of emotions, from anger, both raw and considered, to humour. 50 Years Legal was first broadcast on Sky Arts in July 2017 (there is an accompanying book) as part of last year’s generous range of offerings marking the anniversary. Another was Peter Ackroyd’s Queer City, a wider history of gay London over two millennia, that devoted some 50 pages to the period that Napier-Bell covers in his film, but somehow managed to present it as almost dry-as-dust history. To say that 50 Years Legal gives us a sense of history as a living entity would be a massive understatement, and its testimony is incisively backed up by the director's choice of archive material, including plenty of treats. 

It’s presented in a rapid-fire edit (full kudos to editor Joshua Hughes for bringing the whole structure together), with contributions delivered in bites of a sentence or two, themes recurring over a narrative that Napier-Bell divides into five loose chapters, each of a decade. The effect is somehow cyclical – not unlike the film's visual interludes, gymnastic hoop gyrations from Matthew Richardson Circus Art – which makes it as difficult to single out any one episode as it would be egregious to choose from any of the contributors (though it should remind us just how considerable is the debt that Britain's gay community owes to Peter Tatchell). It's a collective company, as the DVD cover indicates (pictured right), in which men very much dominate, though women and trans people do feature more as the years move on.

There’s occasionally a sense of being bombarded with information and feeling, the result no doubt of Napier-Bell having filmed so much more material than the film's length could accomodate. But the director closes with a much longer excerpt from the remarkable speech that Ian McKellen gave at the Oxford Union in 2015 (main picture), its lapidary power all the more striking for the contrast with what has come before. It also reminds us, hauntingly, that for all the achievements and advances of a remarkable half-century, one that has changed British society beyond recognition, the struggle against prejudice is never going to go away.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for 50 Years Legal & Ian McKellen's speech at the Oxford Union, in full

The opening couplet on Plan B’s new album runs thus: “What the hell have I got to be grateful for?/Can’t be the money as I wasn’t trying to make no more.” One appealing aspect of singer-actor-MC Ben Drew is that he’s spiky, emanating a certain rage. It’s good to see that, after six years away, it’s still there. However, Heaven Before All Hell Breaks Loose, is no Ill Manors, Drew’s 2012 film/album polemic about underclass Britain; instead, steeped in old soul and imaginative production, this is a rip-roaring 21^st century pop album, and a very good one.

Where Plan B’s last album in this vein, The Defamation of Strickland Banks, was a concept piece, with a discernible narrative, Heaven… is simply a tight collection of songs. Delivered with aplomb, Drew’s vocals are rich and impressive, somewhere between Otis Redding and Seal, often laid over Memphis-style rhythm & blues boosted on hip hop beats and surrounded by electronic trimmings. The album, written with various contemporary songwriters such as Foy Vance and Kid Harpoon, initially sticks to this formula, which, after all, made him a star, but then he becomes playful, giving us a couple of housey numbers, the steel-band-flavoured “Wait So Long” and Disclosure-ish “Pushin’”. From there he spreads his wings.

Thematically, the lyrics mostly deal with affairs of the heart and his personal belief (eg “Heartbeat” - “I did it just to prove ‘em wrong/Because they said I’d never make anything of myself”) but he still has time for bursts of anti-authoritarian vim, as on the energized, dubsteppy “Guess Again”. Wherever he heads, musically, he appears unstoppable. The astounding “Flesh & Bone” could come from Beyoncé’s superb Lemonade; the title track has a crackling funk; the rave-gospel of “Mercy” bursts with life and ideas. And there’s much more to revel in besides.

Plan B has returned with all flags flying. Whether the general public, whose memory is notoriously short, are ready to welcome him as he deserves, remains to be seen, but his fourth album is a gem, easy to listen to yet full of vibrancy and variety.

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Overleaf: Watch the video for "Stranger" by Plan B

Awaken is the debut album by German heavy rockers Confusion Master, a combo of relative unknowns from Rostow who are straight out of the blocks with an unashamed tribute to early Black Sabbath. Loaded with slow and low grooves that come on like a storm of rolling thunder powered by high-grade herbs, spoken word film samples and slabs of heavy psych, it’s powerful stuff that is more than enough to reanimate the inner 14 year-old metal-head in anyone.

In an impressive pop royalty hat-trick, the title track features Brian Wilson, Pharrell pops up on “I Got the Juice”, and Prince helped source sounds for “Make Me Feel”. So does Kansas City gal Janelle Monae’s third album live up to expectations set by such a high calibre of contributors? Indeed, it does.

Ealing Studios veteran Basil Dearden may have directed it, but 1944’s They Came to a City is mostly a JB Priestley film, an engaging blend of the mundane and the metaphysical.

Van Morrison has always been drawn as much to jazz as anything else. There is a natural swing to his voice, and his phrasing, melisma and familiar vocal mannerisms have always suited the medium well, from early excursions on Astral Weeks, through the jazzy feel of "Moondance" and his most recent albums.

Blossoms are the latest inheritors of the massive-in-Manchester mantle that has, so often in the past, translated into massive-almost-everywhere ubiquity. That their eponymous 2016 debut album was a chart-topper shows they’re on the way, although they’ve not yet mustered a single that’s thrown them to the next level. The surprise when they first appeared was that, although they look indie and have fans such as Ian Brown of The Stone Roses, their sound was a blend of polished yacht-rock and electro-pop, more The Killers than New Order. With Cool Like You, the rock aspect is almost gone. This is a synth-pop album, and in places a juicy one.

As the album starts, “There’s A Reason Why (I Never Returned Your Calls)” brings to mind Future Islands’ emotionally calibrated quirkiness, albeit without Samuel T Herring’s unique vocal stylings. Instead, and throughout, Tom Ogden’s voice is an ebullient, quivering fusion of Brandon Flowers, Paul Heaton (once of The Beautiful South) and, of course, his own native Stockport writ large. It’s a lead instrument that sets these songs apart: we’re not used to hearing this sort of voice with such synth-pop sounds.

There are catchy stompers, gig-slaying hi-NRG Euro-disco such as “Unfaithful” which absolutely bangs along in the manner of Moby’s Void Pacific Choir albums, or “Lying Again” which builds and shimmers in a way that makes the listener want to power-grab the sky. The synths on both are redolent of Pet Shop Boys at their most gigantic and stadium-friendly.

Elsewhere they chuck in a few slowies, “Stranger Still” and the Yazoo-alike “Love Talk”, and there’s almost a modern prog feel to the rhythmic changes and heaviness of “Giving Up the Ghost” (think Porcupine Tree at their most accessible). Overall, though, this is electro-pop, owing a debt to the past but with its eyes very much on slaying crowds during 2018’s summer festival season.

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Overleaf: Watch the video for "I Can't Stand It" by Blossoms

The touch is not always light here. Swathes of clunking, cliché-ridden English dialogue threaten to make the star-crossed lovers look ridiculous, and one of them (Elliott Gould) can be a wooden actor at times.

There’s a regular problem with techno albums. The DJ-producers who make them are usually so deeply embedded in club techno that when it comes to making a long-form collection, leaving the dancefloor and showcasing variety, they’re incapable. What, to them, sounds like a sonic adventure, to the rest of us sounds like a series of four-to-the-floor bangers that, after a couple, grows quickly monotonous, however good they’d have sounded at 3am in strobe-strafed Belgian warehouse darkness.

Holland-living Brit Oliver Way, however, has some success evading this particular curse. Way, after all, has form in escaping techno’s straitjacket. He is one half of the Detroit Grand Pubahs, an outfit who’ve shown themselves capable of deadpan humour and tongue-in-cheek outings. His debut solo album, once it gets going, has a similar sense of adventure and relative eclecticism.

At first things don’t look good. After a very promising Damian Lazarus-like, Middle Eastern-flavoured piece, “Dust Storm”, Way settles down into the usual bosh-bosh-bosh of a night out in Belgium. However, after a moody soundtracky thing (“Calling Danny Boy”) with DJ Ben Long, he hits his stride with a juicy selection of electro, Fatboy Slim-style cut-up, the geezer-ish Underworld-like “Lucky Dip”” and “Bad Bwoy Tune”, which is a ringer for The Prodigy’s “Voodoo People”. Going even further out on a limb, “Thorpe Road” struts its ragga’n’sax stuff over the much-used bassline to Wayne Smith’s “Under Me Sleng Teng” (as heard in SL2’s rave monster “Way In My Brain”), and “Stained Glass Shadows” sounds as if it hails from another album altogether, an eight minute, Hammond-laced midnight funk jam created on trad instrumentation. The latter, a number apart, is the album’s stand-out track.

With From The Shadows Oliver Way offers a lesson to his techno peers in stylistic exploration. In doing so, he keeps things interesting and the listeners’ ears tuned in.

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Overleaf: Listen to "Dust Storm" by Oliver Way, featuring Jasmin Nolan & Liam Nolan