Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman” was the UK’s first explicitly psychedelic record. Although there were delays with it hitting shops, it was recorded in December 1965. A large part of its impact came through the instrumentation and arrangement. Jazz players were on board, playing in a folky way without abandoning their core musical sensibilities. The ground-breaking arranger responsible was John Cameron.

A standing ovation part-way through a concert is unusual. Conductor Jules Buckley gestures to the members of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Symphony Chorus that they should rise. Beside Buckley, Father John Misty stands looking from the conductor to everyone else on the stage, to the audience. Seemingly, in the midst of this, he’s thrown.

What a conflict of interests. I feel like Jean-Claude Van Damme in that Volvo ad, with the truck on the left hand side being my music editor who was recently name-checked by Lewis Capaldi after describing him as “a constipated Hozier”, and my children on the other who are constantly squawking about the video snippet from “Wish You the Best” shared on Tiktok about the little dog in the bike basket that’s making hoardes of adolescent children sob at the bus stop.

Estonia’s Mart Avi styles himself as “the twilight samurai of alternative pop”. He creates “nowhere-somewhere music, mapping uncharted territories between avant-pop and timeless grandeur”. The characterisations are issued via AVICORP, his internet presence.

Kesha is one of the 21^st century’s most characterful pop stars. She’s regularly stepped out of the boxes people have put her in, musically and otherwise. But, even taking into account truly oddball songs such as “Godzilla” (from 2017’s Rainbow), or projects such as working with Flaming Lips, Gag Order, created with cosmic ultra-producer Rick Rubin, is by far her most out-there work. It’s also the sound of a tormented human being.

Brighton is writhing with music biz sorts. The Great Escape is here, the multi-venue festival that’s taken place here for over a decade-and-a-half, presenting bands from all over the world, most of them little known, at least in the UK. It takes place over four days, Wednesday to Saturday, although not much happens on Wednesday, so the real Day One is Thursday, and here we are.

Amongst the stranger recordings surfacing in 1977’s summer of punk was the version of Sex Pistols’s “Pretty Vacant” appearing on the budget Hallmark label album Top Of The Pops Volume 60 – the latest in a long-running series collecting ostensibly sound-alike versions of current hits recorded by anonymous session musicians and singers in a Wembley studio.

Before even a note was struck, Yard Act’s singer James Smith was setting the bar high. “Over the past two days everyone we’ve met in Glasgow has been telling us this is the best gig we’ll ever play”, he declared, as soon as the Leeds band arrived onstage. They then proceeded over the following 70 minutes to deliver on that expectation, with an evening that’s among the best the storied old Barrowland has ever seen.

My associate for the evening has recently returned from Breaking Convention, a conference on psychedelics, celebrating their renaissance in recent years. He’s been microdosing regularly. Around us the crowd sways, many with eyes closed, bobbing, silhouetted by two screens and a stage backdrop on which a dancing silver-grey blob-humanoid grooves itself to liquid, splatters flowing off it.

March 1960’s I Hear A New World EP was British pop at its most extraordinary. As its liner notes put it, it was “a strange record”: one seeking to aurally reflect life on the moon and in outer space. Musique concrète, pop and studio-only sonic manipulation were rolled into one. Its creator was producer Joe Meek.