Half a century ago today, on a warm August Sunday night in New York, The Beatles played a 30-minute concert in a baseball field. Home to the New York Mets the venue was called the William A Shea Municipal Stadium and had opened in spring 1964.

Sad singers never write truly happy albums, but Positive Songs for Negative People – and was there ever a title that so perfectly summed up the work of Frank Turner? – is probably as close as this one gets to putting a brave face on it. Turner’s sixth album opens where 2013’s Tape Deck Heart left off: a sinner amongst saved men on the banks of the muddy Thames, dusting himself off and falling back in love with the city he calls home anthropomorphised as the Angel of Islington.

When you’re a big Bruce Springsteen fan, as I am, there’s a game that you end up getting quite good at: one in which you have to separate the stories, about the hard-drinkin’, hard-livin’ workingman, from the multi-millionaire songwriter. Roots rocker Jason Isbell writes from a similar place as Springsteen – albeit on the other side of the Mason-Dixon line – but his work has never presented as much of a dichotomy.

There’s been a real sense of expectation surrounding Kevin Parker’s new offering, with rumours of a disco album from the saviour of psychedelia after a conversion to the joys of the Bee Gees while on mushrooms. That sounded an interesting proposition – one that could make the mind bogle.

“It’s gonna get loud, it’s gonna get heavy,” purrs Nina Gordon on “The Gospel According to Saint Me”, the opening track from what must surely, if you overlook Independence Day getting a sequel 20 years later, be one of the more unlikely of the current wave of Nineties reunions. It’s a lyric that succinctly captures what were always the band’s best features – gooey back-and-forth harmonies and an unyielding commitment to the distortion pedal – and one that bodes well for the Chicagoans’ first album together since 1997.

Vintage is word I’m not comfortable with. I make it a point of principle not to pay a 3000% mark-up on clothes someone’s already worn, and when it comes to wine, I’m more likely to shop by ABV in truth. Vintage is however, a word at the heart of The Sweet Pretty Things (Are in Bed Now, of Course . . . ), the new album by R’n’B upstarts-turned-psychedelic story tellers The Pretty Things.

“I’m having too much fun, my arms around the toilet like a long-lost chum, I’m kneeling at the throne…I’m learning what it means to really pray.” Four tracks into Perpetual Motion People, on “Haunted Head”, Ezra Furman paints a picture which must be drawn from real life. If this album screams one thing loudest, it’s that Furman isn’t keeping anything hidden. What’s also more than apparent is the eccentricity of this musical vision.

One, two, three o’clock, four o’clock rock… For those who orchestrated the swing from blues to rock ‘n’ roll, it’s getting late. Like the Chelsea pensioners, their numbers are beginning to dwindle and, as time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future, their testimony must be recorded for posterity, lest it be lost for ever in the music mists (currently somewhere off the coast of Kintyre). Except – and it’s a fairly big "except" – this stuff’s already fairly well documented, no?

Normally, if an album as good as The Man Who Sold the World had itself sold the sum total of sod all on release, it would have been lost, then found, before becoming a fêted rarity, exchanging hands for hundreds while bootleggers had a field day. The fact that it was a David Bowie album meant that, despite the initial indifferent shrug from the buying public, it’s shifted more than a million and a half copies. It remains, however, overlooked and underrated by many.

Sunday afternoon at Glastonbury is an odd time. For some it means carrying on carrying on, trying to wring the very last drops out of the weekend and putting off the inevitable, stomach-churning lurch that will signal a nosedive into a colossal comedown. For others, it’s simply a day to be a bit more sensible: after all there’s a long drive tomorrow… Whichever, there seems to be a clamour for the familiar, something to cling to while you take the edge off with more booze or think about A-road alternatives to avoid congestion.