Sydney has a nervous tic. People think Australians are brash and bolshy but that's not true. There's a deep sense of ingrained anxiety here. That anxiety comes from being at the edge of the world, a long way from Europe and in an unfamiliar and unrelenting land. It has been expressed through the art of Australia for 200 years. Today the country and its biggest city are both more confident, so the anxiety expresses itself in subtler ways.

White noise saturates the air. At mind-melting volume, it shifts through the aural spectrum to settle on the bass end. A voice begins yelling angry-sounding gobbets. The words are unintelligible. The stage is in darkness. Gradually, it becomes possible to make out the source of this impassioned diatribe. It’s a non-descript, white, bespectacled young man in a T-shirt. This nerdy fellow stops for a moment. So does the accompanying noise. Then his guitar-toting accomplice piles on slab after slab of noise.

The trumpeting of a lone elephant can be heard all around Durham city centre, blasting across the River Wear. The organisers of Artichoke’s Lumiere Festival, now in its third biennial year, have been turning up the volume as the evening’s progressed. The 3D elephant, which is the work of French design group Top’là, is a magnificent optical illusion projected onto a replica medieval fortress arch on Elvet Bridge, complete with thunderous audio.

Kraftwerk closing a festival is a big deal. It’s an even bigger honour when the seminal German outfit reconfigure their set to acknowledge where they’re playing. Last Sunday, Kraftwerk performed the rarely heard “Airwaves”, from 1975’s Radioactivity album, within the honeycomb-windowed Harpa concert hall. They were paying tribute to Iceland Airwaves, the remarkable festival which was drawing to a close

“Come out to play” is the tagline for this year’s Dublin Theatre Festival, and a great deal of the work presented in the programme manifested suitably playful exuberance. Running over 18 days, and featuring 27 productions, the 56th Festival highlighted the breadth of contemporary theatre and performance from around the world, programmed by artistic director Willie White. Definitions of “theatre” seemed deliberately capacious: musical theatre, dance-theatre, film-based and multimedia performances came under its umbrella.

Charity gigs, by their very nature, are usually jolly affairs, and Brighton Comedy Festival’s opening gala at the Dome was no exception. It had a stellar line-up, but also the advantage of being hosted by Alan Carr (the patron of The Sussex Beacon, in whose aid it was given) who was, like most of the guests, on cracking  form.

Forty four years ago David Bowie was living in the spare room of the suburban flat I shared with my two young children. He was broke and I was only occasionally employed – so we started a Sunday night folk club in the Three Tuns pub in Beckenham High Street – for fun and so he could pay me some rent.

Tickets are now on sale for the Brighton Comedy Festival (4-20 October), which takes place in several venues in the South Coast town.

“Rock ‘n’ roll was invented in Bodø about 1922,” declares Elvis Costello before kicking into “A Slow Drag With Josephine”. “Then it crept down to Trondheim,” he continues. “Then the squares in Oslo got it about 1952.” Up here, 25km inside the Arctic Circle, it actually seems possible that anything could have developed without the outside world noticing. On the tip of a finger of land between two mountain-fringed fjords, the city of Bodø doesn’t need to shout its identity. The setting is enough.