In a world of reality television show winners and interchangeable flash-in-the-pan singer-songwriter critical darlings, Frank Turner stands apart as the real deal. Over the past 18 months, you’d have been forgiven for thinking that Turner had appeared as if from nowhere and his name was suddenly everywhere.

Camp Bestival is overrun with children, even the night is alive with them. Where WOMAD is full of old hippies, Camp Bestival is full of raver-parents who refuse to stop shaking a party limb, even if they must haul little Finlay around on an exotic, duvet-filled gurney to do so. It creates a unique atmosphere, a bit bourgeois but just the right amount of wild, inner children meeting actual children to wobble about to Benga basslines.

The highlight of this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival is undoubtedly Peter Doig’s No Foreign Lands. As you enter the beautifully proportioned and wonderfully hung rooms of the Scottish National Gallery (until 3 November) the spirit of last year’s Festival exhibition of European Symbolist Landscape seems still to linger and has found its modern echo.

Arriving early on Saturday, the first music I was exposed to in the tranquil arboretum area of the Radio 3 Stage was the mesmeric and gorgeous sounds of Leicester sitarist Roopa Panesar floating from the stage, with dreamy oboe-like shenhai adding to the musical mix.

If there’s a patron saint of WOMAD it must be Bob Marley. His visage, serious but gentle, peers out from more T-shirts than I care to count. And all the festival-goers who don’t have WOMAD-standard long, white, straggly hair sport dreadlocks. The silliest haircut goes to a fellow in (again) WOMAD-standard travellers’ pantaloons who sports small knots of hair, each tied with a different coloured elastic band.

I am a WOMAD virgin. “Princey will be here later, he usually frequents this bar,” a man with straggly white hair tells me as I wander aimlessly about. I think he means Prince Rogers Nelson, the diminutive rock star who sang “Purple Rain”, and I grow vaguely animated. He starts telling me about how last year he advised Prince not to shoot civilians and begins a short diatribe about how Prince is falling into the ways of his father and his grandfather. My mind is slow. The sun and the marijuana has done its work. He means Harry, doesn’t he? My excitement fades.

The city of Katowice in Upper Silesia, Poland, was once an epic industrial hub on the western edge of the Soviet bloc. It was a gigantic centre for coal and steel that was awesome in scale. Those days are long gone yet it seems fitting that one of the city’s now disused coal mines plays host, from August 22-25, 2013, to Tauron Nowa Muzyka, a leading European festival of electronic music.

"Britten or Poulenc?" The question may seem a fatuous one, geared to the 100th anniversary of the Englishman's birth and 50 years since the Frenchman's death. Yet it certainly livens up what would otherwise be the usual dreary artists' biographies, presented with typical elan in this year's Cheltenham Music Festival programme book. "Has anyone said Poulenc in response to this?" asks pianist James Rhodes.

It’s just before midnight on Friday. A few hundred couples circle the floor of a school gym. On stage, violinists play a rhythmic music which cycles repetitively. Coloured with sad, minor notes, it sounds like a stately ancestor to bluegrass. Hands joined, the couples raise their arms above their heads. The woman spins. Breaking the link, the man suddenly bobs downwards, hops up and spreads his arms apart in a come-hither gesture. His partner’s raised hands say no. Linking arms at the waist, they resume the circuit.

"Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park" is a wonderfully grand name for the venue for this summer's Hard Rock Calling festival, but the reality doesn't quite match up. Rather than basking in the glory (and shiny new stadium architecture) of Mo and Jessica's triumphs from last summer, music fans found themselves a few hundred yards away on a drab swathe of stony wasteland, temporarily covered with artificial grass. Still, at least the sun blazed down and they'd got the beer tent sorted, with thirsty punters bundled in and out, several banknotes lighter, at unprecedented speed.