London-based trio Les Triaboliques should perhaps be grateful that Wikipedia hasn’t included them in their entry on supergroups. There you will find a comprehensive list of so-called supergroups with leadenly histrionic names like Isles and Glaciers, Shrinebuilder and How to Destroy Angels (not to mention the super-supergroups that started it all such as Cream, Humble Pie and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. But Adams, Edmonds and Mandelson are, I suppose, the alt-supergroup, representing something of an evolutionary jump forward - if for no other reason than they are musically co-operating rather than competing, admirably intent on suppressing their egos rather than indulging them.

Hugh Laurie knows we're going to be doubtful. He knows that this is a vanity project by the most successful TV actor on the planet, the man who is House. He could have walked into Warner Brothers and said he wanted to do an album of auto-tuned Euro-disco with David Guetta and some middle-management toady would undoubtedly have hit the green light. Thankfully he didn't.

Even the cover artwork refuses to conform, breaking the first rule of graphic design by utilising a dozen different typefaces and alternating upper and lower-case lettering for maximum optical anarchy. In fact, the inference is that we should play by Merril Garbus’s rules by typing “tUnE-YaRdS” rather than “Tune-Yards”. Such wilful solipsism could be interpreted as pretentiousness, but after several listens to this New England lass’s second album I’d be more than happy to write her band’s name in raspberry jam with my finger, if that was her wish.

This is one of the most eagerly awaited albums of the year, at least in world music circles. And for impeccable reasons. It is brilliantly produced and joyously sung; it swings with a rare soulfulness and conveys a sense of the Garifuna community. When Andy Palacio died tragically young at the age of 48 in 2008, he’d managed to put the Garifuna on the cultural map with one of the great albums of the last decade, Watina, and seemed destined for great things – when he was called “the new Bob Marley”, it didn’t sound completely ridiculous.

Joan Wasser, who operates under the name of Joan As Police Woman, has probably seen all sorts in her time, having played with Antony Hegarty and Rufus Wainwright and dated the late Jeff Buckley. But even she was thrown by an inappropriate comment from the stalls at the Barbican last night. "Show us your tits" is the sort of thing female comedians in working men’s clubs, not soulful, passionate musicians in concert halls, have to put up with.

Question: which American star had their third wedding in the Griffith Stadium, Washington in front of more than 25,000 paying fans and recorded the whole thing for release as an album? If you’re wondering how you could have missed hearing about such a quintessential 21st-century publicity stunt it might be because, firstly, this extraordinary event occurred in 1951, and secondly, because the guitar-strumming bisexual bride (who hadn’t even found a groom when the event was arranged) has almost disappeared from the history books.

The great music writer Nick Tosches put me onto James Luther Dickinson. In Where Dead Voices Gather, his self-indulgent but fascinating book about the obscure early-20th-century minstrel performer Emmett Miller, Tosches kept touching on Dickinson, a Memphis musician and occasional Rolling Stones sidesman (he played piano on "Wild Horses").

“Thank you for waiting. I know some of you have been waiting a long time – about seven years – but it takes me a while to get things done.” Thus did singer/songwriter Hayley Willis greet the audience at her return to active service. Two Willis albums have bookended that seven-year period: 2003's acclaimed Come Get Some, her debut for 679/XL, and its excellent follow-up, Uncle Treacle, released on 4 October on her own Cripple Creek label, for which last night's performance acted as a launch party.

It’s funny how things turn out. Of the four former members of Led Zeppelin, John Bonham is dead, John Paul Jones is an odd and unpredictable figure, popping up only occasionally with an album or a collaboration, while Jimmy Page is, according to Mick Wall’s definitive 2008 Led Zeppelin biography When Giants Walked the Earth, lost in a twilit world of his own creation.