I first saw Wolverhampton’s Queen of Soul supporting Al Green in 1999 and despite Green being God (Clapton believers take note), Knight was just as transportive and riveting as a performer. Her voice belongs in the auditorium; it reaches out for the highest balcony and the furthest wall. Capturing it on record is like trying to capture the grace and skill of an Olympic pole vaulter in a single snapshot. And that’s perhaps why she has never quite reached the megastar status of, say, Beyoncé, or been as sonically bold in the studio as Jill Scott is on her new one.

I first saw Wolverhampton’s Queen of Soul supporting Al Green in 1999 and despite Green being God (Clapton believers take note), Knight was just as transportive and riveting as a performer. Her voice belongs in the auditorium; it reaches out for the highest balcony and the furthest wall. Capturing it on record is like trying to capture the grace and skill of an Olympic pole vaulter in a single snapshot. And that’s perhaps why she has never quite reached the megastar status of, say, Beyoncé, or been as sonically bold in the studio as Jill Scott is on her new one.

When I put together my book Rock Shrines, about places music fans go to pay tribute to their dead heroes, I was particularly struck by the story of Ben Cauley. He was trumpet player in Otis Redding's band, The Bar Kays, and the only person to be pulled alive from the freezing waters of Lake Monona, Wisconsin, after the light aircraft crash that killed Redding and the rest of the band in December 1967.

When Western musicians add their bit to traditional African music it can be disastrous: a programmed beat awkwardly forcing sinuous, sensual music to conform to its rigidity, or some dreadful rock vocalist doing a Bono all over some exquisite interplay of mbira and talking drums. But here we have a London collective working with a bunch of musicians from Nairobi, and refreshingly their presence doesn’t for one moment seem unnatural or intrusive.

This was one of the funkiest shows I’ve seen for a long while; perhaps even since Prince’s peerlessly funky residence at the same venue in 2007 (though nowhere near as brilliant). There came a moment, on "Deeper Underground", when everything just clicked – the bassist and the drummer were locked in a deep groove, the guitarist was doing his precisely controlled chopping thing, the percussionist was rattling his timbales, the brass section popped and squirted, the backing singers shimmied, and singer Jay Kay himself did that weird dance, almost nerdy: glide-jerk, glide-jerk. Looking around the arena, I saw a sea of blonde highlights and jiggling bodies; the place was seething.

Alarm bells went off when I learnt that Brian Eno was co-producer of Seun Kuti’s second album. The last thing the son of the legendary Fela Kuti needed was his personal brand of Afrobeat to be given a distancing sheen, or diluted by some space-age Enoesque sound effects. But it’s easy to forget that Eno isn’t only Mr Ambient – he also produced the groundbreaking Afrobeat-influenced work of Talking Heads in the late 1970s.

Beards, beards, beards: at the Roundhouse, they seemed to be everywhere, sprouting from the chins of hundreds of chaps in the audience. Perhaps, though, I was just looking out for them, what with the luxuriant growth on the face of the man they had all come to see: Iron & Wine, the artist otherwise known as Sam Beam, singer, songwriter and former film studies professor from the American south-east.

It takes a certain something to make a roomful of white people get their funk on. I feel I have dispensation to make that ridiculous generalisation because Lenny Henry, famously born in Dudley to immigrant Jamaican parents, addresses the whiteness of the room the minute he comes on stage at Bromley’s Churchill Theatre, and by the end of this biographical show - part comedy, part music - the entire audience is on their feet, strutting their stuff to “Sex Machine” and “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now”.

A lot of hum and crackle about hypnagogic pop has passed through the ether in the last 18 months, much of it concerned with Toro Y Moi. Coined for a small raft of mainly American musicians that recast half-remembered pop from their youths, the hypnagogic aura is misty, midway between awake and asleep, and draws from soul like Curtis Mayfield or even Hall and Oates, as well as shiny Eighties cocaine-blasted pop. In America, chillwave covers it too. A lo-fi refit of Don Henley's “Boys of Summer” filtered through sacks of sand and then underpinned with some funk would fit the bill.

A freezing winter of discontent, a Labour party hell-bent on making itself unelectable, controversial warmongering and record levels of inequality. It may sound like yesterday’s papers but these themes were also addressed by iconoclastic post-punk artrockers Gang of Four in the late Seventies and early Eighties, more than 10 years before the Manics brought agit rock to the masses. Next Monday Gang of Four release Content, their first original album in 16 years.