John Lee Hooker’s recording career began on Friday 3 September 1948. He’d attracted the attention of the Kiev-born Bernard Besman, who was in Detroit after his family moved there in 1926 following five years in London’s East End. By the 1940s Besman, who played piano, was a veteran of dance bands and also worked as a booker. In 1946 he began working with records.

When “Murder Most Foul” was dropped into an unsuspecting world under lockdown, the surprise was palpable, given that eight years had passed since Tempest, filled by Sinatra covers and seasonal tours. That it was a 16-minute epic that took Dylan’s writing into new areas (including No1 on Billboard) – and this on the verge of his eightieth year – is also astonishing.

Norah Jones is writing good songs. The 11 of them which appear on Pick Me Up Off the Floor, the seventh solo studio album by the nine-time Grammy-winner, form a very strong album with a convincing and satisfying shape, a journey from hurt and doubt to contentment. It is probably her best album in ten years. 

Larkin Poe are an American blues-rock band fronted by the Lovell sisters, Rebecca and Megan, both mainstays of the US Americana scene since their teens, at the start of this century. Best known in Europe for their fired-up gigs and festival appearances, their fifth album starts off accessibly yet the immediate thought is that it’s overly derivative.

With festival season upon us but rendered null and void by COVID-19, green field events are looking for ways to present themselves and, this week, in different ways, a couple are doing just that. Also there’s new material from Gorillaz and a virtual electronic music extravaganza. Dive in!

Download TV

Jehnny Beth was the formidable and mysterious leader of Savages’ flinty monochrome attack, remoulding stark post-punk into gender-fluid shapes.

Music, as the sociologist Simon Frith long ago pointed out, is “an experience of placing: in responding to a song we are drawn, haphazardly, into affective emotional alliances with the performer and with the performer’s other fans”. Music makes you feel things, it’s about shared emotional experiences. And while, since the invention of the Walkman, those experiences are possible in the isolation of one’s own headphones, nothing can begin to touch the communal concert experience.

Dublin’s Imelda May, who made her name as a superlative performer of high-energy rockabilly in a way that reflected the music’s partly Irish roots, has just released her first poetry recordings: nine punchy, moving, sometimes humourous and well-crafted spoken lyrics, mostly accompanied by subtle yet atmospheric strings.

There’s something wrong with the picture above. It’s the sleeve of a French EP issued in August 1966 credited to a surly looking band called “Them”. The chap standing in the middle has what appear to be bullet holes in his shirt, but where’s the band’s frontman and main songwriter Van Morrison?

Swallow Tales is a great album. It took three musicians fewer than five hours on one afternoon in New York studio in March 2019 to make. But there again, it also took them more than 40 years.