“Let's walk down memory lane the Magazine way. Let's regurgitate fifth-rate Low [the David Bowie album] period pieces. Let's plonk plonk plonk with ponderous sub-Pink Floydery. Let's do the wallpaper waltz. This is not pushing back the barriers. It's frighteningly bland conservatism.”

Will Bob Dylan’s Never Ending Tour ever come to an end? Two years on from the last UK tour, he’s returned, with substantially the same band, once again mostly featuring material from his brilliant album Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020). He’s a little less steady on his feet, but remains as present as ever, clearly enjoying being on stage and contact with an audience that welcomes him with love as well as uncritical adulation.

Picture this: framing the stage are two pearlescent clouds which, throughout the performance, gently pulsate with flickering light. Behind them on a giant screen is a spinning globe, its seas twinkling like a million stars.

Suddenly, this magical image is rent asunder. Thunder and lightning shake the heavens and torrential rain cascades down in stair rods. Spotlights flash and dance through billowing smoke while Laurie Anderson serenades the tempest on her violin and Kenny Wollesen lashes symbols and drums into a clamorous frenzy. The Apocalypse!

DEATHLY HUSH.

The return of Linkin Park has been a long, winding path. The seven years since Chester Bennington's passing have swirled with speculation over what the long term future for the California nu-metal icons would look like.

It appears Rachel Chinouriri has a good memory. “I remember you!” she yelled excitedly to one fan early on, highlighting that she currently sits in a nice position – popular enough to be playing busy shows in decently sized venues, but at a level where she can still see the eager faces looking back at her.

Beethoven’s renown in his own day was not just as a composer but also as an improvising pianist. He wrote in a letter in July 1819 that “freedom, and to move forward is the purpose of the world of art, as it is of the whole of creation.’

Conceived in 1998 by the renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma to remind the world of the benefits of globalisation in bringing people together, Silkroad is a non-profit organisation with a mission to create “music that engages difference, sparking radical cultural collaboration and passion-driven learning for a more hopeful and inclusive world”.

This is almost too much to bear. This sprawling 37-track collection begins with the sainted 78-year-old Dolly Parton providing a jaunty spoken narration of her family’s history in music and the church. It’s old-school Disney documentary in tone, but because it’s Dolly you listen, and with her endless countrified charm she tells a story of generations of banjo players and preachers of the Appalachians – and reminds us that these, her forebears, were immigrants.

Amy Taylor and the rest of the Sniffers ambled onto the stage of Birmingham’s O2 Academy to a huge roar of approval from a packed and diverse audience on Sunday evening. With her Farrah Fawcett hairstyle, toothy smile, sparkly bikini, knee length boots and shorts she didn’t look the firebrand that her image suggests – but looks are frequently deceptive, as Birmingham was to find out.

South Korean quintet TXT's latest mini-album delivers six meticulously crafted tracks that showcase the group's evolving artistry through everything from dreamy pop to reggaeton to classic R&B.

With its stripped back arrangement – some ethereal guitar chords here, an unforgettably chirpy three-note descending synth riff there, plus vocal lines that flow and blend mellifluously – album opener “Heaven” delivers the mini-album's first and perhaps most memorable earworm.