“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.

Rock music doesn’t get much better than this. For two hours, the raggedy Chicago band Wilco poured out song after song from a repertoire that stretches back 15 years, slipping effortlessly between gentle alt-country and avant-garde rock, between the whisperingly quiet and the crushingly loud. They were sensational, a band at the top of their game. And thanks to the immaculate sound system, and the acoustics of this fabulous hall, loudness never tipped over into distortion; everything was there, audible in the mix.

Shea Seger is a woman with a story. A story of a career interrupted. At the age of 20, the fragile and slightly dangerous-looking blonde from Texas came over here and made a record which sent ripples across the pond of the Americana scene. Shortly after, however, her father became crippled after a botched operation on an old Vietnam injury and she returned to Texas to care for him. During those 10 years she also brought up a little girl, Luna, and lived in a trailer. And now she’s back in the UK. And she’s pumped all the frustration, disappointments and anger from that decade into a new record, simply called Shea Seger.

Last night was the third and probably last time this 21-year-old Nashville songstress will grace the humble Windmill pub in Brixton with her charismatic yet down-to-earth presence. Not because the gig wasn’t a sell-out and an unqualified success, but because of the radio airplay and unanimous critical praise she has received for her debut album Own Side Now from everyone from the Daily Mail to the Independent. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if by this time next year she’s performing at the Union Chapel or even the Barbican.

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.

“One afternoon back in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, I met four scientists in a bar, they were on their way to West Africa to study a parasitic worm that attacks the eyeballs of human beings and turns them into blind men.” And so begin the sleeve notes of C W Stoneking’s second album, Jungle Blues. Last night this teller of tall and fevered tales washed up in deepest Brixton, to perform to a motley crowd in the gloomy but brightly painted Windmill pub. It was an unlikely juxtaposition which nevertheless worked rather well.

“This song is for my kids – and all their Mommas.” Even at 74, Kris Kristofferson exudes the quietly satisfied air of experience of a man who has spent at least half his life drinking, shagging, smoking and strumming to his heart’s content, and now has a whole lot of good times (and plenty of bad) to draw from at will.

The Tapestry Festival is a labour of love. It's the ongoing adventure of a Camden plasterer called Barry Stilwell who decided a decade ago that he wanted a festival of his own. Irritated by the way corporate branding was piggy-backing festival culture, and disgusted by stringent spoilsport ground-rules at many outdoor events, he started his own in 2003, mostly showcasing bands who'd played his monthly Euston-based club night.

A few years ago I wrote a book about Willie Nelson. Keith Richards supplied the introduction – a Kafkaesque saga which deserves a book in itself - during which he opined that Willie had a severe case of “white line fever”. This (for once) had nothing to do with exotic Peruvian powders and everything to do with the odd compulsion that keeps a man in his late seventies on the road for nine months of each year, rattling around the world in a bus while his wife and kids make hay in Hawaii.