To anyone other than Eighties and Nineties indie obsessives, the guitarist from The House of Love and Levitation and the singer from Adorable getting together in 2014 did not cause a stir. However, both had stylistically leapt away from their pasts, and the resulting album, Broken Heart Surgery, showcased rich, heart-worn songs, filtered through a sensibility somewhere between Lee Hazelwood and John Barry 1960s film scores. It brought them a new audience. Their second album is equally palatable.

Boasting great cover art by photographer Rosanne de Lange, featuring the now disappeared car graveyard in Chatillon, Belgium, We Are Millionaires is also appropriately rusted and battered-sounding, bringing to mind the broken junkie romanticism of Nikki Sudden or even late period Johnny Thunders (especially on the frail ballad “Over You”). Lyrically, it’s good, poetic stuff too. The lovely title song is a peach. “We both love downbeat movies,” it almost whispers, like a Byronic barfly at 3am, “Inhabit a monochrome world, where the beat-up hero never seems to get the girl,” before blossoming into a twinkling, longing Bickers guitar solo, with a hint of Dave Gilmour about its technical skill.

The finger-clickin’, Hispanic-flavoured “If the World Is All We Have” is a stoned, filmic rock’n’roll shuffle, a bit Chris Isaak, a bit Twin Peaks, while “Mary Celeste” is Lou Reed in melodically light “Stephanie Says” mode. Throughout the whole album, there’s a clear, world-weary thoughtfulness that’s most welcome in this age of heart-on-sleeve non-specific singer-songwriter vulnerability. There’s also a shining instrumental twang to it that lifts these nine songs, gives them added heft.

A life lived pursuing dreams on the fringes of the music business has given Pete Fij and Terry Bickers requisite experience to fill their work with a resigned charm, and also, more importantly, the ability to attach that feeling to songs of forlorn lusciousness. The pair may be heading into the most fruitful period of their career.

• More New Music reviews on theartsdesk

Overleaf: Watch the video for Pete Fij & Terry BIckers's "Love's going to Get You"

I was 10 in 1967 though I remember much about the year, indeed about the era, not least the release of Sgt Pepper and the first live global satellite broadcast, when the Beatles sang “All You Need is Love”, and all the great transatlantic hits, including of course Scott Mackenzie’s “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)”.

The precocious Steve Winwood joined the Spencer Davis Group when he was 14, when the Sixties themselves were still young, and hasn’t really stopped ever since. True, it has been nearly a decade since his last album of new material, Nine Lives, but he has toured with Eric Clapton and Tom Petty, pops up at assorted festivals and live events, and has put together a highly capable live band that can bend his songs into shapes you might never have thought possible.

I am intrigued by those writers who plan their novels with the bristling rigour of a military strategist, drilling their characters like counters on a model battlefield. And impressed that they seem in absolute control of the direction their story is going to take. One novelist friend told me he always has the final line of his book written before he even starts.

In a 1967 headline, The Washington Post pegged Lynn Castle as a “Shapely Blonde in Blue Jeans, Popular Barber in Hollywood”. She had attracted attention as the hairdresser of choice for The Byrds, The Monkees, Del Shannon, Sonny & Cher and Stephen Stills. Known as “The Lady Barber”, she also cut the hair of music business movers and shakers Lee Hazlewood and Monkees’ songwriters Boyce and Hart.

One-Eyed Jacks, the only film Marlon Brando ever directed, is a masterpiece by any reckoning, a classic western about love and treachery, as well as a startling and boundary-breaking re-invention of the genre.

As the accompanying music reminded us, it's the time of the season for looking back in languor at the psychedelic daze that descended on America's West Coast in 1967. It was an era when one was enjoined, if going to San Francisco, to "be sure to wear flowers in your hair". "Feed your head," added the Jefferson Airplane, ensconced in their Haight-Ashbury rabbit-hole.

It probably hasn’t escaped your notice that we are celebrating the 50^th anniversary of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the triumphant vindication of the Beatles' decision to quit touring and instead exploit the possibilities of the recording studio. Could there be anything new to say about an album so thoroughly analysed, anatomised, eulogised and mythologised?

Fat cigar at hand, Jim Morrison is pondering the future of music. “Maybe it might rely heavily on electronics, tapes,” he says. “I can envision maybe one person with a lot of machines, tapes and electronic set ups, singing or speaking and using machines.” When that prediction was first broadcast in late June 1969, what he described may have seemed outlandish but it came to pass. He can’t be held responsible for Howard Jones, but whole genres of music evolved which revolved around solo artists utilising, indeed, machines, tapes and electronic set ups.

Wow! An unconventional opening for a book review maybe, but ‘“wow!” nonetheless.