“I’m, like, pop star when I have to pop star, and then I’m, like, naked hippy when I can naked hippy.” So Kesha explained recently on the Jennifer Hudson Show, going on to say she spent most of her time romping in the woods and chasing butterflies. A far cry, then, from the trailer trash Gaga guise she adopted when she exploded in 2009 with global chart-topper “Tik Tok” (“Brush my teeth with a bottle of Jack”!).

German singer Claudia Brücken has had a long and busy career, initially defined by her role in Propaganda. They were a cult 1980s band on ZTT Records who laced their opulent synth pop with an appealingly morbid Teutonic sensibility. Decades later, it seemed they’d been forgotten until Brücken and fellow Propaganda singer Susanne Freytag released an album in 2022 as xPropaganda. It scooted up the UK charts.

Dominic “Mocky” Salole has had a long career in which the tension between authenticity and pastiche has been a constant. Toronto-born, of English and Yemeni heritage, he came of musical age in the Bohemian hotbed of 1990s Berlin with a close-knit bunch of other Canadian ex-pats, including Peaches, Chilly Gonzales and Feist.

Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” was an instant phenomenon. Recorded in April 1967 and issued as a single on 12 May after pre-release play on pirate station Radio London, it topped the UK charts four weeks later. Globally, it hit big on most pop markets and was integral to launching the classical music/pop hybrid which evolved into prog rock.

Lorde’s trajectory is continually fascinating. From the minimalist, sparse electropop of Pure Heroine to the similar but more grandiose production of Melodrama was a linear progression, but then came the acoustic guitars and organic percussion of Solar Power.

VINYL OF THE MONTH

Frank From Blue Velvet I Am Frank (Property of the Lost) + Column258 Interloper (The Workshop Sessions, Volume One) (Property of the Lost)

“Theirs is truly rock in extremis, a précis of the youthful impetuosity and cathartic chaos at the heart of real rock ’n roll.”

Haim’s profile just grows and grows. Since their last album, youngest sibling Alana’s starring role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s whimsical Seventies L.A. nostalgia-fest, Licorice Pizza, has done them no harm. I Quit is, the band says, thus titled because its songs are about “quitting something that isn’t working for us anymore”.

Jarvis Cocker is proudly holding the No 1 trophy handed to him on the day Pulp topped the album chart for the first time in 27 years with More, their first album in almost as long. “It’s nice they’ve got something to do when they’re getting on a bit,” Cocker says, acidly imagining the response. “Fuck that!”

Had a passer-by from outwith Newcastle been asked to guess what was taking place at St James' Park, football would have been the likely answer. It felt like nearly every person walking to see Sam Fender was clad in a replica top, bearing the name of club legends past and present or, most commonly, the official kit released to mark Fender's newest album.