Duncan Seaman

Nik Kershaw has enjoyed a 40-year career in music that’s seen him sell millions of records and in the mid 1980s spend more weeks in the UK charts than any other British male solo artist. Yet to this day, he says, he has always suffered a sense of imposter syndrome.

Visitors flock to Galax, Virginia, each summer for the Old Fiddlers' Convention, a days-long celebration of Appalachian music.

With his band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark back on touring duties, singer and bass guitarist Andy McCluskey has been up for several hours readying himself for a band rehearsal by the time he picks up the phone for a mid-morning chat with The Yorkshire Post.

Once a field of dreams where the biggest names in pop and rock played, since the 1980s Roundhay Park has rarely hosted artists of the magnitude of Madonna, Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen or The Rolling Stones.

Back in the early 1980s when Fiat Lux were signed to Polydor, supporting Howard Jones and being championed by BBC Radio 1’s Annie Nightingale, the Wakefield band were expected to become one of Britain’s new big synth pop groups.

The former Talking Heads singer delivers a knockout performance at one of Britain’s finest venues.

Dropped suddenly in late May without any advance publicity, The Coral’s 13th studio album The 388 is the sound of a band doing things on their own terms. Unusually for a contemporary release, for the first two weeks it was only available on vinyl and CD in record stores before being circulated on streaming services. Musically too, it’s return to a former way of thinking, with its 11 songs steeped in the same kind of tuneful neo-psychedelia, ska and dub reggae with which the Wirral quintet made their name in the early 2000s.

Fatboy Slim headlines unforgettable opening day as surprise grassroots appearance, city-wide performances and sunshine set the tone for the weekend.

The vogue for bands revisiting albums from their back catalogue to mark significant anniversaries has become commonplace in recent years. But Clare Grogan admits to being initially puzzled by the idea that her group Altered Images should frame their autumn tour around their 1981 debut album Happy Birthday.

Four years on from its world premiere, the Swedish pop quartet’s digital avatar show is still very much a winner.