I was just Googling the line-up of All Tomorrow’s Parties in 2001, curated by Mogwai (whose still-exhilarating debut album, in deluxe reissue format, was playing five minutes ago). Looking back, I must have been in hog heaven: Godspeed You Black Emperor, Stereolab, Super Furry Animals, Labradford, Ligament, Shellac, Papa M, The For Carnation, the great and good of post-rock and, notoriously, Sonic Youth.

The Courteeners are not, as regular readers could probably guess, the sort of band I like much, and I generally try not to let the existence of groups like them bug me. Occasionally, though, I’ll become passingly outraged by something – like, say, the constant and wildly optimistic comparison that keeps being drawn between the Courteeners and The Smiths.

Out of London for a couple of days, and I'm welcomed back by a bunch of new records, including a new Sonic Youth EP which features their extensive - and terribly-received by most of the crowd except me, if memory serves - jam at All Tomorrow's Parties in 2000. It sounds terrific, happily.

OK, so now it’s 103 degrees so you’ll forgive me if I stay under canvas in VIP and neck a cool beer instead of hauling myself the quarter mile across this parched site to see Duffy.

The band's co-founder and New Order bassist says new archive footage is a revelation

Put on partly to raise awareness of the dangers of racist political parties in the run-up to London's elections this week and partly to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the original Rock Against Racism festival, the Love Music Hate Racism Carnival has got a lot to live up to.

OK, so now it’s 101 degrees and the crowd is crawling from patch of shade to tented shelter, the mass influx of Hollywood types and music biz bigwigs (them that’s left!) arriving in limos when the sun goes down.

COACHELLA FESTIVAL – DAY ONE - The Verve, Les Savy Fav, The Raconteurs! It’s 97 degrees, 50,000 music tattooed fans are surrounded by palm trees and padding cowboy-hatted and barefoot across the lush polo fields of Indio, California while trucks spray water ON the site to keep the swirling dust down. Read it and weep Mr Eavis! It can only be COACHELLA.

I am the proud owner of my late grandmother's radio. It's a Ferranti, bought, so my mother tells me, around 1950/1, from an electrical shop in Tattenham Corner in Surrey, where my grandparents lived at the time. Radio enthusiasts note, it's a 215 model, with a walnut-finish cabinet and, according to a quick Google, would have cost £27 back in the day, very expensive in a post war world of rationing. It carries Long, Medium and Short Wave and, sometimes, there's a rather eerie whistle running underneath the programme when it's on, like the ghost of electricity moping around in the ether.

I got an email from someone the other day about a new band helmed by Richard Fearless, the sometime leader of Death In Vegas. Of Black Acid, they said, “Half of it sounds like a Japanese sixth form band doing Mary Chain covers. Half of it sounds like Bobby Gillespie telling you about records he likes while trying to play them. The first song is ten minutes of backwards noise.”