Having pretty much written the book on blue-eyed soul, if anyone has both the right and the chops to cover some of the classic hits of the Motown and Philly era, it’s Daryl and John. Thus their current album, Our Kind of Soul (U-Watch) on which they look back at some of the greats that brought them together in the first place. Now, understandably anyone who’s heard Michael McDonald’s recent second massacre of the Motown songbook might well have reservations of risking exposing their ears to covers of Standing In The Shadows of Love or Neither One Of Us, but these slip down a treat without making the fatal mistake of trying to be clones of the originals.

The same’s true of their takes on a mix of evergreen and more obscure soul nuggets by the O’Jays (Used To Be My Girl), Aretha (a funky fat groove Rock Steady), Temptations (Fading Away), Teddy Pendegrass (Love TKO), the Stylistics (a stunning You Are Everything), Five Stairsteps (Ooh Child) and even Barry White (Can’t Get Enough of Your Love).

It’s not all old memories though, there’s three easy sliding new self-penned numbers that so seamlessly slip right in among the company that if you didn’t know it you’d be scratching your head to remember who first did Soul Violins and Let Love Take Control. There’s also a nice touch of irony in their rewritten rework of Dan Hartman’s I Can Dream About You. The songs sounds so natural in their hand it could have been written for them. In fact it was, but back then H&O weren’t into doing covers, so it’s a nice touch that it’s finally found its proper home.

Not all of the album will make it into the live set and with thirty years of their own classics to draw upon there’s a good chance that at least some of a list that includes Sara Smile, I Can’t Go For That, Maneater, Rich Girl, She’s Gone and the underrated Out Of Touch should find their way into proceedings. They may not be the chart force they once were, but their soul remains undiminished.

 7.30pm, £29.50. Symphony Hall. Mike Davies

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The Mexican born, Dublin based flamenco guitar duo have been creating quite a buzz on the circuit in recent months, returning for their fourth tour in eight months. If you’ve not encountered them before, they blend jazz, flamenco folk and rock with a dazzling virtuosity, often switching styles within the same piece as when a cover of Metallica’s One suddenly transforms into Dave Brubeck classic Take Five. They’re busy promoting current album Live Mancheter and Dublin (Rubyworks) which does what it says on the tin as they whip their way through the likes of the self-penned Hola and Captain Casanova alongside a brilliant take on Astor Piazzolla's Libertango, shooting off rhythmic changes at the drop of a finger. What you don’t get on disc is their frequently witty, laconic between tune chat, and aside from the breathtaking musical performance it’s worth seeing them in person just to hear about how they once inadvertently wound up living in a brothel.

8pm, £8, Glee Club. Mike Davies

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Tuesday May 10

Another new outfit earning themselves acres of praise, this sees the 80s revival continue apace with the Kentucky four piece’s debut album Night On Fire (Astralweeks) sounding in thrall to Duran Duran (almost clone-like on the title track and You Got Me) while also spraying the scent of The Cure and New Order. While the likes of Alive, The Ocean and parts of the excessively overlong Irreversible show up their rock inclinations, the groove emphasis is firmly on the dance floor with choppy synth driven funk and disco pouting its hips through No Cabaret, Forever and Dynamize. If you reckon that music peaked with Union of The Snake or The Reflex, then you’ll be wetting yourself in anticipation, if not then you may find the whole thing as redundant as the formats of their name.

7.30pm, £5, Little Civic. Mike Davies

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Having spent ten years putting his former nomenclature behind him, Colin Vearncombe now reverts to the identity that brought his greatest success with Wonderful Life. Cynics might assume this to be some desperate attempt to revive a flatlined career but the fact is he’s been doing quite nicely with albums and tours under his own name for some while. Vearncombe himself says the decision to revive the Black label stems from the fact that his new songs are a natural progression from the early days so, since he’s also been playing rearranged versions of the old Black hits, it seemed a fairly logical move. The new material will eventually find its way on to the forthcoming Between Two Churches album due later this year, but for now he’s touring with a ltd edition three track EP taster that features the slap rhythm swampy Cold Chicken Skin, acoustic gently lapping lonely love song In A Heartbeat and the scratchy rhythms and smouldering bluesy rock of Two Churches with its gathering storm cloud guitar climax. All three should figure in a set that will undoubtedly be drawing more on the earlier albums than he has in recent tours but should keep devotees of more recent material such as Dying For The Quarter, Quinn’s Old Flame and the wittily resigned History of Rock And Roll.

8pm, £10. Glee Club. Mike Davies

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Well, after three albums murdering The Great American Songbook, you can’t say that you don’t know what you’re in for. Having hit an unexpected goldmine among the taste impaired when he decided to wring the life out of The Way You Look Tonight, These Foolish Things and It Had To Be You, Rod quickly sussed he’d found himself a lucrative gravy train and, to mix metaphors, duly set about milking it. In the past three years with the As Time Goes By and Stardust albums he’s duly turned such classic standards as Time After Time, Someone To Watch Over Me, As Time Goes By, Baby It’s Cold Outside, Blue Moon, Manhattan and, oh excuse me, ‘Rod’s special UK classic’, A Nightingale Sang In Berkely Square and, subjecting them to his cigarette smoke tones, turned them into coffee table musak for ears that wouldn’t recognise a quality Gershwin, Cahn or Porter cover if they fell over it. Not content with that he also lured such other ill-suited names as Queen Latifah and Cher into serving as duetting accomplices.

Easy listening at its blandest, devoid of anything resembling the heart or wit Stewart used to conjure for the likes of his own contributions to pop’s hall of fame, it’s frighteningly going to be packed with punters who clearly have more money than musical sense. The chances of him doing Hot Legs are slim.

 7.30pm, £50/£40. NEC. Mike Davies

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If the Blackout single were the only thing to go on, then you might assume that the Glasgow outfit were simply about garage blues full of roilling guitars, thundering rhythms and scoured howling vocals torn from some bottomless pit of a tormented soul. However, arriving now with debut album Land of the Rough (Beggars Banquet), the DFBs prove to have more than one string to their bow. Certainly new single Russian Doll is a drivingly urgent beast of churning riffery shot through with the same sort of Doorsy psychedelia that informs the 22-20s but then you also get Didn’t I Hear You Right and The Way She Goes where vocalist Roddy Campbell takes down the mood into smoky, narcotic blues moan territory while Anyway is a 70s blues rock prowl while Ground Nero sounds like some mutant burlesque waltz with doomed guitars playing in hell and Sun Song closes it all up progressing from acoustic to space rock jam and super nova climax. All in all very impressive and a solid bet you won’t be seeing them in such intimate surroundings for much longer.

 8.30pm, £5. Jug of Ale. Mike Davies

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Alison Mossheart and Jamie Hince aka VV and Hotel are clearly admirers of PJ Harvey, Patti Smith and the Velvets, all of whom strongly inform sophomore album No Wow (Domino) with its stripped back raw garage rock n roll, splintered guitars chugging out bristling bad attitude riffs and rhythms weaving an air of threat.

So cool you can get frost burns from listening, they slouch and snarl like a bagful of rattlesnakes with PMT as numbers like the dust and bleached bone desert stuttering Dead Road 7, the primal pulsing blues rockabilly title track, desolate country mooded Rodeo Town, nervy scraped skin pop The Good Ones, poison spitting barbed churner I Hate The Way You Love and the skeletal train rhythm Murdermile with its throbbing bass distortions and insect clicking metronomic.

Ticket Man shows they have a ballad side, albeit a ballad coughed out by someone parched and dying at some godforsaken crossroads, but it’s the dirty, dark and broken glass heart of their gutsy blues that’s going to provide the night’s lacerations.

7.30pm, £8.50. Carling Academy 2. Mike Davies

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With 2002’s sophomore album Sirena barely registering on the radar and then songwriter Davey Moore jumping ship, few would have put money on the band being around for a third album. Especially when they then also lost their drummer and keyboard player too and reverted to their old trade as painters and decorators.

However, singer Liam McKahey has steeped into the breach and, with yet another shift of label, they re-emerge with Nova Scotia (Endeavour) sounding stronger than anyone had the right to expect. McKahey’s love of Scott Walker and the Tindersticks has always been evident but now it surfaces through the material too, and it’s a fair guess from several numbers that he’s a fan of Black too. It’s a melancholic affair with several songs concerned with death. Though musically upbeat, Sadness arose from the death of McKahey’s errant father while She’s Not Coming Back was inspired by the late Paula Yates and the hymnal Pia, a simple piano ballad with a spoken vocal, concerns how a friend dealt with the death of his young daughter.

Add in here the self-loathing of the moody Black Heart Of Mine where he sings "this black heart of mine is stained beyond redemption" (a plea for love as it turns out), the yearning To Sail Away and Echoes and the jazzed torchy Highly, and you get the picture. With the guitars engaging in wah wah and even shades of the Isleys here and there, it is a rockier work than their previous albums but even with the edgier vibe of There She Goes it’s hardly not one for turning up loud and bouncing round the room. Find yourself a corner though, and it’ll curl up with you with the best of them.

Support comes from multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter Tracy Bonham who, after a stint as part of Americana outfit Wayfaring Strangers, finally follows up 2000’s Down Here, getting back to her politely bluesy FM rock stance with Blink The Brightest (Zoe). She’s seasoned well over the nine years since her debut but you can’t help feeling there’s a little too much studio polish here along with songs that do more to suggest others than confirm her own voice; something Beautiful has evident shades of Alanis and Joan Osbourne, I Was Born Without You is a close relation to Fever, Naked and Wilting Flower eyeing up Vanessa Carlton territory.

The higher pitched end of her voice can get a little wearing at times, but the material itself shines as she slides easily between the jazz lounge soul of Whether You Fall, the sunny tumbling acoustic chimes of the Suzanne Vega-like All Thumbs and Did I Sleep Through It All?, Southern lazy blues And The World Has The Nerve To Keep Turning and the swampy loose limbed Eyes.

8pm, £7. Glee Club. Mike Davies

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Hot tipped new boys Winterville (not named for Birmingham’s ill-advised attempt to retitle Christmas), a young bluesy crew from up North fronted by Pete Shoulder whose throaty voice and delivery evokes thoughts of early Paul Rogers and whose guitar work owes a clear debut to Hendrix and Page. Signed to Island with debut album, Everything in Moderation, due later this year, the urgent, melodic Breathe with its flavours of Zeppelin and Family, the a slow smouldering Last Legs and slurried debut single Shotgun Smile suggests they’ll be looking to major headline dates of their own before the year’s out.

7.30pm, £5. Bar Academy. Mike Davies

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With new album, Paradise Hotel, due for release this Autumn, chances are she’ll be showcasing a couple of numbers tonight but otherwise the emphasis should be fairly on the LA born rootsy singer-songwriter’s recent Grammy nominated Land of Milk and Honey (Red House). It’s an album of pointedly political material that perfectly catches the mood of the times with an opening track, Hiway 9, about the oil agenda behind the Iraq war and the way all of America's implicated in the policies of the White House.

But there's no chest beating protest bombast; Gilkyson imbues everything with the female perspective, veining the political with the personal. Thus, the title track is a simple Shaker style hymn as she laments the foolishness of mortals while Tender Mercies is a poignant account of a female suicide bomber married to a mother's prayer for her children and Ballad of Yvonne Johnson is the prison confession and plea for forgiveness of a Native American who committed murder to protect her children from the sex abuse she's herself suffered.

It's not all such downbeat stuff. Wonderland offers a jaunty celebration of physical attraction and even Separation embraces the fall if it means feeling the flame while Dark Side of Town pays homage to the lust for life of their late singer-songwriter father Terry, who wrote Memories Are Made of This and The Bare Necessities. It may not be her best album (Lost and Found still holds that tag, but it's almost certainly her most resonant and promises to forge the backbone of a memorable gig.

7.30pm, £9. mac. Mike Davies

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From the name you might anticipate some sort of Who influenced outfit, but no this sprightly four piece, fronted by Trinidad born singer Romeo (with sister Michele along with matching brother-sister team Sean and Angela), draw more on the 60s harmony of the Mamas and Papas and Lovin’ Spoonful with - they say - nods to the likes of Dylan. New single Forever Lost (Heavenly), taken from the upcoming self-titled debut album, is a bubbly summery pop confection that won’t change the face of music but should put a smile on yours.

Sharing a retro sensibility, Brighton’s The Pipettes (Becki, Rose. Gwenno) say their mission statement is to "turn back the clock to a time before The Beatles ruined everything". Which, going along with new ltd edition EP featuring ABC, Judy and Simon Says, means polka dot dresses, hand jive dances and cheesy organ backed chewy doowop girlie group naive pop. Good fun.

7pm, £7.50. Carling Academy 2. Mike Davies

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It’s been three years since they finally broke through with the Hi-Fi Serious album and its Nothing and Starbucks singles, but since then things have been ominously quiet with a Japanese live mini album the only sign of continued life. They’re back now though with album number four, Teen Dance Ordinance, due in July and preceded by new single Rush Song (London).

It’s pretty much back to basics with churny guitars, driving riffery, loud bits quiet bits, throat straining vocals and a vague nod to radio play chorus. Hardly the dynamic comeback that might have been hoped, but maybe previews of new material like Better Off With Him, The Art Of Making Sense and Black Hole will prove more worth getting worked up about.

Grinding hard rock support’s provided by Instruction who’ve been trumpeted as New York’s new Nirvana with influences that embrace U2 and Queens of the the Stone Age alike. It’s their first time here since the release of God Doesn’t Care (Geffen), a debut album that fuses the straight ahead noisy yowl rock of the piston slamming NIN-ish Lean on You and live favourite Great with muscle n spit post-grunge swaggerer Are You Happy? with the Bono inclinations of radio friendly melodic I’m Dead and the bass throbbing heavy lumber of Breakdown. But while throwing the occasional curve like the sitars of the Eastern flavoured Feed The Culture, the dominant force is the ear crushing steaming riffs that form the engines of such tracks as Death To The 4 Car Garage Band, Your Punk Sucks and the title track. A quick fix for those still missing Creed or wishing Foo Fighters weren’t so poppy, but probably not long haul stayers.

7.30pm, £10. Carling Academy 2. Mike Davies

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Fronted by Eva Petersen, the Liverpool five piece’s last single, Goodbye Little Rose, was infused with witchywood folk that suggested the missing link between Jefferson Airplane and Siouxie and the Banshees. Follow-up Put Your Dukes Up, John (Deltasonic) is an altogether punkier affair with urgent scratchy riffing that more suggests The Strokes with a flavour of first album Blondie. Not as impressive this time round, but a formidable live reputation should carry them over any minor slump.

7.30pm, £6. Bar Academy. Mike Davies

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Having successfully resurrected Deacon Blue over the past couple of years, Ross now turns attention back to his solo career with new album Pale Rider (P3). Evocative of the band’s classic Raintown without sounding overly like a Deacon Blue record, it’s immediately identifiable as Ross (though on She Gets Me Inside he sounds not unlike Brian Kennedy) with its morning after the rain musical mood and misty Celtic flavours yet also basking in the Californian Brian Wilson sunshine of Soundtrack To The Summer.

A wistfully reflective collection written by a man edging 50 (the acoustic, country hued title track notes mortality on the horizon while In The End concerns the death of band guitarist Graeme Kelling), it treats on growing up on the scratchy rhythms of Boys Break The Things They love The Most, the enduring strength of love on the dreamily wonderful If You’ve Got The Time It’s Gonna Take with its cascading chorus lines and the Christmassy tinkles of In This World, the wonder of life in I Know It’s Only Sunday and Calvary and the bittersweet flavour of relationships bruised, bent or separated across distances that hang across Kichijoji and History.

An altogether gentle, easy on the ear affair that brushes its lips across the heart and soul, it probably won’t be the only material he includes in the set, but it’s harf to imagine anyone complaining if it was.

 8pm, £17.50. Glee Club. Mike Davies

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You sometimes wonder if those who worship at the feet of David Gray have ever heard Paul Brady. He’s been crafting his music now for well over two decades, providing hits for such legends as Tina Turner, Bonnie Raitt and Cher yet curiously never finding the same sort of commercial success for his own recordings. His original version of Crazy Dreams remains one of the greatest inspirational love songs to have ever come out of Ireland, yet it failed to even scratch the top 40 when released back in 1981.

Over the years he’s made his share of disappointing albums, but Say What You Feel (Compass), his 14th, is up there with his best, settled back into his Celtic soul skin like a more personable Van Morrison. I’ve never been sold on Brady as an uptempo rocker, so thankfully only Love In A Bubble and the spine-slipping soul blues Doin’ It In The Dark try to get down funky here, the album preferring to ease its way through smoky, rootsy acoustic based ballads and slow swayers, hitting the high spots on such lived in nuggets as the work weary Living For The Corporation, a Claptonish Locked Up In Heaven, and, best of all, the classic Nashville soul The You That’s Really You that would do Dan Penn proud.

Armed with a sympathetic band to help glide his effortless warm nicotine stained honey along, this promises to be a gig to wrap yourself up in.

8pm, £17.50/£15.50. Warwick Arts Centre. Mike Davies

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The old slapshead’s been given some stick for his current album, Hotel (Mute) which finds him dispensing with samples and (save for assorted backing singers) doing it all himself, the songs melancholic affairs inspired by the thought of faceless thousands passing through the rooms in the great hotel of life; permanence and passing then. Gone too is that techno dressing gown, allowing the material to stand fairly naked as largely coffee table easy listening future pop music airbrushed by the occasional sniff of synth.

Despite the Donna Summer lite Very, Human League reject Dream About Me and a terminally ill-advised slow smooch version of New Order’s Temptation with Laura Dawn breathing herself over a spare keyboard backing this isn’t the disaster some would have you believe. There again, while the slightly glam swagger Beautiful, a skittering Lift Me Up and the narcotic ennui of Forever all sparkle, nor is it an especially memorable collection either. Somewhere between the two polar extremes it’s worth checking in for the night.

7.30pm, £22.50. Carling Academy. Mike Davies

Though he seems to have emerged from nowhere, Legend (well Stephens actually) has been making a noise in the background of the r&b scene for a while now, providing session vocals and keyboards for such names as Lauryn Hill, Alicia Keys, Janet Jackson, Britney Spears, the Black Eyed Peas and Kanye West.

Emerging into his own spotlight with major label debut album Get Lifted, he’s proven that golden soul voices can’t be kept in the shadow forever, blending his old school feel with a contemporary hip hop vibe on songs that, par for the course, get down with intimate relationships.

With such album standouts as recent single Used To Love U, the celebratory Lift It Up, cheating groove She Don’t Have To Know and the evocative ballad Refuge (When It's Cold Outside) alongside his snazzy version of Stevie Wonder’s Don't You Worry 'Bout A Thing from the Hitch soundtrack, Legend’s making a good start at living up to his name.

7pm, £12.50. Carling Academy. Mike Davies

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Dubbed the English Bob Dylan on the release of 1965’s debut single Catch The Wind, Donovan Leitch soon put paid to that tag with a swerve into the hippie concept album A Gift From A Flower To A Garden and the funky druggy jazzed psychedelia that characterised Mellow Yellow, Sunshine Superman, Goo Goo Barabajagal and The Hurdy Gurdy Man.

The hits dried up at the end of the decade and while he continued to record through the 70s and 80s, producing such album gems as Cosmic Wheels (featuring the hilarious Intergalactic Laxative) and Essence to Essence, his fortunes continued on a downward slide.

Taking time out to recharge in the latter half of the 80s, he returned the following decade with concerts and, in 1993, a new album, One Night In Time. However, while previewing powerful tracks such as Runaway and Teenage Suicide during his UK tour, it remains unissued in the UK. The critically well-received Rick Rubin produced Sutras followed in 1996, but since then there's been silence. Until now and the release of Beat Cafe.

Enlisting legendary jazz bassist Danny Thompson, he's created a sultry but cool collection that perfectly captures the smoky jazz, blues and poetry vibe of the bohemian cafes, the spirit of Peggy Lee informing the title track while a breathy off the shoulder setting of Dylan Thomas's Do Not Go Gentle surely owes a debt to both Eartha Kitt and Laurence Olivier.

The voice remains as softly burred and mellow as ever (beautifully so on Lover O Lover) sounding (as evidenced on the finger-snapping funky jazz groove Poor Man's Sunshine) like John Martyn but with honey rather than gravel, while the lyrics of songs such as Love Floats, Yin My Yang and Whirlwind show he's not forsaken his mystical inclinations either. Fortunately, as the self-mocking blues Lord of the Universe ably demonstrates, he's also managed to grow old with his sense of humour intact.

Since this is his 40th anniversary, you can take it for granted that, along with dishes from the cafe (hopefully including the Dr John-like voodoo ambience of The Question), he’ll be ranging back over the career, usefully reminding devotees that Sanctuary have just released Summer Day Reflection Songs, a double album compiling all his 1965 material (including alternate versions of Catch The Wind and Colours), along with EMI’s remastered editions of the Sunshine Superman, Mellow Yellow, Hurdy Gurdy Man and Barabajagal albums.

 7.30pm, £20. Wulfrun Hall. Mike Davies

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If it wasn’t for bad luck, Mark Everett would probably have no luck at all. Two years after riding high with the success of Beautiful Freak his sister had killed herself, then his mother died of cancer and, as if the gods didn’t think they’d had enough sport, his cousin was on the plane that ploughed into the Pentagon on 9/11. For most lifelong depressives whose fathers were alcoholics any of these might have proven the last straw. Instead Everett channelled his feelings and experiences into his music, producing the masterful if morose Electro-Shock Blues and the slightly less wrist-slashing Daisies for The Galaxy from which came the irresistible Mr E’s Beautiful Blues, a track that’s become almost a staple of Hollywood soundtracks.

But then he seemed to lose his impetus and, while not disasters, neither Souljacker nor Shootenanny were a patch on their predecessors. Good news then that he seems to have at least partially recovered his muse, looking back on his life so far and, inspired by Bergman’s film Wild Strawberries, distilling it into new double album Blinking Lights and Other Revelations (Dreamworks).

With family tragedies compounded by meditations on alienation, America’s slide into the cultural abyss and the existence or otherwise of God, it’s somewhat inevitably not the sunniest of skipalongs. Yet nor is it a tide of wrist-slashing misery. For a depressive, he’s somehow managed to peer through the fog of negativity and find the glimmers of light on the other side, veining several songs with a sardonic wit to offset the beaten weariness that surfaces in others. Son Of A Bitch, for example, is a wry and unexpectedly loving memoir of his mother who, it seems, wasn’t blessed with the most maternal of natures when Mark was a youngster.

Yet troubled childhood, isolation, low self-esteem, and a general good kicking in the gonads by life are shrugged off in the pick yourself up Dust of Ages while you can sense the unspoken answer when he wonders 'Am I stronger than the curse?' in Checkout Blues.

Working from a musical palette that takes in jazz, blues, rock, country and folk, there’s times when he works up a bit of a lather (even slipping into a kind of doo wop with Hey Man Now You’re Really Living) but, frequently carried along with just voice and piano, for the most part the mood and melodies settle in the vulnerably beautiful category, Brian Wilson without the mental fragility.

Unassuming for the most, there’s nothing likely to find itself propelled chartwards on the back of accompanying some emotional montage on The OC, but there are moments here, like Dust of Ages, I’m Going To Stop Pretending That I Didn’t Break Your Heart, Blinking Lights (For Me), the Tom Waitsy The Stars Shine In The Sky Tonight and the closing Things The Grandchildren Should Know that will endure a lot longer than this year’s trendy fad. Slither along and celebrate a life that’s climbed above the ashes.

 8pm, £15. Warwick Arts Centre. Mike Davies

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Medway angular post-rock trio whose recent single Scarlet Fever goes some way to underlining their self-proclaimed Weezer, Sonic Youth and Pavement influences with its chugging riff and swooping vocals. Armed with an equal reputation for belting live shows, they’ll doubtless be showcasing new material from the impending debut album.

 8.30pm, £5. Jug of Ale. Mike Davies

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