My Best Tunes

You might call it a case of “Thank you for the music – but now please change your name”. Abba tribute acts, who have kept the memory of Sweden’s most famous export alive since the band played their last concert more than 25 years ago, have been told by band’s record company they can no longer use the group’s name.

Tom Robinson has turned his 60th birthday into a prolonged petition to save his current radio employer 6 Music, with the help of, among others, Franz Ferdinand. But it’s when he dusts off his own angry humanist anthems that the night catches fire.

Though they are leaders of a loose confederation of new dream pop bands, Beach House make for strange scene figureheads as they shamble on stage, hidden behind ragged fringes and awkward banter. Such simple failings in stage presence are forgotten, however, within about 30 seconds of the first song of a majestic set.

PENDULUM (DJ SET), SUB FOCUS, MS DYNAMITE, JOKER, BOY BETTER KNOW: JME, SKEPTA, DONAEO, NERO, TEMPA T (TEMPZ), DJ EZ, MAXIMUM, SHY FX, BAR 9, UNCZ CREW: SKIBBA, FUNSTA , HARRY SHOTTA, DJ RUFFSTUFF, WIDEBOYS, MAJESTIC, RATTUS RATTUS & KLOSE ONE (URBAN NERDS)

It’s not often that a gig is set in motion by the click of a slide projector but then we have come to expect something more from Natalie Merchant, the 46-year-old singer-songwriter who has long left behind the folk-pop proselytising of her 10,000 Maniacs days and settled into her role as a solo artist of rare maturity and depth.

The ambitious Australian quintet Pendulum have their sights set on becoming the biggest electronic act in the world. It must have been a blow to the kudos then when Neil Diamond beat the dance-rockers’ second drum’n'bass-meets-metal album, In Silico, to the No 1 slot in 2008.

When the makers of Glee announced that they were taking their show on the road for an all-singing and dancing extravaganza featuring some of the hit drama’s best-loved covers, it was hard not to feel slightly underwhelmed.

They called them the Swinging Sixties, so it comes as no surprise that there are four Beatles singles in the top five in a new compilation of the best-selling singles of the decade.

Germany was in frenzied “Lenamania” yesterday as the nation celebrated its first Eurovision Song Contest win in almost 30 years with the song “Satellite” – a hit sung in rather mangled English by a sweet and self-effacing 19-year-old called Lena Meyer-Landrut.

I’m sure I can’t have been the only British viewer who sprang to their feet and punched the air in triumph when, late on in the Eurovision Song Contest voting, some clearly tone-deaf national jury – Portugal’s, or maybe Israel’s – took pity on the Belarussian entry and awarded it douze points, shunting “our own” Josh Dubovie to the bottom of the pile. Yesss! At the eleventh hour, true notoriety was grasped from the jaws of mere ignominy. What a relief!