“This is great, you don’t have to cheer for that,” deadpans Josh Tillman as a smattering of whistles and applause greet his arrival on stage. “It was pretty lazy of me. But I thank you for your faith.”

Tillman, a tall, commendably hirsute figure, has a fine line in flint-dry humour, which he seems more than happy to indulge himself in many times during his 90+ minute set. After a slow, sedentary “Firstborn”, for instance, he stares out into the crowd and drawls, “This is no Vampire Weekend show, for sure.”

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One of the best shows I think we’ve hosted at Club Uncut last night, thanks to Baltimore’s regal Arbouretum. I raved about their third album, “Song Of The Pearl”, back at the start of the year, and from the grand start of “Another Hiding Place” onwards, it’s clear they’re an unassumingly wonderful band.

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Beth Jeans Houghton tiptoes into the centre of Borders from behind a shelf of graphic novels, accompanied by her drummer. Wearing a black, almost-dinner dress that fans at her waist and a precarious pair of heels that could quite easily constitute a health and safety risk, her striking look is topped off by a yellow and blue striped hat with peak.

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The sixth Cornbury Festival rode out the recession in grand style this weekend with 20,000 or so local music fans rocking up to the picturesque Cornbury Estate near Charlbury in Oxfordshire for a bill that featured diverse headline turns from Fleetwood Mac's Peter Green, Sugababes and Scouting For Girls.

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When these two Hyde Park shows were announced last December, we ran a piece in UNCUT celebrating the return to active service of Blur, where David Cavanagh quite reasonably asked the question: which Blur are coming back? After all, here was a band who had undergone many creative iterations during their recording lifetime; equally, so much had happened since the four of them last played together, in July 2000, it seemed appropriate to wonder what Blur would do with these shows. Could they really reconnect with the moptops who made the buoyant baggy pop of “There’s No Other Way”? Would they really revisit “Parklife”, a song intrinsically linked to an era and movement they’d subsequently gone to considerable lengths to distance themselves from? And what about the more abstract, edgier material from the later albums – what place would that have in Hyde Park?

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