Music

A decade has passed since the last time I attended Glastonbury. It seems some things never change, however. In 2004 England had just been knocked out of a major football tournament and concerns were being expressed that the festival had lost its cutting edge.

Terre Thaemlitz goes by the name DJ Sprinkles, the name she uses on the album. She is a multimedia producer who owns her own record label, she writes journals and books, she talks about her politics, being gay, queerness, transgenderism, pan-sexuality (she also goes by he sometimes) and considers herself to be a left wing activist.

Her politics are central to her music. People will listen to this album and understand the music in various ways, but this only adds to the enjoyment.

The title of this excellent release is somewhat overstated. Suburban Base was arguably the most prolific and iconic label of hardcore and jungle music (though less so drum & bass).

There are many genre classics on this collection, but it would be impossible on three CDs to come even close to capturing hardcore and jungle's wonderfully chaotic, punk-like DIY approach.

I have been a professional musician for 20 years, running bands in Perth, Sidney, Liverpool, Manchester and London. The "inner city scene" is basically the same everywhere in the UK. Musicians on the "original showcase circuit" don't get paid. The carrot is "exposure" as sold by "promoters".

At the end of 2013, Free Angela was reissued and two other compilations were released, all attempting to reflect the music of Black America in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Angela Davis was one of the best-known Communist Party activists in 1960s and 70s America. The then-governor of California, Ronald Reagan, tried to have her banned from teaching at any California university.

One of the great voices from Thatcher's Britain is back to remind us even if we are in the gutter, some of us are looking at the stars. The Pogues have produced a commemorative box set to celebrate 30 years since the release of their first album. Many people will only know the band from their seasonal epic "Fairytale of New York" so now you can buy all their albums in one fell swoop.

Rough Trade Shops has released the perfect stocking-filler for newcomers to music from Africa with its Africa 13.

Seasoned fans will be familiar with some of the choices originally released in the UK on labels such as Crammed Discs, Awesome Tapes From Africa and Soundway.

Highlights include the hypnotic polyrhythms of Congo's Konono No. 1, the minimalist electro groove of the Owiny Sigoma Band and Staff Benda Bilili's dance-floor filler Osali Mabe.

"I have always followed very closely what was happening here in movements against racism and against the Nazis. London had a big influence on me along with the music I heard at home in the 1960s when I was a kid, the protest songs from the Basque Country and from Latin America. The revival of ska and punk in England was a big influence on my first band, Kortatu, along with the two tone movement with Selector, The Specials and The Beat.

Wise Up Ghost is a collaboration between Elvis Costello and live instrumentation hip hop soul group The Roots.

I approached this album as a huge fan of The Roots and as someone who has nothing more than a very limited knowledge Elvis Costello, although after listening to this I think I may need to remedy that.

Whatever else the long-gone "Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia" was, it was multicultural. Established in 1945, it was made up of six republics and populated by 22 different ethnicities, including Muslim Slavs, Albanians, Jews, ethnic Germans, Turks, Vlachs and Hungarians. It had three major religions, two alphabets, three official languages and a variety of minority languages, including Albanian, Turkish, Bulgarian, Romanian, Italian, Czech, Slovak, Ruthenian and Roma.