There are some bands that we like to keep for ourselves, a secret bond that guarantees the intimacy of a small venue for live shows and the all important notion that the band are playing directly and only to you.. Beirut are one such band, but as Tuesday at a sold out Koko proved, Beirut are moving out of the bedroom and into the mainstream consciousness.

This year the RCA’s Summer show combined various fields in an all-encompassing exhibition space that was both innovative and exciting to explore.

In today’s over-saturated electro market it would be easy to dismiss Simian Mobile Disco as just another bleep and whistle DJ duo. However, if the reaction of the Hoxton Bar crowd was anything to go by it would seem that what we have on our hands is a bona fide rave outfit.

Stood in amongst one of the most respectful crowds I’ve seen in London recently; the entire crowd was falling in love one song at a time. The ornate Bloomsbury Ballrooms, which is new to such shenanigans, provided a suitably apt setting; as Bianca and Sierra are really one of the most captivating musical sights to behold.

Jack Penate, him with the legs what move like nothing you’ve ever seen, they’re great those legs. This tune’s alright too; nice and jingly jangly, backed by a bit of ska, he’s all Pete Doherty and Jamie T like with his cocky-ness but without Pete’s opium addled Thomas De Quincy romanticism and T’s who-does-he-think-he-is wide-boy act.

This all female group show includes the copper plated bronze casts of miniature pots and a life sized upright rabbit (named ‘Poppers’ and ‘Hopper’ respectively) by Stephanie Taylor, as well as mixed media pieces by Gerda Scheepers that consist of coloured line drawings mounted within reconstructed picture frames...

So, you want to be hip but you don’t know where to start? Bought yourself some skinny jeans and a banging fringe but you’ve got no soundtrack to your hot new life? Well, help is at hand. For anyone wanting to get into the recent wave of new music but don’t know their Klaxons from their ketamine, Neon Nights is a pretty good place to start.

Sheffield youngsters Charles and Rebecca’s first single is a brilliant introduction to their very individual brand of country tinged indie-pop. Simplicity is everything with this duo and by keeping things stripped down they’ve created a sound which has the immediate effect of making you want to see them live. Touring frantically for the past few months seems to have paid off and transferring all that live goodness to vinyl, keeping production simple and vocals at the forefront of everything, was a great move.

The UCL campus is awash with curators, gallerists, artists, students and friends to see the work of the soon to be alumni of Slade. The final year cross disciplinary show, which takes up the entirety of the Slade, shows off the work of the Postgraduate Students. The majority of the work is of a high standard, however it is the sculpture and new media artists that truly stand out.

Tonight’s show is the first of a four-night residency at Clwb Ifor Bach for Super Furry Animals. Tickets, as you would expect, for these tiny shows were snapped up within minutes. So for fans lucky enough to get their mits on them this was a very special treat indeed – a rare chance to hear new material and old favourites in such an intimate venue. The audience, as you might expect, lapped it up.

Ok, so Coachella Festival 2007 was off the hook! Two properly massive outdoor stages, three impressive tents, two mad high tech dome structures and a couple of mini music playing booths with sun shelters to kickback and relax in. The band action was siiiiick: Bjork, Rage Against the Machine, DJ Shadow, Peaches, Felix Da Housecat, Justice, Digitalism, LCD Soundsystem, The Rapture, Arcade Fire, Explosions in the sky, The Roots, Ratatat, CSS, Soulwax, Teddybears, Manu Chao, MSTRKFT and Kid Sister (to name a few).

Akin to the infectious positivity currently being championed by the children of nu-rave, but leaving behind the re-hashed rave electronics, Architecture in Helsinki return with their third full-length album. Standing aside from their previous effort, In Case We Die, AIH relentlessly push the colourful and the curious with their ten-song strong rambunctious fairground ride – Places Like This.

Occupying the central space of Vilma Gold’s new gallery premises just off Hackney Road are the paintings of recent Royal College graduate Nicholas Byrne. The crisp white wall space remains untouched, instead battened from ceiling to floor a set of board backed canvases hang on simple wood structures aligned in a mono-directional procession. Alongside stands a larger canvas similarly supported from ceiling to floor, though facing the other direction to the adjacent procession of smaller works.

Okay, so the Windmill in Brixton isn't the kind of venue you'd want to see Beyonce play (and I have it on good authority that if you did want to see her play, you wouldn't be welcome there anyway) but a perspiring crowd saw Broken Family Band play an intimate afternoon gig there on Saturday. The Cambridge quintet have a wide host of influences, have a very strong fan base, and really enjoy playing together - combined with sounding great, you've got a darn good set-up. They're also really, really nice guys, and front man Steven Adams kept the crowd pleased with his satirical anecdotes and nonchalant charm. I'm not one for quirky tactics, such as plying your audience with booze, jewellery or airline tickets, but the cake-fuelled interval and occasional free glass of wine actually suits this band's happy-go-lucky, likeable presence. This also gave lead Adams an excuse to hurl expletives at us during the second half, which, of course, had the crowd in hysterics.

Cardiff’s beautiful and in my opinion best venue, The Point is more than 3/4 full this evening. For a band that had released just one single before today this is a rather remarkable achievement in itself. Los Campesinos! are the current Cardiff buzz band, the latest ‘talking’ band if you like. So, frenzied excitement aplenty greets the seven members - who have all incidentally, and rather ridiculously changed their surnames to Campesinos! (Yes, with the exclamation mark).

Having studied graphic design, I too had put on a show at my university and then made the journey to London to showcase my talents to industry moguls. My experience was, well, pretty shit - but this was flawless. With over 50 stands showcasing talent, 2 fashion theatres and an orange-carpeted Moët bar for pre-show drinks, GFW supported by River Island (amongst other major players) really packed a punch.

Apt that Architecture in Helsinki should choose Kings College as the host for their one and only UK date, as the youthful energy of the student haunt provides an active harmony to the sounds of their latest album Places Like This. Instantly cheery and colourful, the six piece Melbourne based ensemble took to the stage and looked every inch the eccentric and varied spectrum that their musical style denotes.

It’s a ten track jewel that beautifully combines the intimate and often extremely sad voice of Doug Martsch with a clear and constructed sound that makes you really appreciate even the long guitar solo on Just a Habit.

It is nigh on impossible to talk about Elvis Perkins without mentioning his tragic life story. Son of actor Anthony Perkins, famed for his role in Psycho, who died of aids in the early 1990s, Elvis’ mother was a victim of the attacks on the world trade centre. Early interest in Perkins seemed more focused on said life story than the actual music he was making. But, with a string of warmly received live dates and glowing reports from across the pond (Ash Wednesday has been available in the US for a number of months) attention has now firmly shifted onto his musical worth. Perkins doesn’t disappoint in this department. His debut release is an excellent advert of his talents.

This is the kind of album you’d like to listen to before going to sleep, or the one you'd play on a Sunday morning when you’re off work. I started to wonder where abouts in the United States this guy is based. Probably somewhere north in one of those forgotten states where there is nothing better to do, and so tempted to take a guitar and get in to that sad and dreamy folk mood trying to escape - at least musically from the boredom of your neighbourhood.

A packed out Boxing Hall in East London held an eager bunch of rain-drenched fashion fans for this years St. Martins Graduate Show. With 40 designers showing, first up was Oden Wilson, who achieved the seemingly impossible - creating a relatively wearable fitted dress out of baby pink PVC - and impressive it was too. Some nice ‘puffa’ style jackets were transformed into dressy top layers and surprisingly the appearance of slightly generic oriental prints did nothing to take away from a solid collection.

Well, well, well what a show. Wholly impressed by the overall talent residing in these four walls of the ever-so-nice Banqueting House just off of London’s Whitehall, I found myself wanting to see more, to stay longer – although a seat would have been nice. Incredibly sleek and professional, Kingston’s Graduate Show this year boasted the cream of their fashion-student crop with a diverse range of designs and fabrics, interestingly expressing the stark differences between one creative mind and another. Neon shoes, metallic leggings, smart tailoring, plimsolls, pompoms and chains of jangling keys...

Seeing Maps live was very different to what I had expected. Their new album being quite sedate, with echoes of Spacemen 3, The Radio Dept. and Slowdive; their live sound a lot more raucous, which had a lot to do with their brilliantly noisy drummer and echoes of Mew and Sigur Ros. The first song So Low, So High with its whale-song chorus caught the audiences’ attention and by the end of You Don’t Know Her Name they had won the crowd over despite some dodgy dancing.

Now on the whole I am adamantly adverse to the neon soaked design tendencies that many designers are opting for in these crazy nu-rave days. Apart from making me feel nauseous, they generally seem to use bright colours to hide the fact that what they are creating is just bad design. American Peter Halley, as an artist on the other hand has created a new-rave dream, as using such colours in contemporary art are a different matter.

Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce to you: First Thursdays – a new East End art innitiaive conjured up by the Whitechapel art gallery and Parasol Unit. Fully supported by those good fellows at Time Out, First Thursdays asks, simply, that the multitude of galleries that populate this bizarre cultural nub we call the East, stay open until 9pm - allowing, presumably, the hard working folk of London to saunter up after hours and check out the abundance of wonderful art the scene has to offer.

You’re in a Charity Shop or your favourite vintage haunt when you find a stack of postcards that have been lovingly kept. You flick through them, learning about Margaret in Toulouse finding the French “quite discourteous”, Jim and Julie on their Honeymoon in Italy get food poisoning on the second day and spend the whole holiday in their hotel room, and Herbert visiting his son in San Francisco and meeting his friends, whom he describes as “Awfully free-spirited” and “well groomed, with a love of Elizabeth Taylor”. Then you get to a vivid mountainous scene of Swiss Alps. It depicts a scene of complete solace. Water mills and homes built into the mountains; with the daunting Alps lurking ominously in the background, whilst goats graze in the foreground, implying a feeling of complete contentment in an epic landscape.