MANIC STREET PREACHERS Dome Tues 2nd
Picture the scene: youth’s ire and fire is gone, you’re ploughing through gigs like the undead, car park attendants where once rock stars stood and the Dyson’s on the blink. You are the Manic Street Preachers and what’s this but a shoebox stuffed with the tortured lyrical minds-eye of presumed deceased member Richey Edwards, wearing titles like Jackie Collins Existential Question Time. Result! So it is with new album Journal For Plague Lovers that the band look to seize a future from their past and become, again, the indestructible force that their fallen ally once slashed bloody rivers into his own arm for. (BG)

KLAUS SAYS BUY THE RECORD / CURLY HAIR Freebutt Weds 3rd
A double bill of chiming lo-fi acoustic pop, ideal for Novello judges searching for ‘the next Leisure Society’. Curly Hair have affiliations with that Wilkommen Collective stable, while Klaus Says Buy The Record are doubtless hoping to atone for their unfathomable decision (was it a bet?) to enter themselves into T4’s execrable Orange Unsigned Act last year. Embarrassingly they did quite well, but it’s back to the safe world of Unlabel compilations and the Freebutt for them now. (SH)

THE HORRORS Concorde 2 Thurs 4th
Some time in 2006, The Horrors visited this venue on a wave of rather ill fitting early hype, like grim reapers of the chimney sweep Olympics. Amid the vortex of white noise, as foolishly named band members ghosted around the murky stage, SOURCE didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. Two months ago, the band unveiled their masterpiece, the eight minute, krautrocking comeback head-splitter Sea Within A Sea, and our grizzly fate was sealed. This fact is underlined by new album, Primary Colours, which mines Bowie, My Bloody Valentine, Neu!, Echo & The Bunnymen and Joy Division to create something fantastically now. Be very afraid. (BG)

GROSVENOR / :KINEMA: Prince Albert Saturday 6th
There’s been much talk in the press recently about how 2009 will be remembered as the year when whiney, stadium-indie was replaced as Britain’s pop music of choice by something much more fun and interesting. If that’s true, then these two bands stand to benefit. Formerly of Hot Chip, Rob Smoughton’s band, Grovesnor, would in a better world, have had a number one single with last year’s Drive Your Car – a joyous slice of electro-disco. Brighton’s own :kinema: join them for this double bill and the two bands do seem tailor made to play alongside each other. Fans of warm synths, dancefloor romance and, you know, actually enjoying themselves, need look no further. (DA)

ORBITAL Dome Weds 10th
The reformation bandwagon is now so jam-packed that most estranged groups seem to have concluded it would be just plain rude not to get back together to pay off their mortgage/drug dealer/herbal healer. Admittedly, many of these acts have delayed their return into decades. Not Orbital, who broke up just five years ago. With a new best of due and high profile slots across the summer festival circuit, it’s difficult to be cynical about a band who deliver the kind of ecstatic, communal dance music few can match. Rumours that Phil and Paul Hartnoll will return wearing hairpieces instead of those funny headsets remain unconfirmed. (BG)

THE JOY FORMIDABLE Audio Thurs 11th
A fantastic amount of excitement surrounds this trio as they create one of the loudest sounds to emerge from Wales in years. Don’t be fooled by the pixie-like frontwoman Ritzy – she punches well beyond her weight in their live sets. Their energetic indie rock is packed with many fantastic singles that drive by like a speeding juggernaut. If you missed their recent performance at our Great Escape Festival you can catch them here as they return to close off their UK tour, following the release of their brilliant debut album, A Balloon Called Moaning. (MB)

KATY PERRY Concert Hall Thurs 11th
At the peak of the recent swine flu epidemic, US pop strumpet Katy Perry could be heard banging on ridiculously about how “cool” and “super-trendy” she thought the virus was. With these words ringing in SOURCE’s fuming ears, we were on the first plane to LAX and around her Bel Air mansion sharpish, armed with the most virulent strain of the disease known to scientific man, housed within a mighty dangerous stray puppy. This evening, expect to see America’s low-rent Lily Allen on her last trotters and in desperate need of some oinkment. Who’s going to save your bacon now, Perry? (BG)

SPIRIT OF GRAVITY: ANIMAL MAGIC TRICKS / HOOFUS / MONSTER BOBBY
Komedia Studio Bar Thurs 11th
A risky move to the Komedia last year has revitalised Spirit Of Gravity’s live electronica nights, celebrated this month by the return of former boy-about-town Monster Bobby. With The Pipettes seeming in disarray every time we check on them, Bobby’s shoring up of his solo songwriting miniatures and underground Totally Bored empire looks a wise move. See if he’s up for a Casio jam in the promoters’ resurrected Elektrocreche – an audience-participatory home for abandoned keyboards and toy instruments. (SH)

OVERHEAD WIRES MUSIC Providence Thurs 11th
Debut showcase for this new Brighton label, with its cheery, if simplistic, ‘Fuck the music industry’ slogan. Overhead Wires’ methods of revolution mainly involve cutting fair deals with singer-songwriters. But they’re an undoubtedly sincere bunch, with a brace of compilation CDs and zines to their name already. Former Tunbridge Wells lad Nick McKenna should be plugging his jaunty oom-pah single Cat’s Out The Bag with a handful of like-minded supports in tow, including Brighton’s own The Move-Ons and Dan Markland. (SH)

DE LA SOUL Concorde 2 Fri 12th
Can you believe this New York trio have been around for over 20 years now? Having originally got together at high school they quickly became masters of the sample-heavy hip hop that spawned a new group of crossover indie fans after their seminal debut album, 3 Feet High And Rising. Always enjoyable as playful wordsmiths, they avoid the usual gangsta rap messages typical of the genre and bring us their now classic hits, Magic Number and Me Myself And I. (MB)

JARVIS COCKER Dome Tues 16th
What activities are missing from the gig experience? Should hardcore drugs be accommodated at the bar? Perhaps members of the audience could score each song on electronic keypads? What about yoga, does it have a future in rock’n’roll? Jarvis Cocker certainly seems to think so judging by a series of recent shows in a Parisian gallery, which saw the former Pulp singer soundtracking classes and jamming with exercisers. All this comes as Cocker readies new solo album, Further Complications, and comes to terms with the collapse of his six-year marriage to Camille Bidault-Waddington. Sounds like he’s gone mad. (BG)

ATHLETE Concorde 2 Tuesday 16th
You have to give Athlete credit for producing their last album themselves – it proves that they at least care about what they are doing. However, no amount of pointless atmospheric noise at the start of songs can disguise the fact that this is Radiohead-lite for people who are still coming to terms with Princess Diana’s death. Their fans will probably leave the show saying how amazingly affecting and emotive it was, but that’s because they have soggy brains and no genitals. Beige. (DA)

BILLY BRAGG Dome Weds 17th
Billy Bragg is an amazing singer songwriter, one of the few English musicians fluent in both the tender and the polemic sides of the pop coin. It seems a very long time ago now that he was on Channel 4’s The Tube, a busking unknown with his guitar amp rucksacked onto his back – it’s scary to think it’s now a quarter century since the release of his first album. The famed Bard of Barking’s catalogue now runs to ten highly lauded solo albums from which to select his set list – should be an excellent gig. (JC)

MARTHA REEVES & THE VANDELLAS Concorde 2 Fri 19th
During their time at the Motown label’s mid 60s peak, Martha Reeves and her Vandellas enjoyed over a dozen smash hits including Dancing In The Street, Jimmy Mack and Nowhere To Run. Known as the archetypal Motown sound they went on to be one of the most covered bands of all time, further confirming their entrance into the popular consciousness. They return to Brighton after last year’s successful show, before they embark on a UK-wide tour. Altogether now – “Calling out around the world, are you ready for a brand new beat?” (MB)

LADY SOVEREIGN Concorde 2 Saturday 6th
Apparently, London MC Thomas Jules had already been given permission to use the melody to The Cure’s Close To Me, on his track, Get Close To Me, before Lady Sov’s people ‘stole’ the idea from him for her new single, So Human. Laughably, Robert Smith says he prefers Jules’ version, even though it sounds so worryingly amateurish that when we first heard it we wondered if all this controversy was in fact a media joke. You could go online and compare the two yourself or, better still, you could just find yourself a copy of Diplo’s bootleg mash-up of Close To Me and Drop It Like It’s Hot from a few years back, which is far superior to both and almost certainly where they all got the idea from in the first place. (DA)

WAR OF THE WORLDS – ALIVE ON STAGE! Brighton Centre Sat 27th & Sun 28th
No-one would have believed, in the last years of the 70s, that Jeff Wayne’s unsettling family favourite would be packing out theatres three decades hence (we thought the Martians’ second invasion would’ve put paid to that by 2009). Especially in a show featuring 35-foot high Martian Fighting Machines, 100-foot wide CGI animation, and, er, an 11-foot 3D hologram of Richard Burton, who’s not letting death stop him tackling The Red Weed. Justin Hayward’s still in it. Ullah! (SH)

KING CREOSOTE Duke of York’s Weds 3rdFence Records’ head honcho, King Creosote returns to Brighton on Wedneday 3rd along with his trusty sidekick The Pictish Trail. You can expect to be alternating between bopping in your seats and weeping into your popcorn as KC takes you on a sometimes psychedelic, sometimes heartbreaking journey. The full band adds something rather special, often bordering on anthemic, to the mix, while losing none of the boy from Fife vibe we all love.
(LM)