"This is a concert," Tim Harrington reminds us, "and we're going to smash this room to ashes." The singer has already abandoned his unhealthy looking vest to the crowd, the nipple peepholes he gnawed in it earlier maybe adding to its attraction. He's bald and bearded, the roll of fat around his stomach suggesting just the right amount of appetite.

While his reputation as a difficult interviewee precedes him, I was still excited to get a chance to talk to Kele Okereke at the Creators Project last weekend. I figured that since I wasn’t going to be asking him what he had for breakfast, or doing a meta-piece on his disdain for the interviewing process, as the NME tried in 2005, I’d be ok.

"As you may or may not know, I have a day job in another band," says Kele Okereke mischievously from the tiny stage under Hoxton's stone arches. Indie-rock lovers couldn't fail to recognise the Bloc Party frontman's rich London voice, but they could be forgiven for a double-take. Thoroughly beefed up, vest-clad and cap tilted way back on his good-looking head, Okereke, or the The Boxer, as his new solo album attests, is grinning. It was a rare sight in his day job, and one you'd think would be even rarer now that the band is on indefinite hiatus, but it becomes highly familiar by the end of this brief, 50-minute set.

Blondie performing for picnickers in the Cotswolds might seem unlikely, but somehow it works

The Bloc Party is over but Kele comes out fighting

Indie kids and ageing rockers come together outside Broadcasting House to protest against closure of the pioneering digital station

The female-fronted London electro-pop trio Chew Lips made a big noise at this year's SXSW festival in the USA. Tigs, their singer, tells Elisa Bray they are 'a show-off and two geeks', and that she is unashamedly the show-off

DJ Tiesto's brand name and face are plastered either side of the stage. You may also see him modelling underwear on giant Times Square billboards, and advertising expensive watches. The Dutchman is the epitome of the modern international superstar DJ. He broke house music into the US mainstream, remixed Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake, and DJed as athletes paraded at the Athens Olympics. Tonight's four-hour set in front of 20,000 people in the East End's open air is a mere aperitif compared to the six hours of his current Ibiza residency. He is the biggest DJ in the world. But, for all the mega-pixel video screens, the scale and success, at the end I'm left wondering: is that all there is?

Joan Armatrading has picked her five favourite players for a Radio 4 series. They'd make rather odd supergroup, she tells John Walsh

There are few better ways of seeing the world than by joining a band and going on tour – as The Rakes have found out. Alex Hannaford reminisces with them about some hard travelling

The army of sensitive, multi-million-selling souls who Snow Patrol are lumped in with show no signs of slowing down.

When non-stop touring left them creatively shattered, Bloc Party had to reinvent their sound. Gavin Cumine hears how they did it

The big autumn show at London's V&A museum takes a timely look at design during the Cold War. Here, the curator Jane Pavitt previews the highlights