It’s hard to shake the feeling that The Great Escape, the annual three-day gigathon for new bands and Brighton’s answer to Texas’s South-By-South-West, has grown too unwieldy for its own good. Certainly, the queues outside venues that snake all the way to Eastbourne offer little hope to the majority of seeing the year’s buzz bands such as The Strypes, Swim Deep or Parquet Courts.

As one of the many journalists who took Reinhart and Rogoff’s work to be a brilliant empirical underpinning for what appeared to be common-sense – that you simply cannot tax and borrow your way out of chronically unbalanced public finances – the discovery that it was, well, flawed, is something of a disappointment.

Century-old Rite of Spring couldn't be more popular – now

It may simply be the influence of producers Flood and Alan Moulder, who have a track record of rendering indie-rock commercially palatable, but on Holy Fire, Foals move further away from their nerdy math-rock origins to a more muscular rock'n'roll style.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that Porsche is booming. The German firm is in the middle of a full-throttle recalibration from niche sports car manufacturer to all-purpose purveyor of luxury SUVs and saloons.

As ever, Kele Okereke’s energies are divided between the political and the personal on Four, with agit-punk assertions like “ Coliseum” and “Kettling” and the contemptuous pillorying of political duplicity in “So He Begins to Lie” punctuated with more tenderly rendered emotional wrestling on tracks such as “Truth” and “Real Talk”.

African musicians take to Britain's railways

The Edinburgh Fringe is all about talent-spotting but forget Footlights - if you really want to see the next generation of performers first, the smart money is on Double Edge Drama. This is theatre company of Eton College, whose recent alumni include Eddie Redmayne, Harry Lloyd and Tom Hiddleston, to name but a few.

Two urban festivals in a similar rural spirit occupy Victoria Park this weekend.

The Mercury Prize is to move to Channel 4 after many years on the BBC in a revamp of the music award.

The new-wave synth sounds of George Lewis Jr, aka Twin Shadow, wouldn't have been out of place on the film soundtrack of the Ryan Gosling vehicle (ahem) Drive.

Slice them where you will, any collection of psychoanalysts is as mad as a parliament. Novelty beards, whirling eyes, twitches, deranged clothing, tics, jitters and habits you wouldn't want to go into. But Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) was the maddest of the lot. His mainspring theory was that all human ills stemmed from not enough orgasms, and, in particular, not enough proper orgasms, which he plotted on graphs from foreplay to the molten afterglow of WH Auden's "Lullaby" (1940): "Soul and body have no bounds:/ To lovers as they lie upon/ Her tolerant enchanted slope/ In their ordinary swoon."

The music industry is counting the cost of the riots after numerous record labels saw their CD stocks wiped out in a warehouse fire.