Received with a fervour and near hysteria comparable to the second coming, it was apt that a church saw the first London appearance of Swedish singer-songwriter Jens Lekman since 2008. Without an album to promote, the wandering minstrel (he’s just back from a year-long hiatus in Australia) shuffled a greatest hits set with only a handful of new songs, among them the epic beauty ‘The End Of The World Is Bigger Than Love’.

• Download The End of the World is Bigger Than Love, via The Line of Best Fit.

Sweden: home to many fine exports – IKEA, Julmust, Volvo and, of course, some of the finest, most sincere and beautiful music in the world. Maybe it’s the climate there, the lack of real pretension and the artistic impulse that seems inherant in every Swedish person I’ve ever met, but there’s a level of quality in their music that you just don’t get elsewhere.

So this week I’ve had The Forest and The Trees staying with me in London. Stockholm residents and husband and wife Joel and Linnea Edin were in the UK to play two shows at The Social and The Rest is Noise and introduce the UK to their swimmingly lovely folksy pop sound. They make music with a sublime heart and soul that sounds like it was recorded in a dusky field sometime in late summer. Totally transcendental and it even sounded great while there was a snow storm raging outside.

Their myspace has some good stuff and there are two great videos on Vimeo that you can watch here and here. Hopefully they’ll be back next year with an album to promote and we’ll get to see them play some more.

Kudos to Joel and Linnea (and to fellow live band members, the brothers David and Robin Lindvall) for being the perfect houseguests and making us wish we’d had more time with them to drink wine and talk music.

It had been two years between my first Loney Dear show and this one. The change was incredible – Emil had grown more confident, developed more presence and didn’t seem afraid to act more as a frontman. It was a marked contrast to the quite, whispering bedroom boy of two years earlier.

Anyway, I’m a real sucker for shots ‘shaped’ like this – the L shape flushed bottom left. Sometimes they work out and sometimes they don’t. I like this one a lot.

A band that I rate and yet I think that the reason they’re so compellingly wonderful live is also the reason they’re unable to translate that onto record. Wildbirds and Peacedrums put on some of the most progressive live shows I’ve ever seen, where the audience is both witness and participant in something extrordinary and magical. No record can live up to it: it’s the spectacle that’s the thing (as Guy Debord would say).

As a husband and wife team, there’s this amazing interplay between Mariam Wallentin and Andreas Werliin. Something sexual in the way they establish a tempo, a mood, an attitude in the early part of the show and then crank it up – slow at first – to a steady, rhythmic beat towards the end, climaxing accordingly.

The best shots from this show weren’t during the outstanding (and poorly lit) performance but while observing the duo set up stage beforehand. Always pays to get to the pit early!

The Tallest Man on Earth – the ironic handle of one Kristian Matsson from Dalarna, Sweden – produced what I feel is one of the best albums of recent years, 2008′s Shallow Grave.

On stage, he’s a fascinating prescence, writhing and gurning his way through a catalogue of tender, introspective ballads. Looking like a little boy lost, clinging for dear life onto his guitar, he strikes poses that are a gift to the photographer.

Strange gig to shoot, this one…ran out to catch a train, had no idea if I was on the guest list or not and subsequently didn’t bring my flash, forgetting that this tiny venue – which isn’t really suited to live bands in any way, form or manner – wouldn’t be kind in the lighting area.

After struggling for ten minutes with the terrible low light – almost half the band, including the singer, were shrouded in darkness for most of the gig – I submitted to using what I had on me – my nice 30mm/1.4 and the pop-up flash (which I used for probably the first time on my current camera).

What I’ve come to hate is using a flash at such close range – any kind of flash – it bugs the performers and it’s too damn big – you stand out a mile away, half the audience get blinded…it’s just not nice to have in a gig as photographer, performer or punter. The only bonus is that small venues without lighting look a million times better with a properly dialed down flash.

But this was not a properly dialed-down flash. This was the shittiest little pop-up thing that should probably be removed from all SLR cameras. No use to anyone 99 per cent of the time….but it saved my life this very night.

The results were mixed, true. I kept having to dial it down and up according to what I was shooting. My success rate was probably about 20 percent or so – which isn’t too bad considering. The best shots came from blindly pointing the camera into the audience when singer Emmanuel Lundgren went crowdsurfing and I’m very, very happy with this one: in focus, fine colours, good composition and totally captures what it was like to be there.

The lesson has been learned too: I shall never leave home without my flash again.

One of the very best festival gigs I’ve ever been to and one of the rare occasions when Jens performed with a full band and brass section. Incredible stuff. The lighting in the tent wasn’t the best and I was struggling with a duff camera but it all came out nice in the end.