Isn’t it great when bands climb onto the stage from the crowd? I’m not sure why, but it’s seriously cute. A Silver Mt Zion do it to make a point about the nature of artist and audience; I remember once seeing a friend of mine clambering out of the pit shouting “Shit, I’m on!”, while his band were looking expectantly back to the wings. Doesn’t matter why you do it; instant love. (At least for the first few seconds…)Tonight, Frightened Rabbit do it because there’s no backstage at the Square Bar & Grill, so they don’t have a choice. I grin even wider. I’m pretty excited about this gig.

Millions of you will have read my review of their sophomore record, Midnight Organ Fight, which was pitched somewhere just south of gushing. But as I left the gig there was a certain sense of anti-climax, of opportunity missed. Make no mistake: this was a good gig by a good band. But you’d be hard pressed to be any more positive than that, and I’ve decided that the main culprit was the too-short forty minute slot they’d been given. It left the band with no real space to shape the set, and what we got was one-paced and dynamically limited. (Not quiet. Limited.) Which is something of a shame: we get all the big-song peaks – a thumping ‘The Modern Leper’ and a demented ‘Fast Blood’ being particular stand-outs – without any of the soft-touch valleys. No ‘Poke’. No ‘The Twist’. And a strangely pointless and shapeless ‘My Backwards Walk’.

So it’s good without being great; fun without being fantastic. They close with ‘Keep Yourself Warm’, and it’s genuinely wonderful to be part of a roomful of the slopey-fringed, arms in the air, all howling “It takes more than fucking someone you don’t know to keep yourself warm”; it would seem almost churlish to point out what they were planning to do with the end of their evening. And the drummer! In The Commitments, when they’re auditioning drummers, they ask for influences. The winning answer: “Yer man, Animal, from the muppets”. That’s what drummers should be: wild eyes, wilder hair, thumpthumpthump, and Grant Hutchinson doesn’t disappoint. He finishes the set on his feet, sticks clutched in his hands like axes, lurching towards the audience with his teeth bared; then he relaxes, the moment passes, and his growl fades into a smile. And everybody smiles back. Good barbarian. Nice barbarian.

This was the Thursday night of Concrete and Glass, a new Hoxton-centric multi-venue festival. Like Stag and Dagger and the Camden Crawl, it’s one of these “festivals” where the organisers take twenty or so venues within walking distance of one another, liberally scatter them with bands, and then ask the wristbanded hordes to make their own night out of it. In theory, excellent; tonight, a nightmare.

We leave Frightened Rabbit and walk a minute to see Bassclef, who’s on at 9. Except – as becomes clear after ten minutes confused trying of fire doors and puzzling of waitresses, and one conversation with a lost German couple – he’s not. He’s on tomorrow. Some programmes were amended; ours wasn’t. Right. A quick scan of the listings and we’re off to see Dirty Soundsystem, except when we get there we find four bored-looking hipsters and a hastily amended wall sign. Not on until 10.30. Right.

We pause in a pub, which at least has some people in it, and we have a row about the Rolling Stones before setting off to see Polly Scattergood. We find the place (eventually), but a hastily amended wall sign tells that Polly’s been delayed, and also moved, and so we mosey back on into the Hoxton night. We haven’t seen any music for about an hour and a half now, and it’s cold. But it’s okay! Skream is on just up the road! In half an hour! So we pootle along in expectation, only to find more delays. Skream’s meant to be on at 11.30, will probably be on later than that, but here’s Grosvenor. Let’s watch them.

As much as I love bitching about bad music in the pub, I’ve never really written about it before. I think that the John Peel attitude – if you don’t like it, ignore it – is best, at least in print. But sometimes it’s right there in your face: you’re cold, you’re annoyed, you’ve just bought a beer, and there they are. Grosvenor. Now, I’ve got some time for some of this Italo-disco-type stuff: it’s slick and it’s sexy and the Chromatics album’s quite good. But when it’s poor, it’s very poor, and when it’s got a self-indulgent sub-Clapton soft-rock sub-Kravitz soft-cock self-proclaimed guitar GOD masturbating furiously all over his own too-tight trousers at the same time, well … we left. Quickly. And we went home.

I didn’t go to the Friday, but I’m told it was a similar nightmare. The marquee draw, TV on the Radio, was moved at the last minute to the far-too-small Cargo. Due onstage at 11, the queues started at 8, and so the be-skinny-jeaned masses had a choice between forfeiting the whole of their evening or skipping the reason they bought the ticket. I think there’s potential in these festivals, but the ambulatory set-up means you need to make damn sure bands are on when they’re meant to be; not very rock-n-roll, but such is life. After all, trying to read your program by the light of a kebab shop while a night-bus drunk pirouettes in front of you will harsh the buzziest of buzzy buzzes. Sort it out, please.