A couple of things in the last month have raised an interesting question for me: how do you keep performing something that you created years ago? Is it still possible to tap into those feelings? Is it still relevant?

This is a question most often faced by music artists. Underworld played a two-song set on Later... with Jools Holland in May of this year to promote their first studio album in six years, Barbara Barbara, We Face a Shining Future. One of the songs they played wasn’t from this new release but was what is undoubtedly the duo’s most recognisable and popular song Born Slippy .NUXX, 20 years after it first charted in the UK.

The anniversary is reason enough, and having been off-radar it was a good reminder of who they are and what they are historically about. But how does it feel having to keep performing your hit songs?

Radiohead refuse to add Creep to their set lists, even though it’s a much-loved song, because it’s twaddle to them – a creation with chart success in mind, not artistic integrity. Robert Plant now hates Stairway to Heaven because he is so sick of playing it. Madonna won’t sing Like A Virgin because it is so irrelevant to her now! A Flock of Seagulls frontman Mike Score can’t stand I Ran (So Far Away) as it’s the only song people want to hear.

There is a tension between what most fans want (a live take of the original recording), what I imagine most artists want (to stop performing it or to make it interesting just for the sake of it) and what the purists want (for artists to perform something with meaning and feeling i.e. reinterpret the song or don’t play it at all). The right call depends upon which of these three you are.

Considering all of this, see what you make of a pre-Elephant outing of Ball and Biscuit by The White Stripes at Glastonbury 2002, a live performance of it on French TV four years after its 2003 release, and the same song performed by Jack White and his band another seven years later at Glastonbury 2014…

This month's favourites:
   Angel Olsen, My Woman
   Hjalmar Söderberg, Martin Birck's Youth
   The Cable Guy (1996)