As long as I gaze on Waterloo sunset I am in paradise

London 2012 has, apparently, succeeded in changing international perceptions about many things British, including its food (a little worrying considering the only relatively British food sponsor of the Games is Cadbury's...).

Such perceptive changes haven't been without the projection of other examples of British iconography. Like public transport.

It is one of our national obsessions: when not complaining about the weather, Brits are having a go at overcrowded trains, buses turning up in threes or not at all, and taxis becoming invisible at the slightest drop of rain.

Appropriately, Britain's handover during the Beijing closing ceremony four years ago combined public transport with music - arguably our strongest cultural asset - with Jimmy Page on the top deck of a double-decker London bus riffing out Whole Lotta Love.

Having picked up the music mantle again during the London 2012 opening ceremony, the theme comes full circle tonight for the finale, which will include the Spice Girls performing from the roofs of a quintet of black taxis. Once again, the stops have been well and truly pulled out: this might be the first time five cabs are seen together in London after 9pm on a Sunday night.

The appearance of Mouthy, Ballsy, Cutesy, Mumsy and Pouty will be part of a suite organisers are calling A Symphony of British Music. It will be a megamix of 30 songs spanning 50 years, seemlessly bridged by original links created by musical director and James Bond composer David Arnold. Certainly we can expect another musical evening of the truly 'best of British'.

"It’s going to be beautiful, cheeky, cheesy, camp, silly and thrilling," Arnold has promised, covering as many bases of the British musical oeuvre as it's possible to cover, and pledging to ensure something for everyone. That means we could have a show that ranges from Adele and Tinie Tempah, to Liam Gallagher's Beady Eye (reportedly) and Eric Idle performing the oh-so-ironic (and possibly tiresomely-so) Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life. Yes. Very funny. Yay for British self-deprecation.

There will also be something of a late-80s Brit Awards line-up as well, with George Michael marking his remarkable recovery from near-fatal pneumonia, along with Annie Lennox and, it is rumoured, Kate Bush (though seeing as she hasn't toured since 1979 and last played live at a David Gilmour show in 2002, it will be interesting to see how she does in front of 80,000 people).

Speaking of Gilmour, Yorkshire's very own guitar-strumming hobbit Ed Sheeran let slip this week that he will be performing Wish You Were Here with one or several of the surviving members of Pink Floyd, though we don't yet know whom. Rooftop-bothering Queen guitarist Brian May will, though, be involved (Hammer To Fall anyone?), as well as the greatest band to come out of Shepherd's Bush, The Who. Not sure what they'll perform, but I'd imagine Baba O'Reilly, with its "teenage wasteland" line, would be well out of place. That said, I'm not sure either Who Are You? or Won't Get Fooled Again would be any more appropriate....

There are more unlikely rumours about Sir Elton John (presumably not joined by "fairground stripper" Madonna...) and the Rolling Stones taking part, and yet another outing for Sir Paul McCartney trawling The Beatles back catalogue.

The evening's guaranteed raised neck hair moment will come from Ray Davies performing The Kinks' Waterloo Sunset, perhaps the greatest song written about London (even if it was originally going to be about Liverpool).

As gloriously ironic as it is iconic, Waterloo Sunset was Davies' melancholic take on hope in post-war Britain, its protagonists Terry and Julie representing the dreams of a generation embarking on a new adventure.

45 years after it was recorded, it will play its part in concluding London's staging of what have been an incredible Olympic Games. From beginning to end, music has been an integral element.

Team GB has made Bowie's Heroes its own, while Queen's We Will Rock You has been keeping the beach volleyball going long into the night in Horse Guards Parade, much to the apparent annoyance of Prime Minister David Cameron around the corner in Downing Street.

Not a bad idea: the US Army made Manuel Noriega surrender by playing The Clash's I Fought The Law around the clock at deafening levels. Maybe Freddie & Co might have the same effect?

It's still raining in Tinseltown

I'm not a betting man, but I'd waver a small purse on the fact that Paul Buchanan will never catch up with Rihanna's energetic work rate.

Unlike the Barbadian minx, who has released six studio albums in the space of seven years, Buchanan has produced just four records in 30 years with his band The Blue Nile.

Over the giddy course of their four releases - the last, and most probably their last, appearing in 2004 - the Scottish trio garnered copious praise from music's cognoscenti, holding them in the highest of regard as 'musicians' musicians.

Bracketed along with other earnest, serious synth-pop bands like Talk Talk, along with Scotia contemporaries like Hue And Cry and Hipsway, The Blue Nile were nevertheless a band apart.

Listening back to those four albums - the beautiful, haunting A Walk Across The Rooftops, the beautiful, haunting Hats, the beautiful, haunting Peace At Last, and the...er...beautiful, haunting High - it's not hard to see what earned them acclaim and collaborative requests from Annie Lennox, Texas and a lengthy list of other serious musicians seeking to tap into the same "beautiful, haunting" soundscapes.

But with The Blue Nile now on permanent hiatus, Buchanan has returned - eight years since High - with his debut solo album, Mid Air. Anyone expecting the sort of grown-up, soulful rock of Tinseltown In The Rain or  The Downtown Lights will be disappointed. This is an album as cold and as sparse as a Scottish moor in winter; extremely intimate and even claustrophobic at times, sounding - in its contemplative vacancy - as if it was recorded at three in the morning in Buchanan's spare room, hoping not to wake anyone else sleeping in the house. Which, it turns out, is exactly how it was recorded.

Just 36 minutes in length, Mid Air skips from track-to-track, Buchanan's achingly mournful voice applied simply over a piano, sometime hardly even registering above it, providing ample evidence why the singer is often referenced in the same breaths as Stephen Bishop or John Martyn for heart-on-sleeve, emotionally-draining singer-songwriter artisanship. The voice-and-piano combination forces you to listen to the lyrics, listen to the phrasing. It's a powerful combination when you have a voice like Buchanan's, but then the same applies to Tom Waits or Peter Gabriel (a case in point is his stripped down version of Here Comes The Flood, something of a prototype for Buchanan here). 

It is not, Buchanan says, intended to be a downer, but Mid Air's sparsity is the result of the singer simply not trying to make a group album:  “I think if I’d tried to make a record that sounds like the band I’d be quite nervous," Buchanan says in his publicity blurb, adding that the songs are "quite small in stature and the songs are very brief."

As a result, the 56-year-old Buchanan channels the highs and lows of getting older, of relationships changing and even loss. “When I was making the record, a close friend of mine died”, Buchanan says. “Peter was very moral, but not for any religious reason – he just loved people. He was also an excellent and hilarious guy, and he would have taunted me relentlessly if I’d made a requiem for him. The record’s very hushed, but it’s not mournful – it’s quite celebratory.”

Mid Air does take two or three listens to distinguish between many of its 14 songs, their plaintive four-in-the-morning angst appearing very similar on first listen, as if Buchanan has taken From A Late Night Train from the Hats album and tried to rewrite it several times over. He does, in fact, admit that he is “continually re-writing the same song”, chipping away at the themes that have absorbed him from day one, but then so have people like Roger Waters and Pete Townshend in their return to themes and, in Waters' case, the wartime death of his father as his writing muse.

Buchanan says the album came about, not through commercial necessity or contractual obligation, but because he found himself, indeed, at a piano staring out of the window in the middle of the night. "At no point did I think I was making a record," he recently told The Guardian. "It never occurred to me that anybody else would listen to it. Looking back, that was a great thing. That unselfconscious quality becomes more elusive as you go on making music, so it's nice to be brought back to that very simple expectation. It was almost like starting out again. I wasn't deliberately making a record of fulfilling a contract. There's a joy and innocence in that."

The result is a minimalist simplicity, an album that could soundtrack Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, were that piece of art to be depicting a Glasgow cafe and not a Manhattan diner at night. The sotto voce treatment, especially of the piano, gives it a Michael Nyman quality, especially on songs like Tuesday and Fin de Siecle. But in losing the warmth that made The Blue Nile's material such joys to curl up to, Buchanan hasn't lost the ability to make music to erect the hairs on your neck, drawing you in to hear the Scot considering life's transit ("Life goes by and you learn how to watch your bridges burn" he opines on After Dark, or "Far above the chimney tops, take me where the bus don’t stop," he reminisces on On My True Country).

Dare I say it, but Mid Air is both beautiful and haunting. It won't liven up dinner parties, nor make your treadmill workout any more vigorous. But if you like listening to contemplative, raw emotion on a record - and better still, through headphones in the middle of the night - this will be an album, much like the four Buchanan made with The Blue Nile, that you will periodically return to and wonder why you haven't listened to it more often.