The capital's venues The Barbican, Koko, Hammersmith Apollo and Shepherd's Bush Empire will play host to the ATP curators hanging out their favourite shirts. Favoured artists will plough through their finest extended works, with other repertoire to follow.

Whether this leads to a loss of spontaneity is clearly neither here nor there for the organisers, but will give fans the opportunity to hear tracks never usually performed live. Your humble servant musicOMH duly offers a user's guide to the series...

It's fitting that Ann Arbor's favourite son kicks off the festival. Its hard to imagine a world where this select band of artists would have flourished were it not for James Newell Osterberg and The Stooges' sophomore blow-out on the Elektra label in 1970, entitled Fun House (Hammersmith Apollo, Tuesday 30 August).

Left to their own devices after the first John Cale-produced eponymous album, Fun House was all breathless nihilism and metallic cathartics. Feral and amphetamine-horny Iggy Pop, Scott and Ron Asheton, and the late Dave Alexander were the last word in angsty lust and diverted frustration. The rawness of the Down On The e Street, Loose and TV Eye is enough to make you melt peanut butter on your chest, while Dirt out-self-destructs Jim Morrison.

Now back together since 2003, The Stooges have recruited one-time Minuteman Mike Watt for this return ticket to the Fun House. Original sax-man Steve Mackay returns and is a more prosaic reminder that while other rock bands were looking towards classicism for inspiration, these Michigan mooks were looking to the skronk of Albert Ayler for kicks.

By the time J Mascis, Lou Barlow and drummer Murph had made their second album You're Living All Over Me, Iggy was dubiously manipulating a child's teddy bear on children's TV programme No 73.

To some, Dinosaur Jr were a departure from the American hardcore sound that had toured the backroads and college circuits. Dinosaur, as they were known pre-litigation, had none of the hostility towards the bloated '70s rock generation that had supertramped their way to the Californian coked-out lifestyle. They had none of the Punk resentment of Jello Biafra, Black Flag, and the their ilk, though they retained the nihilism and mixed it with the stoner-chic they would help to popularise.

You're Living All Over Me (Koko Wednesday 31st August) represented the Massachusetts second long-playing effort, and until Sweet Nothing re-introduced the master tapes to a pressing plant in 2004 the record was impossible to get hold of. Known and admired by East Coast cognoscenti like Sonic Youth and fIREHOSE, Mascis & Co's gigs were notorious for their blasts of sheer screech and volume. But though they were hardly The Dooleys in the recording studio, You're Living All Over Me has structure and form. And with Lou Barlow's Poledo, they were had of touch of runty avant-gardeness about them.

Mascis' bouncy licks on Sludgefest and Just Like Heaven, while full of leakage, inhabited a world where Hardcore had feared to tread, while In A Jar acknowledged a debt to Lemmy's lot. And after hearing his thin, languorous, high-register struggling to be heard above the tamed howl, the whole world realised it was OK to like Neil Young again. With the original three now re-united, it could be time to find out what this whole Freakscene was about.

It's an unwritten rule when covering bands like Dinosaur Jr that one has to mention how they 'paved the way' for what became known as Grunge, and the success of some band whose name escapes me...I think it began with 'N'... Never mind. We'll come back to it later...

But 1992 was the year that grunge ruled. But in the middle of all the drugs, self-hatred and suicide attempts, along came The Lemonheads' defining album, It's A Shame About Ray (Shepherd's Bush Empire Thursday 16 September). Sunny, breezy and utterly irresistible, Evan Dando's finest 29 minutes still sounds as fresh and beguiling today as it did back then. And if you're looking for proof, you'll need to beg, steal or borrow to get a ticket to this sold-put show.

On every track, whether it's the supremely catchy chorus of Confetti, the sweet pleading of Bit Part, the hymn to illicit substances of My Drug Buddy or the rush of Alison's Starting To Happen, Dando managed to create that rare thing - short, sweet songs that instantly made you feel happy. He may have had his own personal demons to deal with afterwards, but this was Evan's true life-affirming album. (JM)

And they also served.... proving that long, lank hair and cheesecloth shirts were kinda gnarly dude, were Seattle originals Mudhoney. Still at the coalface of rock after all these years, the band was named after one of Russ Meyer's boobalicious movies. Too authentically punk to find mainstream favour, the quartet of Mark Arm, Steve Turner, Dan Peters and Matt Lukin did survive life with a major label in the aftermath of Nirvana's success (I knew we'd get around to mentioning them sooner or later).

Their chosen album Superfuzz Bigmuff (Koko, Friday 16 September and Saturday 17 September) was really their first six-tracked EP, rush-released by Sub Pop when Touch Me, I'm Sick garnered some press attention and not a few sales through its association with Sonic Youth. That's probably why the collection was appended with a clutch of early singles including the actually quite disturbing Sweet Young Thing Ain't Sweet No More and the glorious snub of You Got It Keep It (Outta My Face).

Give or take a bass player, Mudhoney are still intact, possibly because no band member ever left to pursue cello studies. However, his did happen to one of the artists on Don't Look Back's first double bill.

When Reykjavik's Mum arrived in 2000 with Yesterday Was Dramatic, Today Is OK (Barbican, Saturday 17 September) Bjorkish comparisons inevitably gushed forth. True, there was a preternatural fascination with pre-adolescent sensory experience (I'm 9 Today, Smell Memory), but unlike Bjork's magpie attention, the two twins of Mum were knee deep in classical electronica.

Expanding generously for touring purposes, Mum's lengthy debut album is no exercise in soporific surrender. Despite the mollifying cuteness of its song titles, there are moments when Yesterday Was Dramatic.... is as uncompromising in its approach as Richard James' Selected Ambient Works, both occupying a place where music becomes peripheral vision, subliminal experience and blurry, furry shape.

A whole green world away from the petri-dish thoughtfulness of Mum is bill-sharer Cat Power (Barbican, Saturday 17th September). Wrestling with a variant of writer's block in 1999 and bored of performing her own songs, Chan Marshall elected to inhabit the darker corners of familiar compositions for her subsequent release after the quiet success of Moon Pix.

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