The first time I interviewed Marc Almond back in the late 1980s he had a pet snake with him, just one of the many things that sets him apart from today's stars. These days the only reptiles one sees around chart-toppers are the publicists. Almond has been part of the pop furniture for three decades but it was still something of a surprise to discover that he was celebrating his 55th birthday last night. Tempus fugit and all that. Or as the still-nimble black-clad crooner said to his mostly similarly-aged audience, "we are all in it together, dear".

Various Artists: Sound System - The Story of Jamaican Music

Thomas H Green

The Searchers: Hearts in Their Eyes

Kieron Tyler

There's nothing wrong with the film adaptation of the stage show Rock of Ages that more raunch and noise - oops, I meant noize - might not put right, assuming that an amiably dopy immersion in Eighties rock pop is your thing. One of those star-a-minute movies ("Look, there's Mary J Blige!"; "Wait, isn't that Catherine Zeta-Jones?") that may well have been more fun to make than it is to see, the director Adam Shankman enters into the flat-out silliness of the enterprise without fully embracing the correspondingly anarchic spirit.

Neneh Cherry has never been conventional. The singer and rapper's latest album is a collaboration with The Thing, a Swedish free jazz trio who have previously tackled songs by PJ Harvey and The White Stripes. If anything, the presence of Cherry has made them braver: The Cherry Thing features reworkings of The Stooges' "Dirt", Suicide's "Dream Baby Dream" and MF Doom's "Accordion". It's gutsy stuff, but it works. The album already sounds like a contender for the end of year lists.

Bob Dylan talked, after his 1966 motorcycle crash, about having to learn to do consciously what he once did instinctively. That quote kept popping into my head as I listened to One Day I’m Going to Soar, the fourth Dexys album and their first for 27 years. On the surface everything seems to be in its right place: the vigorous horns, the virile fiddles. Old hands “Big” Jim Paterson, Mick Talbot and Pete Williams are back on board, aiding and abetting Kevin Rowland’s eccentric yelp, rambling monologues, wry humour and lacerating self-doubt. But somehow it doesn't quite add up.

A few years ago the ultimate in post-modern bollocks appeared – Guilty Pleasures, a club night built around the notion that tepid crap from yesteryear is brilliant. So let’s go dig Toto, Go West, Andrew Gold, Dr Hook, any old toe jam. Of course, there’s no reason why anyone shouldn’t dance around to anything, and it’s refreshing, now and then, to give the po-faced Punk Year Zero thing a kick-in, but actively celebrating drivel is another matter. "Dreadlock Holiday" is not a guilty pleasure, it’s just shite. Move on.

Gary Numan (born Gary Webb, 1958) was born in Hammersmith and raised in the western outskirts of London, the son of a bus driver. By the latter half of the Seventies he was fronting punk band Tubeway Army but his fortunes changed dramatically when he added synthesizers to the formula and became, with the album Replicas and songs such as “Down in the Park” and “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?”, one of electro-pop’s great innovators. His coldly catchy music, sci-fi imagery, adenoidal voice and air of robotic isolation was hugely influential.

In the eight years since the fourth – and very possibly last - Blue Nile album, High, Paul Buchanan has seen his band disintegrate and a close friend die. Little wonder, then, that his solo debut is a reflective record. The most cinematic of bands, the Blue Nile's ravishing sound-pictures generally came in widescreen; Mid Air may be a more intimate, art house affair, but it is no less affecting.

Kevin Rowland always did march to the beat of his own drum. Whether it was purloining his album’s master tapes from his record company or refusing to consort with the music press, he constantly straddled a wobbly fence between control freak and paranoid lunatic. This, as much as Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ sublime, heartfelt music, made him a riveting, charismatic presence in the early 1980s. The name is now just Dexys, but what else had changed three decades on?