If The Wombles had made this it would likely raise a smile despite its lame, lazy nostalgic guitar pop. It even goes as far as to include a feeble version of seminal skiffle song "Rock Island Line". The harsh words it deserves, however, are tempered with pathos, for Ringo 2012 only garners limelight because its creator was drummer for the biggest band of all time. Despite the constant Beatles hagiography of the frotting heritage rock press, these days no one under 50 has personal recall of their epic impact (the rest of us watch BBC Four documentaries and sigh).

Although a relatively new name around these parts, Kathleen Edwards has been alt-country’s nearly girl for almost a decade in her native Canada (as well as the doyenne of many campus radio stations across the States). But praise goes much further. Dylan likes her almost as much as Sheryl Crow, the Stones have had her on tour and in fact almost everyone who listens to her enjoys the way she injects warmth and lightness into musical styles normally bowing under the weight of earnestness. Voyageur, her fourth LP, has an even easier manner than before.

Record producer Steve Lillywhite has been awarded a CBE in the 2012 New Year Honours list. Born in 1955, Lillywhite started his career in the late 1970s working with new wave and post-punk bands such as XTC and Siouxsie & The Banshees. He went on to produce everyone from Peter Gabriel and Talking Heads to Morrissey and Kirsty MacColl, to whom he was once married. His most enduring relationship, however, is with U2. It began with Lillywhite producing their 1980 debut album, Boy, and has continued to the present day.

For about an hour in Hammersmith last October it seemed that all 2011's new music had coagulated into some kind of supernova and was exploding on stage. There were two drum kits, nine musicians, and a nerdy, lanky man singing like an alien. The support act had told us to expect something special and was it ever: Bon Iver’s extraordinary live reimagining of their bucolic, eponymous album took in folk, prog, soul, metal and avant garde. It also pretty much embodied my review year.

PJ Harvey is undoubtedly Britain’s most original and consistent rock musician and poet, an artist with a natural passion for transgression that fuels her ceaselessly self-renewing creativity.

There were other contenders for my favourite album of 2011. Nicolas Jaar’s electronic odyssey Space is Only Noise certainly pushes towards imaginative sonic frontiers in ways nobody could accuse Motörhead of doing, and The Death Set, bratty noiseniks from Australia via New York, demonstrated on Michel Poiccard just what a brilliant racket can be made by lacing punk rock attitude with electronic thunder. In the end, though, as other albums came and went, The World is Yours sat in my car stereo’s 10 CD changer from January until December and I hammered it.

Call it an absurdly grand gesture if you like, but Manic Street Preachers' decision to bow out of live performance for a while with a gig in which they would play every one of their 38 singles had to be admired. It certainly had an all-or-nothing rigour that Richey Edwards would have endorsed. But would James Dean Bradfield recall all the words? Would Nicky Wire's knees survive all of that sustained bouncing around. Would piledriving drummer Sean Moore wear a hole in his skins? These and more questions were answered during last night's frequently stunning gig.

This show was memorable almost as much for the audience as it was for the music. The Roundhouse was perhaps two-thirds full for a show that The Low Anthem’s singer Ben Knox Miller said was “the biggest gig of their career” (adding: “And I’ve never called it a ‘career’ before”), but those who were there had clearly come to see the band rather than catch up on gossip, because the audience’s attention was absolute, their silence total; I can scarcely recall a gig where the crowd’s concentration was so complete.

Nova Scotia-born Leslie Feist is the very model of a 21^st-century artist: independent in spirit yet able to work the mainstream industry to her advantage, technologically savvy and au fait with all the means to build and sustain a profile and sales while still maintaining some sense of artistry and dignity.

I remain bemused when bands such as U2 or Coldplay announce they are “going experimental” and are greeted as if they might be. The correct response is: “No, you’re not, you’re as alternative as avocado in a prawn cocktail rather than lettuce.” So here we have U2 and Coldplay’s wet younger sibling supposedly stepping into the wild unknown for their sixth album. In reality this means having a tentative crack at sounding like an early Simple Minds album, albeit firmly filtered through the epic sonic template laid down by those aforementioned older brothers.