Adam Ant was one of the few who saw Sex Pistols’ first live show. On 6 November 1975, his band Bazooka Joe was playing Charing Cross Road’s St Martin’s School of Art. They found an uninvited support band had gatecrashed the evening. The impact of the interlopers on the then Stuart Goddard wasn’t instant, but he would go on to form The B-Sides and, then, Adam and the Ants, whose manager became Jordan, who worked at Malcolm McLaren’s King’s Road shop SEX. Adam was hotwired into what became codified as punk rock. But his music was never defined by templates.

The second exhibition staged by Damien Hirst in his stunning Newport Street Gallery is of work from his collection by the American artist, Jeff Koons. Hirst was still a student at Goldsmiths when, in 1987, Charles Saatchi showed Koons and other young Americans at his gallery in St John’s Wood. Hirst was blown away by the freshness and ambition of work that took Warhol’s love affair with consumer culture one stage further. This mini-retrospective can be seen, then, as a tribute both to Saatchi and Koons – inspirational figures in the 1980s. 

It was in the long-ago year of 1982 that Martin Fry and ABC released The Lexicon of Love, a feast of addictively lush pop-soul swathed in Anne Dudley's orchestrations and producer Trevor Horn's sparkling electronic innovations. Fry bestrode it like a knowing nouveau-glam mastermind, treading in the ironic footsteps of Bryan Ferry and David Bowie as he effortlessly juggled camp, kitsch and sardonic wit. The album's multi-million-selling success was underpinned by vintage songs like "Poison Arrow", "The Look of Love" and "All of My Heart".

It's getting mighty crowded in the superhero lounge. After the underwhelming Batman v Superman and the overwhelming Captain America: Civil War, here's the X-Men posse back on the warpath, once again under the bombastic helmsmanship of Bryan Singer.

After Dazed and Confused, college days. This successor to Richard Linklater’s 1993 cult favourite about high school hedonism in 1976 moves on to the start of a 1980 college term. Everybody Wants Some!! is named after a Van Halen song instead of the earlier film’s Led Zeppelin but, with the Reagan years yet to kick in, little culturally essential has changed. The pursuit of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll remains these American kids’ inalienable right.

It's peculiar seeing any band come back together after a serious length of time, but when that band were part of your adolescence the cognitive dissonance is exponentially increased. Along with the likes of Ride and Slowdive, Lush were a band linked to the “shoegaze” indie sound born in the Thames Valley at the very end of the Eighties, and my main experience of them was at ear-bleed volume in dangerously packed-out, toilet-stall-sized venues around the area, my fringe covering my face and all the hormonal intensity of youth amplifying the effect of the sound.

Any appreciation of Scotland’s The Associates is coloured by the knowledge that Billy MacKenzie took his own life at age 39 in January 1997. More than his band’s voice, he personified their unique approach to music. Between 1979 and 1982, with collaborator Alan Rankine, he created a string of vital records which defy genre pigeonholing and define their vehicle The Associates as one of Britain’s most wilful pop acts. Rankine split from MacKenzie in 1982 at the point when they had broken into the charts.

The immediate reaction to Close to the Noise Floor is “Why hasn’t anyone done this before?” This new four-disc set’s subtitle captures its objective in a nutshell: to collect Formative UK Electronica 1975–1984 – excursions in proto-synth pop, DIY techno and ambient exploration. While the stars include Blancmange, John Foxx, Throbbing Gristle and the big cult names Bourbonese Qualk, Legendary Pink Dots and Instant Automatons feature, the less well-knowns Sea of Wires, We be Echo and Muslimgauze are also collected.

The post-Christmas headlines could barely contain themselves: HMV sells one turntable per minute! UK vinyl sales set to hit two million in 2016! Tesco stocking records! Vinyl was officially back.

The deadpan duo of Tennant and Lowe have never been easy to suss out at the best of times: maybe their way of layering wackiness on deep seriousness, eyebrow-flickering subtlety on roaring camp, giddy frivolity on erudition, has been their way of staying fresh. The Gilbert & George of British pop, they live to perplex even into middle age and beyond.