This year, says Gary Barlow, marks 30 years since five boys walked into a room in Manchester and auditioned for what would turn out to be the UK’s most successful pop act. It is fitting, then, that what they are billing as the Odyssey tour features 25 hits from across three decades - and more than a few callbacks.

There's a remarkable lightness to the way Norah Jones has glid through her career.

You’d be forgiven for thinking, in the age of streaming, that the promotional single was a dying art. And yet there’s already something familiar about Sigrid’s long-awaited debut album.

The nature of the product that is pop music is that its stars rarely get the chance to be prolific. It’s something that Ariana Grande – the biggest pop star in the world right now, at least on the numbers – complained about in a recent interview: how, when it came to music, she just wanted to “drop it the way these [rap] boys do”.

The Specials were era-defining, making this a hugely anticipated album for many. On paper they’ve released a bunch of albums since the Eighties but their discography is misleading. Encore is their first major work in decades. It’s a big ask for it to match their iconic status, akin to when The Stooges and Kraftwerk reappeared with new music decades after their legendary prime.

Over the last decade or so, there have been a couple of noticeable trends in broad-based, popular music that have segued from mild irritation to disfiguring infection. The first is the fey cover version, the awful balladification of perfectly good songs with the sole purpose of shifting units of plastic crap come Christmas. 

You’ve got to hand it to Backstreet Boys. Who would have thought that 23 years after their first, self-titled album, the finger-clicking fivesome would be the best-selling boy band in the world? They’ve survived the departure of one of their members for a couple of albums, endured personal tragedy, formed a supergroup with New Kids on the Block, comfortably outlived rivals NSync, smashed records with a residency in Las Vegas and recently announced a massive world tour.

Egbert Nathaniel Dawkins III – Aloe Blacc – is one shrewd dude. He's extremely adept at reaching out beyond the confines of his natural beat of funk and soul, whether that's credible (covering The Velvet Underground's “Femme Fatale”) on his breakthrough 2010 Good Thingsalbum or commercial (co-writing and singing the late Swedish EDM gigastar Aviicii's “Wake Me Up” can't have done his bank balance any harm, what with going to number one in 22 countries). And of course nobody ever went bankrupt releasing a Christmas album... 

What makes a great Christmas song? There’s an alchemy to finding the winning combination of whimsy and humour, juxtaposed with a healthy slice of Christmas angst. This formula has led us to spin the same handful of pop bangers that endure down the decades, soundtracking generation after generation of tinsel and mince pies.

It’s astounding to think that given the commercial basis for their whole existence, The Monkees have never released a Christmas album before now. However, it’s a shame that they have waited until the death of one of their number to put out Christmas Party. Even that hasn’t prevented Davy Jones, who passed away in 2012, from performing lead vocals on two of the tunes though.