In a career that began just six years ago, Rumer has tipped her musical hat to such songwriting greats as Jimmy Webb and Hall and Oates while also finding her own voice as a writer. Now, with her fourth album, she pays homage to one of the great pop catalogues, that of Burt Bacharach and Hal David, in a collaboration with Rob Shirakbari, her musical and life partner, who worked as Bacharach's musical director. 

You get two singular punk-era artists – a poet and a songwriter – together in a room for a few nights, with a rack of guitars, a rack of songs from their sweet youth, and a few musical friends to help out on keyboards, trumpet, flute and sax.

Revolution Radio is a title that can only bring to mind The Clash. To be more specific, it feels like a confabulation of “This Is Radio Clash” and “Revolution Rock”. The spiritual great-grandfather of this album, however, would be The Ramones, punk’s New York progenitors. In the wake of Nirvana’s demise, Green Day set a goofy new cartoon template for punk with their hugely successful Dookie album, then topped charts worldwide with 2004’s stadium power pop protest American Idiot.

On first listen, Queen Britney's new album is nothing more than a glorious booty call. I'm no prude, but listening to her sensual requests in musical form feels like earwigging on the soundtrack to a sex tape.

Sixty-five thousand people came to Wonder. The final night of British Summer Time in Hyde Park was a sell-out. With a performance lasting four hours including an intermission, the Detroit-born legend and his band – and also the weather, which stayed fine all evening - can have left nobody disappointed. The show, based on the album Songs in the Key of Life, with some extra off-piste excursions, was thoroughly convincing live. It just works very well, and on several levels. 

Just over three years ago, I was swooning for this very site over Tegan and Sara’s masterful shift from indie rock to full-bodied, floor-filling, retro-inspired electropop. But as catchy and cathartic as that album, Heartthrob, was, ultimately it only hinted at the ability of the Quin twins to write an all-consuming, gigantic pop song.

There was always something otherworldly about Kate Jackson, the voice of late, great Sheffield rockers The Long Blondes. Guitarist Dorian Cox, whose stroke in 2008 precipitated the premature breakup of the band, may have been its primary songwriter but it was Jackson’s voice – cool, poised, arrestingly strident – that set it apart. That the love child of Sophia Loren and Nico was technically a biological impossibility only added to her mystique.

Corinne Bailey Rae’s heart may speak in whispers, but it dreams in glorious technicolour. The title of the Leeds-born songwriter’s new album is an echoey chorus line that swims among the layers of its opening track – a song with the bridge of a boiling ocean that hints at dance-pop beats, reinvention. “The Skies Will Break” was surely an album title contender in its own right, perhaps not so much for its dubious poetry as for the glorious moment of catharsis it signals – a head rush, and then a moment of serenity.

When life gives you lemons, what do you do? Well, Beyoncé took the fruits of her musical labour, those of the black women before her and those hanging between her husband's thighs, to create something pretty sharp. This is a new sound, a new music movement, a new way of hearing her music.

So just how grey were the 1950s? "It was grey," said Bruce Welch of The Shadows. Au contraire, said Joan Bakewell, the Fifties were "giddy and full of optimism." Veteran journalist Katharine Whitehorn added that not only were the Fifties not boring, but that even then people had already heard of sex.