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.

Alexei Sayle (b 1952) first came to fame at the birth of alternative comedy, as MC at the Comedy Store in London at the dawn of the 1980s. He cemented his reputation via his recurring role in the anarchic student sitcom classic The Young Ones, as well as appearances in a number of Comic Strip Presents… films. He has written and fronted a host of sketch shows, including the Emmy Award-winning Alexei Sayle’s Stuff.

There's an area in American music that is oddly under-reported given its scale. Somewhere between the garish mania of mainstream dance music, “EDM”, and the cool cachet of more underground sounds is a kind of “festival electronica”: very musical, often subtle and sophisticated, acts detached from nightclubs and often far more visible on the live circuit, where lasers and LED displays create epic backdrops for their sound.

Never ever have I felt so… nostalgic for the late 90s. While memories of platform jelly shoes, silver eyeshadow and purple all-in-ones mostly have me cringing, there’s no denying that the ultimate coolest thing about that generation was "Pure Shores". And now, despite the tabloid mayhem of the band’s first split in the early Noughties, All Saints are back, with a vengeance.

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.

The answers, for the listener curious as to whether Emmy the Great’s Second Love fared any better than her first (it’s the title of her 2009 debut as much as any reference to the songwriter’s psyche), do not emerge until its final track. “Once I was a flight risk,” Emma-Lee Moss sings softly, almost swooning, “but soon I think I will be safe … Let me get lost in you”. Which sounds as close as one gets to a happy ending, until the lyric changes with the second verse to “I wish I was a flight risk”.

Canadian singer-songwriter Basia Bulat’s first three albums were recognisably folky. Her main instrument was the autoharp. Good Advice is different. With its more upfront songwriting and verve, her fourth album is a giant leap. It is also Bulat’s best to date.

All the tracks for Sia’s seventh studio album were pitched to pop stars like Rihanna, Katy Perry, Beyonce, Adele and Demi Levato, but didn't make the cut. To fashion an album out of rejection is so Sia – it’s tongue-in-cheek, playing a game by turning something on its head. It’s playful. It’s (among other reasons) why we love her.

But while Sia might claim she’s acting in these songs that weren't written from her perspective, songwriting is a personal process and clearly the 40-year-old Australian has leveraged some of herself to get these tracks to where they are.

10cc were the closest the Seventies came to a Fab Four. They were multi-talented vocalists and instrumentalists, came from Lancashire, were technologically ahead of the curve, wrote classy, inventive pop songs in a bewildering array of styles, suffered from dodgy management, were lucky to find one another and calamitously split up far too soon. Since when they’ve cast a very long shadow indeed.

The anticipation for Adele’s new album has been building for months. It’s been nearly five years since her last, 21, which became the biggest-selling album of the 21st century, shifting over 30 million copies.