Santa has returned home, but he wasn’t the season’s only visitor from the Nordic lands. The crop of recent music in from the region embraces genre-crossing jazz, vintage-style rock, the expected electropop, cross-border collaborations and a seven-year-old Finn. Exploring all corners of Scandinavia’s music, theartsdesk journeys where no one else does, landing in Norway first for some finely formed jazz.

The House of Love: The House of Love

Kieron Tyler

Seasonal appearances by The Human League have an air of Christmas panto about them, with halls packed with coach parties of devoted fans who all seem to know each other, but the group have quietly solidified into a great British success story. They made the jump from experimental beginnings to become darlings of early-Eighties electropop, but more remarkable still is their ability to produce modestly credible new music 30 years later.

Ah, this starts so well. The idea of Claudia Brücken, arch-Teuton ice queen vocalist from high class synth poppers Act and Propaganda, covering the Bee Gees, Bowie and ELO is just too much fun to ignore. And her version of Julee Cruise's “Mysteries of Love” from the Blue Velvet soundtrack is damn near perfect – its lusciously sinister textures just right for her perfectly-controlled deadpanning. The downtempo take on Stina Nordenstam's “Memories of a Color” is tasty enough to keep hopes high.

Now I think I've seen it all. After a storming two-hour set Ultravox returned to the stage for a celebratory twin-pronged past-meets-present encore of "Dancing with Tears in My Eyes" and "Contact". At the very end, during a touching, soft-spoken moment, a female fan in an animal mask clambered onstage and appeared to drop a bowl of greeny-yellow gunk, possibly custard, on Midge Ure's head. The woman was bundled off and a towel cleaned up the dapper vocalist, but the crude incident was in breathtakingly stark contrast to the glistening gig that had preceded it.

After Lady Gaga's concert at Twickenham last night, I asked some of the Little Monsters scurrying back to the station the name of the last song she had sung. The song she sang right after declaring that she had to bring the evening to an early end. The song she sang an hour after screaming that she would "sing her pussy off" and no one could stop her. Someone stopped her and no one could name it. (See Update in the penultimate paragraph.)

Pet Shop Boys eleventh album leaps sideways into smooth, opulent US FM radio production in a way that will initially give long term fans palpitations. The duo sound… different. They recorded Elysium in Los Angeles with Grammy-winning Kanye West producer Andrew Dawson and it sounds that way too.

Pet Shop Boys are the kind of national treasure that make the English so inscrutable. For 30 years they have made pop music that is sophisticated, camp and deadpan, an unlikely formula which has shifted over 100 million records, making them the most successful pop duo ever. Their 11th studio album, Elysium, will be released on 10 September. Recorded in Los Angeles, it is a slower, more sumptuous work than their fans have become used to. Could it be the time has come for a change?

Stumbling across the perfect pop hit must be its own kind of curse. It’s been two and a half years since Owl City’s “Fireflies” shot its way into the charts, seemingly from nowhere. With its lush, quirky melodies and wistful, lovelorn lyrics, Adam Young’s quirky electronic project seemed almost to have been custom-built by a crack team of pop scientists to appeal to dreamy girls like me.

Although the Eighties revival has now been going on for longer than the actual Eighties, it shows no sign of abating – to the point where maybe it would be more sensible to refer to it as a tradition or a palette of techniques rather than than considering it as retro at all. However you see it, Jessie Ware and her production team do it with style.