In a Star waggons trailer parked on Warner Brothers' Los Angeles studio complex, as Christina Aguilera preens next door, Cee Lo Green and I are studying his entirely naked and not-insubstantial stomach. Specifically, we are looking at some of the singer's myriad tattoos.

Rome is a labour of love for Gnarls Barkley's Danger Mouse and Italian composer Daniele Luppi.

Having revisited their 1960s landmark Odessey and Oracle a few years back, Rod Argent and Colin Blunstone here revive The Zombies as a going concern, with a new album that repositions the band within the sonic lineage of Steely Dan.

Brought to us on angel wings, the pop diva still has little to fear from the Gagas of this world. Then there's Cee-Lo's bingo wings

Given his career has lasted well over 15 years, it has been an odd path to mainstream recognition for Cee Lo Green. First playing a key role in developing the dirty South rap style as a founding member of the Atlanta hip-hop crew Goodie Mob, he went on to release two inventive, but low-selling, solo albums before teaming up with

Not sure what music to buy as a present? Andy Gill helps you decide with his guide to some of this year's best albums

He sang on the first song (Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy") to make it to No 1 in the UK based on digital download sales alone and his "Forget You" – here in both clean and original versions – kept Robbie Williams and Gary Barlow off the top spot.

Back in 2004, long before his hook-up with Danger Mouse in Gnarls Barkley, Cee Lo Green was proving himself modern R&B's renaissance man, equally adept behind mixing desk and microphone, on his landmark nu-soul album Cee Lo Green... Is The Soul Machine.

Graffiti 6 is the vocalist Jamie Scott and producer Tommy D, a new soul duo from London whose assured debut album sparkles with invention and throbs with emotion.

Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" is playing as Doon MacKichan, star of Smack the Pony and Brass Eye, gangles on to the stage. It's grimly apt for this, the tale of Doon's downward spiral in the decade since her Emmy triumphs.

Greeted with an awed silence from the packed Royal Festival Hall, James Mercer (singer-songwriter and brains behind jingle-jangle indie outfit The Shins) asks an impromptu question that catches his enraptured audience off-guard. "Anybody here skateboard?" he enquires optimistically. "I used to skate at Southbank before it was a skate park. This is my homecoming," he explains, with that tone of wistful poignancy that characterises his work to date and manifests itself in the lovelorn lyrics of the track that follows, "Trap Doors".

The superstar producer/remixer of Blur, Beck, the Black Keys and many more has teamed up with the frontman of The Shins. Andy Gill meets the duo

Four years ago, Ben Drew, aka Plan B, was a rapper with an acoustic guitar, a belly full of fire and lyrics to make a navvy blush.

Burton hops between musical collaborations the way other people change shoes, but this new venture with the Shins' James Mercer is, he tells us, a keeper.