The Spice Girls may have had the number one single over Christmas and the biggest movie opening weekend of the year but they have been voted the worst band of 1997 in a Melody Maker readers' poll.

It's nearly 1998 - but how much of 1997 can you remember? Test your wits with our annual quiz, compiled by Fiona Sturges. (Answers: page 34)

The off-hand, let's-just-have-fun style of `Light Lunch' probably takes an hour in make-up to achieve. They swan in dressed to the nines and perfectly coiffed and then have to be reverse-engineered into a condition of studenty scruffiness.

The funeral of the singer Michael Hutchence took place yesterday in Australia, watched by millions of viewers who saw it broadcast live. The coffin was draped with 500 irises and a single tiger-lily, representing the singer's 16-month-old daughter, Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily, who was cradled by her mother, Paula Yates.

As if the revival of the heinous "Candle in the Wind" weren't enough, the reverberations from the death of Diana still rumble around the pop world. Primal Scream and 2K (aka KLF) both postponed the gigs they'd scheduled for the week after the tragedy. Kylie Minogue swapped the original title of her new album, Impossible Princess, for the feeble alternative, Kylie Minogue. Denim delayed a single called "Summer Smash", and Del Amitri shelved the release of "Medicine", whose lyrics contain a fleeting mention of a "wreckage".

It started last year with The Verve and Oasis wearing Clarks desert boots and lace-up schoolteacher shoes, both part of their Originals range. Pop endorsement has seen Originals elevated to cult status; they are now sold alongside trainers in fashionable urban hangouts. Next for the Clarks make-over treatment are their women's shoes. The Spice Girls and Kylie Minogue aren't swanning around in them yet, but women who can't afford to spend pounds 100 and more for well-made, classic shoes will welcome them.

Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo

Australia's most vilified chanteuse is back. This time it's serious.

No publicity stunt is too bizarre here. The Malawian dance troupe who perform in Preacherman (see review, page 11) suggested that a goat sacrifice should take place after having two performances at the Botanic Gardens rained off. An acquiescent goat proved difficult to find, however. Meanwhile, the 18-year-old star of the children's show The Little Mermaid thought that handing out leaflets from a fountain on The Mound was an appropriate way of publicising it. A humourless park-keeper thought otherwise and invoked a bye-law against her. Then the comedy management organisation Avalon, unofficial guardians of the circuit, tried to drive a car into the Pleasance courtyard. A publicity drive became a publicity prang when it wouldn't get through the gate. A promenade production of Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber in the Haunted Vaults - which lie on the site of a plague-ridden tenement, boarded up in 1645 with the occupants left inside to die - has been, ahem, plagued by genuinely spooky goings-on. Cases of technical gear have been opened and displaced, without any of the expensive equipment being taken; bunches of keys have moved from one room to another; strange voices have been heard over the crew's radio headsets; an actress playing a dead body in a glass case felt tapping on the outside after the audience had left the room. A dead-cert publicity opportunity for the Assembly Rooms' resident paranormal expert Max Maver, surely, before the company call in a priest.

Main Claim: Kylie Minogue's younger sister. A theory more likely to irritate our subject could hardly be predicated, but, let's face it, cool customer Kylie is La Minogue. Dannii, after floundering about horribly in the hit parade's shallows, has suddenly emerged with a new single, a new body, a forthcoming album, and a starring role in the New Taste Diet Pepsi ad. Welcome to Britain, er, Dannii.

Outside The Gardens - a large Irish dance hall in the heart of downtown London SW6 - a serious traffic jam is in progress, a block of flats is on fire and a large football crowd is about to emerge from Stamford Bridge. But compared to what is going on inside the building, Fulham Broadway is a sea of tranquillity. The meeting of shadowy South London underground dance trio Genaside II with the Prince backing troupe previously known as the New Power Generation (NPG) is part genre-busting coup and part monumental cock-up.

ROCK

Suddenly a whole crop of disastrous coiffures are all the rage. What's a girl to do? Ruth Picardie untangles the problem

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Murder Ballads (Mute, CD/LP/tape, out Mon). Some records catch your ear or break your heart. This one ties a flex round your neck, fills your skull with bullets and plunges a penknife in your chest. Turning away from his recent introspective material, Nick Cave goes for the jugular with 10 tales from the crypt: all gothic gloom, with some pitch-black humour for added darkness. It's not often you see the word "Aaaaaaaaah!" on a lyric sheet. The Bad Seeds supply impeccable, uncluttered backing, abetted by a spooky P J Harvey on the spine-chillingly lovely "Henry Lee" and a saccharine Kylie Minogue on "Where the Wild Roses Grow". The only problem is that Cave hasn't twisted the repetitive formula of traditional folk ballads far enough. For all the ghoulish fun of the hammy Hammer horror, the stories aren't all that tense or shocking, and the subject matter isn't examined with much insight. Perfect for scaring small children on Hallowe'en, but I'm not sure that you'd want to listen to it more than a few times. If you do, you should be arrested. Nicholas Barber