James Arthur, the 24-year-old singer songwriter from Middlesbrough, has won The X Factor 2012.

"I want to dedicate this song to all the lovers here tonight," explains the 68-year-old singer. This is the sort of ripe line that was perfectly acceptable in the early 1980s.

The soulful pleadings of Marvin Gaye and the gathering crescendo of Ravel's Bolero are the true sounds of seduction, a new study has confirmed. But there is no place for "Bohemian Rhapsody" in the bedroom.

Listen to the top 10 tracks to get ‘in the mood’ below

Thirty years ago, the soul star Marvin Gaye packed his bags for – Ostende. Adrian Mourby follows a new trail of his haunts

In 1971, there were a limited number of options for a soul singer like Marvin Gaye.

The most perfect suite of music recorded in my lifetime.

Raphael Saadiq and his band have just come out to play their encore and we should all be grateful that they are back on stage – not just because their performance has been brilliant, but because there would have been a stampede had they failed to return.

As I think I might have mentioned before, I come from a trades union family, and while my dad had the theory down and wasn't above a bit of secondary picketing, my mother lived and breathed the struggle for workers' rights. Or, as we call it today, Going Off On One Big Time.

It is a measure of how far voice-control technology has come that you have just read this sentence. The original idea was that your correspondent would speak a line into a machine that turns what you say into text and then open with the gobbledygook the machine had "recognised". Sadly, the ugly facts rather killed the beautiful theory (or, as the machine, still not quite perfect, would have it, "the beautiful scenery").