When it comes to biting power, Tyrannosaurus rex was the undisputed king, a study has shown.

Sometimes, it takes a great deal of skill, intelligence and patience to make the simplest and most immediate of pop music.

It's a challenge for even the mildest-mannered Class Warrior to remember to review The Maccabees' music, not their names: Orlando, Hugo, Felix, Rupert (and Sam), but our privately schooled heroes' third album is their best yet.

Nine years after his death, Joe Strummer is still supporting new talent

In which indie singer-songwriter Emma-Lee Moss and Ash frontman Tim Wheeler, a couple in real life, join musical forces and attempt, valiantly and with not inconsiderable success, to breathe new life into that stalest of stale old genres: the Christmas song.

Rocket From The Tombs were a Cleveland proto-punk legend that remained unrecorded in its brief existence, but would go on to provide the seed-corn from which Pere Ubu would grow.

Theatre 'Lend Me a Tenor' at London's Gielgud Theatre. It's hilarious from start to finish. Just what a musical comedy should be. Stunning score and terrific performances. A real shame that it closed so soon because nobody went to see it!

The all-too-familiar keyboard vamp which opens On Your Radar is about the clearest white flag that could be waved as regards originality: this is an album that seeks not to separate itself from the herd, but to bury itself so deeply in its midst as to be virtually invisible.

It can be argued that Mancunian self-taught saxophonist Birchall is a Coltrane copyist stuck in the run-off groove of 1960s spiritual jazz.

Compared with Rated R and even Loud, this seems a very PG affair, with affirmations of romantic love like "Drunk on Love" and "Where Have You Been".

Magazine were post-punk when the rest of rock was pre-punk – so it's lucky that Mr Devoto hits the nostalgia trail with a healthy dose of irony

Peter Hook, 55

Sometimes you need to get out of your own country to be reminded of your own history. I spent last weekend in Brno, a city in Moravia in the east of the Czech Republic. I was speaking to 500 vaguely alternative young parents at a parenting conference organised by a group of radical political activists. On the day I left, the organisers were taking part in a demonstration against government plans to ban home births.

Hearing for the first time the songs that will, inevitably and inexorably, become part of the fabric of Western life from X Factor auditions to shopping-centre muzak, is a strange and often depressing experience.