After spending many years in the background, writing the lyrics for artists as diverse as Tinie Tempah and Cheryl Cole, tonight, on the final date of her UK tour, Emeli Sandé is basking in the limelight.

This storming debut album from the hot-ticket Alabama soul-rock quartet fully delivers on the groundswell of anticipation built up by already legendary live performances and the acclaim of peers such as Adele and Arctic Monkeys' Alex Turner.

David Zinman's Mahler and Beethoven cycles with the Tonhalle exemplify the "third way" in historically informed performance practice.

Lee Fields is the male equivalent of Sharon Jones: a veteran soul stylist backed up by a crack band well schooled in the nuances of soul dynamics – in Fields's case, The Expressions.

It's interesting how many of today's brighter young talents, from Laura Marling to Duffy, have been reared not on the conveyor-belt exercises of stage school, but on more individually fulfilling engagement with the outré influences of older generations. J

If the biz doesn't stop churning out retro-style soul singers, pop will turn into an Amish farmstead

Soul-rapper Maverick Sabre has steadily built a devoted following, as witness the Jazz Café audience enthusiastically singing along with "They Found Him a Gun", the bonus track concluding Lonely Are the Brave.

The two new main contenders for the British soul crown faced off for a sort of Warble in Shoreditch.

Adele has led the way – and now a new crop of young artists like Michael Kiwanuka Emeli Sandé and Daley are spearheading the great soul revival

Established by producer Rick Hall in 1961, Florence Alabama Music Enterprises became the epicentre of the Southern Soul boom during the '60s, as labels like Atlantic and Chess sent their artists south to access some of that Muscle Shoals Sound, a potent funk groove which many admirers (and singers) were surprised to learn was performed by white musicians.

A "Gothic dream-pop supergroup" led by 4AD founder Ivo Watts-Russell, This Mortal Coil established a style of brooding chamber-pop from which would derive subsequent ruminative indie strains like shoegazing.

As newspaper reporting enters an age where it is as much about multimedia as it is about print, the videos Independent.co.uk readers have been most interested in this year provide a diverse snapshot of what you want from televised news.

The Temptations were the most significant '60s root of the close-harmony boy-band style that has come to dominate R&B, their voices combining with creamy smoothness, their intricately-choreographed steps the envy of less nimble outfits.