End of term reviewers are a bit like film censors. As they reel in the year, there is a tendency to cut and paste according to their own prejudices and passions. Indeed, looking back over the last 366 days of music, there are plenty of things that I would prefer to edit out, others that I would grudgingly recommend (but only with parental guidance!) and still others on which I would slap on a great big U and urge for immediate general consumption. I don’t mind handing out a few Xmas certificates with the benefit of hindsight.

Several things about 1988 are still worth noting. It seems that real honest-to-goodness songwriters are more and more becoming obscured by an increasingly visible corpos of producers, technicians and assistants, whose combined efforts can often snuff out the original creative spark. However, while the single may be on the way out, the song most certainly is not and it was the keepers of this flame that supplied the highpoints of the year for me. The Go-Betweens, Kevin Rowland, Prefab Sprout, The Proclaimers, Sandie Shaw. The Wonderstuff and Pierce Turner (on the single ‘Surface In Heaven’), all supplied tunes and lyrics of beauty, majesty and intelligence. But even these were overshadowed by REM’s veritable blitzkreig on ‘Green’.

Pop. that much maligned beast, had a rather turgid year overall but there were a couple of brilliant flashes which primarily emanated from Transvision Vamp. The Primitives and Voice Of The Beehive. There was also the juggernaut janglings of The Pixies’ ‘Surfer rosa’ and the wonderfully OTT Guns’n’Roses. Dance music took some unexpected twists and turns and while I still haven’t taken up tenancy in this much vaunted House, it has produced one or two well-appointed flatlets, especially in the shape of the Yazz singles. The voices of Toni Childs and Julia Fordham were also highlights, but most of all this was the year in which it became apparent that the quickest way to become a popstar was not to form a band but to get a part in ‘Neighbours’!

The potential of local bands Something Happens!, Stars Of Heaven and A House was finally realised with three sterling albums. Enya’s superbly liqueous ‘Watermark’ was another indispensable Irish artefact. Unfortunately though, 1988 also saw the demise of the great Microdisney, who left us with the brilliant ‘39 Minutes’ as a swansong.

All this and my old pal (and lookalike) Bruce Hornsby’s dark and brooding meisterwerk, the incomparable ‘Scenes From The Southside’. Phew! What a year.