Albums:
1.  Outkast – Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
Ooh, let’s make it a double. Two albums overflowing with ideas, which coloured hip-hop’s palate with hitherto undreamed of hues. Freewheeling experimentation has never sounded this assured and damn good since Prince’s Sign Of The Times. Make that the two best albums of the decade.

2. Super Furry Animals – Rings Around The World
This album looped the loop when it came to standing freak pop on its head. Dream tunes, experimental (but good) noodlings and the daring employment of Paul McCartney eating a stick of celery.

3. The Avalanches – Since I Left You
This album was seemingly concocted in a bonkers crazy lab by Aussie beat boffins who existed solely on fizzy sweets and old vinyl. Crazy in the coconut.

4. The White Stripes – Elephant
Jack White plays his guitar a lot better than he wields his cricket bat on the cover of this blistering album. A scorching testament to the raw power of bluesy rock and roll, it combined passion and killer tunes in equal measure. Give this Elephant a very sticky bun.

5. The Arctic Monkeys - Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not
Rip-snortin’ riffs, juicy tunes and sharp as a dart lyrical concerns marked it down as an immediate classic.

6. Scissor Sisters – Scissor Sisters
A frilly-knickered take on 70s MOR music which managed to be sparky, inject some life into Pink Floyd, and pull off some dextrous word play.

7. Gwen Steffani – Love. Angel. Music. Baby
This had Madonna spluttering into her Kabbalah flakes for a while. Frothily and endlessly inventive, it was a super-charged slab of pure nowness. And every song screamed ‘single’.

8. Belle and Sebastian - The Life Pursuit
Cagoule boogie has never sounded so uplifting.

9. LCD Soundsystem – Sound Of Silver
Juddering house, woozy disco and the kind of cool electro pop which managed to be elegiac, funny and utterly idiomatic simultaneously.

10. Justin Timberlake – FutureSex/LoveSounds
A real supercharged slice of sci-fi r’n’b which, for a mainstream album, managed to be utterly weird (and wired) and pleasingly soaked in dizzying synths and glitchy guitar funk.

Singles:
1. Girls Aloud – Biology
Like a pop version of Bohemian Rhapsody (and consequently 1000 times as good), this melded at least three brilliant songs into one all-conquering monster.

2. Franz Ferdinand – Take Me Out
The bit where it emerges – a quarter of the way through the song, butterfly-like from the carcass of a Strokes’ style indie-me-up – is one of the most seminal moments in recent music history.

3. Beyonce - Crazy In Love
An all encompassing groover, equally at home while in the car or in a club. A delirious whirl of super-swish r’n’b and sassy pop which will be frugged to for as long as people frug to music.

4. Hot Chip – Over & Over
Building up a rare old head of steam, this suitably repetitive groove was indeed like a “monkey with a miniature cymbal”. Super-duper.

5. Gnarls Barkley – Crazy
Big, soulful and unstoppable, this Cee-Lo Green/Danger Mouse collaboration was an instant classic. You can’t now imagine the world without it.

6. Hercules & The Love Affair – Blind
A stunning modern disco tune which successfully added trumpets and Antony Hegarty’s melancholy vocals to its intoxicating mix.

7. Kylie - Can’t Get You Out Of My Head
This is the cherry on Kylie’s sublime cake.

8. Rihanna – Umbrella
Appropriately enough was deservedly number one throughout 2007’s rain-soaked summer.

9. MGMT - Kids
The killer groove, the bouncy verses, the sense of the sun coming up inside of yourself when the chorus hits. Fantastic, basically.

10. Missy Elliot - Get Ur Freak On
Missy’s spiky soundscape was one of those rare tracks that you never grew tired of despite it being the ring tone of choice in 2001.