Imagine a landscape piece of A4 paper. At one end there is a picture of Tony Allen, Fela Kuti’s drummer and Afrobeat pioneer and at the other end of the sheet is Robert Smith of The Cure. Strands of Fat Bob’s back-combed barnet are stretched across the page and they’ve become entangled in Mr Allen’s prestigious afro. Screw your eyes up and it looks a bit like a musical stave.

Peer very closely through a magnifying glass and you can see miniscule figures walking backwards and forwards along the lines formed by locks of hair like little leaf-cutter ants. All of them are carrying big cut-out notes. There go all of the Tom Tom Club. They pass Ladysmith; Timbaland; Osibisa; the rhythm section of Siouxsie and the Banshees; Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers of The Police. But not Sting. And there’s minimalist composers Steve Reich and Philip Glass arguing over a crotchet while all of Mogwai dance around with semi-quavers to the side of that.

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Jamie Fullerton finds a brutal beauty with the future Future Of The Left trio's original incarnation

The fact that Future Of The Left are without a record deal is the kind of ridiculously unjust situation that makes you wonder quite how wrong in the head most of the music-buying public are. But while the Cardiff trio have given us two stonking albums, it was as their previous incarnation, Mclusky – before bassist Jon Chapple left and Kelson Mathias stepped in – that they made the record that will be frontman Andy Falkous’ deepest chisel into rock’s annals.

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Digging up treasure from the depths of our record collections

Formed in 1991, Puressence are the great lost Manchester band, who arrived just too late to capitalise on the Madchester boom. Whereas their idols The Stone Roses articulated the E-fuelled transcendence and bravado that characterised that scene, Puressence sketched the bleak comedown that followed, all icy atmospheres, cavernous reverb and self-doubt.

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In 1992, when a then-unsigned Jeff Buckley was playing a residency at the tiny East Village cafe Sin-E, one of the regulars in the audience was a 19-year-old Rufus Wainwright. I've always thought the two artists had a great deal in common, not just because of their dazzling vocal prowess, but in terms of their flaws, too.

Wainwright echoes Buckley in the sense that he's almost too talented, so generously gifted that he doesn't always know when, or how, to rein himself in. Which is understandable: when you can sing anything, it's tempting to try it all.

But such extravagance can be exhausting to listen to. Like a precocious child, Wainwright will never pen a straightforward chorus when an opulent aria or high-kicking show tune will do.

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Now, nobody wanted to like Ellie Goulding’s debut album more than us. People often accuse us essentially warm-hearted and compassionate bleeding hearts over here at NME of ‘building bands up in order to knock them down’. Like we’re playing some sort of unit-shifting Jenga! Can you imagine?

But seriously – it was us that was knocked down when we realized that yes, ‘Starry Eyed’, ‘Wish I Stayed’ and most of all, the radiant ‘Under The Sheets’ were still brilliant, but, er... that was about it.

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Pleasantly surprising as his pop-soul scrubbing up has been, I never really understood why Plan B's first, East End Eminem, incarnation was a sticking point for so many.

Sure, it's po-faced, big-issue, street-rage shtick was about as subtle as a brick screaming "HELLO! I'M A BRICK!", but he was a feisty little number, and some of the songs were pretty good.

What?! They were. Anyway, although his debut 'Who Needs Actions When You Got Words' might not have set the world on fire critically speaking, it did get to a perfectly respectable No 30 in the albums chart. Ben Drew's socially conscious bad boy persona also landed him a couple of film roles; 2008's Adulthood and this year's Harry Brown alongside original geezer Michael Caine.

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