Echo & The Bunnymen, Gil Scott Heron and Hot Chip are also on the bill

Ian Brown, Dizzee Rascal, PiL also on Spanish festival bill

Pixie on the pull, Barlow on his 'fat years', Macca's Globes veggie plea â€' your music gossip stop

Last year, the pop underground stormed the charts, but you wouldn't know it from today's Brits nominations. What a missed opportunity, says Caroline Sullivan

It's normal to feel disappointed by the Brits nominations, which have a way of including every landfill-indie outfit and reality TV android you hoped you'd never have to look at again. But this year's list is particularly dispiriting. The eligibility rules mean that the nominations will ­always err on the side of conservatism (artists need to have had a hit single or album to qualify). That much one ­accepts. But 2009 was the year that commercial success and musical ­credibility intersected in the charts â€' meaning that, for perhaps the first time in the awards' 30-year history, the nominations panel had a plethora of interesting acts to consider. So where were they all?

Accordingly, Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine, who is both ­inescapably successful and critically acclaimed, has three nods, Dizzee ­Rascal, grime's first superstar, has two; the polarising but top-selling La Roux gets two. That's great news. But the omissions are more noticeable. Little Boots's kitsch disco sold 100,000 albums; Frankmusik's precision-tooled synth-pop got him a top-20 album and shoals of excited fans; and Tinchy Stryder's consistent success helped grime to finally break into the mainstream â€' but where are they? ­Stryder, an ­obvious contender for best male, has received only...

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Friendly Fires, Dizzee Rascal, La Roux also up for gongs

Glastonbury organiser also rules out Green Day from playing this June's bash

Last week was all about new beginnings. As you stagger home from welcoming in 2010, we want your pick of songs about the morning after

Ha-ppy Noo Year! My best wishes to you in 2010 written in my best New York gangster accent.

This week's topic is, I am proud to announce, a topical one. It is also dual purpose. Because I am in the market both for songs about the morning after the night before, but also songs you would recommend to help soothe the pain of a night's overindulgence. Obviously, justifications for the second type of song will be greatly appreciated.

Now, quickly because I have some disco pants to iron, here's your B list.

Velvet Underground â€' Beginning to See the Light
A great song, and one which helped to make clearer the links between this great band and Jonathan Richman (on the A list folks). I decided, though, that it was less about new starts and more about staying up all night. ALL RIGHT!

The Marvelettes â€' Destination Anywhere
A fresh start, but not a happy one. A love ends and our protagonist has to face up to it; "this old world ain't got no back door".

LTJ Bukem â€' Horizons
Drum'n'bass in readers recommend, not very common. But this is a classic of the genre and features Maya Angelou on vocals (sort of).

Sebadoh â€' Gimme Indie Rock
As Fred Flintstone observed it's about a new start in music â€' the genesis of "electric...

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The votes have been counted and verified and we can now announce that, this year, you lot really did like a bit of Animal Collective

As the year draws to a close, the final word on the best music of 2009 goes to ... you! Well, it does if you cast your vote in our Readers' poll. Nearly 1,000 of you did all told and the results were fascinating. There were hundreds of different nominations in both the best album and best song categories, proving what a well-listened and curious lot you are. Curious in a good way, obviously. But despite the diversity there was a clear consensus in this year's census; Animal Collective are your kings of 2009.

Baltimore's finest were voted Best Band of 2009 by a clear margin. Their breakout single, My Girls, also won the Song of the Year category by a healthy distance. And while Merriweather Post Pavilion was pipped to Album of the Year by the xx (which also won the Guardian critics' poll for 2009) it still polled a highly respectable second in that category.

The Collective were, as you might imagine, ineligible for Solo Act of 2009. That vote was won at a canter by Fever Ray, scoring the highest individual vote of all the categories in the process. So congrats to Karin Dreijer Andersson.

Other votes of note included a good performance by Grizzly Bear, missing from the Critics' poll but present here in...

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The demand for a Clash/Public Enemy-style hero started dying out this decade. Yet MIA managed to fulfill this role without diminishing her status as a 21st-century pop star

Surveying the best-of-the-decade lists, I was surprised to see MIA not featuring as high as one might have expected. When Paper Planes
was at its peak of crossover success last year â€' No 4 in Billboard, sampled in TI & Jay-Z's Swagga Like Us, an appearance on Slumdog Millionaire â€' there was a smatter of chatter to the effect that she was "artist of the decade". That appears to have ebbed, leading to the just respectable showings for Arular and Kala on the various lists. This surprised me, not only because of the massive fervour around those albums on their release (in 2005 and 2007 respectively), but also because, while not a fan myself, I can't think of too many other contenders for artist of the decade. Entirely a creature of the noughties, Maya Arulpragasam arrived mid-decade to dramatise some of the central issues of the time. If pre-eminence was measured purely in terms of talk â€' the ability to generate acres of newsprint and blogospheric comment; to turn oneself into a fulcrum of fevered pro- and anti-debate â€' you'd have to say that MIA beat all comers.

As the decade draws to a close, it seems timely to consider once more the MIA phenomenon. But as my Notes on the Noughties blogs are...

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Dizzee Rascal on making his 'modern age' album