Perfect. When I heard the evil old harridan had finally died the words to this song came straight to me. And now it's a phenomenon, a much needed antidote to all these creepy Thatcher worshippers. Clap your hands! And BBC...grow some balls, you pathetic brown nosing creeps.

What a desperate attempt to flog a compilation of old house hits and some student indie disco favourites from 20 years ago. There is not much acid house here, believe me. If you want acid house there are way better buys out there...records that actually contain acid house records. Avoid this sham.

This simply isn't in the same league as 'Auschwitz' or 'The Nazis: A warning from history'. It feels like it belongs on a minor cable channel with its tacky on-screen graphics (endless explosions, rottweiler dogs, etc). Heavy handed visuals and a narrator who lacks the gravitas of Samuel West (used in the two aforementioned series) combine with overfamiliar material (many of the quotes are instantly recognisable as lifted from previous documentaries). Large chunks of the episodes aren't even addressing the premise of the series, that of Hitler's personality. The only plus is the colour archive footage.
I bought 'Auschwitz' and 'The Nazis: a warning' but I'll be giving this a wide berth.

The politics of host nation Azerbaijan aside, the 2012 Eurovision was in many ways a vintage one, not least for a winner that has become the biggest Eurovision hit of the last 20 years (yes, including here in the cynical UK). For me there were no really all-time classic songs in Baku but there were few stinkers either: the overall standard is high (even the shriek-a-thon from Albania I initially dismissed as a waste of CD space turned out to be a favourite on the back of her outstanding live performance). As with every year there's something for everyone: gloriously trashy Balkan pop from Greece and Cyprus, a rock-out from Slovakia, traditional fado from Portugal, 60s retro from Italy's answer to Amy Whinehouse, dance tracks from Bulgaria and Sweden, indie rock from Israel and Switzerland, and 'farmers rap' in Austrian dialect. What's not to love among the 42 tracks here? The adorable Russian babushkas hogged all the publicity and gave the Swedish winner Loreen a run for her money. As for the benighted UK, thanks to yet another incompetent choice from the BBC of a singer who'd had no hits in half a century, we once more languished at the bottom of the scoreboard. I felt sorry for Engelbert Humperdinck but whoever at the BBC pushed for him to be our entry shouldn't be let near this contest ever again. His fate was predicted months in advance by those of us who know Eurovision.
That aside, the 2012 line-up is a very listenable collection.
PS Don't go looking for Armenia on the CD: they stayed at home, worried about the reception they'd get from their traditional Azerbaijani enemies.

All credit to The Cure for making being glum into an art form. Of course no-one at the time called this 'Goth'. I doubt I even heard that term before 1983. But with The Cure's albums of 1980 and 1981, the popularity of Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, Joy Division and, on a lighter note, The Cramps, there sure was something melancholic and morbid in the air in early 80s Britain. Hip kids of the time thought a good night out was reading Kafka novels by a full moon in the local cemetry (and that's a fog-bound Bolton Abbey pictured on the LP sleeve in case you were wondering). Had i-Pods been around "Faith" would have been the perfect soundtrack to some late night crypt kicking (actually they were; we called them Sony Walkmans).

"Faith" starts on cue with the toll of church bells and ends with the line "I went away alone with nothing left but faith" and in between you get, er 'party favourites' such as "The Drowning Man" and "The Funeral Party". Bring your own razor blades. There's a continuation here of the dysfunctional mood music of their previous album "Seventeen Seconds", only to these ears the tracks on "Faith" have more sophistication and contrasts and a nice atmospheric use of layers of synth. This time the music is more emotionally engaging. There's a haunting sadness to it.

Although "Faith" sees The Cure sleepwalking further into depression, it was the album that followed, "Pornography", that was the real dark one. There's no epic here like "A Forest" on "Seventeen Seconds" but to me "Faith" is a more satisfying listen; I can hear the progression. And yes the music is mournful but it doesn't actually drag you down. I was 17 when this came out and, along with a mountain of similar musical miserablism, it chimed perfectly with my self-pitying adolescent self. Now I'm older and with real reasons to be angst-ridden listening to "Faith" is almost comforting, like a soothing, slow motion aural soma. Odd how The Cure can be a real tonic.

The Cure's "Seventeen Seconds" is a kind of 'proto-Goth' calling card, the point where spikey, jumpy late Seventies New Wave starts to transform itself into the genre of Gothic rock that so characterised much of the Eighties. Here the energetic, boisterous New Wave Cure slows to an introspective, self-pitying and anxiety-ridden sulk, permanently indulging an adolescent fixation with the morbid and macabre. By now Robert Smith and his not so happy band are sounding like the Buzzcocks on Mogadon.

The nightmarish classic single taken from this album "A Forest" is a perfect blueprint for student bedsit angst; in my mind it is the greatest thing The Cure ever delivered, sublime in its ability to evoke in music a taut, tense state of dread. The other tracks can't match this panic-stricken epic and on first hearing could be easily dismissed as inferior variations on the same theme, with lots of repetitive, plodding drum patterns, snatches of discordant piano and Robert Smith's trademark weary vocal laments.

The sleeve to "Seventeen Seconds" sums up the music within very well - downbeat, doomy and dank. There's little in the way of contrast or colour, just a relentless grey dirge-like procession of melancholy. Yet believe me, compared to the onslaught of anguish in what was to follow a couple of year's later in "Pornography", this album is a stroll in the park. It does make you wonder though. All this gloom... maybe that is what living in the tedium of suburban (Creepy) Crawley did to the young mind of Robert Smith and his glum chums. Still, "Seventeen Seconds" promised great things for the rest of the decade - and The Cure didn't disappoint.

Yello weren't the first credible home-grown band to make an impression outside of their native Switzerland; Grauzone had major success in Germany and Austria with their 1981 New Wave/synth hit "Eisbär" ('credible' exempts from further mention the only other Swiss export of the time, metal merchants Krokus). But "You Gotta Say Yes to Another Excess" gave Yello with their third album the first critically acclaimed international breakthrough for a Swiss act as well as their first big seller at home. Not only was it a critics' favourite, its two singles were hits of sorts in various places.

What set the 'metrognomes of Zürich' (as they were nicknamed) apart from the glut of European synth pop and electronic outfits of the time was a more arty, left-field approach that made heavy use of aural collages and random sound effects (it wasn't sampling as such as the band created the source material themselves). The music of Yello always had a touch of Dada about it, itself also a product of Zürich. And in Renaissance Man and singer Dieter Meier, looking like an eccentric English banker with his moustache and cravat, the group had the ideal, if a little unhinged, public face.

This album is front loaded with the two hits ("I Love You" in a slightly different mix to what came out on 45) and these tracks are admittedly the highlights. But there's plenty more of what Yello do best: exotic journeys through unfamiliar soundscapes, this time up the Amazon to a back-drop of jungle noises, thunder claps and squawking tropical animals. The title track throws everything into the dance-friendly mix from elephant calls to tribal drumming, while "Swing" adds a dash of Teutonic jazz, like Fred Astaire tripping the light fantastic in Lederhosen. The entire album feels like its a lost arthouse soundtrack to an Indiana Jones adventure.

If Salvador Dalí had made music it surely would have sounded like this; surreal, a little mad and with a knowing glint in its eye. This band's music is like a soundtrack to glamorous cinematic adventures to some very strange places, like a Central European film noir thriller set to an electronic beat. In one such film, The Third Man, Orson Welles famously said: "In Switzerland, they had brotherly love and five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!" A little harsh; there's the Red Cross, Toblerone and Yello's back catalogue too (actually, forget Toblerone; those little nougat bits get stuck in your teeth).

The theory that a musical decade starts about half way through the actual decade certainly wasn't true of the Eighties. By 1981 the best album of the genre that defined those years, synth pop, had arrived. It sounded like the future then, and thirty years later, incredibly, it still does. When the original artily (and hitless) electronic Human League split in two everyone expected the half with the brains (Heaven 17) to triumph (they had to wait a few years for that). Instead it was Phil Oakey's crew that went global with their manifesto of marrying Chic and ABBA to a synthesised beat.

Drafting in Martin Rushent to produce was the master stroke. In 1981 we seemed on the threshold of a brave new world where guitars and drums gathered dust in museums, and the sleeve of "Dare" proudly lists the technology behind this album; Casio, Korgi, Roland and Linn. And thanks to the Rushent touch the League's tunes were given a gleaming, electronic snap, crackle and pop that catapulted four of the tracks on "Dare" into the upper reaches of the UK singles chart. The production also made these metronomic tracks perfect for the dancefloor; check out the prickly, punchy, almost military beat of "The Sound of the Crowd" or the lush sweep and swirling percussion of "Do or Die".

For inspiration Oakey had swapped his cult sci-fi obsessions for the world of high fashion (the album's title and sleeve design were lifted from Vogue magazine). He cleverly oversees the crafting of state of the art electronic wizardry onto traditional 'boy meets girl' love songs, delivered in his trademark 'annoyed android' vocal style. The truth is most of the ten tracks on "Dare" had hit potential; quite how they failed to have a follow-up hit in America after "Don't You Want Me" is a mystery. The less radio-friendly "I Am the Law" and "Seconds" (about Kennedy's assassination) add some experimental weirdness and a link back to the Human League of old. It's just a shame B side "Hard Times", a warped dancefloor staple of early 80s 'night life' and one of the League's finest tracks, wasn't added to the running order of the original record (or subsequent CD releases). But that would have been spoiling us, I guess.

After their early cult albums and then this bona fide synth classic, the group should have just stopped at this. Post-"Dare" it all unravelled with cheesy synth Motown pastiches, clumsy political commentary on the Lebanon civil war, desperate (but successful) bids to reignite their American success with producers Jam & Lewis ... the truth is, I never bought one of their records again. But in 1981, when men in eyeliner and lipstick was the height of sophistication and synths threatened to sweep away all before them, this record was indeed "the sound of the crowd", the definitive soundtrack of young Britain (and, soon after, way beyond). "Dare" has it all: intriguing lyrics, the chicest of visuals whose shiny white brilliance matches the music inside and, above all, those synthetic martial beats and swathes of sleek, thrilling and icily cool synth pop. 'One day all records will be made this way', they promised. These are the things that dreams are made of.

For a brief time in the early Eighties the hip kids, music critics and sales charts were united: glossy commercial pop was where it was at and teen pop mag Smash Hits would share cover stars with the serious music press. Rock paper and arbiters of taste The New Musical Express (or rather its critic Paul Morley) coined the term "New Pop" to describe it: the likes of Kim Wilde, Dollar, Haircut One Hundred and, above them all, ABC. Too late to be New Romantics and not electronic enough to be synth pop, ABC teamed up with the quintessential Eighties producer Trevor Horn to deliver us some of the most ambitious, overblown and thrilling pop music of all time.

Those who demand their artists grow a beard and live a few years in an Alaskan log cabin to organically craft their next record will probably recoil from "The Lexicon of Love" like the undead before a garlic clove. This couldn't be more 'Eighties', brimming with theatrically, archness and a knowing 'camp'. Its lyrics indulge in occasionally excruciating word play with singer Martin Fry's rhyming stream of consciousness piling cliché upon cliché until resistance is futile. Fry seems to be singing permanently in speech marks; don't look for sincerity here. And it's hard to tell where the lush orchestration by Anne Dudley ends and the Fairlight synth samples begin. But when it sounds so damn seductive, does it matter?

Despite the title and a glut of references to 'hearts and flowers', Valentine's Day, lipgloss and marriage proposals this is no slushy collection of love ballads. All through it is a dance beat that reflects the band's involvement in that early Eighties fad 'Brit funk' (Fry and co. were, like many Brits of the time, 'soul boys') and it's no surprise that in America it was in the clubs that this music scored best.

Throughout the album the standard never dips and the hit singles are among the most jaw dropping highlights of this much maligned decade's pop. "Poison Arrow" is as good an example you'll find of Horn's trademark 'everything but the kitchen sink' production style, while 'The Look of Love" ranks as one of the most compelling pop songs ever.

"The Lexicon of Love" was one hell of a calling card and unfortunately one the group was unable or unwilling to match. They perversely embraced a politically aware, rough and ready rock guitar approach on the disastrous follow-up "Beauty Stab" and their career in their home country never recovered (though they continued to have hits on the other side of the Atlantic). Unsurprisingly given how it tapped into the Eighties Zeitgeist of excess and artifice this record couldn't be more unfashionable now; that only makes me cherish it all the more. When in the final ecstatic bars of "The Look of Love" Martin Fry lets rip he sums up just how I feel about this extraordinary record: "Hip hip hooray! Yippee ai, yippee aiay!!"

ABBA's last album is as downbeat as its sleeve and reflects the state of play within the group at the time: gloomy, sombre, the four members, now all divorced, ignoring each other, clearly all ready to go their separate ways. "The Visitors" is about separation, failed relationships, persecution and is a world away from ABBA's bubblegum roots or the disco bounce of their late Seventies material.

Kicking off with the title track we get the trademark lyrical angst wrapped up here in an uptempo synth rock tune about the paranoia of life for dissidents behind the Iron Curtain. It's a compelling Kafka-esque nightmare set to a remorseless disco beat and it takes no prisoners. They're doing it again on "Soldiers", another sweet melody, this time hiding a warning about warmongering. One of their finest moments comes with "When All Is Said and Done", a prime example of a genre they made their own: 'divorce pop'. A minor hit in North America and Australia it oddly remained unreleased in their European strongholds where it would have doubtless been a huge seller. That honour went to "One of Us", their final big international hit over Christmas 1981, a plaintive tale of one woman's post-break up regret.

In among the gloom are two bits of fluff: "Head Over Heels", a song with a fairground feel that's about nothing in particular, an odd and ill-judged choice for a single (it was the band's first release to flop since hitting the big time all those years previously). And the less said about "Two for the Price of One" the better, a banal, cringeworthy attempt at humour that not only has Bjorn on vocals (never a good sign) but has him imitating a woman on the phone. Its inclusion here is nothing other than truly regrettable, especially as they had stronger tracks ("Cassandra" or "Should I Laugh or Cry") that they relegated to singles B sides around this time. These were added to later CD pressings of the album together with "The Day Before You Came", the group's meandering, chorus-free farewell classic.

"I Let the Music Speak" is another stab at musical theatre, an interest we first saw on the group's 1978 album, a calling that was clearly becoming irresistable in light of Ulvaeus and Andersson's post-ABBA musicals. Luckily this five and a half minute opus is a better effort than their earlier attempts and was a sure sign that conventional pop was a straitjacket Benny and Bjorn were growing tired of.

Although a #1 album across Europe "The Visitors" and its melancholic feel was an obvious signal that ABBA were winding down even if no-one, the four members included, quite realised at the time that this was the end. Were it not for the one miss-step mentioned earlier this bleakly mature work would have been a note perfect coda to a stunning decade of songwriting. As it is "The Visitors" is a fine way to bow out. What followed were ultimately half-hearted solo careers from the women, well-received hit musicals from the men and, as the years passed, the slow realisation that we had witnessed the greatest pop group since the Beatles.