ALBUM OF THE YEAR
Frank
Amy Winehouse
They sure do grow up fast these days, when I was 19 my experience of the opposite sex wouldn't have made for one extremely dull b-side but with her debut album young gunslinger Amy Winehouse already had more to say about men than Elizabeth Taylor after a few gin and tonics. And what a dazzling album it was, the sort of record Dinah Washington might have made if she'd grown up in London in the 1990s, with Amy's brassy sandpaper and treacle voice crackling like an old Verve 45 over a mix of classic jazzisms and modern urban beatitude. Her brutally honest songs were like dispatches from the front lines of the battle of the sexes, gleefully dropping bitchy bombs on wussy ex-boyfriends and cleavage-wielding gold diggers and often sounding like she'd taken a few bullets for the cause of love herself. She might be younger than the bottle of Single Malt I have at home but she already sounds like a classic act.

SINGLE OF THE YEAR
U Don't Know My Name
Alicia Keys
With it's strings, glittery piano and cooing "baby, baby, baby" vocal this was like being immersed in a great big tub of Philly Soul cream and Alicia couldn't have produced a better homage to the genre if she'd donned an afro and a pair of orange polyester flares. I'm a sucker for talking on records, especially cheesy monologues like Alicia's talking-on-the-telephone bit on this, she won't be giving Meryl Streep any sleepness nights but it floated my boat in a magical Chi-Lites-Manhattans-Delfonics kind of way. How much of the magic is down to Alicia and producer Kayne West and how much is due to the original Main Ingredient tune they nicked – sorry, sampled – it from is an arguement you can have until the cows get cabs home, but I'll take my Gamble & Huff wherever I can find it and this was the sort of music the word "swoon" was invented for.

MISERABLE BASTARDS
OF THE YEAR
The Delgados
In the immortal words of Sir Elton John of Watford: "sad songs say so much" and the mournful songs on The Delgados album "Hate" spoke so many volumes about misery and existential despair that you might have found yourself wanting to jump in front of a speeding bus or off the nearest tall building after listening to it. Well you would if it didn't all sound so hair-raisingly gorgeous, a huge Sistine Chapel of an album loaded up to its eyeballs with strings, heavenly choirs and Wagnerian beats that swooped and soared and boomed like ELO on steroids. It was almost literally breathtaking and other records sounded like 98lb weaklings in comparison. Cecil B. DeMille's album of the year.

JOLLY GOOD TIME OF THE YEAR
Noel Coward At Las Vegas
Noel Coward was so suave and sophisticated he made Cary Grant look like a plumber with visible arse crack; a playwright, actor, film director, singer and songwriter, he was a Renaissance man in a tuxedo and in the 1950s he added "cabaret act" to his resume with a series of shows at The Desert Inn in Las Vegas which were thankfully recorded for posterity on this blindingly entertaining album. Whether breezing through his own gems like "Mad Dogs & Englishmen" or saucing up Cole Porter's "Let's Do It (Let's Fall In Love)" with naughty double entendres Coward fizzed with verbal dexterity, firing off one witty lyrical bon mot after another in his pinpoint plummy tones, with a finger-clicking, jazzy backing that made this frrrrrightfully proper Englishman sound like the hippest, swingingest cat in the universe. Pure, unadulterated joy.
SOUL SISTER OF THE YEAR
(Stephanie) McKay
If there's anything like the equivalent of a Northern Soul scene in 30 years time then some future hipster looking for obscure gems from the past will pull Stephanie McKay's debut album out of a dusty crate (if they have crates in 2034 that is) and exclaim incredulously "why wasn't this huge?" Why indeed. She may have made the best soul album of 2003 but McKay (who goes by the one name in Cher/Madonna/Liberace style) can't get arrested in her home country of America where it remains unreleased. Recorded in England with Geoff Barrow of Portishead at the controls it was a thick stew of chunky beats, crackly samples and bluesy vocals that mixed hip-hop with soul beautifully without ever resorting to the "guest rapper" syndrome. But don't wait for your grandchildren to discover it, buy it now and show them how hip and trendy you were back in the day.