The crooning glory is all Adele's
Click for more photosThe year in music
Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters performs in Sydney, 2011.
The year began as it ended, with Adele selling. And selling. And then, just for some variety, selling some more.
This year, PJ Harvey made the album of the year in Let England Shake, Eminem and Foo Fighters offered the ultimate stadium experiences, Laura Marling confirmed her status as the most likely to be a future great, Abbe May stunned smart people and Gotye made sure a mispronounced name wasn't going to stop the rise and rise of the song of the year, Somebody That I Used to Know.
But even they were all but buried under a storm that turned into a landslide and finished as an all-encompassing avalanche caused by the second album from the surname-averse Londoner, Adele Adkins.
Impressive Adele. Photo: Getty Images
Called 21, as it was recorded in the year she turned 21, it was the biggest-selling album of the year on three continents and several other islands, territories and far-flung corners of the Amazonian jungle no doubt. All this without touring at all.
With hit after hit of slightly soul-inflected pop songs heavy on the ballads and spiked with personal lyrics about love going well and then awfully, it comfortably sailed past 10 million copies before December, more than 700,000 of those in Australia. Not bad considering the album, like Meat Loaf's voice and career, is supposedly dying.
Speaking of which ! - dying, that is - the woman who blazed the path on both sides of the Atlantic for Adele, the troubled and troublesome and yet singularly talented Amy Winehouse, shocked plenty but surprised few when she clocked out early this year. The woman could sing like her life depended on it; it's just a shame she couldn't live like her songs depended on it.
Someone who once might have succumbed to the lifestyle temptations and the suffocating attention of the gutter press that afflicted Winehouse was another singer who need only be identified by one name, Kylie. As in Minogue. As in the most successful and now longest lasting at the top international pop star Australia has produced.
Having survived 25 years of Molly Meldrum gushing, bubble perms and overalls (and golden shorts that didn't cover all), ''Michael made me sexy'' and ''Kylie's brave cancer fight'', ever younger and impossibly good-looking boyfriends and narky descriptions of her as a Madonna Mini-me, Minogue brought the best pop show of her career, and one of the best pop shows around, to stages all over the world this year.
Perhaps fittingly then, while it's not exactly a damehood or the keys to Yarralumla (though when the equally stylish Quentin Bryce moves on, who knows), Minogue did pick up an honour this year. She was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in a service performed by Julia Gillard, a woman who doesn't need someone to make her sexy after At Home with Julia cracked that problem, but wouldn't mind half the Minogue longevity. Or even a fifth.
Perhaps one day Our Kylie will receive the ultimate musical accolade. No, not a Grammy (she has already got one of those) or platinum albums (scores of them) or a parody by Weird Al Yankovic (God spare us) but a tribute show.
More than a covers' night at the RSL but not quite the real thing, tribute shows are when contemporary artists assay the work of a significantly bigger name to pay homage. And yes, to pay the rent. This year they were like Hills buses: after a flur! ry, noth ing for ages and then three at once. In one hectic week in Sydney we had They Will Have Their Way (a tribute to the Finn Brothers), Way to Blue (a tribute to Nick Drake) and Straight to You (a tribute to Nick Cave). Amazingly, all three were high-class, moving and/or sexy and worth seeing.
Was there a little smile on the faces of the remaining four members of Cold Chisel at the coincidence of three tribute shows on at the same time they were playing their first gigs in Sydney, outside a car race pay job, in years? Playing their own songs, and rather well at that - did that make them a self-tribute show?
What do they care? They sold more tickets than Adele did.
For now.