Its site is the same premises that became home in 1990 to Factory Records, the label set up by Tony Wilson in the late seventies that signed up, among many others, Hooky’s band, their earlier incarnation Joy Division and Happy Mondays. It was members of New Order, though, that stumped up the cash for the club that provided a home for some of Madchester’s most thrilling sights and sounds.

The Hacienda was eventually dragged down by all manner of drug, gang-related and financial crises, which begs the question why Hooky wants to get involved in another establishment. The music veteran claims he has learnt from his mistakes and is now working with an experienced team that comes with plenty of business acumen. Not, it has to be said, at the expense of a vibrant line-up. For rather than focus on one huge space, as at The Hac, this new Factory spreads its goodies across three rooms.

There are club nights every day of the week, with an emphasis on indie, retro and leftfield dance, rather than the Chicago house anthems that once alienated the Hac’s original, post-punk punters. The live set up is just as important with gigs this month from White Lies alongside local talents Twisted Wheel and The Whip (get there early for LoneLady).

If anything, it is not the Hac reborn, but a return to the original Factory. Before Wilson and his mates had the bright idea of putting out albums by local bands on a label based in their home city, Factory was a band night at the Russell Club in Manchester’s down-at-heel Hulme district. Joy Division and Durutti Column played there alongside Sheffield’s Cabaret Voltaire and, from Liverpool, Big In Japan.

It was here Wilson first collaborated with designer Peter Saville on the instantly recognisable aesthetic that Oliver Wood, for one, has termed industrial parody. Now Saville’s unique sensibility reappears as an integral part of the designs for Factory II. But as Hooky himself is keen to explain, the venture is about providing a place for young bands to play; and with a new wave of Mancunian acts on the rise, this could be Hooky’s best business decision yet.

They are obviously indebted to Manchester predecessors New Order, something I found off putting on the first couple of listens, though gradually the group’s futurist sheen and fizzing positivity have won me over this bleak month. All that is missing is the sarcastic snarl of the city’s greatest musical exports, plus the sort of vigorous bottom end that Hooky or Mani could have supplied.

It’s a welcome lift for the north west that recently has had to suffer the mundanity of The Courteeners and the ever-willing, though so-far sadly limited, Twisted Wheel. Even better is the news that Delphic are not the only jewels Manchester has to offer. The band themselves have been keen to sing the praises of fellow city folk Everything Everything, an outfit that is more leftfield, but displayed exemplary pop nous on last year’s single My Keys, Your Boyfriend. And now Geffen have taken a punt on them.

Just as hotly tipped as Delphic are the more coiffured and melancholy Hurts, in some ways a throwback to the chill winds that blew through eighties synth pop, yet with their own engaging emotional punch. And for a more rough-edged, Afro-guitar take on things come Egyptian Hip Hop, with their own delightful single Wild Human Child. Interestingly, both Delphic and EHH hail from Marple, a leafy commuter village on the south east fringes of Greater Manchester in the shadow of the Peak District.

Along with other upcoming outfits Airship and Dutch Uncles, a source informs me, all attended the same school. Now those bands and Delphic are together on an EP, the highlight of which is an Everything Everything mix of Delphic’s This Momentary. The label Love And Disaster has not given its release a title, though I think we might be hearing soon not of Madchester, but Nerdchester.

 Yet lists for the best of the past decade are dominated by albums, proving they remain valid biggest possible statement for an artist to make.

 Looking back over the past 10 years, certain songs as well as some albums stick in the mind. So, doffing my cap to the digital times, my own list is a hybrid of the most memorable albums and tracks.

 Arcade Funeral – Funeral

Can any album sum up a contrary decade that lived under the shadow of global terrorism, ecological catastrophe and financial meltdown, yet was stil full of infantile behaviour? This lot came closest, at least on the impending doom front. It was not just the deaths of close relatives that they captured, but the end of innocence and a lot more besides. Yet somehow they turned their grief into some of the times’ most life-affirming music.

Arctic Monkeys – Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not

Worth mentioning for You Look Good On The Dancefloor alone, but the Arctics gave songwriting a new lease of life. Their razor-sharp vignettes gave us snapshots of life’s grim, prolix verities that remain unequalled since.

The Libertines – Up The Bracket

At the time, this was the gang we all wanted to join. Carl Barat and Pete Doherty cocked a snook at an increasingly corporate live scene, playing in front rooms and cancelling gigs at short notice whenever the latter was banged up. In between, they provided guitar pop with scuzzy glamour and a hint of personal insurrection.

Freelance Hellraiser – Stroke Of Genius

Gotta have The Strokes, the band that launched a thousand wish-they-weres in tight keks and battered Converse. The New Yorkers’ monied insouciance made their debut Is This It? a classic in its own right, but this bootleg mash-up with Christina Aguilera is a perfect fantasy pairing and set the scene for more fusions to come.

Outkast – Hey Ya

Is hip hop dead? Can’t think of a rap album from that noughties that has compelled me to listen all the way through. Even Kanye’s best work comes with too much filler (and this, too, comes from a sprawling double album), yet the genre continues to set the tone for much black music – and not just the self-aggrandising swagger that has seeped into r’n’b. This is not hip hop, just the best dance-pop tune since Deelite’s Groove Is In The Heart.

 Elbow (ft a cast of thousands) – One Fine Day

This brings to mind two key facets of the noughties, both concerned with the levelling out of the relationship between stars and fans. We are now more likely to see them as equals, so why should a band’s most ardent supporters not appear on their signature tracks, as this Glasto crowd do here. The unassuming gang from Bury also typify how quiet artists have found their own place in the hectic digital village, alongside the folkie set, dubstep’s shadowy innovators and introspective singer songwriters.

Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes

Despite – or maybe because of - the easy access to digital production, one of the key sounds of recent years has been that log cabin aesthetic of Bon Iver and Alela Diane. Nowhere is it better encapsulated, though, than in these sumptuous harmonies that evoke the northwestern US wilderness, while apparently being recorded in downtown Seattle.

The Knife – The Knife

Brittle synth lines coming out of a warm, inky darkness; the often icy, sometimes fraught vocals of Karin Dreijer Andersson, the woman now better known as Fever Ray. This is the one critic’s choice that has failed to reach mainstream recognition, yet the frisson of its Scandinavian chill and enigmatic emotional depths, tower above Robyn and Lykke Li.

James Yorkston – Moving Up Country

I thought by using Elbow as an archetype for quiet artists, I might avoid having to pick a folk artist, but Yorkie’s debut album is so perfect. It has the intimate feel of a fireside session, mixing deeply personal lyrics (St Patrick has him lying in bed with a girl thinking about an ex) and communal musicianship (the salt-shaker percussion that pops up occasionally).

The White Stripes – Seven Nation Army

Look, mama, I invented a whole new riff. Jack and Meg White have released at least two indispensable albums this decade – White Blood Cells and Elephant – but while Fell In Love With A Girl and Hotel Yorba reminded us of the pleasures of rock’s primal beat, this jawdropping tour-de-force cements the giddying joys of the spaces inbetween.

A helpful invention in its own right, Record Of The Day is both daily music news digest and talking shop. Now in its seventh year, their awards have established themselves as a light-hearted bit of fun ahead of the Christmas party season. No one begrudges the sheepish winners, often left bemused by the voting process. So congrats to The Observer Music Monthly, Lady Gaga’s press officer and Kruger.

A particular highlight this year was an outstanding achievement award for one of our finest photographers. Pop music and pictures go together like cheese and pickle - think of any performer and usually the first thing that comes into your mind is a memorable image rather than a snatch of music.

And likely as not, that image has been created by Kevin Cummins. That is especially the case for the likes of Joy Division, The Smiths and The Stone Roses. Spot the connection? Raised in Manchester, Cummins is a dyed-in-the-blue-wool Man City fan and has maintained close ties with the North West.

Cummins’ passion for music shines through his work and he has a knack of capturing his subjects’ personalities, whether a pensive Ian Curtis or an arch Morrissey. He was always at the right place at the right time, whether key punk gigs or Madonna’s early UK showcase at The Hacienda. I was more than happy to raise a glass to him on Thursday night, though in the end had one too many. Roll on 2010.

His thesis is there is too much music that is too readily available – and we are taking it for granted. So what better way to remind us of the art form’s importance than to deliberately do without listening to music for a whole day?

This year, one of Europe’s annual capitals of culture is on board for what could well be a fascinating social experiment. The whole of Linz, a city with a proud musical pedigree, is set to ban music on Saturday 21 November – not only will there be no gigs or radio airplay, cinemas will refrain from showing films with music soundtracks and churches will have to do without hymns. It is something even the NME might promote, judging from this piece here.

So will kids do without their MP3 players or those irritating mobile phones that play music (without headphones)? Will homebodies be happy to listen to speech-based radio? Will blue-collar workers maintain productivity without chart hits blaring out? Such questions only really apply if Austrians use music the same way we do here. And I for one won’t be getting involved, having had to do without tuneage due to the postal strike and forgetting to recharge my iPod (I will, though, work on more effective ways to encourage people to think more about what they confirm - and probably get irritated by piped chart pap in shopping centres).

This is the culmination of a five-year plan for the former KLF founder, but the guy that reputedly burnt a million quid has more to say about music’s omnipresence. He would like to ban it altogether and start again. Drummond reckons pop has reached the end of the road, enjoyed all the innovation possible until it can only regurgitate former motifs in slightly different forms.

As part of his 15 project, Drummond has been gathering choirs to attempt to replicate the first music, when cavemen and women gathered together to worldlessly emote their feelings. I don’t think we need to go that far. Thanks to social media, pop is becoming increasingly fractured, so nowadays any musical hegemony holds much less sway. That means we can return to a pre-Beatles tradition of musicians performing for more discrete audiences. That might be an online community with cultish tastes (Pitchfork-style indie) or in their owns locality.

That way, they can play the tunes that mean something to them and their peers – creating a new range of standards that in the north of England might range from The Beatles and The Who to The Stone Roses and Oasis. Then, like broadside writers celebrating local events and characters, they can pen their own tales. Actually, this has already happened and represents the early career path of Arctic Monkeys.

 Moreover, I would argue that Drummond’s is a particularly western-centric view. Pop is now rubbing up against ever more exotic music forms in productive ways, as with fusions between African styles and our own genres, notably in the realms of hip hop and electronica. To take a global view, the music that came out the continent to give us blues and jazz is now returning there in vastly different forms. I wonder if the likes of Blk Jcks realise things have come full circle?

Sean was knocked off his perch by another intriguing phenomenon – Owl City. This is the moniker of one Adam Young, a resident of Owatonna, Minnesota. The shy only child has burst out of his bedroom set-up with the delicate filigree of ‘Fireflies’, a fusion of subtle keyboard motifs and plain, emo-style vocals similar to our own Get Cape Wear Cape Fly.

A sampler of forthcoming album Umbrella Beach reveals more wide-eyed romanticism and even a bizarre, introverted take on house music with its title track. All very promising, though a word of warning should be raised. Young may have found fame with ‘Fireflies’, though whether he can maintain such success is less clear.

Think back, if you can, to the unheralded success in the UK of White Town. This was a similar one-man project set up by one Jyoti Prakash Mishra, who had a number one hit in 1997 with Your Woman. Mishra was already past 30 when he enjoyed his first hit, but was also reputed to be a straight-edged ex-Marxist, hardly fodder for the pop machine. Needless to say, White Town quickly disappeared from view, although Mishra still occasionally puts out music under that name on various indie labels.

And Owl City is not the only one to Do It Himself. From Canada comes the more mainstream Lights, the UK has Fryars, currently opting for the Bandshare route, though the most compelling solo act to emerge in recent months is Memory Tapes. New Jersey’s Dayve Hawke has already caused ripples as Memory Cassette and Weird Tapes. Now he has combined the two pseudonyms and really hit the spot with his album Seek Magic. It is a lovingly constructed melange of shimmering guitars and hazy synths, blissful yet palpably kinetic. Prepare to be entranced.

 On the main stage, Deadmau5 manfully attempts to rouse a chilled Saturday evening crowd politely awaiting the arrival of Fatboy Slim. Meanwhile, in a marquee behind it, several hundred wide-eyed hedonists are threatening to raise the canvas roof to the strains of Underworld’s Born Slippy.

Maybe it was the time, location, or the fact I had not been to a rave in 10 years, but there was a palpable feeling of last-chance abandon, as if a tent-full of thirtysomethings had all decided it was time to stop dropping tabs every weekend and grow up, but before that they wanted to go out with a bang.

Yet where does that leave the artists that soundtracked their thrills and spills? If you are The Prodigy, you are ridiculous enough to carry on dying your hair, dressing up as a punk and gurning in front of festival crowds until your Zimmer frame gets trapped in the mud.

Underworld, though, have always represented the more cerebral end of techno, thanks to Karl Hyde’s stream of consciousness poetry and the bookish demeanour of Rick Smith. Indeed, the group have mellowed over the years as they moved into composing soundtracks for Breaking And Entering and Sunshine, the latter continuing a productive relationship with Danny Boyle.

Yet the band would argue they have always been more than dance producers and as evidence they are set to release a peculiar mix CD entitled Athens from Underworld vs The Misterons. With a cover created by Hyde himself, early Roxy Music and some Soft Machine, it reminds us of their long-standing art school credentials. Also in the mix is a collaboration with former Roxy member Brian Eno (cue another rambling monologue from Underworld’s frontman). So the band have always been open-minded musicians first and dance producers second, though this sedate collection of Afrobeats and jazz fusion is not so ground-breaking - Kieren Hebden does it all the time when he is not reinventing electronica as Four Tet.

Moby, meanwhile, is taking his unplugged set back on the road. He introduced this back in June at Ornette Coleman’s Meltdown festival and is now offering fans the chance to choose the set list as he plays London’s Hard Rock Café for affable music mag Q. As if his live shows were that compelling anyway. More intriguing is the current project of Graham Massey. The 808 State founder has got together an all-female keyboard quartet named Sisters of Transistors.

 Sleeve notes to their album At The Ferranti Institute (nice Oldham reference there) reveal much hokum about a Doreen Lang, her original organ foursome and a chance discovery at a disused air force base, but the important thing is Massey is having fun – he plays drums with them live and is credited with writing their music. SOT bring to mind the scuzzy analogue intensity of the sorely missed all-female outfit Electrelane, with nods to B-movie horror shows and library music. Many dance veterans at some stage in their career need to set themselves as serious artistes, but with nothing to prove and a heap of self-deprecation, Massey has come up with the most engaging answer as to what to do next.

 As has been the custom in recent years, organisers have revealed several months ahead who will win its Outstanding Achievement Award.

You can argue it is a bit previous giving him the gong now, when his career might well have a long way to run. Williams holds the record for most Brit Awards even before you take into account the ones he won as a member of Take That and might well pick up more on the night.

Then again, I can’t think of the award going to a more deserving guy. His first outstanding achievement was to launch a solo career in the first place. Already the boy band’s class clown, once Williams left Take That he sunk into a mire of over-indulgence that made Liam Gallagher look even-keeled. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, no one took him seriously when he set out as a solo artist, yet out of that period he recorded Angels, one of the most cherished songs of the past 20 years.

Obviously it has not all been plain sailing – Rudebox was a crummy attempt at outré electropop that sold poorly. Williams slunk off to the States and transformed himself into a beardie weirdie hunting UFOs in Nevada. So yet again, his comeback has been met with incredulity in certain quarters (hello, Daily Mail), encouraged by his flaky X Factor appearance. Williams is “desperately trying to re-launch his career after years in the pop wilderness”, apparently

Yet even a cursory reading of his biog to date should suggest you underestimate him at your peril. Indeed, Reality Killed The Video Star is as a fine an album as he has made. There might not be an Angels, but there is the warmth of You Know Me alongside the relaxed eccentricity of Difficult For Weirdos.

Such slickness, though, makes we wonder who really deserves the award. True, the performer has been brave to return to face down ridicule and cynicism, but he must have known he was backing a winner, his confidence aided by the presence by a man you can trust more than almost anyone to supply a guaranteed hit: Trevor Horn.

This veteran producer did it for himself with Buggles’ Video Killed The Radio Star, made a silk’s purse out of Scouse chancers Frankie Goes To Hollywood and fashioned a timeless album for new romantics ABC. All that, plus hits for Grace Jones, Propaganda, Seal, etc, etc. Horn has already been celebrated by the industry, with a star-studded tribute concert at Wembley Arena. All those aforementioned names made an appearance – alongside Dollar. Now he has led Williams back to the lush, big-sounding pop he is best at, while maintaining some of the star’s twitchy oddness.

Robbie will probably thank Horn when he picks up his latest gong, but will he thank the Brits? After all, look what happened to Oasis when they won the very same award…

 Now their advertising agency has gone one better and commissioned original music to highlight the firm’s use of Fairtrade cocoa beans. The ad, replete with smiling Ghanaians and dancing beans, is as twee as anything you might suffer in The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency, though its funky soundtrack is a vast improvement on the trad background music you hear on the bland TV adaptations and worthy of more consideration.

 Zingolo is a collaboration between Ghanaian rap star Tinny and UK uber-producer Paul Epworth. It is a fresh take on the nation’s very own hiplife, a fusion of hip hop beats and native high-life music, the bedrock of Ghana’s pop culture for generations. Watch the full promo here.

 It is a fun, zingy number up there with plenty of other recent intercontinental fusions, not least that of London-based crew The Very Best, who feature a Malawian vocalist and last month distilled their euphoric sound on the album Warm Heart Of Africa. They follow in the wake of Portugal’s infectious Buraka Som Sistema, who combine Angolan kuduro and tight production to great effect.

 So the tracik may have been devised to sell more sugary confectionary, but at least it makes a change from the blanket use of twiddly guitars and stuttering rhythms under the guise of Afrobeat. As South Africa’s Blk Jks and DJ Mujava show, the continent’s emerging musicians are moving way beyond those cliches. Now Fallon, Cadbury’s ad agency, has gone beyond the usual bounds of syndication to set up a record label for its client – A Glass And A Half Full Records. The chocolate manufacturers’ profits from iTunes sales go towards the charity CARE International, who work in villages throughout Ghana.

 What’s not to like? Well, the chocolate may be fair trade, but there are no details on the single release. You could argue it is more important to nail commodities before we move on to intellectual property, but 50/50 share models have been around since at least Rough Trade’s early releases. And I should know, for I am benefiting from a similar deal on this very site.