Rate 08: This year just gone: July 2008

Having run out of enemies, Amy Winehouse started to slap members of her own organisation while James Blunt took on all of Athens. Having been invited to play Quebec, Macca managed to insult the city. On its birthday. Dublin, meanwhile, decided to upset Dubliners just to keep Dutch singer Bono happy and approved plans to let his property company screw with The Clarence on the river.

A nurse claimed that hosting a festival trebled the pregnancy rate in her town, but that was nothing compared to the mess Zoo8 left in its wake. Even worse was the Moscow rave where the lasers somehow ended up being shone into people's eyes. Coldplay ticket holders were asked to return their tickets to get different ones for no apparent reason.

Long-promoted 'three strikes and you're out' plans to disconnect people the BPI don't like resulted in a pointless compromise. The EU decided to extend mechincal copyrights to 85 years - hoping that was long enough that Cliff would be dead by the time his expired so he might stop visiting them - but also called for royalty organisations to be more competitive. Yahoo tried to pull the your DRM servers are being switched off trick. Surprisingly, McFly and the Mail On Sunday hooked up.

As the TV coverage focused on Nelson Mandela and not Queen, Brian May felt ITV had missed the point of Mandela's 90th birthday show; Dave Lee Roth had a fake, nut-allergic Dave Lee Roth to contend with and Lemmy sort-of broke German law (and all laws of good taste) by dressing as a Nazi. Billy Joel at least had the grace to admit he had never been in a concentration camp before comparing a rehab resort to one.

Having been at the middle of a really nasty incident with Kele from Bloc Party, John Lydon found a corner of the world where he was still treated with respect, as the Daily Star's gossip column was handed over to him for a day; Calvin Harris tried for a reviewer's job at NME - hopefully not simply to upset Mark Ronson - and Kanye cranked up his own platform to bypass the lying media. Hey, it's worked for Courtney Love - where else would she have got the chance to issue a claim that Ryan Adams robbed her blind without a bunch of lawyers insisting on proof and such like?

Hints of a Madonna affair suddenly made people in the UK have to pretend they knew what an A-Rod was and we discovered that Morrissey will never, ever share a toilet and 50 Cent will not tolerate jokes at his expense.

Alan McGee told new bands not to bother with record companies; and it turned out EMI's Guy Hands had invested in the movie Nine Dead Guys while Poison started fighting over their booking to play a rodeo. Amongst themselves. Noel Gallagher wouldn't approve - he wanted an end to violence - perhaps by banning computer games? Boris Johnson thought that Lily Allen might have the answer to knife crime. Ringo Starr asked for world peace as a birthday present, but the world had already bought him some crayons and a sweater.

David Davis resigned from parliament in order to make some sort of point that he'd not quite thought about. Who would fall for such showboating? Bob Geldof was the first to endorse him. At least he didn't accidently endorse a mayoral candidate on air, like Jason Donovan did on 37 networked GCap stations. Jason went with Boris, but don't worry, Gordon: Robin Gibb still loves you - unfortunately, it was Tony James who ended up on Today.

Irony hit: Tim from the Cardiacs had cardiac problems.