If there's one quality which unites the best music of 1999, it is a bloody-minded spirit of innovation. But you had to look hard to find it. This was the year when Travis ruled the airwaves and our very souls, when Fran Healy mithering away at us about rain and driftwood like the world's wettest human was bafflingly considered to be of actual artistic merit. When sounding like you were doing a crap impersonation of Jeff Buckley was somehow enough to be lauded by NME, Q magazine and The Brits. It was bad for those of us with good taste. Thankfully, we had no idea Coldplay were lurking around the corner, just biding their time to boo-hoo at us about cobwebs and the fucking colour yellow. If we had, I may not be here writing this now.

And yet, if you did take the time to look, great, inventive music was there in abundance. Even better, most of it appeared to be made by genuine crazy people, pop culture refuseniks and outsider geniuses. Just have a listen to the still astonishing aural assault of Aphex Twin's 'Windowlicker', the burbling proto-synth weirdness of Add N to [X]'s Avant Hard or the feminist electro-punk slap of Le Tigre's debut. Think back to the impact Mogwai's Come on Die Young and Godpeed's Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada made on you. Each one was like a little terrorist cell, acting alone but achieving a unified destabilising of the humdrum pop reality, letting dazzling strangeness bleed into ordinary grey lives.

Elsewhere, more established acts delivered their own moments of mad brilliance. Blur's 13 was a purposeful attempt to create something as obtuse and difficult as possible. That it contained 'Coffee and TV', their most accessible single in years, and that this was penned by Graham Coxon, for most of the band's existence the anti-pop thorn in Damon Albarn's side, is just an enduring testament to their song-writing prowess. Meanwhile, Beck decided he'd rather be the white Prince than the post-modern Dylan and gave us the sexy, slick, but still funking nutzoid Midnite Vultures, and Pavement did perhaps the most perverse thing they possibly could by delivering a (mostly) straight alt-country record in the form of Terror Twilight.

So, 1999 was kind of like a magic eye picture (Remember them? Sorry, Soundblab just had a Peter Kay moment) – if you purposely fuzzed up your senses and looked through the gaudy jumble of crap your were presented with, you got to discover a lovely picture of a dolphin. Or some glorious, brain-frying, eardrum-bleeding white noise. Whichev.