2024
This tune is fan-fucking-tastic. It took me about ten seconds to realise it’s Underworld, and a few more to realise it wasn’t a new remix of Born Slippy – arguably the greatest dance tune of all time.
I discovered Can at the age of 16, back when I was at school. Not because I was some sort of cool avant-garde kid but purely because they put out an album for a cut-price 59p.
Girl groups are not normally my thing, especially those “idol” groups who dress up, dance and sing. But I can make an exception for Atarashii Gakko! Because while they are girls, and they do dress up and dance and sing, AG! are a kind of anti-girl-group girl group.
Pioneering krautrock legend Michael Rother performs selections from his solo works and influential albums with Harmonia and Neu! to an appreciative sell-out crowd in London.
The Pheromoans are new to me and I’m willing to wager they’re new to you. Yet this peculiarly British band has been ploughing its lone furrow for 18 years.
Here is the MC5’s infamous hometown performance by a Detroit highway in July 1970. Thirty-four years later I finally got to see them play for myself.
One of my favourite Americana artists is Matthew Houck, a native of Athens, Georgia, who makes music under the nom-de-plume Phosphorescent.
This collab between two London rappers of West African origin is a hymn to their families’ mother continent… and the women they find there. But it’s the music as much as the sultry vocals that really catches my ear, with its shuffling rhythms, lazy swing and joyful, jazzy undertones.
This record, championed by my fellow music scribe Ged Babey, sounds so familiar, touching so many bases from my punk past, yet also sounds fresh. And that’s because, while it’s true that these musicians are no spring chickens, this is a new release.