Allow me to introduce you to Carlos Alberto Cázares Valenzuela, aka ‘El Solovino’ (The Uninvited). He’s 20 years old, he’s Mexican, and he loves Joy Division.

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Girl Talk is the stage name of Gregg Gillis, a master of mashup music who makes albums entirely out of classic samples. This is from his best album, Night Ripper.

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If he had never played another note after 1977, Fred Smith would still have had a place in music history as one quarter of the band who made Marquee Moon – my favourite album of all time.

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This is exactly the kind of song I hated back when it came out in 1982. I thought I was far too cool for disco; I definitely wasn’t ready for post-disco.

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Bob Marley captured the concerning mood of the times with his warning of impending global catastrophe – as relevant today as when he sang it in 1979.

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Here’s a vocal version I’ve never heard of my all-time favourite reggae tune, the title track of Augustus Pablo’s album King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown.

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Sly Dunbar was one half of the greatest reggae rhythm section in history, alongside the late and equally great Robbie Shakespeare.

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Packaging are a duo from Seattle who combine krautrok rhythms with swirling synths on this pulsating ode to airport anxiety. (more…)

Earth Disciples (not the reggae group) were an instrumental funk-soul-jazz group from Southern California in the late ’60s and early ’70s.

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The S.O.S. Band had a hit single with Jam & Lewis’s post-disco banger Just Be Good To Me years before it was co-opted by Fatboy Slim.

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