Do we like to funk on a sunny summer’s day? Yes we do. And we very much do when the soundtrack is Big Time by Rick James.

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The Godfather of Soul’s backing band came up with the ultimate party tune Cross The Track (We Better Go Back) in 1975 – and never looked back.

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This must rank as one of the unlikeliest musical collaborations ever – soul brother Jermaine Jackson and jerky New Wave weirdoes Devo.

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Scottish funkster Jesse Rae might not have made a name for himself but he did write the huge hit Inside Out for Odyssey.

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Earth, Wind & Fire recorded Happy Feelin’ as an album track back in 1975, a quarter of a century before it formed the basis of a hit single.

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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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Still digging into early-Seventies soul, I have to admit I’d never heard of Brick and consequently I’d never heard of their disco and jazz hybrid that they called “dazz.”

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In 1977 I was listening to a solid diet of one-chord wonders, varied only with a weekly dose of Top of the Pops to find out what the rest of the country was listening to while I pogoed.

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Jazz-funk was never my thing, conjuring nightmarish visions of George Benson and Level 42, but it did provide a moment of Pleasure in 1979.

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