I can’t pretend i was ever a big Fleetwood Mac fan.
So the death of Christine McVie didn’t resonate with me as strongly as with those millions who bought Rumours. But the outpouring of love and sadness for her death is a poignant reminder of the unifying power of music.

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Has there ever been a more perfect match of a song to the opening scene of a movie? It’s impossible to think of Saturday Night Fever without the bouncy rhythm of Stayin’ Alive coming into your head.

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The first time I came across Grace Jones was in 1977 with her radical disco-meets-bossa nova take on Edith Piaf’s signature song La Vie En Rose.

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Listening now to their debut single, Tell Me Your Plans, it’s hard to see (or hear) how The Shirts were ever considered a punk band. Yet they were staples at CBGBs in that golden era of the mid-Seventies that spawned The Ramones, Television, Talking Heads and Blondie.

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The hot summer night Pulp and Leftfield played in an outdoor amphitheatre in Barcelona. And I was there.

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It’s hard to overestimate the sense of anticipation and mystery surrounding the return of Johnny Rotten after the dismal demise of The Sex Pistols onstage in San Francisco in January 1978.

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Say what you like about Boney M, they were an entertaining fixture in the singles chart all through the second half of the Seventies.

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As punk was mutating and evolving in 1978, a new band called Japan surfed in on the New Wave. I went to see them at the Music Machine, attracted mainly by their image.

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Like most music fans, I first set eyes on Amanda Lear in 1973 as the coquettish vamp on the cover of Roxy Music’s second album, For Your Pleasure, sheathed in black leather with a black panther on a leash.

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This was a kind of guilty pleasure during my disco-hating days as a punk. It came out in 1978 and I probably noticed it because of Alicia Keys’s provocatively punky hairstyle – somewhere between Bowie and Billy Idol.

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