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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When it comes to the best disco song of all time, I Feel Love is surely in a class of its own. But if we exclude Moroder’s masterpiece, then Evelyn ‘Champagne’ King’s song Shame is well worth a shout.

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Following my accidental discovery that Lene Lovich wrote the lyrics, here is French disco artist Cerrone’s electronic opus Supernature.

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It wouldn’t take long to write down everything I know about this song, or the girl who sang it. At the height of punk, Stiff Records had a hit single with B-A-B-Y, sung by a 15-year-old girl from Akron, Ohio called Rachel Sweet.

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