This song came out when my kids were at primary school and we used to sing it every day as they were about to leave the house, with one minor lyrical change – “Get your fleece on.”

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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.

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I’ve only just found out that Ply Styrene – back when she was Marianne Elliott-Said – was making music before X-Ray Spex. Music like this.

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Not many bands slipped through the cracks of my post-punk world in the early 80s but Modern English seem to have passed me by completely.

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This all too brief but beautiful fingerpicked blues was written by Elizabeth Cotten when she was 12 years old. Here she is singing and playing it 80 years later, shortly before her death.

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RIP Melanie Safka (1947-2024)

I remember Melanie – just “Melanie” – as a hippie chick with long hair, black eyeliner and a warbling vibrato. I first heard her singing a song called Ruby Tuesday. I was a child and she sounded like one too.

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This was the first tune I heard by Archie Bell & The Drells when it was a hit single in 1973. It’s very different from the sprightly funk jam of Tighten Up which put them on the soul and funk map five years earlier. For that matter it’s different to the Northern Soul stomper Here I Go Again that gave them their first UK hit at the end of 1972.

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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.

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This was the first song I ever heard by Tori Amos. It’s also the last, when it played over the closing titles of an episode of Beef last night. A wacky song by a kooky redhead, it was a good fit for what is a wacky TV show about a man and a woman with extreme anger management issues.

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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.

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