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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Last night I went to see music legend Michael Rother and took my chum and self-styled (kraut) ‘rock expert’ David Stubbs along to the Barbican to help me identify some of the tunes.

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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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I always thought I Can’t Explain was the first single by The Who, and it is. But before that, in July 1964, they released this song under the band name The High Numbers.

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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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This really is a proper deep cut from Gene Clark’s long-forgotten fourth album No Other from back in 1974. Long forgotten for many years, but now regarded as something of an underground classic.

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There are two equally spellbinding versions of this haunting lament to lost love and innocence, by two different singers, and ever since I first heard them I’ve been unable to decide which is the best. The problem is that they’re not all that different, and of course there’s no need to pick one over the other.

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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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