Here’s a deep cut from Santana… No, it isn’t. It’s by a school band from Nigeria called Ofege, recorded back in the early ’70s.

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Ghost Woman make the kind of atmospheric, moody music that instantly appeals to me – slow and spacey, trippy and twangy, jangly and hazy.

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Los Bitchos say of their sound: “We wanted to sound like Van Halen and Cocteau Twins… but from Turkey.” You can’t get much more niche than that.

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Valerie June breaks all the rules by taking on Mazzy Star’s unimprovable song Fade Into You and absolutely nails it.

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Dub maestro Elijah Minelli takes an ancient English folk song, A’Soalin’, and rearranges it as a 21st century reggae tune.

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The Clean were pioneers of New Zealand’s so-called Dunedin Sound, blending a punk influence with a bucolic brand of jangly psychedelia.

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Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark came up with their eco-anthem Electricity, the foundation stone of synthpop, in the summer of 1979.

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As the days grow shorter and darker, why not fill two hours of them with my latest playlist? From the warm embrace of The Cure to the date-adjacent celebration of The National, there’s soul and disco, reggae and ska, country and jazz, with a bit of an early-Eighties flavour running through it.

Mr November is the climactic final track on The National’s 2005 breakthrough third album Alligator and a highlight of every live show.

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Is this classic late-period disco? Or is it prototype ’80s dance-pop? Frankly, who cares when it sounds like this?!

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