One of my favourite Americana artists is Matthew Houck, a native of Athens, Georgia, who makes music under the nom-de-plume Phosphorescent.

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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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Not many people liked Happy Mondays’ fifth album Uncle Dysfunctional when it came out in 2007. I’m not sure I even heard it at the time; I may not even have known (or cared) that they had reunited two years earlier.

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This song is so perfect, like a four-minute movie. A miniature kitchen sink drama. Shot in black-and-white, of course, with the principal characaters played by Albert Finney and Rita Tushingham.

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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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The only thing wrong with this slice of psychedelic funk is that it’s too short; far too short. Put all three parts together and the whole thing is less than two and a half minutes long.

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For all my abiding love of The Velvet Underground, I’d have to concede that Lou Reed’s solo career has been inconsistent, and his albums a patchy representation of his talent.

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Whatever we expected when Eno left Roxy Music to go solo out of sheer boredom – he said he was found himself “thinking about the laundry onstage” – in 1973 it probably wasn’t this.

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