Another of the first wave of Manchester punk bands to evolve from the early days of The Electric Circus, V2 showed their roots by blending punk with a hefty dose of Glam… hardly surprising since most of us who jumped aboard the punk bandwagon had grown up on Slade, Sweet, T.Rex and Bowie.

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The Panik were one of the first punk bands to form in Manchester, alongside a handful of fellow travellers – Buzzcocks, The Drones, V2, Slaughter & The Dogs and The Fall.

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The first time I heard this song it made me cry and it still does. Especially today. Its lyric, written in the 1980s, articulates why a young woman with a young child might not wish to bring up a child Thatcher’s Britain.

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If you were a black kid growing up in postwar Detroit, there’s a good chance you would sing in the school choir and the church, and end up in a doo wop group before graduating to RnB and soul.

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Fusing punk, funk and elements of avant-garde jazz, Ludus were one of the first, and most distinctive, postpunk artists.

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Before they became The Carpenters, the clean-cut California siblings were called The Dick Carpenter Trio. And this was their first TV appearance in 1968.

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Who knew Joan Jett’s fist-pumping anthem I Love Rock’n’Roll was a cover version? Not me. And, I’m willing to wager, not most of you.

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This shouldn’t work at all – Johnny Cash singing Barbie Girl thanks to AI – and I bet you think it won’t. Then again you’d probably say the same about the film. Until you’ve heard and seen them.

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La Luz sound as if they should come from somewhere by the sea in sunny SoCal but actually come from rainy Seattle… though they did once record an album in a California surfboard shop, and now live there.

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Wreckless Eric is a national treasure. He would be one even if he’d never made another record after his 1977 masterpiece Whole Wide World. Yet here he is, nearly half a century later, with another simple but striking song that you can’t get out of your head; it arrived in my inbox this morning and now I can’t get it out of mine.

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