I’d never heard of The Bears until I began reading Richard Norris’s memoir, Strange Things Are Happening, and came across their debut single, On Me.

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A Carry On-style collaboration between John Martyn and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Big Muff came into being at the breakfast table of Island boss Chris Blackwell.

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One of the great singles from the punk period, Spanish Stroll has nothing much in common with the rest of the CBGBs crowd. But that’s where it came from. And it’s just a classic, with that lazily strummed guitar intro and the spoken word Spanish bit in the middle.

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There was no escaping this song in the summer of ’77, though I was far more interested in the Pistols and the Clash than chart-topping disco tunes.

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The Zeros are another of the long-forgotten punk bands from the Class of ’77. This was on the fairly terrible Streets compilation on Beggars Banquet that year.

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Forget The Fall… The U.K. Subs have had at least 82 members and are still going strong – with the same singer. Charlie Harper formed the band, initially as The Subversives, after seeing The Damned at the Roxy in 1976 and never looked back after shortening their name.

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The Carpettes never reached the giddy heights of the Pistols or Clash but they made their mark on punk as one of a handful of bands from the North East.

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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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Around the turn of the century I made a musical pilgrimage to the tiny Texas town of Luckenbach, once immortalised in song by Waylon Jennings.

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When it comes to Filipino funk, you could write what I know on the back of a postage stamp. I didn’t know it existed, and I didn’t know it was called Pinoy Funk.

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