Talking Heads’ second album tends to get unfairly overlooked. Probably partly because it came so soon after their debut, and partly due to being sandwiched between their landmark debut 77 and the masterpiece that followed with Fear Of Music.

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The Pop Group never sold many records but their legacy has been huge in their influence on other bands. Nick Cave, whose band The Birthday Party was very much in their image, acclaimed this song as their masterpiece.

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Listening now to their debut single, Tell Me Your Plans, it’s hard to see (or hear) how The Shirts were ever considered a punk band. Yet they were staples at CBGBs in that golden era of the mid-Seventies that spawned The Ramones, Television, Talking Heads and Blondie.

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Sometimes a song just hits you right there, regardless of genre or anything else. In 1978 this one-hit wonder got me right from that opening acoustic guitar.

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It’s hard to overestimate the sense of anticipation and mystery surrounding the return of Johnny Rotten after the dismal demise of The Sex Pistols onstage in San Francisco in January 1978.

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Say what you like about Boney M, they were an entertaining fixture in the singles chart all through the second half of the Seventies.

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As punk was mutating and evolving in 1978, a new band called Japan surfed in on the New Wave. I went to see them at the Music Machine, attracted mainly by their image.

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Like most music fans, I first set eyes on Amanda Lear in 1973 as the coquettish vamp on the cover of Roxy Music’s second album, For Your Pleasure, sheathed in black leather with a black panther on a leash.

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This was a kind of guilty pleasure during my disco-hating days as a punk. It came out in 1978 and I probably noticed it because of Alicia Keys’s provocatively punky hairstyle – somewhere between Bowie and Billy Idol.

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It wouldn’t take long to write down everything I know about this song, or the girl who sang it. At the height of punk, Stiff Records had a hit single with B-A-B-Y, sung by a 15-year-old girl from Akron, Ohio called Rachel Sweet.

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