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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Zones were the short-lived band the even shorter-lived PVC2 became when frontman Midge Ure buggered off to join Rich Kids. Which is also to say they were also once teenybop band Slik.

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Dead Fingers Talk are another of those bands that shone brightly for a brief moment before slipping through the cracks in the immediate aftermath of punk.

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Back in 1977 I don’t think I knew what rockabilly was, and I’d never heard Elvis Presley’s early Sun Sessions. Then along came a cool dude with impeccable punk credentials called Robert Gordon.

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This wasn’t The Members’ first release – Fear On The Streets introduced them on the Streets compilation – but it was their first single, released on Stiff Records in 1978.

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This stark, minimalist single is a landmark release in the birth of electronica and its commercial cousin synthpop. It’s the entire recorded output of The Normal, alter-ego of Daniel Miller – and the first release on his label Mute Records. (more…)

Before they made perfectly crafted pop-soul records, Scritti Politti were what was then called an “agitprop” band – though you would not immediately mark them down as left-wing firebrands from their music.

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Looking back from more than half a century later, it’s astonishing how rapidly the primitive pounding of punk evolved into the questing experimentalism of postpunk. PragVEC were one of the first to embrace the avant-garde.

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