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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This was always my favourite song from Low. And this is the story of the day David Bowie played it for me in private – at my own request.

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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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In March 1977 I went to the Rainbow Theatre, scene of many of my favourite gigs, to see Iggy Pop for the first time – with a band including David Bowie.

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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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When it comes to the best disco song of all time, I Feel Love is surely in a class of its own. But if we exclude Moroder’s masterpiece, then Evelyn ‘Champagne’ King’s song Shame is well worth a shout.

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Following my accidental discovery that Lene Lovich wrote the lyrics, here is French disco artist Cerrone’s electronic opus Supernature.

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I don’t normally go for novelty songs because they quickly get on your nerves even when they’re not awful in the first place. In this case that’s true of the former but not the latter; probably because it was on Stiff Records.

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