Whatever we expected when Eno left Roxy Music to go solo out of sheer boredom – he said he was found himself “thinking about the laundry onstage” – in 1973 it probably wasn’t this.

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Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris were never romantically involved but when they sang together their voices made the sweetest love. Never more so than on this song. (more…)

Bass lines don’t come much funkier than this minimalist drum-and-bass obscurity by a short-lived mid-’70s band called Spaghetti Head.

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I’ve never listened to anything by Yoko Ono. I grew up hearing the propaganda line that she “broke up The Beatles” and subsequently formed an uninformed opinion that her music was experimental rubbish.

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When I think of funk, this is the sound I hear in my head. The fat bass (is that the “phat” bass?), the hissing hi-hats, the waka-waka guitar licks, the muffled exhortations of the vocalist… put it all together and that’s The Fatback Band.

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Merry Clayton is best known for her gospelly backing vocals on the Stones’ anti-war anthem Gimme Shelter, wailing in harmony with Jagger. But there was much more to her than that.

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Bo Diddley’s heyday was long gone by 1970 and he was mostly seen as a heritage act on the oldies circuit (if at all) by the time he tackled the topical issue of Pollution. But it’s a great track.

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Michael Chapman was a guitar virtuoso, acclaimed for his acoustic fingerpicking. But it’s Mick Ronson’s electric guitar that steals the show here.

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When what the music press lazily dubbed “The Scottish Sound” emerged at the end of the Seventies, Josef K were the yin to Orange Juice’s yang – the dark underbelly to their bright and sparkly pop.

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This lost gem from 1976 is a little piece of punk history – the first single to be released by a West Coast punk band. A double A-side of Hot Wire My Heart and Baby You’re So Repulsive (surely a contender for best punk song title), it was the debut single by a San Francisco band called Crime.

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