I first heard this song when Canned Heat had a hit with their 12-bar blues version called Let’s Work Together back in 1970.  Six years later, along came Bryan Ferry to stamp his smooth sophisticated style all over it. (more…)

Full disclosure (as nobody said in the Seventies): I didn’t like disco at the time. But it was an inescapable part of my my late teens. (more…)

Looking at the singles chart, 1976 was as dire a year as there’s ever been. No wonder punk came along to blow the rubbish away. (more…)

Another lost classic from the funk vaults, The Watts Breakaway is just one of many musical achievements of Johnny Otis. The singer is Delmar ‘Mighty Mouth’ Evans and the guitarist may well by Johnny’s equally well-known son Shuggie Otis. (more…)

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It’s only listening to this again now, 45 years later, that I realise it’s the best Four Tops song not actually by the Four Tops. (more…)

Freddie McKay emerged as a rocksteady singer in the late 1960s with Prince Buster and Coxsone Dodd, recording at the Studio One and Treasure Isle labels. (more…)

By the mid-Seventies you had to forage far and wide for rough-and-ready roots music in a music world dominated by prog dinosaurs and disco. (more…)

Novelty pop songs don’t come much more annoying than this, at least without children and bagpipes. Except they do – because Convoy prompted an even worse “parody” version. (more…)

The first time I heard Scott Walker’s distinctive baritone was when No Regrets came out early in 1976. (more…)