As winter draws in, what better to chase away that chilly wind than a sunny slice of reggae from Jamaica. 
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Everyone my age must have grown up with Peter Wyngarde’s two TV shows – Department S and Jason King. Few have heard his only album.

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It’s funny to recall how much I hated disco at the time because this is another of those songs that just puts a smile on your face the minute you hear it.

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Here’s a confession. I only really knew Kool & The Gang for their party tunes and schmaltzy ballads in the Eighties.

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Nothing puts a smile on the face and gets the feet moving like Highlife music. So, to celebrate a century of recorded Ghanaian highlife, here’s a prime example by the late legend Atakora Manu.

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Seventies singer-songwriter Kevin Coyne deserves to be celebrated as one of British music’s cult icons as much as the likes of Nick Drake and Syd Barrett.

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Jackson Browne was not the first to record Stay, still the shortest single ever to top the charts, but he made it his own when he covered the doo-wop oldie in 1977.

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No one would pretend Nick Lowe was a punk – he had almost a decade in music behind him by 1976. But he plays a key role in punk pre-history.

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Here’s another of those not-quite-punk-but-nearly records that came out in the musical hinterland between pub rock and punk in 1976.

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(I’m) Stranded is just fantastic. It’s a perfect storm of Ed Kuepper’s buzzsaw guitar and Chris Bailey’s sneering vocal, anchored by the whirlwind of Kym Bradshaw on bass and Ivor Hay’s drums.

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