1990
What I love most about Bonita Applebaum is that it’s musically a hybrid of reggae, jazz and hip-hop – and even a sitar sample.
A Tribe Called Quest laid down a marker as one of the more original and eclectic voices in hip-hop with 1990 single Bonita Applebaum.
It’s impossible not to love Snap!’s hybrid of hip-hop, house, soul and a dash of heavy rock. It kicked off the whole dance music scene when it topped the charts in early 1990.
Andrew Weatherall reimagines Saint Etienne’s cover of Neil Young’s Only Love Can Break Your Heart with his dubwise Mix Of Two Halves.
Saint Etienne took Neil Young’s wistful song from After The Gold Rush and gave it a dance makeover to create a classic indie-dance comedown lament.
Guitar legend Mick Ronson performed this magical instrumental, showcasing his unique style, with the Hunter-Ronson Band shortly before his death.
Galaxie 500 take Yoko Ono’s delicate Christmas song and transform it into an intense Velvets-like jam that improves on the original.
The Blue Aeroplanes, led by the Langley brothers from Bristol, emerged in the early 1980s and are still going strong four decades later.
I have to admit that, like most others, I was initially attracted to this tune by its sampling of Lou Reed’s Walk On The Wild Side. But there was much more to the New York rappers than that – though Reed got all the money and the teenage rappers never saw a penny.
Andrew Weatherall’s remix of his own remix of St Etienne’s cover of Neil Young’s song is, to adopt football parlance, “A Mix Of Two Halves.”