I have loved this song since the day I first heard it, and I still love it just as much today. The only doubt I have ever had is whether I prefer it to Wah! Heat’s first single Better Scream.

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I have to confess I wasn’t swept away with the baggy revolution at the time but I did come around to The Stone Roses’ debut album.

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The two signature songs of Barrington Levy blasted out of every shop and car window in Hackney for one summer in the mid-1980s.

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“Like getting stabbed in your ears,” said one critic about the abrasive funk, atonal horns and unhinged screams of James Chance & The Contortions’ opening track on No New York. “In a good way.”

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It’s always sad to hear that someone you once used to see on Top of the Pops has fallen on hard times. That’s what prompted me to post Pigbag’s finest moment – the funky instrumental with which they (literally) made their name.

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The Moondogs were another of the seemingly endless parade of power pop bands to spring up in Northern Ireland in the late 70s.

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You know when your eccentric auntie drinks a bit too much sherry at Christmas and embarrasses everyone by singing along to a record and dancing around the tree?

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There are few aural pleasures greater than accidentally stumbling across an old song you used to love that had somehow slipped from your memory. That’s what happened this weekend when I found an album comprising the early recordings of Kimmie Rhodes.

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Here’s one of those songs I haven’t heard in years (decades?) but it comes right back to me the moment the needle touches the groove. I was never a fan of jazz-funk but you’d have to have a heart of stone, and feet of concrete, not to be moved physically and emotionally by the infectious groove, skittering bassline and blissful vocal of Southern Freeez.

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Ivor Cutler was an eccentric Scottish poet whose chronicles of Life In A Scotch Sitting Room became popular during the punk era after being championed by John Peel.

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