Twee indie-pop normally raises my hackles, especially when it comes along with a fey attitude and irritatingly catchy tunes. Belle & Sebastian spring immediately to mind.

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The growling blues-boogie of La Grange gave ZZ Top their big breakthrough in 1973, though they were already on to their third album by then – and would go on to enjoy a second lease of life in the ’80s.

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Mississippi bluesman Junior Kimbrough did not come to fame until he was in his sixties – but made a lasting impression with his Hill Country Blues.

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“You got to have a J-O-B if you wanna be with me… No romance without finance.” This is one of the finest funk and soul singles of all time – despite its far-from-feminist materialistic message; it was the ’80s after all. (more…)

Leroy Van Dyke’s first job as a livestock auctioneer inspired the song that brought him to fame back in 1956.

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Maria McKee wrote this song when she was a teenager and it became Feargal Sharkey’s only chart-topping single a few years later.

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Once upon a time, 15 years before Underworld became dance legends and Born Slippy became the biggest song of the rave era, they were a very different band.

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The best thing about Television Personalities – the DIY punk band, not the narcissists on your telly – is their titles incorporating famous figures. And this song.

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Moving on from yesterday’s Ray Charles post, but not completely… in the early ’50s he went down to New Orleans to work with Guitar Slim, and this was the result.

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Ray Charles is rightly credited with almost single-handedly inventing soul and R&B in the early 1950s. But in the 1960s he surprised his fans, and the whole of the pop world, by turning his hand to country-and-western.

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