RIP Melanie Safka (1947-2024)

I remember Melanie – just “Melanie” – as a hippie chick with long hair, black eyeliner and a warbling vibrato. I first heard her singing a song called Ruby Tuesday. I was a child and she sounded like one too.

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This was the first tune I heard by Archie Bell & The Drells when it was a hit single in 1973. It’s very different from the sprightly funk jam of Tighten Up which put them on the soul and funk map five years earlier. For that matter it’s different to the Northern Soul stomper Here I Go Again that gave them their first UK hit at the end of 1972.

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This was the first song I ever heard by Tori Amos. It’s also the last, when it played over the closing titles of an episode of Beef last night. A wacky song by a kooky redhead, it was a good fit for what is a wacky TV show about a man and a woman with extreme anger management issues.

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Not many people liked Happy Mondays’ fifth album Uncle Dysfunctional when it came out in 2007. I’m not sure I even heard it at the time; I may not even have known (or cared) that they had reunited two years earlier.

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This song is so perfect, like a four-minute movie. A miniature kitchen sink drama. Shot in black-and-white, of course, with the principal characaters played by Albert Finney and Rita Tushingham.

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The only thing wrong with this slice of psychedelic funk is that it’s too short; far too short. Put all three parts together and the whole thing is less than two and a half minutes long.

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For all my abiding love of The Velvet Underground, I’d have to concede that Lou Reed’s solo career has been inconsistent, and his albums a patchy representation of his talent.

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Whatever we expected when Eno left Roxy Music to go solo out of sheer boredom – he said he was found himself “thinking about the laundry onstage” – in 1973 it probably wasn’t this.

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This dirty, primitive, fuzzed-up slice of vintage RnB from comes from four smooth-looking black fellows called The Dyna-Sores.

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When it comes to minimal techno it don’t come much more minimal than Daniel Bell. And sometimes – driving at night, for example – that’s just what you want to hear. Well, I do.

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