I don’t know if psychedelic drugs were involved in the making of this song but I would be highly surprised if they weren’t. Then again, just listening to it is a mind-bending trip.

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Los Angeles soul trio Sly, Slick & Wicked are one of two obscure vocal groups to name themselves after a 1970 single by The Lost Generation.

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This is one of the first – maybe even the very first – songs I played for my children when they were very small.

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It’s 50 years since the release of that landmark album Dark Side Of The Moon. I think I first came across this in LA. It goes well with the sunshine and relaxed pace of life in SoCal.

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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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Darrell Banks had one of the greatest voices in soul music – and plagiarised his biggest hit from the equally great Donnie Elbert in their hometown of Buffalo, New York.

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I first heard the name Leroy Smart when Joe Strummer name-checked him in the lyric of The Clash’s best single, White Man In Hammersmith Palais, in 1977.

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Donnie Elbert displays his remarkable falsetto on this slow-burning jazz-inflected soul number from 1960 – a far cry from his string of hits a decade later.

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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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