This was the first big hit for Motown founder Berry Gordy (I think), and the first big hit for songwriting trio Holland-Dozier-Holland (I think) and the first big hit for Martha Reeves & The Vandellas (for sure).

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Here is a classic sixties song that I had never heard until a version by Misty Miller popped up in Lena Dunham’s excellent medieval comedy Catherine Called Birdy and sent me delving for the original.

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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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Well this is just stunning; aurally and visually, it’s breathtakingly beautiful and emotionally powerful. It’s featured in two feature films, Sicilian Ghost Story and Corsage.

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When I first heard The Allergies I assumed they must be some long-lost American band from the early seventies. In fact they are a white duo from Bristol.

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When I first heard Nina Simone sing this, and for a long time afterwards, I thought she was singing about a “Sea Lion Woman.” Some time later I found out that the song title, which appeared as the B-side of Mississippi Goddam, is actually See-Line Woman.

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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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You’d be forgiven for thinking this fellow and his home-made guitar, fashioned from a cigar box, had been unearthed deep in the Mississippi Delta. You couldn’t get further from the truth. William Adamson is just one of the alter egos of Rob Gallagher, former acid house DJ, underground poet, new age rapper and lead singer of acid jazz combo Galliano – the first act to be signed to Talkin’ Loud in the late eighties.

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Merle Haggard’s self-penned number from 1974 has all the elements of the perfect Christmas song – a sad, sentimental, yet optimistic lyric, and a cracking tune.

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