Listening now to their debut single, Tell Me Your Plans, it’s hard to see (or hear) how The Shirts were ever considered a punk band. Yet they were staples at CBGBs in that golden era of the mid-Seventies that spawned The Ramones, Television, Talking Heads and Blondie.

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The hot summer night Pulp and Leftfield played in an outdoor amphitheatre in Barcelona. And I was there.

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Sometimes a song just hits you right there, regardless of genre or anything else. In 1978 this one-hit wonder got me right from that opening acoustic guitar.

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It’s hard to overestimate the sense of anticipation and mystery surrounding the return of Johnny Rotten after the dismal demise of The Sex Pistols onstage in San Francisco in January 1978.

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This was always my favourite song from Low. And this is the story of the day David Bowie played it for me in private – at my own request.

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Like mother like daughter… this is Madonna’s daughter Lolahol slavishly coping the methods that brought her mother to public attention more than 40 years earlier.

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Say what you like about Boney M, they were an entertaining fixture in the singles chart all through the second half of the Seventies.

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In March 1977 I went to the Rainbow Theatre, scene of many of my favourite gigs, to see Iggy Pop for the first time – with a band including David Bowie.

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As punk was mutating and evolving in 1978, a new band called Japan surfed in on the New Wave. I went to see them at the Music Machine, attracted mainly by their image.

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I came late to the party with Low; I missed their whispery slowcore beginnings and my engagement was limited largely to their magnificent Christmas album, which should be a staple of every home in December. It certainly is in mine.

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