Jim Carroll’s tragic song, People Who Died, commemorates the friends he lost to drugs during an early life catalogued in his teenage memoir The Basketball Diaries. (more…)

Another list song. I first heard this marvellous melancholic tune when I went to see a quartet of new artists at a Bella Union showcase, billed as A Summer Evening at the Union Chapel in 2010. (more…)

Punk rock meets primitive electro in The Nails’ finest moment, a tribute to the women they met on their journey from the backstreets of Boulder to Downtown New York. (more…)

List Songs are a category all of their own: songs whose lyrics recite things – usually names – like, for example, My Favourite Things from The Sound Of Music. But not that. (more…)

While I was on an instrumental soul and funk tip with The JBs, I began exploring the interweb for new discoveries in that vein. And I came across Oliver Sain. (more…)

James Brown’s backing band The JB’s were pretty much in a class of their own when it came to funk. Pick Up The Pieces was one of their finest moments from 1972. (more…)

New World are the forgotten band of the early Seventies. Deservedly so, some might say, and they would be right, in musical terms anyway. In legal terms, not so much. (more…)

No one had a voice quite like Esther Phillips, with that distinctive Minnie Mouse twang, which is why I remember her only hit – this disco classic from the Seventies – so well. (more…)

Joni Mitchell’s extraordinary gift for images and phrases first caught my ear, as much as her voice, with the jazz-textured 1975 album The Hissing Of Summer Lawns. (more…)

Hello were strictly second-division Glam. They had the second – and last – of their hits when they got back together with Russ Ballard of Argent, who had first discovered them when they were a covers band. (more…)