The Amen Break is the much-sampled drum loop that spawned a thousand tunes and kick-started drum & bass. Here’s the song that started it.

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Here’s a confession. I only really knew Kool & The Gang for their party tunes and schmaltzy ballads in the Eighties.

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Nothing puts a smile on the face and gets the feet moving like Highlife music. So, to celebrate a century of recorded Ghanaian highlife, here’s a prime example by the late legend Atakora Manu.

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Seventies singer-songwriter Kevin Coyne deserves to be celebrated as one of British music’s cult icons as much as the likes of Nick Drake and Syd Barrett.

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Terence Wilson, universally known as Astro, was the percussionist and part-time toaster in UB40, the unfairly maligned kings of UK reggae.

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Ernest Tubb once remarked that whenever one of his songs came on a jukebox, men in bars would turn to their girlfriends and say: “Heck, I can sing better than that.” And, agreed Ernest, “They’d be right.”

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Hank Williams once said that when it came to pulling power for the famously devout music fans of the Deep South: “It was Roy Acuff – then God.”

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Hank Williams was the first superstar of country music and the architect of rock’n’roll. This was the last song he recorded, in 1952. (more…)

A teenage Lyn Collins sang lead vocals on this Northern Soul stomper in an obscure girl group called Charles Pikes & The Scholars.

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