Bob Dylan’s delivery drips with sarcasm on the opaque lyric of Idiot Wind, from my favourite album Blood On The Tracks, but the meaning remains elusive.

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There are a handful of musical moments in my life where I’ve heard a song for the first time and felt: This changes everything. Never Understand is one.

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ABC fused the attitude of punk with the sophistication of disco – and great tunes – to create hits like Poison Arrow on The Lexicon Of Love.

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Diana Ross will always enjoy a special place in my affections – the Queen of Motown sang the first song on the first album I ever bought.

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Etta James might not have come from the Mississippi Delta – she grew up Los Angeles and came of age in San Francisco – but she was a bona fide blues belter.

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Chicago blues and soul man Lou Pride recorded this Northern Soul favourite after moving down south to El Paso in 1972.

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This is powerful stuff: it reminds me of when I first heard Linton Kwesi Johnson back in my youth. Like LKJ, Cleeshay uses spoken word, though the music is stripped-back R&B rather than roots reggae.

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The Bee Gees song written for Otis Redding but redone as a hippie country-soul heartbreaker. Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers, give it a country twang replete with pedal steel guitar that was entirely absent from the original.

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Full disclosure: not being a jazz buff, I had never heard of Lou Donaldson who died this week at the ripe old age of 98. This is his masterpiece. (more…)

If there’s one artist I wish I’d seen live more than any other, it’s probably Nina Simone. Especially when she was a regular at Ronnie Scott’s in the 1980s. Except I had probably not heard of her back then.

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