Happy Easter – here’s my March playlist to put a Spring in the air as you open your eggs today. There’s a cracking mix of old and new, borrowed and blue: some drum’n’bass, some soul and reggae, vintage Velvets, country music, banging dance beats and primal punk.

This is very lovely, with a dark undercurrent. Bnny’s previous album, which was a gruelling grief-filled reflection on death. This is about trying to make a fresh start when you’re running from the past… “but the past keeps catching up.”

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Yesterday, as every good Catholic knows, was Good Friday – the counter-intuitively named day when Jesus was crucified. So it was only right and fitting that I spent the evening watching The Jesus and Mary Chain at The Roundhouse. And it was doubly appropriate that they finished their set with their cataclysmic anthem Reverence.

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This refreshingly primitive punk nugget by The Innocent Vicars is one of those lost gems that you unearth by chance. Or in this case because I’m reading the singer’s newly published memoir, Strange Things Are Happening (Adventures In Music).

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Genital mutilation is a subject rarely tackled in popular music; even more rarely, I’d imagine, when it’s the male version under the microscope (so to speak). But here it is, by the Fat White Family.

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Is there a genre called jazz-dub? If there isn’t – or wasn’t – then I think it’s been invented on this tune. I can’t stop playing it.

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Black Uhuru were everywhere in the late ’70s. It seemed they would step into Bob Marley’s shoes after his death in 1981 – only for their lead singer, Michael Rose, to leave the group.

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This is the best song I’ve ever heard by an artist from Luxembourg – and yes, it may well be the only one. It may also be the most romantic video I’ve seen.

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Before he became a pop star singing sweet soul pastiches, Plan B was a hardcore rapper tackling social issues like the death of Damilola Taylor.

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I’m not entirely sure what I think about these posthumous recordings, where a living artist duets with a dead one. Some work well; others defile the dead artist’s memory. I think this one settles the argument in their favour.

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