With its smooth groove and sweet vocal, sinuous sax and bubbling bassline, this is just the job for a hot summer day. (more…)

Chuck Norris didn’t do karate but he earned his chops playing session guitar in California in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He also cut a handful of solo singles like this. (more…)

There are many contenders for the ultimate driving song – Born To Be Wild, Highway Star, The Chain, Road To Nowhere. But for me there’s only one – Radar Love. (more…)

The inspiration for one of the more regrettable dance crazes, Rock The Boat was also the inspiration for Rock Your Baby, regarded by many as the first disco hit. (more…)

The great Senegalese singer Baaba Maal plays a key part in the birth of my daughter Lily. No, not like that… (more…)

Every year there’s a song of the summer that somehow creeps into your consciousness and stays there til the sunshine starts to fade. This year the first contender for me is Mash Up The Dance. (more…)

This is the greatest disco song of all time; no argument about that. And one of the greatest songs of all time. I usually tend towards the view that these things are a matter of opinion but in this case I hope we can all agree. (more…)

There have been plenty of crazy characters and egotists in the history of popular music, and Ernie K-Doe was one of them. A bit of a blues and soul legend in his native New Orleans, he performed in a cape and crown and billed himself as “Emperor of the Universe.” (more…)

I’ve spent a lot of time on the road in the past week, driving to Cornwall and back, listening to 6Music (at least when I had a DAB signal in the car). This is the tune that caught my ear the most. (more…)

For Jamaicans, and an older generation of fans, Horace Andy is one of the legendary reggae singers from Jamaica. For a younger one, he’s synonymous with Bristol as the guest vocalist on some of Massive Attack’s best tunes. (more…)