It’s 50 years since the release of that landmark album Dark Side Of The Moon. I think I first came across this in LA. It goes well with the sunshine and relaxed pace of life in SoCal.

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Old soul and New Wave, classic reggae and traditional folk, jazz-funk and French punk, boogie-woogie and a spot of lounge music. All of which should be enough to warm us up in February.

Kicking off with the peerless Nina Simone and moving forward several decades to the poitnant monologue of Dead (but not Ed) Sheeran, some vintage funk and soul, a bit of classic country and a tribute to the recently deceased guitar genius Tom Verlaine.

I have to confess I wasn’t swept away with the baggy revolution at the time but I did come around to The Stone Roses’ debut album.

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The two signature songs of Barrington Levy blasted out of every shop and car window in Hackney for one summer in the mid-1980s.

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Ladies and gentlemen, I present for your appreciation and enjoyment a great new single by the UK’s most successful singles artist of the 1980s.

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Darrell Banks had one of the greatest voices in soul music – and plagiarised his biggest hit from the equally great Donnie Elbert in their hometown of Buffalo, New York.

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I first heard the name Leroy Smart when Joe Strummer name-checked him in the lyric of The Clash’s best single, White Man In Hammersmith Palais, in 1977.

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Donnie Elbert displays his remarkable falsetto on this slow-burning jazz-inflected soul number from 1960 – a far cry from his string of hits a decade later.

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“Like getting stabbed in your ears,” said one critic about the abrasive funk, atonal horns and unhinged screams of James Chance & The Contortions’ opening track on No New York. “In a good way.”

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