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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It’s always sad to hear that someone you once used to see on Top of the Pops has fallen on hard times. That’s what prompted me to post Pigbag’s finest moment – the funky instrumental with which they (literally) made their name.

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I’ve never heard of Betsy Legg before and I bet you haven’t either. This eponymous album – “Betsy” – is, as far as I know, her only record.

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The feature-length Luther film is far from brilliant, replacing characterisation and intrigue with action and a dollop of torture porn. But the music makes up for it.

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Not many people reading this will have heard of Dorothy Moskowitz, an iconic counter-cultural figure from the late Sixties, apart from my friends familiar with the avant-garde fringes of music.

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