Mojo - The Music Magazine

Self-declared "pub talk made real", Earl Brutus released just two albums and nine singles of oppositional, inflamed art-rock before their recording existence came to its end in 1999. Their final venting of spleen came via this three-tracker, whose sleeve featured an illustration of the band enjoying a back garden barbecue while an adjoining semi burns down. Up first, withering glam chugger Larky sees three-years-gone vocalist Nick Sanderson sarkily stitching together phrases from Bruce Forsyth, the National Lottery and Damien Hirst's comedic superband Fat Les, among others - "Nice to see you to see you nice, It could be you/ Know what I mean? Hi-de-hi, vindaloo" - before the song immerses the listener in a cold bath of sobriety with the urgent reminder that "there are no times like these ones". It has the mid-afternoon, walls-closing-in feel of a day where nothing has been achieved, and this disquieting ambience continues on the urgent electro rock of Teenage Opera, where combing your hair becomes a way of being "a part of the action". But the real Barrett home-black mass moment of hilarity and horror comes with England Sandwich, where the drums from Iggy Pop's Nightclubbing, discordant synth pulses and the gloopy electronic jingles off a pub fruit machine meet sampled voices of impressive banality. These include TV ads, daytime quiz shows and even an elderly ex-public schoolboy casually remembering giving some oik a thrashing. Throughout, speaking clock voice Brian Cobby intones that, "at the third stroke the time sponsored by Accurist will be three forty four and twenty seconds..." This does not change. For England Sandwich, it will always be three forty four and twenty seconds - making it a suitably out-of-time end point for this omni-oxymoronic, unforgettable group.

The recent release of 40 Odd Years, Shout Factory's four-disc Loudon Wainwright career overview raises an interesting question: which Loudon do you like? For some it's the bi-polar "new Dylan" of the first two albums, for others the melancholic biographer of History and Last Man On Earth, while there also appear to be some who see him purely as a live comic performer, an unwelcome blend of Randy Newman and Jasper Carrott. Me, I like the straight-ahead craftsman, the master songwriter who occasionally manages to write something beautiful, poignant, dark-edged or true without resorting to gags, goofs or maudlin self-pity. I know the Loudon Wainwright Best-Of I'd compile and I'd lean heavily on this admittedly erratic forgotten album. I wouldn't go for any of those tunes where he sings in those 'hilarious' high notes, or rocks out in comic fashion though. First off, I'd choose Hollywood Hopeful, a companion piece to 1971's Motel Blues, a bluegrass La-la land hoedown behind which hides a tale of west Coast weariness and struggle, our hero staring down the barrel of thirty, in a Hollywood hotel suite with "drugs in the rugs/and ghosts in the walls... blood on the curtains and a phone by the pool". Then I'd pick Prince Hal's Dirge, Wainwright's brilliant sludge rock compression of Shakespeare's Henry IV Parts 1 & 2 and Summer's Almost Over, the beautiful piano-and-vibes lament for the passing of the long school holidays, autumn atonement round the corner, "vacation time running out like an unplugged fan". Finally, and perhaps most painfully for Loudon, I'd go for Reciprocity and Wine With Dinner, two brutally honest dissections of mid-'70s Wainwright family life, liberally lubricated with booze, unfaithfulness and domestic violence ("He threw a tantrum and she threw an ashtray"). This is the Loudon who does it for me. No gags, no showing off, no meanness. It's different for every Loudon fan. It's what makes him so unique.

Bolan sang about the Ballrooms Of Mars. Bowie wondered that there might be life there. And a mythologically minded Gustav Holst simply vibed like crazy off the idea of it for his Planets Suite. But it took oddball jazzers-turned-too-old-synth poppers Landscape to connect the Red Planet with the tea rooms that undoubtedly exist there, not to mention the worrying Hell-holes found on its freezing gas giant sibling. Not that this album is concerned with off-world concerns, particularly; recorded in ten studios using an unusual group set up of trombone, analogue synths and drums shaped like human heads, these are songs concerned with the coming computer age and its effects on weak-willed humanity. You can smirk at the visions of futurity of thirty years ago - Face Of The 80s wasn't a title made to age well, and Computer Person is what Kraftwerk would have sounded like had they come from Surrey - but as pop hits about global nuclear destruction and a cross-dressing murderer, respectively, Einstein A Go-Go and its follow up Norman Bates remain admirably perverse chart entries. The phantasmagorical chipmunk cackling of The Doll's House keeps up the Psycho mood, and it ends with the cod-latin shimmies of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy-evoking title track. They wouldn't last much longer in their original guise, though singer Richard James Burgess went onto produce Spandau Ballet and, er, King, while bassist Andy Pask co-wrote the theme to The Bill and keys man John Walters writes about music for The Guardian. And providing the voice over for Norman Bates and the title track, late actor Ed Bishop.

In 1970, disenchanted by performing and the end of her liaison with CSN&Y's Graham Nash, Joni Mitchell set off on a holiday through Europe. The songs she wrote on this soul-searching journey would become the bulk of Blue, her 1971 hit album and a landmark of introspective songwriting, featuring the graceful guitars of Stephen Stills and then-flame James Taylor. For a younger me, doing some soul-searching of her own, each word rang true: beyond the trappings of travelogue - from that park in Paris, France to a Grecian isle - these are meditations on their author's weaknesses ("I miss my clean white linen and my fancy French cologne") delivered with humour ("I want to talk to you / I want to shampoo you") as much as reflections on heartache and homesickness. She gets to the heart of the matter, crystallizes her journey and captures life defenselessly ("I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes," she would say of that time. "I had absolutely no secrets from the world"). Upon discovering Blue a handful of summers ago, I would roll out of bed and stick it on the turntable, the lovelorn All I Want awakening me from slumber, the starkly vulnerable My Old Man, with its poignant manifesto of freewheeling hippie romance ("We don't need no piece of paper from the city hall") coaxing me through to breakfast. The exquisite Little Green, happy-go-lucky Carey and intoxicating A Case Of You, would all rate as peerless standouts on any other record, but ultimately what keeps me coming back to Blue is River. A Christmas anti-carol, subverting the melody of Jingle Bells with lingering piano, it is the best expression of chagrin on record and may remain the most vivid map of Mitchell's world. And what a world...

Right now, over in the offices of the other music magazine on this floor, they're playing a pop record that contains a nagging refrain that sounds a bit like "It doesn't make it alright..." and seems to go on for about eight minutes, repeating the refrain, round and round, again and again, before it finishes. Then they play it again. It's probably very popular. It might be Number One. But I needed an antidote so I reached for this, a year-old triple CD of epic psychedelic jams from space-kraut jazzers Causa Sui ("The cause of itself", in Latin, the phrase cribbed from 17th Century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza). Formed in the latesummer of 2004 (apparently MOJO promised its readers that everyone would be listening to them in 2006. Ho. Ho.), this Danish four-piece - now operating as a power trio of Jonas Munk (Guitars, keys, electronics & vocals), Jess Kahr (Bass) and Jakob Skøtt (Drums & percussion) - unashamedly reference such esteemed cosmic talents as Blue Cheer, Guru Guru, Amon Düül II and Ash Ra Tempel. Yes, it's another improv quest for the heart of sonic enlightenment, but they do it with a conviction, dexterity and drive that few modern bands possess. And at this moment, as the slamming, 23-minute supercharged wah-wah freak out Tropic of Capricorn starts motoring out into the fast lane, bending trees, smashing rear-view mirrors and totally drowning out the needling popear-worm playing over in the other office, I wouldn't want to be listening to anything else.

There have been some great incongruous support acts across the ages - Bad Manners supporting Echo and The Bunnymen at the Electric Ballroom in 1979, for example - but the bill for the Walker Brothers' farewell UK jaunt in April 1967 is a classic; joining the faux siblings at the nation's Granadas, Gaumonts and Odeons were Englebert Humperdinck, Cat Stevens and Jimi Hendrix. Images, the last album Scott, John and Gary made in the '60s is also something of a contrast to the increasingly psychedelic times. Released just as they were on the way out - singles were charting ever-lower, while work permit hassles had obliged them to quit Britain for six months - it's a curious mix of material to appease their mental teen fanbase, MOR-minded mums and dads and even those wanting real substance to their pop entertainment. Immaculately realised by the three-tunes-in-four-hours studio hands, ably orchestrated by chain smoking producer Johnny Franz and arranger Reg Guest, the Scott-sung cover of Michel Legrand's Once Upon A Summertime has that mix of half-cut lachrymosity and super-lush soundworld that would have gone down a storm at the Batley Variety Club. It's followed by Scott's Experience - a fantastical, careering waltz through the central European bierkeller of his mind - and John Walker's lazy, heat hazed saunter through Blueberry Hill. These gear changes persist throughout; Scott's extraordinary Orpheus and Genevieve (a dry run of sorts for Always Coming Back To You on his first solo LP) also stand out, while equally as good is I Can't Let It Happen To You, a cool, swinging-London-at-rest song of empathy written and sung by John, the essential harmonist who sadly died on Saturday.

We here at MOJO oversee a broad church of music. At our heart, however, we are a rock magazine, still wary of poking our head into the vast knotty thicket of contemporary 'classical' music. This is a real shame, however, as the world of modern composition sometimes contains sounds, sensations, shocks and seizures that can rearrange the skull and sooth the senses of even the most knowledgeable of thrill-seeking crate-diggers.

In the same way that old jazz-heads would base their shopping decisions on which drummer and bassist were playing with that week's young man with a horn (Elvin Jones on drums? Take it to the till, Jill! Major Holley on bass? Give it the swerve, Merv [IMHO, of course]), the easiest way for relative novices like myself to navigate these dark, fathomless waters is to follow the players.

Austrian violinist Thomas Zehetmair (who looks eerily like a cross between William Hague and Herrick, from BBC3's Being Human) has been playing professionally since his mid teens in the late '70s and over the past thirty years has proven himself adept at most period styles but particularly a rough-edged, breathily expressive style (bruscamente, is it?) ideally suited to the 20th Century wonders he unearths.

Seven years ago he formed the Zehetmair String Quartet (violist and wife, Ruth Killius; second violinist Matthias Metzger; cellist Françoise Groben) a crack troop of tightly attuned chamber virtuosos who rehearse, perform and record entirely from memory. Zehetmair's recordings with the quartet are masterclasses in organic, intuitive interpretation his solo recordings more viscerally immediate.

For his latest release he's teamed up with wife Killius for what might be called a series of dark, sad, scordatura conversations between violin (him) and viola (her). Played loud in an empty office on a beautiful spring weekend while I was trying to finish my Black Keys feature, their slow, steady creep through Heinz Holliger's Drei Skizzen sounded like strange birds chattering in the creaking rigging of a doldrums-locked clipper ship. Proper magic. I promise that my next Disc of the Day will be nothing more edifying that Tiger B Smith's Tiger Rock but, right now, Zehetmair is the dude.

"I don't feel much like preachin', but I feel like singin'!" confesses a breathless Brother Claude Daniel Ely, just one track in, on this free-rolling collection of wild Christian hymns. Recorded in 1953, at Ely's Free Pentecostal Church of God in Cumberland, Kentucky, this is one of those straight-out-of-the-traps examples of sweaty live testifying, that, like MC5's Kick Out The Jams or Jerry Lee Lewis' Live At The Star Club Hamburg, puts you down the front, hands in the air, the righteous chills running down your back. Although not as spooky and forbidding as some Pentecostal services, Ely's church isn't necessarily everyone's cup of holy water. Dubbed 'The Gospel Ranger' by King Records (who originally recorded the two sessions found on this essential Ace compilation) Ely traded in a Pentecostal preaching approach rich with fiery admonishment and dark portent. His unique singing style often feels threaded with ghosts, thanks to the whistling lisp that blows through the words, and a melancholy air of impending apocalypse that sits heavy on his delivery. Tracks like I Want To Rest vibrate with eerie echo, unhinged by the unsettling harmonies of the five-woman strong Cumberland Five, but when Ely and his congregation cut loose - as on Cryin' Unto The Lord, or when the fiery Send Down That Rain bleeds into an army-strong stomping and clapping version of his most covered number, There Ain't No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down - the power is pure, untamed rockabilly gold. Any fans of pre-'60s rock'n'roll will likely already own it. If not, you know what to do.

"At the height of rock'n'roll The Kingston Trio started having folk hits so I thought, Let's try that and see what happens," explains Eddy on the subject of this 1960 acoustic album. For Eddy, the album marked a radical departure from his trademarked uproarious instrumental outings like Rebel Rouser (his second 45 and breakthrough hit of '58 which reached Number 6 in the US), Forty Miles Of Bad Road and, indeed, his thunderous re-working of Henry Mancini's Peter Gunn (his first UK Top 10 hit in '59). For all the frat-party fun associated with his early singles, Eddy was a player of vast scope steeped in both country and jazz as well as rambunctious rock'n'roll - a point evinced on lesser known album tracks like Erskine Hawkins's Tuxedo Junction (from 1959's Especially for You) or Loving You (from 1958's Have 'Twangy' Guitar Will Travel).

With Songs Of Our Heritage, his fourth set, Eddy elected to showcase his dexterity, most notably by dipping back into a selection of traditional tunes. As a result standards like John Henry, The Streets Of Laredo and In The Pines (to name but three) ­ are full of the man's understated elegance. Such is the subtlety of his playing that in 1960 Songs Of Our Heritage proved to be his least successful album to date. Over 40 years on, it is now one of his most satisfying with elements chiming with his new album, Road Trip, produced in Sheffield by Richard Hawley and due out in June.

When Rick Rubin signed greasy Syracuse outfit Masters Of Reality to his Def American label in 1988 he was sure he'd signed the spiritual heirs to Cream. The band's self-titled debut album - sometimes referred to as The Blue Garden due its sleeve - emerged in the same year and, despite the critical acclaim, sold modestly forcing band and label to part company. Masters mainstay Chris Goss went into musical hibernation. He re-emerged four years later with fellow MOR bassist Googe, this time with Cream drummer Ginger Baker in tow, and delivered this sterling second effort.

Indeed, Sunrise... once again confirmed Goss's ability to harness the kind of psychedelic hard rock grooves not heard this side of 1968 via tracks like She Got Me (When She Got Her Dress On), Jody Sings and Tilt-A-Whirl - all of which sparkled with post-White Album gold-dust. Baker also co-wrote a number of the tracks including J.B. Witchdance and Ants In The Kitchen. The album's most startling track, however, proved to be T.U.S.A - a tune which saw Baker deliver a monologue in which he berated Americans for their inability to make a decent cuppa. A fine slice of kitchen sink psychedelia, if you will.

Unfortunately, Sunrise... proved as successful as its predecessor and remains one of the long lost albums of the '90s. It was reissued in 2001 but, in the wake of Goss's latter day import as a desert rock figurehead/producer and Josh Homme affiliate, somebody somewhere really should dust it down one more time. It really is that good.

Any recent visitors to Tate Britain, walking in the windless calm of the west wing (aka "the free bit") drifting through the current displays of 20th Century art, nosing at the Hiltons, Hodgkins and Hockneys, might possibly have heard the distant call of a heavenly choir.

Those who followed this sweet sound would have found themselves standing in a dark octagonal gallery, illuminated only by a grainy colour video projection on the far wall, depicting the slow-motion exit of various bewildered looking individuals through the International Arrivals doors of British airport. The work is Mark Wallinger's 2000 installation, Threshold To The Kingdom, the music playing is the Tallis Scholars' 1980 recording of Gregorio Allegri's "Miserere mei, Deus".

Although originally composed in the 1630s, Allegri's Miserere is a child of many fathers. The idea of setting the text of Psalm 51 as a falsobordone, with two alternating choirs of five and four voices between verses of plainsong, was first coined by Renaiisance composer Costanzo Festa in 1514, and refined by the likes of Palestrina and Guerrero, before Allegri composed his version for Pope Urban VIII.

After its debut performance in Sistine Chapel, as part of the Tenebrae service on the Wednesday and Friday of Holy Week, the Pope was so struck by the piece's beauty that he forbid the piece to be transcribed, on pain of excommunication.

As a result, the Tallis Scholars beguiling version, recorded in Merton College Chapel Oxford, its haunting top C, sung by a lone voice, against the sweeping harmony of the larger choir, is the result of a series of unauthorized by-memory transcriptions down the years - including one by a fourteen year old Mozart - multiple versions that attempted to capture the ethereal beauty of Allegri's original, as hear in the Sistine Chapel.

The dreamlike nature of the piece as it's heard today (another great argument against the idea of 'authenticity' in music), performed by a choral group at their early 80s peak, invests Wallinger's film with a glow of transcendental warmth, an act of transubstantiation that invests these his tired, weary, relieved and teary travelers with the spiritual grace of lost souls arriving at the final, final destination.

So if you find yourself in London, weighed down by the woes of family, work, or the lack of sufficient Stackridge coverage in the latest edition of MOJO, you could do worse than step into the West Wing of Tate Britain and give yourself up to a brief interlude, that contains within it the celestial vesper calm of heaven on earth.

"Record buying public, we hate them," yelps Art Brut's frontman Eddie Argos on Demons Out!, sixth song on the art-punk exhibitionists' third. An odd stance when you're in a band - they're actually buying records, and you still hate them? - but as Art Brut Vs. Satan demonstrates, he's ready to declare contradictions, and seems to actively seek out embarrassment. But however trivial his concerns (think public transport, how bands should behave, reading comics and hungover misery) he still believes in rock'n'roll, rendering the trivialities somehow noble while deadpanning lines like, "I can't remember anything I've done / I fought the floor and the floor won" (Mysterious Bruises). With Frank Black producing, the results are like a drunker version of Young Knives, all the better for enjoying the group's comic English thwartedness. See also Argos' 2010 collaborative answer song collection Everybody Was In The French Resistance... Now!, wherein famous tunes like Billie Jean, Scarborough Fair and Jimmy Mack get pleasingly two-fingered retorts.

It's hard to imagine a cooler combination: Miles Davis and French new wave noir. Louis Malle's 1958 film Ascenseur Pour L'Echafaud (aka Lift To The Scaffold) tells the tale of two sets of lovers caught up in a crime. One couple's fate disintegrates into betrayed anguish, the other in flight from the pursuing police. Encouraged by his assistant Jean-Paul Rappeneau, Malle approached Davis at a performance at Club St-Germain in Paris in November 1957. With Barney Willen, René Urtreger, Pierre Michelot and Kenny Clarke in tow, Davis rolled up to the Le Poste Parisien studio on December 4. With minimal prep, barring a truncated preview for Davis and a short outline of the film's plotline for the band, the quintet improvised the entire soundtrack live as they watched the film unfold before them.

Over the next two years, Davis would issue an astonishing run of albums: Milestones; Porgy & Bess; Kind of Blue; Sketches Of Spain. Standing just as successfully alone as any of those better-known classics, Ascenseur Pour L'Echafaud is something beyond a movie accompaniment; it's a story told in sound. The somnambulist stroll of Nuit Sur Les Champs-Élysées conjures Jeanne Moreau, moodily skulking the dark streets of Paris, the cry of Davis's trumpet arousing the pain of her heartbreak every time it sounds. Then listen, rapt, to Sur L'Autoroute - and be forgiven for casting a glance over your shoulder for les flics. Just to check.

With 2007's Asa Breed, Matthew Dear crafted dancefloor-savvy electropop in love with music and with love itself. One can only guess at what's been going on in Dear's life in the interim. But it appears to involve sex. And lots of it, for Black City is 50 minutes of sweaty, grinding, seductive techtronica. Denser, darker and deeper than its predecessor, it's best evidenced by the creeping, creepy cosmic disco of Little People (Black City) and the paranoid Jarre-meets-Krautrock shufflings of More Surgery. Yet Black City isn't just about Dear's exemplary synth work; his voice is an equally powerful tool. Take You Put A Smell On Me, which - ahem - climaxes with Dear's crackling tenor growl intoning "little red night gown" to fade over a helicopter-blade techno rhythm. Black City is the devil leering over Asa Breed's shoulder; a seedy, dirty place - but an endlessly fascinating one, too.

1964's Sing The Golden Oldies sees the New Jersey four piece look back to the records that impacted on their girl group sound; their harmonies sound heavenly on Tears On My Pillow, To Know Him Is To Love Him and Runaway but on release were deafened by the charge of the British Invasion. 1967's Spontaneous Combustion though had them frugging in the aisles. Recorded live for the most part at New York's Columbia University and bolstered with live in the studio takes of then current single A Last Minute Miracle and No Doubt About It, it's everything the title promises as the group, stood around a single mike, squeal and jerk their way breathlessly through the Stones' (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction, Eddie Floyd's Knock On Wood and their own Mama Said, Baby It's You and Boys with gusto.

Play Dylan Le Blanc's debut album three times and you find yourself enveloped by the sheer warmth that emanates from it. In truth, the album's familiarity is down to the fact that the 12 tracks on offer resurrect the sound of the South from Muscle Shoals' glory '70s. Opener Low is enough to convince the listener that LeBlanc is a rare find while the likes of If The Creek Don't Rise, The Changing Of The Seasons and Coyote Creek evoke an irresistible air of American romanticism. If there is one criticism to be made, it is simply the fact that you do yearn for the odd moment where LeBlanc would cut loose and scream his heart out. Doubtless, life will teach him to so in due course. Right now, Dylan LeBlanc is good. His voice, however, will only get better. Greatness beckons.

In 1996, World Circuit's Nick Gold had the idea of getting a bunch of Malian musicians out to Cuba to collaborate with their counterparts in Havana. Cuban guitarist Eliades Ochoa was to get a group together but unfortunately the Malians didn't get the right visas and never made it, so Gold asked Ochoa to coax whichever musicians from Cuba's golden age he could out of retirement. Nine million album sales later, the Buena Vista Social Club is a household name. Now here is the album that was meant to be. Kora master Toumani Diabaté and Rail Band guitarist Djelimady Tounkara represent the cream of Malian musicians, while Ochoa's Grupo Patria provides the rhythmic discipline needed to make sense of the collaboration. Cuban and West African music blends remarkably well. On the heartfelt Ai Vaiven Mi Carreto, the joyous Karamo, and a languid version of Guantanamera, it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.

Some records are made for rain, and Scott 3 comes into its own via headphones as you zone out on the top deck of the bus, watching bedraggled humanity trudge "cellophane streets" through Walker's merciless microscope. There's Big Louise, the plus-size ladyman smashed by life's disappointment: "She's a haunted house, and her windows are broken". And there's poor Rosemary, sealed in amber, dreaming of travelling salesman Mr. Jim, who "smelled of miracles" and had his wicked way. Walker - born in Ohio of German parents - had the 20th Century Euro-fiction trope of entrapment to a tee, and his first album of largely self-penned tracks is full of the torment of the crabbed and thwarted, partnered exquisitely by Wally Stott's avant-lounge arrangements, the latter exemplified by the gothic swoops that open Winter Night, the music box ending of groovy blues vignette, 30th Century Man, and the constrained, febrile shimmer of It's Raining Today's strings - which I fancy to have influenced Jonny Greenwood's similarly taut arrangements on this. Walker would spiral further into the avant-garde on the equally ace Scott 4 before washing up on the featureless plateau of his muzak years, while light-music veteran Stott (his witty music for Hancock and the Goons endures) would undergo a sex change in 1972 - becoming Angela Morley - and continued to pen award-winning orchestrations until the late-'80s. The real-life Big Louise? There's a question for when MOJO next meets Scott - who's writing a score for Jean Cocteau's 1932 play Duet For One, due to be staged in the Royal Opera House's Linbury Studio theatre in June 2011.

Only a dyed-in-the wool cynic could possibly deny Percy Mayfield's immortal words are as timely and touching now as they were 60 years ago, when his classic song Please Send Me Someone To Love reached the top of the US Billboard R&B charts in November, 1950.

More often remembered these days for the hit tunes he penned for Ray Charles - most notably Hit The Road, Jack - Mayfield was a unique singer in his own right, whose stint with Specialty Records in the early '50s produced arguably his most ground-breaking work. The 25 tunes collected on Poet Of The Blues, spanning the years 1950 to '54, reveal an artist who not only enjoyed significant commercial success (seven Top 10 R&B hits), but whose artistic influence, albeit often indirectly, is still keenly felt today.

After leaving his native Louisiana in the early '40s, Mayfield spend several years in LA trying to launch his career before his talents were spotted by Specialty's famed producer, Art Rupe, who signed Mayfield to his label in 1950. As was often the case, Rupe's talent for nurturing hit-makers was swiftly rewarded with the success of Please Send Me Someone To Love before the year was out. The combination of Mayfield's smooth but deeply emotive voice and heartfelt lyrics were further enhanced by Rupe's production skills. Using state-of-the-art studios, 'Pappy' (as Mayfield fondly dubbed his producer) was able to capture every nuance of Mayfield's blues- and gospel-drenched croon, while surrounding him with some of the most talented musicians to be found on the West Coast, including sax players T. Maxwell Davis and Jack McVea and drummer Jesse Sailes.

From the slow-swinging blues of Life Is Suicide and the bayou groove of Louisiana, to the jumping R&B of Baby, You're Rich and the salacious humour of Loose Lips, Mayfield's talents as both a performer and writer would influence many blues and soul singer-songwriters (he also cut many excellent sessions for the Tangerine, Atlantic and RCA labels). But a car wreck in 1952 left him cruelly disfigured (in a harrowing letter to Rupe he described himself as "too ugly to be seen in public") and he was never the star his voice, songs and pre-crash handsomeness had promised.

It's a disservice to Mayfield, who was so much more than a songwriting footnote in the careers of others. It's about time the 'poet of the blues' received his dues.

While I have nothing actively against Reading five-piece guitar group Pete & The Pirates, - apart from one of those dorky, bopping-around bass players it hurts to look at - they've never made a case for being something for me. How strange then, that singer Thomas Sanders' second solo album should be so much the opposite. The fey, Estuarine voice is, naturally, the same and the backing, while cheaper and scrappier, is not a dramatic redux (Sanders has not "gone" gabba, or chillwave). Yet stripped of the trappings of a contemporary indie group, the singer's winning aesthetic shines properly in all its English oddness and inadequacy and borderline depression (on Syd Barrett-esque opener Autumn & Tea, it's as if he just about made it out of bed, and instantly regretted it). Melodically, there is something daringly basic about tunes like Spanglish carny novelty, El Gusano and the twisted nursery cadences of Straight To Hell ("It really doesn't matter what dress you put on / because your clothes never seem to stay on for that long"), while the June Brides-y Queen Of Hearts recalls a time when "indie" records weren't produced to death and Dirty Sky is a gorgeous, wispy slice of melancholia Damon Albarn might write if he weren't so high-concept these days. Every song is a world in itself, playlets haunted by exotic gamines - gypsy types and "Egyptian-eyed" temptresses - whom Sanders' narrators feel guilty about obsessing over. Perhaps the songwriter needs to ask himself if he's with the wrong woman - or, for that matter, the wrong band.

Few have done more to excavate the blues than Nottingham-born musicologist Paul Oliver. Having written 13 books on the subject since first being published in Jazz Journal in 1951, he has also compiled and annotated countless albums, the latest being this exemplary 68 track collection, the audio companion to his recently published tome of the same name. Barrelhouse Blues - named after the first known male blues recording made by Ed Andrews for Okeh in 1924, the first track included here - provides an essential overview of pre-War tunes, painting an spectral picture of black America between 1923 and 1940. Standards like Furry Lewis's John Henry sit alongside stomping jazz-tinged laments, country-infused tales of woe and field hollers, but this compilation is at its most valuable when it unearths long forgotten talents such as Blind Washington (aka Washington Phillips) whose Paul And Silas In Jail remains truly transcendental.

The first instalment in Silva Screen's Roy Budd reissue series is the welcome return of his score for Mike Hodges' 1971 Newcastle noir masterpiece. Often dismissed with the faint praise of "kitsch cool", Budd's Carter soundtrack always sounded closer to the odder experiments of the British '70s jazz scene, a drummerless trio working with acoustic bass, percussion, harpsichord, Rhodes piano and teen male vocals producing something as distinct and strange as John Cameron's Off Centre or Terry Durham's Crystal Telephone. This release, the most complete so far, includes extended liner notes featuring essays from director Mike Hodges and superfan Jonathan Ross, a Budd appreciation from jazz scholar Roy Carr and interviews with Budd's musical collaborators (The Dudley Moore Trio's bassist and percussionist, Jeff Clyne and Chris Karan) and the soundtrack's callow Geordie vocalists (and later Blockheads) Mickey Gallagher and Johnny Turnbull.

Their 2008 self-titled first was recorded live in 48 hours in Camden with Jim Jones and his Revue yelping their way through distorted in-the-red songs indebted to Little Richard, The Sonics and Bunker Hill. Their second, which took just a little longer to record, is stoked heavily with Stooges wildfire, but is, thank the heavens, really just more of the adrenalin-fuelled same. A different version of the explosive title track may have turned up first on Here To Save Your Soul, their stop gap A and B sides collection from last year, but its psychopathic raging - "I'm burning your house down, to let you know I'm still around," Jones hollers as the band clatter around him - epitomises the ear-shattering cacophony on offer here.

There's no getting away from the fact that this is an album by Radiohead's drummer, but reducing Phil Selway to such glib comparisons does Familial a mighty disservice. Don't expect Thom Yorke's twisting-on-a-pinhead angst here: the metaphorical black dog in the cellar of By Some Miracle is as near to a dark night of the soul as it gets. Selway instead gives voice to those moments when we all look in the mirror, take a deep breath and just get on with our lives, where responsibility is weighed and discharged rather than dismissed with rock's default setting of petulant 'why me' teenage pique. Familial is an acoustically plucked, feet-on-the-ground record, Selway's fragile and inviting voice a delightful match for his slightly anxious, if misplaced, self-doubt. Credit where it's due: it's time to give the drummer some.

The 'if I enjoy it, then the audience will too' gambit isn't 100 percent fail-safe, but it seems to work for Plant. Resisting, once again, a world tour with Led Zeppelin, he has instead followed his heart to Nashville with co-producer and tremolo guitar whizz Buddy Miller. Working with multi-instrumentalist Darrell Scott (banjo pecks, jinking mandolin etc.) among others, the pair cut 12 eclectically sourced cover versions in ten days. Country chanteuse Patty Griffin is clearly this record's Alison Krauss; a perfect foil as Plant taps the more sensual stations of his range. The tender, propulsive take on the late Townes Van Zandt's Harm's Swift Way is a nice touch, and atmospheric readings of Low's Silver Rider and Monkey should spark pots of royalties for everyone's favourite Mormon slowcore band. It all adds up to more wilful magic from Plant.

It's not easy to make Sabbath-style proto-metal sound fresh, but Black Mountain have a way of writing songs that go to the places you hope they will without descending into cliché. Huge riffs, spooky organ sounds, tight drumming and twinned male/female vocals from Stephen McBean and Amber Webber work to make songs like Old Fangs and Wilderness Heart heavy psychedelic classics with one foot in the early 70s, while tender ballads (The Space Of Your Mind) and expansive epics (Sadie) show a range that goes beyond mere denim-clad revisionism. Perhaps because three of the band until recently worked in a Vancouver homeless shelter, but there's a lack of pretentiousness and egotism here that makes the music great. Black Mountain sound like they are in thrall to a power greater than themselves: all the cool stuff that has gone before them. The result is an inspiring, triumphant album.

With the Jazzman label's release of A Lifetime In Oriental Jazz last year ethnomusicologist Dr Lloyd Miller finally received something approaching his due, his seamless combination of ancient Middle-Eastern instruments and post-Giuffre chamber jazz, striking a chord with modern hipsters searching out lost 'new' sounds. Now, following their hook-up with Mulatu Astatke, Malcolm Catto's London-based jazz travellers have lent their rhythmic talents to the 72-year old multi-instrumentalist. With Miller displaying a rare mastery of Middle-Eastern time signatures and instruments, the Heliocentrics follow his lead, a loose caravan creating an hypnotic, spiritual jazz amble through the forests, mountains and clearings of a magical Middle-East. Given Miller's on-record disgust at modern music, the real triumph here is how well this trip grooves, managing to sound simultaneously modern, ancient, and blissfully timeless.

When Elvis Presley, Scotty and Bill released five singles for Sam Phillips' Sun Records and toured the US South leaving screaming teenagers in their trail in 1954-5, they acted as a catalyst for thousands eager to emulate the Hillbilly Cat's success. Presley's haunting, accelerated cover of Junior Parker's Mystery Train features here, a near perfect meld of slap bass hillbilly boogie and chugging R&B. Nothing else tops this rockabilly apotheosis, but a succession of whooping and hollering country boys (and one girl) sure whip up a storm trying, with Wanda Jackson's sassy Mean, Mean Man coming close. Such is Décharné's expert ear that despite providing a selection heavily weighted towards the obscure, this 28-tracker still acts as a superb genre primer with the demented likes of Gene Maltais and Ronnie Self helping to turn up the heat.

After an apprenticeship with producer Clement Dodd, like his peer Bob Marley before him, Winston Rodney, aka Burning Spear, achieved international renown with a sublime encapsulation of social and spiritual ferment that transcended its Jamaican context. Marcus Garvey sounds better now than ever, thanks to a bountifully bottomed remaster restoring the snap to Lawrence 'Jack Ruby' Lindo's production of The Black Disciples, featuring such supreme players as trombonist Vin Gordon, bassist Robbie Shakespeare, drummer Leroy Wallace and guitarist Earl 'Chinna' Smith. This is definitive roots: amid the dancing horns and molten rhythms, Spear mournfully declaims Rasta parables like Slavery Days, with added supplication from harmonisers Delroy Hines and Rupert Willington. Its final mix was reputedly sweetened for UK tastes by Island, but unlike Marley's Catch A Fire, no contention surrounds Marcus Garvey - a reggae touchstone, the perfect marriage of musical uplift and lyrical dread.

It was already the group's seventeenth album and as ever, Fall autocrat Mark E Smith had things that needed saying. Delivered with customary cryptic astringency, and with a title related to the blurring effects of entertainment posing as information, these songs still provide mental fat suitable for prolonged chewing. Thumping glitterbeat track Glam Racket, for example, addresses rosy nostalgia for the not-too-distant past - the bri-nylon seventies as mooned over by the then-swinging Pulp and Suede in this case - while a cover of Steve Bent's I'm Going to Spain, unfairly included on Kenny Everett's World's Worst Record Show comp, concerns the British proclivity for escaping to a sunny life abroad. Other songs, meanwhile, consider the dilemmas facing the man approaching middle age with all its fears of obsolescence - "Kicked the leaves, learning about time," murmurs the arch, troubled Service, "winter is here." Remarkably, it reached number nine, and is certainly one of The Fall's most cosmetically appealing LPs, with the group in taut rock form with what Smith called "the techno shit" layered over it. A year on the messier Middle Class Revolt A/K/A The Vapourisation Of Reality was released, inaugurating a half-decade of turmoil. As for those late-30s misgivings, by 2008 Citizen Smith seemed to have resolved them with Imperial Wax Solvent's mighty 50 Year Old Man.

In MOJO 184 the ever-smart Brian Eno discussed the music world's current passion for recycling. "I find it interesting," he said. "They're recording a story and an image of what people were like and how they could be, recombining [elements] so we hear them differently." One of the truly great recyclers is Andy Cabic who, with Vetiver has seemingly imagined the music George Harrison might have made if he'd never returned to England in 1967, but just remained at his house on Blue Jay Way, up in the Hollywood Hills, getting stoned with Cyd Charisse and The Buffalo Springfield. Recorded in Sacramento and Los Angeles, Tight Knit is a beautiful, lazy album of befogged west coast dreams, in which - backed by spare guitar/bass/drums arrangements, and occasional stipples of piano - Cabic's amiable, balmy voice sings of freedom, escape and, erm, generally not coming back. The perfect getaway for these wet winter days.

It begins, softly, on a slow stirring incline, just piano and mournful Robert Wyatt lament, singing what might at first appears to be a simple love song about a couple who always "pass but never touch". On closer listen, the song also reveals itself as a bowed-down Blue Nile esque ballad concerning the creaking funicular rail cars that work the slope on the Aberystwyth Cliff Railway - "One rises/the second rolls the other way/Over the years things haven't changed that much." This is the opening, scene-setting act of ghostly mesmerism on Tim Noble and Paul Newland's debut album as The Lowland Hundred.

Naming themselves after (the English translation of) Cantre'r Gwaelod, the mythical lost kingdom said to lie beneath the waters of Cardigan Bay, these two recent Aberystwyth residents have embraced the Victorian architecture, Cambrian wilderness and strange history of their surroundings to deliver a debut album of startling ambition and ghostly power.

Like all truly great albums, Under Cambrian Sky is constructed as a journey, one that moves from the seaside melancholy of the present day into the groaning depths of Wales' mythic past. Track two, Camera Obscura, finds us on the peak of Aberystwyth's Constitution Hill, using one of the town's main tourist attractions as a lyrical device for travelling into the past, signalled by the subsequent montage of bird song, creaking metal and running water, The Bruised Hill. Track four, Picot, finds us back in the Victorian town - Paul Newland's sad, lonesome voice finding transformative beauty in the windows of Prospect Street and Vulcan Street, and picot doilies and cotton reels washed up by the sea. However, as the album unravels, history intrudes in less pleasant ways. Allt-Glais, set in the chattering ancient wood outside the town, where the court of King Gwyddno Garantir reputedly fled following the flood, is Meddle-era Pink Floyd by way of Walter De La Mare, while The Air Loom is a twelve-minute epic set inside the gibbering mind of 18th Century Welsh tea-trader, James Tilly Matthews, whose schizophrenic torments are sound-tracked by a musique concrete of ringing bells, winding clocks, shuffling paper, short-wave radio chatter and a sinister Dreaming-like recital of Matthews' imagined torments ("Fluid Locking/Lobster Cracking/Stone Making/Thigh Talking/Bomb Bursting...") and tormenters ("Bill The King/Jack The Schoolmaster/Sir Archy/Glove Woman...). The album ends with the plaintive, Bill Fay-esque Anemone, a track of deep, sorrowful beauty which finds our traveler floating past "Dolphin bottle head/Shallow mussel bed/Half moon jellyfish", towards, either, the buried kingdom of The Lowland Hundred or a blissful underwater expiration.

It's so rare that an album this singular arrives without press fanfare but Under Cambrian Sky really is unique, like Robert Wyatt's Rock Bottom imbued with the mystic Welsh spirit of Arthur Machen. And still, after all these listens, it continues to beguile.

It's December 1965 and The Music Of Lennon & McCartney - a British TV show due for broadcast the week before Christmas - is being recorded in London. In amongst the top echelon of '60s entertainers (Peter Sellers, Marianne Faithfull, Cilla Black, Lulu) is diminutive Texas native Esther Phillips. At 29, she already has 15 years worth of music behind her, having begun recording R&B sides for Johnny Otis in 1950 under the guise of 'Little' Esther Phillips. She's been flown to the UK at the request of The Beatles and John Lennon is about to introduce her as "someone who has done the best version of one of our songs ever". Grown-up Esther Phillips, it seems, is about to hit the big time. Her performance of the Fabs' song - a soothing Barcharach-esque reading of ballad And I Love Her - is a distillation of why she remains one of the greatest soul singers of the 20th Century.

Possessed of a tremulous, nasal voice that combined jazz fluidity with a frayed blues power, Phillips cut this first album for Atlantic under the watchful eye of super-fan Ahmet Ertegun - a man who called her "one of the best singers I ever heard." The finest moments are couched in Ray Ellis' minimalist, string-filled arrangements. She's gutsy (People), elegant (Moonglow & Theme From Picnic), pouting and bluesy (If You Love Me, Really Love Me) and always, effortlessly cool. Channelling Dinah Washington's swing and Billie Holiday's swoon, Phillips looked like she might capitalise on the success of these mid-'60s recordings, but her heroin use would soon take over. She remerged in the 1970s with the haunting From A Whisper To A Scream and a disco version of What a Diff'rence a Day Makes!, but nothing can beat the songs she recorded for Atlantic.

OK, it's certainly a mess. Peter Tork had already left, buying out his contract in early 1969. The first post-Tork release, Instant Replay had been a grab-bag of old and new tracks, yet still peppered with magic, particularly Mike Nesmith's Byrdsian While I Cry and his cover of Goffin & King's I Won't Be The Same Without Her (also covered by The Twilights). Present was, in fact, the rag-end of a project that had begun when Tork was still in the band - two records, one side per Monkee. With Tork gone Monkees bosses, Colgems, picked through Mickey, Davey and Mike's submissions and presented their own version of the threesome's songwriting identities. Like The Walker Brothers Niteflights, this approach tended to favour certain members over others. Davey Jones' sub-Nilsson selections make the least impression, exhausted vaudeville syrup-cups that sound like the kind of oily music-box lullabies Frank Spencer sang to baby Jessica in Some Mothers Do Ave Em, while Mike Nesmith's tracks are all country pop-rock delights, the sounds of freedom, of a singer preparing to fly the coop.

Weirdest of all, however, are Mickey Dolenz's offers, Bye Bye Baby Bye Bye, Little Girl and Mommy And Daddy. Like some disturbing cross between the grim solicitations of Harry Nilsson, the Child Catcher and the darker fantasies of the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, Dolenz's cuts are sinister, whispered nursery rhymes, where The Monkees squeaky clean TV image gets pulled through the dirt, and images of childhood innocence are pushed into nightmare: "Ask your mommy if she really gets off on all her pills/Ask your Daddy..."Would it matter if the bullet went through my head?/If it was my blood spilling on the kitchen floor/Scream it to your mommy and daddy/They're living in a lie." Included as part of a conceptual side-long suite, Dolenz's tracks might have made a kind of 'theatrical' sense. Floating free alongside Jones and Nesmith's pop and country they genuinely creep you out.

After this, the fab three Monkees had a few more things to do, contractually, before Nesmith too flew the coop ("A Nerf's e-Nerf!"). And then there were two. If you're looking for the point the Monkees went truly rubbish, check out Jones and Dolenz's 1970 truly forgettable Changes. But not Present, an album far too weird and strange to be dismissed as merely bad.

It was, it's said, an ironic title - guitarist Phil Chevron quipped The Pogues were in "ever decreasing circles of hell" at the time of Peace And Love. Was it because of main writer and figurehead Shane MacGowan was wrecked all the time, and so into the burgeoning sound of Acid House that he wanted a twenty minute dance track called Contact Yourself included? But if, compared to the group's fabulous first three LPs, there were flaws on Peace And Love, it's still worth lending an ear. With Shane somewhat removed from the creative process, the rest of the then globally touring group filled the gap. This meant febrile variety, with noir instrumental jazz (Gridlock), brooding, Bo Diddley-leaning Americana (USA) and fairy tale stadium rock (Lorelei) all warping the formula in intriguing ways. The songs belonging to the Pogue mainline are enhanced in their company, the best being MacGowan's White City. Off out of the gates with an oddly mechanic dance beat and Cajun accordions, it sees the singer mentally time travelling back to the famed, demolished race track where "the paddies and the frogs came to gamble on the dogs, came to gamble on the dogs not long ago." Full of elegiac, bitter joyfulness, it's one of his great London songs. Jem Finer's beauteous, Shane-sung Misty Morning, Albert Bridge is another to slot in next to the Poguetry In Motion EP. The group with MacGowan would only manage one more LP, but there are rumours the reconstituted touring Pogues may be about to record a new album, possibly entitled Salvador Dali. If it was as good as Peace And Love, nobody would moan.

There were few things we agreed on during that family touring holiday of Scotland in 1983, but one of them was the in-car entertainment. Purchased on tape, from Woolworth's, at a Crack Down price, on the day of release, Big Country's The Crossing became, thanks to a faulty car radio aerial, the sole musical soundtrack for a ten-day sightseeing trip into the Scottish highlands. As a result, The Crossing has become one of those albums that, through a strange combination of Proustian hoodoo and the healing balm of memory, bypasses the critical faculties. Yes, I hear Mark Brzezicki's horrible gated drums, and Steve Lillywhite's grand, eager-to-please empty-ballroom production on opening track, In A Big Country, I just choose not to acknowledge them, or allow them into the hazy, romantic glimmerings where the cloud-capped mountains, ruined castles and vast mist-shrouded lochs of the A82 are forever sound-tracked by the Cinemascope grandeur of Stuart Adamson's bellowing Braveheart vocals and the cold-wind skirl of Bruce Watson and Adamson's E-bow driven guitar harmonics. Perhaps inevitably, listened to again for the purposes of this DOTD, The Crossing also reveals itself to be a deeply melancholy album, an album for ever in search of sunlight, wide skies and open spaces yet burdened with the milled shackles of ill weather, ancient myth, John Buchanesque supernatural curses, and romantic misfortune. Adamson was found dead in a hotel room in Hawaii on 16 December 2001. 7000 thousand miles away from the deep, dark landscape of The Crossing, but still, clearly, under heavy clouds.

I've not had much luck with John Cale performances. Every time I decide to go and see the man live, secretly harbouring the Luddite-fan's wish that he will just be sitting at the piano, under a single spotlight playing "the hits", I'm treated to "very special" one-off showcases of pop-electronica, experimental new directions or some collaborative exploration of the limits of modern composition in which John constantly defers to a dull man on a very high chair, playing an input board. I know he still does the hits in Spartan circumstances but, just, you know, not when I'm around. The problem, and the solution, lies with this album. I first heard Fragments Of A Rainy Season when it came out, in 1992. I was 26, with limited Cale education and I was floored. Recorded live with just grand piano on his 1992 European tour, this is John Cale's oeuvre stripped of its production, art attack and orchestration. Cold, clear and unadorned, minus Phil Manzanera's guitar, the songs blossom anew: beautiful, cryptic snapshots of lives lived in the shade of high trees, the death-stricken houses of Dylan Thomas land, and Somerset Maugham short stories bleached to their bones in the midday sun. The live set-up - just a man and a piano staring out into the dark - perfectly suits the solitary mood at the heart of songs like Dying On The Vine, The Ballad Of Cable Hogue and Buffalo Ballet, these hallucinatory dispatches home from attenuated wayfarers who've cut off all ties or only wish they could. It's an album that plays best at night-time, in winter, sleep becalmed under the mile-off moon, when everyone else in the house is elsewhere. Only then can you still enjoy Cale's definitive version of Hallelujah, untainted by Shrek, Buckley, X Factor and American Idol. And oddly, given that holy grail of the solo Cale performance, it works better without pictures. YouTube has a handful of clips from the same 1992 tour and they just don't hold the magic in the way this CD does. Lights out for the territory.

Having spent six months with Butterfly House, it has grown steadily into my favourite Coral album. Released in the summer, it sounds even better in the chill of winter, with the broken-down fairground swirl of Coney Island, the acoustic warmth of fireside ballad Walking In Winter, the breezy, Byrds-esque groove of Two Faces and She's Comin' Around's incantation that "the moon hangs high and the wild night comes out to play" offering irresistible invitations into Coral World - a land inhabited by bad machines, beautiful vistas, empty forests, nascent romances and probably the odd creature from Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas. As ever, the key to the genius of these songs lies in the detail of the arrangements and the sheer strength of the melodies. With lead guitarist Bill Ryder-Jones gone, Lee Southall has stepped up to the plate, delivering prickly psych-licks and immaculate acoustic lines that sing alongside James Skelly's vocals whether it be during one of the record's grand mini-epics (More Than A Lover, North Parade) or snug folk songs (Falling All Around You). The omens - the severing of ties with Sony, the departure of the talented yet unpredictable Ryder-Jones - but sometimes a seismic re-alignment of personnel, a decent stretch off the road and the influence of an outstanding producer (John Leckie) can re-focus a band quite unlike anything else. Since day one, it's as if The Coral have toiled, brushstroke by brushstroke on a painting of a strange new world. Finally, with Butterfly House, it's finished, and it's such a vivid creation you could almost step inside it.

There is a school of thought that holds the 'Best Of' artist compilation to be superior to all studio releases. In some instances, that might be an argument worth having, that here is the all killer-no filler rubric writ large. But for the most part, there comes with compilations a feeling of dissatisfaction, a sense that you are merely skimming the surface of a band or artist's oeuvre, rejecting nuance and shade in favour of a harsh, energy-saving-bulb brightness. One career compilation that refuses to conform to type is Gene Clark's Flying High. Released in 1998, this glorious collection (compiled by sometime MOJO contributor, one time Long Ryder, current Coal Porter, and friend of Gene, Sid Griffin) touches parts other anthologies cannot reach. For one, it opens out a career that, up to that point, had been shut down or closed off to many. Lest we forget, back in 1998, Clark's '70s solo work had been largely forgotten, while their composer, dead some seven years, had been written off by many as but a shy, boozy footnote in the history of The Byrds. Yet while Flying High single-handedly restored Clark's reputation and revived his back-catalogue, it also worked, as a complete listening experience. From the early Byrds tracks at the start of CD 1 to high-flying cosmic country and the lost, lonesome tracks that rounded off CD2 here was a compilation that served its purpose as a job of curation but also, thanks to Clark's skills as a songwriter and Griffin's skills as a compiler, told a rich, sad compelling story of an American visionary and storyteller, one superior in every way to that other broken Western poet, Gram Parsons. In fact, one night, some years ago in a bar called The Two Boots in New York's Lower East Side I tried drunkenly arguing that same point with Black Crowes' frontman and number one Gram Parsons fan Chris Robinson. It ended with me being sick on a tree but I think I won. Gram Parsons never wrote anything as tragically beautiful as this, and no Gram Parsons compilation could come close to the rich, dark complexities of Flying High.

The late '70s were a golden age of movies on British TV. Due to the bulk-buying policy that forced terrestrial TV companies to cough up for, say, ten minor-stripe movies with every James Bond blockbuster, broadcast schedules were regularly filled with beguiling, bonkers movies in prime-time chunks of the day. One of the best slots for any movie-hungry kid was BBC2 6.20pm, a post-scran nook in the working-class day where the well-fed child could dreamily digest their carb-heavy feasts whilst watching strangely soundtracked products of the post-war sci-fi movie boom. Favourite memories included winter screenings of William Cameron Menzies' unearthly, roseate, Invaders From Mars, Rod Taylor fleeing the Morlocks in The Time Machine and the infernal internal sci-fi lunacy of Richard Fleischer's Fantastic Voyage.

One side-effect of these ensorcelling films was the passion they instilled for spectral, dreamlike music. The connection was made: if I heard an amorphous, droning soundscape, whether Flying Saucer Attack's Popol Vuh 1 or Harper's Bizarre's Witchi Tai To, I was back there in the strange glowing world of childhood evenings in front of the TV. And from the crimson neon glow of Jon Wozencroft and Heitor Alvelos' sleeve design to the pulsating, hypogeal guitar sounds contained within, Touch Music's reissue of Rafael Toral's Violence of Discovery... is another instant Interzone ticket back to those halcyon sf winters. Recorded between 1994 and 2000, the music finds Toral feeding his Fender Jaguar, Ibanez Silver Bass and 12-string Danelectro through a Roland G-707, pushing the amplification to the point of eerie molecular vibration.

Yet while some of the tracks edge into disorted reverberation and radioactive creepiness - Measurement of Noise could be the dreamlike keening of the giant ants coming over the hill in Gordon Douglas' 1954 mutant insect shocker, Them! - for the most part, Toral conjures up a serene, Utopian space age sound, the kind of calming vibrating hum a silver spaceship powered by dust-feathered old valves might make as it spirits you up into the night, out over the valleys of Neptune, the mountains of Mars.

By the time Mavis Staples released her first solo album for Stax in 1969, the 30-year old Chicagoan gospel belter had almost 20 years of singing behind her. That debut LP - packaged here with its equally compelling follow-up - draws on those decades of sanctified soul worship by combining powerhouse vocals with rubbery funk grooves, southern horn bounce and epic string-soaked ballads. Unlike the call-to-arms anthems she recorded with the Staple Singers throughout the previous ten years, both albums shun political fervour in favour of matters of the heart. Not that this makes any difference to Mavis's warm, oak-smoked vocals. Whether it's the light pop-soul of Until I Met You, the churchy magnificence of Don't Change Me Now or her heartbreaking reading of Buddy Johnson's blues standard Since I Fell For You, Staples manages to wring every last drop of emotion out of each syllable. Like some of the other albums released under the rejuvenated Stax banner of the late '60s - Hot Buttered Soul among them - there's an emphasis on big, sweeping arrangements. A lesser voice could have easily been swamped, but Mavis remains in charge throughout - no easy task given the musical pedigree surrounding her (Isaac Hayes, Eddie Hinton, Duck Dunn, Steve Cropper and Al Jackson are among her collaborators). After the release of Only For The Lonely, Mavis would return to the Staple Singers to play her part in the most successful phase of their lifespan. And what if you want to experience one of soul music's finest voices today? Well, if you're in London this week you're in luck. Mavis plays The Jazz Café on Wednesday (November 17).

In 1989, when this CD was first released, Pauline Oliveros was already a thirty-year veteran of the musical avant-garde. Schooled in composition at the University of Houston and San Francisco State College between 1949 and 1957, she'd worked with and influenced such luminaries as Terry Riley, Morton Subotnick and Loren Rush, helped form the San Francisco Tape Music Center, and taught at University of California, San Diego where her unconventional methods of notation ("Allow your vocal cords to vibrate in any mode which occurs naturally") and meditative theories of 'deep listening' showed fellow musicians how to listen closely and respond to the ambient sounds of their environment. Although a skilled tape manipulator and technophile, for her first recording with the Deep Listening Band, Oliveros relied solely on her skills as accordionist and improviser, taking trombonist Stuart Dempster and avant-garde vocalist/percussionist Panaiotis (aka Peter Ward) into a massive 14-foot deep disused water cistern at Fort Worden State Park in Pt. Townsend, Washington and asking them to "listen intensely to one another and the transformative spatial modulations... to make a collective music". Using accordion, sea shells, trombone and didgeridoo, and utilising the cistern's incredible 45-second smooth-reverb delay, the trio slowly, carefully crafted deep, measured acoustic reverberations that, astonishingly, give the auditory illusion of being vast electronic drones, eerily similar to the VCS3 meditation mantras of early Tangerine Dream or Popol Vuh, but generated entirely from homely acoustic instruments. "[The sound] slowly moved along the walls until it enveloped the listener," writes Oliveros in the album's liner notes, "a most remarkable and beautiful phenomenon." The more you listen, the more peculiar the effect is. Dismiss the sounds as mere electronic ambience and they possess an immense, astral calm. Try to locate the source of these strange, expanding harmonics and the effect is ghostly, unnerving, maddening. "The actual act of listening influenced the result," wrote the session's recording engineer, Al Swanson. "My eight year old son, Stephen, who was assisting me, [said], during a break, "Dad, what would this stuff sound like if we weren't listening?" Given the album's acoustic uncertainty (are you hearing an instrument, its reverberation, or its effect on your own stereo or listening space) Deep Listening is an album experience that's significantly affected by the circumstances of you, the listener, when you're listening, where, at what time of the day or year. It's like having a living thing there in the room with you. On an autumn afternoon, against the crackle of distant fireworks and the smell of wood smoke on the air, the effect is intensely, darkly magical.

Bug is a blood-spattered battleground of an album. By the time of its release, relations between singer-guitarist Joseph Donald "J" Mascis and bassist Lou Barlow had entirely broken down, after recording sessions so heated that when Mascis instructed his wingman to scream "Why don't you like me?", repeatedly, for six minutes, on closer Don't, Barlow coughed up blood. But while Don't is the ultimate musical expression of barefaced mutual disdain, the rest of Bug is by no means doom and gloom, its peerless slacker rock buoyed by melodic vocals, layers of squalling guitars and a strong backbone of fierce cymbal-crashing drums. Three albums into the group's career, it captured the remaining youthful candour of the original line-up, before Barlow was acrimoniously ousted in the middle of the album's promotional trail.

Freak Scene is the pertinent opener, an energizing cocktail of thrashed riffs and intense lyrics that work through an affair in crisis, ending in a resolution of sorts: "Sometimes I don't thrill you / Sometimes I think I'll kill you / Just don't let me f__k up will you / 'Cause when I need a friend it's still you". But resolution is short-lived, as the despairing No Bones endures life "entombed in war" while melancholy-drenched vocals and crescendos of feedback gorgeously resound. Elsewhere, Pond Song strips the Dino sound back to its acoustic roots, showcasing their rarely-credited technical aptitude, while the '05 reissue's bonus track Keep The Glove shoves surf-pop through the Jesus & Mary Chain's feedback mincer. The contrast is the essence of Bug's genius. Reflective lyrics and a raw sound that's at times sentimental and at others crazily chaotic make for an emotional rollercoaster, a white-knuckle ride through the death throes of a failing relationship - its makers' own.

Here, at the end of 2010, it seems that we've come to the end of the golden era of jazz CD reissues, curtailed at exactly the point where music blogs are introducing fans to yet rarer recordings and stranger figures from the bypassed shadows of the genre. One such player is multi-reedist, Sahib Shihab.

Born Edmond Gregory in Savannah, Georgia in 1925, Shihab cut his teeth on post-Parker bop, recording with Miles, Coltrane, Monk (he's on the original version of Round About Midnight) and Dizzy Gillespie's big band before departing the U.S. in the late '50s, angered by the racial tensions of contemporary New York. "I don't have time for this racial bit," he told Down Beat magazine in 1963, "It depletes my energies."

After touring Europe with the Quincy Jones Big Band in the early '60s, Shihab settled down in Scandinavia, moving between Denmark and Sweden and establishing a thoroughly unique driving sound that blended post bop, modal, Eastern and Northern European styles; wild rasping experiments on flute and sax, against driving, flowing rhythms that suggested nothing less than the reed equivalent of the mercurial Monk himself.

This album, cut live in Copenhagen in '63, is a rolling joy. Led in by Niels-Henning Orsted Pederson's walking bass, and the twin-drum kits of Alex Riel and Bjarne Rostovold, opening track, 4070 Blues, comes on like some pastoral theme tune from the wildest ever '70s kids' TV show, Shihab's urgent, rough-house flute wigging out and digging in as the rhythm section keep it moving ever forward, like some carnival of woodland animals hopped up on mushrooms and licorice root. Shihab's clenched, cautious introduction to Charade - "The title... song... from... the Stanley. Donen. Pro. Duction. A UNI! Versal release... titled 'Sharard' or 'Sha-raid'..." - suggest that he may not have been completely sober during the recording, but his playing, as soloist and bandleader is totally in control, pulling the band on a twisting, mystical ride that conjures up images of Cary Grant's Euro playboy world wrenched at the seams by free psychedelic revolution.

An unsung hero of radical '60s jazz, Shihab's wider rediscovery is long overdue. Unfortunately, with CD reissues the way they are, it's unlikely to happen any time soon.

The economical low-slung stoner-blues of Leaf Hound's one and only '70s album was recorded during a single 11-hour session. 40 years on, the album's main claim to fame remains its rare status, with mint condition originals reportedly selling for well over $1,000. Thanks to Repertoire, the more strapped connoisseur of heaviosity need fork out little more than a tenner, the reward being a creaky and unvarnished, quintessentially British creation, inhabiting the same netherworld of psychedelia, proto-prog and hard rock inhabited Black Sabbath, Atomic Rooster and Free. Leaf Hound's best song, Freelance Fiend, kicks off with a cavernous, oozing riff, then spends three minutes 10 seconds wallowing in a quagmire of sludgy guitar and grimacing rock vocals (in a good way!) - the latter courtesy of Peter French, who would shortly leave to join Atomic Rooster. Elsewhere, Stagnant Pool is the distant cousin of Led Zeppelin's Living Loving Maid (She's Just A Woman) with French and guitarist Mick Halls emulating Plant and Page at their most ferocious, while the riff for their only single Drowning In My Fear could have easily fallen off the back of Tony Iommi's lorry. It all adds fuel to a proto-metal furnace stoked by a band who managed to capture their song With A Minute To Go with, er, a minute of studio time to go. Leaf Hound disappeared shortly after the album was completed but a new version of the group, piloted by Peter French, released a follow-up in the form of 2007's Unleashed.

Initially you created your image as a means of escape-cum-defence. Then it became a trap, leading the press - and the tabloids in particular - to fixate on you, labelling you "the most beautiful man in pop" and quite possibly Britain itself. With your group, you are at the height of your powers but this is not what you signed up for. So what do you do? In the case of David Sylvian, the answer was to walk away from his hit-making band and, like Scott Walker before him, to take that group's developing musical textures to their logical conclusion. The first fruits of this new, deeply personal approach manifested itself in Brilliant Trees.

Sylvian's liberation is exemplified by the list of collaborators on his solo debut - Danny Thompson (bass), Jon Hassell (trumpet), Kenny Wheeler (trumpet/flugelhorn), Ryuichi Sakamoto (synths) and Can's Holger Czukay (guitar, Dictaphone, French horn) among others - all of whom reflected the singer's deep listening tastes. The left-field posse built an album that still sits at the apex of progressive pop, mixing crepuscular funk with ECM ambience and deep electronica, and whose ambition is exemplified by the fluidity of The Ink In The Well (resplendent with Wheeler's solo), the majestic interplay on Red Guitar and the nod to Sylvian's past that is the knowing Pulling Punches. For all it's anti-pop tendencies, Brilliant Trees confirmed its creator's pop star status when it entered the UK charts at Number 3. "That was just people giving me the benefit of the doubt," he told this correspondent two years ago. "They soon knew better."

Gil Scott-Heron's merciless intelligence - the hallmark of his '70s masterpieces, which pierced American political injustice and the compensatory delusions of its victims - made his subsequent downfall - sped by drug addiction and studded with jail time on narc beefs - all the more tragic. His latest, I'm New Here, is a poignant comeback, with an aptly wounded vibe, but to hear him in his imperial phase is to stare into the steely eyes of an artist with utter faith in his vision (he'd taught creative writing at Columbia, after all) and the chops, musical and lyrical, to back it up. This, his group's fourth alloy of Rhodes-laden souljazz with their leader's razor-sharp beat-poetry, is centred on the funky social-realism of The Bottle (confusingly, the track Winter In America would come later). "See that black boy over there, running scared," sing-raps Gil, "His old man's in a bottle." His horror seems absolute - the horror of a man, perhaps, who felt and feared the lure of narcotic analgesia. Meanwhile, co-headliner Brian Jackson, Scott-Heron's musical ally since 1967, takes time out from his mournful keyboard-tickling (gorgeously vaporous on A Very Precious Thing) to invent Acid Jazz with a hectoring flute part. Elsewhere, Heron lays into the black middle class ("You're my lawyer, you're my doctor / But somehow you forgot about me") on the sourest song entitled Peace Go With You, Brother, you'll ever hear, then hits the whole thing out of the park with the super-hip, Nixon-blasting rap, H2Ogate Blues. Great gags (""Click, brrrrrr... I'm sorry, the government you have elected is inoperative"), stunning wordplay, and blazing black oratory ("Afraid of shoeless, undernourished Cambodians while we strike big wheat bargains with Russia, our nuclear enemy: just how blind can America be?") ensue as Scott-Heron rolls up Black Panther Bobby Seale, the Watergate conspirators, "Napoleonic" Chicago mayor Richard Daley and the Kent State shootings, combining erudition and blinding insight in his depiction of Nixon as Melville's Ahab and Shakespeare's Richard III. In the '70s, America had voices like Gil Scott-Heron; now it has The Daily Show's Jon Stewart - and for all Stewart's established strengths, he ain't this funky.

White Hinterland are nothing if not adventurous. Their 2008 Dead Oceans debut, Phylactery Factory, served up nine tracks of eccentric jazz-flecked, home-spun dream-pop centred around Casey Dienel's piano playing and her enchanting vocal reveries. The follow-up consisted of Luniculaire, a French EP based around covers of material by Brigitte Fontaine, Serge Gainsbourg and Françoise Hardy. Now, having spent the last year absorbing minimalist beats and pure pop (tellingly, Dienel's favourite track of 2009 was Beyoncé's Halo and she has covered Justin Timberlake tunes), Casey and collaborator Shawn Creeden deliver a bold affair that eschews their previous organic approach in favour of an altogether more electronic direction. The effect is utterly intoxicating, tracks like Amsterdam, No Logic, and Cataract marrying an irresistibly chilled synth-pop edge to lo-fi spectral arrangements that sit somewhere between Kate Bush and Arthur Russell at their most accessible. And, as its title suggests (it's the Greek for "the perfect moment", or thereabouts) supremely timed to tie in with those resurrected '80s vibes we're bathing in right now...

In his 1995 kosmi-pedia Krautrocksampler, Julian Cope insists that all copies of this album should come with a warning sticker such is the transcendent, life-altering power of the music that lies within. Personally, I think it's always better to approach Schwingungen with no caution whatsoever, opening up to the full force of its three-track free-rock fuck-you. At a relatively breezy six minutes and 20 seconds, Light: Look at Your Sun is a deceptively welcoming opener, its smouldering blues drone reminiscent of The Doors at their most languid and epic (see Riders On The Storm). But vocal preacher John L is no crooning Jim Morrison. This guy is terrifying and even at his most reserved sounds like a tortured freak looking into the abyss ("We are all one", he intones, unsettlingly. "We are all one"). After the calm comes the storm, in the form of the 12-minute-plus Darkness: Flowers Must Die - a creation seemingly born on the burning slopes of some volcanic land. Another John L mantra signifies the start of a tribal groove that builds to a trepanning conclusion where blasts on the saxophone meet galactic guitar abandon under a shadow of unnerving electronic phasing. Unsurprisingly then, it's an ideal record to listen to on your way to work. Invest in the ritualistic rhythms of the 20-minute title track and your commute will become an altogether more rewarding experience. I guarantee it.

A decade on from punk's Year Zero, the movement's snot-caked Kulturkampfers had, by and large, scrubbed up and slinked back into the mainstream: the officer class to predictable roles in the media aristocracy, footsoldiers into a Mr Byrite Mcjobworld to a chorus of told-you-so sneers. Rubbing salt into the wounds were Sudden Sway - their own Residents-like secret-hipster mystique unblemished by vulgar success - with this tableau of crushed dreams and homogenised humanity, an episodic song-cycle about formerly flaming youth now content with an MFI Home Amusement Centre and a "Hunstanton tan" (one for the East Anglians out there), the horror flip of the '80s consumer fantasy. It was not the group's first, nor their weirdest art-pop gambit, having released a single in 1984 (The Traffic Tax Scheme) which incorporated a computer program and board game*, and having kicked off their inevitably brief tenure on Warner Bros with eight bafflingly different, simultaneously released versions of one single, Sing Song**, but it remains their most sustained and coherent long-player. Stealing some clothes from Ray Davies' underrated Kinks flop, Soap Opera, drawing from the same well of faux-slick indie-soul visited by Prefab Sprout and The Kane Gang, it will be too clever-clever, budget-production-thin or conceptually top-heavy for some (sometimes the Sway seem slightly too eager to parody Spandau Ballet) but mid-'80s indie explorers should not be without it. Intellectual ambition aside, it is a melodic treasure trove, testament to the purely musical skills of singer Mike McGuire and guitarist Simon Childs, with the sonic swoon of opener The Phoenix Family Protection Plan and the poignancy of the title track adding empathetic cushioning atop the contemptuous swipes at curry-vomming weekend warriors and Hush Puppy-shod enterprise culture boosters. Mostly, however, you're left to ponder how a record made in and for 1988 can speak so eloquently to Britain in post-crash 2010. "Should I let my feet do the walking / Upon an England the English made?" sings McGuire towards the record's close. "Sell our shirts / But save The Stock Exchange..." The Sudden Sway Anthology Box Set Release Campaign starts here.

*I have legendarily suave former MOJO Editor Paul Du Noyer to thank for my copy. Thanks, Paul.

**I own #3, but have a vague, Peel-based memory that #6 may have been best. Can readers help me out here?

A grunge devotee born into the wrong musical generation faces a conundrum: how to reimagine the euphoria of releases you didn't live through the first time around? Sadly for me, back when Smashing Pumpkins were at their peak, putting on my own shoes would have been regarded as a success. But great records live beyond their contemporary impact - they evolve with the times - and by the time I'd mastered laces and was ready to rock, Smashing Pumpkins' second album was waiting for me. Forged through intra-band chaos (singer-auteur Billy Corgan's nervous collapse, drummer Jimmy Chamberlin's heroin addiction, the end of bassist D'Arcy Wretsky and guitarist James Iha's romance) and crazed perfectionism (barring Chamberlin's volcanic drums, Corgan over-dubbed most of the instruments himself, layering as many as 100 tracks of guitar), it's an album of contrasts which, with its technical sophistication, psychedelic edge and heavy metal power, didn't quite fit '93's raggedy-ass grunge zeitgeist; and despite the record's commercial success (a good job, since production went $250,000 over budget) there were always slightly disparaging comparisons with the soon-to-immolate Nirvana. Seventeen years on, however, it has aged superbly, elegantly housing the wistful Luna as comfortably as the unforgiving adrenaline injection of Cherub Rock. And while Today and Disarm set tragic lyrics to majestic melodies, Rocket and Hummer sound like scenes from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. With its artful depth, vicious guitars and gentle lullabies, it's a testament to timeless rock values, so why is Siamese Dream not more treasured, more talked about today? Even in death, Billy Corgan probably has that blond-haired Seattle geezer to thank for that.

Watching clips of Evans hunched over his piano on YouTube underlines the impression of a somehow tragic figure. Everything great he ever did was sad or regretful, like those genius first notes of Kind Of Blue's So What or the Erik Satie-like clouds of elegance and dissonance of 1958's Peace Piece. By then, he'd taken up with the heroin, which is what hanging out with Miles Davis will do to your average classical piano-genius varsity quarterback. Just say no, kids.

Portrait In Jazz - Evans' fifth record as a band leader - gets you every which way. At its least great, it is merely brilliant, like the bit at 1.39 into Come Rain Or Come Shine where Evans seems to hit a bum note, likes it, goes back to it, and worries at it some more, like a hole he's just noticed in a favourite sweater.

But it's Evans' exploration of the album's ballads that fanfares his utter originality - there, in the troubling grace notes that unlock the melancholy fantasist at the core of Heyman & Young's When I Fall In Love, or in the way that Someday My Prince Will Come - even when it waxes upbeat - seems underscored by the suspicion that Bill's Prince will *never come. Contrast with the rictus jollity of Brubeck's Dave Digs Disney version, from two years previously, or that of Evans's witty and agile, but inevitably inferior replacement in Miles's band, Wynton Kelly (skip to 4.27, then 7.43), recorded two years later.

Davis wrote in his autobiography that "Bill had this quiet fire that I loved on piano. The way he approached it, the sound he got, was like crystal notes or sparkling water cascading down from some clear waterfall." But what makes Evans extra-extra-special is the way his playing drags you in and shares the vulnerability at its core. Oh, the humanity!

We couldn't fit this record into last month's MOJO Filter (although we welcomed Jamaica's venerable Jolly Boys back in issue 201) so Disc Of The Day steps in to right a wrong on behalf of the soulful oldies' latest dub plate, an addition to the annals of "it shouldn't work, but it does". Taking a bunch of classic rock songs - Passenger, Rehab, Hanging On The Telephone, I Fought The Law and so on - and having the Jolly Boys do them over in a mento stylee is a bold move. As the last remaining original mento group, they range in age between 71 and 84, play banjo, shaker, acoustic guitar and marumba box (bass version of the kalimba thumb piano), but it works beautifully. But after half a century in business, there's little left to intimidate them, and they totally take over the songs, shaping them into wonderfully-layered arrangements, and moving them into the dawn of ska with vivid Jamaican flavour. Then on top of that is the rich harmonising and rousing lead tenors that give the songs a new, wholly original vibrancy. In a word: fantastic.

While the violin seems to have largely faded from popularity as a jazz instrument, it nevertheless holds a long and distinguished place in the music's history. From the early ragtime and vaudeville era onwards violinists were a common component of many jazz and swing bands, with artists such as Joe Venuti and Stuff Smith enjoying considerable success in the '20s and '30s, while players such Ray Nance and Jean-Luc Ponty were able to significantly broaden the instrument's use and appeal to audiences in the post-bop and rock eras.

While not nearly as well known as his French contemporary Ponty, Texan-born violinist Michael White also played a significant part in ensuring the instrument's relevance and worth within the changing jazz scene of the '60s. As well as numerous appearances both on stage and in the studio with figures such as Pharoah Sanders and Joe Henderson, White began recording under his own name for Impulse in the early '70s. Recorded in February, 1973, The Land Of Spirit And Light is perhaps White's crowning achievement - an album of profound melodic and rhythmic scope that mixes the experimentalism of the avant-garde with the intensity of jazz-rock fusion, yet always manages to be inviting and uplifting.

From the stirring title suite to the sombre moods created by White and Cecil McBee's bowed bass on the closer Lament (Mankind), listeners are treated to an extraordinary aural trip. White's violin work throughout sounds as lyrical and perfectly suited to jazz as a trumpet, drawing out long evocative lines as well as rapid-fire melodies that give the already bubbling avant/fusion mix a thrilling classical hint. The 10-minute free-form canvas of Fatima's Garden draws the audience into a restless and intriguing mix of modal melodies and exotic percussion. Fiestica Domenical has a joyous Afro-Latin feel, before segueing into the hypnotic, Middle Eastern-flavoured O Ancient One, which features more haunting flute and clarinet from the legendary woodwind master Prince Lasha. In fact, every player here plays their proverbial butts off; percussionist Kenneth Nash is so good we don't miss a traditional drummer at all, Ed Kelly's piano is an often subtle but essential element throughout, and the bass work of Cecil McBee has to be heard to be believed - his nimble, elastic bass runs almost steal the show on several occasions.

After finally receiving an overdue CD reissue in 2005, here's an album that deserves much wider currency amongst fusion, avant-garde and spiritual jazz lovers.

The 27-year hangover that has lingered since the nadir of Marguerita Time, has seen the Quo legend tarnished further by fair-to-dire albums, the celebrity support of Corrie's Dad-rocker Les Battersby and the 'controversy' caused by Francis Rossi's decision to hack off his trademarked ponytail. In this light it's easy to forget that between the release of the career-defining Piledriver in January 1973 and the dawn of the '80s (which saw the release of faltering Never Too Late), as a hard rock band the Quo were unrivalled in the UK terms of popularity and unassailable in terms of productivity. In that time they released a remarkable run of 11 albums, all of which dented the Top 5 in the UK. September 1973's Hello!, their sixth studio effort and their first Number 1 album (deposing Slade's Sladest compilation at the top of the charts), underlines the evergreen appeal of their three-chord boogie wallop. Roll Over Lay Down, Forty Five Hundred Times and Caroline (their first UK Top 5 single) remain British rock classics on what is a definitive dandruff-liberating set whose appeal remains undimmed.

As well as its super-mellow yet zingy title tune, the debut LP by family singers The Free Design featured songs about umbrellas in the rain and their younger brother Woody playing football and climbing trees (later they'd cover the theme to Sesame Street). But if this sounds to you like a wilfully naïve soundtrack for pre-schoolers to do interpretative mime to, hold on. Coming out of Delevan, NY, the harmonising Dedrick brothers Chris and Bruce and their sister Sandy's beatific first LP is an impeccably wrought piece of summer of love vocal pop to soothe and beguile. They're not hippies (see Make The Madness Stop's advice to the freaks to "blow your mind but not completely", before adding sarkily, "Honesty and purity, beauty and sincerity... doesn't that sound corny?"), but they still condemn the greedhead omni-consumer with the scathing The Proper Ornaments. Elsewhere there are love songs, a baroque cover of Michelle and a slow saunter through Feelin' Groovy, all with near-perfect voices and arrangements that hover somewhere between jazz, folk and psych-lite. Six LPs and no hits later, they split in 1972, but would reunite for 2001's Cosmic Peekaboo when the proselytising efforts of Cornelius, Stereolab and others made them realise that some people were listening closely. And remember group leader and songwriter Chris Dedrick, who sadly died on August 6.

When Tom Waits guest edited MOJO 200 there was one piece he insisted needed to appear in the magazine: an interview with his hero Harry Belafonte. Singer, songwriter and producer extraordinaire Joe Henry was duly tasked with interviewing the great man, delivering an exemplary piece in the process. For the MOJO team, it was a journey of rediscovery into Belafonte's music, and this - his eighth album - proved territory well worth revisiting.

By 1958, Belafonte's glittering career - he was the first artist to sell a million records with 1956's landmark Calypso set - had seen him cut across genres and styles at will, taking in folk, country, spirituals, jazz as well as Caribbean-rooted music. Here, however, he found liberation in the blues.

Producer Ed Welker's skill ensured that covers of Leadbelly's Cotton Fields (subsequently a bop-blues live staple in Harry's set), Ray Charles's A Fool For You and Billie Holiday's God Bless The Child ("the greatest song ever!" enthused the interpreter in the album's sleevenotes) are stirring, warm and utterly exquisite. On release, Belafonte Sings The Blues was his lowest-charting LP to that point. Today this 10-track set sounds like a stone cold classic.

After three decades of fallout from the volcanic vom-spew of punk, the dust has settled and assimilated into culture as we know it, and the failures of the time can start to look like successes in the great scheme of things. Often derided for the solitary, no-good reason that it was produced by Flo & Eddie, Boston garage punk masters DMZ's lone major league offering deserves a second take in the here and now. Weaned from the same teats that fed the Sonics, the Stooges, the Chocolate Watchband and the New York Dolls, these masters of the form built the bridge between the mid-'60s and late-'70s garage aesthetic. Led into battle by Mono Mann aka Monoman aka Jeff Conolly (a wild shouter who gives Iggy run for his money in the raw power department) the band tear through the set with a delicious viciousness and jump right into the deep end with Mighty Idy, a furious Sonics-like pounder that always reminds me of the insanity of speeding late at night through Beantown's corkscrew traffic nightmare, Mass Ave. They ratchet up the energy levels with Bad Attitude, Don't Jump Me Mother and Destroyer, all self-explanatory signature-sound classics. They even pay tribute to their forefathers in punk with covers of The Sonics' Cinderella and The Wailers' Out Of Our Tree. So why's the rep so bad-to-nonexistent? Well, some folks thought Bowie screwed up Raw Power, so naturally Flo & Eddie had no business by the boards at this keg party. Me, I like the MainMan mix jus' fine, and I rock this platter whenever the world's gotta end. Perhaps you'll feel the same? Crack it open, give it a turn and feel the burn!

For most rock fans jazz remains a closed shop. For those looking for a way in, however, The Neil Cowley Trio offer the perfect entrée with this second album, whose sonic palette draws on Radiohead at their most pernicious and Keith Jarrett's concentrated piano pounding in equal measure. In truth, these reference points neglect to convey the sheer joy that so often courses through this well-paced 10-track affair. Moments of sweat-browed intensity (the Kid A infused opener His Nibs, the transfixing Dinosaur Die, the math-rocking Captain Backfire) are matched by light-hearted, spirited touches (the polka-skank of Ginger Sheep, the bumptious We Are Here To Make Plastic), and flights of neo-classical beauty (the swelling Synaesthesia Traffic). Such is the fluidity in evidence that pianist Cowley, double bassist Richard Sandler and drummer Evan Jenkins must be applauded for producing one of the freshest, most uplifting albums of recent times regardless of genre. A modern classic.

Punk warned me off superjam albums and I was too uptight for years to truly dig the loose-limbed vibeyness of Stephen Arthur Stills' joyous solo debut. Perhaps if SS had been sold me as, essentially, a soul man, I'd have bought it; listening to this record today I'm struck by his passion and grit, and the ease with which, say, the Isleys went on to adapt Love The One You With's anthem-to-expediency is suddenly (as the young people say) a no-brainer. Churchy organ and piano abound here, and not just on the Arif Mardin-arranged, self-consciously gospelized Church (Part Of Someone), on which Stills sounds every inch the substance-raddled seeker-of-redemption that history tells us he most certainly was. Jimi Hendrix plugs in and funks all over Old Times, Good Times - tragically he would be dead before Stephen Stills hit the shops - and Eric Clapton provides a similar service ("Courtesy of Robt. Stigwood Org"), albeit in a loucher vein, on Go Back Home; but porchfront solo blues Black Queen establishes Stills as no mean picker himself ("the performance is courtesy of Jose Cuervo Gold Label Tequila" say the sleeve credits, brazenly soliciting a free crate), as befits the multi-instrumental architect of CSN's 1969 debut. So why, good as it is, is this record now so rarely praised? Blame Neil Young, whose After The Goldrush trumped his erstwhile colleagues in the race for solo laurels, post Déja Vu. But blame Stills, too: a huge talent with an even bigger talent for alienating those around him (Google Stephen Stills+asshole to see what I mean). Give a dog a bad name, as the old people say.

There's little else that can deliver the goods like the crosscurrent betwixt soul, jazz and poetry. Toss in some warm funk if you like. It's a spot where you are free to be human for a while, if nothing else. Within this essential third stream Boscoe was born, like some meeting of souls between Sweet Sweetback's era Earth Wind & Fire, Les Stances A Sophie Art Ensemble Of Chicago and The Watts Prophets, ushering forth in total obscurity an album whose fruits have only recently reached a fraction of the audience it deserves thanks to the kind diggers at Numero Group. Starting off with the cautionary Writin' On The Wall, - bearing the warning, "if you can't read the writin' on the wall, goddamn you, goddamn us all!" - they heat up with the slow funk syncopation of He Keeps You (down, that is... he is The Man after all). Full flight velocity groove is attained in We Ain't Free and there's a great tender ballad, I'm What You Need, that's full of some of the most soulful tag team vocals that've ever fed my ears. Totally connecting, emotional, powerful jazz soul (as opposed to soul jazz). Thank God for Numero Group, or we'd have never gotten hip to its trip.

The fourth part of a trilogy is a non sequitur. Gong, however, have never been bound by the laws of logic; hence, 35 years on, the space-jazz collective elected to release the follow-up to their classic '70s triptych of Flying Teapot, Angel's Egg and You. The latter LPs housed leader Daevid Allen's Radio Gnome concept, observing man's self-destructive absurdity via whimsical, allegorical tales of Zero The Hero, Pot Head Pixies et al. With Gong veterans Steve Hillage and sax player Didier Malherbe (taking a day off from his invigorating jazz-fusion combo, Hadouk Trio) back in harness, 2032 echoes Gong's high watermarks of yore (The Gris Gris Girl and Portal are good examples). There's the odd moment when the material falls short in its quest for modernity (the cod Chili Pepper-styled rap-rock of How To Stay Alive, for instance, is a niggle) yet 2032 remains an engaging and suitably unhinged return by psychedelia's last true adventurers. Gong's renaissance continues at an impressive pace and their UK shows this month promise to freak us out all over again.

I remember putting Entertainment! on my 13th birthday wish-list because I'd read a review, in either Rolling Stone or the NME, that compared Andy Gill's guitar style to that of Jimi Hendrix. Come to think of it, the review probably didn't say that, did it. It most likely said Gill's playing was as revolutionary as Hendrix or the most innovative since Hendrix, or something like that. Either way, I had not read the review closely enough. And I was foolishly expecting a Jimi Hendrix album. Shocked is an understatement. Andy Gill's guitar does not sound like Jimi Hendrix's guitar. In place of the expected expansive, flowing, psychedelic space-blues I was sat there on my birthday listening to something nervous, claustrophobic, austere; an off-the-peg, drip-dry guitar sound, folded tightly into a cheap, cardboard suitcase, to be stowed under the bed. Dave Allen's bass rumbled like an Inter-City train rattling cheap foundations; Hugo Burnham's muffled drums thudded like angry fists on cheap partition walls. With Jon King hoarsely shouting his vocals, the magical illusion was complete: I was in some grey-walled Leeds bed-sit, telly on in the corner of the room, living next door to the local anarcho-syndicalist commune. Happy birthday. Time to blow out the candles.

Ironically, this modern grim world of nervous agitation and shouting opened up exciting new paths of musical exploration - Wire, Magazine, The Fall - and led to art books on Dada, John Heartfield and The Situationists, Barthes' A Lover's Discourse and Kafka's Metamorphosis ("And I feel like a beetle on its back"): the perfect recipe for the insufferable trying-too-hard teenager I was to become. Hendrix had been something to hide inside. Hearing Entertainment! I felt like I'd woken up.

Listened to again, this morning, Entertainment!'s rants about the corrupt politicians ("The last thing they'll ever do / Act in your interest"), the tarnished promises of advertising ("ideal love a new purchase") and the dangers of information overload ("This heaven gives me migraine") still speak to the disgruntled 43-year-old I am today. Its anger at the iniquities of modern capitalism has not dated. How incredible. How sad. Two steps forward. Six steps back.

I'm currently two-thirds of the way through Rob Young's Electric Eden and have therefore spent the last two weeks exclusively listening to British folk music. It has been brilliant and this collection of unreleased Fotheringay tracks has proved a real highlight. Sandy Denny, the rosy-cheeked songbird who played such a key part in Fairport Convention's foray into mainstream success, formed the band in 1969 with her future husband Trevor Lucas, but the slow-burning sales of their eponymous debut caused the group to split leaving the follow-up LP in tatters. 38 years later original guitarist Jerry Donahue finally breathed new life into this second album; a record that ties trad-folk arrangements to hearth-side ballads and country-rock rambles. Unsurprisingly, Denny provides the most sublime moments, her vocals sounding as impassioned and melancholic as ever. The anti-war polemic of John The Gun and brooding mysticism of Late November would soon appear on her solo debut, but these first takes sound free and unfettered. Elsewhere, Wild Mountain Thyme, with its "crystal fountains" and "blooming heather", is a trad-ballad refracted through Denny's wandering dreamer psyche, while Wanda Jackson's Silver Threads And Golden Needles is transported from the American Midwest to a sun-blushed glade deep in the English countryside. All are crisp, autumnal creations that have benefited from four decades of slow fermentation. It was worth the wait.

The first song starts with the sound of marching armies rendered in gunshots, with molar-filing synths and recordings of losing-it American soldiers in combat. But it's when a chunk of Lionel Ritchie's All Night Long shimmies on in that the extent of the conspiracy becomes clear. This is Paradise, a gallows-humoured audio-panorama of insurgency sampledelia and dance music, originating in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. It's fair to say it explores contradictory phenomena, and recklessly sets them beside and against eachother; across its ten songs there's religious extremism of every stripe, US election adverts, dialogue from smut films and possibly uncleared sample-warpings of Sonny & Cher, Born In The USA and, in a tune concerning Guantanamo Bay, The Gibson Brothers' Cuba (really pushing the boat out are God Is Dead the groovy G-Had, which presents the idea of religious war to Chic's Le Freak and Phil Collins' In The Air Tonight). Taking a wider view, 18-minute closer Going Out In Style cranks it up from gone-postal mall gunmen to suicide bombers and onto the prospect of planetary nuclear death that ends with Charlton Heston's "You blew it up!" speech from Planet Of The Apes and the musings of sundry eschatological nutjobs. You're not going to put this vinyl-only release on at the work Christmas bash, then, but as Giorgio Moroder-fan Foundation's motto runs, 'I Want You All To Hate Me So You Can Love Each Other'.

Recalling vocalist Damo Suzuki's debut appearance with Can, at the Blow Up disco in Munich, bassman Holger Czukay remembered the singer screaming at the audience so much that everybody left bar 60-odd gig-goers. In one version of the story, one of the remaining groovers was David Niven. Is it true? Listen to Tago Mago, named for a magical island off Ibiza, and you will believe. Seven songs that last an hour and ten minutes - or could it be years - it shimmers in spectrally with the foreboding Paperhouse. Damo's in lamenting mood, but then two minutes in the beats starts up. And what beats they are; Jaki Leibezeit is, no doubt, one of the most amazing drummers in all rock'n'roll (guitarist Michael Karoli described his rhythms as having "great cosmic coldness") and his megalithic grooves drive Tago Mago. Paperhouse segues straight into the weird clatter of the ghoulish, psychotic Mushroom, and then a mighty detonation heralds the backwards-tape lift-off of Oh Yeah (incidentally, this is where Mark E Smith borrowed some for The Fall's 1985 tribute I Am Damo Suzuki). After that we're into the molasses-wading, Madchester-twenty years too early morlock lope of Halleluhwah, which chops and changes and occupies a similar mighty space as Yoo Doo Right does on Can's debut Monster Movie. 18 minutes long and worth every moment, it chops and builds to a paroxysm of battlement-leaping lunacy before collapsing in exhaustion. Get through it and you're set for Aumgn's 17 occult minutes of acid mouth-music, sawing violins and chain rattling, and Peking O's 11.35 of wilderness wailing, cha-cha rhythms and speeded-up cartoon voices reminiscent of kids' TV fave Pingu (both of these monstrous pieces will, naturally, separate the mere downloaders from the true believers). Bringing the trip to its end, Bring Me Coffee Or Tea has the same sense of forlornness as the first song, half-suggesting Can's freak hit of the near future Spoon with a dash of The Doors' snake charming organ and wire guitars that can unsettle like a big furry moth suddenly divebombing your face from out of the dark. So was David Niven there at the Blow Up? He must have been!

When Jimmy Webb was asked in MOJO 201 how he felt about the multiple strange interpretations of his insoluble 1968 composition, you detected a certain annoyance at the fact that people couldn't quite decide on exactly what the song was about. "I've heard more stupid things," he said, when asked how he reacted to the idea that Wichita Lineman was about cocaine. "I got a letter from a couple from Texas, she said they listened to it every day - can you believe that? She asked why he had to get electrocuted at the end of the song. I got another letter from a jock, he was happy I'd written a song about football. But what was serious and really hurt was when it was said that it was about mainlining heroin. I had to do some PR to stop that." It's perhaps understandable that some songwriters would be peeved by their listeners' inability to pinpoint the core meanings in their work but Jimmy Webb, the man responsible for such epic-pop Gordian Knots as MacArthur Park and The Yard Went On Forever? Surely not. The enduring power and beauty inherent in Wichita Lineman is as much to do with its shrouded meaning and muzzy narrative, as it is in its perfect spectral execution.

Written and recorded in less than two days at the end of 1968, Wichita Lineman was always an incomplete narrative. Instructed by producer Al De Lory to write a "geographical" follow-up to his previous smash collaboration with Campbell, By The Time I Get To Phoenix, Webb drew on memories of driving through the boundless flatlands of northern Oklahoma, and the surreal spectacle of the lone telegraph workers, high up on the telephone poles. Writing the piece in just half an hour at the green baby grand in his LA home he was, crucially, never able to find words for the song's middle section. Campbell cut the track in under ninety minutes in Capitol's Studio A, with L.A.'s superior sessioners the Wrecking Crew, the gaps in Webb's narrative filled in later by De Lory's peculiar, sweeping string arrangements, Morse code like violin stabs and the humming electronic tremolo outro provided by Webb's Gulbranson organ.

So what remains unknown in Webb's narrative? Well who is the Wichita lineman? Is it the narrator, eerily addressing himself in the third person, or is it another telegraph worker competing for the affections of our "singing in the wires" beloved? It's a small matter but an important one, especially given the song ends with Campbell singing that "The Wichita lineman / Is still on the line". Are we to read that as an eternal state of loss, of longing, existential torpor or futility in the face of that eternally present 'other man'? In the process, Webb's refusal of the explicit brings extra layers of meaning to such lines such as "I know I need a small vacation but it don't look like rain / And if it snows that stretch down south won't ever stand the strain." We know that this is a man who won't (or possibly can't) speak in absolutes so what is he trying to say here? Is he just referencing the rigours of the job and his need for a holiday, or is he trying to convey something more, about his state of mental well-being? And what are we to make of De Lory's Morse code? Another hidden message?

Campbell's exquisitely weary delivery of these ambiguous lyrics is essential to their shifting meanings and this original version of Lineman - which reached Number 3 on the US charts in December 1968, selling over 700,000 copies - and remains the definitive interpretation. Other versions have shown that they may appreciate the song's ghostly melody but they're clueless in regards to the point of that veiled lyric. The normally excellent Cassandra Wilson, for example, royally ballses everything up. First she changes the lyric to "My man's a lineman for the country", which leads to "I hear him singing for the wires" and "my Wichita lineman is still on the line..." What in sod is all that about!? As soon as the woman knows that someone is listening in, where is the mystery, the spookiness, the loneliness and loss? Suddenly it's a song about a woman who's married to a man who listens in to her phonecalls when he's out at work, all with her consent. Then she truly buggers it all by singing "I know I need him more than want him / And I want him for all time". So it's you who needs him, Cass? So why is he the one pining for you, or doing whatever he's doing, out on the wire? Gibberish!

Willie Hutch gets similarly tangled up in knots, trying to decide who's who, and the unctuous Grammy Award-winning version by James Taylor, messes with the subtlety thanks to his slight changes (from "is still on the line" to "well he's still on the line") and odd, faint Jamaican diction and he, like R.E.M., can't resist vamping at the end, the repeated "still on the line" phrase now suggesting boredom ("He's still on the line!? Jeez!") rather than mystery or despair. Even Glen goes and screws up the ambiguity on a live 1968 version from The Smothers Brothers Show, singing "I'm the Wichita Lineman!" Next you'll be telling us who the Walrus is.

The amazing OC Smith, well he sounds like he doesn't care who the Wichita lineman is, as long as he's got a good Goddamn groove going but, the only other good version I can think of is Charles Stepney's and The Dells' 1969 medley of Wichita Lineman and By The Time I Get To Phoenix where Marvin Junior's baritone brings a barely veiled blue collar anger to the lyrics, keeps the ambiguity and, in melding the two songs makes you realise that Jimmy Webb's narrator could just be the same guy in both songs, who decides to take his "small vacation", a thousand miles west, in Phoenix, Arizona. Far enough away, and another thousand miles back to his home-town on the bay, in Galveston.

Long before Rivers Cuomo became a walking, talking parody of himself, Weezer made their name by extrapolating the best and worst elements of nerdiness (intelligence and humour and introverted self-loathing, respectively) to create a joyous celebration of geek culture. While their eponymous debut, better known as "The Blue Album", defined that role with the whimsical Buddy Holly, this second, darker, grungier, record delved more deeply Cuomo's warped and twisted psyche, focusing on his inability to deal with the fame that hit him like a Mack truck in 1994.

Laying out all of the singer's neuroses like dissection subjects, it begins with Tired Of Sex, an ennui-filled ode to meaningless rumpo - a pre-emptive antidote to Lou Bega's Mambo No. 5, perhaps? - before delving into ever more blackly comic territory. On Pink Triangle, Rivers laments the fact that the object of his affections is gay, wondering that "if everyone's a little queer, can't she be a little straight?" and Across The Sea is Cuomo's super-deranged reply to a letter he received from a Japanese schoolgirl fan. "I could never touch you," sings Cuomo. "I think it would be wrong." Yes, Rivers, I think it would.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, critics and fans were not ready for Rivers Cuomo: Freak-perv, and after Weezer finished touring Pinkerton, they went on hiatus for nearly four years. Some 14 years on, however, this boisterous, challenging record stands strong as a hyper-personal expression of one man's internal and artistic angst - not to mention his wonderfully curious and off-kilter sense of humour.

Reminiscing recently with a fellow Midlander about the rock venues of '80s Birmingham, I experienced a Proustian rush that time-tunnelled me back to a New Order show at Ladywood's Tower Ballroom, October 2, 1986. Supporting were a group that could only have been on day release from the special school, dressed with supreme disregard for any extant style code and playing some kind of clattering, diseased funk hybrid while a "dancer" gave it maximum Edvard Munch's The Scream. "Spread your bug, pass your bug, spread your germs," instructed singer Shaun Ryder (for it was he) in a chewy Manc bellow, a fisherman's hat crammed so low on his head that no eyes could be seen. A cold shiver ran up my spine and my brain flashed CATEGORY ERROR. The following April, I bought Happy Mondays' debut album and played it to the exclusion of all other records, hypnotised by its ugliness and seemingly unprecedented sound, kept cold and bare by producer John Cale at his transparent Modern Lovers/Horses/The Stooges best.

Listening back in 2010, Squirrel & G-Man... remains passing strange, although I can trace some of its DNA: Paul Ryder's Bootsy Collins basslines, guitarist Mark Day's autodidact Afro-inflections (check out the almost James-like Olive Oil) and drummer Gaz Whelan's ACR-indebted groove (in fact A Certain Ratio's supercool Don Johnson [far left] had given him lessons). Amid the scratchy, relentless junk-funk of Kuff Dam, Tart Tart, Russell and - perhaps strangest and best - Little Matchstick Owen, it's the sheer not-giving-a-f**kness of Shaun Ryder that most alarms and delights. Did he really just sing "Jesus is a c***"? Yes he did. Did he rip off Ob-La-Di-Ob-La-Da so heedlessly that one track, Desmond,had eventually to be excised in favour of the somewhat-out-of-place Twenty Four Hour Party People? I fear so. Through Ryder, a scary, drug-wibbled street world opens up, one where "thinking and sleeping and smoking and whoring" goes on uninhibitedly, unfiltered by any interest in how an external observer - or a society of observers - might perceive or judge the narrator. It's one of the strongest statements of identity in any art of the period, and an arm-punch of a reminder that if rock'n'roll can be this it can be anything, truly anything at all.

Few bands can have filled their songs with as much desperate fatalistic resignation and simmering anger as Portland, Oregon's Wipers, a fact that was not lost on Kurt Cobain (seen here covering D-7 from Wipers' debut album). Leader Greg Sage had a way with a minimalist repeato-riff-chuggin' melody, and even bent strings in a way that, at times, recalls Sonic Youth (I'm thinking When It's Over). Youth Of America, Wipers second full album, opens with one of Sage's catchiest songs, Taking Too Long, a tune full of little hypnotic repetitions, acoustic guitar, piano and a steady building tension. The rhythm section - drummer Brad Naish and bassist Brad Davison taking over from original members Sam Henry and Dave Koupal - is modestly mixed but offers effective support to Sage's dynamic fretwork, going into high gear for Pushing The Extreme and No Fair. It all ends with the nearly side-long anthemic title track, filled with heavily reverbed and delayed guitar and vocals. One can almost imagine an Alan Vega-fronted Hawkwind launching a call to arms to the disenchanted kids of the US. A fitting end to one of the best post-punk albums ever.

It's a national disgrace that the heirs to Britain's peerless tradition of heavy headrock - its Floyds, Zeps, Sabs and beyond - are to be found on foreign shores, and stage three of this Montreal group's ecstatic voyage rubs salt in the wound. More muscular, less ethereal than 07's ...Are The Dark Horse, it is no less exciting, with that signature ocean-of-echo drenching mountainous guitars and the choral counterpoint of Jace Lasek and spouse Olga Goreas's siren vocals. Central is Albatross: like the My Bloody Valentine of Isn't Anything buffeted by horns (3.19 will blow your head off). Less fraught, Light Up The Night promises wider acclamation with its sturdy classic-rock chassis and log-chopping riffs while closer The Lonely Moon sees their ship in calmer waters, edging into the sunset like departing elves. I've been rocking this hard since mid-February and it's just been nominated for the Polaris Music Prize, which is like the Mercury Prize, except Canadian, and nicer, and not sponsored by a world-f**king credit company and they tell you who the jury are, and... and... and I hope it wins it.

Houses Of The Holy bridges the gap between the two distinct phases of Led Zeppelin's lifespan. Sandwiched between the anthemic mysticism of IV and the eclectic swagger of Physical Graffiti, it is an album made by musicians who have been given a license to expand and explore. All of Zeppelin's core influences - heavy blues, celtic folk, cool exoticism, explosive rock'n'roll - are here, but it's the band's desire to take another massive leap forward that makes HOTH a record that shouldn't be overlooked. The variety of approaches may in part spring from the start-stop nature of the sessions. Recorded in London and at Mick Jagger's palatial home in Berkshire before being mixed in New York, the best songs stem from demos created by Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones. The latter's new obsession with one of the '70s instruments du jour, the Mellotron, gives the likes of The Rain Song and No Quarter a wintry, brooding feel that chimes perfectly with Plant's eerie messages; how could we forget that the "the dogs of doom are howling more"?

Opener The Song Remains The Same remains one of Page's greatest guitar triumphs. A nuclear blast of energy and orchestration harnessed by a hurricane of John Bonham drumming, it barely pauses for breath during its five-and-a-half minute duration and stands as Led Zeppelin's prog rock masterpiece. If the cod-reggae/funk of D'Yer Mak'er and The Crunge veer too far from Zep's ground zero for your liking, you can always get stuck into the monster riffs of Over The Hills And Far Away, Dancing Days and The Ocean. And then there's Hipgnosis' suitably otherworldly cover (featuring our Senior Editor's brother-in-law, fact fans!). Led Zeppelin stay heavy, produce beautiful folk melodies and get psychedelic. What's not to like?

Freedom never sounded quite so hair-raising as it does throughout the first ten minutes of Funkadelic's mind-frying second album. Ostensibly, its epic opener is Clinton and Co's argument for LSD-enabled liberation, but as scratchy electronic noises wriggle like black worms in your brain and a weird woman wails "the kingdom of heaven is within!" and Eddie Hazel's axe-mauling pans sickeningly from left to right, up and down and back again, it's clear that what's on offer is not the serene enlightenment promised by other acid-rock texts, but a celebration of anarchy, entropy and chaos. Good trip, bad trip: what's the difference, Funkadelic seem to say, when The Man has you by the short and curlies?

The rest of Free Your Mind... lurches wildly, like a drunk wading through a swamp, sometimes waving, sometimes drowning. The mix is bonkers - the group made the whole record on acid - but the groove impeccable, while the lyrics delineate a struggle between good shit and bad karma that peaks on the nasty blues-funk lope of Funky Dollar Bill. "You don't buy a life, you live a life," instructs rhythm guitarist Tawl Ross, noting that money makes junkies of us all while Bernie Worrell sloshes out a random piano solo that Les Dawson would surely have applauded. Then the dirty sex-fug of I Wanna Know If It's Good To You descends and we are made clean again.

Free Your Mind... ends aptly, as it begins, in a barmy freak-out. Eulogy And Light is Clinton's satirical prayer to the great god Mammon, our father "which art on Wall Street", but even by Clinton's freewheeling standards the blasphemy is daring and startling, and made more disorientating by anti-gospel vocal intercessions and woozy tape-manipulation. "Hysteria holds the room in sway," he declaims. "I back away, I run, I back away to hide / From what? From fear? The truth? The light? / Is truth the light?"

But here' s another question. What if you didn't stay away from the brown acid? What if you took it? All of it. And you liked it? You'd be George Clinton, and you'd be one fabulously freaked-out dude.

There is surely a Gender Studies dissertation in "Phobia Of Inadvertent Homosexual or Transsexual Encounters In 'Golden Age' Hip-Hop". Try that one on your prof next term. The paradigm, natch, is Tone Loc's 1989 pop-rap classic Funky Cold Medina ("I don't fool around with no Oscar Meyer wiener," Tone assured us, perhaps protesting too much). Something similar happens in The Pharcyde's rollicking Oh Shit, a litany of causes for consternation culminating in a date with a "Crenshaw cutie" that goes a bit Crying Game. "I got a funny feeling like something was real wrong," frets rapper Fatlip, "Looked at her shoes and her feets were real long."

Other West Coast rap groups of the time might have overreacted - one can imagine Ice Cube getting busy with some "gat"-based retribution - but this being The Pharcyde, there's nought but a shrug and a belly laugh. It's the font of their debut album's charm - a one-off full of good-humoured ensemble rhyming from 'Lip, SlimKid 3, and helium-shrill Imani, with warm jazzy breaks marshalled by producer Juan "J-Swift" Martinez - Coltrane and Herbie Mann slipping in alongside the then-regulation Donald Byrd and JBs. Single Passin Me By is the loping signifier of their otherness, an unusual rap single in its melancholy tribute to unrequited adoration, borne on the wistful organ from Quincy Jones' ace version of Summer In The City.

Less serious-minded than their East Coast cousins in the Native Tongues posse and prone to old-fashioned, super-stupid boasting (I'm That Type Of Nigga), The Pharcyde are sceptics, questioning Cali rap's glorification of weed (Pack The Pipe) and swiping at in-vogue "conscious" hip-hop in the intro to their most gloriously feckless tune: Ya Mama (as in "ya mama got a glass eye with a fish in it"). There's also room for an evolved pop at Uncle Tomming that's of a piece with Robert Townsend's brilliant late-'80s blaxploitation satire, Hollywood Shuffle.

A reminder of the sheer variety of West Coast rap styles extant on either side of 1990 (anyone for Del Tha Funkee Homosapien or Digital Underground?) it's worth going back to this bright-side flip of the skunked-out nihil-threat posed by the DJ Muggs/Cypress Hill/Funkdoobiest axis, ladyboy "action" notwithstanding.

For an artist with a career stretching back to the '60s, Fred Anderson has a profile so low as to be non-existent. Forsaking a life on the road to run his Chicago hot spot bar, Anderson received the shallow end of the hero-sub that is mainstream jazz music coverage. That you, Joe Average music listener, have been robbed of the singular joy of basking in the warm-as-life tones emitting from his tenor sax highlights the inequities of consumerist-driven publication policies. As one of the founders of the AACM, Fred should rate a beefy footnote in history at least, but judging by the pleasure to be had by bathing in his just-post-bop freefire output the consideration of a historical rewrite may be in order. This double disc outing on the always-interesting Eremite label captures the artist in his element in a major way. Recorded with the utmost attention to detail (atypical for a label as often interested in the sound of the room as the sound of the artist) it blazes and burns with a subtle intensity I've not known from a contemporary jazz recording in some while. Consisting of four long, self-titled tracks/movements spread across two discs (one on the first, the remaining on the latter; track IV is streamed here), with the amazing rhythmic backing of giants-in-their-own-right Parker and Drake, the only option available to humans is surrender. If you're going to listen to only one free jazz disc this aeon... well...

Rewatching DiG! recently confirmed two things in my mind. Firstly, that it remains a brilliant film (drugs, rock'n'roll, occasional violence, arrests, roller skates - what more do you want?). But perhaps more potent was the realisation that when the Brian Jonestown Massacre were good, they were really good. It all made me reach for this 2004 Best Of... a compilation that plots a warped path through the band's first two decades of '60s psych worship. Anton Newcombe - a man whose ground zero lies somewhere between Odessey & Oracle and Loveless - is a songwriting machine, writing and recording full albums in a single night. His best songs have always come when he's reined in the temptation to voyage too far into the cosmos. When Jokers Attack, Nevertheless and Straight Up & Down are economical, Byrds-esque rockers that pay homage without sounding dreary, while Prozac vs. Heroin (he really does wear his influences on his sleeve) is underpinned by the sort of mantric pulse you'd expect to find humming away in George Harrison's grotto. During these moments, his commitment to reawakening a bygone era is intoxicating. For Newcombe and his ever-revolving carousel of BJM personnel, the past is the present. This compilation proves that, for some people at least, that's no bad thing at all.

A beautiful slice of chunky Australian dinosaur rock that sounds way ahead and simultaneously behind its time. Predating the Stoner Rock movement, here we have a punky reductionist hard rock churning out the same stock that beasts such as St Vitus and The Obsessed would call their own, complete with guitar solos straight out of the SST catalog. Heck, the first time I heard 'em I could swear it was Boston area '70s throwback clown punks The Bags. Opening with the uptempo end-times boogie of Sunrise (Come My Way), peaking with the stretched out and improvisatory The Prophet and ending with the dark hard thrash of Shylock, it's an epic ride of dirt-writhing sun god ROCK, easily matched by its hideously humorous album cover depicting a genitalia-free ghoul holding a boulder phallus triumphantly overhead while molten lava flows from beneath the ass cheeks of the volcano. Reputedly their label told them they thought their music sounded better than contemporary Black Sabbath, who were grossing them considerably more income. Who are we to disagree?

Sat in the garden over the Glastonbury weekend, bare feet in the grass, and a pint of iced water by my side, I found myself transported back to a weird Romantic arcadia of ancient lore, the lost estate of "visionary music" as chronicled in Rob Young's Electric Eden, his magical exploration of transcendent 20th Century British 'folk' music. The book unearths many weird sonic theurgists, from the pagan melancholy of Celtic tone poets Arnold Bax, John Ireland and Peter Warlock to troubled prophets of rotting paradise, Comus, Spirogyra and Bill Fay; but on this sunny day I found myself most affected by Young's fresh retelling of the story behind Vashti Bunyan's dreamlike 1970 album debut. Like so many tales from the mythic margins of British folk, the making of Just Another Diamond Day is a fuzzy fable shrouded in mystery, half truths and legend, thanks in part to Bunyan's own reluctance to reveal all the personal details of a long-gone time. Fans of the delicate, filiform folk narratives on ...Diamond Day know something of the tale, of how one-time '60s pop singer Vashti, her companion Robert Lewis and her dog Blue, fled London for the Outer Hebrides in 1968, in an old green delivery wagon pulled by Bess the horse. Lewis kept a diary, Vashti wrote these songs. The full account of their hardships, misfortunes and travails should be left to the book but a few details are worth retelling. As Young rightly points out, Vashti's songs resemble lullabies, "charms to ward off danger and dread in the midst of adversity". Turns out that the majority of these jolly, delicate fairy tales were written, says Vashti, "in the worst bits of industrial England... as a way to keep the dream alive." Vashti recorded the songs with Joe Boyd in late '69, after just finding out she was pregnant. These talismanic lullabies were now being sung in a soft, intimate night-time hush, a comforting balm for both mother-to-be and the child inside. Playing the album again, with that added knowledge, transformed an already magical album into something unbearably poignant. I must admit that my eyes were a little damp.

After spending much of the '60s and '70s travelling around America and Europe in the employ of legends such as Sam Cooke, Charles Mingus and Art Blakey, 1979 found George Adams in Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg, recording a solo album for ECM Records, his only one with the famous German label.

Stylistically, Sound Suggestions is an artful blend of the many styles permeating jazz by the late-'70s. The opener Baba is a warm and unhurried mix of modal and freer post-bop elements, with all the horns given plenty of time to solo. Adams displays a strong but supple tenor sax sound, much like his contemporary Joe Henderson, with a deeply soulful sound on the drawn-out notes, but still wild and hot in his flurried runs. Producer Manfred Eicher has Adams on the right channel while German saxophonist Heinz Sauer's tenor is on the left, but their horns are very easy to distinguish; the latter has a deeper, more fragile tone that complements Adams' sound perfectly.

The second track, Adams' Imani's Dance is a masterful piece of advanced hard bop, with lovely repeated sections between the solos and a fabulous groove by drum legend Jack DeJohnette and bass maestro Dave Holland. Stay Informed is a thoughtful mid-tempo modal piece from Sauer, with some stately but energetic piano from Richard Beirach and some boldly emotive trumpet work from Kenny Wheeler before the horns go on an extended fusion workout through to the outro.

The bluesy jazz of Got Somethin' Good For You offers a terrific change-up, complete with powerfully gruff juke-joint vocals from Adams, shredded R&B solos and some very tight and groovy group horns. A Spire closes the set, an elegant ballad tempo piece from Wheeler which, once again, gives the horns lots of opportunities to create evocative melodies over DeJohnette's restless and wonderfully propulsive shuffles.

For those looking to find a lesser-known, slightly 'warmer'-hued gem amid the ECM jazz catalogue, Sound Suggestions is indeed just what its title promises.

Noel Ellis received his earliest musical education in the heat and culture of Trenchtown in Kingston, Jamaica. The son of "Godfather of Rocksteady" Alton Ellis, Noel was raised in the hectic heart of the Studio One's early '60s scene. "Most of the older musicians, them a know them from a small, yunno?" Noel told Kevin Howes in the liner notes to the 2006 Light In The Attic reissue, "Heptones pass by. All of them!" But in 1969, following a successful series of gigs, his father moved to Toronto. The family followed but when Alton left to pursue a solo career in England, Noel was left behind, in the charge of his aunt and uncle. Initially starved of reggae, the teenage Noel studied funk and disco and formed a soul harmony group The Disciples, with fellow Jamaican immigrant, Anthony Hibbert. But following the launch of Jerry Brown's reggae recording studio Summer Records, in Malton, Ontario, and the arrival of Studio One releases in Toronto's West Indian record shops, an underground reggae community grew up around Toronto, a basement party scene of jam sessions and sound systems, which Hibbert and Ellis Jr. became central to. Soon Summer Records was attracting Jamaican talent keen to exploit Brown's innovative heavy-bass dub techniques and thanks to Hibbert's connections, Noel was enlisted as a session vocalist. Encouraged by a visiting Jackie Mittoo, Ellis lent his oddly mournful vocals to Willi Williams, Bongo Gene and Mittoo's 'Rocking Universally' rhythm track. The album that followed was equally melancholy. Over booming bass, deep echo, tinkling piano and strangely insectoid guitar lines, Ellis sings with a ghostly, downcast sadness about Haile Selassie, Marcus Garvey, loneliness on the dancefloor and the Jamaica he left behind, his voice bounced and fading through the cavernous spaces of Brown's multi layered production. Standout track is the Hibbert-penned Memories, a doleful recalling of "youthful days... somewhere behind my eyes". Recorded on a shoestring, Noel Ellis now sounds like a record out of time, eschewing the digital sounds of the time for an astral, echoing sound that perfectly captures the emotional estrangement of spiritual outcasts stranded in a strange, cold, foreign city.

Everyone has a selection of sunny day records mentally filed for the purpose. Like anyone else I cannot resist the lure of Hums Of The Lovin Spoonful the minute the barometer begins to edge toward "fair", and there's a subset of sunshine pop that always goes well with linen and espadrilles. I'd add Red House Painters' controversial "happy album", Ocean Beach. Dividing fans upon release with its comparative dearth of wrist-slashing apocalyptica, it was - conceded Walken-faced mainman Mark Kozelek - the product of a leavened psyche, bathing in the glow of romance and the departure of certain demons.

Named for the epic, typically fog-bound strand that marks the Western edge of Kozelek's San Francisco stamping-ground, Ocean Beach swaps the electric drone-glower that wreathed the RHPs' brilliant but gloomy "Rollercoaster" and "Bridge" albums to twangle acoustics like the spiritual kin of Simon & Garfunkel, a lovestruck tone set by the beatific, waft of Summer Dress, but exquisitely countervailed by a hardwired long-vac melancholy that knows the finiteness of all things. "Quietly we sleep inside / Lost summers of my youth," intones Kozelek on the hypnotic, memory-hazed San Geronimo. "I spent them all with you."

As summer records go, it is more Seasons In The Sun than Agadoo, but where there is pain it is dulled by beauty and the music skips, as often as not, with that 59th St Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy) gait that makes the best of things, even unassuming South London oasis, Brockwell Park. I leave you, for once, with a DIY YouTube cover of the latter song, just because the contrast between unpromising context and luminous performance is so startling and moving. I'm sure Mark Kozelek would approve.

From 1987 on, speakers quaked to the sounds of Public Enemy, Eric B & Rakim, Coldcut and others using the 'Funky Drummer' break - Clyde Stubblefield's super-hypnotic percussive shuffle sampled from the 1969 James Brown tune of the same name. The previous year this funk-centric rarities selection had given non-crate diggers the chance to hear it in its original nine-minute glory. Selecting from the Godfather's output from 1969 to 1971, it's full of extreme tastiness; highlights include a piledriving, polished-up full version of Talkin' Loud & Sayin' Nothing and the opening 'what's wrong with being sexy' stomper It's A New Day; the songs were recorded with different groups, the latter with Mr Brown's soon-to-depart '60s band and the former with new blood the J.B's, but both exert the same churchy, polyrhythmic power to which resistance is useless (ex-band members have spoken of James Brown musically directing the band with bodily movements and vocal exultations, and in a strange way these songs exert a similarly physical effect on the listener). And don't forget veteran DJ Danny Krivits' bonus beats edit of Funky Drummer itself, which extends Clyde Stubblefield's original eight-bar breakdown into three minutes with transcendent drum nirvana the result.

Whenever we have one of those "which was the best year in rock" conversations in the MOJO office (yes, we are that sad) I always like to throw in a word for 1985. Assessed objectively, it doesn't have the revolutionary cachet of a 1968, or the staggering variety of a 1975, but it was a coming-of-age for me, musically speaking, and though I am prepared to concede, if bullied, that better records have been made than The Loft's Up The Hill & Down The Slope, I secretly wonder if they can be, really, so much better.

1985 was not a year great cultural forces clashed or musical movements coalesced. Yet Psychocandy, New Day Rising, This Nation's Saving Grace, Fables Of The Reconstruction, Meat Is Murder and Steve McQueen* remain a part of me in a way that, for all their genius, Revolver and Blonde On Blonde do not. 1985 was also the year of this, the beginning of a journey, dead ends included, into the great hinterland of music.

1985 begat, also, Rain Dogs, my induction into the cult of Tom Waits (I went back to Swordfishtrombones, and the rest). A brawl of junkshop instruments, arcane dance-steps, and picaresque environments, these were not songs but evocations of worlds dead and buried, or surviving in another dimension, shipmates of Conrad's Nostromo or The Flying Dutchman, ghosts. Waits performed Rain Dogs' black-comic, jazz-chaotic Cemetery Polka on British TV's greatest ever pop show, The Tube, on October 16, 1985, wheezing along with his harmonium, and beguiled all who witnessed him. I read somewhere, probably the NME, that Waits had had a tracheotomy and the surgeon had left swabs and instruments in his larynx. I think I half-believed it.

Of course I knew little of Brecht or dada then, and nothing of Ken Nordine, and though I see the connections now, Rain Dogs is richer than the sum of its outré influences. There is merely hilarious pantomime, yes, in 9th & Hennepin's beatnik rap ("all the donuts have names that sound like prostitutes") and Singapore's clanking, rolling shanty ("the captain is a one-armed dwarf"), but everywhere, too, there is the real dirt and savagery and sadness of the human condition springing out, like the contents of a suitcase that won't shut, the melancholy inside Gun Street Girl's bum travelogue, the bleakness of life's filthy toil seeping through Diamonds And Gold.

While Rain Dogs is essentially "only" Swordfishtrombones Part Deux, the songs are on a par, and it is more musically varied: veering between the Bernard Herrmann craziness of Midtown's instrumental logjam and the searing blues-rock of Big Black Mariah, abetted by Keith Richards' slashing, piratical guitar. Then there are the ballads: among Waits' most beautiful and most exquisitely accompanied, G.E. Smith's spidery guitar rococo on Downtown Train just one triumph, Time a moment of limpid prettiness at the record's centre, aping the role of My Head Is My Only House Unless It Rains within Captain Beefheart's Clear Spot, a comparable record in terms of shape and range, but surely not in terms of pure humanity.

I'm biased, of course. Clear Spot had the misfortune to emerge in 1972, Swordfishtrombones in 1983. But Rain Dogs came out in 1985, The Greatest Ever Year In Rock.

* ...and The Hounds Of Love, and Biograph, and Don't Stand Me Down, and Around The World In A Day, and Up On The Sun, and Low-Life, and Kings Of Rock, and Our Favourite Shop, and Rum, Sodomy & The Lash, and What Does Anything Mean? Basically, and This Is Big Audio Dynamite, and Love by The Cult, and even There Are Eight Million Stories by The June Brides.

When Steve Reid disembarked by boat for Daxaar's studio summit in the Senegalese capital Dakar, his drums fell into the water. Characteristically, the man whose rhythm-supplying CV included such worldshakers as James Brown, Fela Kuti and Miles Davis didn't miss a beat. In town to record with his "musical soul mate" Kieran Hebden of Four Tet and local players including guitarist Jimi Mbaye from Youssou N'Dour's band and trumpeter Roger Ongolo, proceedings open with a mellifluous welcome on voice and kora before the beats begin to roll. The subtly twisting Afro-jazz jams that follow - replete with Hebden's paint-splats of robo burble and U-Boat noise - are like conversations between the African continent and urban America; for example, poised between looseness and precision, Big G's Family cross-hatches the rhythms on a Melting Pot-era Booker T & The M.G's-like organ groove, while the malarial, 10 minute Dabronxxar comes on like a spy theme before Bitches Brew'ing it up into a sustained state of enjoyable suspense. Throughout, the drummer presides with ego-less playing, directing the musicians on to Exist In The Moment and make music that "sounds damned good" (see 3.17). Reid, who died in April, was 62 when he made this - an example to forward thinkers planning on not going quietly if ever there was one.

On the day after the MOJO Honours, with some delicate dispositions being nursed in the office, requests were made that we only listen to spiritual sounds, hushed, mollifying sides that would provide a soothing balm for sore heads. Thankfully, one of the albums we had in the office was this lost offering of dreamlike gospel funk. According to the good people at the Numero group label, Wartts was an aspiring songwriter from Greenville, MS who grew up singing in church choirs, moved to St Louis, Missouri, worked for the police department and sang in the Southern Wonders gospel group between 1961 and 1967. In 1983, while living in Bloomington, Illinois (a next-door neighbour and good friend of the late Donny Hathaway) Wartts formed the Gospel Storytellers, hoping to interest other artists in his heavily scriptural compositions.

"I wanted to do something different with gospel music and still make people feel good about life," says Wartts. "The truth is that all of the songs on that album were written for the express purpose of getting some major group to record them. I wanted to be a songwriter. However, no-one was interested. I mean we sent those songs out to so many people and couldn't get anyone to record a single one. Now, as life goes, shortly after we recorded the album I was approached by a representative for a major Rhythm and Blues star who is now deceased. But he was a big star. Everyone knows his name. He was interested in doing a gospel album. He liked what he heard and wanted me to write the material for him. I began to think that maybe the songs were pretty good."

The songs are good. Wartts holds hard to a then-outmoded JB's/Curtom sound, with funky drums, soft, wailing organ, golden harmonies and Oliver Sain guitarist Earl Wright laying down a minor-key chicken-scratch soul groove. Wartts burrows into the far corners of the Bible (The 37th Psalm, 25th verse; Luke, Chapter 16; John 14; the third chapter in the book of Acts), his sweet harmonies making these dusty, forbidding words sound like the mesmerizing entreaties of Curtis Mayfield. A silvery, euphoric sound, that is also effortlessly funky, it comes close to convincing you that the way of the Lord is a joyous one, not merely the mean choice between being a sinner or a winner.

"You will feel the need to vomit,"goes stern oration Sonic Attack. "You may be subject to fits of hysterical shouting - or laughter!" Yes, reactions to Hawkwind's 1973 live double-beast have been extreme. But just listen to it: hard, speeding, tranced-out riffing, with the thunderous Lemmy/Simon King rhythm section driving on roaring electronics and into-infinity lyrics - they all require listeners to psychically strap themselves in and prepare for trauma. Recorded live in Liverpool and London at performances of the ambitious, multi-media "space opera" that orator, poet and "swazzle" Robert Calvert said depicted the dreams of cryogenically frozen cosmonauts as they travel in deep space, these songs are extended and mutated; Nik Turner's Master Of The Universe is particularly monstrous and city-razing, while Brainstorm is nine minutes of squonking sax and relentless drumming, like Neu! or Jonathan Richman's Roadrunner forced into a cramped podule for a no-return mission to Uranus. For all the sci-fi, there is nothing so novel or exciting as meeting aliens here, and as Calvert's poetic interludes (see 10 Seconds Of Forever or The Black Corridor) make the vastness of space and disconnection from Earth actually seem real, it's possible to feel a shiver of just how terrifying real interstellar travel could be. Frustratingly, there's no footage of the live Space Ritual show, with its Barney Bubbles-designed set and the naked majesty of Amazonian frug-Valkyrie Stacia. So until it turns up, here are the clips for 45s Silver Machine and Urban Guerilla.

In the most recent MOJO profile of Peter Green, in November 2008, his debut solo album was dismissed in passing as "a mainly instrumental solo album that nobody bought." Look for more information on the All Music Guide and you'll find The End Of The Game described as "incoherent drivel from an immensely talented guitarist. Sad." I beg to differ. Released in June 1970, The End Of The Game arrived barely a month after Green's farewell to Fleetwood Mac, the LSD-infused 7" riff attack of The Green Manalishi, had hit the top ten. The album was, however, born in the trauma of the Mac's European tour earlier that year.

Arriving in Munich that March, the Mac were invited to a private LSD party with Rainer Langhans, Uschi Oberthe and members of the infamous High-Fish communards. Something happened to Green at the party that involved spiked drinks and an epic jam session in an underground studio/cellar, that "allowed me to go deeper into myself" and led to his formulation of a new kind of music. The dark, frayed rags of that new guise are what can be heard on The End Of The Game.

With Zoot Money on piano, Godfrey Maclean on percussion, Nick Buck on organ and Alex Dmochowski (aka Zappa sideman, Erroneous) on bass, Green can he heard either shredding his past (the faded white ghost of Albatross can be heard on the shimmering Timeless Time) or pushing ahead to a percussive, near-free jazz rock. Stand-outs include the hypnotic, nine-minute wah-wah jam of Bottoms Up and the deep, bassy riffs of Burnt Foot but the more elusive tracks like the powdery, crystalline Descending Scale, the ever-fading electric Miles jazz of Hidden Depth and the gloriously schizophrenic End Of The Game possess an elegiac mystery that's still impossible to fathom after multiple, late-night listens. Reviewed by Melody Maker as "certainly the most disturbing album release this year", The End Of The Game may not be an easy listen but it's certainly a rewarding one. Now someone just needs to reissue it, along with Green's two lost Reprise singles, Heavy Heart/No Way Out and Beasts Of Burden/Uganda Woman, recorded just before he jacked it all in and went to work at Mortlake cemetery, alongside the tomb of Sir Richard Burton.

Sometimes groups can lead to all manner of brain-heating conjecture. Like - the historian Geoffrey Of Monmouth said the first King of Britain was Brutus, and he slew the giants Gog and Magog. Earl Brutus, pub-marinated elders active throughout the Britpop bender, used to drink in the New Gog in Canning Town. Fully engage with Your Majesty...'s wide-eyed, cerebral/stupid prog-glam with synths, though, and heightened, possibly drunken significance becomes the norm. Sticking its head through the telly screen immediately is livid opener Navyhead, wherein a Bowie fan licensee comes out with lines like, I'm three times the woman you take to bed, ginger-man," as School's Out guitars rise and fall like the raging main. Elsewhere, On Me Not In Me brings synth mournfulness, fear of solitude and baroque rock freakout, while the mighty Life's Too Long conflates mortality and Artex (other mundane song conceits include reversible jackets, Harvester restaurants, Barrett houses and the M25). There is also melancholy in the careering chaos, as when Blind Date ends with a Kraftwerk-robot voice simply saying the word "England". What does it all mean? The blank pages inside this CD's booklet aren't giving anything away. Maybe it's something to do with the forcible conciliation of opposites. But what is certain is that the emanations of Earl Brutus continue to confound and amaze. And two years on from his untimely passing, remember their frontman Nick Sanderson.

Heldon grand fromage Richard Pinhas is France's great lost guitar hero: a left-wing intellectual who pioneered a fusion of Robert Fripp's acidic guitar tone with harsh kosmiche electronics. Hordes of great French musicians passed through Heldon's ranks, including many ex-Magma members, but Pinhas did much of his most powerful work with the monstrous rhythm section of Didier Batard (bass) and Francois Auger (drums). Interface sees this brilliant line-up at the peak of its powers, augmented by workaholic Patrick Gauthier (ex-Magma, at this time in Weidorje)'s banks of synthesisers. And what a glorious, acid-drenched, cyborg mess of a noise they make.

Side 1 opens with Les Soucoupes Volantes Vertes, all bubbling synths and relentlessly funky bass and drums. This recurs at several points throughout the side, the final version featuring some righteous axe-mangling from Pinhas. Jet Girl features synth drones and mournful guitars, a perfect marriage between early Tangerine Dream and '70s Crimson, while the incredible Bal-A-Fou builds from a slow-burning intro into a lyrical haze of Neu! at their most cheerful, underpinned by a warped gamelan funk that anticipates the direction Fripp himself would follow in the '80s.

However, none of this can quite prepare you for the epic title track, which swallows all of side two. A spaced-out epic that works its way through cavernous dub bass, howls of synthesiser noise and kinetic funk grooves, all the while topped off by Pinhas' unbelievable soloing. Striking the perfect balance between tortuous prog technique and proto-punk noise and chaos, he's the evil love child of Manuel Göttsching and Keith Levene. The rest of the band is right at his heels, the punishing groove held in place by the dextrous rhythm section and the harsh, alien synthesizers. The end result sounds like no-one else on earth.

Perhaps this very singularity harmed Heldon's chances of achieving more recognition. Too harsh and electronic for proggies, too complex and accomplished for punk or post-punk, Heldon just didn't make sense in the context of the day. That didn't stop them from putting out more great music - particularly this album's equally wondrous follow up, Stand By (though all Heldon albums are worth owning). With the benefit of hindsight, we can look back and see what an incredible hybrid Heldon were, and how unique, powerful and engrossing their music sounds today.

Nic Jones' story has tragedy in it. On February 26 1982 a road crash that almost killed him ended his career, and since then a handful of archival releases have served to suggest what might have been. But listen to Penguin Eggs, his last 'new' recording, and it's hard to have woeful thoughts. Bound by stories of seafaring and work that begin in England and end in Australia, Jones' melodic, rhythm-rich guitar playing and heartfelt voice are intimate, like discovering someone singing in a pub, and give songs of fortune, love and labour startling immediacy. There's a fatalism about it but not harshly so; cheerful-sounding death song The Drowned Lovers, for example, is like a Tarot card come alive, while the sub-zero grimness of life for whalers is softened by warmth and companionship in Harry Robinson's The Little Pot Stove. That said, the crushing of worldly endeavour in Paul Metser's Farewell To The Gold is painful, as the prospector who gave up home and family tells himself, "It's no use just sitting Lady Luck blaming, I'll pack up then I'll make the break clean." It's hard not to think of Jones' own predicament here. But if you have to leave one record, make it as good as Penguin Eggs. Oh, and Dylan did this album's Canadee-I-O too.

Devised by St Etienne's Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs (with liner notes by MOJO's soul sage, Lois Wilson), Complete A And B Sides is a Ronseal-simple concept that allows listeners to fully appreciate the compositional genius of Curtis Mayfield simply by illustrating the solid-gold fact that the man never wrote a single duff single during his time with the Impressions. Even the best compilations have some skipworthy tracks but from the eerie bolero incantations of 1961's Gypsy Woman to the anti-war soul valedictions of 1968's Don't Cry My Love, Complete A And B Sides is, to state the bleedin' obvious, all killer, no filler.

There are certainly highlights, but from the truly inspirational uplift of It's All Right ("When you wake up early in the morning/Feeling sad like so many of us do/Hum a little soul/And make life your goal/And you got to say it's alright!") to the twinkling romantic glow of I'm So Proud no songs ever expressed positive human warmth, love for your fellow man, and joyous inner spirituality better than the Impressions.

Sometimes Mayfield called it "soul", sometimes "faith", sometimes "moving" and "pushing" and "keeping on" but the message was always the same: that inside us all was the power for change. All of the tracks are imbued with Mayfield's trademark soaring melancholy, a quality that, as Lois Wilson points out in her liner notes, had much to do with the black key/F sharp tuning of Mayfield's guitar. Combined with that philosophy of positivity, the songs possess a peculiarly sweet sorrow, of strangely joyous farewell, as if Mayfield were passing on travel advice for a journey he knew he wouldn't be taking himself.

Its scuzzy, fuzzy guitars may be a world away from the AOR safe-haven most people now associate with R.E.M., but while Monster is certainly the most underrated album in the band's canon, it's also the most visceral, a deliberately conceived antidote to the sublime, subdued Automatic For The People, a slap in the face for those still mooning over Everybody Hurts. The closest Monster comes to looking back to its world-conquering predecessor is Strange Currencies, a tale of obsessive love told from a stalker's pov. The fabulous Tongue, sung by Stipe in a sad falsetto, is the album's only other soft spot, though the cheap sex of its lyrics ("Call my name / Here I come / Your last ditch lay / Will I never learn?") jars with its sweet melody, toying with its seeming innocence.

Elsewhere, the guitars and amps, delay and distortion pedals, are in full force. This is the problem for the album's detractors, at odds with its murky, sludgy, raw, creepy edge and the band's desire to "rock". But that coarseness is its very strength, propelling with fury, fervour and frustration the wistful white noise despondency of Let Me In (a haunting paean to the recently departed Kurt Cobain), the bitterness of Bang And Blame, the jagged energy of What's The Frequency, Kenneth?, the hapless, hopeless lust of Crush With Eyeliner, the snarling confusion of I Took Your Name. So crank it up, close your eyes and let the dirt soak into every pore. Then crank it up again.

Despite James Milton Campbell's diminutive moniker, there isn't much about the man's five-decade long recording career, or the esteem in which he is held by his fans, which could justifiably be called 'little'.

While working the Southern juke-joint circuit in his late teens Milton met roving band-leader and talent spotter Ike Turner, who convinced him to sign with Sun Records in Memphis in 1953. After a short and relatively unsuccessful period learning his craft at Sam Phillips' label, Milton's career would see him move, like many post-WW2 African-Americans, up the Mississippi River from the South towards St. Louis and Chicago, in search of greater financial and personal freedoms.

It was while he was working with radio and media entrepreneur Bob Lyons' Bobbin Records label in East St. Louis that Milton's potential was spotted by Leonard Chess. The legendary label boss quickly signed the young rising star to his Checker imprint in the Windy City and, for almost a decade from 1961, began releasing the singles and albums that would become some of the greatest and most successful Milton would ever produce.

From the very start of his Chess tenure, the smoking cocktail of blues and soul within his vocal chords and the deftness of his guitar playing would become Little Milton's trademarks. Too often lost these days in the shadows cast by his more famous contemporaries like B.B. King, Welcome To The Club represents a handy (though sadly out-of-print) 'Exhibit A' of just how accomplished a musician he truly was. His biggest crossover hits are here - from the radio-friendly groover We're Gonna Make It, to the magnificent cover of Little Willie John's Grits Ain't Groceries, and the cheerful morality lesson Who's Cheating Who? - but the wealth on offer here runs much deeper than these better-known gems. Indeed, it is the sheer quality of Milton's work through the '60s, and across the bulk of these 48 tracks, that will probably impress first-time listeners the most. Songs such as the infectious I Need Somebody (with a young Fontella Bass at the piano) and the brassy You Colored My Blues Bright (with future Earth, Wind & Fire star Maurice White on the drum stool) were surprisingly never released on albums before. Indeed, nuggets like the bluesy Sneaking Around and the steamy reading of the Sugar Pie DeSanto tune Moanin' For You Girl are unearthed for the first time on this collection.

A must for any soul or blues lover, Welcome To The Club shows just how important Little Milton really was - important enough to tell a national audience that Things Go Better With Coke, anyway.

Yes, Lord Sutch, Black Sabbath, The Cramps and plenty more had mixed music and scary films before them, but it was Northampton's Bauhaus who were present when the Gothic Horror tendency in rock'n'roll was birthed. Glam-Bowie fans on post-punk with future Maxell cassette ad star Pete Murphy declaiming actorly at the front, their ghoulishness-with-backbone debut was a tasty mix of the serious and the daft; see how the tribalistic title track makes reference to both the Labyrinth of Greek legend and sorting out index cards (Murphy was working at a printing firm at the time) in a breakneck song about being bored, or the exuberantly demonic Stigmata Martyr, where Murphy channels The Exorcist and gets in hysterics as Daniel Ash's guitars scrape and clang and bassist David J plays four notes, evilly. It all, surely, relates to that regional condition of tedium and the self-generated imaginative escape from it, and the LP's best enjoyed with a side order of debut 12" Bela Lugosi's Dead, the band's spectral tribute to the oft-married Hungarian actor who famously played Count Dracula. Bela's most famous line in the 1931 film that made him synonymous with the role: "Listen to them. Children of the night - what music they make."

"Peter Hammill's great," John Lydon told Tommy Vance on Capital Radio in July 1977, "A true original. I've just liked him for years... I'm damn sure Bowie copied a lot out of that geezer. The credit he deserves, just has not been given to him. I love all his stuff." Vance then played the driving, wailing sneer of Nobody's Business from 1975's Nadir's Big Chance, of which Lydon beamed, "'Nobody's Business'. That's it. That's really good. It's about punks. He didn't mean it to be, but it's true, [sings] 'You're nobody's, nobody's business'." Sandwiched between the brain-blistering musique concrète of 1974's In Camera and the self-flagellation and despair of 1977's end-of-the affair masterpiece, Over, Nadir's Big Chance saw Hammill adopting the persona of his whispering alter-ego Rikki Nadir. According to the eerily prescient sleevenotes, Nadir was an "anarchic presence", a Stratocaster-wielding creator of "distorted three chord wonders [and] beefy punk songs". The title track, Nobody's Business and Birthday Special are brilliantly prophetic in their nihilistic whine, sounding eerily similar to Magazine or X-Ray Spex, thanks to Nadir/Hammill's camp sneer and the aggressive wailing of David Jackson's sax. But the Ballardian ballads like Airport and The Institute of Mental Health, Burning are, if anything, even better, possessing a mood of creeping sci-fi threat that pulls at the frayed edges of Nadir's cold-war (in)sanity. Never as oppressively operatic as the extremes of VDGG, this might be the best way in for those hoping to connect with the disconcerting sci-fi brain of this most peculiar man.

Hearing an expressive, truthful soul singer such as Knight grappling with disco, synths and the unmalleable plinky-plonk preferences of 1980s studio sound provides a masterclass in how a singer adapts to the limitations of the music's terrain. In disco, the parameters of the music generally demanded either an anonymous, less engaging voice that blended in with the overall essence of the track - a exercise in teamwork - or it forced greater invention from the most gifted lead singers in order to invest the music with a power and conviction that lifted the melody and arrangement beyond the insistent tramlines of its thudding 4/4 rhythm. This is the basis of all imperishable soul records. Consequently, a weight of synths that might crush singers less confident of their command of a song is no barrier to Gladys across these three albums. In particular, her ebullience makes Visions a very "up" album from the effervescence of opener When You're Far Away through Save The Overtime (For Me) to Oh La De Da, co-written by Sam Dees and not to be confused with the similarly titled song by The Staple Singers.

Produced by various teams but half the tracks bearing the imprint of Gladys and her brother Bubba with Dees, the album also boasts ballads that are more positive than lachrymose (gorgeous lead and harmonies on Heaven Sent, grandstanding on Hero). A pleasure to rediscover, but not actually a surprise, bearing in mind the identity of the singer.

The way-too-early passing of this generation's American Primitive folk guitar master Jack Rose continues to send shockwaves throughout the underground music community, particularly since the release of his posthumous masterpiece Luck In The Valley. The trail he blazed from post-Dead C noise guitar to Theater Of Eternal Music drone psych to post Fahey/Basho/Old Weird America master was singular and deep. No other recording he plays on stands so very much at the crossroads as this, which could practically be credited to Jack Rose & Pelt; the creative leap in Jack's technique emerges far more assertively than on any previous Pelt recording. Consisting of three long tracks of a rich dronescape with the band jamming on a plethora of exotic instrumentation (yes, I think I hear sitars) overlaid with the exquisite picking of Jack, you could easily find yourself drifting downstream as these tracks ebb and flow unlike any others in the collective output of the artists involved. Truly a special moment in a brief career full of them.

The irritating fact was that Robert Forster and Grant McLennan hadn't had any hits to cash in on when they reformed The Go-Betweens (original lifetime: 1977-1989) in 2000. But such prosaic concerns disappear when faced with the almost perfect Oceans Apart. The two co-writers didn't change the dynamic that had sustained them through their first phase; they sing the songs they're most suited to, with Forster the edgier, somehow amused intellect to McLennan's more serious and mysterious heart. Though the melodies and lyrics are always finessed, McLennan excels first; the folky, longing Finding You sees him thinking on a former friend and somehow communicating with them through a song, while the quietly devastating Boundary Rider is a middle-aged variant on the group's earlier, childhood classic Cattle And Cane. Forster gets his say later; Darlinghurst Years is a wry memoir of his teenage self in all its brilliance and ludicrousness (a lot of what makes this album so rewarding is its articulation of how the past can rise up unbidden and still seem real) while The Mountains Near Delray is a beatific, Australian C&W return to their Brisbane hometurf. That said, there really, honestly isn't a duff track here, which makes Grant McLennan's sudden death four years ago even more lamentable.

"Scottish friction, Scottish fiction" recites Caledonia's poet laureate Edwin Morgan, as if he couldn't hear the wall of guitars that raged behind him. But whether he could or couldn't, Morgan closes and summarises Idlewild's finest hour in four simple words. Released in 2002, the Edinburgh quintet's fourth album is torn between its folk roots and post-punk routes, between the traditional narratives of the band's homeland and the modern pressures it bears. The distorted adrenaline rush of A Modern Way Of Letting Go jars with the soft confessional of Live In A Hiding Place, but in a way that exaggerates both. The former is a remnant of their chaotic past - all broken amps, shouty vocals and riotous shows - while the latter is a modern folk song that flows so naturally it could have been around for centuries.

The band met at a student party in Auld Reekie in 1995, drawn together by their love of R.E.M., Sonic Youth and Pavement. By 2002, however, they were finding inspiration closer to home, retreating to the Scottish Highlands to write the tracks. But the Big Country patriotism is offset by a sense of unease. The opening track, You Held The World In Your Arms, asks "When you're secure, do you feel much safer? / When days never change and it's three years later," and the album's admixture of fear of change and its acceptance is crystallised on its elegant, emotional closer, Remote Part/Scottish Fiction. During its climax neither singer Roddy Woomble nor guest Edwin Morgan raise their voices. They don't need to: the chills that hit you last long after the final piano chord is smashed out.

Like so many musicians of his generation, Neil Young spent the best part of the 1980s striving to reinvent and rejuvenate. The result was a run of albums (Trans, Everybody's Rockin' and This Note's For You among them) that confounded the majority of his fans. Happily, the end of the decade saw the ever-restless Ontarion retrieve his trusty 'Old Black' Les Paul and blast his amp stack back up to 10. This refocused period of creative energy began with Eldorado (1989) and Freedom (also 1989), before crystallising on Ragged Glory's electrical storm of primitive guitar rock. With Crazy Horse and all their garage band grit reinstalled for the first time in 10 years, RG is an album that demands to be heard at a punishing level of volume. I've been lucky enough to see Young twice over the past few years and on both occasions many of the standout tracks came from this album. None more so than the 10-minute-plus Love And Only Love, a song that begins with close-to-two-minutes of two-chord axe-grind and harmonic pinching that's repeated in the equally dirge-y (and equally long) Love To Burn. But for every minor key thrash, there's a pretty melody. The choruses of Over And Over, the Dylan-esque Days That Used To Be and the call-to-arms finale of Mother Earth are all driven by the Neil Young who gave us After The Gold Rush and Harvest. Still, Ragged Glory is all about that lurking passion for full-on noise. Within a year Nirvana and Pearl Jam would be taking their own feedback-soaked albums into the Top 10 while Young would once again return to his harmonica and acoustic guitar. He's never rocked harder than he did here.

Yes, most of the songs are on the first real Bowie LP, and they're all on its deluxe edition released earlier this year. But it's still worth revisiting this budget comp of his Deram-era songs, recorded when manager Ken Pitt thought he was grooming the new Tommy Steele. Decca's The World Of... series, remember, also included such special interest comps as The World Of Kenneth Williams, The World Of Reginald Dixon and The World Of World War One (in 1995, World Of Morrissey paid homage) - and into this starched, unswingingly British milieu come similarly-minded songs like Rubber Band and Little Bombardier, tunes with oboes, tubas and references to 1912, some enunciated Anthony Newley-style and whimsy'd up in maudlin sad-clown-with-Lord-Kitchener-muzzie fashion. Elsewhere there are easier signposts to the later Bowie; music hall jape She's Got Medals depicts a male impersonator deserting from the army, while The London Boys is a queasy rumination on the mid-'60s mod underbelly (remarkably, he was only 19 when he wrote it). The singer re-recorded the song plus this collection's louche cabaret folk tune Let Me Sleep Beside You, the Buddhism-crazed Silly Boy Blue and the impassioned In The Heat Of The Morning for inclusion on the unreleased Toy LP in 2001. Proof that these songs were always more than ways to kill time before the regular hits started piling on in the '70s.

A decade into their career and Hawkwind had already survived both prog and punk. Now they saw their audience buoyed by New Wave Of British Heavy Metal fans who'd discovered the group through the success of their former bass player Lemmy, now leading Motörhead and lionised by the new metal hordes. Hence, Hawkwind once again found themselves regarded as the forerunners of a scene they had nothing or very little to do with. Nevertheless, their renewed appeal led to a triumphant winter tour in 1979 - captured on the invigorating Live Seventy Nine set, released on the Bronze label. The latter proved that the band could survive the departure of troubled frontman Robert Calvert and that their new line-up - which now featured ex-Gong man Tim Blake on synths as well as guitarist Huw Lloyd-Langton and bassist Harvey Bainbridge alongside leader Dave Brock - appeared set to usher in the third phase in the band's tumultuous career.

Replacing drummer Simon King with the legendary Cream drummer, Ginger Baker, the re-energised five-piece laid down nine tracks during the summer of 1980 at London's Roundhouse Studios. Some of the tracks - such as Motorway City - harked back to the band's controversial recent past as Hawklords (a name change enforced by contractual wrangles and general dissatisfaction), but while the band's previous studio release, PXR5, had been little more than a jumble of random material, Levitation itself offered a fresh, re-focused vision of where Hawkwind were heading.

The opening title track crackles with intent and energy, fuelled by Brock's trademarked cyber-riffs and Lloyd-Langton's clear, stinging lead work, the latter being a feature throughout this nine-track affair. While the album boasted a newly refined sound (recorded, as it was, using then-groundbreaking digital techonology), thematically it nodded to the band's past (The 5Th Second Of Forever alluded to Calvert's 1972 poem, Tenth Second Of Forever) while Hawkwind's continued sci-fi influence manifested itself on the closing track on Side One, World Of Tiers - inspired by US author Philip José Farmer's series of novels.

Released in October 1980, Levitation crashed into the UK Top 30, and confirmed Hawkwind's enduring appeal. Latterly, the album has been reissued by the good people at Esoteric records via the Hawk-specific Atomhenge subsidiary. Their expanded three CD set (limited to 3000 copies) also features additional demos from the pre-Levitation Hawklords-era (the gargleblasting Valium 10 being particularly fine), as well as an entire live show recorded at Lewisham Odeon on December 18, 1980, and featuring a guest appearance by author/acolyte Michael Moorcock. Writing as someone who, as an impressionable teen, attended the same said show, it is easy to be overcome by the Proustian rush of it all. Three decades after Levitation's release, however, it is hard not to believe that Hawkwind's very aesthetic presented fans and listeners with a design for life that was truly alternative. Remarkably, they still do.

Hawkwind play the MOJO Honours List launch at HMV, 150 Oxford Street, London, tonight [May 4] from 6.30pm. Admission is free.

The way my CDs are arrayed at home, I disproportionately favour acts beginning with F, M and W. It's a simple matter of geography. They're at eye level, pretty much, obviating the stepladder I need to access the As, mid-Gs and latter Ps. This makes most weeks a good week for Fleetwood Mac, Funkadelic and Robert Forster. And Fugazi, who have blown through my April like a divine wind. This, their third album, saw the DC quartet stretching out, their viscerally powerful guitars undercut by aching, mournful melodies and buffeted by the superb split-personality co-vocal attack of Ian MacKaye (growly, dogmatic, redbrick sociology lecturer) and Guy Picciotto (hysterical, somehow feminine, like one big exposed nerve). An earlier, 1992, Steve Albini-produced version (you can hear bootlegs, if you must) was deep-sixed - one can only imagine the bad-vibe simmer of conflicting control-freakery at those sessions - before Fugazi regrouped in their native Washington with trusted Ted Niceley behind the knobs, and while a rawer, more "present" Fugazi is theoretically what we could have had, the sonic scale of the DC versh offers enveloping depths, adding oceanic ebb and flow to the supreme Lally-Canty rhythm section. In truth, it would tempt the Gods to ask for something better. There can be fewer more exciting ends to a rock song about US imperialism than the anthemic "cha-cha-cha-cha-champion!" exeunt of Smallpox Champion, nor a more beautiful rock instrumental than Sweet And Low, while 23 Beats Off is right up there with Slint's Breadcrumb Trail and Bitch Magnet's Americruiser in the pantheon of post-hardcore psycho-slowies. The intensity that pours off this record, the sheer blatant need for the music to exist, is a lesson to all. Do you care as much as Fugazi? Does anyone? Can anyone?

A cult hero of the first water, Denim's Lawrence has faced an uphill struggle in his quest for fame. Cruelly, he lost his hair at a young age. In 1986 an NME front cover for his band Felt was aborted at the last minute in favour of an all-black affair devoted to 'YOUTH SUICIDE'. In 2000, a proposed appearance on Ant & Dec's TV show dressed as Mozart riding about in a dodgem (his vehicle at the time was called Go-Kart Mozart) playing a song called We're Selfish And Lazy And Greedy did not come to pass. But in September 1997, this bad luck reached its apex when stomp-and-singalong chart contender Summer Smash was pulled from the airwaves after Princess Diana met her end in a Paris underpass. Maybe there was too much wishful thinking in such Autotuned lyrics as "I think I'm gonna come straight in at Number 1 and stay there all summer". There's more familiar fare elsewhere though: Sun's Out recalls a teenage holiday to Paignton with hapless, sighing pathos, while an instrumental Cajun synth-squelch through Terry Dactyl & The Dinosaurs' novelty hit Seaside Shuffle would be alarmingly right for a Tartrazine-OD kids' party. In the end, Lawrence's wish to jump on a podium and dance with Baby Spice on Top Of The Pops would not be realised, but he's still out there, and his beyond-unique works continue to offer extraordinary VFM.

When I first came to London I was obsessed with the history and mythology of the London Underground. I tracked down films set in or around the tube system, visited abandoned stations, read up on the lost lines, and even bought myself a little self-published monograph that informed me of the correct places to board the train in order to arrive by the most convenient exit point (It's now an iPhone "app", apparently). London-based songwriter and electronic composer Oliver Cherer similarly haunted by the ghosts of subterranean train travel and has released this beautifully-packaged release on the Second Language boutique label (founded by Martin Holm, Glen Johnson, and MOJO's own David Sheppard). Ghost Stations (Geisterbahnhöfe in German) refers to the abandoned metro stations of London and Berlin, Leslie Green's blood-red terracotta mansions cut loose at various points during the 20th century and the stations of the German capital, terminated in the no-mans-land between East and West during the Cold War.

A requiem for the dead souls that passed through these dusty terminals, built around actual field recordings from the U-bahn and London Underground, the music on Ghost Stations is beautiful, eerie and ominous, stalled midway between states of calm dream and uncanny disquietude. Track one, the London journey, takes us from the echoing ballroom grandeur of Down Street through the doomy cavernous melodies, cimbalon espionage and dark organ chimes of York Road, The British Museum and Brompton Road before we arrive at North End/Bull & Bush (the sad drift of music hall melodies) and the chilly breeze and ghostly whisperings of The Strand. The Berlin section is yet more beautiful and sinister, a freezing Checkpoint Charlie jazz suite of mournful trumpet, wheezing accordion, Bill Evans piano, short wave radio and burbling electronics, seemingly based around The Rolling Stones' She's A Rainbow. Beautifully packaged with miniatures of old tube maps and train tickets Ghost Stations is a perfect possible future for mail-order music: a hand-crafted time capsule of beauty, loss and decay.

Clocking in two seconds shy of 74 minutes, Modest Mouse's second album is the Issaquah band's quintessential one: a rambling, rambunctious and unsteady long-distance drive through the heart of America. Aided by Eric Judy, Jeremiah Green and Dan Gallucci - this was nine years before celebrity guitarist du jour Johnny Marr joined the band - frontman Isaac Brock sneers, shouts and sighs his way through sad shopping malls (the "soon to be junkyards"), parking lots and trailer parks, all populated by oddball characters for whom the American dream has become more of a nightmare. From the delightfully ramshackle seven-minute opener, Teeth Like God's Shoeshine, through to the almost sentimental, existential Styrofoam Boots/It's Nice On Ice, Alright, Brock's incisive lyrics and the band's distinctive, capricious sound capture broken people gleaning "short love with a long divorce", penniless reprobates Doin' The Cockroach and, for good-humoured measure, "two one-eyed dogs... looking at stereos". A fan of contradictions, Brock's lyrics have never been more paradoxical than on this album, and, indeed, the album itself is a paradox. For while Modest Mouse's America is an urban and emotional dystopia, it's also a source of riotous celebration. Even the sombre refrain of Polar Opposites - "I'm trying to drink away the part of the day that I cannot sleep away" - is uttered with a sense of defiance, an understanding that, yes, things are f___ed up, but you can still try to have a good time. It's an uneasy, unrefined listen, overlong and occasionally overbearing, but it's those very imperfections which bring to life this snapshot of troubled, turbulent life in the USA.

Blowing across the mouth of a pop bottle to get that spooky "whoooooo" noise is a favourite with kids of all ages, but Herbie Hancock wasn't too grand to make it the jumping-off point for '73's radical jungle-boogiefication of his instant 1962 classic Watermelon Man. 70 this week, Hancock is owed more than almost any other living jazz musician, a trailblazer in almost every post-hard-bop sub-genre, and Head Hunters is the underlining of his genius for sophistication and simplicity, his return to the Afro-funk source after a period of stratospheric journeying. Chameleon sets the scene, with Hancock's stanky Clavinet making it clear we ain't in Kansas (or Chicago, or New York) anymore, although the light-filled Fender Rhodes solo that comes after 8.30-ish builds a bridge with the leader's tenure as piano man with Miles Davis's Second Great Quintet, where he filled Bill Evans's boots with nary a quiver. Above all, enjoy the nasty, swampy groove - a mélange of Harvey Mason's skippety-bip drums, Bill Summers' Puckish percussion support and bassist Paul Jackson's threatening lope. Stevie Wonder and Sly Stone are benchmarks, the latter inspiring track 3, Sly, and indeed it's Head Hunters' tethering to soul that has been its preservation, and it remains fusion music that works for those turned off by the high-intensity blowing of Lifetime, Return To Forever and their ilk. Hancock's snobbery-free journey through music would embrace the shimmering, vocodered disco of Sunlight (home of the still-exquisite I Thought It Was You) and the aggressive electro ground-breaking of Rockit, while '07's excellent River: The Joni Letters featured Hancock once more thinking outside the box, but he was never, ever, quite this funky again.

Although the MOJO team are all tucked up in bed by 10pm these days, reading our Somerset Maugham novels and sipping our Ovaltine Original there was a time when we partied largely (is that the correct term?) like the best of them. There are many tales oft told in the office of our normally together staff taking too many Anadin Liquifast at three-day festivals and declaring Level 42 to be the best band ever but listening to the 12" version of this track on the Victoria line the other morning I was reminded of how I spent the eve of the new millennium, actually dancing, with thousands of others, in one of the crumbling sound stages at the old Gainsborough studios, and announcing to complete strangers that it was undoubtedly the best thing I'd ever heard, ever. Part of the responsibility must be placed at the feet of the DJ for that part of the evening, Saint Etienne's Pete Wiggs. I vaguely remember he'd previously played some Chairman Of The Board and maybe even Pam, by Crazy Elephant but this was the track of the evening. Produced by Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers for flop movie, Soup For One, Why (no question mark, Strokes fans) is one of those great club tracks that feels like it could and should go on forever. Riding on an hypnotically simple piano hook and hissing drum machine rhythm its genius is bound up in the way Simon's twin refrains ("Why does your love hurt so much" and "Ladidadida") continually swap places with each other, bouncing back and forth like piano and drums, a call-and-response chorus between Grief Stage One and Acceptance And Hope, two halves of one big romantic heartbreak. It couldn't have got much better. Then, for the last record of the evening, they played this! I walked home from Hoxton to Finsbury Park. Best night ever!

Charlie Gillett's untimely departure had us reeling off the ways this uncommon broadcaster had made our lives better, and here's another. MOJO writer David Hutcheon noted in his online tribute how Gillett hated iPods, preferring to soak up the sounds of whatever locality he was in, and this brilliant compilation is a product of that geo-sociological sensitivity - a record that simply reeks of New Orleans, from the insouciant roll of Archibald's compendious Stack O Lee and the lachrymose lurch of Bobby Bland's heavenly-toned St James Infirmary. More so even than the excellent New York, Los Angeles and Chicago volumes that accompanied it, this is a paean to a homogenous musical community, and all these tunes are, although different, somehow the same, with a fonky stutter in their step and a shared conviction that we're here for a good time, not a long time. Highlights in this vein include Willie Tee's sprightly, amoral Thank You John ("Now it's all right for you to go out all night / But when he spreads that bread, be sure he spreads it right") and the late Bobby Charles' distinctly unheartbroken No Use Knocking, and it is perhaps another tribute to Gillett that he even finds a G Love & Special Sauce tune I can get behind: the slurring, twitching Bye Bye Baby. No NO compilation could claim definitive status - the story is too big, wide and tall, and there's no King Oliver or Lil' Wayne in Gillett's mix. But if 44 irresistible invitations to loucheness, programmed with all the skill of a lifelong DJ, is all you demand, this will never disappoint.

As we move further from the idyllic ambient ideal of calm futurism envisaged by Brian Eno on 1978's Music For Airports, alert to the harsh realisation that modern "public transport hubs" are now sites of anti-terrorist dislocation, constant shuffling and horrible metallic noise, it's only right that someone should have had the genius idea to produce a Music For Real Airports. That someone is Ken Downie of "intelligent techno" pioneers Black Dog Productions. Now working with Richard and Martin Dust of Dust Science Recordings, Downie has allowed his Black Dog to mutate into a brooding beast of post-Orwellian threat. Based on 200 hours of field recordings from actual terminals Music For Real Airports begins, naturally, with a track called M1, a sullen droning cloud on the borderland of tweeting nature and urban hum, before we're welcomed "to East Midlands Airport" on Terminal EMA, an insistent dreamlike ticking punctuated by distant buzz and echo. From the repetitive swipe and mournful chorale of Passport Control, to the arctic harmonic gloom of Wait Behind This Line it soon becomes apparent that The Black Dog are all about the dead hours of abstract waiting that occupy our airport time, as opposed to, say, the free tots of Lagavulin at World Of Whiskies and a quick browse around Waterstones. And while they may lay the existential weltschmerz on a bit thick at times (one track is entitled DISinformation Desk [sic] while a brilliant welt of Metal On Metal clatter is called Strip Light Hate) but by the time we've drifted through the ghostly dub sadness and sombre digital repetitions of Sleep Deprivation (Pts. 1 and 2), and awoke to the echoing Korg melancholy of Business Car Park 9 one thing is undeniable: the next time I fly I may still be hoping for Brian Eno, but I'll be grimly resigned to The Black Dog.

In An Aeroplane Over The Sea is Mangum's pomegranate -- the intricate fruit of his psychological labours, closeted or otherwise. Loosely based on recurring dreams about a Jewish Family during WWII, and often yielding lyrics and sounds that defy immediate comprehension, it starts accessibly enough with The King of Carrot Flowers Part 1, a tale of adolescent rites ("as we would lay and learn what each other's bodies were for") and domestic misery ("your mom would stick a fork right into daddy's shoulder") backed with fetching guitar and accordion. The title track is Magnum's version of a love song carried on acoustic strums, confronting you with unnerving lyrics like "I would push my fingers through your mouth to make those muscles move that made your voice so smooth and sweet", and tones which sound like the whimpering call of a killer whale. Album highpoint Holland, 1945 is Mangum's devastatingly beautiful tribute to the holocaust and his supposed muse, Anne Frank, the singer noting the "indentions in the sheets where their bodies once moved" while an overdriven guitar and horn arrangement waxes ironically upbeat.

It's baroque stuff, employing a whole circus of instruments as arcane as Mangum's lyrics: the flugelhorn, Wandering Genie organ, zanzithophone, Uilleann pipes, and bowed banjo, and surely, the oughties influx of old-timey instrumentation into US indie-rock started here. In The Aeroplane Over The Sea may sometimes seem a little overwrought, but there is something in Mangum's off-tune, emotively-drenched voice that we can all understand. And even if it makes little sense at first, he assures us "I will shout until they know what I mean."

Half Man Half Biscuit's cheap but dead funny debut Back In The DHSS (1985) is surely one of the essential British indie records. So think of the dismay felt by their admirers in secondary schools, regional vinyl outlets, pubs and other places where deadpan, punky ribbing of Bob Todd, Precious Mackenzie and Peggy Mount was appreciated when motivating brain Nigel Blackwell called a halt in 1986, fearing that the band were becoming too successful. Thankfully they returned in 1991 with this album, named for some players for football team Barnstoneworth United from the 1979 Ripping Yarns episode Golden Gordon, and with a scene from said programme on the cover. Within were better-polished guitar group sounds, and a sense that Blackwell had spent the intervening four years honing his lyrics of everyday surrealism, strikingly monikered sportspersons and light entertainers, and other pop-cultural esoterica (the de-coding of which offered hours of enjoyable bewilderment in the days before the Internet). Consequently you get the sublime line "Sign on you crazy diamond" in bittersweet love/ cycling fantasia A Lilac Harry Quinn, shout-outs to Kendo Nagasaki and Flintlock on Everything's A.O.R., and, on Let's Not, a partial revisiting of Back In The DHSS's I Hate Nerys Hughes with a possibly disparaging reference to Carla Lane. The band have carried on since with no noticeable commercial peaks or troughs but have made eight more albums that fans know will hit the spot - what a model of creative sustainability.

Ry-o-philes could spend days arguing the toss over which of Cooder's early-to-mid-'70s albums is truly his greatest. In truth, there's case for both his second and third sets, Into The Purple Valley and Boomer's Story, from February and November '72 respectively. 1974's Paradise And Lunch is more polished but no less satisfying. But maybe Chicken Skin Music edges it thanks to the added aura of Cooder's own guitar heroes, the larger-than-life Hawaiian slack-key duo of Gabby Pahinui and Atta Isaacs. Cooder hooked up with the pair to record CSM's languorous version of Hank Snow's Yellow Roses and mischievous instrumental, Chloe, and paid their islands further tribute by welding Blind Alfred Reed's old time classic Always Lift Him Up to Hawaiian gospel song Kanaka Wai Wai. It's all brilliantly indicative of Cooder's ability to amalgamate seemingly diverging streams of music, an impression bolstered by a cover of Stand By Me reinterpreted with campfire warmth and served with a Tex-Mex twist courtesy of accordion player Flaco Jiménez's swirling backing. The closing waltz through Goodnight Irene provides the perfect final bow. "For me, this album reaches levels of real understanding and mutuality in music," says Cooder in the sleeve notes, setting a tone for many more of his intriguing musical immersions.

Few people who grew up outside of Australia, and in particular Melbourne's expansive suburban sprawl in the 1970s, are likely to be familiar with the social phenomenon known as the Sharpies. Easily recognised by their distinctive skinhead-with-tails haircuts, colourful knitted tops, tight jeans and cuban-heeled shoes, the Sharpies represented a distinctively Melburnian take on the disaffected and bored urban youth looking to make a mark on their world, or at least have a good time drinking, dancing, fighting and shagging (not necessarily in that order). And yet the band most often associated with the Sharpies - and at the time, often accused of inciting the violence surrounding the Sharpie subculture - were a group of ardent and avowed pacifists.

In 1972, singer and lead guitarist Lobby Loyde was already a veteran of the Aussie music scene when he joined forces with guitarist Bobsy Millar, bass player John Miglans and drummer Trevor Young to form the Coloured Balls. Mixing the classic rock'n'roll and R&B they had grown up on with the more progressive musical elements of the early-'70s, the Coloured Balls created a unique, often ferocious sound that belied their peaceful personalities. "The Coloured Balls were the greatest bunch of hippies that ever crawled," Loyde states in his notes. "They were really gentle guys, but on stage we let it go and spat out all the venom we had... that was our release."

With the help of producer Ian Miller, Ball Power captured the band's musical force without sacrificing its commercial potential, reaching the Top 20 in the Australian charts. Opening track Flash is a perfect taste of what's to come, with hard-driving riffs and a shout-along chorus. The raw rush of Mama Don't You Get Me Wrong and Won't You Make Up Your Mind follow in quick succession, the latter a frenetic sub-two-minute explosion of proto-punk that deserves much wider acclaim. The dirty blues of Something New and B.P.R. showcase the band's road-honed tightness, while the first half of Human Being features a monstrous riff that eventually gives way to some more meditative guitar work, highlighting Loyde's virtuosity and growing songwriting sophistication. This is made even clearer on Side B of the original album, where the crowd-pleasing rock of Whole Lotta Shakin' and Hey! What's Your Name give way to the epic That's What Mama Said, a 10-minute, pounding slab of freaked-out rock'n'roll featuring Loyde on foot-controlled Theremin.

The recent Aztec reissue adds a clutch of revealing pre-Ball Power singles, displaying all the elements that would crystallize so fully on their debut LP. The inspired inclusion of the live track GOD (short for Guitar Overdose) from the band's legendary appearance at the Sunbury Festival in early '73 rounds out a stunning portrait of a band which, while little known outside the Antipodes, has left a legacy to Australian music which is still keenly felt today.

First a warning: not everything about this 1974 WLIR radio session is brilliant. Big Star ride in off the back of Radio City - their second album, destined to be another commercial letdown - and are breaking in a new bassist, John Lightman, following the departure of Andy Hummel. Perhaps as a result, the ensemble performances of the band's rockers, September Gurls especially, are curiously disconnected, the joins painfully visible under Alex Chilton's too-quiet guitar. After five tunes in this vein a reluctant Chilton is buttonholed by DJ Jim Cameron for an interview that will have other duel-scarred Chilton-interrogators cringing in recognition. As if enveloped by a shroud of disillusionment, Chilton is asked to recall his teenage days in The Box Tops. "Pretty scummy," remembers Chilton. "...About as scummy as now."

Yet what follows is as exquisite a four-track run as I can think of on any rock album. With Lightman and drummer Jody Stephens on a break, Chilton pours all his weariness and sensitivity into solo acoustic versions of The Ballad Of El Goodo, Thirteen, I'm In Love With A Girl and Loudon Wainwright's Motel Blues, each more heartbreaking than the last. Goodo's intimations of autobiography - "I've been trying hard against unbelievable odds" - are starkly haloed, Thirteen's volatile mix of innocence and obsession poignantly present in Chilton's lonely voice: "Won't you tell your Dad, Get off my back / Tell him what we said 'bout Paint It Black". Motel Blues is, perversely, most revealing of all: a vignette of existence on the road lent vivid reality, with its final, desperate plea to a young groupie - "Come up to my Motel room and... save my life" - somehow utterly believable and utterly sad. At 23, this was Chilton's life. It was all that he'd known, and he didn't like it one bit.

This was always the most troubling thing about Chilton. He was too burned, too early, and Big Star's subsequent cult status arrived too late to convince him that there was any worth in it. The one time I interviewed him, in 1994, his reticence to discuss, or even acknowledge Big Star, made me assume he was f___ing with me. But I now understand what I should have known then: that it wasn't about me, it was about him. Was he ever happy? More than ever now, I hope so.

When MOJO staff first started writing Discs Of The Day back in November 2007 this was intended to be my first choice. I brought into the office, stuck it next to the computer and promptly wrote about this instead. Now, as MOJO prepares to move office and I clear my desk of dust balls, blank tapes and a disturbing excess of fluorescent marker pens there it is again, under a file of BBC Radiophonic Workshop CDs; and so, after much prevarication, here goes...

Recorded at Bearsville Studio and Turtle Creek Barn, Woodstock, New York, in 2000, White Pepper finds the demon brothers Gene and Dean Ween (aka Pennsylvania autodidacts Aaron Freeman and Michael Melchiondo Jr.), casting aside the thermocline prog sickness of 1997's The Mollusk and finally opening shop on their myriad teenage musical influences, presenting a phatasmagoria of '70s rock and pop protein, marbled with Ween's trademark bacteria and pathogens. Much was made at the time of Ween's "attempts" to write pop hits on White Pepper, unaware that this was the Boognish gameplan made manifest: Sandoz acid in the water-cooler of American FM radio. Opening track Exactly Where I'm At is the album's manifesto laid bare - "Let's begin with the past in front/and all the things you really don't care about now" - a reclamation of soft-rock flotsam that just happens to sound like Steely Dan's Showbiz Kids processed through a rusty Soviet vocoder. So while the clogged-sink vocals and metallic emetic guitar solos were still there, alongside a sick-brained Jimmy Buffett love song to Bananas And Blow they're punctuated by such eerie pop interludes as Even If You Don't - a latex McCartney mask disfigured by meth-head chemical dependency - and Back To Basom, Karen Carpenter laid low by high-grade Floydian numbness. The juxtaposition is everything, infection uppermost, so that even the gorgeous Badfinger/Wilburys sunlight of Stay Forever (one of the great, straight-ahead love songs of the last ten years) is warped by its proximity to a fat-tongued Phil Lynott jazz deification of a garbage-eating beach groupie called Pandy Fackler. It's a model that the group have stuck to with subsequent scattershot releases but this is the pinnacle, Sgt. Pepper lysergic conceptuals split asunder by sprawling White Album eclecticism; hey, White/Pepper. Of course. Duh!

I was still climbing trees, skipping stones, and scabbing up my knees when Wilco released their debut album in 1995, but I wasn't too young to swallow its dose of magical moonshine genius. After the break-up of Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy's Uncle Tupelo the previous year, Tweedy stole the scrappier side of the partnership and gave us A.M., which emerged as a blithe combo of loose, Stonesy rocking and bona fide back-porch balladry. It was a time when the ghost of Gram Parsons and influence of an aging Merle Haggard presided over the rise of the rhythm, rock, and country blend we now call Americana. And though Wilco's sound has become more experimental and labyrinthine, A.M. retains a kind of cracker-barrel perfection that can't be touched. There's the raw, foot-stomping rock of Casino Queen -- a track punctuated by Max Johnston's fiddle and the raucous shouts of recording hoopla. That's Not The Issue is a banjo hoedown worthy of a Western bandit chase, and then there are those heartfelt lyrics of loss and love that remind you of Tweedy's honest-to-goodness poeticism. Box Full Of Letters' "I just can't find the time to write my mind the way I want it to read" remains one of the best darn excuses a man could use on a woman, and a DUI licence suspension was never confessed so poignantly as on Passenger Side ("Should've been the driver, could've been the one, I should've been your lover..."). Wilco and I have been through a lot in the last 15 years (although only Wilco made a film about it) but A.M. is a reminder that there is something beautiful about beginnings.

Dillinger's signature tune Cokane In My Brain has been covered by such disparate musical forces as Ian Brown, The Mars Volta and Die Toten Hosen - proof if it was needed that the man christened Lester Bullocks was worth his shout-out on The Clash's White Man In Hammersmith Palais. Given the name of the famous American bankrobber by Lee Perry, who was producing him at the time, Dillinger effortlessly re-voices songs recorded at Channel One studios by Gregory Isaacs, The Mighty Diamonds and others with humour and seriousness where necessary. In the former category, the dubbed-up, brass-scything Race Day jocularly imagines a day betting on horses at the Caymanas Park track in St Catherine, while, in Buckingham Palace, the singer airs anti-establishment credentials by blazing up his "chalice" in the queen's gaff and burning down the Vatican. Somewhere in the middle is the aforementioned and very grooving anti-drug tune Cokane In My Brain - what heights of schizoid psychosis must the narrator be roving in, to free-associate a two-way conversation with himself about how "a knife, a fork, a bottle and a cork, that's the way we spell New York"? Elsewhere, Natty Kick Like Lightning is a martial arts/football mash-up that aims to (what else) make Babylon fall and set Dread free, and Crankface sees pal Trinity stop by on a version of The Spinners' It's A Shame, wherein Dillinger sympathises with an attractive woman who cannot cook. The CB200, meanwhile, was the Honda motorbike that was useful for circumventing traffic jams in Kingston. Now, who's dancing? This guy.

Alternating lead vocalists during the course of a song, or indeed a verse, was not the sole domain of The Temptations or Sly & The Family Stone. It was a device frequently used to thrilling effect in the gospel and doo-wop of the '50s and featured in the performances of many '60s acts, notably the under-rated and these days somewhat forgotten soul group The Dramatics, who were one of that rare breed - a hit vocal group on Stax/Volt who weren't The Staple Singers.

The Dramatics began in Detroit in the early '60s as The Dynamics, recorded for Wingate and Sport and, in 1969, by which time they'd been renamed, signed with the Memphis label. First single Your Love Was Strange flopped despite William Howard's David Ruffin-style roar, but two years later producer Tony Hester perfectly harnessed the group's talents. Get Up And Get Down starts Whatcha See Is Whatcha Get in a straight 4/4 dance tempo, but Hester's expansive string and horn charts and prominent guitar riff matches the work of his contemporary, Thom Bell. The title track, by contrast, is set at a gentler midtempo with a lilting Latin undertow courtesy of congas, maracas and clonking claves, and has a plainspoken message of taking love, indeed people, at face-value, delivered with beautifully interwoven vocal colours. But the pièce de résistance is In The Rain. The sound of thunderclaps, wind and a sudden rain shower give way to atmospheric guitar and Ron Banks' sweet and delicate falsetto, shining through the tears and rain.

It's not a flawless album - Hot Pants In The Summertime and Gimme Some Good Soul are as predictable as their titles - but the Tony Hester/Dramatics marriage seemed made in heaven. Sadly, Hester had another mistress - drugs - which meant he certainly knew what he was writing about on The Dramatics' second album, A Dramatic Experience, where the melodramatic The Devil Is Dope, Jim, What's Wrong With Him, Hey You! Get Off My Mountain and Beware Of The Man (With The Candy In His Hand) maintain a powerful anti-drug thread.

Hester took a bullet through the front of the head during a robbery on Detroit's East Side in late 1980, dead at the age of 34; Ron Banks happily lived a fuller life. He died of a heart attack on March 4 at the age of 58.

Yuppie types in the early '80s liked Heaven 17's debut for its aspirational, smell-of-money ambience, corporate presentation and songs called Play To Win, Penthouse And Pavement and - best of all - Let's All Make A Bomb. Band member Martyn Ware was dismayed when greedheads complimented him on how well he'd encapsulated their schtick - when all the while the group were satirising monetarism and the Reagan/ Thatcher fantasy f*ck-y'all that went with it. Having split from The Human League, Ware and co-conspirator Ian Craig Marsh had recruited sonorous Glenn Gregory and got busy while their former bandmate Phil Oakey was making '81's pop masterpiece Dare in the same studio at the same time - and Penthouse And Pavement probably suffered from the latter album's world-crunching success. But here, with the megapowered slapbass of young John Wilson to the fore, soul, funk and electronic influences mix on gleefully subversive songs - see the title track's anti-work message, the Dr Strangelove-like nuclear war tune Let's All Make A Bombs or the religion-baiting We're Going To Live For A Very Long Time - and its potency as early-'80s documentary and enduring pop statement is clear. The 2006 expanded version adds Kraftwerk-y 45 I'm Your Money and its B-side, a screwy cover of Buzzcocks' Are Everything, while March 2010 saw Gregory and Ware (Craig Marsh has gone AWOL) playing the album in its entirety. Maybe the now-greying city boys will get it, finally.

Sometimes the man and the voice just don't seem to match. For a softly-spoken, self-styled loner with a predilection for clean-living and hard graft, CCR howler John Fogerty still managed to razor through some of the densest R&B of the late '60s. This album - the second of three Creedence LPs released in 1969 - marks Fogerty's move from Bay Area choogler to hit song architect. Its predecessor, Bayou Country, saw the band break free from the San Francisco underground, shunning psych-tinged boogie-blues for heavier, funky cuts that drew on Fogerty's library of '50s rock'n'roll favourites. Green River saw them take things even further. Joni Mitchell may have been imploring the Woodstock thousands to get "back to the garden", but, by the summer of '69, Fogerty was ahead of the game. The title track's "I can hear the bullfrog callin' me, home / Wonder if my rope's still hangin' to the tree" and Commotion's "Backed up on the freeway, backed up in the church / Everywhere you look there's a frown, frown" clearly set out his agenda for a simpler way of life, a message that's reflected in the music. From the buoyant, ever-rolling Bad Moon Rising and Cross-Tie Walker to southern ballad Wrote A Song For Everyone and paean to escape Lodi, these songs are chiseled from the recording room walls at Sun Studios. They remain compelling in their economy and, thanks to Doug Clifford, Stu Cook and the Fogerty brothers, unflinchingly badass.

When East End publican's son Matt Johnson released his UK Number 71 single This Is The Day - a gospel-tinged rumination on lost time and how money can't buy it back - he'd reached the grand old age of 21. The song's melodious singability and mood of fraught introspection set the tone for his first album as The The. Rhythms and tunes are robust and infectious, with afro-drums and synth pop flourishes, but the songs find their narrators stuck in tight spots in varying stages of self-loathing (examples: being covered in leaves hiding in someone's garden; tied to a chair in the desert; and, best of all, "floating down a tunnel in a little wooden box" on the title song). There is a fascination - explored on the red-eyed Uncertain Smile - with the love affair gone wrong, and a certain relish for self-abasement, as on housebound lunatic song The Sinking Feeling, when he declares he's "a symptom of the moral decay that's gnawing at the heart of this country". The LP hit Number 27 in Britain and Johnson would go on to more toxic diagnoses of the world's ills with '86's Infected LP, and later worked with his old pal Johnny Marr to plumb further depths of isolation on Mindbomb and Dusk. He's been most recently heard of doing the soundtrack to British serial killer movie Tony, directed by his brother Gerard - though others might prefer to remember him via this fresh but twisted music that's pop enough (oh, the irony!) to soundtrack adverts for M&Ms.

The CD above is not exactly the copy I'm reviewing from. That would be Butterfly Entertainment's Music Club release, The Very Best Of The Chi-Lites, a 1991 purchase whose 'Pound Shop chocolate-box' packaging now looks offensively half-assed. Tragically, unlike fellow '70s vocal groups like Harold Melvin And The Bluenotes or The Detroit Spinners, The Chi-Lites have never had an easy ride, often demoted to the discount garage forecourt of soul history, racked next to the saccharine pop-soul oiliness of The Stylistics and Blue Magic. What with the scant attention accorded to the recent passing of their vastly underrated tenor Robert "Squirrel" Lester it felt like the right time to replay this Best Of and re-immerse myself in the deep soul sincerity the Chi-Lites did so well. Music Club's choice of opening tracks accurately captures the astonishing range of the group.

Fuzzed out, broken-hearted and lost, the pleading, spectral doo-wop of Have You Seen Her provides a perfect showcase for the sad, soaring tenor and confiding, good-hearted storytelling of the band's late leader, Eugene Record, while the Norman Whitfieldesque civil rights stomper For God's Sake Give More Power To The People accurately captures the group's ability to bring a deeply hip, Curtis Mayfield-like civil-rights philosophy to the '70s dancefloor. This ability, to nail the lowering mood of personal and political depression in Nixon's America, with their brumal lonely laments only really hit home the other night, watching John Dower's More4 documentary about the 1975 Ali-Frazier fight, The Thriller In Manila. As we learnt of the conflict between the two fighters and Ali's racist baiting of 'Uncle Tom' Frazier, to the delight of 'liberal' America, The Chi-Lites' sorrowful The Coldest Days Of My Life and There Will Never Be Any Peace could be heard wailing on the soundtrack, profound enough to break your heart.

It's not often that the missus refuses to cuddle up in front of a BBC 4 music documentary, but last Friday's Metal Britannica received a non-negotiable "not-on-your-nelly". In fact the look that accompanied my meek withdrawal to the sitting room for an orgy of riffage was not one I will delight to see repeated. Despite rewarding footage, notably of NWOBHM vanguarder Rob Loonhouse and his hardboard (assuredly not cardboard) guitar histrionics there was something not quite brilliant about it: too much time expended on needless self-justification and cultural cringe. The casualties were too many good stories, some unmissable characters (whither Thunderstick, whither Venom?) and the legacy: no Earache, no thrash (not British in the main, but inspired by NWOBHM). Still, the Budgie footage was revelatory, and the whole thing had me burrowing into the vinyl hoard for this dog-eared guilty pleasure, doubtless purchased for the double-draw of Rainbow's version of Since You Been Gone and Motörhead's Ace Of Spades, neither of which require any expansion here. Digging further down, there are items that not even a mutha could love - Samson's Earth Mother was sub-Tap at the time, now it's risible - but spare a moment, and contemplate the staggering bombast of Black Sabbath's Die Young, with turbo-dwarf Dio at peak power-yodel and the stoner genius of Blue Oyster Cult's sampled-to-buggery Godzilla (admire the hilarious papier-mâché simulacrum at this 1980 live show). Listening now, many years later, I realise the maples v oaks unrest of Rush's The Trees is in fact a baroque allegory of the Canadian independence movement, but more than anything I find myself mourning the early '80s heyday of the momentous Various Artists comp - like Axe Attack, Dance Craze or even Cherry Red's wimp-pop manifesto Pillows & Prayers - distillations of then-contemporary music movements that underlined that, whether you liked it or not, there was something happening here and urged the curious to investigate. I no longer own many unalloyed metal albums, but treasure the documentary value of Axe Attack Volume II... Just don't tell the wife.

Those lured by latterday post-punkers like The Rapture or Liars into a No Wave flashback, or currently throwing out the ol' sacroiliac to revived NY skronk kings The Contortions (they're at ATP - don't miss!) should check out their UK kin. Bristol's The Pop Group had connections with The Slits, but inhabited a paranoid noise-funk dimension of their own, assaulting conventional musical structures as if they were the pillars of capitalism itself. On this, their long-playing debut, the band circle ominously, unleashing flurries of antagonism, as "singer" Mark Stewart howls and squeals, a prison of civilisation's rubber room. Meanwhile, cut-up news announcements and random noise bursts butt in to enhance the mood of Burroughsian dislocation and disquiet. Snowgirl is a nastier Arthur Russell (much nastier): a song that approaches disco, jazz, even proto-deep house, before periodically shattering and moving on. We Are Time is Duane Eddy in hell-twang-assault mode, spiralling into a dub timeslip (reggae master Dennis Bovell produced, as he did The Slits' Cut). Even when flirting with prettiness - as Savage Sea's Satie piano intimates - we are never far from a descent into nightmare. Subsequent collaborations with free-cellist Tristan Honsinger (We Are All Prostitutes) and rap godparents The Last Poets (on the jovially titled follow-up album, For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder?) would confirm The Pop Group's eclectic impulses before the volatile bunch went their separate ways - guitarist Gareth Sager with frenetic Face mag pinups Rip, Rig & Panic and Mark Stewart on a perma-challenging solo mission with pioneering Brit dub label On-U. Latest "expanded" versions of Y include the catchy punk-funk debut single She Is Beyond Good And Evil, but a comprehensive compilation awaits. Another indie-archaeological project for the estimable Domino?

Fate has decided; music fans will likely always know Noel Burke as the frontman of the Ian McCulloch-less formation of Echo & The Bunnymen (he later told Bunnysite Villiers Terrace that he was "practically dancing round the room" with happiness when his tenure ended). But before that he sang with Belfast's St Vitus Dance, whose smart, tuneful Love Me Love My Dogma came out in 1987. 21 years later and completely out of the blue, the follow-up arrived. A folkier listen than its predecessor, with bouzouki, accordion and mandolin augmenting the drums and guitars, it melodically articulates things that good-time rock is generally uncomfortable with: there's failure, ageing, ambivalence about the past and irritation with stupefying popular culture and positive go-getter types (the narrator of the languorous The Stakeholder's Lament speaks for millions when he says "I'm just a naysayer / I'm not a team player"), with Burke sounding forbearing and slightly pained like a grumpier Roddy Frame. There are also just-out-of-shot feelings of doom, as on closer Longfinger, which begins as an Ennio Morricone pastiche and ends like Strangeways-era Smiths. Like bigger histories, rock'n'roll can be a triumphant story when written by the winners, but this marginalia's still worth investigation. The title, incidentally, is an in-joke invented to mean a disco for the sheep-minded.

I recall more than one house-guest who, upon hearing this album for the first time, studied the album sleeve, and thought that Jimmy Scott was an unlikely name for the afro-haired female on the cover. Given the strange beauty bound up in Scott's eerie voice and the deep torch-song sadness he invests in these tracks, it's not as foolish a mistake as it first seems. Almost strangled by his own umbilical chord when he was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1925, Scott was also stricken with Kallmann Syndrome, a hormonal defect which seriously damaged his health, restricted his growth and left him with a high contralto voice. Abandoned by his deadbeat father, Scott lost his mother at the age of 12 (she bled to death when a car ripped off her arm as she was trying to save her daughter from running in front of it). By the time of this recording, Scott had already been singing for thirty years, starting out on the Cleveland club circuit before joining Lionel Hampton's Band in 1948. Sessions came and went, many for the tight-fisted Savoy Records, who refused to release Scott from his handcuff contract. A proposed comeback album for Ray Charles' Tangerine Records in 1962 was removed from shelves a month after release, and a similar fate befell this masterpiece in 1970.

Recorded for Atlantic by friend and producer Joel Dorn, The Source captures Scott in transcendental realm, drifting like the smoke through the black framework of a haunted Manhattan. His cover of Exodus, turns Pat Boone's biblical belter into some spectral shadow of Sam Cooke's A Change Is Gonna Come, while Arif Mardin's rueful reworking of On Broadway strips it entirely of hope, Scott's narrator already beaten and bound for the bus home before we're one verse in. In fact, by the time you're at the halfway point with Scott's cover of Unchained Melody ("Time goes by / So slowly / And time can do / So much") it's a steely heart that won't have felt the hot tears well up, such is the otherworldly sadness possessed by this album.

From a hippie commune they came, racked by political differences, fuelled by ancient German mythology and equipped with an arsenal of exploratory free-form rock that remains compellingly bonkers. By the time they came to record debut LP Phallus Dei - that's God's Cock to the rest of us - Amon Düül II had been gigging relentlessly for well over a year, spending their live shows swapping ideas, instruments and hallucinogens. Clocking in at just under 21 minutes, the title track is a freak-out mix of tribal rhythms, incantatory chants, electric guitar meltdown and general psychedelic Sturm und Drang. It's brilliant and manages to switch between the sinister (the first 11 minutes), the pastoral (11:20 to 12:00), the terrifying (12:00 to 13:50) and the exuberant (the rest). After all that you'd expect things to go down hill but they just get weirder (ie. better). None more weirder than on Luzifer's Ghilom. A mere (pah!) eight and a half minutes in length, it's a relatively structured piece of heavy kosmische rock that when turned up to the required volume sounds as if it could cause a nearby Wicker Man to spontaneously combust. The band's keyboard player Falk Rogner told MOJO in 1997: "Onstage, it was often the case in Amon Düül that every musician was on a different drug." Luckily, for those of us that didn't experience them live, this unique chemistry is also all over their records. To take a tip from a magic mushroom-hungry Mani: "it's time for a boil-up".

Pub quiz fodder: name the five pubescent siblings from the Midwest fronted by a four-year-old boy and mentored by a soul legend who had their first chart hits back in 1968. Full marks and a warm bottle of Lambrini to the dude in the corner who stopped their companions writing down 'The Jackson 5' and muttered 'The Five Stairsteps'. Organised into a singing act by their police detective father Clarence Burke Sr. and given their collective moniker by their mum (after noticing that when lined up according to age - little Cubie Burke at the end - their descending heights resembled a flight of stairs), this Chicago R&B brood were auditioned by The Impressions' Fred Cash before signing to Curtis Mayfield's fledgling soul label Windy C, in 1966. But it's the work they did for Curtom, the label Mayfield launched with the Impressions' manager Eddie Thomas in 1968, that possesses the real magic. Although eight of the ten tracks on Love's Happening were written by Mayfield himself, The Stairsteps' versions of Stay Close To Me, Don't Change Your Love, Little Young Lover etc. sound surprisingly different from the Impressions' originals. Gone is Mayfield's sad-sweet falsetto and melancholy yearning for a lost love/memory/America, replaced by innocent, barely-broken vocals that seem to tell you The Stairsteps are living all these precious moments right here, right now, in the first flush of teenage joy. A Fifth Dimension autumnal sadness would creep into later singles but this is just pure bright green summer days.

With the expert guidance of Paul Morley, Frankie Goes To Hollywood's records delighted in confounding their listeners - see the "Edith Sitwell shoulder bag" they sold, or the instructions to read Kierkegaard and Nietzsche while listening. But these weird-out-the-teens moves were modest compared to the experience of listening to the original epic 12" 'Sex Mix' of super-rude global smash Relax. Here the building blocks of the single version - a bass drum, cowbell and handclap Linn pattern that producer Trevor Horn likened to "an English square dance", a bass spank possibly played by sessioneer supreme Norman Watt-Roy and various Fairlight-sampled squelches and squishes, plus voices commanding "hit me", "hey!" and "do it" - were re-assembled into a repetitive, libidinous throb that was equal parts drugged disco, trance, warped rock and studio hands hitting keys at random. By about 12 minutes in, with singer Holly Johnson freeforming lines including "I refuse to live on the same planet as you... the streets are paved with gold", it arrives at something like the hit version, but still disorientation reigns. In 1994, Horn mused to Sound On Sound mag, "We got so many complaints about it - particularly from gay clubs, who found it offensive." A blizzard of remixes followed - the tamer second 12" was confusingly also called the 'Sex Mix' - but none quite reached the same levels of bizarre experimentalism as this.

While MOJO's Dream Pop CD salutes an earlier Felt - via Maurice Deebank's 1984 guitar étude, Sempiternal Darkness - there's an argument for this being the Brummie boho crew's ultimate reverie. Whilst a record of instrumentals, none over three minutes and most under two, was not quite what new label boss Alan McGee had in mind, this is typical bloody-mindedness from Felt-head Lawrence, making as ever a certain perverse sense in honouring these ace players - future Primal Screamer Martin Duffy on keys and Marco Thomas on bass augmenting Felt lifer Gary Ainge on drums - with a wordless showcase. Amid distant wave-noise, Ancient City Where I Lived is a snatch of limpid loveliness, with guitar from Lawrence like a Gaudi minaret, while Elektra artboss tribute Song For William S Harvey serves as a jaunty introduction to Duffy's rococo organ, Felt's lead instrument for the next several records, especially this one. More hallucinatory still, Voyage To Illumination is hazy and languid, like the first act of Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides, exemplifying Snakes...' quest to catch an instant of bliss in amber, or to grope for the disappearing fragments of a dream.

Eternal thanks to Deborah Dolce, who did me a tape of this in 1986, and was herself like the groovy, beret-wearing girl out of a Felt song.

The Cocteaux track on MOJO's current cover-mount CD (Bluebeard, since you ask) sent me spinning into their back catalogue - felled again by its uniqueness, stung again by the mockery due those who introduced fey pop into the Arrow Vale High School Sixth Form cassette deck in the mid-'80s. It was worth it, though. For all the strengths of their opening brace of albums (gnarly Garlands, 1982; plangent Head Over Heels, 1984) this was the alchemical moment in the group's catalogue, the point where the Grangemouth axis of ululating vocalist Elizabeth Fraser and multi-layering guitarist Robin Guthrie (augmented for the first time by Simon "Bella Union" Raymonde on bass) paid off their debt to Siouxsie & The Banshees and embarked on a new stage of their voyage, into an unmoored post-punk unpop that was simultaneously unambient and unclassical. The commonest misapprehension - of the Cocteau Twins as pedlars of pixie frou-frou nostrums - is exposed by the dark and haunted Spangle Maker, with lyrics that take some untangling but are not beyond our ken: "Singing, broke and winded, broke and winded!" wails Fraser, gorgeously wracked. This is also the home of the superior, extended Pearly-Dewdrops' Drops, perhaps the apotheosis of Fraser's "instrument" - now brushing the stratosphere, now hiccupping bubbles of gold. This is Dream Pop, certainly; but our dreams are rarely benign, and the Cocteau Twins would not be a group to cherish without the pools of sadness and fear that collect between their distillations of joy. Singing, broke and winded, but still singing.

The Holy Modal Rounders were all but defunct when newly appointed Elektra producer Barry Friedman convinced them to record an album for the label in 1968. By now, the original Greenwich Village folk duo of vocalist/fiddle player Peter Stampfel and guitarist Steve Weber had evolved into a rambling, notoriously drug-raddled five-piece whose number included the playwright Sam Shepard. Weber's reluctance to rehearse any new material meant Stampfel was busying himself instead with a rock group, The Moray Eels of the title.

Having persuaded them to regroup in a Californian studio Friedman was confronted by a band with a brace of new songs (bar one Michael Hurley cover, Werewolf), no rehearsals and a drug consumption that was as prodigious as their musical palette was broad: acoustic folk, lysergic rock, blues, country, ragtime, speed and weed. The results were predictably chaotic but also remarkable both for the number of great songs that did make it through the mire and as a snapshot of the bleaker end of the '60s. The STP Song (a "mutilated version" of his song August 1967, according to Stampfel in the highly entertaining liner notes) was a case in point. A three-day trip on the titular hallucinogen yielded only the last line: "Yummy, yummy, yummy, sucking off a mummy / Hippies call it STP". The rest was written after Stampfel came down and the song was renamed by Barry Friedmann in the final mix (along with several other songs, to Stampfel's evident chagrin). Stampfel's sped-up, acid-warped vocal parodies hippie junkies and cosmic pushers and like he says "Sure as hell captures the period better than that goddamn song about going to San Francisco being sure to wear flowers in your hair". A summertime love-in it is not. On the other hand, Weber's lazy, folky, One Will Do For Now and gutsy acid rocker Half A Mind sound as groovy as any of their Elektra contemporaries.

Stampfel is particularly disparaging of the opener, Bird Song, which his girlfriend Antonia had written as If You Want To Be A Bird but again was renamed by Friedman (who perhaps tellingly would emerge from these sessions having changed his name to Frazier Mohawk). A disjointed country waltz with a simple message - you gotta get high to fly - it was one of the few tracks on the album to get any radio play (Friedman/Mohawk's insistence that all the songs run together into two single-groove, DJ-challenging suites didn't help). Peter Fonda heard it and enshrined the song on the Easy Rider soundtrack. "Geez, I hate this cut," Says Stampfel of what would become his most successful song. Peace and love indeed.

BBC FOUR's recent repeats of their Folk America programmes sent my mind wandering back to last year's accompanying live shows at London's Barbican. The 65-year old Eric Andersen - tall, bashful and oaken-voiced - appeared on a bill that included US folk stalwarts Judy Collins, Carolyn Hester and the Byrds' Roger McGuinn. For this writer, Andersen's short set was the undoubted highlight of the season. By the time he recorded Blue River in Nashville at the age of 29, he'd spent the best part of a decade cutting his teeth in the coffeehouses of Greenwich Village and recording for the Vanguard label. Two years before he'd watched James Taylor - his west coast counterpart - hit the big time with his Sweet Baby James album. But Andersen was never destined to be that guy. You can hear why here. Despite the appearance of Joni Mitchell on the elegiac title track, Blue River is an ascetic affair driven by Andersen's sweetly reassuring vocal and producer Norbert Putnam's super-subtle arrangements. These are songs of love, strife and the quest for salvation: a post-hippie return to the earth coloured by the intimacy of Andersen's folk song apprenticeship and the warmth of the early '70s Neil Young/Elton John/Jackson Browne/Graham Nash axis. Evocative of the evening sun slicing through trees and bonfires smouldering on a dewy dawn, it remains an unheralded masterpiece - a true buried treasure. And there's not a duff tune on it.

It's Immaterial, AKA Johns Campbell and Whitehead, called Song "commercial suicide but definitely worth doing". Think of the interesting music there'd be if more people thought like this. Imaginative former attendees of Liverpool punk nexus Eric's, the band had been signed as Britain's answer to the Talking Heads and scored an irregular hit with 1986's English road song Driving Away From Home. But, emerging from the mist four years later, one thing Song isn't is chart eager. As in opener New Brighton - a Larkinesque mini-play of a fading holiday resort and an old friendship - this is music made in the rain and on the edge of town, peopled by frequently unemployed characters with a mind to get moving but who are too much part of their locales and pasts to escape. The smoothly synthetic productions, featuring zither, piano, brass, tribal-lite drum programming and Campbell's soulful winetaster's voice, variously touch on country, flamenco, some Satie and Ryuichi Sakamoto, with The Blue Nile's ambient pop music another parallel. Such are the subtleties, that when elegant single Heaven Knows (sample lyric - "I know what it's like when you come round to thinking how you've missed the gravy train") insists that despite everything, things will be alright, the directness is almost jarring. The spirit of the album is arguably better found in closer Your Voice, an insomniac journey into memory full of heightened significance that exists half in the subconscious mind. Annoyingly, this was the group's last album release, but word is Campbell and Whitehead still meet every Thursday to work on new music. Any chance, etc?

During his leadership of The Impressions, Curtis Mayfield's lyrics had exuded a strong moral conscience and deep understanding of American society. His final album with the group, 1969's The Young Mods' Forgotten Story had unveiled the imperishable Choice Of Colors (from 01.09) and Mighty Mighty (Spade & Whitey), but great as they were, they only hinted at the intelligence and compassion that would run through the eight tracks of Curtis, from which Mayfield would emerge as the true successor to the Sam Cooke of A Change Is Gonna Come.

Pre-dating the conscience-stirring Motown albums of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, a well-argued flow of ideas moves through Curtis like the reasoning of a philosopher. Over a portentous fuzz bass riff, the album opens with a brief hubbub and a woman's voice advising us to read the Book Of Revelations. Then Mayfield's brusque enumeration of racial epithets announces the dark, conga-clattering groove of (Don't Worry) If There's A Hell Below, We're All Going To Go. From that grim portent of Armageddon, Mayfield proceeds to light the path to hope, warns of the traps and pitfalls, including the dangers of ghettoism (on The Other Side Of Town), but insists the solution is in our hands. His messages of brotherly love, understanding and togetherness come to potent fruition on the loose-limbed but painfully wise We The People Who Are Darker Than Blue and his most famous anthem of hope, Move On Up.

It's a message that still inspires, and music that still thrills, with full yet uncluttered arrangements punctuated with horn fanfares - a trademark of his Impressions days - driving percussion batteries and swirling strings. Even now, 40 years on, a lyrical surprise - "It is my theory, that the two of us are somewhat leery" (Give It Up) - or unexpected piece of instrumental decoration (like Wild And Free's ripples of harp) can catch one unawares. In 1970 Curtis announced a soul master coming into his time; in 2010, with its author ten years gone and a black man in the White House, it speaks louder than bombs: "Pardon me brother / I know we've come a long long way / but let us not be so satisfied / For tomorrow can be an even brighter day".

Bowie is one of those acts, like Guided By Voices and Orchestral Manouevres In The Dark, that divide the MOJO office down the middle. There are those profess to like only the Pye singles, others who won't have him in the house. Then there's me, who can find something to like in most Bowie records, even this one.

But even Bowie's firmest fans tend to underrate Aladdin Sane. Oft described as Ziggy Stardust's runty sibling, it is certainly cast from the same mould ("Ziggy Stardust in America", reckoned Bowie at the time). But life in Ziggy's shadow has kept it fresh and there are aspects in which it is even an improvement. There's its thicker, stronger sound - exemplified by Watch That Man's rich boogie stew and the tightly-wound sex-rock of Cracked Actor - and its weirder, wider palette: from the sci-fi doo-wop of Drive In Saturday and The Prettiest Star to the title track's discordant avant-cocktail jazz (pianist Mike Garson to the fore). Then there's the cover's face-flash, such an iconic upgrade on Ziggy's gold forehead spot that it's easy to forget that Ziggy didn't have the flash to begin with.

Notwithstanding Ziggy's alien rock star theme, Aladdin Sane is also more bonkers, in a more human, disturbing way ("The sniper in the brain, regurgitating drain / Incestuous and vain" goes the astonishing Time), a slight return of Bowie's preoccupation with psychic collapse. The Dame's core talent - surprising melodies framing a fragmented, hyperreal worldview - is here in spades, most of all in the closing Lady Grinning Soul. A sweeping ballad with sensuous contours (reputedly about ex-Ikette Claudia Linnear) that prefigure Station To Station's Wild Is The Wind, it's a Bond theme from another dimension.

Released in 1977, and first broadcast on BBC2 on the evening of the May 18, 1980, Werner Herzog's pitch-black US picaresque Stroszek is perhaps most famous for being the film Ian Curtis stayed in to watch on his last night on earth. Given Stroszek's overwhelmingly bleak and defiantly enigmatic ending, it's very tempting to wonder just what might have happened if Curtis has caught another re-run of 633 Squadron or A Matter Of Life And Death instead. The tale of an harassed and humiliated German street musician who goes to seek his fortune in the badger state of Wisconsin, Stroszek ends with its lead character's shotgun suicide on a ski lift and a burning truck driving in circles in a deserted parking lot before Herzog's camera finally focuses in on three horribly claustrophobic roadside attractions - a dancing chicken, a duck paying a bass drum and a rabbit riding a fire truck - as Sonny Terry's Lost John plays out on the soundtrack. Herzog may have chosen Lost John for its subject matter - the tale of an escaped chain gang joe on the lam across the States, his sightings ever more sad and strange - but there are no lyrics in Herzog's chosen Folkways version (to be found on this wonderful 1965 album of field calls, railroad songs and gospel wails), just Terry's eerie harmonica wail and train whistle holler. The tune somehow became synonymous with Herzog's take on America - the romance of the American frontier descending into gibbering, whooping madness - and fittingly, he's returned to it again in his new portrait of American insanity, a jazz riff on the Hollywood corrupt cop genre entitled The Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans. Lost John returns, fittingly, during another nightmare dance sequence where Nicolas Cage (a deranged career best) as corrupt coke-snorting, crack-smoking, pill-popping police lieutenant Terence McDonagh has just witnessed a gangland shootout between two rival druglords. As one Mr Big lies dead on the floor McDonagh yells "Shoot him again! His soul is still dancing!" We cut to McDonagh's POV and see the blood-spattered mobster breakdancing and spinning on his back as Sonny Terry's Lost John once again plays out on the soundtrack - "Woo! Heee! Woo! Heee! Ah! Woo! Ah Woo! Wupwupwup! Woo!" He's long gone.

In 1982 Wall Of Voodoo's rare frontman Stan Ridgway called their songs "a bunch of little Twilight Zones strung together". Not a bad way to approach this anti-sunbathing Los Angeles group's admirably unclichéd sign-off Call Of The West. A suspenseful travelogue full of twists, shadow and ambiguities, it also perplexes with its musical palette; Ridgway's mordant, sung-from-the-corner-of-his-mouth vignettes of paranoia, pessimism and alarm are accompanied by synths and drum box set to "malarial", Joe Nanini's junkyard percussion and Marc Moreland's boss, punk-via-Luther Perkins guitar playing. The supremely catchy Mexican Radio was an MTV hit, but elsewhere the group played it as sinister as toxic fumes glooping up from the La Brea tarpits - see the heat hazed Lost Weekend, for example, which presents a gambling/ robbery husband and wife team aimlessly looking for more vice, or the metal-on-metal clanging Factory which portrays a bitter, violent worker-drone who says, "I like to know what I'm doing when I do it, and I do what I'm doing 'cos I don't know what to do when I'm not doing it." Sounds like sense. Their real scope, though, can be gleaned on the LP's title track, wherein a credulous rube rolls California-wards dreaming of an easy life only to be confronted with drunk, gun-toting reality. It wasn't to last. Ridgway and Nanini left just after the band's biggest show at the 1983 US Festival, but Stan went on to a rewarding and unique solo career that's still ongoing. For the fall out of 1983 and the early deaths of Nanini and Moreland, see his Talking Wall Of Voodoo Blues Pt.1.

No apologies for another appearance by my 5-year-old, Sam, in this column, because if you ever get bored of the Beatles (not that I ever get bored of The Beatles) try viewing the entire phenomenon through the eyes of a kid. Not only do you get the best tunes written by anyone, ever; you get four (count 'em) discrete, supercool characters to cut out and keep, and an array of adventures, some real, others fictional, to boggle the mind. The 21st Century has a pat phrase for what the Beatles pioneered: the "immersive" entertainment experience.

My five year-old's favourite Beatles album is currently this one. Obviously that has something to do with the film, which has inspired a bout of 6am cap-wearing and mouth-organ-playing chez nous, and a worrying tendency to hail an unfortunate local pensioner, loudly and in public, as a "clean old man". But that's not in any way to denigrate the purely aural elements of the package. Beyond that chord, so startling that it seems to summon The '60s into existence, beyond even the sod-it-let's-start-with-the-best-bit perfection of Can't Buy Me Love, AHDN is an astonishing amalgam of rock'n'roll thrills, melodic ingenuity and Tin Pan Alley traditions, from the groove and attitude of You Can't Do That to the minimalist, faux-Latin swoon of And I Love Her. Only two years before the Beatles, having consumed all previous pop and found themselves sated, reinvented it all over again as sonic science, it's remarkable for its confidence in the human voice, a guitar or two and little else. So much subsequent pop feels cluttered, drowned, over-patina'd in comparison.

At the weekend, Sam saw Help! for the first time. On balance, he liked it even more than AHDN, but he had a concern. "Where's Paul's granddad?" he wondered. "Has he died?"

The first time I saw Kasabian's Tom Meighan he was lunging across a crummy East London stage sporting a John Lennon-Pepper-era moustache and a tight-fit polo neck. Bobbie Gillespie looked on from one corner of the room. Someone who might have been a Kaiser Chief stood at the bar. It was that sort of place. Arms raised to the heavens, Meighan looked like he'd just walked out in front of a sold-out Wembley Stadium. Every time I hear tracks from Kasabian's debut I can't help but picture this scene. Compared to the layered expanses of Empire and West Ryder... Kasabian is a crisp, lean call-to-arms, that drills straight to the heart of the Meighan/Pizzorno partnership. As indebted to the likes of Nightmares On Wax and DJ Shadow as it is to Primal Scream and Hawkwind, it is the sound of Tom'n'Serge falling in love with music over and over again. During the pugilistic bass quakes of Club Foot (still their most exciting creation), L.S.F and Cutt Off, their minds are blown; the atmospheric hypnotics of Running Battle, Butcher Blues and Test Transmission are after-hours exhalations of "I just can't stop losin' control". Each track hints at an alternate reality where space travel is free and Amon Düül II rule the airwaves. This has remained their manifesto and it's served them very well indeed. Five years and three albums down the line, Meighan walked out on the stage at Wembley Stadium, arms raised to the heavens. Thankfully, minus the moustache.

I still remember that bright spring Saturday afternoon in 1985 when I first heard New Day Rising. I'd bought it in Probe Records on Button Street in Liverpool and I think I was served by grumpy Bob Parker, guitarist with vastly underrated Scouse psych goblins, the Walking Seeds. But now I was back home, Final Score was on, with the sound down, mum had just made the "lazy Saturday tea" of pork and salad baps, dad was reading the paper, and my older brother was studying the lyric sheet. None, I think, were prepared for the glorious, soaring bank of discount drums and razor guitars and the repeated screaming of "New day rising!" that was the opening title track. My brother was 32 back then, I was 17. He and his best friend Alan (who had one of the best psych record collections on Merseyside - some feat) were inevitably professorial in their overseeing of my early attempts to assemble a cool record collection of my own. So dad cleared his throat, mum stayed in the kitchen, but half way through Girl Who Lives On Heaven Hill, amidst the blissed-out electric storm, and Bob Mould and Grant Hart's screamed chorus harmonies, I'm sure I heard by brother murmur his assent. Listening to it again today (ten years older than my brother was then) I can understand why. For all its confrontational hardcore attack, NDR remains a joyous album, and still retains that bracingly bright feel of summer light on still-cold days. Whether it's Greg Norton's walking bass intro and the woah-ho-ho! backing vocals on Terms Of Psychic Warfare or Grant Hart's joyous teenage love song, Books About UFOs (the only example of honky-tonk piano ever being put to good use on a rock song) New Day Rising remains an album of euphoric, giddy pleasure, the most fun you can have while still sticking it to The Man.

The new (ie. forthcoming) Weller album has been spinning merrily chez MOJO, and while it's too soon to tell if it will Wake Up The Nation, it has certainly blown away 2010's cobwebs with the intensity of the performances and the breadth of musical ideas: "a Style Council record played by The Jam," is spaketh a passing Wise Woman.

It's a continuation of the experimental phase ushered in by 08's 22 Dreams, the re-emergence of a broad-minded Weller who can groove to My Bloody Valentine and Can as much as to Dusty or Tim Hardin. Turning back to 22 Dreams to see where this all began, one is still struck by its stylistically schizophrenic, 69-minute smorgasbord of reveries and meditations, the first Paul Weller album you can imagine being made by the Paul Weller you hear on Robert Wyatt records. Addressing aging and fatherhood with almost disconcerting candour, and including unabashed mood pieces tied to the seasons Weller watched change from his home-from-home at Black Barn studios, Woking, it could hardly have stepped more boldly outside The Modfather's perceived comfort zone. It's a record you have to listen to again and again, if only to assure yourself that you heard it right the first time.

There are exquisitely crafted songs - like Black River's dramatically unWellerish echo of early Bowie or the jazzy, melancholy turmoil of Cold Moments. There are experimental grooveathons, like the frenzied Push It Along and druggily disorientating Echoes Round The Sun (a Noel Gallagher co-write). There are moments of bravura musical alchemy, as when Lullaby Für Kinder's time-freezing piano étude segues into the bluff, violin-encrusted folk of Where'er Ye Go. From soup to nuts, there's barely a chord-change the listener could have confidently predicted.

Occasionally, Weller pushes the boat out too far (God - with former Stone Roses guitarist Aziz Ibrahim impersonating the deity in chewy Mancunian - is 22 Dreams' Lenny Henry moment), but at its best/weirdest (111's unsettling Moog'n'Mellotron troika, Night Lights' crepuscular raga, the self-castigating soul-pop of Have You Made Up Your Mind) it's as if a delirium has set in, with Weller and his cohorts drunk on music, too excited sometimes to end a piece "properly" before fast-forwarding to the next unexpected idea.

There are great albums that are nose-to-tail singles, but 22 Dreams is not one of them. Settle in for the duration, however, and expect a genuine trip. Exactly what kind of psychic jolt has prompted this radical reorientation is anyone's guess, but for whatever reason the risk-taking Paul Weller is back. And as Wake Up The Nation already intimates, he'll be with us till last orders at least.

After the release of Dare and its club-mixed companion Love And Dancing, producer Martin Rushent retired from studio work for years. Maybe that's what happens when you help create a masterpiece like The Human League's immaculate synth-conception. A UK Number 1 album in October 1981, it contained the brain-burrowing big hits Sound Of The Crowd, Open Your Heart, Love Action and the US/UK Number 1 Don't You Want Me. But there was more to it than simply irresistible tunes - Seconds concerned the assassination of John F.Kennedy, I Am The Law was sung from the perspective of 2000 A.D comic's shoot-first lawman Judge Dredd and a sparse cover of Roy Budd's Get Carter theme (played on the cheap and cheerful Casio VL-Tone) lent a pleasingly discordant whiff of violent Geordie hoodlums to the smooth pop sounds. There had already been warning signs of their abnormality; until October 1980 the group was an all-male affair with a more sinister, sci-fi leaning agenda, and when deep-voiced frontman Philip Oakey had gone on Top Of The Pops in make-up and asymmetric wedge hair-do he beat the rest of the '80s gender benders by a year. This chemistry wasn't going to last, though; fluctuating fortunes and line-ups followed Dare's triumph, as did the perplexing spectacle of the group playing nostalgia tours in the '00s. Oakey and vocalists Susanne Sulley and Joanne Catherall haven't released a new long-player since 2001, but prompted by the future-retro moves of La Roux, Little Boots and the rest, they've just signed a new deal with the Wall Of Sound label. They could do worse than give Martin Rushent a call, we're saying.

I still remember the profound funk of disappointment that permeated my being on that dark night in the early '80s when I stayed up late to watch Godard's One Plus One. What did a 13-year-old boy possibly imagine a French avant-garde director would do with the Rolling Stones, student protest, ladies and machine guns? Certainly not the am-dram lecturing and endless band rehearsals I ended up sufferering through, in a futile desire for streetfighting, rock'n'roll action and brief nudity. Better at capturing the outsider's sense of Mai 68's chaos and excitement is this lunatic compilation from the French Le Maquis label which seeks to recreate the noise, blather, drugs, protest and rock'n'roll noise by simply sticking this next to this as snippets of this bleed in and out, as if we were listening to the most exciting pirate radio broadcast ever. It's a magic formula that would work even if the compilation confined itself to the vogue sounds of US and UK pop and rock; but it's when the cool home-grown sounds of Paris '68 - from the tortured chanson of Léo Ferré's les Anarchistes to the My G-G-Generation yeh-yeh pop of Jacqueline Taïeb's 7h Du Matin - go up against the crash and burn of detonating petrol bombs that Cocktail Mol6t8v really delivers. It's not a history lesson, nor is it an education, but Cocktail Mol6t8v is certainly damned exciting. See you at the barricades.

First, I must declare an interest. Half of Boo Hooray is Tom Doyle, a music writer of this parish. While that might call my objectivity into question, I prefer to see it as reflecting positively on MOJO that its writers can make such good records. Doyle joins this fraught young man, the sideburned chap playing mean Rickenbacker, this young drummer getting short shrift from the TOTP cameramen, and one of the good people behind this swoon of gorgeousness: MOJO contributors all. Proving, if nothing else, what a broad church we keep, Doyle's MO could not be more different from all of the above. Boo Hooray specialise in intimate, soulful pop - nicely grubby and fuzzed like the hangover's kicking in and the Wurlitzer's on the blink, a bit Costello on Cursed Moon (from 3.49 here), a touch of Mark Hollis's crushed bleat on Haunted By You. Imagine walking into a derelict dancehall to find the spooks speaking through harp echoes and glockenspiel tinkles, and the creak and whirr of unidentifiable junktronica. Loss and its bedfellow, the dull ache of disappointment, hover in motes of dust, especially on the woozy The Last Day Of Something ("it's the first day of nothing...") and exquisitely psychedelic Gramophone Needle, where the implications of the phrase "vinyl junkie" are fully explored. Doyle and oppo Anth Brown have spent a while getting here - an album as Electric Music, another as Electric Music AKA (Kraftwerk's Karl Bartos, also operating under "Electric Music", objected) - but the balance between organic instrumentation, classic songcraft and po-mo cut-and-paste elements has been perfected here. With rumpled velvet pop back in vogue, it could be their time. As long as these guys don't sue.

Joe Pernice's latest project - an in no way autobiographical novel about a struggling indie rocker with a soundtrack of cover versions attached - was a neat enough idea, and Pernice found something transfiguring in each of the songs, even Mary Poppins' mockney nostrum Chim Chim Cher-ee. It made me realise how much I'd missed that hickory-smoke voice, multi-levelled writing and sun-kissed sonic aesthetic, still best exemplified by his first record after divorce from mandied-up alt.country combo the Scud Mountain Boys. Like Paul McCartney and Roger McGuinn after a Burt Bacharach songwriting seminar, Overcome By Happiness disguises Pernice's existential traumas with irresistible power-pop action, like the glare of a grim reality dimmed by prescription drugs. Fans of Teenage Fanclub should take note (Clear Spot is a cousin of Grand Prix's Don't Look Back, Crestfallen recalls Bandwagonesque's Sidewinder) but I hope Blake, Love and Co would forgive me if I dare suggest Pernice wites better lyrics, with a more complex and wounded outlook, ranging from "mere" self-loathing ("I woke up sick in my shoes and clothes") to the supersad suicide vignette of Chicken Wire, added still greater poignancy by its lonely Bacharach brass. Down lyrics with up music ain't rocket science, but done well the formula has its own gravity, and Pernice is the neutron star of the game. His web site suggests a new album is "in the can", but held up by a crisis over whether it's a solo record, a Pernice Bothers record or what. A short UK tour - promoting It Feels So Good When I Stop - begins on January 26 at Islington's Union Chapel. Pop along and tell him to pull his finger out, there's a dear.

Back in early 1978, Scott Walker hadn't recorded any of his own songs since 1970's co-written 'Til The Band Comes In. And after the well-sung if complacent cover versions of that time of drought, his four compositions on the reformed Walker Brothers' final album - loved by Bowie and Eno among others - were a devastating way to resume operations. Played by a rock band and orchestra, these four freezing bursts of shock and anguish blend experimentalism, pop sounds and even disco with the same cold ambience of Martin Hannett's productions of the following year. It can be oblique, it's fair to say; apocalyptic opener Shut Out sees the writer and harmonising stage brother John declaring "Something attacked the earth last night", while Fat Mama Kick features the let's-party declaration "Deaf, dumb, blind!" repeated six times, before a blast on a church organ and a rabid saxophone solo. But the real darkness descends with The Electrician. A nightmare evocation of US-backed torture squads in South America, this dialogue between torturer and tortured is part intense humming of evil, part south American getaway holiday theme - and if you want to gauge how far the group had come from the clean-cut romance of their '60s glory years, this is the song to go to (in the face of this uniqueness, it's probably unfair to compare the six songs included here by other two Brothers John and Gary). After its release, they played some cabaret dates but split soon after. "I always wondered what might have happened if we'd carried on after Nite Flights," John Walker said in 2006. "Where would we have gone? Why did we break up? Damn, I wish I knew."

Back in 2002, when labels still flew journalists overseas, and didn't ask them to hole up in $7 flophouses, I found myself staying in The Scott House, a 19th Century Detroit mansion with its own library, drawing room and beautiful Arts & Crafts detailing. Even though it was only a short walk from the museums and galleries of Midtown and many of the now famous "feral houses of Detroit" I was told that it was unwise to explore the neighbourhood on foot. Being without a driving license, that meant plenty of sundown time waiting around in the library, reading up on the history of Michigan and (in the days before my first iPod) nodding off to the one CD I'd remembered to bring with me.

Thankfully, this was the Chet Baker Deep In A Dream comp. Chosen by author James Gavin to accompany his Baker biog of the same name, Deep In a Dream is in no way the definitive comp it holds itself up as but provides a handy insight into the beclouded, opiated world that Baker cruised through for most of his life. The Scott House also had one of those Bose CD alarm clocks (so new and fancy at the time) so every morning I would wake up to The Gerry Mulligan Quartet playing My Funny Valentine. Not the five-minute Pacific jazz version from 1953 but the mist-shrouded three-minuter, from September 1952. Recorded in Los Angeles, for the Fantasy album Gerry Mulligan Quartet (with Carson Smith on bass and Chico Hamilton on drums), this pianoless, anchorless drift - complete with uncredited are-they-really-there ooh-oooh vocals - possesses a ghostly narco-haze on a par with Phil Phillips' Sea of Love and The Jaynettes Sally Go Round The Roses. Baker's horn sounds like crying while Mulligan echoes the distant harbour lament of a fog-shrouded fishing smack. But it's Baker's vocal cuts on the album - often dismissed as easy listening by hard core jazzers - that really cue you in to that dark and fuzzy no-man's land of the junk high. Baker sings love songs, true; but they're love songs of resignation and defeat like The Thrill Is Gone and Spring Is Here ("No desire / No ambition / Leads me") or dreams of oblivion (Let's Get Lost, the title track) all delivered with fading heart, weary soul and the self-pitying exhaustion of a stoned saloon-bar clip-artist; it's like he's been cored and hollowed, a ghost in a shell, high on his own ephemeral smoke. Try as you might, you know he's not really in love with you, or wanting you, or wanting anyone on these love songs; but, hey, you just may be able to get him something, fix him up, if you could just spot him till the weekend. Nasty, really, which gives these vocal cuts another edge, placing them at the distinctly uneasy end, that dark violet bloom, of the easy-listening jazz spectrum.

In 1970 a dental hygienist working in California was convinced by one of her clients, producer Leonard Rosenman, that she should record some of her songs in his studio. The result was Parallelograms, an album whose depth and beauty is, over three decades on, still utterly staggering. Opener Chimacum Rain sets the tone for what is an ethereal musical journey matched only by Vashti Bunyan and Joni Mitchell, married to the vocal innocence of The Carpenters, while the textures and varying tempos (courtesy of Rosenman's well marshalled team of crack jazzers) frame Perhacs's voice to wondrous effect. The spacey lyrics add to the Perhacs mystique - the album's title track, for instance, being the only song in the history of rock or folk to render mathematical shapes sensual. "Quadrehedral, tetrahedral, mono-cyclo-cyber-cilia!" she swoons and, while on paper it makes for laugh-out-loud reading, on record it appears to make perfect sense.

Perhacs' quirky perception of the inadequacies of a record that in any case failed to sell resulted in a drift away from music into a self-defined spiritual vocation and a return to dentistry. However, the last decade has seen the album reappraised and reissued (the latest version being in 2008 on Sunbeam in definitive edition form), creating a new audience for Perhacs' sui generis version of hippie-folk. Despite her 37-year absence from the studio, rumours are abroad that Perhacs has resumed writing and has been collaborating with Devendra Banhart (for whom she contributed harmonies on 2007's Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon). There have been other signs of life, including a mini documentary, usage of her music in Daft Punk's Electroma, and remixes, all of which are testament to Paralellograms' unique and ongoing power.

Travel with me to an unfamiliar past, where alternative rock music is yet to be overrun with Pet Sounds references, when not one but two brand new Brian Wilson albums - Orange Crate Art, and I Just Wasn't Made For These Times, both 1994 - could appear to a universal shrug. A time, in other words, before Gideon Gaye re-sold the marvels of the Beach Boys' heterogeneous, post-psychedelic soundworld to a whole new generation of musos. Banjo, tack piano, strings, tuned percussion, all rushed in on the coattails of ex-Microdisney man Sean O'Hagan's second full album under his Andean camelid moniker, but it's so much more than the sum of its Van Dyke Parks cast-offs, and remains an object lesson in how to use inspiration to unlock the doors to exploration. From the instant weirdness of Giddy Strings' woozy overture and the piano-laden reverie of The Dutchman, this is antic pop, played for kicks, as exemplified by the blithe wordplay of vintage keyboard choogle Giddy & Gay and the cocked eyebrow that turns gorgeous country-pop canter Checking In, Checking Out into the vehicle for a Steely Dan picaresque of West Coast detachment, complete with Carmelites and joggers. Roy Budd, Burt Bacharach and The Fifth Dimension hover in the wings, offering asides, and a nagging note of mourning tugs at the sleeve. And if none of that sounds quite, well, heavy enough for your tastes, then turn on to the trippy, quarter-hour ur-groove of Track Goes By, with its aeriform Marcel Corientes flute freakout straight out of the David Axelrod playbook. Recently, O'Hagan has waxed fashionably multi-media, making musical paintings with artist Jean Pierre Muller and orch-literature with Rotter's Club novelist Jonathan Coe; as a bracing dose of Gideon Gaye can't help but remind you, a return to recording is somewhat overdue.

It's 3:00am on a dank Monday morning in Upstate New York and Stephen Stills is peering into the darkness. In front of him are hundreds of thousands of mud-soaked revellers, the last survivors of the first Woodstock weekend. "This is the second time we've ever played in front of people, man," he chuckles. "We're scared shitless!" Not that you could tell from the trio's performance that night - a tightknit, harmony-packed jam made up almost entirely of songs from this album. All three had enjoyed international success with The Byrds (Crosby), The Hollies (Nash) and Buffalo Springfield (Stills), but by 1968 the jingle-jangle optimism of the LA scene had all but disappeared. Its key players retreated to the hills - no doubt with a shaggy dog and a lissom blonde in tow.

To be honest, I often wince at some of this record's '60s mumbo jumbo ("Say, can I have some of your purple berries?"), but although the sentiments are firmly rooted in the past, the sound most definitely isn't. That's why when you turn up Long Time Gone and Wooden Ships they break free from the shackles of hippiedom and become brooding, menacing rock tunes - strangely, the group's celestial vocal blend and acoustic arrangements often mask this. Crosby, Stills and Nash were all in amplified bands and their ditching of noise, effects and weirdness (goodbye psychedelia!) is what makes this a timeless listen whether you want to join the Marrakesh Express or not. "We wanted to take the listener on a journey," said Graham Nash. "Where you smoked a big one, took the shrink wrap off, put the record on the record player... and you were gone!"

It was on my way home last night that I got pulled back into this album again. The iPod shuffle had just performed one of its eerie little segues, from the nightmare infanticide hoedown of The Violent Femmes' Country Death Song into Dan Deacon's weird multitracked ladyfolk screech, Wet Wings, and I was feeling a little unnerved, a silver shank of moon blinking at me through the Walthamstow high-rises, when I heard a familiar voice reel off those mythic, cryptic opening lines: "Of those that sailed / The silver ships / From Andilar / I am the last..."

Ever since I was a young kid, I've always loved story lyrics, songs like Gordon Lightfoot's The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald and those epic folk arrangements of Child ballads that sit you down and beguile you with their rambling labyrinthine tales of death, desertion and deceit, but Townes Van Zandt's Silver Ships Of Andilar is something else. It appears to concern the journey made by a group of sailors from the lush, green land of Andilar to a frozen landscape called Valinor, where "ice we drank and leather we chew" before "one by one did we die alone / Some by hunger some by steel." Oddly it ends with the dying narrator urging other young men to follow in his steps ("Arise young men / fine ships to build / and set them north to Valinor / neath standards proud as fire"). Some have wondered whether Van Zandt's Valinor is the same as the tropical land described in Tolkein's Middle Earth tales, but Van Zandt refers to it as a "lifeless plain", and I'm more inclined to think that this freezing, unsanctified landscape is no different from the destination of all of Van Zandt's heroes.

Although it would be another 25 years before Van Zandt's drinking and drugging finally laid him low, by 1973 the storm clouds had already started to gather and there was no returning to shore. Whether it was the "lover of women who can't hardly stand" from Rake, the codeine-supping outlaw of Waitin' Around To Die or the voice in Nothin' who holds that sorrow and solitude are "the precious things", after a certain point Townes had charted a certain course for the "unwholesome oceans" of Valinor; and the scary thing is that even when you hear his conscription call today there is a part of you that wants to follow.

One of the finest soul singers from the style's last golden age, Teddy Pendergrass has previously achieved MOJO Disc Of The Day eminence with his 1977 solo debut, Teddy Pendergrass. His death last week has demanded a second visit. This 1972 album by the group in which TP had once served as the drummer is the record that first brought the outstanding baritone to the fore. Philadelphia International founders Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff signed Harold Melvin & The Blues Notes to their fledgling label in 1970 and were attracted to the powerful yet tender baritone of featured vocalist Teddy Pendergrass, somewhat of a dead ringer for The Dells' Marvin Junior's. Three exceptional performances on this debut established Teddy as the late '70s' soul force of nature. On I Miss You, Pendergrass is pleading and distraught; on Be For Real he's a sermonising philosopher; on If You Don't Know Me By Now he's a slightly wearied, still ardent lover trying for one last time to convince his woman that they should give their life together another chance. He has not yet developed the more overtly sexual style of his late-'70s solo recordings such as 1978's Turn Off Lights, and the reined-in style suits group work the better. With the Blue Notes, though not on this album, he would also venture into the arena of social commentary (Wake Up Everybody). He should have done so more often, because his declamatory preaching style was perfectly suited to such material.

Josh Homme to MOJO, 2002: "What do women see in Dave Grohl?" Nick Oliveri: "He's horsey looking. Girls like ponies." Whatever the source of Grohl's personal charms, his presence on QOTSA's 2002 album was not to be underestimated. The heady cocktail of louche Zeppelin rock and Sabbath riffs offered on 2000's Rated R (altogether now: "Nicotine, valium, vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy and alcohol / C-c-c-c-c-cocaine!") proved a bit strong for the nu-metal generation at home in the US. So here was The Queens' sly riposte: two fingers to mainstream radio on a loosely themed concept album parodying US stations as heard on a drive out to the desert from Los Angeles. Introduced by "Clone Radio" drive-time jock, Kit Casper ("We play the songs that sound more like everyone else, than anyone else!") and punctuated with spoof links and glitches on the dial. Musically, their modus operandi remained intact: heavy, propulsive rock'n'roll that renewed the vows between sex and drugs, offering thrills for girls as well as boys. With Josh Homme's ear for a great pop hook and the addition of rock's golden boy on drums, the potential for a mainstream rock hit was complete, with songs like No One Knows and Go With The Flow shaking hips as much as heads. Lanegan's tequila soaked rasp is creepily perfect on the title track and threatening on God Is On The Radio, in counterpoint to Homme's libidinous, raised-eyebrow croon. Songs For The Deaf would be the last Queens album with bassist Nick Oliveri, who was sacked in 2004. Without their loose cannon the Queens have never quite regained this record's brink-of-madness excitement but perhaps one classic rock album per decade is good enough.

Discussion at MOJO HQ recently turned to the vast, labyrinthine world of Elvis releases. It's been 33 years since Mr Hips left the building for the very last time and yet his songs are still re-ordered, re-packaged and re-issued several times a year (here's the first of 2010). So, how do you buy Elvis Presley? Greatest Hits/Best Ofs... are all very well, but, as a MOJO reader, you know there's nothing better than going straight to the source. Not only is Elvis Country his most consistent album of the 1970s, it's also a record that taps into every facet of a man who, after 15 years of superstardom, was still desperate to find satisfying material to record.

Read any account of Elvis in the studio, and you'll be presented with a man who just loved to sing the southern spirituals that coloured his childhood. From his early days at Sun, the songs he sang with his mother and father equipped him with the feel and the atmosphere he needed to tackle the session ahead. On this album, Willie Nelson's Funny How Time Slips Away, Ray Price's Make The World Go Away and Stonewall Jackson's I Washed My Hands In Muddy Water are driven by vocals that come straight from that lagoon of spiritual solace that, by the turn of the '60s, Elvis was finding it harder to tap into. He'd already re-captured an impassioned authority on 1969's From Elvis In Memphis, but Elvis Country is a better record because we hear a soul torn between the glory and the darkness: on one side, the lean, 'aw-shucks' rock'n'roll rebel; on the other, the pale, lethargic schlub of the Las Vegas lounges. What's amazing is Elvis seems aware of this. In fact, he thrives on it. His majestic take on Ernest Tubb's Tomorrow Never Comes - a slow-burning march that he would later re-work for live favourite An American Trilogy - is the best of the bunch. Looking down the barrel of a gun, he is at his most free and soulful. As are the Muscle Shoals players who help define the record's late night jam spirit, not least soon-to-be regular Elvis guitar man James Burton, whose licks chime perfectly with that Tupelo twang (check out the heavy, one-take storm of Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin On for proof).

How do you buy Elvis Presley? We'll be answering that conundrum in a future issue of the magazine, but for now, look for the album with a picture of Elvis as a kid on the cover. He's the one with the curled lip.

French songwriter and producer Daniel Vangarde's co-writing credits include The Gibson Brothers' Cuba and Ottawan's D.I.S.C.O. Another of his co-productions was his son Thomas Bangalter, one half of Parisian house music conceptualists Daft Punk. He and partner Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo had risen to the first division of late-'90s dance music with 1995's club smash Da Funk and the 1997's Homework album, and 2001's punningly-titled, less uptight Discovery saw the self-confessed Frampton Comes Alive fans donning robot suits and thinking themselves back into the benign brainspaces of their childhoods. This meant that, alongside steroid-injected house thumpers like opener One More Time, we had the Vocodered, TV-theme soft rock of Digital Love - which recalls both Supertramp and The Buggles while sampling George Duke's I Love You More - and the Rockit-era Herbie Hancock homage Short Circuit. Other tracks have a roboid-R&B sound in keeping with the twosome's cyber-suits - Harder Better Faster Stronger, as sampled by Kanye West for Stronger in 2007, is an ideal soundtrack for making your Citroen C4 turn into a giant ice skating robot - while the presence of several vintage-synth-embroidered easy listening slowies give pause for reflection on this playful yet serious collection. The album's also available in visual form on Interstella 5555: The 5tory Of The 5ecret 5tar 5ystem, 2003's full length animated film using all the songs, supervised by Japanese cartoon master Leiji Matsumoto, though it seems after the robotics and the animations, Daft Punk felt the need to call 2005's follow-up Human After All.

Nyro wrote pop-soul songs covered by Blood Sweat & Tears, Barbra Streisand, Three Dog Night and, most effectively, The Fifth Dimension, and in the late '60s recorded a trio of superior singer-songwriter albums. Then, in 1971, came this album of soul covers. As somewhat of a soul snob, I would normally have run a mile. But a colleague on Melody Maker insisted I listened to it, and as I had not long joined the music weekly it didn't seem wise to refuse. I've been grateful ever since. At first distinctly Noo Yoik in persona, Nyro had worked in 1970 with the Southern players of the Muscle Shoals house band but now, paying homage to the black styles that informed her writing, she worked with the nascent Philadelphia International team: producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff; arranger Thom Bell; much of the MFSB rhythm section (Vince Montana, Ron Baker, Roland Chambers, Norman Harris); and as very prominent backing singers, Labelle, just making their transformation from Patti LaBelle & The Blue Belles. Throughout, Nyro channels everything that is cherishable and lasting about soul music. Starting with a delightful and mostly a cappella cover of The Shirelles' I Met Him On A Sunday and continuing with that delicate treasure, The Bells, Marvin Gaye's song for The Originals, Nyro sets a tone of both serious homage and joy. Motown gets a good airing - Dancing In The Street, You've Really Got A Hold On Me, Jimmy Mack, Nowhere To Run - and it's a gas to hear one of the key house bands of the '70s reinterpreting the work of one of their foremost predecessors. One and all have great fun on the uptempo songs, and hearing Labelle do the Vandellas is a real treat. But the ballads and least orchestrated songs are the ones that leave the strongest impression. The gentle doo wop of The Charts' 1957 A-side Desiree, and Nolan Strong & The Diablos' The Wind (1954) raise goosebumps while the title track, a mid-'60s song by Teddy Randazzo, is a genuinely love-affirming song of fidelity. Nyro died in 1997 aged just 49 - a terrible, terrible loss.

The summer of '76 saw punk's reductivism strike a savage blow against the notion of musical accomplishment, transforming 'prog' into the most pejorative of terms. Brighton's hirsute septet Diagonal will have no truck with this foolish notion, proudly reclaiming the term on this frenzied, brain-scrambling debut and declaring 'prog' to be more iconoclastic in its boundary-shattering aesthetic than punk ever was. Then again, a number of punks would have agreed with them back in the day; Johnny Rotten was, after all, a massive Peter Hammill and Hawkwind fan, while Captain Sensible has never hidden his admiration for Pink Floyd and Egg.

Musical polemics aside, Diagonal's debut is refreshing in its open acknowledgement of the band's influences. Produced by Liam Watson at his Toe Rag studio and released on Cathedral frontman Lee Dorrian's label Rise Above, this five-tracker marries the jazz-rock complexity of Soft Machine, Nucleus and Colosseum to the fiery Hammond-soaked approach of Deep Purple circa 1970 (specifically the cantering work-out of Wring That Neck. The result is both expansive yet taut, a point exemplified on the bombastic 10-minute-plus opener Semi Permeable Men-Brain, and the reflective jazz-flecked Children Of The Thunder God. The odd dud moment aside (Alex Crispin's vocals on the intro to Deathwatch are flatter than a pancake), Diagonal's first outing is daring, rewarding and ambitious.

The group's most recent recording consists of their contribution to the second instalment of MOJO's Pink Floyd tribute, The Wall Rebuilt, where they delivered an inspired and sophisticated re-working of Stop. A second album appears overdue, although this debut provides audible proof that, over 30 years on from punk's Year Zero, the term 'prog' need no longer be considered a four-letter word.

Nomads: they're tough guys to pin down, and Tuareg psych-pedlars Tinariwen are less a band, more a moveable feast. Their rotating cast and mercurial approach can make for startling explosions of spontaneous music-making but can also bemuse. Recent gig-goers noting the absence of Tinariwen lodestar Ibrahim Ag Alhabib - he of the Hendrixian freak-rug and Strat chops - have debated the point at which Tinariwen might become a franchise, like those '90s touring versions of Wu-Tang Clan featuring U-God and some blokes he met on the plane over.

Identity issues have also haunted the last two Tinariwen albums. 2004's Amassakoul emphasised their Western blues-rock influences (Oualahila Ar Tesninam was a ringer for '69 Fleetwood Mac) but was too tidy for some. '07's Aman Iman continued down a more urban path. Ibrahim has expressed misgivings about both, and Imidiwan is billed as the group's attempt to recapture the sound of the desert around their spiritual hearth, Tessalit, deep in the Malian interior.

This is good news for fans of the hazy ecstasies of 2001's Radio Tisdas Sessions, and from the off Imidwan recalls Tinariwen's debut in the way its multiplicity of guitars slip in and out of focus, gambolling around an implied beat, the grooves dark and fuggy, peaking with distaff harmonies and spooked ululations. A renewed connection of ancient with modern and a rebalancing of desert and urban influences are evident in Tamodjerazt Assis - a gritty contribution by prodigal nomad-poet "Japonais" - and a revival of live favourite Chegret, intoned by Ibrahim in a voice veined like an old acacia trunk. Throughout, the drone is the transporting element, most marked on the tripped-out Kel Tamashek, a rumbling tribute to the people who speak Tamashek: ie. the Tuareg.

Like its historic African-American cousin, Tinariwen's blues comes from a place of struggle, their yearning voices full of the sorrows that on-off guerrilla war have brought to their corner of the world. But there's joy and abandon here, too (Lulla is a kind of desert romp through Brubeck's Take 5), and succour for admirers of classic stoner grooves from Neil Young's On The Beach to King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown.

This is cosmopolitan music plugged into the global mainline, nothing to alarm those overly daunted by the unknown. And yet - and here's the trick - it's also strange, dusty, wild and wonderful. Imidwan : Companions ends on a ghostly note, a secret track that's just a pulsing shimmer of feedback, the product of Ibrahim's guitar, propped against its battery-powered Peavy amp in a clearing outside Tessalit. If it was indeed his ambition to get the sound of the Sahara on record, he has succeeded, unquestionably. But Imidwan is nothing so specific, or - like the people who made it - geographically constrained.

Afrika Bambaataa was a busy man. As well as being the leader and ideologue of south Bronx hip hop movement the Universal Zulu Nation since 1973, he also found time to be a trailblazing rap DJ and creator of such early b-boy faves as Jazzy Sensation and Zulu Nation Throwdown. But it wasn't until third single Planet Rock, made with the five-man Soulsonic Force, that he found his signature electro-funk sound. With inspirational debts to George Clinton, James Brown and Sun Ra's mental journeys into outer space, it came about after the group entered a $25-an-hour, eight-track studio called Intergalactic, which was, by chance, kitted out with a Roland 808 drum machine and Fairlight synthesiser. DJ and producer Arthur Baker ended up hearing the stark, proto-techno results, and, thrilled by the sounds he called "black sci-fi", he went on to complete the final version with co-producer John Robie. It still sounds phenomenal and otherworldly, with elements of the Kraftwerk songs Numbers and Trans-Europe Express (recreated rather than sampled) adding a roboid frigidity to all-positive rapped entreaties to "rock it, don't stop" and "show you really got soul." Inevitably Kraftwerk got legal on them, but the damage was done; Planet Rock sold 600,000 copies and effectively founded the Tommy Boy label. "It was a confluence of mistakes," recalled Tommy Boy CEO Tom Silverman in 2002, "but it ended up making something great, kinda like Springtime For Hitler, except we weren't trying to make a stiff."

The "new" Prefab Sprout album is in fact an old one. Denied a release by Paddy McAloon's record label in 1992, resurrected for obscure reasons now, it is of its time in its infatuation with house music, a cousin of that other ginger stepchild, The Style Council's Modernism: A New Decade . It should sound hopelessly dated, and its subject matter - God - will certainly polarize. Yet its melodic riches and passionate, headlong rush are not to be denied, and McAloon's pudding-wine vocal has rarely sounded so persuasive as it does on the bonkers Let There Be Music ("Hey Jules and Jim, I wrote the hymn to ecstasy!"). In fact, ...Music's most incautious gambit - Ride's envious salute to those who "ride home to Jesus, heads held high" - is also its most exquisite, its jacking synth bass and chromatic gob-iron in heavenly harmony. In song, McAloon once called angels "hard-faced little bastards"; perhaps this is his penance.

The late '60s shift from peace 'n' love to war 'n' hate is generally represented by documents of violence and chaos: Gimme Shelter's grainy soup of gurning Angels or the Qualuude funk fug of There's A Riot Going On. However, for every OD, cudgel and backhander there were a thousand quiet nights of creeping dread: and this is the soundtrack. Written by the former Hollie and CSNY peacekeeper at the start of 1970, as his relationship with Joni Mitchell crumbled, Songs For Beginners is the sound of a gentle soul from Northern England watching the LA lights go out and sighing "I told you so". Steeped in the "solitary sadness" of a wartime childhood, and the hymns and nursery rhymes that soundtracked that melancholy, Nash produced one of the great '60s fin de siècle LPs: songs of change, revolution and hope heavy with an unfathomable foreboding.

Captain Beefheart's quest was to unseat the 4/4 "mother heartbeat" of rock. He has an heir in DPs' David Longstreth, whose virtuoso skills (Afro-math-mess guitar, four-part vocal arrangements to make your hair stand on end) are applied to a comparably torn-up canvas. This is his poppest to date (for context, he once made a "glitch opera" about Don Henley), crypto title track Useful Chamber's ecstatic chorus (at 2.43 here), the quasi-Beyoncé strut of Stillness Is The Move and the exquisite chamber pop swoons of Angel Deradoorian showcase Two Doves indicating a desire to play nice, even if the lyrics ("your hair is like an eagle"; "what hits the spot like Gatorade?") remain reliably outré. This is fresh music, making exciting shapes with primitive resources, and though some will find Longstreth's keening bleat and bravura deconstructions show-offy there are constant flowerings of devastating prettiness, and when all the singers blare in unison, the beauty they summon is almost overwhelming.

With the disappearance of their lyricist/iconoclast Richey Edwards in February 1995, the Manics seemed hamstrung. Yet out of the darkness emerged their most fluent rock album, a magical compromise between bassist Nicky Wire's sepia-tinged dignity-of-labour rhetoric, the Plathy remnants of Edwards's lyric book and singer/guitarist James Dean Bradfield's elegiac chords and tolling, lachrymose riffs. Though slightly less au courant than its jagged, post-punky predecessor, The Holy Bible, today it sounds miraculously big-yet-small: massive harp and string arrangements plus Spectorish Mike Hedges production swirling around a tiny, defiant Bradfield. Almost despite themselves, the songs struck a chord in a new audience for whom Richey was but a spectral presence, and retain their power because - in a mature, sincere, unsentimental way - they appear to offer a glint of hope that tomorrow might just be survivable. A proud, lovely record and - by dint of its near-unique circumstances - the indie Back In Black.

The other day, walking to work in the cold morning mist, I found myself coming over all emotional while listening to this cover of Dylan and The Band's Basement Tapes hymn to a Guerrero whorehouse. I do love Bob's version, with its laid-back Robbie Robertson guitar and Garth Hudson's eerie heat-haze organ, but there's something about the sticky, high-summer feel of the track, coupled with the way Dylan and co. boozily deliver the lyrics that lends the song a sweat-backed, mean-hombre edge, as exuded by such border-country sleaze lords as early '70s Warren Oates.

But this... well, before I launch into its many wonders it should be pointed out that I have little love left for either Calexico or Jim James' house band, My Morning Jacket. Calexico have always sounded to these ears like Ivy League Ry Cooders transforming world music into elevator Americana, whereas My Morning Jacket, I now realise, are simply a great American voice trapped in a permanently confused jam band. But, whether simply a one-off or a blueprint for the future, this is something else.

While less spectral than Bob and the Band's version, it's equally unearthly. James' voice is heart-breakingly beautiful: sweet, mournful and oddly valedictory, as if promising a final farewell to the American life. But, like Jimmy Webb's Phoenix or the unnamed destination in Fred Neil's Everybody's Talkin', you wonder, with this version, whether Acapulco mightn't be one of those places the narrator will never reach. South America has always held a mythic power in tales of the fading west, representing a more primal state, once big train money and 'civilization' crowded the outlaw out of the US. With Joey Burns and John Covertino's town square cantina horns echoing Robbie Robertson's forlorn arrangements on The Band, and James' angelic voice possessing a beautiful weariness that's reminiscent of (yet very different from) that band's tragic Richard Manuel, this 'Acapulco' takes on the dreamlike contours of The Band's arcadian wonderlands - the final, romantic destination of that album's lost confederate souls.

Listening to it that day I suddenly had a massive panic about Bob Dylan, erm, going off to his own arcadian wonderland, forever. That's perhaps understandable, on a magazine like MOJO, but the wave of sadness this track triggered was profound. Don't go to meet the sun in Acapulco, Bob. Not just yet.

Originally an acronym of surnames of founders Fernand Boruso, Jean-Luc Young and Jean Georgakarakos, French counter-culture label BYG launched in '67 and captured the unrest that swept through the country the following year. Initially designed to feed the minds of the restless student population and create an alternative distribution network in the process, BYG's musical manifesto was rooted in the avant-garde experimentation of the time and closely linked to Actuel magazine, which Georgakarakos ran simultaneously. A noted focal point of BYG's self-styled 'European Music Revolution' was the Actuel festival held in the Belgian town of Amougies and which saw Frank Zappa acting as compère and jamming with Pink Floyd on a bill which read as a veritable Who's Who of underground rock and free jazz, and promised 60 acts for 60 francs. Four decades on from that fateful festival, British crate-diggers Finders Keepers assembled this tumultuous celebration of BYG's anarchic spirit, producing a compilation that cuts across the worlds of free jazz (the Art Ensemble Of Chicago's Rock Out), nascent prog (Gong's Rational Anthem), funky space rock (Vangelis's Stuffed Tomato), Gallic rock (Ame Son's Je Veux Juste Te Dire) and French freak-ery (Brigitte Fontaine And Areski's Ca Va Faire Un Hit). The result is a uniquely groovy and mind-expanding collection that proves that, in France at least, the children of the Plastic Ono Band were given free reign to express themselves and a label which they could call home. While the label itself would hit choppy financial waters around 1973, its impact continues to resonate, not least in the continued work of Georgakarakos and Young who subsequently formed the Celluloid and Charly labels respectively. Musically, meanwhile, the artists involved with BYG would exert a wide-ranging influence on those that followed in their wake, Thurston Moore being a particular advocate of the label's unique charms. Charms which, as this 22-tracker proves, have lost none of their freak-power.

In the dance music bangaround of the early '90s, revellers needed calming sounds as well as big boshing ones. And so it was, thanks to The Orb's Alex Paterson playing it in his DJ set, that Steve Hillage's 1979 ambient mesmeriser Rainbow Dome Musick found its way back into currency. The attention drew Gong veteran Hillage and partner Miquette Giraudy into the dance scene and the result was their techno reincarnation as System 7. This epic, 19 minute 35 second treatment of an album cut from their Point 3 LP by Ontario techno droog Richie 'Plastikman' Hawtin starts off with what sounds like a sweeping lighthouse beam, but it soon becomes a pounding exercise in tension building. Hi-hats don't appear before three minutes in, and when it seems your fevered brain cells can take no more, the demonic, intestinal splat and squelch of the Roland 303 kicks in at 6.35 mins. Then we're off with a series of near-painful, incremental crescendos before it all collapses at 12 minutes and we're back to the lighthouse beam searchlighting an alien landscape. Left near dead, the whole thing begins again on a series of punishing drum rolls before full 303 cerebral bursting is achieved. It's totally psychedelic, but on a fiercely physical level: a bracing start to a new year of MOJO4music Discs Of The day.

"Santa Claus had the right idea. Visit people once a year," deadpanned Danish stand-up legend Victor Borge, his misanthropic comment echoing the sentiments felt by many during the kick-bollock-scramble nature of the festive season. As if the sheer mania of Christmas were not enough, this time of year also provides a regular opportunity for radio stations to bombard us with The Worst Music Known To Man (be grateful that Bryan Adams's Reggae Christmas remains a well kept secret...) and for TV stations to serve up so-called Christmas 'specials'. Now that Bob Dylan has piled on the seasonal misery, it is hard to find musical salvation in such a bleak climate. Thankfully, The King is on hand to offer us a modicum of succour with this, his first Christmas collection from '57.

Of course, there are those who view this album - his fourth for RCA - as proof positive that The Hillbilly Cat had been thoroughly de-clawed. And yet, this is a strong set that underlines two key Presley traits: the first his Sinatra-esque ability to turn even the most ridiculous material to his advantage, the second his profound empathy for gospel music. The latter is typified by stirring renditions of I Believe, (There'll Be) Peace In The Valley (For Me), It's No Secret What God Can Do and Take My Hand Precious Lord, while he adds richness to familiar Christmas nostrums like O Little Town Of Bethlehem and Silent Night. Of the more kitsch material, Santa Bring My Baby Back To Me and Gene Autrey's Here Comes Santa Claus sizzle with hip-thrusting élan, while I'll Be Home For Christmas and Blue Christmas ripple with Elvis's inimitable sense of blues-laden melodrama. White Christmas, meanwhile, follows The Drifters' interpretation of the Irving Berlin standard, causing the latter to dub it "a profane parody" of his classic song and urging that it be denied radio airplay. As it turned out, DJs played these tracks and, indeed, continue to play them. And, when you hear them, they still manage to transport you to a world away from that frenzied last minute panic-barge down Oxford Street...

Christmas with Dino. Let's ponder that concept a second. No, let's revel in it. It would involve plenty of these, perhaps one or two of these, and plenty of feet-up time. Dean might sing you a song... but rest assured he wouldn't knock himself out. That's OK, though. Martin's good-natured mumble-croon is the perfect complement to a lazy Yule: real-fire warm and ludicrously laid back - practically comatose, in fact, on Winter Wonderland, drawn for this seasonal Dino roundup from his 1966 Crimble cash-in, The Dean Martin Christmas Album. These tracks are never less than exceedingly agreeable, but are bettered by those drawn from 1959's A Winter Romance, with gloriously witty arrangements and crisp work by the Gus Levene-conducted orchestra putting the porridgey '66-vintage orchestrations to shame. This, surely, is the best Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow! on record, and elsewhere Dino lives up to his King Leer nickname on Frank Loesser's slyly lascivious Baby, It's Cold Outside. Dean's Christmas TV special became a holiday staple in the States. Like everything else, he didn't seem to take it very seriously, and perhaps the irony was not lost on him when he expired, of an acute respiratory failure, on Christmas morning, 1995. All ye who live to loaf, raise a glass to him.

Smoothly sympatico or jarringly brusque and abrasive, the clash of genres that is the side product of any Christmas record makes the sub-division endlessly fascinating, eternally cringworthy. For example, carols and festive ditties shoehorned very comfortably into Phil Spector's Wall Of Sound, but Berry Gordy's Motown teams were so keen on extracting every last ounce of goodwill sales out of Christmas records that some pretty awful crimes against pop, soul and, indeed, Father Christmas were committed down Snakepit way. By the '80s the Christmas album seemed a less desirable addition to an artist's catalogue, which is what made Alexander O'Neal's 1988 chestnut roaster so fascinating. Because here was another hugely distinctive production team - Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis - addressing the same set of questions. Which were, How does our sound absorb a prescribed format as the Christmas record? and, How do we stop the artist from sounding like a prat? Their solution was to write five of the nine tracks, with seasonal subject matter and titles (Sleigh Ride, Our First Christmas, Remember Why (It's Christmas) and the title track among them), thus giving the singer the comfort blanket of a familiar format. Certainly, O'Neal makes a better fist of the originals than the Jam-Lewis reworkings of Winter Wonderland, The Christmas Song and The Little Drummer Boy. To the best of my knowledge, neither O'Neal nor Jam-Lewis returned to the format. They had said their piece. Their Minneapolis confrère, Prince, has dipped his empurpled toe in the icy waters but once, I think, with the lovely Another Lonely Christmas. Surely the genre is not too constraining?

"Here is an ebullient Ella Fitzgerald, exuding the warmth and spirit and good cheer with which the Yuletide is usually equated." So say the liner notes to Ella's first (and best) Christmas album, a record that shuns the heartbroken, lonely and blue in favour of festive fun, frolics and goodwill. From a finger-poppin', scat-fuelled Jingle Bells to a blissful White Christmas, Ella's cool, clear vocals are the perfect soundtrack to the crackle of home cooking, the slosh of wine and the flicker of early evening candle light. Amazingly, Frank DeVol and Russ Garcia's arrangements avoid the trappings of schmaltz throughout, ducking and diving their way around the vocals with rippling ease. It is to their credit that this remains a jazz album from start to finish - the smooth pulse of Let It Snow! and Frosty The Snowman are guaranteed to give your Christmas Day a particularly zinging feel. But this is an Ella Fitzgerald album and it's her authoritative stamp that ignites these festive favourites. Each track is deftly articulated and elegantly poised, and of course, naturally swinging. The queen of jazz could sing these songs in the middle of July and make it seem that Rudolph and his pals were already limbering up for their leap into the night. Now, where did those mince pies get to?

The further we get away from the fur-lined festive grotto of the '60s and '70s American lounge sound, the more glorious it seems. While many Americans might possibly have reality-bruised memories of these festive rites of passage (mom 'n' pop sozzled on sidecars while Pat Boone and family shimmy with Scooby Doo) we Brits stare at the pixelated images on YouTube and imagine a winter wonderland far more bright and colourful than our own grim session with a bowl of nuts, mince pies, Empire sherry and Christmas Night With The Stars. Perhaps the urtext of the Santafied style is this 1968 release from Los Angeles trumpeter Herbert Alpert and his gang. Repackaged in 2005, with liner notes that assure us Herb and the gang "weren't going to give the project a going-through-the-motions effort", this cocktail of smooth-sailing jazz, sleighbells, and ba-ba-ba-ing boys and girls now sounds surprisingly groovy. This is thanks in part to the assistance of Herb's "good friend", legendary West Coast jazz trumpeter and arranger Shorty Rogers. Alpert's signature sound - bi-polar honey bee trapped in a yogurt pot - remains ever present, but on tracks like Sleigh Ride and My Favourite Things Rogers brings a woozy fruit punch pep to proceedings and even lets Herb sing a few. Purists out there can dismiss Herb's sound as the epitome of Republican naugahyde cool, but this album still manages to capture the warm, woozy buzz of being one egg-nog over the line. Like the reindeer in the song, Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass really know how to fly.

There are some in the MOJO office who feel a bit stuffed after just one CD of this, but that's the beauty of the digital of course; if you don't want Boyz II Men featuring Brian McKnight doing Let It Snow (on CD2), you can simply uncheck the box and instead download the bits you know will be great. Such as The Jackson 5's rightly celebrated Santa Claus Is Coming To Town - showcasing the natural speed of Michael's beat-perfect lead vocal; Stevie Wonder's 1967 weepy, Someday At Christmas or Marvin Gaye's moving 1972 Vietnam war petition, I Want To Come Home For Christmas. And if Diana Ross is a tad shrill on The Supremes' Joy To The World she makes up for it by ring-a-linging beautifully through their refined take on Silver Bells. And hark! Here are The Supremes themselves trilling down the years to wish us "a merry Christmas and a happy new year!" on one of 16 recorded messages from the Motown stable's seasonal finest including Marvin, Smokey, Thelma Houston, Eddie Kendricks ("Your singing Santa") and David Ruffin rapping at march-tempo to usher in The Temptations' atmospheric Little Drummer Boy. A bonus 'stripped version' of them singing Silent Night is also rather lovely, shorn its '70s gospel ding-dong.

Personally, I could listen to a whole album of Funk Brothers Christmas instrumentals and here we get their Normal Whitfield-produced Winter Wonderland. And if there were one note left to leave for Santa, it would be to ask for the addition of the Jacksons' Frosty The Snowman. But then they had to save something for the Jackson 5's Ultimate Christmas Collection (also reissued this year).

Yes, it could be considered blowing our own novelty plastic party hooter, but the fact is that round at our house MOJO's free CD from December 2005 has become as necessary a part of Christmas as the Doctor Who special, the Alastair Sim Scrooge and The Two Ronnies. A fine selection of Christmas tunes by the likes of The Staple Singers, Davids McAlmont and Arnold and Diana Ross, somehow the time of year amplifies those familiar sentiments of peace and goodwill to all, making it a dependable and subtle antidote to the vapid kakola that can pass for the Yuletide entertainment experience. It's expertly sequenced as well, going straight for the jugular when, on The Flaming Lips' opening A Change At Christmas (Say it Isn't So), soulful Wayne Coyne sings about how at this time, "there is sympathy for those who are suffering/And the world embraces peace and love and mercy/Instead of power and fear". And while you're letting these momentous sentiments sink in, we're off into Rufus Wainwright's chirpy wassail Spotlight On Christmas, which excitedly declares "It's Christmas!" My God! It is! There are sweetly melancholic, third-double-whiskey numbers up next from Marvin Gaye, The O'Jays and A Girl Called Eddy before James Brown turns up to advise Let's Make Christmas Mean Something This Year (Soul Brother Number One recommends thinking back to being a kid. OK, then). And so it continues, with Ed Harcourt's In The Bleak Midwinter another highlight and The Ventures' gambolling take on Jingle Bell Rock rounding things off. And when the fun's over, the decorations are back in the loft and it's back to reality, this CD will go back on the shelf, only to radiate again this time next year.

It's a conundrum that Argentine poet and author Jorge Luis Borges would doubtless enjoy. How can a live Ramones album that is almost identical to another live Ramones album from seven days earlier (1979's landmark It's Alive, recorded at The Rainbow in Finsbury Park, London on New Year's Eve, 1977) be superior to that earlier model in every way, sounding less like a straight copy than something totally fresh?

In May 1939 Borges published an essay in the Spanish journal, Sur, entitled 'Pierre Menard, Author Of Quixote' in which he discussed the work of the (fictional) French author Menard, most notably Menard's 20th Century reproduction of Cervantes' Don Quixote in which every newly crafted line, painstakingly recreated in 17th century Spanish, was word-for-word identical to Cervantes' original. If Borges' point was that so much of a text's meaning depends on time, context and the act of reproduction then he'd doubtless dig NYC 1978.

I first heard this near simulacrum of It's Alive on its release in 2003. By then, my worn vinyl copy of It's Alive had become a little exhausted of meaning, the way overplayed albums often can. It was, by then, twenty-four years old and had accumulated both a wealth of memories and the dusty patina of age. But NYC 1978 sounded (and still sounds) vital and alive, new all over again, like those Beatles' Anthology collections, or the remastered Can albums. In terms of actual sound differences, Johnny's guitar is just that little bit louder, Joey's comments a little different (He says "It's great to be back in New York City..." and jokes about "dressing room food" instead of "chicken vindaloo" before I Wanna Be Well), and the whole set (27 songs in 52 minutes) is possibly that wee bit faster than It's Alive (28 songs in 55 minutes). Plus, moving the near-identical set-list (no Judy Is A Punk) from London's scruffy old Rainbow to New York's scruffy old Palladium can't help but change the whole meaning of the performance. The New Year's Eve Rainbow gig is the end of something, the full-stop on the UK's glorious punk year, a New York band silencing all those mouthy London gobs. The NYC gig feels like the start of something, a triumphant return of the geeky hometown nerds as conquering heroes, pointing the way forward to Blondie's pop-punk sound, the horror comic attack of The Misfits and The Cramps and the relentless dumb speed of US hardcore. It's the same gig, but a different one.

Is it for you? Take this test. Presented with a favourite old jumper, freshly pressed and laundered, would you a) press it to your face and inhale deeply or b) loudly complain 'Who washed my favourite jumper?!' if your answer is b) best stick to It's Alive. If it's a), it's time to do the timewarp, all over again.

Consider this a call-out to aficionados of the "3am album". No, not this, or this, but those special records that should only be played, with weary soul, in the smallest of hours, albums that thrive in that dark pocket of time after the temperature drops and the heartbeat slows, when the very air itself feels heavy. Side two of On The Beach flies the flag, so does John Martyn's Inside Out and Bonnie 'Prince' Billy's I See A Darkness. These are not recordings to slumber to. They are for the last ones awake.

Ghost Tropic, Jason Molina's fifth LP as Songs: Ohia, exists in exactly this state, moving like a black molasses of resigned defeat, just one long burdensome sigh. An anchor weighs down every guitar string, the acoustics are eerie, haunted, and Molina's voice sounds so baked it is surely familiar with Neil Young's recipe for honey slides. In No Limit On The Words, exhausted and breathless, Molina strains to explain that "Simply to live/That was my plan". Elsewhere, the percussion that drives Lightning Risked It All harks back to Tom Waits' Shore Leave, but somehow sapped of colour, an apt evocation of the album title: the exotic stripped down to a shadow of itself. Meanwhile, the pulsing twelve-minute centrepiece Not Just A Ghost's Heart and bleak closer Incandescent set a blueprint for the kind of gloomy phantom-folk adopted by Phosphorescent and Micah P Hinson. Even the birds on the two instrumental tracks sound weary.

Molina went on to make other great records (2002's Didn't It Rain, especially) but he never returned to an ebb this low. The band became Magnolia Electric Co. in 2003 and their most recent record is very good - it's warm and melodic; bright, even. But who wants that? Here's to the night shift.

Earlier this year I re-read O'Day's no-holds-barred autobiography and watched the recently released Life Of A Jazz Singer documentary. It sent me into a month of Anita worship. Anyone who's seen her iconic performance at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival will have experienced her extraordinarily rhythmic voice and ice-cool delivery - the latter due in no small part to the whack of heroin she'd been given just before taking the stage. By the time she came to record this second collaboration with arranger Billy May, she'd endured two abortions, been busted for drugs twice, suffered alcoholism and nervous breakdowns, spent six months in jail and released eight solo albums for the Verve label. All are worth investigating, but it's this that best reveals the breadth of her talent. The hypnotic rush of Johnny One Note, the smoky big band swing of Ten Cents A Dance and a be-bop reading of Have You Met Miss Jones? are fine displays of Anita the "song stylist" (she preferred that to "singer"), while her understated takes on candlelit standards such as Bewitched and Spring Is Here are startling and sensuous. It's this combination of beatnik flair and pared-down intimacy that puts her up there with the Holy Trinity of Holiday, Fitzgerald and Vaughan. Like her superstar contemporaries, O'Day was a glutton for experience, good or bad, but her relentless enthusiasm and super-tough constitution would ensure she'd outlive them all. You've got to be made of stern stuff to live and breathe the jazz life for more than 60 years. Anita O'Day was badass.

As Esther Rantzen might say, our thanks to MOJO contributor Stevie Chick for bringing to our attention a 40-minute sound clip of the talkie bits from Fugazi live shows, as posted by the esteemed Chunklet magazine on their website. Not everyone's idea of fun perhaps, but for those who fondly remember the Washington DC band's peerless live shows it offers an oddly nostalgic thrill. The fragments of song intros that punctuate their pointedly polite anti-violence diatribes snap the synapses back into remembering how great a band they were (now on indefinite hiatus since the birth of drummer Brendan Canty's third child. Even Fugazi struggle with flexible working it seems...). A 20-year recording career began here on the fade-up into Waiting Room, the audacious start to Fugazi's debut 7 Songs EP. An exemplary case of heavy yet accessible with its nimble bass groove and shout-along chorus, Waiting Room remains arguably the group's definitive statement (imagine if Smells Like Teen Spirit had been Nirvana's first breath). Bad Mouth lurches around the kind of rhythmic skank later reprieved on the Margin Walker EP's compelling Burning Too, a proto-eco anthem ("The world is not our facility/We have a responsibility/To use our abilities to keep this place alive"). While the Guy Piccioto-sung Provisional was a live standout from a band so fiercely drilled that their every setlist could be improvised on stage.

From this distance Fugazi look like early up-takers on all fronts: side-stepping traditional industry machinations, dictating their own CD and ticket pricing and generally putting the 'do' into DIY to a degree that puts Radiohead's efforts in the shade. And as the Chunklet link goes to prove, no-one addressed a crowd quite like guitarists Ian MacKaye and Guy Picciotto, the pair's inspired dressing down of hardcore goons ranging from calling troublemakers "sir" and recounting salutary lessons from the American Scientist on the mating habits of the Bonobo Ape to the somewhat more direct "You don't like it? Take your five bucks and get the fuck out of here!"

'80s graphics guru Neville Brody has had a pop at Haircut 100, tracing the beginning of the end of popular culture to the moment the outdoorsy white-funk ensemble first entered the UK charts. Which dates the decline of all things good from some time in mid-October 1981. Well excu-use me, Mr Once Trendy Design Guy, but there was more than one player in that badmouthed decade's style/content mismatch, and some would say that he with a hand in this is not wholly without sin. Now Brody has designed some fine record sleeves, but is this really a patch on this or this? And more to the point, do Beckenham's Nick Heyward and clean-cut chums really deserve tarring with the Go West brush?

This Friday, "The Haircuts" reform for a one-off show at Chelsea's Cadogan Hall and, putting my cards on the table for a mo, I shall be in attendance. In context, and despite the lightweight window-dressing, they were an authentic aspect of the British post-punk infatuation with funk and jazz that gave us, at opposite ends of the credibility scale, A Certain Ratio and Spandau Ballet. Haircut 100 would start shows with War's Low Rider at around the same time that Orange Juice were starting theirs with Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah), and there were other elements - the chaste and campy self-deprecation; Heyward's scratchy guitar and twinkling chord changes - in common. And while it would be overcompensating to rate Pelican West alongside the same year's You Can't Hide Your Love Forever (although both were championed by the way-coolest girl in my High School, Sharon Gumbley), there's more to Heyward's only album with the band than the smash hit singles, notwithstanding the bongo-furious disco jitter of Favourite Shirts (Boy Meets Girl) and Fantastic Day's madly-grinning trumpet voluntary. Dig beneath the surface for the spangly proto-indiepop of Snow Girl and - best of all - the misty, suburban English melancholia of Milk Film : a template, surely, for the twee pop wave that would break later in the decade.

Citing something like a nervous breakdown, Heyward went solo after this, with a buff new bod and the odd standout single - 1983's fey A Blue Hat For A Blue Day, 1987's more muscular Warning Sign - struggling to affect a transmogrification of his hardwired reputation for winsome bubblegum. In 1998, Creation's Alan McGee - as part of an addled campaign to rehabilitate some of the overlooked pop craftsmen of the '80s (including The Dream Academy's Nick Laird-Clowes) - spunked another tranche of the Oasis millions on Heyward's The Apple Bed, but vindication was not forthcoming. For that, he'll have to wait for Friday. See you at the front, Alan, shouting for Baked Bean.

In her original liner notes for this mournful, soft-footed collection of traditional folk songs, Shirley Collins makes a strong case for the enduring power of the ancient, anonymous trad. arr. love ballad. "These songs survive," she says, "because they reflect an idea which is still evolving in our generation, the conflict between the ties of love and the ties of society... true love as a power outside society's control." Allowing for the romance of the flower-power age in which those words were written, there is a lot of truth in Shirl's words, but she overlooks two crucial factors as to why these tragic tales of scandal, shame, romance and ambiguity still retain their power: Shirley and Dolly Collins. Speaking to MOJO's Mike Barnes for his definitive 2002 Collins article in The Wire, Shirley considered her vocals on TPOTTLK to be "a bit rushed". Yet while there is an audible frailty to her delivery on tracks such as Bonny Boy and Barbara Allen it is only a frailty that the songs' bereaved, trusting and wronged female characters possess themselves. Collins inhabits these songs so perfectly that they sound like ghostly echoes from the hidden heart of nature, while Dolly's beautiful new settings - using 5-string dulcimers, 18th century cellos, a hurdy gurdy and Dolly's own modern reproduction of a miniature 17th century flute organ - recall the fantasies of 16th Century English composers, the melancholy silvery groans that may have emanated from the castles and country houses that overlooked these lonesome scenes of female longing, desertion, and death. As a result, TPOTTLK invests the lives and names bound up in these songs - Lady Margaret, Polly Vaughan, Black Eyed Susan and Lovely Joan - with a heartbreaking, ethereal immortality.

Bernard Cribbins - actor, comic, storyteller and voiceover kingpin - has been around forever. And while he's expressed bemusement at his brief spell as a chart buster in 1962 (when he had two Top 10 hits), this collection of singles, b-sides and songs off the A Combination Of Cribbins LP still packs a pre-Beatles light entertainment wallop. Throughout, Bernard's verbal versatility, George Martin's production and the witty, dextrous songwriting of Myles Rudge (words) and Ted Dicks (music) are a rare combination. Some of it's inevitably of its time - how the national service generation must have chortled at The Bird On The Second Floor (a mildly swinging, less strenuous variation on Twenty Flight Rock), and with self-deprecating songs like Winkle Picker Shoes (a thwarted youth club lothario rues his choice of footwear) or I Go A Bundle ("...on Camden Town, sitting down and geraniums") it couldn't have deviated more from the priapic American rock'n'roll model if it tried. And there's more of the kind of uncomfortable Britishness that - don't laugh - Alan Bennett or Morrissey gravitate to on Double Thinks, where our hero talks to himself, wracked with self-doubt and class-cringe over a haughty object of desire. But the real gems are big hits The Hole In The Ground - one of Noël Coward's Desert Island Discs - and Right Said Fred. Respectively a working man's revenge tune and a Beckett-Carry On hybrid about removal men, both of which were sampled by Big Audio Dynamite on their Megatop Phoenix album, they're still entertaining kids today. And if you're wondering, that's six cups of tea they have while failing to move the unidentified object left standing on the landing.

Onstage, Georgia-born Madeleine Peyroux is both an effortless and strangely reluctant performer, often appearing ill at ease with the very concept of an audience. For someone who spent her teenage years busking on the Parisian Metro, this is a strange paradox. Peyroux, however, has a history of reticence. Having returned to New York in 1993, she began singing in a jazz club and drawing comparisons to Billie Holiday thanks to her languid delivery and phrasing. A few months later she was offered a deal by Atlantic's Yves Beauvais, and cut her debut album, Dreamland, with Tom Waits' producer Greg Cohen and guitarist Marc Ribot two years later. Then, after soliciting praise from all quarters and touring as part of the Lilith Fair package, she simply walked away from the music business. Understandably, her return eight years later with Careless Love was not met with a huge fanfare. Such is the album's startling power, however, that, in the two years that followed, it spent 183 weeks on the Billboard chart while also climbing into the UK Top 10, feats fuelled by word-of-mouth rather than an orchestrated media campaign.

At first glance, sceptics may be put off by the MOR sleeve, and in truth, the shot of a stylised, barefoot Peyroux sitting in the middle of deserted street with a strategically placed bouquet of flowers is perhaps better suited to the Katie Meluas of this world. Disregard the sleeve and dive into the music, however, and Peyroux reveals herself to be a remarkable interpreter of classic song, translating a string of cover versions into modern day blues laments. A heartbreaking version of Leonard Cohen's death camp meditation, opens the proceedings, immediately setting the tone for the mixture of unfettered melancholia and lingering hope that follows. Peyroux's choice of material is perfectly suited to her languorous delivery, Elliott Smith's drinking song Between The Bars and Hank Williams's Weary Blues both luxuriating in resignation and loss. Elsewhere, her lived-in version of Dylan's You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go is one of the finest covers of the man's work you are likely to hear. "I do sort of sit in awe of the power of music and worry that it's not going to touch people," she told MOJO at the time. With sales of Careless Love well over the million mark she need not have worried. Meanwhile, her records continue to impress with their bashful, understated charm and Peyroux's ever-increasing compositional confidence.

A sui generis, cello-playing Buddhist, Iowa born Arthur Russell seemed to live and breathe music (see the category-confounding variants of folk, pop, rock, ambient and orchestral strangeness that have been rediscovered since his tragically early death from AIDS in 1992). His remarkably broad creative talents - and mission to combine popular tunes and "serious" music - found another vehicle when he tuned into New York's clubbing underground in the mid '70s. Russell's Kiss Me Again by Dinosaur and Loose Joints' Is It All Over My Face hit in 1978 and 1980, and Dinosaur L's weirdo, unhinged disco album 24->24 Music followed in 1982. His label argued that a DJ-friendly re-rub of the track initially called #5 (Go Bang) would improve reception on the dancefloor; consequently, François Kevorkian was given the tapes and transformed it in style. Originally a jazzy-sounding, stoned and slightly claustrophobic abstraction - at one point fuzz guitar, bass and trombone fight for space - in its remixed form, Go Bang found proto-house forward motion without sacrificing its glorious oddness. Now introduced by Peter Zummo's trombone and immediately suspended in space by the loose-but-tight Ingram brothers rhythm section, it finds an operatic voice declaim the title as keyboard and congas ride the rhythm into an orgiastic but somehow removed disco-dub monster. Also babbling the title is former James Brown singer Lola Blank; but what does it mean? Is it carnal? Drug-related? Is it simply about having a good dance? Or, considering Russell's Buddhism, is it about achieving Nirvana? Not to worry; this is a seven and a half minute breach in normal reality where art and disco's rhythmic imperative find balance, and it will Bang forever.

Lurking at Number 34 in MOJO's albums of the year, the seventh Wilco record topped my own list having seeped into my cell-structure via several brisk walks with an ipod and a rainy trip across the Scottish highlands with it playing on the car stereo. Anyone contemplating a similar journey would do well to skip track four, however. Bull Black Nova, Wilco's own cross-country murder song about a fugitive killer ("This can't be undone / Can't be outrun") complete with horror soundtrack piano and insistent groove is brilliantly agonised, but a bit too nervy for a perilously wet mountain road. Thank God for this album's breadth and variety, then. Skip from Wilco (The Song)'s '70s pop stomp to You And I, Tweedy's country-soul duet with Leslie Feist and look, here comes the sun again. Or more accurately, My Sweet Lord, with You Never Know's nod to George Harrison, jangling guitars chivvying youthful nihilism ("All you fat followers get fit fast / Every generation thinks it's the last"). It's testimony to the stability of the current Wilco line-up that Wilco (The Album) sounds as consistent as it does. "Play the hits", someone called out at a recent London show. "Where have you been?" Asked a bemused Jeff Tweedy. "These are the hits". Be it baroque Summerteeth melodies, the avant-rock cred of A Ghost Is Born era Wilco or Yankee Hotel Foxtrot's Eno-gone country innovations, Wilco (The Album) consolidates the group's disparate strands into a most satisfying whole. And come to think of it, if ever a band were ripe to be Eno'd, it's Wilco. There's an idea for album number eight.

Earlier this year Allen Toussaint told me how much he had appreciated Boots The Chemist using his song Here Come The Girls in an advertisement campaign - financial reward, a degree of artistic exposure, confirmation of his melody's long life. As the sole surviving member of the three composers of Everybody Needs Somebody To Love, another classic soul song now appearing in a tedious version on a UK TV ad, it's to be hoped this will prompt a fresh airing for the wonderful early works of Solomon Burke. The mealy-mouthed ad version is a pretty poor representation of an original that, Burke explained to me in the summer of 2008, he adapted from an offertory march, a piece of music played in church as worshippers marched down the aisles towards the altar to place cash donations in a bowl or box or on a plate. Burke, like soul singers from Ray Charles and Sam Cooke down, has a long and honourable history of rock'n'rolling gospel music, and this is one of his most effective, and effervescent ways to start a show. "I'm so happy to be here tonight," Burke announces in an opening speech punctuated by shouts of encouragement from the studio gallery, "so glad to be in your wonderful city. [Yeah!] And I have a little message for ya. And I wanna tell every woman and every man tonight, [Yes?] that's ever needed someone ta lurve. [Yes!] That's ever had somebody to love. [All right now!] That's ever had somebody to understand them [Yes!]..." and above the steadfast 4/4 groove the band is laying down - fast choppy guitar chords and walking bass, baritone sax phrases - Burke's voice gradually metamorphosing from speech, into sung recitation "that's ever had someone to need to love all the time. Someone that's with them when they're up! Someone that's with them when they're down. If ya had y'self somebody like this, you better hold on to 'em. Cos let me tell you something. Sometimes you get what you want, and you lose what you had. [All right!] But there's a song I sing, and I believe if everybody was to sing this song it would save the whole world. Listen to me..." And the rest of the track, sung, becomes a brilliant exposition of how this gospel root is whipped up into a thrilling and climactic screamer of a soul performance. It's easy to visualise Burke Pied Piping his audience/congregation out of the club/church into the streets. Wilson Pickett plugged into its powers, The Rolling Stones used the song in 1965, on their second album, as did The Blues Brothers in the first BB movie 15 years later. They, like Burke, were on "a mission from God". Even a heathen like me gets it.

The W11 bus travels every morning from the blasted industrial wilds of the Crooked Billet roundabout to the modern wipe-clean urban island of Walthamstow bus station, through the modernised post-war council high-rises of the looming Priory Court. It's not a journey to fill you with festive joy on a wet and windy December morning but the other day my ipod shuffled onto a track entitled Brody Jacket by Songs Of Green Pheasant and I found myself transported to a magical glade of distant fireworks, bright clock chimes, glistening guitar echo and melancholy brass lamentations. The track, an instrumental elegy for a lost item of clothing, came from Aerial Days, a mini-album of autumnal ambient atmospheres and shimmering Slowdive'n'Garfunkel harmonies released in 2005 by an artist and teacher from Oughtibridge called Duncan Sumpner who hides behind the arcane pseudonym of Songs of Green Pheasant. Turns out I have all of his albums on my iTunes but we've never reviewed any of them in MOJO. Sorry. I don't know why. Sitting somewhere between the blissful feedback and dreampop drones of such early '90s gloomoids as Flying Saucer Attack and Galaxie 500 and the '70s drummerless field-folk isolation of bands like Heron and C.O.B., the SoGF sound manages to be both airy and abstruse, light in melody yet mysterious in meaning and perfect for big-coated journeys on public transport through the depths of winter. That's how I roll, as the Grey Gang have it in Priory Court.

Ian Dury's six-year-old son Baxter appears on the front of New Boots And Panties!!, stood next to his dad outside Axford's, a clothes shop at 306 Vauxhall Bridge Road in Victoria. There's further generational food for thought in reflective track four My Old Man, which relates to Dury's father William, who "smoked too many cigs", "lived in one room in Victoria" and died in 1968. A small detail perhaps, but suggestive of how much depth there is in these songs. Having been gifted with a telepathic rhythm section in Norman Watt-Roy (bass) and Charley Charles (drums) after a chance remark from the owners of Alvic studios, Dury and his main writing partner Chaz Jankel recorded songs that mixed music hall, funk and (pub) rock'n'roll, all featuring the unapologetically London tones of Dury as he narrated poetic vignettes of hilarity, pathos, darkness and warmth. Even 32 years on the range of sentiments is striking; there's the still-uncommon instance of a polio survivor (as Dury was) being intimate and fruity on Wake Up And Make Love With Me and the jaunty I'm Partial To Your Abracadabra, the deep, exquisite lamenting and abandoned rocking of Sweet Gene Vincent, the far-side-of-logic song Clevor Trever and Blackmail Man's out to lunch attack on prejudice. The delightful lyrics of Blockheads, meanwhile - "they've got womanly breasts under pale mauve vests, shoes like dead pigs' noses" - were noted by Charley Charles, who correctly pointed out this was what he was wearing at the time. Soon after, the augmented band would recognize that Blockheads is what they were, and a series of sublime records would follow. The title, incidentally, derives from Dury's well-known reliance on second-hand apparel, insisting only on previously unworn footwear and drawers.

Much as I favour a bit of the old punk rock, I would always, if pushed, take the camp and weird over the gobby and beery. And while kneejerk values hold sway - in an undeniably bracing way - among the seminal releases of UK punk's first wave, the cerebral tangents of post-punk were already abroad, explicit in the work of Buzzcocks, Subway Sect, Wire and Solihull's Swell Maps. If the bandname were not advertisement enough of their outré sensibilities, the latter boasted the best noms de rock outside of Captain Beefheart's Magic Band. And beyond the instinctive brilliance of singer Nikki Sudden's art-Bolan songs, it was the subversive, cross-grained shatter of Epic Soundtracks, Phones Sportsman, Biggles Books and Jowe Head - maverick technicians in a kind of junkyard pop laboratory - that signalled unbroken territory ahead, routes the UK indie sub-industry would explore, even unto the nascent Blur. 1977's 7" debut Read About Seymour (the song that would bequeath Colchester's Britpop darlings their original handle: Seymour) is the essence of Swell Maps' genius: tick-tocking guitar, blamming drums, neurotic nerd-yelp vox, extraneous irritants like the crappy drum-rim clatter at 0.40 and 0.50, and a chaotic spazz meltdown signalling an early bath. There is a challenge here, not only to old conventions but also to the new, plus a basic, savage rock'n'roll attitude turned inward. Their third single - also featured on this aptly scattershot 1999 comp - was the snooty Real Shocks, an arch critique of punk's style-into-revolt, transmogrified by the wholly unexpected, stunningly mournful piano knell that takes the song out of suburbia and into space. The Maps' subsequent long-players - 1979's A Trip To Marineville (Rough Trade's second full-length release) and 1980's Swell Maps In "Jane From Occupied Europe" - stretched this uneasy tension between rock and art, and are both essential purchases (only a fiver apiece on amazon.co.uk!), and when Swell Maps split the art gene went with drummer Epic (real name: Kevin Godfrey) while his brother Adrian (aka: Nikki) would become an increasingly spectral embodiment of the rock'n'roll fiction-romance - a British Johnny Thunders right down to the choice of leisure activities and manner of demise. Behind them, they left a glorious mess of music, which I can summarize no better than Richard Mason did some moons ago on Perfect Sound Forever: "The real point for me," wrote Mason, "is that Swell Maps epitomize punk rock as I see it, which goes something like this; do it yourself, do it cheap, do it your way, do it anyway and screw what other people think. Main thing is, do it. And they did. And how."

First up, a confession: I can neither speak French nor make much sense of it in its spoken form; well, no better than your average 11-year-old grammar school kid. So, when I'm doing the dishes at home and listening to Preface, the dramatic, echoing opening track on Léo Ferré's bleak 1973 masterpiece (the title of which translates, fellow students, as "There's Nothing Left"), where he recounts his Anarchistic poetic manifesto of 1956 ("Poetry is a clamour/ it must be heard like music!") over military drumming, swirling strings and stabbing horns, it's the emotional bite and fire of Ferré's astonishing delivery that's getting me through the suds routine, rather than wry amusement at his poetic imperatives. But this is perhaps the reason to mark Ferré's later work out for notice. Influenced by Charles Trenet, Ferré started out as a classic chansonnier, writing songs for Piaf, Juliet Greco and Charles Aznavour, but by the late '60s Ferré's communist and anarchist leanings and contempt for bourgeois society, along with his hatred of France's post-war governments and his fascination with the events of May 1968 had transformed him into an astonishing figure of ferocious cultural originality, whose ability to blend the worlds of love and passion with ruminations on death, revolution and pointless existence resulted in epic poem-lyrics more complex, brilliant and untranslatable than even those of Brel or Gainsbourg. However, Ferré was a true performer, so even when I can only glean fragments from his epic belle-lettrist narratives ("Under the paving stones, the beach / under the beach... Hell!", I think he sings on the title track), or interpret Ne Chantez Pas La Mort as a dismantling of Brel's My Death over a noir soundtrack, I can channel much of the rest from Ferré's impassioned romantic delivery, that switches from the adoring to the abhorred in an instant; and then figure out the rest with babelfish. As a late teach-yourself-French course, it takes some beating.

One of the highlights of the BBC4's brilliant Krautdoc (apart from how fabulous Michael Rother still looks) was the brief interview with Jaki Liebezeit in which Can's most dignified member reveals that his much-copied drumming technique developed after an encounter with "some freak" who advised him to play it "more monotonous". Which he did of course, and never to greater effect than on this most tranquil career-high, an album that would be singer Damo Suzuki's last with the band and on which, fittingly, he surrenders centre stage to Jaki's propulsive, heart-of-the-machine rhythms. While I've never really considered having a 'favourite drummer' (any more than I have a favourite kettle) if it came to it, mine would be Jaki. Bubbling through the bossa figures of the opening title track Future Days ebbs and flows from a central pulse. Future Days and Spray burble jazzily along for a combined 18 minutes that seem not a second too long. Moonshake (one of history's great song titles - surely it must be an actual lunar phenomenon?) is Can hitting the sunniest groove on what is possibly their least avant-garde album (on which Jaki gives great gourd too). Side two (and it is a proper second side, never the same on CD - and again, I say that as someone who is about as interested in audiophile snobbery as I am in the latest EU legislation on ballast water...) is Bel Air. Twenty minutes of blissful ambience sculpted, no doubt, from hours of improv experimentation. And it's wonderful, by turns peaceful and unsettling and features the final opportunity to hear Damo make his exotic bird noise vocal sounds. Dear BBC, please can we have that doc on DVD and at least an hour longer? Thank you.

"This is a new number... as yet untitled. We'll call it Derby Blues," says Phil Lynott, launching into a track he'd re-title a few months later as Cowboy Song. The tune itself would appear on the band's Jailbreak album in March 1976, alongside Emerald, Warriors, The Boys Are Back In Town and the title track, the core in other words of the first truly classic LP of their career. The decision to road-test the track during this sulphurous Friday night show at Derby's College Of Technology in November 1975 underlines Lizzy's move away from the blues-rock roots of their earlier albums into altogether heavier territory, led by the twin guitar brawl of Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson. Renewed power ripples through this set's It's Only Money, Suicide and a rebooted version of The Rocker. What's more, unlike 1978's much-lauded Live And Dangerous, this was mixed on the night and captures Lizzy in the raw and overdub-free. While diehard Lizzy fans may already own sections of this 15-track affair on the remastered DVD version of Live And Dangerous, where it appeared as bonus material, this East Midlands epiphany deserves to be experienced in its entirety, sparkling remastered sound revealing just how powerful a live act Lynott's mob had become by 1975. As if to labour the point, yet another unearthed live recording has emerged since this one. Entitled Still Dangerous, it includes a remarkable performance from the Tower Theatre in Philadelphia in 1977 during the Bad Reputation tour, capturing Lizzy on a swaggering high. Both albums prove unequivocally that there was a defined period - between '75 and on until '79 - when few rock'n'roll bands were capable of standing toe-to-toe with Phil and his boys.

God knows I want the record shops to survive. I'm the kind of aged music fan who still gets excited about popping into HMV of a lunchtime and coming out with an unknown gem plucked from the more obscure corners of the "downstairs" categories. But when a trip to my local Walthamstow branch of HMV reveals a thin corner-rack gruel of "Classical/Jazz/World/Easy Listening" (Mac Davis next to Miles Davis) and even a casual walk through the specialist racks of yer major Oxford Street CD emporium only shows up the classics and standards you do wonder how exciting a trip to the record shop will continue to be. Take Tony Scott. After years of scouring the jazz section of HMV Oxford Street I've only ever seen one Scott CD, 1964's Music For Zen Meditation. Granted, it's a unique and strange record - the sound of a tough guy Italian-American bebop clarinettist (born Anthony Sciacca) who, having inexplicably fled the New York jazz scene in 1959, travelled the world, immersing himself in alternative folk and world melodies and the religions of the east - but it's an unlikely place for the curious jazz fan to start. Better by far is Sung Heroes, which showcases Scott's last 1959 date before scarpering for Europe. A series of chamber-jazz requiems for his jazz heroes (Art Tatum, Billie Holiday, Hot Lips Page), his father and Ann Frank, its melancholy, valedictory feel explains why this "Noo Joisey" Juilliard graduate felt the need to leave New York behind: too much death and darkness. "The clarinet is dead and I hate funerals," said Scott. "All my friends, my inspirers are dead and for me the creativity in jazz died with them. I'm looking for new sounds, new feeling and a change of thought. Japan will be only the first stop to fill my soul for my creative spirit, I must get out and search for new sources." The set is certainly heavy with sadness, but also innovation in its quest for new sounds. Bringing together the classic Bill Evans trio for the first time (Evans on piano with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian) Scott affects a lazy, breathily sentimental style that sits somewhere between Ben Webster and Jimmy Giuffre, with Evans, Motian and LaFaro tiptoeing gingerly between Scott's bluesy ambiguities and haunting abstractions. Japan did turn out to be his next stop, and then came albums like Homage To Krishna and Astral Meditation, followed by retreat to Italy and some kind of inner peace. But for truly moving music, it's this album, which finds Scott at the despondent point of departure, which is truly worth seeking out.

The Smiths, The Clash, Buddy Holly and The Fall; Captain Beefheart, the Rolling Stones and The Who. All have made music in various states of indebtedness to Ellas McDaniel of McComb, Mississippi, AKA Bo Diddley. Having graduated from busking on Chicago's street corners with maraca-shaking pal Jerome Green, Bo's raw materials - his mighty 'shave-and-a-haircut, two-bits' rhumba-boogie rhythm, and the shimmering distortion he routinely fuzzed out with that whacko oblong guitar (electrified using his old mum's radio set) and self-built speakers (he said these homebrewed sounds were from "from the , from the , down to the ") - were potent things. This compilation selects from singles released on Chess from 1955 to 1958, but there's nothing restrained about them; Who Do You Love voodoo's it up with talk of cobra snakes for neckties, Hey! Bo Diddley is a saucy rewrite of Old Macdonald, and debut single Bo Diddley got him banned from the Ed Sullivan Show when he played it instead of coal mining lament Sixteen Tons. Fashions came and went over the next five decades, but garnering awards as he went, Bo kept on playing these songs until taking ill in 2007. He rocked into the great beyond in June 2008, and his family said that one of the last things he did was give the thumbs up and say "wow".

While Mark Oliver Everett's life would turn darker soon enough - the death of his mother and the suicide of his sister lay in wait - his debut under the Eels moniker demonstrated clear signs of unsteadiness. With three albums already unleashed (one, Bad Dude In Love, under his own name, two more for Polydor as 'E'), all hinting at his emotional fragility (finding his quantum physicist father dead in E's teens can't have helped) Beautiful Freak was the first fully-formed glimpse inside his heartache and headfuck. But if MTV-endorsed lead-off single Novocaine For The Soul implied that here was another marketable loser-geek icon to rival Beck, the illusion was short-lived. Later albums would see E push away from the commercial expectations to forge his own unique path, but the signs were evident to anyone paying attention. In Beautiful Freak, post-grunge paranoia and eccentric flourishes (spooky glockenspiels, TV-theme pianos) combine to create a schizophrenic soundtrack, introverted and obsessed, but leavened by lyrical black humour and ironic distance. Susan's House, My Beloved Monster and the title track are all oddball love songs that celebrate imperfection and abnormality, while the grungy Rags To Rags and Mental channel their protagonists' dislocation ("it's like I dressed up in my momma's clothing," reflects the latter) into flurries of cathartic feedback. Still perfectly described by its title, 13 years on, Beautiful Freak remains a weird and wonderful ride into the darkness and out the other side.

The tenacity of the Isleys is a thing of wonder. At the forefront of soul trends for five decades, they handled doo-wop, R&B, funk, hippy-rock, disco and hip-hop transformations with ease, as if driven inexorably on by brother Ronald's astonishing instrument, and as the 68-year-old singer currently nears the end of his bit in the big house (having been convicted on federal tax evasion charges in 2005) you wouldn't bet against some kind of a comeback. He could certainly use the cash.

A prime example of the brothers' bouncebackability, The Brothers: Isley was their second great album of 1969 (lest we forget, the year of Stand! and Cloud Nine), the group having looked out for the count after their misfiring Motown stint despite delivering the exquisite This Old Heart Of Mine (Is Weak For You), a Billboard Number 12 in 1966. But the Isleys were best when falling back on their own resources, and the vocal trio's secret weapons were the maturing younger siblings, Ernie (guitar) and Marvin (bass) plus bro-in-law Chris Jasper on keys, who'd earned their spurs on February's's superhip crossover-funk smash, It's Your Thing, and brought a wider appreciation of American youth culture, black and white, its poster issues and its musical enthusiasms. Here the Isleys' instrumental flange master a cornucopia of psych-flecked soul and funk specialisms, from the lascivious crotch-twitch groove of I Turned You On to the Meters-like lope of Vacuum Cleaner (Ron's "love" is like one, apparently), while on the gorgeously restrained contrition of I Got To Get Myself Together, they're pure Muscle Shoals.

The scarlet habits of the cover might make Ron, Rudolph and O'Kelly look like a kind of silly Spanish Inquisition, but this is a grown-up record underpinned by grown-up concerns, with the desperation and regret of Get Down Off Of The Train matched by the sepulchral Weltschmerz of operatic-blues clincher Feels Like The World ("...is closing in on me"). Around the corner was their post-Woodstock anthem-fest, Givin' It Back, but arguably they'd never strike a more perfect balance between soul grit and rock vision.

In music, as in life, timing is everything. After taking a good deal of the previous two years off to recuperate from the 'lifestyle' problems he had developed, Lee Morgan returned to the recording studio at the end of 1963 with a vengeance. That December he assembled a talented quintet to record the new tunes he had been working on, and just two months later Morgan was back in front of the mics with a superb sextet, working on some of the most inventive material he had ever written.

But when the December sessions were released shortly afterwards as The Sidewinder LP, and the surprised Morgan found himself with a hugely popular and lucrative chart hit in the form of the soulful, boogaloo-laden title track, priorities and release dates quickly changed. In between tours with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, the trumpeter's next few albums (such as The Rumproller and The Gigolo) would generally follow the template set by The Sidewinder's success, and the February '64 tapes were left gathering dust on Blue Note's shelves until 1966, when they were finally released as Search For The New Land. (It could have been worse - another terrific Morgan sextet from August '64 had its sessions shelved for 15 years, before finally seeing the light of day as the Tom Cat album.)

But far from the misstep its shelving suggests, Search For The New Land remains arguably the most daring and focused studio album of Morgan's entire career. The trumpeter wrote every track here, and it is immediately obvious how attuned Morgan had become to the diverse styles infusing jazz towards the mid-'60s. Mr. Kenyatta has its roots in hard bop, but the calmer, measured tempo and controlled blowing by Morgan and Wayne Shorter on tenor sax are more than a little informed by the waxing modal jazz trend. Grant Green's guitar work is a revelation, his warm and precise notes providing a proto-fusion sound that is both distinctive and immensely catchy. The gorgeous ballad Melancholee sees Shorter and pianist Herbie Hancock blend their love of avant-garde jazz space with the slow-blues base of the tune to stunning effect. Even the more mainstream hard bop tracks like The Joker and Morgan The Pirate are lifted above the norm by the inspired soloing from the horns, the intuitive rhythm section of Hancock, Reggie Workman and Billy Higgins, and the sheer quality of the compositions, which lend themselves not only to exquisite solo performances but some inspired group harmonies and melodic refrains.

The title track is the crowning glory, a 15-minute tour-de-force beginning with a gentle blend of ivories, cymbals and trembling guitar notes, over which the horns play a stunningly emotive melody. As the introductory theme fades, the bass, piano and drums pick a smooth but determined groove over which Shorter, Morgan, Green and finally Hancock each make their statements before returning to the original theme, retelling it in their own inimitable styles, before a final group effort brings the journey to a striking end. Impossible to adequately describe, the song is like a tremendous wordless poem, hinting at places and emotions familiar to us all - the dream of a faraway exotic land, or perhaps just a quiet corner of our own minds. May the search go on forever.

Too often spurned as the troubled, ill-conceived youngest sibling of the Faces' albums, Ooh La La nevertheless contains some of the greatest songs the band ever recorded, and showcases brilliantly the elements that brought about both the group's greatest art and their eventual demise.

While Rod Stewart's growing preoccupation with his solo endeavours played its part in the band's dissolution, the Faces had always been a group of very different musical spirits, brought together by a shared passion for a tipple and a good time as much as by any unified creative vision. By 1973-74, Ronnie Lane had increasingly voiced his desire to spend more time at the lead mic and get more of his own songs down on record, while Ron Wood had already begun working with Jagger and Richards, on both Rolling Stones tunes and material which would wind up on Wood's first solo disc, the unambiguously titled I've Got My Own Album To Do.

And while these disparate drives would eventually fray the band's working relationship beyond repair, Ooh La La still stands as a lasting tribute to the musical empathy and artistic heights these men were capable of in consort. From the ferocious, testosterone-charged stomp of Borstal Boys to the gentle melodic sway of Glad And Sorry, the band played every card in their sonic deck with confidence and flair. My Fault and Just Another Honky bounce along on waves of chugging guitars and rolling piano melodies, the congregation-pleasing instrumental Fly In The Ointment is a juicy slice of funked-up rock powered by Ian McLagan's soaring organ and Lane's dexterous bass work, and If I'm On The Late Side highlights the impeccably emotive balladry skills Stewart would rely on throughout his career. Indeed, Stewart's performances across the entire LP are often stunning in their deftness and power, particularly on the hilariously wry Silicone Grown, and the beautifully bittersweet single Cindy Incidentally. And last but certainly not least is the magnificent title track, a whimsical and achingly nostalgic ode to lives and loves past, lent a special charm by Wood's distinctive lead vocal performance - a poignantly fitting end to what would be the Faces' final studio album.

Like a teenage rock Twilight, Do The Pop! traces the Saints/Birdman bloodlines, following a trail of garage rock DNA as bands feed off each other and celebrate shared touchstones. Traces of Stooges/MC5 pass through The Saints to The Psycho Surgeons, on to The Lipstick Killers (nearly all the bands names take the definitive article - one notable exception being the Birdman/Stooges supergroup New Race, taking their name from an early Radio Birdman teen rabble-rouser, also collected here). While in Perth a more artful, New York trash aesthetic runs through The Victims and into the '80s with The Scientists (whose wonderful, sleazy, Crampsy Swampland kicks off CD2) and on to The Hoodoo Gurus. Radio Birdman's Rob Younger produces numerous bands inspired by his own, including the mid-'80s power blast of The Hard Ons.

Radio Birdman and The Saints appeared on the same bill on just three occasions according to Laing, including a legendary gig at Paddington Town Hall in Sydney in April, 1977. Punk's Grand Vizier Jon Savage sends out a clip of The Saints there every now and again (just so we don't forget). Fresh faced, unselfconscious and blissfully unaware of any pre-existing notion of 'punk' or 'cool', they look and sound like no-one else. Do The Pop! shows what happened next.

It's 1948 and Pops Staples - steel worker by day/ bluesman by night - is preparing his three daughters for their first performance at a local church service in their new home town of Chicago. 52 years later, the Staples' family figurehead passed away, leaving behind a vast body of songs that made it all the way from the plantations of Mississippi to stadiums across America. Whether it be the impassioned gospel/R&B they recorded in the 1950s or the trailblazing grooves of their '70s Stax soul, the Staple Singers were spirited, devoted and, most importantly, united to the very end. There are several comps out there, but for sheer career-spanning volume, this two-disc collection comes out on top. Purists will cite 1971's Be Altitude: Respect Yourself as their most consistent work, but the heart of that album's fluid urban funk (Respect Yourself, I'll Take You There) can be found in their early gospel-folk recordings - a good handful of which are included here. The Staples sound is suspended between Pop's vibrato guitar and his youngest daughter Mavis's simmering baritone - a combination that manages to deliver both the spiritual calm and the righteous fire of the southern Baptist church. It's there on the country-indebted Will The Circle Be Unbroken and the pastoral blues of Uncloudy Day, the protest shuffle of Long Walk To D.C. and the soulful demands of When Will We Be Paid (For The Work We've Done). By the time the group reached the Stax label in 1968, Mavis had established herself as one of the decade's most powerful singers. Possessor of a super-rich voice that could send their messages of peace and protest hurtling through those lucky enough to get in her way, she struck to the core of the matter every time. The next decade brought triumph after triumph, not least in their collaboration with The Band during their Last Waltz swansong and in the politicised funk-o-rama of the Wattstax festival. As the '70s came to a close they took a step back from the mainstream pop world, but they always remained a relentlessly positive force. You can taste some of that power here.

That an indie rom-com about a man's relationship with a sex doll, directed by a TV commercials hack, turned out to be one of the most strangely affecting Hollywood romances of 2007 was only one of the surprises about Lars And The Real Girl. Just as startling was how David Torn, an '80s jazz-fusion guitarist, who also operated as electronic sound-collagist Splattercell, who had recently produced a cinematic space-noir blast of experimental skronk and dreamlike atmospheres entitled Prezens for the ECM label, could also, in his downtime, have created this wistful, dreamlike soundtrack. Processing the warm wheezes, plinks and pianissimos of accordion, piano and clarinet - plus a whistling bloke and a hovering string section - into a dreamlike collage of languid, misty loops, Torn conjured up the kind of magical dwindling state only ever realised in high, hazy summer. As a result, Torn's soundtrack becomes one of those very rare beasts, a suite of music that both enhanced the film it was scored for and works as a thing of beauty in its own right.

The perception's altered since the end of the USSR, but for decades Russia would have been considered an austerely unhip, rock-free zone. But just as groups like Aquarium and Zvuki Mu contradict that idea, Russophile Marc Almond's most recent album illuminated the music of an earlier Soviet era, with the (translated) popular songs of singer-writer Vadim Kozin. Kozin's tale is a grim one - he was exiled to Magadan, a remote port city in the far east of Russia, for refusing to praise Stalin and for homosexuality, and was forced to tour the gulags - and there is much lament in his songs. But while they acknowledge the tragedy, heartbreak and terrible brevity of existence, these songs also seek to transcend them and to embrace life. Emotively sung and empathically arranged to blend woe and flamboyance, these covers do likewise; opener Boulevards Of Magadan is Kozin's compact with his place of exile, while Forgotten Tango recalls the long-fled good times to guilty jazz guitar and producer Fedorov's foreboding strings. The album's last clutch of songs are particularly gripping: When Youth Becomes A Memory (check out the original here) dwells on fate and rages against the encroaching dark; Autumn reflects upon absent friends and the process of passing into history; and the closing, waltz time Letter From Magadan echoes Jacques Brel's If You Go Away. Some singers of '80s vintage are best suited to the nostalgia circuit; Marc Almond, a man with his own obstacles to surmount, is not one of them.

A groove isn't, of itself, normally enough to make a song. There's all that harmony and melody stuff to consider, too. But that didn't stop The Meters, the New Orleans counterparts of Booker T & The MG's. While they perhaps lacked the extensive range of the Memphian instrumentalists (there's nothing in The Meters' canon like the deep, regretful sigh of Time Is Tight - although their Stormy comes close, and the transplanted Highland fling of Dry Spell outstrips Soul Limbo for sheer quirk) as pure groove merchants, they were easily their match. At this remove, it's the lead drums of Joseph "Zigaboo" Modeliste that most blow the mind. The rest of the chaps - Art Neville of that ilk on organ, bassist George Porter Jr and chicken-scratch axe maestro Leo Nocentelli - mostly stay out of his way, as if a half-decade as Allen Toussaint's house band has earned them an afternoon with a foot off the gas. Cissy Strut kicks off their debut album as headliners, and it prances like a Rue Basin dandy in a feather headdress, challenging you not to revel in every syncopated snare hit and half-open hi-hat tssssh. It's just one of any number of sampleable beat matrices in the Meters canon, a dressing-up box ransacked by 2 Live Crew, Black Eyed Peas and Amerie (remember her startling '05 smash 1 Thing, heavily in debt to The Meters' skeletizing of Stanley Walden's Oh Calcutta!?), but it would be a mistake to dismiss The Meters as the building blocks, not the building. These tunes drip with character and the joy of music making, instant remedies for creeping November Weltschmerz (we have found), and you never feel the lack of a Lee Dorsey or Betty Harris vocal on the irrepressible Art or the self-explanatory weed-sesh blues of Ease Back. The best R&B doesn't need a voice to have soul.

Like Frankenstein repulsed by his monstrous creation, Damon Albarn believed Britpop was his to destroy. Hence Blur: partly a sop to Blur's grunge fifth column Graham Coxon, partly reflective of Albarn's own brief obsession with Pavement, it overspilled with downbeat moods, dirty guitars, references to hard drugs (the creeping, gouched-out Beetlebum) and the Britpop morning after (the dread-ridden Death Of A Party). The juddering funblast of Song 2 - so uncharacteristically mindless it nearly missed the cut - demanded Blur be reassessed and America took note. Blur were now the "whoo hoo guys", trading one albatross (Parklife) for another, but at least this one was a pension plan and indicative of irresistible pop instincts that ran deep, irrespective of style. They'd swopped DMs for Chuck Taylors, and found life beyond the so-called "Life" trilogy.

The flange'd and phase'ing opening track depicts a humble fisherman driven by his need to find food for his family, and it's not the only reference to feeding the hungry on this roots classic. If this, as a red-eyed vicar might hypothesise, was also a spiritual hunger that needed sating, Heart Of The Congos is an all-you-can-eat gourmet feast. Dreamed up by mystic harmonisers The Congos with production magus Lee 'Scratch' Perry at his Black Ark studio, with crack session help courtesy of Sly Dunbar, Ernest Ranglin, Gregory Isaacs and more, it presents lilting, beauteously sung parables of Rastafarian spirituality that combine weight with feelings of levitation. The mellifluous interplay between falsetto Cedric Myton, tenor Ashanti Roy Johnson and the Melvin Franklin-like bass of Watty Burnett is a thing of magic, but an apocalyptic flipside co-exists: for all its joyous pop reggae sounds and the presence of Scratch's famous moo'ing cow sound effect, Children Crying is a plea for deliverance, Sodom & Gomorrow has nemesis in its repeated phrase "burning!" and Ark Of The Covenant also brings the expectation of Old Testament wrath. Similarly ambiguous is Scratch's Echoplex'd up production, which makes a close, elemental listening experience (that irie vicar above's just said that the drums are rocks, the bass is the earth, the voices water, and the dub effects are air - woah!) that demands your attention. Bizarrely, Island records passed on the LP, and it was only widely available with Blood And Fire's expanded reissue in 1996 - a timely reminder that, even for an album made when reggae was so strong, Heart Of The Congos remains outstanding.

"You come around looking 1984/You're such a bore, 1984." Entertain, the first single from their final album (and one of only a handful of singles in ten years) saw S-K's Carrie Brownstein turn her withering eye on media churn and the endless bands re-treading the fag-end of post-punk; dismissing the dreary retro hoards to "Join the rank and file on your TV dial". If only she could have know then how much worse the refried ''80s would get after her group split in 2006, a year after this album, a record which transformed Sleater-Kinney from tight, disciplined, hard core-indebted punks to a questing, experimental rock band. From the opening bars of The Fox, in which co-guitarist/vocalist Corin Tucker pits her yelping vocal against an oncoming river of muddy guitars it's clear that our trio of grown-up riot grrrls were fighting for new ground.

The punk brio of their''90s albums, bristling with youthful indignation and feminist rhetoric turned increasingly rocking with the addition of Quasi drummer Janet Weiss and by 2002's One Beat they were dabbling in vintage synths and millennial angst. But with The Woods Sleater-Kinney were looking to get lost. Teaming up with Dave Fridmann, known for fanning the flames of weirdness in Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev, was a surprise move, but in truth his effect here is more of spurring them on, encouraging the trio to trample on the strictures of previous discipline and get loose like a goose (deuce, whatever...) Or, in the case of The Fox's twisting fable, a duck ("Laand ho!!"). They save their furthest out-there best for last, the 11-minute Let's Call It Love - a relationship-as-fight-club metaphor complete with "seconds out" bell and sonic twists and turns that segue into Night Light's romantic glimmer of hope.

Propelled by the international chart success of Killer Queen, Sheer Heart Attack quickly became Queen's access-all-areas pass into the opulent world of rock superstardom. Sitting squarely between the multifaceted fantasises of Queen II and the more refined pop structures of A Night At The Opera, the album is unsurprisingly a gargantuan mix of the two. Stone Cold Crazy, a Freddie Mercury creation left over from his days in Wreckage, had been waiting in the wings for years before the addition of Brian May's super low-slung riff turned it into one of Queen's heaviest cuts (Metallica still cover it today). The scorching scales of Brighton Rock and swelling grooves of Now I'm Here and Tenement Funster are also examples of the band at their most monolithic, each track gorging on May's mountain range of guitar. A nasty bout of Hepatitis would see Queen's axe man holed up in hospital for several of the sessions, but his intricate layers of harmony still gleam. Mercury lightens proceedings with the hymnal Dear Friends and Lily Of The Valley (the latter could have easily made it onto the black side of Queen II) before providing a real curtain-closer in the form of anthem to the heavens In The Lap Of The Gods...Revisited. Sheer Hear Attack's spirit lies in its combination of bravura experimentation and pop nous and for that reason it remains one of Queen's best records. For the band, the real party began here...

The original sleeve notes described Ascension as "a guaranteed soul rinsing". A single listen to this one 40 minute track album is enough to convince even the hardiest of listeners that Coltrane and his cohorts have over-delivered on this simple promise.
The previous year 'Trane had released A Love Supreme, a landmark album which saw the sax player and his quartet move further away from their bop roots - typified by his classic adaptation of My Favourite Things - as they began to explore the world of free jazz. Ascension, however, took things one step further, with Coltrane entering Rudy Van Gelder's New Jersey studio with a coterie of musicians plucked from the burgeoning avant-garde scene. Among those gathered were tenor sax pair Archie Shepp and Pharoah Sanders, alto sax Marion Brown, and trumpet player Freddie Hubbard alongside mainstays McCoy Tyner (piano), Jimmy Garrison and Art Davis (both on double bass) and legendary drummer Elvin Jones. Once in the studio, Coltrane re-worked the central theme to A Love Supreme but gave the musicians total freedom as far as their own solos were concerned, creating a 12-part single piece. The result is both frenzied and intoxicating, the album sleeve's sober black and white portrait of a wistful-looking Coltrane doing little to suggest what lies in store.

The CD reissue of the album took Ascension even further by featuring both takes of the track to mind-mangling effect. In fact, he first take should be enough to persuade to underline the insurrectionary spirit running through free jazz in the mid-'60s. While the rock world prepared to thrill to the sonic revolution contained within the grooves of The Beatles' Revolver, when it came to freak-ery Coltrane and his band were miles ahead. Indeed, your correspondent must confess to having discovered Ascension as a barely played vinyl album lurking in the darker recesses of my parents' record collection some 25 years ago. A quarter of a century on from that initial discovery, the album now resides firmly in my collection and remains one of the most intense recordings of any genre.

The post-Elvis rock and roll boom brought many contenders. But a special salute must be given to Johnny Burnette and the Rock 'n Roll Trio for the scorching urgency and wildness of their rockabilly boogie. Memphis native and former electrician Burnette, who actually went to school and worked at the same firm as The King, was a vocalist given to screams, spasms and palpitations, a style ideally suited to these full-pelt songs of dames, trains, alley cats, wine and chains of love. Famous cuts Train Kept A-Rollin', Lonesome Train and Honey Hush are raw, undeniable highpoints, but the rest isn't far off, as basses slap, drums thwack and a futuristically fuzzed up guitar mixes up jazz, country and blues, as on the super-bopping Rock Billy Boogie and the wino-whooping Drinking Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee, Drinking Wine. But the world wasn't listening and the original trio jacked it in in autumn 1957; Johnny Burnette had some pop hits at the turn of the 60s, but died in a boating accident in 1964. His bass playing brother Dorsey died in 1979, and guitarist Paul Burlison followed in 2003. On the tracks recorded in the middle-50s, though, they bottled enough lightning to make time evaporate, and Johnny Burnette and the Rock 'n Roll Trio still sounds fiercely alive.

It's hard to imagine so loving and soulful a record being inspired by scummy old London. Our true Brit suspicion of anything approaching sincerity means we're much more comfortable with London Calling's grimy urban declamations or Madness's affectionate tragic-comedy. But '60s pop sophisticate Nyro lived and breathed the streets of her Manhattan home. A drawn-out ancestor of My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, New York Tendaberry took a full year to make, Nyro often travelling to Columbia studios through Central Park in a horse-drawn carriage from her Upper West Side apartment, in a ball-gown. "She was very theatrical", engineer Bob Halee remembers sweetly in the sleeve notes. She certainly was; unable to read music, she reportedly expressed what she wanted to the studio guys in wonderful, synaesthetic metaphors ("Here I would like some light blue, then go more pink over here," Can you hear that, Kevin Shields?). The mostly stark, voice and piano arrangements are definitely bluish in hue, while the vibrant gospel magenta of Save The Country - an increasingly frantic, horn-driven plea for spiritual and social cleansing, like an East Coast answer to the Youngbloods Get Together ("In my mind I can't study war no more") - was the track most likely to be a hit for someone else, à la Stoned Soul Picnic. Even so, an earlier full-band version of Save The Country failed to chart in 1968 but it makes a fascinating bonus on the 2002 reissue.

Another gem from the dragon's hoard of MOJO's Dave Henderson, who runs eclectic reissue label Righteous and manages our covermount CDs when he's not wrangling talent for MOJO's annual Honours List awards ceremony. This, one of many excellent titles he's disinterred so far this year (the Merle Travis is another humdinger), is a compilation of the weepiest '50s tracks by the honky-tonk hottie born with the fanciful handle of Argolda Voncile Hill. From the "it shoulda been me" soul-scrape of Boye/Glazer's Call Off The Wedding, this is a three-lane pile-up of romantic calamity, with Hill's gritty holler vying with some of the starkest arrangements (and, come to that, some of the most unashamedly pathetic pedal-steel playing) in the canon. So, wince and swoon with vicarious sorrow as Hill's man done gets boozed up (Liquor & Women), beats her, cheats on her (Please Don't Betray Me), and neglects to write that "letter that means more to me than gold". What a complete bastard. Hill, who'd blazed a trail for female country singers when her version of I Let The Stars Get In My Eyes topped the Country chart in 1953, gave up the honky-tonk game soon after to shack up with June Carter's ex-hubby Carl Smith. She seems to have been luckier than her songs, and Smith and Hill were still married when she joined that Hayride in the sky in 2005, aged 72.

"Techno-boffin" was a description slapped on many an early-'80s synth-prodder, but Thomas Morgan Robertson was the real deal, a former Members' sound man who earnt his nest egg playing the innovative synth parts on 1981's Foreigner 4 before splurging it on four surprising, eclectic solo albums and, latterly, making it all back as a magus of mobile phone software. This, his second album, spawned Top 20 Latin-electro-funk novelty Hyperactive!; the rest roamed the canyons of his over-read, under-sensible mind with baffling, beautiful results. Screen Kiss is a vertiginous crane shot over the debris of Hollywood's dreamland; Mulu The Rainforest is lysergic world-jazz brained on dead man's root; The White City an utter synth-spazz about someone called Keith who builds "a drug cathedral" while Robyn Hitchcock contributes a hatstand monologue. Unimaginable sounds boom and whistle, while a preoccupation with mental dislocation adds a constant dark undercurrent, even unto the haunted dinner-jazz cover of Dan Hicks' I Scare Myself. After the chart action of The Flat Earth, Dolby appeared to please himself too much, and indulgent collaborations (George Clinton on the P-Funk-lite May The Cube Be With You) and tacky promo concepts (Dolby as Travis Bickle - or is it Mr T? - in Fieldwork) ensued. But at his mid-'80s peak - 1985 also witnessed his masterly production of Prefab Sprout's Steve McQueen - there was method in his mad scientist act.

Jeffrey Lewis's fifth Rough Trade album has sustained me since February and I return to his wobbly voice and over-sharing lyrics as if they were a pair of comfy, dog-gnawed slippers. For me, this marks his transformation from "jokey NYC songwriter" (© Pitchfork) and (admittedly ace) part-time cartooner into a musical artist of note, heir to that unpolished rock-naïf lineage that runs through Jonathan Richman back to the Velvets of I'm Sticking With You. 'Em Are I's strengths include its wit and musical variations, from Slogans' Buzzcocksian brief history of low self-esteem to The Upside-Down Cross's groovy indie rave-up, via Whistle Past The Graveyard's helter-skelter, bluegrass-tinged musings on mortality. Good Old Pig, Gone To Avalon even features a gleefully unwound guest guitar solo by one J. Mascis. Haunting the whole thing, there's a bittersweet air of existential stock-taking, with Lewis aware of the "sun setting on my youth" and weighing the value of the touring muso life, with its grabbed naps, cheap desserts and expensive medication. While he has yet to draw the line between public and private to his complete satisfaction, the tension has shaped a funny, honest and touching record that's thoroughly good company from start to finish - perhaps even an It's A Shame About Ray de nos jours. And as Lewis remarks about something else entirely: "That's easier said than done and it's not even easy to say."

A good rule of thumb for music that has its own internal logic and goes on for too long: stick with it, and odds are it will soon sound brilliant. Such is the case with the two epic jams of Ash Ra Tempel's debut. Amboss - AKA Anvil - drifts in slowly on a galactic dust cloud of Manuel Göttsching's guitar before the storm begins, underpinned by Klaus Schulze's tight-yet-all-over-the-place drumming. Sometimes he plays like a speeding woodlouse, at others a zooming bullet train; similarly, Göttsching's protean guitars move from Chuck Berry ur-riffing to what sounds like Hendrix playing a rusty gate hinge, a Tony Iommi sea shanty or Mick Jones doing doom metal. They keep it up for 20 minutes and end with a bang on the snare, as casually as if they've been rehearsing some Quo covers at 2 in the afternoon. It's less frantic on the flip, with the 25 minute Traummaschine - Dream Machine to you, Anglophones - coming in slowly on a softly howling void of effects. Eight minutes in there's the beginnings of a riff, by nine minutes some frowning hominid is banging pieces of bone together before the monolith and by 12 minutes there's a semi-Yoo Doo Right bassline, clattering bongos and some shredded guitar to charm the snakes slithering round the flickering acid campfire. As Julian Cope's ever-rewarding Krautrocksampler has it, this is "the power trio playing as a meditational force... at its greatest when it's impossible to work out what instrument makes which sound." Indeed. And well worth the day's round trip to buy at the Ultima Thule shop in Leicester in those pre-everything-for-free years before the internet.

This storied outfit's earliest activities after emerging from the California desert included playing Rolling Stones tunes and releasing a single version of Diddy Wah Diddy by Bo Diddley. And if the above activities seem a fair distance from later Beefheart trepanning parties like Trout Mask Replica, they're a good précis for Safe As Milk. With Beefheart's signature wolf-roar (strange to think of him ever being 26) present and correct, the music is a blues-heavy rock rich in natural eccentricity rather than paisley-underpants '67-psychedelia, and despite previous label A&M dropping the band for being uncommercial, these songs are invariably catchy, hummable and in possession of the all-important good beat. They're varied too; take latiny choco-bar tribute Abba Zaba, the soul and doo-wop of Call On Me and I'm So Glad and freak folk weeper Autumn's Child for proof. There are signposts to where they'd go later - see how rhythmatist Drumbo's already getting to grips with those treble-jointed micro-beats on the fabulous Electricity - but there's a kind of calm here that suggests he hadn't yet started forbidding the band to use the toilet to make their playing "tense". As for contemporary admirers, a certain J.W. Lennon was on the money.

The inspiration behind and gestation of Marvin Gaye's masterwork is well known and has been told at length in MOJO 64 and in Ben Edmonds' MOJO book from 2001. One of the keys to its success are the arrangements of David Van DePitte, who also conducted the orchestra. Arguably the most able and sophisticated of Motown's arrangers, Van DePitte wrote charts that gave What's Going On its overarching cohesion and gravitas, made the storyline and concept whole and cemented the impression that here was a major statement, a work of spiritual inspiration and profundity.

And yet, as he told Billboard's Book Of Number 1 R&B Hits, he got the job by default - none of the other arrangers, weary of the singer's peculiarities, wanted to work with Gaye. And, indeed, when Van DePitte first heard Marvin's plans he said, according to Edmonds, "it was never gonna fly". And Berry Gordy doubted What's Going On, the album's forerunning single, from the start. But Gaye insisted and after that, added Van DePitte, "we both got into a kind of 'the hell with the company' mode."

Certain happenings an arranger can never write. Eli Fountain's opening alto sax solo on the title track for instance, was only the musician's warm-up yet fitted so perfectly, and engineer Ken Sands' mistake created Gaye's voice double-tracked duetting with itself - yet for the most part Van DePitte induced a discipline in Gaye while giving the studio musicians latitude to stretch.

The success of the single (#2 Billboard Pop; #1 R&B in January, 1971) demanded an album, but Gaye's (lack of) working practices pushed Van DePitte to the brink and he demanded to be released from the project. Lured back, the arranger suggested segues to link the tracks. These added to the album's sense of serious purpose, pulling together the thematic subject matter, and highlit the organic flow of voice and instruments, melody and rhythm. Gaye was also relying on Van DePitte to get the music he heard in his head, and his ideas for instrumentation, on to paper, and thence to the other musicians. As engineer Ken Sands told Ben Edmonds, "Marvin relied on David to translate the feel he wanted... The arrangers were there to steer the ship." Finally, master helmsman Van De Pitte added classic string arrangements to give the album its rich sheen. That Gaye and the label knew the extent of these contributions was implicit in the ultra-rare credit on the front cover of a Motown album: "Orchestra Conducted And Arranged By David Van DePitte".

Melancholia has permeated heavy music from the beginning. Behind the bludgeon, there is a nihilism that extends far beyond the blues, and Black Sabbath's early work is packed with it. Even Paranoid, tossed off by the band in a matter of minutes during surplus studio time, reaches us now as if from a well of psychological anguish ("Finished with my woman / 'Cos she couldn't help me with my mind!" wails Ozzy). Solitude - from the Sabs' 1971 album, Master Of Reality - is grimmer still ("My name it means nothing / My fortune is less"), and is reinterpreted on this, the seventh studio album by Norway's most inspired avant-metal outfit.

In many respects, Ulver epitomise what happens when metal's melancholic strand is taken to its logical conclusion. While the band's roots lie in clattering black metal, their evolution began with the release of 1998's openly progressive Themes From William Blake's The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell. By the time they'd got to Shadows Of The Sun, they'd wandered still further away from their gnashing early work, sitting at the remote, windswept crossroads of art-rock, ambient adventurism, improvisational noise, and the hymnal aspects of modern classical music.

If you need more specific reference points then marvel as opener Eos plunges the listener into a world where it is possible to imagine mid-period Pink Floyd collaborating with a latter-day David Sylvian. The choral beauty of All The Love follows, a sanguine lament on the subject of fear, ignorance and the ignobility of conflict, while Like Music provides the listener with a sense of solace and redemption. Yet the scale of Ulver's true ambition is best illustrated on Let The Children Go, its celestial church feel liquefying into ECM-influenced noodle-soup with the use of ambient percussion and Mathias Eick's Jon Hassell-ish trumpet.

Meticulously assembled, Shadows Of The Sun is an album whose scope defies time and genre. It stands as a tenebrous testament to Ulver's unique vision.

Over on the West Coast, the "Paisley Underground" revived melodic '60s sounds within a raw, pared-down aesthetic. Among the leading lights were The Dream Syndicate, and although their career and creative peak was short-lived they left this brilliant debut. Unlike their rootsier contemporaries, their music delighted in the sonic experimentation of the Velvets (the name was, after, all, a giveaway) an impression underlined by the Lou Reed stylings of lead singer/songwriter Steve Wynn. But there was breadth there too, exemplified on their debut by the the chugging Creedence guitars of Definitely Clean, and the way the opening thrash of Then She Remembers digresses into Byrdsian jangle, while guitarist Karl Precoda's mantric Halloween could almost pass for Marquee Moon-era Television.

Today, it's rarely mentioned in the same breath as Murmur, Daydream Nation or Zen Arcade, but perhaps it should. In their way, The Dream Syndicate was as crucial to the development of alternative rock in the '80s, and it was hardly Wynn's fault that his stream-of-consciousness style would soon have a more charismatic poster boy in R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe. But for whatever reason, Wynn & Co could neither capitalise nor expand on their early critical successes and after a brief period in major label oblivion the band's fortunes went downhill, and they split in 1989. They are not long, the days of wine and roses.

At time of writing, Ulrich Schnauss's label are in legal discussions with Guns N'Roses over claims of improper sampling on the Chinese Democracy LP. Not that you'd take the producer from the Baltic city of Kiel as the type to pick a scrap. Goodbye, for example, is a layered and dreamlike wash of shoegazing indie rock and synthesizers, with breathy vocals and the drifting-in-space tones of the Oberheim OBXa and other analogue polyphonia, and if an involuntary mental checklist of the Cocteau Twins, Boards Of Canada, My Bloody Valentine, Tangerine Dream, Slowdive and similar purveyors of inner flight soundtracks springs to mind, this is still a superior kind of aural brain bath that manages to sustain a sense of forward momentum. Stars and Medusa, for example, both manage to pack rumble and wallop, but songs like Einfeld approximate the settee-bound, Venusian pedalo-ride wooze-state arrived at by turning the heating on full and swigging a bottle of kaolin and morphine. Schnauss has said this was the third album in a trilogy that set out to blend indie rock and electronica, and that trilogy is now ended, hence the title. But as a man who's collaborated live with members of Chapterhouse, bets are he won't keep away from that washed out, reverbed sound forever.

In Los Angeles for work recently with fellow MOJO scribe and good pal Peter Relic, driving in a loaned BMW across the flummox of interstate intersections from Eagle Rock to East Hollywood to pay a visit on Mr. David Axelrod, I found myself profoundly affected by an album I thought I'd grown tired of years before. It probably had something to do with the aural and visual assault of L.A.'s abject upgrade society: kids in boob tubes, grown-ups in romper suits and that dreadful creeping-dread sense that technological progress coupled with intellectual regress would bring the death of us all, but suddenly the brave genius of Richman's short-hair, straight-as-a-die philosophy knocked me sideways. To fall in love with the then-unhip Velvet Underground in 1971 was cool enough, but to want to develop the Velvets' urban cheapness, motoring riffs and Cale drones at a time when everyone was going either agrarian acoustic or heavy denim, and then to swap Lou Reed's sneery junkie nihilism for a strange clean-living positivity was a masterstroke.

Revelling in such unhip concepts as museums, tenderness, old people, short hair and suburbia, Richman went out as far on the nerd limb as he possibly could, while seemingly still singing from the heart. It may have been as much of a stance as the "free love" "weed liberation" crew, or the "smash it up" punk gang who would follow in his wake, but the difference is/was that it took far more guts for a 22- year-old '70s kid to defend something as "uncool" as parents or health food than it did to stand by the wall, sneering at everything, just a few years later. To dwell on it further is to delude oneself into imagining a world where every teenager gets to hear The Modern Lovers and makes their life just a little bit better: where depressed self-harmers realise that "I can see through this bitterness and sadness / And so I won't die / Someday I'll be dignified and old" and every impressionable kid hanging out with the bedroom stoners can at least think "If these guys, if they're really so great / Tell me, why can't they at least take this place / And take it straight?"

Yes, I'm middle-aged, I'm worried about the future for our kids and I'm probably still a bit jet-lagged but right now The Modern Lovers has brightened the corners of this bankrupt world. So, I'd like to ask you all to join in and sing: "Hey kids / I said hey kids / I say someday we'll be dignified and old! That's right / I said some day we'll be dignified / Someday we'll be dignified and old!" And, like Jonathan, I'd like to hear the kids sing back.

Ståle Storløkken, Nikolai Hængsle and Torstein Lofthus woozy cacophony of psychedelic jazz-rock opens with a feverish instrumental that sets the tone for the next 40 minutes of pulverising sounds. The relentlessly high levels of energy - Lofthus' rapacious drums rarely stop rolling - are only matched by Storløkken 's organ/synth mastery and it's the latter's nimble-fingered abandon that fills Skink, the title track and the relatively conventional funk grooves of Misdirection with the confidence and brio that made this record one of my 2008 favourites. It's reference points all lie in the late '60s/early '70s fusion explosion - they even cover two Joe Zawinul classics- and the band's decision to use analogue studio equipment only emphasises their desire to re-capture some of that era's experimental, overdriven fury. Here's a record guaranteed to turn those grey October skies into a technicolour tapestry of avant noise.

Anyone tuned to 6Music or Radio 2 this week will have heard the new Foo Fighters single, Wheels. The one that opens "I know what you're thinking / We're all going down". Actually Dave, what many of us will be thinking is "Oh my God, that's Learning To Fly by Tom Petty!" Which it is, from its lolloping, southern road-trip backbeat to the radio-friendly harmonies, the similarities are startling. It'll be interesting to see what the writing credits on the Foos' single read like, but undeniably, both are thumping good pop songs and so utterly MOR as to have the megawatt musos in this office teetering on the window ledge (don't do it boys! We haven't had the Stevie Nicks duet yet!).

The Foos' single is a previously unreleased appendage to their new Greatest Hits, much like Petty's cover of Thunderclap Newman's Something In The Air which closed his Greatest Hits in 1993 (bumped on a 2008 edition in favour of that slightly plodding 1981 duet with Nicks, Stop Draggin' My Heart Around). Also new at the time was the excellent Byrds-y, Mary Jane's Last Dance, a Rick Rubin-produced kitchen sink drama of a sort that Petty does so well.

Spanning 1976-'93, from The Heartbreakers debut (the rollicking American Girl and Breakdown) to Petty's post-Traveling Wilburys compositions with Jeff Lynne (including worm-that-turned anthem I Won't Back Down, and Grohl fave, Learning To Fly) Petty's songs share a rootsy, comfort fit that ensured hits at home in the US (though The Heartbreakers new-wavy mid-'70s sound first broke in the UK) but resist schmaltz in so much as fate almost always twists the wrong way against his denim-clad protagonists. A career studded with record label wrangling plays out via aspiring rocker "Eddie" in The Great Wide Open ("The A&R man said I don't hear a single") and Petty himself once declared bankruptcy after his first label was bought by MCA. And if Foo Fighters' new single appears to signal further legal wrangling it would be wise to remember that Grohl himself tried out for The Heartbreakers just after Nirvana ended, drumming with them on Saturday Night Live in 1994. Curiouser and curiouser.

Feted for 2008's fab long-player London Zoo, Kevin 'The Bug' Martin earlier collaborated with Bradford dub sorcerer The Rootsman on singles and other tracks collected on this brilliantly poisonous horrorscape of extreme raggacore. While raw-larynxed dancehall MCs including Warrior Queen, He-Man, Cutty Ranks and Bongo Chilli growl songs called Killer Queen, Killer, Boom Boom Claat and War Start, ragga beats spring, hammer and punch as synths are tortured - other sound sources include sirens, concrete-shaking bass and, as on the fierce and murderous WWW (voiced by dancehall hardman Mexican) bursts of a machine gun, all elements artfully arranged for maximum abrasion. There's a second disc of dub versions which, if anything, turns up the pressure: the re-rub of the aforementioned WWW Version brings stygian bass and noise and Mexican's distorted vocalising echoing off into a landscape charred and scorched by the relentless brutalism. "I don't believe in music as escapism," says Martin, whose youthful mind was opened by Pil's Metal Box and On-U dub. "I want it to assault body and mind simultaneously." On Killing Sound, the job is, in a very real sense, done.

In 1985 I was a punk-a-be from the middle of Ohio whose LP collection ran the gamut from Ramones to Black Flag with the ultimate Midwest wannabe punks The Replacements in between. The closest I got to "soul" was a copy of Electric Warrior. But I fancied myself into all types of music, mainly because I read a lot of music mags. One now-defunct organ was Musician, which was better than most and reviewed all sorts of music and audiophile gear. And it just so happened that in the issue they reviewed the 'Mats latest opus, Let it Be, it was next to a review for a "long-lost live record" by some old dead guy I knew my dad sang along to in the car. His name was Sam Cooke. Oh, I knew You Send Me and Chain Gang from AM radio but I just knew he was one of those overproduced pretty-voiced pop singers I was so against.

I was bored and read the review anyway and something about it stuck with me, probably because I was getting into bootlegs and this kinda read like an old bootleg someone had cleaned up for release. Well, for whatever reason, about a week or so later I got my allowance and went to Record Bar (seriously, that was what my mall's record store was called) to go pick up the 'Mats brand new masterpiece. But even then and to this day I can't just buy one album; it's two or more or I'm out the door, musicless. Well, damned if that old dead guy's album wasn't right next to the front with all the other "new releases", so instead of going home without Westerberg and the Stinson bros' latest I picked up the "rescued from the vault, newly remastered, soul find of the last 20 years...". The high-school hipster behind the counter gave me nodded approval about The Replacements disc but looked leerily at Sam. I mumbled about "grandma's birthday" or something and I was OK in his eyes again.

So 11 o'clock on a school night finds me in bed with those headphones they made back then that covered your ears, half your cheeks and the entire back of your skull. No matter, thought I, this Sam Cooke record will put me out in no time. Then someone I swore was standing in my room started telling me to give it up for "Mr Soul! Sam Cooke!" This band kicked in, hard, rough, but tight, so damned tight! And this voice came in, like it was just one more instrument, just a better-sounding horn or something. Oh I knew the voice, that voice is unmistakable even to some ignorant 15-year-old asshole who knows better about everything than anyone older than 20 or 21 cuz they can get beer. His voice sounded like he'd had a whiskey or three and maybe that many women right before he stepped out there; it was still smooth, just like you could tell he was, but had a smoky edge to it that I never heard before. He was in control of every little thing: every note, every ad-lib, total control of his backing band. Even when he changes things up they're right behind him like troops following a General like Patton; they know Sam is gonna keep them safe and get them back home.

But the biggest player is the audience. They are so choreographed in their parts that they know when to shake the rafters, when to shut up but most important, they know when to swoon. For 40 minutes I was transfixed. I realised then I was smiling, beaming like it was Christmas and I got my teenage smoking hot girlfriend under the tree naked with a bow that said "from mom and dad, have fun". And then I noticed I was dancing in my bed, my feet and legs shaking all over. "My God!" my ignorant 15-year-old thoughts hit me, "you can be a normal straight white punk asshole but you can DANCE too!" This album changed what I thought about EVERYTHING that I knew, a lot of it about music, and if you think that's nothing I dare you to get into a teenager about the music they listen to.

Two last quick things. If you think you won't like this because you don't like soul/hip-hop etc... don't worry; this has more to do with rock like Springsteen than Lil Jon, but if you love rap/hip-hop etc. then this is where it started. And finally, if your last excuse is that you hate live albums, join the club. I abhor live albums - since 1955 up to now maybe three are worth listening to more than once. But I've been playing this for people for 25 years and everyone who's heard it has searched out their own copy. All of them.

In just a few short years, The Beach Boys popularised, then transcended, a whole new genre (surf pop) and recorded one of the decade's undisputed masterpieces (Pet Sounds), but they exited the 1960s in a tangled mess. Sunflower, their first offering of the new decade, had tanked and their chief songwriter - already fried by acid and plagued by the voices in his head - was still haunted by the aborted recording of the Smile album. Step forward Carl Wilson, younger brother of the troubled Brian and the band's de facto lead singer since 1965's Good Vibrations. Despite borrowing the title of Brian and Van Dyke Parks' epic hymn, this album belongs to Carl. Not only does he contribute two of the best tracks - the soulful, politically-pumped Long Promised Road and the hallucinatory Feel Flows - he also helps realise one of his brother's most sublime triumphs.

The bare bones of Surf's Up had been delivered to camera by Brian in late 1966. Filmed for documentary Inside Pop, Wilson performed the new track - then only at demo stage - alone at the piano. Host Leonard Bernstein was spellbound, calling it a song "too complex to get all of first time around" and "a symbol of the change many of these young musicians see in our future". After the Smile sessions left it half-recorded and cast aside by its creators, Surf's Up looked set to remain lost until its composer returned to earth. For this writer, the 1971 recording remains the definitive version, with those crystalline vocals imbuing Parks' cryptic verses with a grace and simplicity missing from the 2004 reboot. With Brian re-joining his brother in the vocal booth for the second-half of the song, this remains a fraternal creation from start to finish.

After a turbulent few years, the sun was setting on the Beach Boys' second stage. And it wasn't just Brian who was grappling with seismic shifts. Bruce Johnston's beautiful Disney Girls with its talk of "country shade and lemonade" is about as far from Little Deuce Coupe and I Get Around as you can get, while 'Til I Die is awash with the threat of an uncertain future ("I'm a cork on the ocean / floating over the raging sea... I lost my way"). The tide had turned, but with Surf's Up, the Beach Boys had pre-empted the changes now sweeping the coastline they had so often eulogised in their songs. As the Californian hills were flooded with the sound of singer-songwriters all wielding acoustic guitars and mammoth record deals, it was time to look inside and ask, "where next?"

The first of many exceptional groups lured to Berry Gordy's nascent Motown empire, The Miracles also housed arguably the very finest American songwriter of his generation. Smokey Robinson's melodic flair and facility with a metaphor would influence pop and rock writers on both sides of the Atlantic, and even on this first album his gifts gleam, from its surprising beginning to its heart-tugging close.

Kicking off the Miracles LP career, Who's Lovin' You had been a hit but doesn't sound like an album opener. A ballad of bereft emotion and a shattered heart, it nonetheless sets the mood. Track 2, Depend On Me delivers a message of solidity and reliability in almost exactly the same tone, at a very similar tempo and with the same warming effect. This would be one of Smokey's calling cards - the ability to wring equal measure of pain and pleasure from two almost identical pieces of (his own) material. The album only picks up tempo with track four, 1960's Number 2 US pop hit Shop Around, and even here the drummer's still using brushes.

Motown debuts tended to hark back to their prehistory and Hi... is no exception. Cause I Love You is a real throwback as Smokey and Ronnie White, who had recorded as Ron & Bill (there was a novelty Tamla single, It, in 1959, before the Miracles made wax under their own name) sing it as a duet, rather in the manner of Love Is Strange. Robinson's wife Claudette sings lead on After All and it's a great shame that debilitating shyness restricted her work because she had a strong voice: assertive, clear and emotional. But the abiding impression is of the strengths of Smokey's writing. Take Way Over There, a clever mixture of doo-wop and rock'n'roll adorned with gospel-suggestive imagery ("get to the other side"), all squeezed into under three minutes: another early masterpiece of Smokey Robinson concision.

Ten of the 11 songs on this record are Smokey's. For the Miracles, he would maintain that level of output throughout the decade, while writing hits of equal stature for Mary Wells, The Temptations, The Marvelettes and many others in the Detroit dynasty. "Don't mess with Bill," sang The Marvelettes, and with good reason.

More so than anger, "anxiety" is the definitive punk word. Think of the way The Ruts' Malcolm Owen sings it ("Babylon's burning wiv ANXIETY!!!!!"), like it's the most electrifying force in the universe. Some of the best punk singles - Germ Free Adolescent; One-Chord Wonders; Suspect Device - are steeped in it, and Buzzcocks are the Shakespeares of it. And while on one level Love Bites is the Buzzcocks' rapprochement with classic rock models - there are not one but two psych-groove instrumentals; Diggle's Love Is Lies is a cheeky rewrite of The Kinks' Days - no band built around the torn and stunted psyche of Pete Shelley was ever about to mellow out. Amid the new warmth and sonic daring (has the quasi-motorik ESP the most epic fadeout in rock history? Answers on a postcard please...) Shelley's question remains: when will I be happy? In the future (Nostalgia)? Probably not. In the past (16 Again)? On reflection, that wasn't so great either. On the wound-tight Just Lust, he's slave to the whims of a predatory lover ("It seems it's only greed / To taste all that you touch"), an unusual perspective for a male songwriter, even one whose stage surname was the one he would have been given if he'd been born a girl. Overall, the sense of a man shackled by fate is overpowering and even the pop perfection of Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn't've) serves a theme of cursed helplessness: "I can't see much of a future," the narrator bemoans. Later, having resumed a solo career that began with a pre-Buzzcocks album (Sky Yen) in an electro-Kraut vein, Shelley talked about his bisexuality. But for the singer there was no sense of catharsis. His songs would continue to belong to an olde English sexe worlde of shame and innuendo, resonant art drawn from the well of loneliness.

CDs were taking off in a big way and the smooth sounds of Linn drums, the Fairlight sampler and gated reverb were everywhere. How bracing it was, and still is, to be exposed to Hurricane Psychocandy. Channelling beehive'd pop fizz and S&M Warhol drugginess, the Jesus & Mary Chain conjured a mid-'60s New York of the mind, unhinged by mini-cyclones of feedback, intoxicated by sugared melodies and driven on by relentless, one-armed drums (thanks, Bobby Gillespie), while singer Jim Reid breathily daydreamed of being infected with parasites, feeling quick in his leather boots and unreal girls called Honey and Cindy. This was pop and experimentation in disharmonious harmony with itself, vivid and three-dimensional as it shimmered and raged on such being-fed-into-a-screaming-maw-of-slashing-knives triumphs as The Living End or Never Understand. There are moments of poetry as well - try Reid's plea, "Don't want you to need me" at the end of The Hardest Walk for a teenage breakup tune at odds with their destructive, dark side. Speaking of which, their early career saw rucks, tabloid thrill-seeking and suspicions of blasphemy (mooted B-side Jesus Suck suggested those, at least, were justified), but such concerns seem a long way away in 2009, especially when compared to this.

Released in 1978, the first in Eno's Ambient series was conceived as an antidote to the harsh environmental sound of public places, few of which are as nerve jangling as the hubbub of a busy airport. The ex-Roxy Music keyboardist turned composer and producer coined the term "ambient" to distinguish his utilitarian scores from the canned Muzak of the 1950s. His intention was not to mask our environment with musical blather but to enhance existing sounds and atmosphere. As such, Music For Airports opens with 1/1, a short, looped piano line played by Soft Machine drummer Robert Wyatt (who is credited as co-composer). The slow, simple motif is part lullaby and part the sort of tonal 'bong' you hear before a public announcement. Phased synthesisers and loops create a slowed down background of space and calm, the effect of which is a brief zoning out of whatever din surrounds the listener and would make an excellent companion to that huge Alexander Calder mobile that hangs in JFK, Terminal 4.

And if anyone should ask you, Music For Airports is also very effective for getting new-born babies off to sleep, successfully soundtracking my son's daytime naps for a couple of years. Too much aural stimulus being very stressful for new-borns, generations ago mothers discovered the seemingly magical power of a vacuum or washing machine to stop a baby crying. And thanks to Eno's Ambient experiments we now have many more hours of becalming sounds. Now, if you're still taking commissions Mr Eno, can you work on something for the pre-school market please? Something to enhance the infernal din of CBeebies perhaps.

The story goes that when U.S. TV producer Merv Griffin was holidaying in Ireland in the late '60s he found himself in O'Donoghue's Pub in Dublin, home of The Dubliners and the famed spot where legendary Irish traditional singer Joe Heaney (Seosamh Ó hÉanaí) had once regularly performed. Looking at a framed picture of Heaney on the wall of the pub, Griffin exclaimed, "Hey! That's my doorman!"

Raised in the remote village of Carna in the Irish-speaking region of Connemara, County Galway, Heaney was schooled in the, old florid style of unaccompanied Irish singing known as sean-nós, reputedly developed during the 17th Century after the British had confiscated all Irish musical instruments in an attempt to destroy their cultural unity. Heaney had gone on to make a name for himself in O'Donoghue's and The Grafton Theatre, and in the early '60s spent much of his time in London, working on building sites, teaching Irish music, and performing in such Camden Town haunts as The Stores and The Laurel Tree and Peggy Seeger's Singer's Club in Holborn. Then, in 1965, on the back of a growing reputation and recordings made for Topic and Gael-linn Records, Heaney was invited to America to take part in that year's Newport Folk Festival. Shortly before he left, Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger invited Heaney round to their house in Beckenham. Holed up there for several weeks, fuelled by, as Seeger put it, "enough as-it-comes whiskey to fell an ox" Joe regaled them with baroque songs and elaborate stories of poor neglected mendicants (The Glen Of Aherlow), infant mortalities (Suantrai), a version of Lord Randall in which the young man has been poisoned by a coiled eel, and lessons on how to sing in a country house ("You turn your back and pull a cap over your eyes").

Heaney settled in New York City but it soon became apparent that sean-nós would never pay the rent and he took a second job as a doorman at an upscale apartment block at 135 Central Park West. Merv was right, and he invited Heaney on to his show, to perform traditional Irish songs, an appearance which established the singer as an important figure in New York's Irish community and led to a position teaching Irish folklore at a Connecticut University and later, Irish traditional singing at The University Of Washington, in Seattle. He would make later recordings - including a version of Finnegan's Wake with John Cage - but by then his voice was weakened by the fags and the booze. Heaney died in 1984, For the closest approximation of what it must have been like to be in a room with Heaney as he closed his eyes, pulled down his cap and spun the tall tales, this is the place to go.

Fifty years ago, Charles Mingus released Mingus Ah Um, Ornette Coleman's The Shape Of Jazz To Come shook the genre's foundations, and Miles Davis minted Kind Of Blue, another jazz template still in use today and which, as Richard Williams' excellent recent book explains, spread its influence far beyond the hip and the hep. But of all the jazz releases in that epochal year the LP which spread the word the widest most immediately was The Dave Brubeck Quartet's Time Out. The album would reach Number 2 on the US pop charts, Number 11 in the UK and the defining single, Take Five, the first instrumental jazz single to sell a million, reached 25 (US) and 6 (UK). Time Out's commercial leanings have risked excommunication by the wrathful jazz cognoscenti, but Brubeck's masterwork has stood the test of time precisely because it makes sense of jazz for the common weal. That it remains so likeable, listenable and approachable while using metres outside the standard 4/4 swing is remarkable.

Time Out's rhythmic daring is bound up in two tracks: opener Blue Rondo A La Turk and the aforesaid Take Five. The former would later be appropriated by The Nice, but in its original state the meld of chattering 9/8 rondo, first led by pianist/composer Brubeck, and the 4/4 choruses shared by Brubeck and altoist Paul Desmond, never loses focus. Desmond it was, too, who wrote Take Five, although the tune's unsung hero is drummer Joe Morello, who lucidly sets out the unusual rhythm before moving again to the fore with an erudite drum solo (honestly, they exist) before Desmond's final chorus. Morello's drive is again in evidence on Three To Get Ready and his cleverness (tempered by discretion) on Pick Up Sticks, but the steadying influence of Eugene Wright's old-school time-keeping bass is fundamental to every track's success (in rock terms, think John Entwistle keeping time while Keith Moon and Pete Townshend lock lead drums and lead guitar). Clearly, Time Out was not as all-embracing a statement as Kind Of Blue - few albums were. Yet its two iconic tracks, its supporting cast of appealing material and an ensemble that overcame early tensions to forge a lasting partnership turn what might appear to be an intellectual enterprise into a bright, inventive, thoroughly delightful experience.

Possibly because commentators were baffled by someone MC'ing in a hybrid midlands-London accent, The Streets' Mike Skinner was originally lumped in with the early-noughties' UK Garage scene. But while garage hits like Oxide & Neutrino's naughty Bound 4 Da Reload (Casualty) or Deekline's goofy I Don't Smoke are more specialist interests today, concept album Original Pirate Material still rewards listening. Reputedly recorded in his bedroom, here are eloquent descriptions of young adulthood spent in pubs, clubs and takeaways, hopped up on too much fast food, Kronenberg and self-medication, plagued by feelings of melancholy and dissatisfaction, and constantly on guard against modern living's threats and pitfalls. But there's uplift and even heroism in songs like the elegiac ecstasy-honeymoon remembrance Weak Become Heroes and the tenacious Number 18 hit Has It Come To This? (where Skinner admits he walks "the tightrope of street cred"), and all combine into a listening experience that reaches beyond the mundane realities it's seemingly concerned with. Jokey tunes about him and his chums getting off their nuts in Amsterdam or the illogical nature of UK drug laws might sound unpromising in isolation, but here, the rough does come with the smooth amidst Skinner's good sense, random blather, insults and insights.

No-one's ever going to get a sore bum from sitting too long on the fence over this album. Indeed, for many fans of My Morning Jacket's's established sound, the only thing to do with the fence on first hearing Evil Urges was tear up the posts to fling them at the stereo. Personally, I love it (I love Marmite too). As per their previous albums, it's a tribute to, and romp inside, the music that delights them. The only difference is that this time they're inhabiting some more blatantly commercial skins - mixing contemporary pop enthusiasms with influences from a long-ago, unfashionable American '70s. So we have MMJ incorporating modern R&B (mainman Jim James' falsetto on Highly Suspicious was the final straw for some) and Grease-indebted pastiche (Two Halves) alongside the lighter-waving ballads (The Librarian), power-pop anthems (I'm Amazed) and melodic soft rock you might expect from an American Guilty Pleasures. But there's no need for guilt - this is one warm-hearted, pleasurable record, with all the passion and invention you expect from My Morning Jacket.

Having loved 2007's Dirt Farmer - Levon Helm's first solo album in 25 years - this summer's follow-up initially passed me by, but it's fast becoming one of my favourite records of 2009. Helm's musical rebirth began after his daughter Amy suggested a return to the Cajun/bluegrass roots of his Arkansas homeland - but it was a big ask, even for The Band's indefatigable torchbearer for the spirit of the American South. A lengthy battle with throat cancer in the late '90s had left his once tough, raspy voice in tatters, and he wasn't sure if he would ever sing again. And yet, a decade and 28 radiation treatments later, one of rock's greatest drummers was once again singing and playing to weekly audiences in his Woodstock barn. Recording was the logical next step, and if the mainly acoustic arrangements of Dirt Farmer witnessed a cautious Levon dipping his toe back into rock'n'roll, then Electric Dirt's rousing country swingers (Grateful Dead's Tennessee Jed) and snaky blues covers (Muddy Waters' You Can't Lose What You Ain't Never Had) are the sound of a man firmly back in harness. The album's one original song - the Band-esque ballad Growing Trade, a co-write with producer and longtime Dylan sideman Larry Campbell - is best of all: a vivid reimagining of dustbowl America with Helm in the role of struggling farmer, a man who's down, but not yet out. The parallels with the Bandsman are hard to ignore. A naturally ornery character who's always preferred his music free of superfluous add-ons, Levon's lust for life is all over Electric Dirt. 30 years ago, in The Band's Last Waltz movie he recalled the funky happenings at the medecine show gigs he grew up on: "The songs would get juicier, the jokes would get funnier and the prettiest dancer would really get down and shake it a few times". That spirit is still with him, thank God.

Walking past the Oxford Street HMV, on the muggy morning of the 9 September, 2009, as camera crews milled round the entrance, interviewing shoppers about The Beatles Remasters and Mercury Music Prize winner Speech Debelle, I found myself listening on the ipod shuffle to Cold Bread, a raggedy folk picaresque in which Flynn and his frayed and unadorned band sang the praises of a romantic London life on a shoestring budget. It was eerie, heartfelt, poetic and beautiful, tapping in to rock and folk's glorious past but moving it somewhere new and strange. If any artist deserved to be nominated for the Mercury Prize, let alone win it, it was Johnny Flynn. Back in 2007, amidst the skinny-trousered glottal stops of a thousand pseudo-plebeian rockers, Flynn stood apart. He played similar gigs, had similar fans and wore similarly skinny keks but Johnny Flynn was reaching for something more, looking beyond the Camden drug run of his peers to the blasted heath of King Lear. Against an acoustic swell of fiddle, cello and ukulele Flynn's songs sought out beauty and sadness in both the mountains green and dark satanic mills of a modern Britain. Here was someone digging deep into the loam of British history, unearthing such lost items as post-war integrity and youthful vim. In an age when perfidious Pete Doherty wouldn't know his Albion from his elbow, Johnny Flynn sounded like the new voice of olde England, interpreting the golden past to comprehend the dark future. With no UK radio play it's sold 40,000 worldwide, not harmed by the fact that Flynn is currently selling out venues across the States, where his album came out on the roots-cred Lost Highway label, home of Willie Nelson, Ryan Adams and Elvis Costello. If you live in London go and see him at The Union Chapel in Islington on 26 September and look out for the Sweet William EP in November and marvel at how this man can be overlooked in his own country.

First-wave white rappers Michael "MC Serch" Berrin and Peter "Prime Minister Pete Nice" Nash had their work cut out establishing the credibility of ofay hip-hop. For one, whitey's exploitation of the nascent genre was already a significant beef, one the Brooklyn-Queens pair felt obliged to "step to" (alongside PW Botha and their own label exec Lyor Cohen) on their debut album's strident diss single The Gas Face. For two, 3rd Bass were on Def Jam, the home of the pre-eminent Public Enemy, and the prickly Serch was not one to gloss over the undercurrents of anti-semitism in PE's black power rhetoric (Serch's ruck with PE's Professor Griff would prompt the latter's suspension from the group). Third, this man lurked in the wings, primed to deep-six caucasian hip-hop for a generation, or at least until the advent of this man.

Twenty years on, the turf-warring is ancient history and what's left is an undervalued gem from one of hip-hop's greatest years. Serch and Nice were vigorous, inventive rhymers ("Black cat's bad luck / Bad guys wear black / Musta been a white guy who started all that") surfing up-tempo funk action, stupid-fresh cut-ups and a side of crackly vinyl fetishism courtesy DJ Richie Rich and producers Sam Sever, Prince Paul and The Bomb Squad, a veritable Brains Trust of golden-age "skillz". Their cultural breadth brought Doors samples (Peace Frog on the title track), allusions to Mr Magoo actor Jim Backus, and a diverting Tom Waits parody over that Way Down In The Hole (oh you, know, The Wire theme) brass vamp. But while there is even more to be said for genuinely comic rap in these days of 50 Cent and his po-faced ilk, it was not 3rd Bass's only gear, as Triple Stage Darkness's crepuscular lope through a benighted America underlines.

3rd Bass's follow-up - Derelicts Of Dialect - was easily as good, and spawned a shock Billboard Number 1 in Pop Goes The Weasel, but Serch's ability to ruffle feathers ensured outsider status and sped the trio's dissolution. He went on to a solo career and exec status at Wild Pitch records, but like a dog with a bone, recently reappeared as host on VH-1's bottomfeeding "talent"-trawl, The White Rapper Show. Nash has "moved on" more definitively, with a baseball memorabilia store in Cooperstown, New York and a scholarly work of "secret" history to his name, Baseball Legends Of Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery. When the book of rap's shouldabeens is written, his group will be first on the contents list.

Musically cauterised by 1971, the late Syd Barrett lived quietly until his 2006 death, all the while provoking strange legends and doomed hopes. Premier British psych artefact The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn was the cause of all the excitement. Condensing the lifetime of his version of Pink Floyd into 42 mesmeric minutes, it's an exercise in exhilarating whimsy and derangement, with lyrical nods to the I Ching, Kenneth Grahame and interplanetary travel, or as Nick Kent described it, "musical rococo freak-outs underpinning Barrett's sudden ascendancy into the artistic realms of ye olde English whimsical loone..." As such shimmering fantasias as Flaming and Matilda Mother channel Syd's beaming inner six year old - Roger Waters' Take Up Thy Stethoscope And Walk can only sound stiff in such effervescent company - cosmic rock outs Astronomy Domine and Interstellar Overdrive communicate a more elemental force churning underneath the glowing colours. Certain lyrical cues also suggest an edge of psychosis; like notorious outtake Vegetable Man, Scarecrow depicts an inert figure "resigned to his fate", while Bike's glassy-eyed exit suggests the removed tragi-comedy that would follow. But while there's an inescapable feeling of descending, the ascents are equally dizzying, as are contemporary singles Arnold Layne, See Emily Play and Apples And Oranges, sensibly available on 07's affordable box set incarnation.

Tim's journey from sad-eyed '60s singer-songwriter to wayward jazz progressive started here in 1968. Three albums into his career and still only 21, his musical questing seemed unforgivable to a late '60s audience who'd fallen in love with him as the doomed romantic folkie with the soaring voice, and the record sounded perversely uncommercial in its day. Personally, I heard Happy Sad first of all - on a second-generation cassette on a boom box while a friend cooked curry. Even in that challenged audio setting it sounded extraordinary. With the windows steamed up and a joint next to the extractor fan it was like being underwater, enveloped by waves of vibes and congas. A southern Californian Selkie, Tim lures the listener in with Strange Feelin' and Buzzin' Fly's soothing, jazzy instrumentation, his wonderful voice swooping between tenderly romantic and sonorous boom. But he's just warming us up for Love From Room 109 At The Islander (On Pacific Coast Highway) where he sounds like Fred Neil at his most heartsore and weary. "Lost without a song" our singer finds love in his "hotel life" and, inevitably, loses it again in a little shy of eleven minutes. Music myth insists the sounds of the sea were later added by Elektra producers Jerry Yester and Zal Yanovsky to conceal tape distortion and I'm sure I can still hear someone cough on my copy.

An absent father's lament, Dream Letter is no less moving now we know how Tim's relationship with his son played out (perhaps more so?); Gypsy Woman is twelve-minutes-plus of whooping, yelping, lyrical obfuscation and acoustic bass-driven Latin jazz, and it's fantastic. Closing with Sing A Song For You, a little nugget of lost love so beautiful lesser singers could build a whole album around it, as a first taste of Tim Buckley these six songs smoothed my path to Lorca and Starsailor's freer extremes but like a lot of Buckley fans I'm more comfortable here, in the kitchen, under the sea.

Looking back on the emotional over-investments, free-love profligacies and karmic withdrawals that took place out in the neon plains of late 1960s Hollywood it now seems inevitable that a crash was coming. Many were too bound up in their own private psychedelic reels to see it coming, but there was one harbinger of the nation's collapse who had no choice but to observe and report.

Born in 1925, to strict New Jersey Irish Catholics, Dory Previn was caught in the push and pull between an alcoholic mother and a violent father, who - thanks to a gassing during the war - believed he was sterile and Dory was not his child. Although he doted on Dory - writing songs for her, putting her into talent contests - when another child came, dad flipped and held his family at gunpoint in their home for over a month.

An already delicate Dory left home aged 16, and worked as a lyricist for MGM before meeting fellow studio staffer André Previn whom she married in 1959. The couple worked together throughout the 1960s but, following a nervous breakdown on a plane in 1965 ("Somebody in my seat is screaming," she told the stewardess), Dory developed a dreamily detached song-style on such classics as Valley Of The Dolls and Come Saturday Morning. Then, in 1969, at the news that her friend, Mia Farrow, was pregnant with André Previn's child, came a period of electro-shock treatment and gestalt therapy in which Dory was encouraged to write about her life.

The result was 1970's On My Way To Where, a collection of vaudeville noir sketches that included her Farrow character assassination, Beware Of Young Girls, and Twenty Mile Zone, which begins with Dory screaming, alone, in her car and ends with us all screaming for release from the human zoo. Whether writing as herself, or through one of the many voices she heard in her head, Previn's sinister riverboat chansons revealed the pain, games, lies and loneliness behind the L.A. myths.

After moving from United Artists to Warner Brothers in 1974, Previn's style became more abstract and optimistic and both albums from that period are worth tracking down but this 1970-72 collection - her first authorised compilation - is the place to start. Despite the avowedly personal nature of her work, The Art Of Dory Previn stands as a valuable record of a nation's crack up, from a writer who dared to document the unspeakable truth in sharp, terrible relief.

Approaching the fifth anniversary of his death on October 24, 2004, it's time to reflect how much poorer we are without Radio 1 DJ John Peel. If you grew up in the late '70s, he shaped your attitudes, not only to music, but also to what music meant. Some of us would listen in every night as he played an increasingly disparate range of genres, and whilst we might not have liked all of it we picked out our favourites - Bogshed or Half Man Half Biscuit or The Fall or Siouxsie or Toots. Unlike the other DJs we were exposed to, he genuinely loved the music he played. He would be seen at gigs, chatting in record shops or gazing out sardonically from the TV screen on Top Of The Pops.

Hyped2death dedicate this album to Peel - "without whom this might not have happened". But in truth, for the artists on this CD - step forward Royston, Steve Treatment, Thin Yoghurt - it didn't really "happen" at all. A best-of drawn from a series of CD-R compilations of lost post-punk, DIY culture and punk 7"s, and taking its name from a track on an early Scritti Politti Peel session (or alternatively, a line misheard from The Undertones' My Perfect Cousin: "maths, ethics and bionics") Messthetics is a shrine to the true spirit of Indie. Indie as in Independent (note the capitalisation) as opposed to mushroom-headed scrotes playing almost-heartfelt Beatles approximations. This is Indie as in Spiral Scratch, Rough Trade, The Desperate Bicycles and Sniffin' Glue's challenge: "here are three chords, now go and form a band."

It's kind of a Nuggets for the Peel generation. There are tunes from O Level, The Scrotum Poles, Puritan Guitars, and - my personal favourite - Tronics, with a fantastically no-fi Shark Fucks http://www.myspace.com/sharkfucks, none of which you are likely to remember from the first time round. What grabs you, throughout, is the excitement, the conviction that "we can do that". And they did, even if all they did was a 7" single that no-one bought.

Re-watching the recently reissued Gimme Shelter DVD at the weekend, I was struck by just how on top of their game the Stones were at the close of the '60s. Strangely, it's not the savage brutality of the Hell's Angels or Jagger's ultra-camp posturing that now stick in the mind. It's the music - particularly the snippets of songs that would eventually appear on the imperious Sticky Fingers. There's this scene in which an unsuspecting Holiday Inn gets an early taste of the swaggering Brown Sugar while, a little later, the playback of Wild Horses is an early, unrefined glimpse of the band's defining country ballad. Free from the dark clouds that hover over Let It Bleed and uncluttered by the sheer volume of material found on Exile On Main Street, Sticky Fingers sees the Stones punching at a fighting weight. Rather than over-egg these songs with superfluous horns, keys and backing vocals, SF's 10 cuts see the band applying maximum finesse with minimal additions. Like the bare-bones drive behind the Southern soul sounds of Muscle Shoals and Stax, there's a feeling that things must be kept lean at all costs, and Billy Preston's organ, Bobby Keyes' sax, Ry Cooder's slide and the late Jim Dickinson's piano are all the better for their restraint. Sticky Fingers also marks the point at which Mick Taylor's elegant soloing first gels with Keith's R&B grind (Dead Flowers and Can't You Hear Me Knocking offer two particularly seamless sparring sessions) and Jagger has never sounded more soulful than on Wild Horses and I Got The Blues. There has never been a more rocking version of the Rolling Stones than the one found on this record. Now, if only I could get my hands on a copy with a real zip...

This sorry state of affairs has a lot to do with who I was and what I was up to in 1982, the year of Thriller's release, and 1983, the year of its chokehold on popular culture. While others moonwalked, I wrapped myself in Murmur, Power, Corruption & Lies and - oh f--k it - The Hurting, and glanced, with furtive longing, over to the corner of the playground where the Smash Hits girls giggled and rustled their ra-ra skirts. I wasn't having Michael Jackson at all.

And that remained the case, by and large, until June this year, when my four-year old son - made vaguely aware that something momentous had happened regarding someone called Michael Jackson - dug out my CD copy of Thriller (a still-shrinkwrapped freebie from an Invincible media beano) and started playing the shit out of it. It's the first real pop music record he's totally dug, so I've rolled with it and not tried to deflect him with this or this, records he's probably not, for different reasons, quite ready for.

The period of being irritated by this enthusiasm was surprisingly short. The heavy rotation that had so alienated me in 1983, has had the reverse effect in 2009. I am now officially obsessed by the breadth, energy and weirdness of Thriller, and to be specific, the spooked, paranoiac miasma of Billie Jean. I have become a Billie Jean stalker.

Because is Billie Jean ever weird. A transatlantic Number 1 single with an unreliable narrator, played with fierce, spluttering ire by Jackson, it's callous and unnecessary, especially all those "the kiiiid is not my son"s. You can't help feeling the protagonist protests too much, and reflect how often Jackson must have heard those very words from his oft-estranged father. The music, that ominous lope punctuated by luminous synth/string stabs, is ridiculously perfect, and (for all that producer Quincy Jones did to shape the remainder of Thriller's patchwork tour-de-force) all the essential elements can be found in Jackson's revealing demo version on the CD reissue.

Jones says that Jackson fought tooth and nail for Billie Jean and its suspenseful 29-second intro; Q, in a rare lapse of judgment, cared for neither. The case for Jackson's greatness as a writer and an artist - not just as a singer or a dancer - is made right there. It only took 27 years and the advocacy of a four-year-old for it to sink in.

By all accounts Bob 'The Bear' Hite was not a nice guy. A perhaps apocryphal story, oft told by my brother's record collector mates, says that Hite, the founding member and second-best singer with '60s boogie blues belters Canned Heat (after this guy, who clearly influenced this guy), was such an uncharitable hound for the rare 78s that, if he ever found doubles of any "sides" he was hunting for in the warehouses, thrift stores and yard sales of America, he would snap them in half so that he, Hite, would be the only one to benefit from the joys of said blues groove. Which makes you wonder how he would have felt about choice cuts from his enviable collection landing in the lap of the general hoi polloi public. Compiled by the legendary Belgian archivist/DJ Dr. Boogie with the help of Canned Heat drummer Fito De La Parra this glorious CD is assembled from the remnants of Hite's collection, which was (hello karma!) heavily plundered after the singer's death in 1981. Whether it's classics like Etta James' Good Rockin' Daddy, R&B party grooves like Googie Rene's Wiggle Tail or little-known cuts from blues legends (Elmore James' stomping Country Boogie), the Dr. Boogie emphasis is always on tracks that will awaken the jook-joint hawk in us all. But it's in unearthing rave-ups that, it would seem, only Hite ever found (snap! break!) like Mad Mel Sebastien's gin-still wang-dang cover of Chuck Higgins' Pachuko Hop, that the comp really comes into its own. When so many shellac-to-digital comps are presented as educational tablets from on-high, it comes as some relief to be given a history lesson that's more about the dance-hall than the lecture-hall, from a compiler who doubtlessly won his doctorate here, as opposed to here.

We have celebrated the great Dells before in Disc Of The Day, but the death of their co-lead Johnny Carter on August 21 spelled the end of the longest-running unchanged line-up of any vocal group. Carter was, moreover, one of that rare, rare breed having been inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame not once but twice, first in 2001 as a member of The Flamingos, and three years later as a Dell, which he became in 1961 as a replacement for their original tenor Johnny Funches. Thereafter, Carter remained with Marvin Junior, Chuck Barksdale, Verne Allison and Michael McGill until his death - a span of 48 years. With so many acts from that era existing on one or, indeed, no original members, that is some achievement. Clearly, their career spanned many changes in taste and style, but the power and unique blend of their voices sustained The Dells - the signature harmonies, honed in doo-wop days, the rip-roaring leads, burnished by gospel and distinguished by Marvin Junior's exceptional baritone, and gently persuasive or reflective ballads. This album found the group seeking a niche amid the clatter of disco and they did so by accentuating their supremacy as interpreters of ballads (So You Are Love, Look At Us Now, and producer Eugene Record's title track, which is almost as memorable as their classics Stay In My Corner and Oh What A Night). The album's uptempo highlight, meanwhile, is All About The Paper, which punches its weight against anything Gamble & Huff were up to over in Philly at the time.

Released when its principal songwriter, Tim Wheeler, was still 19 (and not long after Ash had ceased being a provincial hair metal concern called Vietnam), 1977's pubescent preoccupations - sci-fi, martial arts movies and kissing - are excused, exalted even, by a timeless, typically overexcited production from Owen "Definitely Maybe" Morris and Wheeler's own magical pop nous (Goldfinger, Lost In You and Oh Yeah drip girl-group honey). Torn between noise-rock and Spectoresque pop craft (though Wheeler's choirboy-next-door vocal range best suits the latter), Ash have flip-flopped ever since, and while there's something absurd about 1977's economical charms thus distended, the bonus material commemorates Ash's early breadth, with a masterful cover of Abba's Does Your Mother Know? offset by creditable faux-American post-hardcore in the shape of 5am Eternal. Even juvenilia like Cantina Band and the notorious Sick Party (bassist Mark Hamilton voms to order) has its place. Boys will be boys, after all.

Shortly after midnight on the morning of August 27th, 1990, a group of four helicopters rose into the hazy night around the small town of Elkhorn, Wisconsin, bound for Illinois. One of the passengers aboard the third helicopter was blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan, who had just finished a two-show run with his band Double Trouble in the nearby village of East Troy. Along with several other musicians and friends, Vaughan was on his way to the band's next show in Chicago. They never made it; less than a mile after take-off the chopper crashed into a steep hillside, killing all five passengers on board. Vaughan was just 35 years old.

Yet the Dallas-born axe-slinger had packed a lot in to an often troubled life. In a career which began at the tender age of twelve, Vaughan's electrifying showmanship, relentless touring and a practically obsessive dedication to music helped him build a huge following of fans, a remarkably accomplished and admired body of work, but also a long and life-threatening problem with alcohol and drugs.

Vaughan openly addresses all these issues on In Step (a reference to the therapeutic steps he was following to overcome his addictions) - the last of the four studio LPs he would produce with Double Trouble during his lifetime, and a perfect snapshot of his musical prowess and growing skills as a singer/songwriter. From the anthemic, pounding rock'n'roll of opening track The House Is Rockin', to the delicate beauty of the instrumental closer Riviera Paradise, the seamless mixture of styles reaffirmed not only the band's talents but the ambition and vitality of their music. Vaughan's vocal craft and growing compositional maturity were never clearer than in the mid-tempo grace and power of songs like Wall Of Denial and Crossfire, the latter going on to become his first and only U.S. #1 single. Emotional and inspired covers of Willie Dixon's Let Me Love You Baby and Buddy Guy's Leave My Girl Alone highlighted not only Vaughan's deep assimilation of the blues canon, but the ways in which he was reworking those elements to create his own unique voice.

The 1999 Sony/Legacy reissue of the album also includes several excellent live tracks from the In Step tour - though, in light of all he had been through, and what would happen in Wisconsin just a few short months later, it is heartbreakingly ironic to hear Vaughan tell his audience, "I'm gonna stop right now, and thank God that I'm alive and well enough to be with y'all today", as he delivers a deeply moving rendition of - prophetically - Life Without You.

"Good evening ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of Iceland Air, the captain and crew, I would like to welcome you on board..." intones the flight attendant that introduces the opening track, Outward Flight (Psalm 323), and this record's elusive travelogue concept. Six of the eight titles here include a geographical location - for instance, France (A Mutual Thrill) and Holland (Latent) - but the tracks themselves are not paeans to places. Rather, the entire album confirms KUKL's libertarian principles and their ideological quest for personal freedom.

While KUKL are renowned, if at all, as Björk Gudmundsdóttir's first band of note, the outfit deserve recognition as one of the most challenging outfits to emerge in the wake of post-punk, fusing elaborate concepts with dense musical endeavours that sit somewhere between the stürm-und-drang of Neubauten and the rhythmic propulsion of free jazz. Meanwhile, the band's third set reflects just how much of a debt the youthful Björk - a mere 19-year-old when she started recording this album at London's Southern Studios - owed to Siouxsie Sioux.

"Hard rock from some tasty geezers" promises the appallingly drawn sleeve in a moment of quotable abstraction, but in fact, what you get is an album that showcases a free-spirited take on punk that remains unique and progressive (Crass's Penny Rimbaud produced). Indeed, KUKL would find a far greater audience as the nucleus of the band - Björk, Einar Ørn, keyboard player Einar Melax, and drummer Sigtryggur Baldursson - slowly began to morph into a new band named Sykurmolarnir. Their English name? The Sugarcubes.

That the very notion of 'a reggae version' of anything should have become synonymous with novelty - Brighton students devouring the delicious irony of Dread Zeppelin etc. - is a shame. The art of interpretation has been a cornerstone of reggae since the dub pioneers of the '60s (Tubby, Perry) first dabbled in mixing desk alchemy in Jamaica. But po-faced defences aside, no-one embodies Airbag's "deep deep sleep of the innocent" better than Horace Andy, first and arguably finest guest vocalist here of the Easy Star collective, the four-man unit directed by Michael Goldwasser who had previously reimagined The Dark Side Of The Moon. Andy's ghostly high tenor brings the additional promise of spiritual salvation to Thom Yorke's secular, near-death experience ("In an interstellar blast / I am back to save the universe") while the ominous, bass-heavy rumble takes few liberties with the original's blood-thumping-in-the-ears rhythm, with a squall of guitar freakout as a closing flourish. It's hard to top, but Citizen Cope's plaintive Karma Police and Toots And The Maytals' lovely, Thom-approved (see bottom), ska retread of Let Down (Jonny Greenwood as horns) have a good go. Kirsty Rock puts in a valiant performance on Paranoid Android, her pure, glassy voice more than a match for the vocal but ultimately the band struggles to keep up with the song's mood swings. Sgt Pepper's was next in line for a makeover... with more mixed results.

Seemingly typecast by the very title of the their wryly observed debut single, One Chord Wonders, The Adverts would take two and a half years to follow up their first album, Crossing The Red Sea With The Adverts. Yet the result stands only second to The Clash's London Calling in terms of illustrating just how adventurous punk rock could get.

Indicating their ambivalence toward punk orthodoxy, TV Smith, Gaye Advert and co hired producer Tom Newman, who'd helmed Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells. As if that wasn't controversial enough, the road-weary band repaired to the plush, un-punk surroundings of Manor Studios (the UK's first residential studios, then owned by Richard Branson) to begin recording. The result was staggeringly bold and confirmed TV Smith as one of the finest tunesmiths of the new wave.

The opening title track saw sweeping orchestral arrangements welded to the band's pop-punk sensibilities. Smith described the song as "intended to spoof The Adverts image: the little amateurish punk band - now with added grandiose piano, massed choirs and wild synthesizer!" And while The Adverts only had the dough to record four songs at The Manor, that wasn't their only indulgence (Television's Over actually included tubular bells).

Mercilessly slammed by fans and critics upon its release in October 1979, the failure of Cast Of Thousands sped the demise of The Adverts (lawsuits from ex-members and the elecrocution of manager Mike Dempsey didn't help) and they'd played their last show, at unglamorous Slough College, before the month was out. Today, however, the album sounds as fresh as anything recorded by The Libertines or Graham Coxon and remains a bold and beautifully frayed statement of intent.

I still remember that night-time summer walk down the tree-lined boulevard of Plymyard Avenue - a monied arterial of big windowed Victorian houses that took the teenage me home from Bromborough railway station to the family home at Athol Drive - past the duckponds, gravel drives and drunken couples lurching home from the Merebrook pub. I'd spent all day revising for "O"-levels at Liverpool Central Library and my end-of-the-day treat was to pop a newly-compiled New Order C90 tape (Side A: Movement; Side B: 12" singles) into my Mk 1 Walkman and fast-forward (that thing ate batteries) to the recently acquired 12" version of Temptation. Listened to now, with journo head on, Temptation is the sound of a band declaring a moratorium on their own past, leaving behind the Joy Division sci-fi landscape of dead ends and degeneration, combining cold machine efficiency with human accident, to create a music of joyous uplift and optimism. Back then, however, it seemed truly inspirational: euphoric, panel-beating New York rhythms and post-punk guitar sharpness piped directly into my ears, allied to Barney's naïvely romantic lyrics that seemed to be specifically about walking down Plymyard Avenue at night and thinking that everything after "O"-Levels was going to be brilliant ("Up, down, turn around / Please don't let me hit the ground / Tonight I think I'll walk alone / and find my soul as I go home!"). It wasn't, of course. Both New Order and I would find themselves corrupted by outside influence once we left our creative bunkers and mixed with the real world, but aside from perhaps hearing my brother play Scott McKenzie's San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair) at 7am, on the morning after he got back from the Hollywood Music Festival in 1970 - and first experiencing the exhilaration and emotional uplift of the pop key change (at 1.53) and music playing loudly from another room - that night, thanks to a unique combination of age, place, acoustics and song, may be the happiest that music has ever made me feel: on my own, on a big road, walking past Victorian mansions that aren't there any more and thinking of a girl out there with green eyes, blue eyes, grey eyes... It's funny the moments that stay, isn't it.

Within days of the births of each of my two daughters, oh happy days, I rediscovered dormant passions in modern jazz. Nineteen years ago, when Rebecca arrived, quite unexpectedly I found the need to hear the great jazz pianists again and bought many reissues of Bud Powell, and Bill Evans, a couple apiece by Sonny Clark, Elmo Hope, Hampton Hawes and others, but I was most rewarded by the gospel-soul-jazz vigour of Bobby Timmons and, well, the sheer iconoclastic genius of Thelonious Monk, the great incomparable one. A fecund composer who wrote quite as many jazz standards as Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Charles Mingus, his peers of the day, Monk's melodic facility was allied to the immense ingenuity of a thrower of improbable musical shapes. So, although originals such as Blue Monk, Ruby, My Dear, Epistrophy, Monk's Mood and, of course, Round Midnight linger in the brain and form an essential part of jazz's lingua franca, Monk's interpretations of the canon are mightily rewarding too. Here, with the subtlest of bebop drummers, Kenny Clarke, and bassist Oscar Pettiford, he gets under the skin of Caravan, Sophisticated Lady, I Got It Bad (And That Ain't Good) and five other memorable Duke classics, starting, mischieviously, with It Don't Mean A Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing). It does indeed swing brilliantly, in Monk's particular and inimitably off-kilter way. As an unexpected by-product of Dadhood, it has been a wonderful reacquaintance.

Bafflingly lumped in with early '90s "shoegaze" when their guitar-blasted, stonerish take on Americana was far more red-blooded, this Oxford quartet mixed post-Sonic Youth tuff-gnarl with metal-Morricone menace, pachydermal Crazy Horse grooves and acres of billowing low-end. This was their acme - brighter than their Raise debut (best bit: the Son Of Mustang Ford single), ballsier than their third, the wry, Who Sell Out psych-pop canvas of Ejector Seat Reservation, and predicated on the theory that the only thing better than guitar is more guitar. Every song a road movie, with oaken-timbred singer-guitarist Adam Franklin ever the jaded protagonist, and a sneaky fifth gear always to hand - as when Duel breaks ecstatically into guitar-spangled sunshine at 1.36 - Mezcal Head deserved breakout status, but UK alt.pop was reaching for the up drugs and Swervedriver hit a ditch. Last year's reformation shows proved how well-loved they were, though Franklin would sometimes throw his head back to find those dreads were simply no longer there. He can console himself with the knowledge that his latest solo record, Spent Bullets, is rather lovely.

Not the most critically lauded Philadelphia International act (they were, notoriously, Prince Charles's favourite group), The Three Degrees were nonetheless crucial in the breakthrough of Gamble & Huff's uptown soul sound, just as, a decade earlier, The Supremes had been in the vanguard of Motown's move from R&B chart supremacy to pop chart residency. At the time, the Degrees were Sheila Ferguson, Valerie Holiday and founding member Fayette Pinkney, a line-up that had been together since 1967. But when their Svengali, Richard Barrett, discovered the act as teenagers in 1965 only Pinkney was in the trio. Barrett shepherded them through several record deals that produced only modest return but enabled a strong career as a live act in the better clubs. Not too much chitlin' scrabbling for these girls. By 1970 they were signed to Roulette and Barrett had them re-record Maybe, which had been a hit in 1958 for a group he'd previously managed, The Chantels. A Number 29 pop/Number 4 R&B in the USA, it in turn led to a cameo in William Friedkin's 1971 movie The French Connection. After a couple more R&B hits, Barrett signed the trio to Gamble & Huff's label and their sophisticated harmonies and urbane, smooth tones glided easily across the contours of the brilliant Philly house orchestra, MFSB. This album, their first for PI, set the bar high. On vinyl, side one started and finished with two Gamble & Huff pop gems Dirty Ol' Man and When Will I See You Again respectively, both benefiting from exceptional Bobby Martin arrangements. And side two ended with the LP's third G&H diamond, Year Of Decision, arranged this time by Norman Harris. Nor were the other five tracks makeweights, with Bunny Sigler's I Didn't Know a favourite. An overly MOR stage show and 'establishment' image rather weakened their street cred, but a version of this rightly-loved group still tours.

Occasionally, you just get sick of an artist. Probably you surfeited at some point and the next dish they offer, however toothsome it might appear, will just get pushed aside. This is exactly how I felt about Kieran Hebden after Four Tet's 2005 album Everything Ecstatic, a brilliant glitchadelic collage that seemed to draw a line under the genre and say, move on. So I did, and afforded Hebden's subsequent immersion in an improvisational relationship with jazz drummer Steve Reid (Ornette, Miles, Sun Ra, all the tough guys) little more than a sideways glance.

More fool me, as I was to discover upon spinning NYC - somewhat after the fact - and finding myself impelled into an alternate universe of rich and bubbling sound. The duo's fourth full-length liaison is a rhythmic dystopia, pitched rattlingly ever-forward, a recurring theme being a steady, pitch-lifting wail that makes you feel like you're strapped to a Saturn 5 rocket as it rips through the fabric of space, or - more likely, perhaps - the space of Fabric. Hebden steers clear of melody as such and concentrates on rhythm and weirdness, while Reid keeps a trashy, rocking groove going that never lapses into clever-cleverness. It's like an old-skool drum battle, except kit vs computers, and minus the solos.

Most astonishing is fourth track Arrival, which couches Reid's super-dry, super-nasty snare sound in a bed of echoing sound-blooms. Imagine a stop-motion film of a city reclaimed by nature as Jaki Liebezeit and The Cocteau Twins jam in the pit. Reid says that after a lifetime trading licks with the pioneers of jazz, he has found in Hebden a "musical soul mate". Everything about NYC says he's right.

With its sleeve image of a Mercedes-Benz and a VW beetle, Autobahn was a surprise US smash for Kraftwerk in 1974. When the following year's Radio-Activity failed to repeat its success, the group returned to European transport with their next LP, Trans-Europe Express. This signalled a significant refinement of the band's aesthetic; losing all traces of their earlier experimentalism, it presented coolly gliding, rhythmic techno-pop flavoured by classical melodies and musique concrète techniques, and examined the emerging European ideal via a train journey from Paris to Vienna. Europe Endless and Franz Schubert seemed to find this idea full of ambivalences - see also the '30s-style sleeve images by Chicago's photographer to the stars Maurice Seymour - while Showroom Dummies and The Hall Of Mirrors reflected the dehumanising effects of the consumerist age. Some argue the latter song, which depicts a narcissistic celebrity disappearing up his own reflection, relates to the then-Berlin resident David Bowie's offer of a collaboration (the title track's lyric "From station to station back to Düsseldorf City / Meet Iggy Pop and David Bowie," is more sanguine). Five years later, electro godfather Afrika Bambaataa lifted a chunk of the title track and spliced it with Kraftwerk's 1981 track Numbers to create the mighty Planet Rock, while Trans-Europe Express itself remains an essential part of the Kraftwerk live experience.

Back in 2006 I wildly suggested that 2007 would be the year of "post-orch" - you know, bands blurring the boundaries between jazz, rock and classical. Then, in an edition of the New Yorker from April 16, 2007 their resident classical expert Alex Ross was seen raving about the chamber minimalism of such 'indie' types as Amiina and Eluvium. Well, it's hardy a theory that went viral and got picked up by the cool tastemongers at the NME but maybe I was on to something. Artists like Peter Broderick, Richard Skelton and Max Richter and young London jazzers like The Portico Quartet and Twelves Trio all seem to have caught the imagination, sparking clubs and collectives like The Arctic Circle for the pursuit and enjoyment of daedal, minimal, cloistered sounds that provide an alternative alternative to the alternative music scene. One obvious source of post-orch inspiration is ECM's Norwegian jazz scene; musicians like fellow ECM-ers Tord Gustavsen Trio and Rune Grammofon's Supersilent using a genre's freedom to pause and hold back rather than blast and spew forth. Expanded to a sextet for their fourth ECM release (harp and strings added to the piano, trumpet and drums trio) Wallumrød's minimal moodists cut themselves further adrift from ECM's romantic Keith Jarrett template, deconstructing Purcell fantasias and Norwegian church music to craft an album of crepitating shifts from eerie pacific beauty to storm-tossed clatter in a manner that would boggle fans of doom-metal and Radiohead alike. With a new album coming at the end of October I will sit calmly as the skinny-trousered buffoons of London trend-jabber start listening to Deathprod and hanging out at the Union Chapel and I will smugly hold off from saying "I told you so."

When Turbonegro split in December 1998, bass player Happy Tom issued a statement on behalf of the six-piece blaming "drug problems, mental illness and an impending religious crisis". If it wasn't for the fact that it was true, it would've been funny. After a four-year drying out period which allowed their troubled singer Hank Von Helvete to regain his joie de rock, they reformed and found that their absence had enhanced their legend. If Turbonegro found themselves name-checked by everyone from Jello Biafra to Queens Of The Stone Age, their reputation was founded firmly on this, their fourth album, which established them on a global basis despite their provocative moniker.

The band themselves - having sensibly reneged on the initial idea of calling themselves Nazipenis - openly stated that their name was designed to challenge the questionable attitudes to race held by some of their fellow Scandinavians. Not content which tackling the issue of colour, Turbonegro also squared up to the issue of homophobia in rock music on 1996's Ass Cobra album, developing their ambiguous look (brickies-meet-Bowie at a sailor's convention) and lyrical approach. The fact that they claimed to peddle "dangerous gay rock" while remaining staunchly heterosexual is as confusing as Eddie Izzard's assertion that he's a male lesbian; nevertheless, their provocative faux-mo tendencies are here evident on tracks like The Prince Of The Rodeo, Rendezvous With Anus and Back To Dungaree High.

Musically speaking, Apocalypse Dudes is muscular rather than camp, rampaging over the same ground covered by '70s dumbkopf cult classicists The Dictators, and straddling the nebulous grey area that exists between punk and hard rock. The influence of early Alice Cooper, the Ramones and prime Blue Öyster Cult are equally apparent, the melodramatic opener Age Of Pamparius (fantastically named after a pizza parlour initially run by the band's guitarist/keyboard player Pål Pot Pamparius) recalling Sandy Pearlman's production on BÖC's Tyranny And Mutation. Selfdestructo Bust and the anthemic Get It On follow in quick succession, sparking up an album whose bruising, burlesque power has ensured that it remains one of the seminal underground releases of the '90s.

Six long years after Robert Wyatt's previous solo album Shleep, Cuckooland, arrived in troubled times. A baby born in Baghdad at the start of the first gulf war, the conditions facing gypsies seeking asylum from the Czech Republic and the plight of factory farmed sheep were all on the singing sticksman's mind in 2003 when Wyatt, along with poet wife lyricist Alfreda Benge, drafted in illustrious friends including trombonist Annie Whitehead, Dave Gilmour and Paul Weller on guitars, Brian Eno and Carla Bley's daughter Karen Mantler to indulge his taste in charmingly eccentric instrumentation, including, on Cuckoo Madam, the sort of toytown keyboards reminiscent of his 1976 keystone, Rock Bottom. A comfortable, wonky jazz feeling permeates the spare, sorrowful songs but the real star, as always, is Wyatt's ageless voice, softly crooning his whiskery wisdom as if soothing a skittish horse. Cuckooland is a lesson in achieving sophistication through economy, there is even a 30-second silence dividing the album into two parts ("for those with tired ears to pause..."). Ageing also concerns Lullaloop, one of Cuckooland's moments of light relief in which Wyatt gives affectionate voice to Benge's song about a grumbling old man trying to get to sleep ("Don that duvet/Cook that cocoa/Turn that music down!"). The overall effect is one of enchanting melody and sharp, informed songwriting, that arcane, folksy album title suggesting either Wyatt or the rest of us are living in cloud cuckooland and I rather suspect it's not him.

Northern California, December 20, 1968. 17-year old David Arthur Faraday and 16-year old Betty Lou Jensen are enjoying their first date when they decide to drive out to Lovers' Lane just off Lake Herman Road. Within an hour, they would both be dead - shot by an unknown killer who would soon be dubbed "Zodiac". In David Fincher's movie chronicling the investigation into the spree of killings, it's this early scene that really sticks in the mind. The darkness and isolation create a haunting sense of impending catastrophe, but it is the director's choice of song that really sends shivers up the spine. Gently humming through the car's radio we can just make out the dreamy Tambura drones of Donovan's Hurdy Gurdy Man. As the volume increases and the young couple look back to see another car appear behind them, those clipped vocals seem to deliver an eerie portent of what's to come. It's a masterful touch by Fincher and one he manages to repeat again and again, framing each appearance of the Zodiac with Donovan's Celtic creepiness.

As we move into the 1970s, the Latin shimmy of Santana's Soul Sacrifice and The Four Tops' Bernadette give way to the knife-edged funk of Sly & The Family Stone's I Want To Take You Higher and Isaac Hayes' Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic - long gone is the peace and love era, shattered by something more sinister, a terror embodied by the Zodiac's bloodstained riddles and the incantatory chimes of Marvin Gaye's Inner City Blues. Fincher's California breathes through these songs, the offices of the San Francisco Chronicle and the city police force pulsing to his period-perfect choices. 40-years later, the killings remain unsolved.

Nowadays Julian Cope stalks the land as a leather-clad dissenter making livid protest albums and propagating Odin, megaliths and groups with names like Blood Moon, Skullflower and Crow Tongue. But fronting The Teardrop Explodes he was a Top Of The Pops-appearing, hit-bagging pop star who was on the cover of Smash Hits. Kilimanjaro was the album of this phase (though perhaps it's not that different - Cope was wearing leathers then too, and it's named for a giant rock). Army surplus-clad, neo-freak ex-punks standing against music's then-raincoated mood - guitarist Alan Gill even had a moustache - Kilimanjaro sounds a permanent reveille on trumpets and reaches the kind of climactic drama most groups would save for their last tune a mere 90 seconds into the first track, Ha Ha I'm Drowning. Such early singles as Treason, Sleeping Gas and Bouncing Babies continue to sparkle in re-recorded form, and despite the relative serenity of the last few songs, the remaining mood is one of a breakneck conflict situation, as on Poppies In The Field, where, whether it relates to opiates or Remembrance Day, their Lancaster bomber is about to crash and no-one knows how to open the parachutes. When accompanying single Reward was a smash a few months later the group looked set for lasting stardom; for the group's full lysergic Benny Hill chase into extinction, however, read Cope's fabulous memoir Head On and spare a thought for guitarist Mick Finkler, who co-wrote all but one song and played on five tracks, but was ditched from the aircraft on the brink of takeoff.

Out of the three classic records the Mael brothers recorded in Britain, Indiscreet is a strong contender for the best. While precise, theatrical rock songs like Happy Hunting Ground and In The Future wouldn't feel out of place on either of the previous two albums - 1974's ace brace of Kimono My House and Propaganda - it's the tongue-in-cheek arrangement (partly thanks to Bowie/T. Rex producer Tony Visconti) of the remainder that marks out Indiscreet's peculiar genius. The marching band sound of lead single Get In The Swing, the jaunty hoedown of It Ain't 1918 and the campy swing band pastiche Looks Looks Looks take Sparks into territory that even Kimono... might have thought outré. Ron Mael proves himself one of the most overlooked lyricists in rock, falling somewhere between the narrative style of Ray Davies and the mordant wit of Cole Porter; in fact "The canopy over the main doorway of the Ritz hotel / Had served as a very large umbrella when the May rains fell" could even be Noël Coward, if it weren't for the bit where the hotel manager's hands are blown off in a bomb attack. In Ron's world, everyday scenarios and facets of the human condition are played out in a surreal, disturbingly comic fashion. Indiscreet? Perhaps. Audacious? Absolutely.

Before you think my brain's turned to nostalgia-fried marshmallow and that next I'll be lapsing into a Maconie-esque faux-reverie about Spangles and white dog poo, hear me out. While this is, yes, ostensibly a collection of music that soundtracked animated kids TV shows in the '60s and '70s, it is also so much more than that. Most of the credit for this, of course, is due to the peculiar vision of Noggin/Ivor/Clangers/Bagpuss auteur Oliver Postgate. Postgate's creations were not infantilising rot but surreal excursions that treated its target audience as fellow weirdos on a shared path toward, well, what, exactly? Defiantly unfocusgrouped, they were shot through with a melancholy crypto-misanthropy and a horror of galloping modernity (the Clangers' terrifying encounter with a terrestrial TV set is axiomatic) which has continued to haunt the generations they entertained. If there was hugging or learning, it was of an unfathomable sort.

Secondly, there was Vernon Elliott, a classical bassoonist with a jazz sideline. His small ensemble combined both elements in a limpid sound that could change emotional tone in a quicksilver instant (you can imagine the Ivor theme delighting Mozart or Debussy; Cruising Theme is an English pastoral with a dash of New Orleans), while his incidental stings remain, quite simply, very funny indeed. Admittedly, this CD will work best for those with roots in an age where kids' telly was a teatime ration not a 24-7 barrage of Dick & Dom; but - showing my age perhaps too much here - I already imagined myself too old for Ivor when it finally showed on the Beeb in 1975-1977 (it had originally been made, in black and white, for ITV in 1958). So I don't think I'm using Elliott's music as a teleport to some peril-free wombworld, but - I hope - appreciating it for what it is: witty post-classical chamber music of a unique and unclassifiable stripe.

Elliott's Clangers compositions - tantamount to a primer in 20th Century "classical" music - were recently performed at London's QEH. There's an Ivor/Pogles show planned for N1's Union Chapel in October: more details when we have them.

Ike Turner was a mere 19 when he oversaw the session that produced Rocket 88. A working bandleader who knew what was hot on the jukebox and radio, his band The Kings Of Rhythm played jazz, blues, R&B and country - the rock'n'roll recipe in waiting. Written in March 1951, reputedly in the band's Chrysler en route to Sam Phillips' Sun studio in Memphis, the results were cheap, strange and irresistible. The fuzzy bassline - played on the bass strings of an electric guitar - saxes and a beat-up boogie woogie piano accompanied vocalist Jackie Brenston as he eagerly sang about the new, fast and powerful Oldsmobile (Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bo Diddley would hear this song and absorb its template for their own rocking salutes to freedom and the road). It hit number one on the R&B chart, but there was bad news for the late Ike; he thought the tune would be out on the California-based Modern label under the name Ike Turner & His Kings Of Rhythm feat Jackie Brenston. Instead it ended up on Chess with a new credit. As for the 'first rock'n'roll record' argument, the jury will never be in because of the many raucous, near-as-dammit party songs that predated it. Instead, best take a little nip, and move on out!

Of the many fans John Fahey attracted in his peculiar, mercurial life, he probably hated music critics the most. In 1968, fast behind the live recordings on The Great Santa Barbara Oil Slick, Fahey put out The Voice Of The Turtle, a haunting collection of scratchy blues riffs, eerie ragas, country drifts and occasional bleeds of white noise that came accompanied with a set of liner-notes that can be filed alongside Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, as one of the music world's great "Fuck you!"s. Aping the unbearably dry, Folkways-style liner note of the day, Fahey told us that ...Turtle was assembled from Hillbilly, Hawaiian and Indonesian record catalogues of the late 1920s and early '30s, referenced supposedly "lost" artists including "Finious Flatfoot Firk", "Thomas Gamblin' Gamelan Gong" and "the pyrrhic dodecameter Volk ballads of certain old Takoma Park Negro women" and concerned "the seven cantrefs of Dyfed", "the palace of the Big Sunflower" and an industrial accident at "the Takoma Park Strawberry Cannery... jam on the rocks... the sluice plugged up with strawberries." Like Vindice in Thomas Middleton's Revenger's Tragedy, Fahey held that "Whatever you say I am, I am not", an oft drunk enigma regarded as everything from sensitive guitar classicist to acoustic blues revivalist and new age composer for sensitive dope travellers.

This shift of identities can be clearly heard on the 1968/69 live recordings that make up The Great Santa Barbara Oil Slick. Taking in material from Blind Joe Death to The Yellow Princess it finds the often irascible Fahey in eerily happy mood, stomping his feet, chatting with the audience about the ethics of blowing your nose on stage, and playing around with his back-catalogue: speeding up, slowing down, changing direction and taking his audience on a great excursion into indefinable holy strangeness. In later years Fahey made less music, drank more booze and moved from charity shelters to flop houses, reselling thrift store 78s for meagre profits. Adopted by everyone from the healing crystals New Age crew to avant-garde rock types like Thurston Moore and Byron Coley, he hated the first lot, liked the second. Disowning his old recordings, he descended into a new, dark, raw world of experimental music with new label, Revenant and 1997's City Of Refuge and ended with 2004's Hitomi. The one constant was the need to escape, to travel, to discover. ...Oil Slick's late '60s wonder is one of the best trips he ever took. Bon voyage.

Money were tight in them days (is that a Hovis loaf theme I hear?), but the appetite for music were powerful. Albums? Apart from essentials, out of the question. Singles? Listen to the radio, jukeboxes, share, stick to soul and R&B. Ah, but the EP. In shiny picture sleeve, more tracks than a single, less filler than an album. You heard most of what was good in a band, and fewer of the missteps. Two EPs from the golden era of Merseybeat - the headline offering from King Size Taylor, plus another little record I'd like to draw in, The Mojos' self-titled EP from 1964 - illustrate all of that, and highlight the Epstein Curse that fell on Decca in all their dealings with Liverpool in the wake of that label's rejection of The Beatles.

King Size Taylor, a butcher by trade, built like a barn door, had a real affinity with early rock'n'roll and New Orleans R&B but was tempted by the sirens of an extremely lengthy residency at the Star-Club in Hamburg, which mean that he had no exposure in the UK and no chance of making it. But he and his band, recorded here 'live' in said club, blast out convincing versions of Little Richard's Slippin' And Slidin', Fats Domino's Hello Josephine, a roaring take on Phil Upchurch's You Can't Sit Down, and Little Willie John's All Around The World, written by the great Otis Blackwell. By the time he returned from Germany, the music world had moved on and Decca were never able to capitalise on his King Size talent.

The Mojos did have a UK Top 10 hit, Everything's Al'right, covered by David Bowie on 1973's Pin-ups, and Decca seemed to have broken the spell. If this EP, which featured that smasheroonie plus a decent stab at Smokey Robinson's The One Who Really Loves You, a raucous charge through The Isley Brothers' Nobody But Me and, perhaps inevitably, I Got My Mojo Working, encouraged their hopes, subsequent A&R decisions by their masters at Decca quickly quashed them. Pity. Stu James had a promising sparky lead vocal and, like the Dominos, their line-up expanded on the lead-rhythm-bass guitars and drums, Terry O'Toole's piano giving them a rock, R&B and soul edge. But the pop material Decca foisted on them split the first line-up, and though the second, with Aynsley Dunbar on drums and bassist Lew Collins (he would later turn Thesp and star in The Professionals), was as good, the material got worse. Item: Goodbye Dolly Gray, a song that had seen service in the Boer and First World Wars. They were demobbed for good soon after.

NB: On CD, find The Mojos' tracks on Everything's Alright (RPM, 2009); King Size Taylor's on Die Ariola Star-Club Aufnahmen (Bear Family, 4CD box, 1999)

With its AA Milne-like artwork and miserable bear motif, Into The Woods is a most lovable kind of solipsism, one self-aware enough to maintain a droll humour throughout the boozy fatalism of songs like Devastation ("I'll make it up to you with a million steak McCoys") and the unexpected keyboard-driven euphoria of Loneliness Shines, the album's first single (once sufficiently cleaned up). Into The Woods' appeal does not lie solely in its incongruity, however; the songs are consistently brilliant, whether framed with brittle acoustic guitar (Monday Night Nothing) or thumping, toe-tapping electronics (A Happy Medium). In a just world you'd be able to play them all on BBC radio.

The Belgians brought little but misery to the Congo. Misery and Franciscan priest Guido Haazen, whose mission at Kamina in the far south east of what is now the Democratic Republic Of The Congo became the birthplace of the Missa Luba. Shakers and drums echo in a chamber of what feels like cathedral size, a choir of Congolese kids and their teachers unite on a collection of local folk songs, and, even more stunningly, a version of the Catholic mass scored with Congolese melodies. Considered a propaganda coup by the Belgian imperialists, the Kamina ensemble were paraded at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair as an example of their "civilising" influence on the Dark Continent. Yet the Missa Luba does not feel like a Eurocentric straitjacket imposed on Africa, but rather the opposite: a triumphant indigenous culture kicking over the traces of their political overlords as they take the words of the Latin mass to an ancient, ecstatic place. It's not an outrageous stretch to hear in it a prelude to the January 1959 riots in Léopoldville/Kinshasa that spelt the beginning of the end for Belgium in Africa.

As unrest brewed at home, the Kamina kids toured Europe, sang with the Vienna Boys' Choir and sold bucketloads of this, their only album, and were still in cultural currency when Lindsay Anderson added extracts to the soundtrack of his 1969 movie, If... And no wonder. It's unspeakably beautiful music, with the eccentricities of the recording - notably the distortion and overtones that kick in when the choir approach, um... critical mass - actually adding to the impression of passions unbounded and turning the whole thing into a spine-tingling sonic narco-soup. There aren't that many records with roots in the '50s that sound as 2009 as Missa Luba; that's got a lot to do with the current vogue for choral, ecstatic rock, and perhaps most of all what Animal Collective and their drummer Noah "Panda Bear" Lennox have pioneered, or perhaps rediscovered, of late. The connection struck me with revelatory force, shortly before I saw that it had occurred to a lot of other people, too . But there it is, most vividly in Panda Bear's Bros, from his 2007 album Person Pitch, a piece which seems to operate within exactly the same resonant co-ordinates as Missa Luba's wondrous Banana, to which the available YouTube bootlegs barely do justice. You can buy the Él release on Amazon for a tenner and not waste a penny.

Will there be a professional life after Michael for the former Jackson 5, or are they destined to tour incessantly as a tribute band to their late brother before taking up a lengthy residency at the yet-to-be-built Neverland Theatre Complex in Las Vegas, a season which will stretch long into their dotage? Well, brother Jermaine, sister Janet, and even Rebbie have some track record of solo success, albeit decades ago, but the prognosis for Jackie, Tito, Marlon and Randy is problematic, and all the appurtenances of Pro-Tools are unlikely to make LaToya an in-any-way palatable singer. She has, apparently, recorded a tribute to Michael, and shelved her imminent album, which is very good news. The tribute I mean, of course.

But let us look back to the group's better days when they finally shrugged off the production shackles imposed by Motown and, after two LPs with Gamble & Huff, recorded their best work as a quintet. Their third for Epic, seven of Destiny's eight songs were written within the group, with first single and opening track Blame It On The Boogie coming, somewhat confusingly, from Mick Jackson, an English songwriter who also had a hit with the track. Michael's other dance tracks are meatier - a breathless Things I Do For You, the thunderous Shake You Body (Down To The Ground) and draining All Night Dancer. The ballads are just as successful. The narrator of That's What You Get (For Being Polite), MJ obviously, attempts to explain his inability to connect emotionally, a trait also echoed in Push Me Away, in which a dreamer cannot equate reality with the warmth and love he imagines in his sleep. Hmm.

The title track may raise your hackles if you've an innate resistance to rich folks telling us how hard it is to get off the merry-go-round and how much they yearn for the simple life away from the hustle and bustle, etc., etc. However, one of the least known, least assertive tracks is perhaps the most telling. Bless His Soul finds Michael in the role of one who spends his life trying to please others (brothers? Dad?), "I give myself at beck and call", but might end up satisfying absolutely no one, least of all himself.

At last, the brothers had recorded their most entertaining group album. But as if to dash their hopes at the cruellest possible moment, it was the signal for Michael to fly the Jackson coop. Next came Off The Wall and all bets were off.

"Hi neighbours. It's sundown at our house as we make this new Columbia album for you. So sit back, kick off your shoes and relax... just a little bit". And so begins Ray Price's Night Life - an album that bridges the gap between the string-heavy Nashville Sound and the lonesome country-blues of Price's one-time roommate Hank Williams. In 1953, Price formed the Cherokee Cowboys, whose alumni included one Willie Hugh Nelson. It was Nelson (or as he's referred to here, "a boy from down in Texas way") who gave Price the sumptuously swinging title track - a song that, with Buddy Emmons' mesmerizing pedal steel, quickly animates the pair of young canoodlers on the front cover of the LP. A neon-lit string of broken-hearted ballads follow. Best of all are Price's Elvis-esque croons during Let Me Talk To You and the honky-tonk farewell of Bright Lights and Blonde Haired Women, in which our hedonistic guide is "tired of roaming around... tired of painting the town" - a quick shift from Sittin' And Thinkin's incarcerated bad-boy who got "loaded last night on a bottle of gin" and proceeded to have "a fight with my best girlfriend". Booze-fuelled violence and a sore-headed, early morning search for redemption are the tenants of Price's after-hours world where people go to "bury a broken dream and watch an old love die". These days, whenever I hear this album, I'm always reminded of Ellen Barkin introducing a episode of Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour: "It's night time in the big city... a woman watches her neighbour through binoculars," purrs Birkin before delivering the clincher, "...a cat knocks over a lamp".

I still remember the gig, East London, 2004, the tramping of plastic glass underfoot, the whispering of the truly scary mad bloke on my right, quietly cursing the band, and out of the speakers, a sound like asthma, bees packed in the chest and ghostly voices that bore no resemblance to the act on stage, this shifting crew of eight, maybe twelve, hairy and bald types named Critter, Chad, Cousin Rich, Phil, Reverend John, and other things, all in a circle, beat out chain-gang rhythms, led by the pulsing bass of aged schoolboy scholar Rob Thomas. Formed in Massachusetts in 1997 from such defunct outfits as Franklin's Mint, Fisherman's Faggot, Shit Yourself, Faxed Head and Ghetto Breakers, this band who debuted with an album called Shit-Spangled Banner, played abstract psychedelia with roots in Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac, Cream, Funkadelic and Ash Ra Tempel, but made out in the dark woods by the demon children of John Fahey, abandoned in a car full of tapes. I remember the stage, the aftermath of some '68 hippie riot - protesters trapped in the dying control centre - and the groove lurching on and on, the band circling constantly, like a ragged drum and bugle corps born of American's two Sawyer families - Mark Twain's ragged-trousered truant leading Texas Chainsaw Massacre's pallid cannibal family up from the rusty iron depths of their stuckboard kill-pit and into the sun: blasts, chimes, clanks, screams, thunks and mental-institution shouting-in-the-dark; a terrifying mystic broadcast on the King Biscuit Flour Hour. At the end of the gig I met two girls who told me it was the worst band they'd ever seen. And they were laughing, hard. But, you know, in a good way. I listened to a bunch of their CDs afterwards but this was the only one that ever came close.

It's been covered with various levels of cheeriness by UB40 and Chrissie Hynde, the Harry J Allstars and even a Pussycat Doll, but what emotional pain there is at the heart of this LP's song Breakfast In Bed. Welcoming a secret paramour early one morning, the singer seems casual at first, but later cuts loose and begs them to stay (it also uses a protesting-too-much line that replicates the title of one of Dusty Springfield's big hits, "You don't have to say you love me"). Recorded with the magisterial production team of Jerry Wexler, Arif Mardin and Tom Dowd, and crisply blending soul and sophisticated pop, there's a similar range throughout Dusty In Memphis. In parts it's cool as can be, her immaculate voice close and confiding as she reflects on imperfect affairs of the heart, but as on the elegantly end-of-tether version of Randy Newman's gossiping neighbours song I Don't Want To Hear It Anymore, more urgent feelings are never far away (Wexler would recall Dusty as an insecure perfectionist who needed to feel songs before she could sing them). Consequently, with the ever-wondrous southern soul tune Son Of A Preacher Man, the driving Don't Forget About Me or the jazzy version of celebrated psycho-drooler Windmills Of Your Mind, there isn't a duff track. Though there is irony in the fact that the strings - not to mention those stunning vocals - were actually recorded in New York.

Resisting the neat sub-categories devised by P.R.s, music journalists and fans is surely the goal of any right-thinking recording artist, yet sometimes it means that, despite the undoubted excellence of the music, you slip through the net designed specifically to get you noticed. So when a young hip Manchester indie label releases an album of expansive spiritual jazz from a flat-cap wearing, middle-aged saxophonist influenced by dub acoustics, Bob Dylan, Roland Alphonso and John Coltrane, and it's P.R.'d by a company best known for its work for dubstep/techno pioneer label Tectonic, is it any wonder that the spatial sunship beauty of Nat Birchall's Akhenaten might have so far passed some people by? Although Birchall has been a much sought-after musician on the jazz circuit for the past thirty years, a name in the hipster fleet of Gilles Peterson faithful, Akhenaten is only his second release, following a 1999 sextet debut with the Sixth Sense. This is clearly an artist who takes his time, and the mood of Akhenaten is fittingly expansive and dreamy. Album opener Nica's Dance taps into the languid, post Coltrane cosmic drift of Charles Lloyd and Pharoah Sanders, an Eastern peregrination that moves from balmy calm to reedy skreigh, suggesting a desert dream state buffeted by sirocco winds. Track two, A Prayer For..., continues the back-to-Africa mood, with Birchall's sax following Adam Fairhall's soft, rolling piano like Ricky Ford tracking Dollar Brand while on the title track (named after the Henotheistic 18th Dynasty Pharaoh) Birchall is joined by Mancunian trumpet whiz labelmate Matthew Halsall for ten minutes of lyrical heat haze hypnotism. This is a jazz that manages to be deep, intelligent and complex without ever once hitting you over the head with the difficult stick. If we manage to win back one more balmy summer's evening before the cold autumn comes then this is the record you should be expanding the collective consciousness of the neighbours with. Truly transcendental.

In the strange career of Scott Walker, there is something of a contrast between his poptastic early fame days and his later nerve-shredding exercises in "beautiful hellishness". But somewhere in the middle is the '67-'69 run of magnificent solo records that began here. In some respects here is music unlikely to make mum and dad kick the TV in, made by a crack orchestra and arrangers, with covers of Sinatra and Dean Martin tunes and an effortless, sonorous voice that should have knocked them dead in Vegas. But more uncomfortably, and presented in the same immaculate style, there's versions of Jacques Brel's seamy playlets of death, vice and masochism - opener Mathilde thunders like doom - and the singer's own songs of shimmering, heartsick gloom, like Montague Terrace (In Blue). It's a sublimely schizoid experience - whose idea was it to follow Tony Bennett hit When Joanna Loved Me with Brel's terror-stricken My Death? - with a swelling version of The Big Hurt managing to sound swinging and desperate at once. Though Scott's fraught take on Brel's Amsterdam caused consternation with its references to brothels and public urination, Scott still got to number three and all was rosy until Scott 4 tanked in '69. Then, the singer went into a tailspin of MOR that was only checked by the most drastic left turn in rock history.

Recently rewatching Werner Herzog's 1974 film, the Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser I came to the realisation that the short, vague life of poor Kaspar is similar to that of many of our non-mainstream recording artists. After a hermetic life of cellar dwelling, devoid of all human contact, Kaspar emerges into the outside world, a toby jug brimming with savant strangeness, the subject of intense wonder and curiosity. Unfortunately, contact with rank humanity inevitably transforms him, to such a degree that his newly educated presence brings about a powerful anger in the masses and he gets stabbed and hit on the head a lot, before dying of liver failure. Surely we all have a minor recording artist we have treated in such a fashion, revelling in their preternatural, unheimlich manoeuvres but getting all affronted and angry when they embrace the sophisticated trappings of, you know, normal society. Mine is New York singer-songwriter Pat Gubler who, as P.G. Six, first appeared in 2001, as if from Northern Appalachian barrens, a thorn-scratched disoriented Thoreau blending exquisite innocent-abroad vocal delivery with near-perfect Jansch picking, Eno-esque hum and guitar feedback. His album debut, Parlor Tricks And Porch Favourites possessed a profound fog-on-the-headland unease, the songs of a young man heading out into the mystic with all the fear, trepidation and fortitude of the gentleman traveller in a Victorian ghost story.

From the tenor banjo picking and double-tracked boy/girl whisper on Come In ("Arise arise... love, the guest, is come today"), to the lonesome guitar and Korg Polysix stream that babbles underneath Crooked Way ("I drove down some crooked way / Roads not so clear"), The Well Of Memory, took the PG Six template even further, bringing in prepared wind harp, ukelin, Prophet 600 and tin whistle, placing the listener in a dark, hallucinatory wasteland between the familiar and the uncanny, the customary folk landscape imbued with a sense of terror and exhilaration, the manic desolation of a man wrestling with his own dark soul. Yet, 2007's Slightly Sorry found Gubler swapping the pastoral dread and mesmeric Gordian knots of melody and meaning for, well, an album that sounded a bit like a third-rate Bonnie Prince Billy's country rock jam. Here was an evidently sane, happy man making strum-happy music with a modern, bright production. He was cured. I hated it. I wanted to hit him on the head. Now I feel a bit bad. But, after watching Kaspar Hauser, there remains a part of me that wants to lock Pat Gubler up in his metaphorical wood cellar and not let him out until he's unwell, ready to make more beguiling, unfathomable albums like this.

Watching Blur live at Hyde Park last Friday (and yes, Jenny, they were magnificent - much more relaxed than at Glastonbury and twice as powerful) it struck me how much the band enjoyed playing songs off 13. Tender, Coffee & TV, even the mournful Trimm Trabb were delivered with abandon. Perhaps that's no surprise; 13 represents the last time the band were a quorate, functioning unit, and although it is haunted by sadness - there are loud echoes of Damon Albarn's still-raw break-up with partner Justine Frischmann - it has grown old gracefully. "Space is the place..." croons Damon at the end of the fuzzed out, psych-spazzed Bugman, and space is Blur's destination throughout on a record that bids to explore sound rather than impose order on it, and at Hyde Park, Tender and Trimm Trabb became vehicles for spontaneous extemporisation and in-the-zone grooving.

On plastic, its vibe is more impressionistic. William Orbit, fresh from producing Madonna's Ray Of Light, brought his rave-honed sensitivity to texture, and even the ever-unsettled Coxon claimed to dig the "bonnet-off" approach. Battle's nebulous dub-threat is typical, while Caramel - think Roy Budd sloshing about in a trip-hop sound-soup - is as far out-there as Blur ever went or (probably) ever wanted to, yet the brittle and beautiful Mellow Song re-emphasises Albarn's lack of fear of the simplest ditty, the mark of the pop genius. Consumer alert! There are two genuine shockers - the useless Swamp Song and Trailerpark - but Blur would have had to come round for tea and poo on mum's sofa to outstay the welcome extended on behalf of all-time-classic wheezy heartbreaker No Distance Left To Run. Hands up who's in bits when the battered Albarn sings "I hope you're with someone who makes you feel safe in your sleep" and Graham's exquisite guitars describe a fuzzy lullaby. No? Then, you, my friend, are a monster.

...It does, doesn't it? [yes, it does - Ed] I knew it. Far be it from me to stir up ancient conflicts but I've never really 'got' Blur. It's not the songs that offend (I like that Graham one with the milk carton video, for instance...); it's Damon's studied disinterest. All that eye rolling, 'its all soo booring' can't-be-arsedness. If it's all too much effort to sing, then don't, I say. You don't get that from Oasis. Which is why, in a round-about sort of way, I nominate their thrilling, epoch-shaping debut to put the euphoric rush of this mid-'90s landmark back into a Blur-centric week.

I spent the summer of 1994 in America and missed all the excitement that pre-empted Definitely Maybe's August release. On the plane home, casually flicking across Virgin Radio's in-flight station I heard the slightly creepy bass rumble that opens Supersonic. By the time they were up to full acceleration I was hooked. "Give me gin and tonic" indeed (and let's face it nothing beats a G'n'T at high altitude. It's not a perfect album, it's lumpy in places (Shakermaker) and the lyrics can be downright silly ("I'd like to build myself a house / out of Plasticine"?? Shakermaker again!) but its naiveté is also the source of its brilliance, its "sun sh-ee-ine" radiance.

It resonated with my 21-year old self the way it did with millions that year and ever since. Not just with the basic instinct rock-outs (swaggering Rock'N'Roll Star; the still unsurpassed, heart-in-mouth Live Forever) but in its rare quiet moments too. Slide Away with its lighter's aloft chorus, acoustic ballad Married With Children's universal teenage break-up sentiments ("I hate the books you read and all your friends"). Definitely Maybe perfectly reflects youth in all it's exuberant, messy, painful reality. And that's no small effort.

Jimmy Webb was on a roll in 1968, with no less than eight Grammies won for songs he'd written. Six of them were for the high-flying Up, Up And Away, whose hit version was sung by Los Angeles vocal quintet The 5th Dimension. The previous year songwriter and group had made an orchestrated, harmony-rich album that, next to *Astral Weeks and *Forever Changes, was a favourite of Nick Drake's. Like the two aforementioned, *The Magic Garden was out of step with certain arguably naïve summer of love conventions, and presents a series of bittersweet, interlinking songs that depict a love affair screwed up by both parties - boy lets himself be walked over, girl regrets it, girl gets married to some rich sap and after attending the wedding boy goes off to get smashed on skid row. Along the way there's romance, regret and heartbreak galore, with poppy R&B of superior lyrics and melody iced with strings and the singers' creamy harmonies. There's also an appealing kind of squareness and show tune vividity to songs like the Burt-and-Hal-style The Girl's Song, the psych-lite Dreams/Pax/Nepethe and the Macarthur Park-esque Requiem: 820 Latham. And the story goes that The Association turned down the chance to record the album - bad move!

Saw Becker & Fagen last Wednesday, at a Hammersmith Apollo show that pillaged my pocketbook but did nothing but stoke my admiration for the kings of jazz-rock snark (there's a great chat about it, here). Beautifully bookended by two versions of Reelin' In The Years - the first a radical reworking, the latter a faithful rave-up featuring original Reelin' axedude Elliott Randall (now a London resident) - it was joyous and energetic, with Fagen in excitable voice. Yet it was their version of Black Friday - all that stuff about grey men diving from the 14th Floor swollen in significance by the ongoing economic apocalypse - that's camped out in my forebrain and had me racing back to Katy Lied. Now I won't start a pub fight by saying their fourth album is their best - there's an equally strong case for each of their first six - but as a record its creators long dissed (unhappy with the effect of early noise reduction technology) it's perhaps the least openly celebrated. But Black Friday's saturnine boogie (Becker's guitar solo, emerging from the ample shadows of Baxter/Dias/Randall/Derringer, is killing) is just one plus. The nasty hangover of Daddy Don't Live In That New York City No More is another. Then there's something bizarrely modern about Everyone's Gone To The Movies, from Jeff Porcaro's mechanistic rhythms to the fuzzy sax snatches that could almost be samples. And weirdest and best, Your Gold Teeth II: a surreal beatnik concoction built on melancholic, Vince Guaraldi-style piano. Sunny and black simultaneously, Katy Lied is the Dan album for London right now: too hot, too fragile, a cocktail of booze and anxiety dressed in hotpants and debt. The perfect post-boom album by the perfect post-boom band, anyone?

Mr. Million. Mr. Mercer. Mr. Weckerman. Mr. Demeski. Mrs. Sauter. It would be easy to see these people lifting their hats to each other and greet each other in old-fashioned gentlefolk-style, such is the kindness at the heart of the music they play on this album. The Good Earth, The Feelies' second album, produced by Peter Buck, seems to have that particular kind of Quaker-goodness about it too.

This, the follow-up to the jaunting Crazy Rhythms, was a far more demure adventure. The opening two tracks, On The Roof and The High Road, are gentle mid-tempo janglers, a mellow impression strengthened by the low-mixed vocal of Glenn Mercer, sounding here like a slightly bored Lou Reed. But that's when business picks up. The uptempo bluegrass-styled The Last Roundup ropes you in and there's a real sense of urgency in Slipping (Into Something), where the twin guitars of Million and Mercer build up towards menace and culminate in a frenetic ending. But the reflective mood returns with the hummingly fine Let's Go and Two Rooms, and though Tomorrow Today's military drums (the very effective Mr. Weckerman) and fuzz guitar allay the slumbers, the sun finally sets on this all-too-short set with the neatly meditative Slow Down.

The Feelies are scaling no steep cliffs or high mountains. They are at home on these flatlands, but sometimes there is adventure to be found in the spaces between. On this lovely, gentle album The Feelies make those spaces their own. Hats off.

If you want pretty, pot-pourri folk, you're in the wrong place. A compilation of amateur recordings from his late-'70s gigs, this disc gives listeners a chance to hear Nic Jones live, something they've not been able to do otherwise since a 1982 car accident cut short his career. But while the back story is undeniably poignant, this record gleams with uplifting life, wit and energy. It's the rawboned sound of a strident English voice and guitar (sometimes not even the guitar), singing traditional songs with the coming-at-you directness of a hatchet. It's a record of stark beauty and often dazzling, ego-less playing, all serving performances that'll pin you to your seat 'til the story's told. The varying textures, from track to track, only add to the charm, like a DIY tape made for you by a friend. Not outright pretty, then, but definitely one to love.

As part of Rick Hall's FAME stable of songwriters, producers and session players, Alabama native Dan Penn cut his teeth throughout the early '60s with some of soul's finest architects. With childhood friend Spooner Oldham, Penn would quickly meld the gospel fervour of the black church with the plaintive country sounds of Nashville and Bakersfield. The result was a sanctified country-soul amalgam that took the likes of Joe Simon, Percy Sledge and Mighty Sam onto the US airwaves. Before the decade was out he'd served up two defining southern soul anthems in the form of James Carr's The Dark End Of The Street and Aretha Franklin's Do Right Woman - both co-written with Memphis ace Chips Moman. 1973 saw Penn somewhat reluctantly take centre stage, cutting this low-key collection of home-cooked, earthy R&B grooves. It's not an easy record to find (there's a CD version currently sitting on Amazon marketplace for an astonishing £128) which is a crying shame when it contains the waltzy, organ-propelled Time and the driving, Stax-y If Love Was Money. Of course, we knew Penn could write songs, but could he sing them? Well, the answer is a resounding 'yes'. Check out his churchy delivery of CCR's Lodi or the Charlie Rich-esque I Hate You. Penn's is a voice steeped in the romantic heritage of the deep south and it cuts through some of the more polished production numbers like a rusty scythe through a corn field. "We're not the stars, we're just the twinkle behind the stars," Penn told MOJO in 2006. Nobody's Fool proves that some of the backroom boys can cut it out front too.

To celebrate Dinosaur's recent MOJO Honours List show (see issue 189) it seems only fair to right the great wrong of them not yet having had a Disc Of The Day. But what that's you say, not one of their life-changing (mine at least) trio of LPs from the mid-'80s? Well no. Those treasured discs undeniably shaped their career and helped re-energise US alternative rock but the following years, the J Mascis-solo-in-disguise years, deserve more than footnote status in a story that's now come full circle with the original triumvirate of J, Lou and Murph two albums into a reformation that's proved to be as strong (and only slightly less dysfunctional) than their '80s heyday.

Where You Been from 1993 was Dinosaur's second for a major label and first with their newly solidified line-up of Murph permanently back on drums and Mike Johnson as a full-time bassist. And if they lacked the passive-aggressive dialectic that drove the J Vs Lou era Dinosaur (skip to 2.35), they certainly didn't lack the power. From the off, here was J indulging his love of a windswept guitar epic, blowing through opening track Out There and Start Choppin's wailing guitars and whining sentiment ("it's not just you with problems mounting high...") over which the benevolent spectre of Neil Young looms large. J's winning combination of melancholic, 'what did I do now?' vocal and violent, sonic attack becomes amour plated on songs like Get Me and a vulnerable, string embellished What Else Is New; while Goin' Home offers a jangling, melodic anthem for all those negaholic indie types to wallow in. If some critics passed off Where You Been as just more of the same it still went top 50 in US and frankly, when your basic materials are this good, who needs diversity?

When the 'Deluxe Edition' of Keith Moon's only solo album came out in 2006, it became one of the few prestige reissues of the rock era to include the words "horrendous", "bona fide turkey" and "really shitty record" in its sleevenotes (the latter two phrases were in relation to a cover of Brian Wilson's Don't Worry Baby that allegedly made its composer burst into tears of pain). But if this 1975 LP is absolute proof of why some studios have a no drink or drugs rule, it would be a hard heart that couldn't rejoice a little in its wrongness or be moved by its folly. Created because The Who were between albums and their drummer needed to be kept busy, it saw uncontrollable boozer Moon gathering Los Angeles pals and sessioneers including Ringo Starr, Dick Dale, Klaus Voorman and Harry Nilsson in a studio. He then proceeded to brazenly ignore his inability to sing with reeling approximations of In My Life and The Kids Are Alright. At just 29 minutes, and with Moon only drumming on three of the tracks, it does at least prove that when he let you down, he did it spectacularly. His minder Dougal Butler called it "the most expensive karaoke album ever made", and interested parties should track down Moon the Loon, Butler's prank-packed memoir of life with the late Keith, if only to find out what "doing a Cyril Lord" means.

Although it died a death at the box-office Alexander Mackendrick's acid showbiz noir stands as one of the greatest films of the 1950s, a twisted, venal trawl through a sordid twilight world of amoral press agents, power-hungry gossip columnists and fat, bent cops. It features two geniuses at the helm - Mackendrick directing the actors and cinematographer James Wong Howe setting up the luminous shots - and two star actors - Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster - turning in lifetime performances as the demonic master-and-servant double-act. It's therefore somehow appropriate that it also features two of the best soundtracks ever recorded in that decade. Chico Hamilton's 1957 Quintet provided the nervy and sad music for the club scenes while Elmer Bernstein turns in the quintessential late noir score for the grand dramas of death, redemption and defeat, utilising a suite of weeping violins and mourning cellos to a veritable main street of sleazy, swaggering, hectoring horns.

William Bell is almost too good at too many things. An emotionally convincing soul balladeer and exceptional songwriter, he has also run his own publishing and labels for roughly 30 years, evidence of an astuteness and acumen not often evident in artists of his era in any genre. That said, timing has not been his forte. In 1961 he had one of Stax's first big hits with the self-penned You Don't Miss Your Water, which helped draw the Southern soul blueprint. But it was six years before this, his debut album, was released, an interruption owed in some bulk to a stint with Uncle Sam's armed forces, albeit in Hawaii. After demob it took William a while to get a grip on the fast-changing soul scene, but he regrouped with Booker T. Jones, a co-writer since 1963, and with the moving and gently chastened storytelling of opening track Everybody Loves A Winner gave notice that he was right back on the money. . Soul Of A Bell continues with a stereo re-make of You Don't Miss... (the original was cut only in mono) and covers of well-known Southern soul classics Do Right Woman, Do Right Man and I've Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now). Even better are his measured readings of the lesser known Nothing Takes The Place Of You (Toussaint McCall) and Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye, (John D Loudermilk), completing a run of six quite beautifully judged ballads that together build a mood of profound contemplation about the vagaries of life and love. The rest of the album is markedly more uptempo with Eloise (Hang On In There), a Stax romp with William using distinct Levi Stubbs-style phrasing to drive the chorus. Also re-cut from earlier mono days, Any Other Way is a midtempo message of defiance to an old flame, and he gives good Sam & Dave soul on Never Like This Before. All this, and Bell, who will be a sprightly 70 on July 16, had yet to record his own stunning I Forgot To Be Your Lover, the pop smash duet Private Number, with Judy Clay, or kickstart Albert King's Stax career with the bluestastic Born Under A Bad Sign.

Before bands were expected to write all their own tunes, it was perfectly acceptable - if not expected - for singers to make entire albums of other peoples' songs. This covers collection, dreamt up by executive producer/ A&R man Eddie Belazel and studio grafter Hugoth Nicolson, suggests there was more to this model than its detractors would admit. Using a carefully calibrated blend of strings, guitar chime and the gently truthful voice of Nevada City folk psychstress Alela Diane, this small but perfectly formed 33 minute album brings together disparate material - try Daniel Johnson's True Love Will Find You In The End, Linda Perhacs' Hey, Who Really Cares and the Jesus & Mary Chain's Just Like Honey - and absorbs them its own warm, somewhat opiated vision of emotional pain. Throughout Diane doesn't go overboard and trusts the listener to feel it too; duly, I Am Kloot's To You seems like an old familiar classic, Nick Cave's Nobody's Baby Now becomes a ghostly transmission of lost romance and Jackson C Frank's Blues Run The Game is as lost and heartbroken as the original. Belazel, who has since worked on a collection of "surreal felt hats", describes the aesthetic as the "bittersweetness of heartache and love", and any masochistic fool wanting to imbibe would surely agree.

"Play it like a midget's bar mitzvah," Tom Waits told guitarist Marc Ribot when recording this 1985 album. If only more groups would follow suit. Named for hounds that have lost the scent of home in a rain storm and are forced to roam the streets, Rain Dogs was inspired by Waits' tenure in pre-money New York. The bruised and lost populate its ragged city songs of brutality and tenderness; death is at Waits' elbow, and there's nothing for it but poetic melancholy and maybe a few laughs. There are no half-measures here; recorded using an eclectic array of instruments including accordions, pump organs, angle-ground guitars and, so the story goes, an old chest of drawers as a drum kit, what resulted was a complete inter-relation of lyric, voice and melody. When Waits croaks his sideways visions of mundane horror on 9th & Hennepin, for example, the clarinet, marimba, musical saw and piano shadow every word; the gulpingly sad Time, meanwhile, becomes even more luminous in its overgrown junkyard surroundings. And though it might look like him, the cover star isn't the artiste, but some nestling drunk from photographer Anders Petersen's 1978 book Café Lehmitz (a swinging dive bar on the Reeperbahn in sunny Hamburg).

By 1982 OMD had achieved something very strange. Formed in the late '70s by Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys - two bookish lads from the Wirral obsessed with valves, electronics and Kraftwerk - the band had crafted a unique brand of Northern, industrial pop music: uplifting and dramatic yet imbued with a sepulchral melancholy. Their third album, Architecture And Morality, had found them composing romantic electronic paeans to a 15th Century female warrior-saint and ambient laments for the doomed industrial world and selling over three million copies. But where next? Growing up in a radical left-wing household in Heswall in the '60s, his father a communist atheist, McCluskey was fascinated by the Eastern bloc radio stations transmitting to the west. Bunkered down in their Liverpool studio, The Gramophone Suite, with a brand-new E-mu Emulator, he decided that the new album would be a mid-Atlantic musique concrète of dying ideologies based around sound collages of short wave radio, speaking clocks and Texas Instruments' '80s miracle toy, the 'Speak & Spell'. The album would be called Dazzle Ships, at the insistence of [sleeve designer] Peter Saville, who had recently discovered Edward Wadsworth's 1919 Vorticist painting, Dazzle Ship In Drydock. But if the album's concept was fixed, that's more than could be said for the songs. Radio Waves dated back to 1978 while Of All The Things We've Made and Romance Of The Telescope had originally been 1981 single B-sides. But all contributed to the eerie mood of an album for which this was the single, and the mournful stand-out track, International, began with a short wave news sample concerning "a young girl from Nicaragua whose hands had been cut off at the wrists". Like much of the album it is eerie, breathtaking and deeply weird and, unsurprisingly, after the 3 million sales for A&M, Dazzle Ships struggled to shift a tenth as many. Plus, the band were losing money on each copy sold, thanks to Peter Saville's elaborate Vorticist-style packaging. The fallout from Dazzle Ships was a collective loss of nerve. "There was a withdrawal back from the abyss," Andy McCluskey told MOJO in 2007. "With our next album we got more careful. But it was like people didn't trust us anymore. We became exactly the type of band we didn't want to be." Few '80s pop albums still sound as daring.

Amongst the thrash and vitriol of the late '70s/early '80s LA punk scene, X distinguished themselves early. Their sound was a distinctive tug of war between the white-lightnin' rockabilly speed of Billy Zoom's riffs, DJ Bonebrake's surf-smash drums, and the anti-harmonies of bass player John Doe and his poet paramour, Exene Cervenka. Their first two albums were produced by ex-Door Ray Manzarek, and X toured relentlessly behind them, waiting for the inevitable fame to hit like an atom bomb.

But, by 1982, the band hovered still on the cusp of mainstream success. Their third album, Under the Big Black Sun, is the sonic equivalent of a bruise; black and blue and tender to the touch. Sun finds our heroes road-weary and shell-shocked, Cervenka reeling from the death of her sister, Mirielle, who was killed in a car accident on her way to an X show. After the propulsive John Doe-penned opener, The Hungry Wolf, the album is handed over to Cervenka, who swiftly proves she's no Cleopatra-eyed gimmick. Her songs seethe with heartbreak and rage that reach far beyond the typical punk rock "up yours" manifestos of the time. The side one transition from Come Back to Me, a yearning ballad of loss, to the epic, dervish-like title track is one of the truest expressions of bereavement ever committed to vinyl. Side two's Dancing With Tears In My Eyes, a song Cervenka discovered on a Leadbelly album, confirms the band's fascination with "the old, weird America" but also proves apt tribute. "Dancing with tears in my eyes," Exene sings, "because the girl in my arms isn't you."

The Have Nots rounds out the album with weary humour, a road band exhausted with the road, buoyed by Billy Zoom's country-surf Gretsch groove. After two more albums (and Doe and Cervenka's divorce), Zoom would leave the band. His replacement, Lone Justice's Tony Gilkyson, would last one album before the group decided to call it quits.

As the title suggests, Under The Big Black Sun is the darkest of X's albums, but it splinters all the while with vicious brightness. Listening is akin to opening the door in that after-hours bar and shielding your eyes against the realization that last night has already become today. So you raise your glass, Exene's wry words on your lips: "Good morning, midnight..."

Digging back through the dusty vinyl on a Drifters Disc Of The Day excavation in praise of their unsung lead voice Rudy Lewis brought a reminder about another exceptional voice heard on their hits. Dionne Warwick, her sister Dee Dee and aunt Cissy Houston sang background vocals on several of them, starting with Mexican Divorce in July 1961. Soon after, the arranger/co-writer Burt Bacharach called in Dionne to sing on his demos, and that quickly led to Scepter's perceptive owner, Florence Greenberg, offering Warwick a contract. Thus began one of the great musical marriages - Dionne and the songs of Bacharach and lyricist Hal David. Her hits were a template for numerous British covers - the styles of Dusty Springfield, Cilla Black and Sandie Shaw were all Warwick-hued to greater or lesser degrees, while many a Mersey band was partial them. The 1963 releases Don't Make Me Over and Anyone Who Had A Heart established her in the pop singles charts; this album had three more hits (the iconic Walk On By, You'll Never Get To Heaven (If You Break My Heart), Reach Out For Me) and no fewer than three more that have entered into the pop canon: the original of A House Is Not A Home, the original of The Carpenters' Number 1 (They Long To Be) Close To You, and Wishin' And Hopin', which she had recorded on her 1962 debut, Presenting Dionne Warwick. Sung in that distinctively cool tone with exceptional emotional understanding and technical control, all these six Bacharach & David interpretations are as close to pop perfection as anything made by humans gets. Anything else? A great The Last One To Be Loved, another B&D song which Lou Johnson had recorded earlier, and two noteworthy versions not written by the producers: Goffin & King's Make The Night A Little Longer and the show tune People. It's often said that 'black' albums in the '60s are just a couple of hits and the rest just filler. Clearly, Make Way For... is a glorious exception.

1996 was UK dance music's year of decadence. Away from the clubs, in the flickering half-light of British front rooms, the aftershock of the genre's hedonism had begun to manifest itself in an unwelcome dawn chorus of sickness, self-loathing, and withdrawal. This was not lost on The Aloof. Begun in 1990 as a studio-based operation with Sabres Of Paradise's Jagz Kooner and London club DJ Dean Thatcher, by 1995 they had - with the addition of Red Snapper drummer Richard Thair and Sabres programmer/multi-instrumentalist Gary Burns - developed into a fully operational live band, blending house, techno, dub and rock with the stygian trudge-beat of the 1994 Bristol sound. But it was with the addition of Ricky Barrow - a friend of Thatcher's with a self-lacerating lyrical style - that heralded the band's new direction. Recording in a converted Hounslow council flat, and fuelled by Guinness, marijuana, and acid the band set about turning Barrow's dystopic song fragments into an album. Visitors to the studio encountered a near-feral, sleep-deprived group, talking about how the world was crumbling inwards from the edges. "We felt we had to push back the barriers," Kooner told me in 2006, "mutate the formulas, live on the dark side, hit rock bottom."

Recorded for £18,000, Sinking stands as one of the few albums of the '90s that truly captures the epic drift of the dance scene's biblical highs and lows, songs of euphoria, oppression and claustrophobia, driven by the hypnotic melancholy PiL riffs of multi-instrumentalist and fellow Weatherall collaborator, Gary Burns. Listened to again in 2009, the roots of artists like The Bug and Kode 9 can be heard in the album's suffocating ghost-dub production and Barrow's visions of urban and mental collapse. "I will never be the same again," he sings on the album's tormented postcard home to self-sanity, Wish You Were Here, and those words contained a horrible truth. In the wake of positive reviews, the band embarked upon an album tour and set about obliterating themselves. "People were breaking down, crying, losing their minds," says Kooner. "We weren't going to make it as a pop band, and because we couldn't cope with the situation, we just got pissed out of our minds and took loads of drugs." The last ruined outpost on the thin borders between weekend excess and life-long psychosis, the worrying thing is, that in June 2009, Sinking also sounds like a retrofit soundtrack for modern, beggared Britain.

If White Denim's 2008 Let's Talk About It EP - all spastic guitars, barked vocals and random synth burbles - suggested a gloriously hyperactive Pere Ubu, then the Texan trio's first LP proper implied they were of the opinion that if you can mine one genre, why not mine fifteen? From Nuggets-era garage rock (Shake Shake Shake), jaunty piano-pop (Sitting), and jigsaw puzzle math-rock (Don't Look That Way At It), everything and anything is tackled with frenzied aplomb, often in the space of a single verse. Songs on Workout Holiday don't so much progress as they do suddenly transform themselves beyond all recognition; for instance, listening to WDA is like sitting in the middle of a centrifuge as Sonic Youth's Teenage Riot is spun out into disembodied fragments before realigning itself as Spiral Scratch-era Buzzcocks. However, rather than sounding like an incoherent, overly ambitious mess, White Denim's schizophrenic tendencies are reigned in by muscular musicianship (drummer Josh Block is a trained jazz percussionist, fact fans) and a charmingly lo-fi sound quality, the result - presumably - of being recorded in a disused trailer. Their more house-trained follow-up, Fits, emerges later this month.

It was that high-pimped pope of the well-written word Nick Tosches who turned me on to Chuck Higgins. It was back in 2003 and I was inexpertly romancing the writer in the hope that he would forego his usual Vanity Fair rates and pen something for MOJO. Didn't matter what it was, just, you know, well, something. Tosches had a plan. He was meeting up in London with Johnny Depp to record the audiobook version of his insane, profane antinomian mob-boot-kick of a novel, In The Hand of Dante, and did I want to hook up with them later and discuss feature ideas? ".!."

I heard nothing. The next week there's was call from Tosches. "It was an horrendous experience," he said. "We started to record it but the producer seemed so shaken by what was being recorded and so threatened by the presence of Johnny and I together, the way we acted, that he just fled! He abandoned us. All our talk about letting all the demons of darkness out scared a lot of people. I was asked to leave."

No further information was forthcoming but Tosches stayed in touch, talking about features and asking for more money, time and editorial freedom than it's ever been MOJO's luxury to give out. Occasionally he would submit suggested tracks for various list pieces in the mag, and I would write the copy. Highlight of my brief tenure as Old Nick's amanuensis was hearing a sloppy 7" honk of R&B horn sleaze entitled Broke, from a man called Chuck Higgins. A Hollywood tenor-sax man and former preacher's son, Higgins had spent the mid '50s bouncing from one local label to the next, trading in low-budget jump blues and party grooves. However, the summer of 1954 saw the Indiana-born honker royally spoilt, supervised by Specialty's Art Rupe and working with pianist HB Barnum and future James Brown/Johnny Otis guitarist Jimmy Nolen on a gloriously carefree tale of high-times lived and riches squandered and available on this super cheapular '90s CD comp. There are other, sexier Higgins comps out there but none feature the brazen skid-row screw-you of Broke.

Thanks to the junkyard bark of vocalist 'Daddy Cleanhead' (aka brother Fred Higgins), Chuck's down-at-heel lyrics are transformed into a Ripple-ripped celebration of rock-bottom skintness - "Now I'm a lowdown dirty bum / Right back where I started from! / Broke! Broke! Broke!" Backed with the rocking doormat doo wop of I'll Be There, it's just the right single for the last jukebox payment at the end of the night when all the money's gone, trouser pockets are flat-empty and still no-one's going home. The rest of the CD ain't bad neither.

Earl Brutus had a thing for former Daily Express astrologer Justin Toper - at one point planning to turn his medieval-looking visage into a glowing-eyed stage spectacle somewhere between Donington Monsters Of Rock and Saturday night TV. Brutus were a bit clairvoyant themselves, muddled seers-on-the-beer who saw Broken Britain even in the Cool Britannia of 1998. Their depiction of useless celebrity, brute hedonism and anger-for-its-own-sake was both hilarious and moving, assembled over a brilliant mêlée of glam beats, progressive rock, electronics and power chords, via full-throated consciousness-stream lyrics. Anglo-Japanese, mostly 30-something provocateurs active from 1993, the band were big on rage and remorse, smarts and irrationality - a slogan ran 'Pop Music Is Wasted On The Young' - and their second album was in no mood to shirk. It's a purgative best taken when feeling irritated and depressed by modern culture, mortality and theme pubs. It's hard to say exactly why, but the CD booklet's images of a slipper, an inhaler, a cup of tea and a chip on a plastic fork definitely relate to this. That's not to say confusion of a deliberately pursued sort does not also reign; what is The SAS And The Glam That Goes With It (the name comes from a VHS owned by frontman Nick Sanderson, which featured Mick Ronson footage juxtaposed with the SAS storming the Iranian Embassy)? Why is there a Lindisfarne reference on Come Taste My Mind? Who is the relieved sex change case depicted in East (a bastardised version of the GDR national anthem), who has the crucial operation in London before heading back to Poland? But this is not a place to seek answers. Instead, calm yourself with the album's elegiac qualities, like Let Me Be Kind's poetic reflection "the pylons stretched for miles" (the shortness of life, time and lamenting the industrial past in one go!), grinding dirge Male Wife ending with Sanderson forgetting the words to God Save The Queen, or the poignancy in the peak-Bowie-careering-down-a-steep-hill-in-a-shopping trolley howl of 99p; "Will you talk to me for a fiver? 'Cos I'm English and you hate me... Beat me up so softly." As it was, Earl Brutus's dreams of mega stardom were not to be realised, but their mighty works remain. Pop Music Is still Wasted On The Young. And remember the great Nick Sanderson, who died one year ago today.

No group has ever benefited from as many truly outstanding lead singers as The Drifters. From the first, the ill-starred Clyde McPhatter, through the imperishable Ben E. King to the commercially durable Johnny Moore, there are strong claims to be hailed as the finest vocalist in the group's labyrinthine line-up history. For a few, however, the relatively unknown Rudy Lewis was The Drifters' best. A graduate of The Clara Ward Singers gospel group (and there weren't many male ones, to be sure), he filled the not inconsiderable loafers of the group's great baritone lead Benjamin Earl Nelson [King], who departed in 1960 to enjoy massive solo success. It was no small task yet Lewis immediately established a grip by embracing the emerging 'soul' vocal textures.

At his first session in February 1961, Lewis's leads on the gorgeous supplication of Burt Bacharach's Please Stay ("Now I hang by a thread in the canyon of doom / But I still can be saved by your kiss," he sings and makes it convincing!) and the rather more joyful Some Kind Of Wonderful were the perfect introductions to this under-appreciated talent. Such was the confusing pattern of Drifters releases that this album actually features several tracks from the King era, notably the sublime title track, while the other strong Lewis leads are Jackpot, Mexican Divorce and Somebody New Dancin' With You.

Other Rudy Lewis leads not on this album, but which have become an indelible part of the pop landscape, are those to Up On The Roof, On Broadway, Rat Race and Only In America. If you've got this far can I urge you to seek out She Never Talked To Me That Way, an exceptional reading of a Doc Pomus/Mort Shuman song which finds our man overhearing his girlfriend talking to another man. (Actually, men of a suspicious or insecure nature should avoid this like the plague.)

The Drifters were booked into Atlantic Studios NYC for a session on May 21, 1964. But on May 20 Lewis was found dead in his hotel - drug overdose or choked to death on food - and so Johnny Moore sang lead on a session that included Under The Boardwalk while Charlie Thomas offered a memorably distraught take on Jerry Wexler/Bert Berns' I Don't Want To Go On Without You.

It says a lot about Phil Lynott's personality that this, the Thin Lizzy leader's first solo album, boasted a cast of players that ranged from his hard rocking bandmates Gary Moore, Scott Gorham, Brian Robertson and Brian Downey on to Dire Straits guitarist Mark Knopfler (whose fluid interplay helps characterise Elvis tribute King's Call through to Ultravox man Midge Ure (the co-writer of the album's seventh track, electro-pop classic Yellow Pearl - later used as the theme to Top Of The Pops. A roguish man-about-town, Lynott portrayed himself as a zeitgeist surfer of the first order, suggesting that he was one step ahead of the game at any given time - hence his collaboration with Pistols men Paul Cook and Steve Jones in 1979 under the Greedies moniker for their spoof Christmas single, A Merry Jingle. Indeed, the proto-rap of Talk In '79, Solo In Soho's closing track, saw Lynott attempting to prove just how in touch he was with the current scene, reading as it does like a Who's Who of the artists that defined that year (The Clash, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Nina Hagen and The Police are among the 20-plus acts mentioned).

Lynott's genre-hopping was such that, while recording Lizzy's granite-tough Black Rose album, he emerged with a surfeit of material that eschewed his day band's trademarked sound. Much of that material - such as the cod-reggae of the title track, and the R&B strut of Tattoo - ended up on this hugely entertaining 10-tracker. Having said that, the album's stand-out tracks - Dear Miss Lonely Hearts, Ode To A Black Man (later covered by Detroit garage punkers The Dirtbombs) - could easily have made it on to Lizzy's 1980 album, Chinatown.

While the album's evident diversity created a certain amount of confusion among fans when it was released in September 1980, today Solo In Soho emerges as a bold and brave effort made by a man whose restless approach to music allowed him to rise above the caricature that so often dogged him.

In 1968, with the release of Are You Experienced, Beggars Banquet and The White Album, there was no shortage of bonced, Year Zero-minded rockers getting their minds together, calling for palace revolutions and talking about piggies crawling in the dirt. How unlike the home life of our own dear Kinks, or so you'd think listening to their opus The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society. Their sixth album was an affecting meditation on place, memory and the changing nature of things, devised by a psyche (Ray Davies's) that seemed naturally calibrated to not fit in. Davies believed in the past and early youth, but wasn't so sure about the here and now - for proof see People Take Pictures Of Each Other and Picture Book, which both refer to photographs capturing fleeting happiness. But alongside the anxiety (see All Of My Friends Were There's masochistic lines, "oh the embarrassment, oh the despair!"), narrators find comfort in the incidentals of idealised lives, as in the title song's idiosyncratic listing of antiques, draught beer, Old Mother Riley and Dracula, or by doggedly sticking to the old ways, as on the born-40-years-too-late Last Of The Steam-Powered Trains, which brings a great railway journey of the blues to the English countryside. Throughout, the playing and singing are languid and melodic, creating a maudlin, summer-into-autumn sound that adds to the escapist melancholy. The LP didn't even chart. But bets are, if that long-awaited Kinks reunion ever happens, that they'll play this wondrous LP in its entirety.

Over eleven and a half minutes, opener Breaking In To Heaven travels up a Mekong River of swampy atmospherics and tribal drumming to find a band at the peak of their musicianly powers. It's heavy rock played with a serpentine dexterity and whispered menace, of a piece with Driving South and Love Spreads - swaggering, ice-cool injections of monkey-gland into the venerable blues-rock format.

Elsewhere, Ten Storey Love Song revisits past melodic glories while the stuttering dance-rock of Begging You remains suggestive of the proto-Big Beat then cooking chez Chemical Brothers. And although some of these goods are half-baked - Daybreak is essentially a six-minute groove looking unsuccessfully for a song - they shouldn't overshadow the sweetmeats elsewhere in evidence. Brown's delightfully laid-back Straight To The Man has a bozo-on-the-Bayou playfulness he captured neither before or since and the stripped-down folk of Tightrope is genuinely touching.

That it only took World War II six more months to complete is inexcusable, but, really, whatever the band produced after their eponymous masterpiece had the fortune to define its era was bound to be found wanting. Of course, it all went tits up from here: drummer Reni left, followed by guitarist Squire, and the less said about 1996's Reading headline slot the better.

"Second Coming," bassist Mani told MOJO in 2001: "it should have been called Premature Ejaculation." He's wrong - it was hardly premature, after all. But judged on its quality and not its gestation period, it deserves a better rep. Had we but known the fiascos that the Britpop era still had in store...

Roy Budd died on August 7, 1993, too soon, at 46, to fully appreciate his rediscovery as an icon of '90s British cool. A self-taught prodigy, born in Croydon in 1947, Budd mastered the Wurlitzer organ at eight and, formed The Roy Budd Jazz Trio whilst still at school. Influenced by Oscar Peterson, learning from The Henry Mancini Book Of Sounds And Scores, he soon moved into soundtracks. Recorded for just £450, his minimalist harpsichord-and-tablas score to 1971 Brit gangster classic Get Carter suited the film's mood of soulless cool and effortlessly established the Budd style - practical idealism with pop grooves and a boxy finish, effortlessly mirroring the austere slum-modernism landscape of the era. Whether it's the melancholy drift of The Marseilles Contract or the cliff-edge suspense of Fear Is The Key, Budd's sound was always more evocative of the English Riviera than the real thing. A criticism? Not one bit. If you're planning to take the TR6 down to Torquay this summer, shades on and the top down, there is no better soundtrack.

Pussy Galore were always up for a jape - they did a somewhat unlistenable cover of all of Exile On Main Street in 1986, publicly wound up Dischord records boss Ian MacKaye around the same time and in 1990 called their final album Historia De La Música Rock after a series of Spanish compilation LPs that usually featured Eric Clapton or Genesis on the cover. That sense of warped hilarity is everywhere on Right Now!, a cheap and nasty riot of yucks if ever there was one. 85-second opener Pig Sweat sets the low tone, as make-them-sound-worse guitars, one-armed drums and Jon Spencer's phlegmy blues-yodel try to outrace each other and shift out of sync and tune before abruptly ceasing. Then we're off onto the next one, and the next one, with fragments like the JAMC-odoured Fuck You, Man maintaining the needless nihilism. Along the way The Cramps, Stooges, Birthday Party and side two of The Fall's Totale's Turns hove into blurred view, while in charming blueser Pussy Stomp there's a glimpse of Spencer's soon-to-sprout Blues Explosion. Throughout negative currents, sensations of collapse and carnivorous entropy condense into a strange kind of upfulness and positivity, suggesting a homeopathic treating of ills with even worse ills (as Spencer himself declares early on, "I wanna feel good!"). And even if you ever get bored of one song, another one's along in about 30 seconds.

Recorded just two months before June died, some of this lovely, homespun album is rendered almost painfully poignant with hindsight. But that was the point of course. Recorded in the living room of the Carter Family home in Virginia, songs like AP Carter's Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? have the sort of admirably brave take on death that only the most devout can afford ("When death shall close these eyelids / And this heart shall cease to beat... / Will you miss me?"). With almost all The Carter Family gone, she admits to crying for them sometimes but more often mourning them in warm, acoustic songs and a voice left heartbreakingly frail by the end of her 64-year career. Produced by John Carter Cash, with guest spots by many of her extended family and on occasion by her suitably humble-sounding husband, Wildwood Flower made a lovely and most fitting farewell.

I have too many Townes Van Zandt albums, some below-par and unnecessary, and yet I still feel the need to hold on to them. Some contain just a few good songs, while others reveal a man whose voice is shot and whose will has gone, with only his withered grip on the guitar neck and its six sharp strings stopping him from sliding into the roadside ditch of whisky catalepsy. Yet, on all of these records there are moments where Van Zandt taps into a fatalistic romanticism, spinning wounded degenerate lieder for the bitter, lonesome wanderer in all of us. Delta Momma Blues was Van Zandt's fourth studio album, recorded in 1970 before the singer had fully jumped into the perilous drug gorge of later years, yet while the cover gives some indication of where the then 26-year-old singer was at - wearily bemused, bookish, standing to one side of a street-level romantic clinch - it doesn't begin to convey the clammy air of jaded passivity that was already pocketing in the dank folds of Van Zandt's patchwork landscape. Album opener, the trad. arr. FFV, despite being about a speeding train ("the swiftest on the line") that smashes into a young boy, moves with a dope-heavy ache, while Brand New Companion's tale of a woman who "chases away those howlin' bottles of wine" never escapes its low-end bum-booze blear. Yet it's when the songs are thoroughly devoid of hope and tradition, as on the sweetly tragic Come Tomorrow ("It's strange how many tortured mornings / Fell upon us with no warning"), or Rake and Nothin' - which both possess the dark, nihilist worldview of the habitual addict - that Delta Momma Blues takes flight into wonder. There's no way around it, here was a singer coming to realise that, for him, "sorrow and solitude are the precious things / And the only words worth rememberin'". With "Outrage my joyful companion...[and] a laughter the devil would frighten," this rake Van Zandt makes emotional cruelty soar like a high idealism. This is the path he was starting out on. There would be no way back.

Out of the 500 or so albums featured (so far) in MOJO's Disc Of The Day parade, a Bob Dylan record has appeared only once. In recent times, the resounding success of his Theme Time Radio Hour show and a number one album on both sides of Atlantic have once again proved that after almost half a century, the Dylan dollar remains as strong as ever. It's a fitting time then to raise Bob's Disc Of The Day tally by delving back into the last record that took Hibbing's hero to the top of the UK charts.

On its release, New Morning was considered Dylan's big return to form ("Well, friends, Bob Dylan is back with us again," said Rolling Stone's Ed Ward). Today, it remains one of his most exuberant records. The unfettered joy of the title track with its choral exultations and talk of "rabbits" and "roosters" is, like the rest of New Morning's pastoral hymns, inexorably linked to the place in which it was written. This is the ultimate evocation of Bob Dylan's Woodstock, the east coast community of artists that, under the publicity glare brought by the festival of the same name, had already begun to fragment. Unlike the biblical overtones of John Wesley Harding and the ancient tinkerings of The Basement Tapes, New Morning presents Dylan as a (briefly) contented soul, surrounded by his children, breathing the fresh country air, chopping wood for the fire and, most brilliantly, playing lots and lots of piano.

Bolstered by the return of Al Kooper's Hammond organ swirls, Dylan's country-gospel chords shine through The Man In Me and Sign On The Window; the former a love letter to wife Sara ("But oh, what a wonderful feeling / Just to know that you are near"), the latter a Dylan spiritual par excellence. Those tumbling runs of surreal images still make the occasional appearance: "The man standin' next to me / His head was exploding / I was prayin' the pieces wouldn't fall on me" he sings during Day Of The Locusts, but Dylan's focus is that of a real homebody refreshed after the strange excursions of Nashville Skyline and Self Portrait. Of course, the feeling wouldn't last. After returning to touring in 1974, our hero would face another new morning - a hungover one, sizzling with venom, pain and heartache...

Someone somewhere must have a form of synaesthesia where, via crosstalking neural pathways, music becomes flavoursome. Early Black Sabbath could taste soily and rusty; maybe Happy Hardcore would be like sherbet consumed via the nostrils. But what must The In Sound From Way Out! by Moog fanciers Jean-Jacques Perrey and Gershon Kingsley sound/ taste like? Very nutty, with added plastic fruit, elastic bands, helium and bracing electric shocks every five seconds, we're saying. Europeans in the USA, they both had real music credentials - Perrey was a piano prodigy while Kingsley had conducted on Broadway and played with John Cage - but having joined forces they combined forward-looking intent with tuneful populism. Using labour-intensive tape-splicing musique concrète techniques, live drums and the Moog ur-synth, the results remain both ludicrous and brilliant: cf. opener The Unidentified Flying Object, which sends burps, bubbles and trills ricocheting around the interior of your skull, the literally honking Swan's Splashdown, or Cosmic Ballad's electro-dub for leisure-suited suburban swingers. The duo managed a second LP, Kaleidoscopic Vibrations - check it out for curiously-weighted versions of Spanish Flea and Winchester Cathedral - but split after, with Perrey going on to make the wizzo Moog Indigo LP and Kingsley writing the global hit Popcorn, among other endeavours. The sleeve to this, meanwhile, was famously borrowed by the Beastie Boys in 1996 for a compilation of their instrumentals, but they did ask the originators first.