Antwon w/ Steel Tipped Dove – Lay With You

A love song. And a great sample of the Cocteau Twins’ Lorelei.

Rose Tattoo – Rock ‘n’ Roll Outlaw

My mother had Rose Tattoo’s great 1978 debut LP when I was a kid. She was pretty cool, my mum.

This is classic straight ahead, no holds barred, good time, ballsy and bluesy hard rock boogie. Great vocals, great slide guitar and an overall sound that’s a cross between The Faces and the Sex Pistols. Plus you get all that guff about rock ‘n’ roll as salvation and escape.

The lead singer is Angry Anderson. What he was angry about, I don’t really know. It could have been about the fact that he was only four foot seven or something. But then again, judging by the way he spreads his legs on stage to make himself seem even smaller, that may not have been the case. Still: grrr.

Jukebox Advertising, Norwich

Angel Olsen – Some Things Cosmic

You don’t need anything fancy to accompany a voice like this.

Meat Puppets – Up On The Sun

At the time of this release in 1985 I was besotted with a whole clutch of American bands that made the British scene seem a little dull: Swans, Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers, Minutemen, Big Black, The Replacements, Husker Du, REM and Meat Puppets. Mostly coming from a hardcore or art noise background, they livened rock up a bit and paved the way for the likes of Nirvana to break through (so they could make it all a bit dull and predictable).

The title track from the Meat Puppets third LP, Up On The Sun is a deliciously pretty mix of folk, psychedelia and country. The guitar playing – the rolling lead line, the scratchy rhythm and the interplay with the bass – is its most striking and attractive feature. Slightly mournful, it’s also gloriously uplifting, especially when it all pulls in for the bridge at 1:40.

Above it all are Curt Kirkwood’s vocals which, having played this song to many people over the years, can obviously seem a little jarring: a guitar playing friend of a friend once told me that while the guitar playing was perfect, the vocals just ruined the whole thing – but that’s what you get when you ask a musician. Apparently singing off-key or out of tune, the nonchalance of his singing belies the impassioned and somewhat fantastical nature of the lyrics whose incomprehensibility starts with “A long time ago I turned to myself and said ‘You are my daughter’” and grow ever more cryptic. Rather than distracting from the song, they make it seem all the more intriguing and unique.

Taken as a whole, what we have here is a sublimely sunny piece of psychedelic folk/country rock that, as prosaic as it sounds, can brighten anyone’s day.

Nicolas Collins/Peter Cusack – Baby It’s You

This is what happens when you leave a couple of nine-year-olds alone with your tape player. Or, rather, a couple of avant-garde performance artists/composers.

The great thing about this ‘cover’ of Baby It’s You is that it sounds completely artless and clumsy. There are some lovely and compelling moments (the voice singing over itself and the monkey’s guitar solo) but they mostly seem accidental. You’d probably be just as well kicking your record player down the stairs.

And although at the time it was probably considered (at least by Collins and Cusack themselves) to be a cutting-edge slice of sound manipulation, today it just seems sweetly naive. And a little bit silly.

Aaron Neville – My True Story

What do you do with a classic Doo-Wop song so great that attempting to reinterpret it, let alone improve upon it, would be an utterly foolish and futile thing to do?

You sing it like Aaron Neville does.

Alvin Stardust – Jealous Mind

I was five in 1973. Which was lucky because British pop music at that time started to become fun again. This was partly achieved by it harking back to the simpler, golden age of rock ‘n’ roll. It helped, of course, that some of its practitioners – such as Alvin Stardust and Gary Glitter – had been around the first time. They knew their stuff.

I’m not going to make any great claims for this song except to say that it’s the perfect mix of glam rock flash and rock ‘n’ roll heartache. And despite his vocal and visual poses, Alvin sings it like he means it, especially with lines like: “You could be out with him and I would never know”.