The current ‘random choice’ mechanism from the shelves is to look for artists who only have one CD representing them on the shelves, and...

I think I picked this up in a sale, just with a feeling that I ought to know Cale’s work far better than just the first Velvet...

No idea where I got this, but I’d have been aware of Adderley through his work with Miles Davis. It’s a live recording of a 1966...

A quid at a boot fair, I knew of Bedford from his work with Kevin Ayers, Mike Oldfield and his avant-garde classical works on the early...

I don't recall buying this, I suspect it's one of my daughter's that she put out for the charity shop, and I thought I'd give it a...

I first heard Richard Dawson on Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone, when his previous album 2020 was featured and wasn’t sure at first. After...

This one seems to always appear up at the top of the ‘Top 100 albums ever’ sort of lists, and I’ve even seen it at number one. Yet it didn’t merit a place on the shelves, having been relegated to the drawers years ago. This purchase (almost certainly charity shop) was another ‘ what’s all the fuss about ’ purchase. Was I missing something? Let’s see. I haven’t listened to it for a number of years, so it’s almost a new listen. Airbag rocks the album off in a fairly nondescrip

Subtitled Experimental German Rock and Electronic Musik 1972-83, this 2CD set was a (requested) Christmas present about ten years ago....

I was aware of Zappa throughout my youth, and even remember Dancin’ Fool on Radio 1 during university days, but he hadn’t really made an...

In the 1970s, this was what us serious boys listened to, put off Bowie and glam by homophobia (Men wearing make up? They’ll be sporting...

XTC were a band I was aware of by 1978 and I first saw them at Sheffield University (3rd Nov 1978, according to the internet) at about...

Pete Wylie, self styled ‘part time pop star full time legend’, wrote some great songs and some of them are collected here. Originally...

There is a system I’m using to work my way through these CDs, which should have given me Talking Heads’ first album, 77, at this point,...

I first became aware of this album about twenty years ago, hearing one of its pieces on Radio 3’s Late Junction, where the late Robert...

In 1971, David Bowie, a trier with years of flop singles behind him (of 13 single releases, only one, Space Oddity had charted) went to...

The Quartet are a Canterbury based collective, led by former Wang Chung front man Jack Hues, (fans of Emile Zola will be tittering right...

Led Zeppelin have always been there or thereabout for me. Never a personal favourite, but a band I’m always happy to listen to and...

As I recall, William Orbit had his 15 minutes of fame in the late 1990s when his version of Barber’s Adagio For Strings was a chart hit,...

This was a band I’d wanted to hear long before I actually did. Formed in 1975, when Hatfield and the North imploded (just before I’d ever...

I missed the initial hype in the early 1990s about these noisy and angry young chaps, hailing from my wife’s home town, Blackwood, and...