When sunny Philadelphian folkateer Croce died in a plane crash in September 1973 (the day after Gram Parsons’ demise), he was just starting to peak. “Time In A Bottle” soon became a posthumous US chart-topper, but?as Parsons went on to canonisation?Croce’s star had all but faded by the 1980s. A pity, because he popped out airy melodies by the handful, picked guitar sweetly and sang like a blue-collar James Taylor. Includes the sprightly “You Don’t Mess Around With Jim”.

A South African Jew, Tandy emigrated to the UK in 1964 where she tried, but failed, to establish herself as a pop princess. Despite the promise of early singles like the exquisitely lovelorn “Perhaps Not Forever”, Tandy ditched pop to become a soul-singing wannabe Modmother. She signed to Atlantic, recorded at Stax in Memphis (before Dusty) and even vied for a PP Arnold/Small Faces arrangement by teaming up with second division freak-beaters Les Fleur De Lys for 67’s rambunctious “Hold On”. But her voice lacked the alabaster-cracking trill of truly great white female soul sirens like Timi Yuro. As a plea for her reassessment, there’s sadly nothing here to elevate Tandy above the level of a footnote.

The late Sam Phillips famously said that if he could find a white singer with a negro feel, he’d make a million?and then stumbled across Elvis Presley. Maybe the early recordings of Johnnie Ray didn’t reach Memphis (though I doubt it), but in 1951 that’s precisely what The Nabob Of Sob was doing: selling tortured club blues singles by the million (“Whisky And Gin”, “Cry”) while having his clothes shredded by hysterical young girls. Despite being skinny, pigeon-toed, half-deaf and effeminate, this highly emotional performer was the most popular singer of the pre-Elvis era. Indeed, when Elvis first started out, he was introduced on stage as “the new Johnnie Ray!”. Though mostly remembered for such lip-quivering hits as “The Little White Cloud That Cried”and “Glad Rag Doll”, JR definitely started out on an R&B kick?which he regularly returned to on “Such A Night” and “Flip Flop And Fly”. Though later, JR would slip from vaudeville (“Somebody Stole My Gal”) and show tunes (“Hey There”) into jukebox hits (“Just Walkin’ In The Rain”) and faux gospel (“Up Above My Head”), he was always at his most potent preaching his own take on the blues.

With his label established in 1974 but not graced by George until 1976, Harrison’s Dark Horse years should have been a bounty of unfettered Harrisongs. But as his health, outlook, business arrangements and ultimately his interest was seen to stutter, the period was mostly regarded as a continuation of the downward path Harrison’s work had taken after 1970’s All Things Must Pass. And the consistency of his lyrical concerns?romantic/spiritual love, the search for enlightenment, snipes at the modern world’s shortcomings?palled even for avid Beatlenuts amid less-than-blue-chip musical settings. Efforts to reassess the period following his death in 2001 were foiled until now by the unavailability of the albums. Now they’re back. The Dark Horse Years still resists revelatory critical repositioning, but the set is welcome?and strangely comforting.

Thirty Three And 1/3 (1976) appeared in the wake of the “My Sweet Lord”/”He’s So Fine”court case, where Harrison was found guilty of unconscious plagiarism. His musical response?”This Song”?contained a wry humour masking the blow to his confidence and inspiration; the rest of this oddly ordinary album, however, conveyed it all too clearly.

George Harrison (1979) was a freshly enthused, minor treat?a fulsome acoustic rocker replete with sunshine melodies and gorgeous slide guitar. “Blow Away” perfectly conveys the breezy change of mood required to banish his sporadic blues, “Soft-Hearted Hana”jazzily details his experiences with magic mushrooms, and the bitter White Album reject “Not Guilty”is buffed into modest splendour.

Somewhere In England (1981) was another slump, however. Rejected in its original form by distributors Warners, then later a hit in the wake of Lennon’s assassination and George’s hastily adjusted tribute, “All Those Years Ago”, the best tracks were probably a pair of old Hoagy Carmichael songs, which says it all. Gone Troppo (1982) was a return to form of sorts?amiable, light-hearted music made by a bunch of mates with nothing to prove?but by now George had lost interest in promotion, and the album was barely noticed.

For five years Harrison diversified?mainly into films and gardening?then unexpectedly exploded back onto the charts with a hit single, James Ray’s “Got My Mind Set On You”, and the fabulous album Cloud Nine (1987) . Producer Jeff Lynne was probably what George needed all along; a trusted musical pal who could record his voice properly and tidy things up at the back. Cloud Nine brought out the best in both men.

And that?aside from a pair of late-’80s Wilbury albums (still absent), the record of his short Japanese tour in 1991, Live In Japan , and the posthumous Brainwashed (2002)?was that. Business problems, Beatles Anthology duties, illness and a desire to be as free from hassle as possible precluded any serious return to the music world in his lifetime. Taken as a body of work, The Dark Horse Years remains largely second division Harrison with the occasional contender for promotion, but this music is now inevitably fragrant with poignancy and, for many, that will be enough.

Discounting the exhausted, Groundhog Day-like apathy most fans must now feel where The Fall’s reissue avalanche is concerned, a 25th anniversary seems good cause to celebrate Mark E Smith’s opening brace; the yelping, cynical Bontempipunk of Live At The Witch Trials and the coarse, post-Beefheart sermonising of Dragnet. Originally released at opposite ends of 1979, both witnessed the steady fermentation of the smart, secular Northern detachment Smith later perfected on his first real masterpiece, 1980’s Grotesque.

Extras include the usual nonalbum, Peel session and live tracks; all fabulous, but even a card-carrying Fall disciple like myself can see that, played consecutively, the four alternate takes of “Rowche Rumble” on the latter are akin to some Salford equivalent of Chinese water torture.

A copy of Black Devil’s marvellous Disco Club seldom surfaces on eBay, but when it does eagle-eyed collectors happily shell out

It’s almost a pity that recent No 1 hit “Mad World” associated Gary Jules forever with such a freak anthem, as critics will now be forever sniffy about this warm, consummate singer/songwriter. Hot on the cash-in heels of new album Trading Snakeoil For Wolftickets comes this re-release of his debut from 1998, another collaboration with Donnie Darko soundtrack producer Michael Andrews. With Counting Crows’ engineer on board, it’s less tingly than the more recent effort, playing safer, but Jules has a real talent for fusing his tales of losers, boozers, beauty and violence to his gently weary, rich coffee voice. “Barstool”?present on both albums?refuses to pass judgement on the character claiming, “Love is for sissies, it’s whiskey that makes you a man.” Other vignettes about drug doom are keen-eyed, not vulgar. Sapphire-blue.

Somewhat overlooked and critically undervalued when it was originally released in 2002, The Isness was a tabla-driven, sitar-wielding psychedelic behemoth of a record that proved once and for all that The Future Sound Of London had soared way beyond their dance music peers. For devotees, the album’s only flaw was that it wasn’t twice as long. Well, now it is. The abundance of extra mixes that accumulated during Garry Cobain and Brian Dougans’ five years of obsessive tinkering have now been gathered together as The Otherness, and they display the same interstellar dynamics and richness of texture as the original did, never more so than on the fully restored version of “Morning Sky”, which out-brasses even “Penny Lane”. Music for modernists.

If early-’80s new pop showed one route out of the scuffed idealism and local concerns of post-punk, The Waterboys hoped for a more romantic, royal road. Indeed “The Big Music”, from 1984’s A Pagan Place, was a clarion call for a certain strain of mid-’80s would-be British Cosmic Music. Like Celtic soul brother Kevin Rowland, Scott was an inveterate manifesto writer. The first two Waterboys records are full of promises of paganism and immensity, like an evangelist heralding the promised land…but, first: another sermon. This Is The Sea, the band’s third album, may be as close as anyone is likely to get to the music of his dreams.

It begins portentously enough, with widescreen Morricone atmospherics, before erupting into “Don’t Bang The Drum”. It’s another manifesto: you can’t help but read it as a dig at the flag-waving of early U2. Scott was after a sweeter, questing, spontaneous pop prosody, and on “The Whole Of The Moon” he kind of delivered. A jukebox fixture for years, it remains a magnificent folly, a glimpse into a pop Narnia where Prince OD’d on Van, not Joni. It’s the only song on the record that attempts to reinvent the ’80s rather than escape them.

It’s a brief interlude. “Spirit” and “The Pan Within” continue Scott’s quest for the old spirits of the islands, evoking wide-eyed rapture at a very benign paganism (there’s nothing as daemonic as The Wicker Man’s Summerisle here). Scott’s infatuation with the Orphic charms of Dylan (“Be My Enemy”), Patti Smith and Springsteen leads him up strange roads. While they were romantics, they were also instinctively modernists, welding glamour from the facts of American life. In search of a similar romantic hit, Scott ends up with a song like “Medicine Bow”, a dream of stowing away to sea, like something The Boss might have written in the late 18th century.

In the new sleevenotes, Scott writes of being inspired by “the holy triumvirate” of the Velvets, Astral Weeks and Steve Reich. This sounds like an admirable programme, but for all the record’s pleasures, you don’t get much sense of it from This Is The Sea. Instead, it makes you think of The Blue Nile: compare “The Whole Of The Moon”‘s delirious litany (“Unicorns and cannonballs, palaces and piers, trumpets, towers and tenements…”) with its sober echo in “Downtown Lights” (“Chimney tops and trumpets, the golden lights, the loving prayers, the coloured shoes, the empty trains”).

You get a glimpse of a road untaken on the extra disc, with synthetic instrumentals like “The Waves”, but with the departure of keyboardist Karl Wallinger to form World Party, there was nowhere for Scott to go but…”This Is The Sea”, the closing track, a gorgeously lush cinemascope swim through Van’s “Sweet Thing”. And then over ever stranger seas, a pop Ancient Mariner, before washing up on the far folk shores of “Fisherman’s Blues”.

Strangely for such a revered guitarist, David Pajo’s style remains hard to pinpoint. Unlike most guitar heroes, his virtuosity is often masked by understatement, which is the keynote of this singles and rarities compilation. Pajo’s innovations, as he shifts nomenclature from M to Aerial M to Papa M, have been dulled a little by his imitators, most obviously Mogwai. No one, though, can negotiate an entente between hardcore punctuation and pastoral ripple quite so well, or organise slow, dry, methodical chord progressions with such discretion. Better yet, occasional subversive detours?”Travels In Constants” is, partially, cod-techno?nestle alongside signature pieces like Pajo’s harmonic extrapolation of “Turn Turn Turn”?conceivably post-rock’s loveliest 16 minutes.