It’s a brilliant conceit. You take 17 Lennon-McCartney songs they never recorded and create an instant ‘lost’ Beatles album. Listening to these versions by Graham Parker, Bill Janovitz (Buffalo Tom) and Kate Pierson (B-52’s), it’s clear that John and Paul’s give-aways deserved a lot better than the often trite arrangements they were given at the time. Highlights include Janovitz’s “World Without Love” (Peter & Gordon) and Pierson’s “I’m In Love” (The Fourmost). But the revelation is “Tip Of My Tongue”. Few will recall Tommy Quickly’s original cover version, but it emerges here courtesy of Parker as a neglected early Lennon/McCartney classic.

Last year, lambchop were commissioned by the San Francisco International Film Festival to perform a live score to soundtrack FW Murnau’s. 1927 proto-film noir masterpiece Sunrise. It so happened that Lambchop’s leader, Kurt Wagner, had already embarked upon a self-imposed mission to write a song a day. As a result of both endeavours he ended up with so many songs that there are now two new Lambchop albums, each containing 12 songs. So is this the alt.country equivalent of OutKast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below?

Not quite. For a start, these are two albums palpably conceived by the same creative spirit. Nor is there any great musical gulf between the two. It would be fair to consider Aw Cmon as slightly darker in its moods, and No You Cmon its more playful brother. But the same concerns link both records. Consider them as two different ways of telling the same story.

Musically, Wagner has achieved a fusion of the outgoing, string-driven country-soul heard on 2000’s Nixon?most Lambchop followers will be glad to see the full line-up returning?and the reluctant intimacy of 2002’s low-key Is A Woman. There is nothing on either album which recaptures the generous exuberance of Nixon’s “Up With People”, but that doesn’t mean emotional generosity is nowhere to be found.

Aw Cmon begins very much as The Love Below begins, with the orchestral lustre of an instrumental?here “Being Tyler”, a tribute to these albums’ main musical voice, guitarist William Tyler?quickly succeeded by distant atonal guitar shrieks and then the intimate balladry of “Four Pounds In Two Days”, where Wagner’s baritone muses: “They say you walk around as if a ghost had crossed your path.” Business as usual, then.

“Steve McQueen” ups the emotional ante, if not the volume; against stately strings, Wagner agonises over a pet theme: the reality of who a person is and how far that overlaps with the image a person projects (“Is this just another way to be me?not Steve McQueen?”). Songs like “Nothing But A Blur From A Bullet Train” are Carveresque in their depictions of waning lives clinging on to the past, with the introductory imagery of “wearing a halo of mist”, the meticulous checklist of memories (“The picturesque old quay house, the car park”) and the string outro spookily reminiscent of Psychic TV’s “Message From The Temple”.

Aw Cmon methodically works towards the emotional peak of the stunning closing track, “Action Figure”, which Wagner sings beautifully, sometimes with fear, other times with barely contained fury. The lyric starts with a touch of self-mockery: “I heard a rumour that I’m sad.” But the self-mockery then turns outwards into revelation?or will it (“Let’s let the cat out of the bag/Let’s let the neighbourhood go bad”)? Finally, he rages quietly about the compromise under which all life must endure: “I will learn to look away/When there are things I cannot bear.”

No You Cmon begins with a more cheerful instrumental, “Sunrise”, halfway through which the hitherto absent pedal-steel of Paul Niehaus makes one of its brief appearances. But before long, the emotion which has been slowly simmering throughout both albums finally boils over. On (the presumably ironically-titled) “Nothing Adventurous Please,” we are treated to the unprecedented spectacle of Lambchop rocking out; rocking out, moreover, in the motorik style of Neu!, with a touch of Daydream Nation-era Sonic Youth. But even this will scarcely prepare you for the bubblegum of “Shang A Dang Dang”, wherein Wagner’s vocals mutate into Vic Reeves singing in the “club style”?quite possibly Lambchop’s first hit single, if they want one.

“Under A Dream Of A Lie” is the closest either album comes to recapturing the post-Mayfield soul of Nixon, a delectable ballad, even if it begins with the words “Give up like a man!” And then another unexpected side to Lambchop is revealed on the instrumental “Jan 24” which, with its staccato piano and deliberately clunky ’70s pop-rock rhythm, sounds like Michael Nyman auditioning for Lieutenant Pigeon.

But beware of the superficial jollity, for this foreshadows what is perhaps the bleakest and most disturbing song on either of these albums, “The Gusher”. Over an MOR samba rhythm, Wagner, in his lowest and scariest of voices, sings lines like: “The damp stains upon your jeans… The water in the sink turns brown/And you scrape your skin with a razor.” Eventually a chant of “Who can turn the world on with this smile?” sardonically manifests itself, and as the “Paranoid” guitar riff storms back in, Wagner climaxes the song with a reassuring “You’re gonna make it…”, then adding a frightening snarl of “…after all”.

Nothing left for Wagner to do now except sum both records up with “Listen”, where again he agonises about the uselessness of language for This Sort Of Thing. “Confused and caught up/Could you give it up for this?/I will listen to what you’ve got to say/You said it anyway.” Is Wagner singing at us? “They may not work it out,” he concludes to himself.

In fact, it’s not hard to work out that these two albums really do function as a double, and certainly represent the group’s most complete work to date. Their quiet ambition still provides an undemonstrative mockery of the limitations of so many other contemporary rock acts. And, above all, they provide continuing evidence of Wagner’s unmatched ability to put a microscope to the most seemingly conventional of stories or musical forms and, by sheer dint of his imagination, turn them into something which is quietly but extremely unconventional.

Barry blue was an unlikely star even for an era that gave us Alvin Stardust?imagine Robin Askwith as a spiv crimper in a UK remake of Shampoo?but this was a teen dreamboat with an auteurist streak. The balalaika boogie of the self-produced “Dancin’ (On A Saturday Night)”, his biggest hit, may be 30 years old, but with everything up front in the mix, it’s lost none of its terrace-stomp whomp.

Born in 1950, Blue joined a formative version of Uriah Heep, before producing bubblegum obscurities for Decca as Barry Green. But his golden age was 1973-4, when he enjoyed a run of hits co-authored by Lynsey De Paul (due for reappraisal herself). “Dancin’ (On A Saturday Night)”, kept off the top slot by Donny’s “Young Love”, was followed by the glam blitzkrieg of “Do You Wanna Dance?” and neo-doo-wop “School Love”.

…Best Of has 34 tracks, which is going some, but there are moments of genre-pastiching genius to match Roy Wood’s output of the time, from the Spectoresque “Ooh I Do” (shades of De Paul’s “No Honestly”) to “The Girl Next Door”, a sonic companion piece to Hot Chocolate’s Brit-soul classic “Brother Louie”. Even after his heyday, Blue was busy if invisible, issuing singles under bizarre aliases, penning The Long Good Friday’s soundtrack, Toto Coelo’s “I Eat Cannibals”, songs for everyone from Bananarama to Celine Dion, even ’89 Italian house club smash “Afro Dizzi Act”(trading as Cry Sisco!). Maybe 2004 will see a further revival of his fortunes. After all, if it could happen to Rob Davis of Mud…

If the greatest hits represent the city centre of Curetown, lit up for Christmas and on the razzle, then this exhaustive 70-song curiosity box mopes about its dank bus terminals and spooked back alleys. In its own darkling way, this collection might even give you the best feel for the place. Join the dots, and, though the career might lead you from London to Paris to LA, the songs are always obsessively mapping out the same bad dream suburb of the sublime.

They grew up creepy in Crawley and, in a sense, they never really left. “10.15, Saturday Night” backed first single “Killing An Arab” and put its (rive) gauche pose in perspective, locating some existential, kitchen-sink glamour in flickering striplights and dripping taps. The first disc here follows the band’s drift from a Woolworths guitar satellite town orbiting the Buzzcocks (“Plastic Passion”, “Pillbox Tales”), through a bleak estate on the outskirts of Joy Division (“Descent”, “Splintered In Her Head”) before settling down in a more popular mid-’80s neighbourhood nestled between the electric light of New Order and the Banshees’ edge of darkness (“The Dream”, “Lament”, “The Exploding Boy”).

Smith writes in his sleevenotes of his youthful enthusiasm for the lost institution of the B-side, of expecting great flipsides from the bands he loved, and it’s the cusp of discs one and two here, from 1985 to 1989, that bring this to some fruition. If the early material often sounds like salvage from a band permanently on the brink of disintegration, by the mid-’80s the songs sound like a band gearing up for Disintegration. “A Few Hours After This”, “A Chain Of Flowers”, “Snow In Summer”, “How Beautiful You Are” and “2 Late” make a virtue of their dippy, wistful grandeur, poised attractively between the early bathetic gravitas and their more plainly daft essays in pop kookiness.

But this run would undoubtedly be shown to greater effect on a more succinct collection. Disc two fizzles out with three versions of “Hello, I Love You” and a frankly pointless remix of “Just like Heaven”, and the two discs covering 1992-2001 include the dubious distinction of two more versions of “Hey Joe”, a spectacularly inept reading of “Young Americans” and a woe-begotten contribution to the Judge Dredd soundtrack, of interest to only the most stubbornly curious of Curators.

The final disc gathers various experiments in relocating The Cure to the 21st-century studio city of clicks and cuts (including a drum’n’ bass revision of “A Forest”), as though Smith had finally tired of the fractious business of keeping a band together, but none of them do click?the nagging dolour of his voice seems like an odd relic, even in these ’80s-friendly times. Like a Tim Burtonised Freddie Krueger, the best bet for Smith’s continued relevance looks to be as a patron saint of haunted suburban adolescence.

Covering the years 1973-1983, this collection surveys the period in which Tangerine Dream, led by Edgar Froese, laid claim to their status as synth pioneers. Certainly, you can see the influence they had on the expansive, sequencer-driven techno-prog work of post-ravers like Fluke and The Orb. However, their more common influence came on TV and film soundtracks. So, while Froese talks of TD’s music switching on “the projector of your own personal dream”, the images evoked here are often unfortunately trite?helicopter’s eye views of coastlines, action sequences from ’80s TV dramas, albatrosses in flight etc. Compared with Krautrockers like Kraftwerk and Can, TD are distinctly apr

South is better known as a hit-writer for others (from Deep Purple’s “Hush”to Lynn Anderson’s “Rose Garden”) and a revered session player (Simon & Garfunkel, Aretha Franklin, Dylan), but such achievements pale beside the psychedelic Nashville soul of these, his own solo albums from ’68 and ’69. It’s Johnny Cash meets Stax meets Pet Sounds, the kind of LPs that Elvis should have made post-’68 Comeback (not that unfeasible considering Presley would cover the latter LP’s “Walk A Mile In My Shoes” in Vegas). Stunning songs arranged and produced with flabbergasting invention, these are simply classic albums.

Few groups were more conscious, more vigilant, more keenly aware than Gang Of Four, not just politically but in examining the workings of their own music and the ‘entertainment’ industry in which they were supposed to play their part, as well as the existential lot of the consumer. “The problem of leisure/What to do for pleasure” (“Natural’s Not In It”) exercised nervously sardonic vocalist Jon King constantly. Gang Of Four took punk’s back-to-basics principle extremely seriously. For them, it meant a process of deconstruction, a return to first principles, at a time when Thatcherism was coincidentally in its own process of ‘deconstructing’ the British welfare state, “rolling back the frontiers” with an ironically similar punkish fervour.

This was no time for druggy stupor or ambient reverie. Everything was up for grabs, open to question, at stake. Hence the skinny urgency of Gang Of Four: they were the musical equivalent of Franz Kafka’s definition of art?a “cold bucket of water at midnight”.

With 1979’s brilliant Entertainment!, Gang Of Four nagged away like a conscience in an era when many of punk’s pop entryists were making the deliberate transition onto the “disco floor” solemnly invoked by King on “At Home He’s A Tourist”, their first single. “Tourist”‘s martial dance rhythms?”two steps forward (six steps back)”?intimated that the dancefloor wasn’t a place where you “broke free” or “let go of your inhibitions” but a zone in which you acted under the diktats of consumerism, right down to the “rubbers you hide in your top left pocket”.

Their critiques of written history (“Not Great Men”) and “love” as glibly represented in pop songs (“Anthrax”) were stern, mocking reproaches to the baubly world of TOTP from which they were specifically exiled (see Andy Gill Q&A, left). However, like PiL, their closest musical relations, their music was, although scabrous, hardly austere. It was to their credit that, unlike many politico-polemicists then and subsequently, they were able to convert the frantic, pop-eyed anxiety of their lyrical concerns into music that was viscerally exciting, throbbing like a vein in the temple. They turned funk rhythms inside out, counterpointing them with Andy Gill’s volatile, pebbledash guitars, sputtering and exploding like hot oil on troubled waters, spilling incontinently across the rhythmical bed, or strafing and serrating the songs, as on “Anthrax”. For a group so often and so earnestly associated with the clipped spirit of post-punk, guitar-wise at least they were a throwback to the guitar ‘excesses’ of Hendrix, as well as a harbinger for the late-’80s rediscovery of fretboard frenzy (Big Black, the Buttholes, etc)

Solid Gold (1981) arrived at a time when Gang Of Four’s punk/funk formula was paying chart dividends for the crop of bright young things who followed in their wake, when slogans like “Dance Don’t Riot” were being invoked in the eye of those troubled times, times also of ironically delirious hedonism (though the irony, in many cases, was optional). As for Gang Of Four, they stuck to their political guns. “Paralysed” is a dank, faintly dub-wise sonic impression of the de-industrialisation of early-’80s Britain, with King mirthlessly mimicking the catchphrases of an emergent, selfish, Jack-the-laddish entrepreneurial class (“Wealth is for the one that wants it?paradise?if you can earn it”), before revealing himself as the voice of the “washed-up”, reflecting confusedly (“I can’t make out what’s gone wrong/I was good at what I did.”). A live version of “What We All Want”, lyrically reflecting, as ever, Gang Of Four’s grasp of the politics of desire, hints at the static energy the band gave off on stage, Gill’s guitars chuntering like a sick engine over a thick boogie bass line. Shame they haven’t included “History’s Bunk”, the B-side of the “What We All Want” single, a riotous maelstrom of guitar extremism.

With 1982’s Songs Of The Free, the band’s agitpop held firm, “I Love A Man In A Uniform” nailing the appalling relapse into jingoism that came with the Falklands war, the outbreak of which would see the single dropped from playlists. Perhaps, however, 1982 was as much a watershed year for Gang Of Four as it was British politics. On the likes of “Call Me Up”, King elects to adopt more of a singing style, perhaps feeling a need to eschew the bleak, bullhorn vocal tactics of the band’s early days. Unfortunately, while the songs still burn instrumentally and thematically, King sounds like he’s engaged in a Heaven 17-soundalike competition.

As the decade wore on, Thatcherism took its toll and post-punk-pop entryists (ABC, Associates, PiL) were supplanted by spiky-haired but de-ironicised popportunists like Howard Jones. Gang Of Four found themselves in a different game, a different country. Hard, from 1983, was an attempt to move on with the more opulent musical times, still further onward from their ragged-trousered beginnings. However, the results were unsatisfying?the album is suffocated by the slick R&B they’d honourably attempted to use as a Trojan horse into the charts. Still, songs like “Womantown”, with its chunky, treated guitars, falsetto chorus and feminist sentiments, had enough about them to affirm that if Gang Of Four had been defeated by the times, unlike many of their contemporaries, they never capitulated to them.

Thereafter, the pendulum swung completely away from Gang Of Four, pop heading off back into a hideous (white) soulful orgy of passion, rock into the dreamy, comatose realms of post-rave, grunge, shoegazing. In those ’90s, times of relative economic fair weather, coupled with a cynical, helpless feeling in the collective gut that ‘resistance’ was naive or futile, no one could be less fashionable than Gang Of Four. Now, their music couldn’t be more timely, thanks to the likes of the newly radicalised Radio 4 and The Rapture taking up post-punk’s unfinished musical business, thanks also, perhaps, to a reawakening of political rage in the Blair/Bush era. Whatever, it’s bracing to experience this cold, acid shower once more.

They didn’t waste much time cashing in on Robert Palmer’s death with this 19-track compilation, complete with a short bonus DVD containing the infamous “Addicted To Love” video and a handful of others. If you’re a fan of Palmer’s bombastic ’80s style, you will approve of the selection. If you think Palmer’s best work came on the rootsier ’70s LPs he made with assistance from Little Feat and The Meters, then you’ll be disappointed. All the hits?and not much more.

That so little of Bill Withers’ catalogue is available domestically is nothing short of scandalous; someone at Sony (who also own the four superb early Sussex albums) should be beaten soundly. Still Bill did slip out here a few months ago, but with little fanfare, and now that and his 1971 debut, Just As I Am, produced by Booker T Jones, appear on Australian label Raven. There’s an extraordinary run of perfectly crafted little songs tumbling out of these records (“Ain’t No Sunshine”; “Use Me”; lesser-known gems like “Grandma’s Hands”), a large number of which were huge hits at the time. The production is taut and simple, Withers’ gorgeous, woody voice deceptively casual in delivery. Perhaps the most familiar are simply too familiar?how else could such a talent have been forgotten?

Ronnie Lane’s transformation from button-faced mod to raggedy-arsed minstrel was one of rock’s less likely overhauls, but the results were no less inspired. Sounding at times like the missing link between The Basement Tapes and Rum, Sodomy & The Lash, Lane’s two mid-’70s Island albums have aged well, and reveal that his melodic gifts never deserted him even if his business acumen did. On the cover of “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down” he sounds, presciently, like his old bottle buddy Rod does now, while Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell” gets a complete Anglo-Celtic makeover. Imagine Kathy Burke and Johnny Vegas dancing rather than Uma Thurman and John Travolta. Go on.

Here’s a treat?the first new music from the sainted Long Ryders in 16 years. ‘New’, at least, in that although this live recording from the Bottom Line was broadcast on New York radio in 1987, it has never been commercially available. Three Minute Warnings finds Sid Griffin and co on the verge of breaking up, but you’d never guess it from the verve and commitment on display. Guitarist Stephen McCarthy?now a Jayhawk?is in stinging form and Sid whips the band up to a storming climax on Neil Young’s “Prisoners Of Rock”.