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”.

Often harshly misrepresented as plod-rockers with doughy imaginations, Counting Crows are a much more intriguing, melancholy proposition than sceptics realise. With the unlikely figure of Adam Duritz rustling up romantic, aching lyrics and the band building on all the right foundations of US rock history, they can reach peaks of sincere intensity. They’ve yet to surpass their 1993 debut August And Everything After, from which the beautiful “Anna Begins” and addictive “Mr Jones” star here, but they still have silvery spurts, as beguiling new songs “Friend Of The Devil” and “She Don’t Want Nobody Near” prove. They still count for something.

In recent years, Roy Wood has let slip a little poignant regret that he didn’t see things through with ELO. No wonder. Jeff Lynne went platinum and got to work with The Threetles and Dylan while his Brum beat colleague spent the first half of the 1970s decked out like a Christmas tree on TOTP, and the second half fashioning his increasingly anachronistic, Spectoresque fantasies into a series of solo flops.

Evidence of consummate skill is still apparent on the sublime “This Is The Story Of My Love” and “French Perfume”, but overall there are too many pointless rock’n’ roll retreads.

A plastic jive counterpoint to Bowie’s plastic soul? Nope. Just a waste of a great talent.

It’s an unlikely story: avant-garde cellist sees the light in a disco glitterball at New York gay club The Gallery and decides disco is the ultimate modern format for exploring minimalist composition. In the mid-’70s, Russell?conservatory-trained, a scholar of Eastern music forms, steeped in the ideas of Steve Reich and Terry Riley?was blown away by the engulfing quality of music transmitted over a massive club sound system and literally entranced by disco’s use of repetition. Over the next decade, collaborating with New York’s leading DJ/remixers and recording engineer Bob Blank, Russell produced a series of captivatingly quirky 12-inches under a variety of aliases?Dinosaur L, Indian Ocean, Loose Joints?in the process establishing an enduring cult reputation.

Russell’s most famous tunes, the dub-sluiced Dada-disco of “Go Bang” and the relatively conventional-sounding “Is It All Over My Face” (not the plaint of someone eating spaghetti bolognese but a clubgoer who can’t hide his attraction to another dancer), pop up regularly on compilations. But most of Russell’s oeuvre is near-impossible to find, with obscurities like “In The Light Of The Miracle” fetching huge sums on eBay. Now Soul Jazz have punctured that little market and done us all a favour by compiling some of Russell’s best moments (including “Miracle”). And 2004 will see a long-overdue Russell reissue programme kick into overdrive, with re-releases and compilations from Rough Trade and the Audika label.

“Let’s Go Swimming”, originally released on Rough Trade in 1986, might just be Russell’s finest five minutes. It’s impossible dance music. Waves of polyrhythmically perverse percussion jumble your urges, confounding your body with discontinuities of beat and strange cross-rhythms. This is disco for contortionists or an alien race blessed with an odd number of limbs. All thermal updrafts and tidal currents, the mix really does sound aqueous?synthesisers gibber like dolphins and bright sound-clusters dart, swerve, double-back and vanish like shoals of exotic fish. “Let’s Go Swimming” makes me think of a kinetic, animated version of a late-period Matisse, one of his deliberately naive seascapes made of cut-out blocks of blue and green. “Keeping Up” and “A Little Lost” are more in the non-dance vein of Russell’s other Rough Trade release, 1987’s World of Echo. Accompanied by his own effects-treated cello, hand percussion and acoustic guitar, Russell sings meandering, rapturous melodies in a bleary, beatific mumble. Vaguely reminiscent of John Martyn on Solid Air, Russell had a wonderful voice?indistinct around the edges, eerily lacking a stable centre, a gorgeous fuzzy cloud of longing and languor that seems to wrap itself around you in a gaseous embrace.

For precursors, think of Can’s cosmic funk, Martyn at his most and dub-flecked (“I’d Rather Be The Devil”, “Big Muff”), Weather Report. For contemporaries; think Czukay’s sunkissed Movies, the alien time signatures of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s B-2 Unit, the strange new emotions and inbetween mindstates of Thomas Leer’s 4 Movements, Remain In Light-era Talking Heads (who Russell almost joined at one point). Successors: the lush digital foliage of A Guy Called Gerald and 808 State, Bj