It’s been a long crawl back to credibility for prog titans Yes, but things seem to be shifting in their favour of late. There’s a new wave of young bands emerging, unafraid to wear their prog influences on their sleeves (The Mars Volta, Cave In, Beecher) and the old sods themselves are attracting ‘celebrity’ plaudits (The Flaming Lips, PiL’s Keith Levene, Vincent Gallo). This is as it should be?contrary to post-punk dogma, Yes were never a joyless listen. The 21 tracks on The Ultimate Yes (including the sublime “Roundabout” and “And You And I”) burst with insane creativity, absorbing jazz, pop, classical and R&B with far-reaching ambition and energy in abundance. The Remixes project could easily have been dreadful, but Virgil Howe’s sympathetic reworkings are surprisingly effective, occasionally recalling the work of Air and ambient drum’n’bass maestro LTJ Bukem. Nicely done.

Ochs was as influential as Dylan in crafting the Village folk-protest legend. But while Bob went on to superstardom, Phil wouldn’t budge from the barricades. He remained loyal to the idea of turning the news of the hour into the music of the times, long after it became unfashionable. His career, already blighted by writer’s block, depression and alcoholism, ended with his suicide in 1976.

As this timely compilation reminds us, however, Ochs’ best songs sound like they’ve been torn from the morning’s headlines?anti-war classics like “White Boots Marching In A Yellow Land” and “I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore” (both included here) and “Here’s To The State Of Mississippi”, one of the bravest protest songs ever written (sadly absent).

He could also be windily allegorical (“The Crucifixion” makes “Gates Of Eden” sound as blunt as Billy Bragg), and the often bafflingly inappropriate arrangements make a lot of tracks here sound dated. Which is unfair, because the important things Ochs had to say remain entirely timeless.

For those who didn’t catch Radio 4 first time around, either out of confusion at the moniker or scepticism at the sudden chic embrace of any NY dudes with guitars slung around their necks, here’s a second chance. Like The Rapture, Radio 4 are essentially retro, revisiting the choppy, politically agitated aggression of Gang Of Four, particularly on “Start A Fire”, a passionate pricking of Aids consciousness. Also included here are two new tracks, “Caroline” and live fave “Sink So Low”, as well as several remixes, the best being Mark Stewart and Adrian Sherwood’s high radiation-level treatment of “Struggle”.

For those about to shag, this album salutes you. Musical Massage was originally released in 1976 and composed by Ware in downtime while recording Marvin Gaye’s classic I Want You?an album Ware had originally written for himself. Musical Massage is the album he made to replace it, and Ware claims Gaye was hungry to claim it for himself, too. It’s not hard to see why: this is silky, yearning soul with a comical leg-over obsession. Ware’s mellifluous croon lacks some of Gaye’s precious drama, but is nevertheless persuasive enough a flashback to one of the cocaine soul era’s defining moments.

It is perhaps too coloured by soul and disco to be considered by purists a reggae masterpiece. Yet Hurts So Good is up there in the Trojan label’s all-time top five LPs. Issued two years after its title track single went Top 10 in the UK, it’s an outstanding ’70s pop album. Her voice is pure caramelised bliss, whether singing rocksteady Elvis (“In The Ghetto”) or reinventing Shirley & Company’s “Shame Shame Shame” as a contagious skank-boogie. Just listen to her devastatingly poignant rendition of Wilson Pickett’s “If You Need Me”?an absolute must.

Before the sex pistols there was New York’s Lower East Side: trash aesthetes with short hair and kinky vixens in B-movie stilettos. Kids with minor drug habits and slim volumes of symbolist verse. Pre-punk ‘punk’ was Gotham’s reaction to smug denim California and prog-pomp stadium blow-out. The new Bowery Bop was about immaculate posing, street-corner nihilism. It was railroad-apartment art-rock out of the Velvets, Stooges, Dolls, with a side order of Nuggets garage psychedelics. Patti Smith was the tomboy boho icon (hairy armpits, Rimbaud fixation); The Ramones the inner-suburban denim’n’leather drongos peddling cartoon ramalama. By contrast, Television were cool and arty, monkish Apollos to Patti’s distaff Dionysus.

Tom Verlaine (n

As detailed in Uncut (see Strange Days, Take 76), this 1974 debut from the super-effete Smiley has been rotting in obscurity for nearly 30 years. Unashamedly over-produced by Loog Oldham (who saw Brett as “the British Jobriath” rather than a pale Bowie), it’s clear on the glam-baroque of “Queen Of Hearts” alone that Smiley had superstar potential. Just listen to his angelic cover of Neil Sedaka’s “Solitaire” and mourn the career that might have been.

The latest folk-psych gem to be salvaged from obscurity, Linda Perhacs’ only album, from 1970, occupies a beguiling middle-ground between Joni Mitchell and Tim Buckley. As one would expect of a sometime resident of Topanga Canyon, much of Parallelograms conjures up a fleeting bucolic idyll, all “moons and cattails”, frail charms and distant flecks of instrumentation. Perhacs’ songs are too strong to be dismissed as mere whimsy, however, and an experimental dimension?multi-tracked vocals, stereo pans, ambient drop-outs in the middle of songs?give this lovely album the edge over many of its more puritanical contemporaries.

RAISING HELL

The world changed in the first few bars of “Rock Box”. Track two of the 1984 self-titled debut album from Joe “Run” Simmons, Darryl “DMC” McDaniels and Jason “Jam-Master Jay” Mizell took a novelty black pop noise called rap and hooked it up to bleeding metal guitars, crushing beatbox and dubwise echo. Rendering Sugarhill, Kurtis Blow and electro redundant overnight, this bunch of pork-pie-hatted street satirists from Hollis, Queens sounded alien, young, funny, unstoppable. The trio, their visionary white producer Rick Rubin, and Joe’s manager-brother, Russell Simmons, had Def Jammed rebel rock’s codes, and Run-DMC made everything else in the Live Aid era sound lame and tame. From now on, hip hop’s rise to commercial supremacy was only a matter of various LLs, Chucks, Eazys and Dres taking their cue and adding ever more dirt and danger.

Not that Run-DMC were among the main beneficiaries of rap’s inevitable rule. This reissue of all seven studio albums may have been prompted by the shocking murder of Jay in November 2002 and the unavoidable end of Run-DMC but hip hop’s key pioneers had been struggling to keep an audience since 1988 and fourth LP Tougher Than Leather. Ironically, they were never truly forgiven for crashing through Aerosmith’s doors in the video for “Walk This Way”?and crashing the mainstream?as blacker-than-thou became hip hop’s disingenuous pose. Run’s other career as a preacher and DMC’s voice-slaughtering drug problems didn’t help any either.

But with current corporate rap’s reliance on styling and over-production creating nostalgia for the old school’s whiplash wit and sonic punch, those first four albums sound fresher than bluey-white laundry. Run-DMC and 1986’s Raising Hell may have been the milestones that forced the music biz to take rap seriously, but the gritty King Of Rock bridged the gap, and Tougher… ?deconstructing The Monkees and The Temptations?now sounds like their masterpiece.

How quickly falling sales and personal problems began to sap the muse. The inspired purloining of “Fool’s Gold” on “What’s It All About” from 1990’s Back From Hell showed how clued-in Run-DMC remained, but the set’s reality themes and ‘bitten’ rhyme styles sounded like a band trying too hard to prove their relevance. Down With The King from 1993 bigged up The Lord, wheeled in the guest producers, and saw the great Run coming off like an impersonator of lesser, if more successful, talents. No surprise that it was eight years before another guest star-crammed affair, Crown Royal , emerged to tell us, with Jay and DMC barely audible and all original character absent, that Run-DMC used to be good. Sad, but maybe not that truly tragic in the light of subsequent events.

Rediscover those first four vivid, sly, thrilling, visionary albums and remember them walking this way.

What do the frontmen with an arty Scottish post-punk outfit and a Sheffield techno-pop act have in common with a German digital dance pioneer and a New York breakbeat technician?

Plenty, as it turns out. After leaving Josef K?imagine The Smiths, only more solemn?Paul Haig became the most likely pop tactician to make it after Phil Oakey, Martin Fry, Green Gartside et al. Rejecting the guitars’n’ gravitas of his former band?who, despite titles such as “Sorry For Laughing” and “It’s Kinda Funny”, were outcasts from 1981’s ironic funk party?he finally tapped into the dance zeitgeist, swapped Oxfam for Gaultier and allied his lugubrious croon to the emergent electro.

However, despite being eminently marketable in an alienated, Bowie-esque way, Haig’s debut album, 1983’s Rhythm Of Life, bombed. His next, produced by ex-Associates whiz Alan Rankine, The Warp Of Pure Fun (1985), remains his best-selling, featuring excellent singles “Big Blue World” and the Bernard Summer-helmed “The Only Truth”. It now includes his version of Suicide’s “Ghost Rider” (Haig does Vega does Elvis) plus six extra examples of Haig’s anguished android funk-pop.

Having been one of those synth-pop artists who influenced the early hip hoppers and Detroit/Chicago’s respective techno and house scenes, it made sense for Haig to team up with Curtis Mantronik (and Lil’ Louis on some tracks) for Coincidence vs Fate. Work began in 1990, although the record was shelved due to lack of interest until 1993, a typical fate for the luckless Haig. Mantronik was once tagged the one-man Kraftwerk, all minimalist beats and keyboard drones, but after his brilliant auteur project with Joyce Sims, his reputation was for computerised soul, which is what Coincidence vs Fate mainly comprises. Mantronik programs Haig out of the picture during “Flight X” and wailing divas drown him out on “I Believe In You”, but his robo-vox perfectly suits the hi-tech bounce of “Right On Line” and “Out Of Mind”.

Remixed & Rare contains some early Mantronix?the uncluttered clatter of “Bassline” and “Who Is It?”, featuring ghost-rapper in the machine MCTee?and a lot of his Phase II nu soul melodies for singer Wondress. “Got To Have Your Love”, “Take Your Time” and “Don’t Go Messin’ With My Heart” saw Mantronik ostracised by the hip hop elite, but they remain superb future-disco contrivances. Had Phil Oakey joined forces with all-time hero Giorgio Moroder three years before, it would have been considered an entryist masterstroke. By 1984, Going Dance was no longer a radical initiative. Besides, there was a vertiginous decline in Moroder’s quality control after his Midnight Express/E=MC

Three ballads out of 99 tracks is the strike rate you’d expect of a Mot

When Bruce Palmer was finally dumped by the Springfield in 1968, he began an epic musical exile punctuated by rare, traumatic reunions with Neil Young. In 1971, however, he managed to record one unsuccessful, engaging solo album. The Cycle Is Complete consists of four lengthy, cloudy jams, with flutes, violins, congas and haphazard vocals (courtesy of Rick James) in orbit round Palmer’s meandering bass and guitar lines. Absolute flakiness is countered by Kaleidoscope pianist and arranger Jeff Kaplan, who introduces a semblance of organisation to what would otherwise be a roomful of hippies going diverse ways in pursuit of transcendence. “Calm Before The Storm”, though, is tremendous?an unsteady symphony that acts as a folk correlative to David Axelrod’s grandiose psychedelia.

Possibly the last post-punk obscurity to bid for a belated 15 minutes, The Wild Swans were more beautifully obscure than most. A perfect pop career was fashioned by recording one towering single (1982’s “The Revolutionary Spirit” which somehow managed to marry Phil Spector to Lord Byron), before they fell frantically apart. Thus denying themselves the chance to join fellow messy beat Liverpool poets (Echo, Teardrops, Wah!) in leading the fight against new-romantic shallowness with an intensely Northern form of doomed romanticism. This 23-track anthology finally confirms their status as one of the era’s great lost bands, with radio sessions and live recordings adding to their meagre studio output. Two decades on, their huge ambition is waiting to be applauded. So clap until your hands callus. Dizzying, visionary stuff.

Sometimes one feels like collaring the rock yoof of today and blaring, “You! Stop listening to that cack. It’s not special. Listen to ‘Back Of A Car’ by Big Star. That’s special.”

Driving around London listening to Big Star Story in the front of my car, it was as clear as ever that, higgledy-piggledy as their oeuvre is, the group were so much more than a rock critic’s conceit/conspiracy. The cult hero’s cult hero Alex Chilton may be; the music itself never deserved to be marginalised.

Fortunately, the cult lives on, with micro-masterworks such as “Car”, “Thirteen” and “In The Street” enchanting new generations who prefer their power pop laced with danger and tragedy. (I was standing outside Stamford Bridge, of all places, in a Big Star T-shirt t’other day when I was accosted with a loudly burped “Alex Chilton! Yeah!” Maybe I’ll try my Jimmy Webb T-shirt next week.)

The pity is that Big Star Story is neither fish nor fowl. It’s not a true introduction, nor do the 18 tracks constitute a chronological anthology, darting as they do between different eras and albums. Worse still, the compilation fails to flag up the fact that several of the recordings are lives, with few clues as to their exact provenance or that Chris Bell’s hauntingly great solo outings “I Am The Cosmos” and “You And Your Sister” (that Siamese twin to “Thirteen”, with Chilton sweetly harmonising) are post-Star. Shoddy stuff, Ryko.

From a quality-control standpoint, the flat-footed boogie of “Don’t Lie To Me” could have made way for the supercharged garage Stax of “O’My Soul”, the version of Bolan’s “Baby Strange” for either “Daisy Glaze” or “What’s Goin’ Ahn” or “Life Is White” (ah, those uncategorisable Radio City gems). And why “Jesus Christ” and “Thank You Friends” from Third/Sister Lovers and no sign of the spectral “Big Black Car”? The pointless “Hot Thing” instead of “Kangaroo”? I think not.

If you’re a Big Star neophyte, you’re better advised to invest in the three principal studio albums (#1 Record, Radio City, Third/Sister Lovers) and Bell’s I Am The Cosmos, approaching anything else (e.g. Chilton’s solo works) with caution.

Maybe we just get what we deserve.