Another early 1970s song from a band who came to prominence in the 60s. This is great stuff.

It was released as a single but this is the long-playing version.

Ian Dury was another who partly surfed the punk wave, but did so with added humour and wit. The lyric to Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick, as well as being a showcase for uncommon rhyming, contrives to be both meaningless and profound at the same time while still carrying a strong undertone of sleaze but the song is perhaps too well known for use here.

Reasons to choose this instead? Dury mentions Wee Willie Harris.

Then there’s What a Waste, with its immortal line, “I could be the ticket man at Fulham Broadway Station,” a perfect iambic heptameter – as are several others in the song. Sublime.

There’s a pretty muddy sounding video of the band playing What a Waste, live on Revolver – introduced by the incomparable Peter Cook.

This is one of the few songs from the latter end of the 70s that will make it here as I never much went for punk and its aftermath.

However Tom Robinson partly surfed the punk wave and I was predisposed to his work as I had actually seen him performing on-stage at the Apollo in Glasgow when he was supporting someone or other – exactly whom I now forget – as part of an acoustic trio named Café Society (not, I think, the South African band Wiki links to.) The Café Society Tom was in were good, very good indeed. I wasn’t surprised when he went on to success.

The Tom Robinson band was harder edged as this live performance attests.

Lindisfarne’s finest hour. (As a single, anyway.)

More Atomic Rooster, just for completeness.

I remember reading somewhere in the late 90s a complaint that “none of today’s bands have a knowledge of music that goes back more than ten years,” or words to that effect. In that case, I thought, why do Embrace sound like Badfinger?

I can’t remember which Embrace song it was but Badfinger’s was either, or both, of these.

Creedence was one of those bands that spanned the 60s/70s crossover. This is a song from 1971; towards the end of their chart run in the UK, but it barely made the top 40. I think it’s the descending bass line during the refrain that makes me like it so much. It’s simple but, to me, effective.

I don’t know exactly what it is about this song. I know some folk hate it but for some reason I’ve always liked it.

Lobo’s follow up hit I’d Love You To Want Me has not worn as well, I fear.

A late psychedelic classic?

This is another of those 1970s songs that feels 1960s. It’s a bizarre title for a single to have.

There is a wiki page about Tin Tin here.

In my mind this is a kind of companion piece to Albert Hammond’s The Free Electric Band which also dealt with the attractions of a popular music career but this one is more about the frustrated dream.