It’s easy to find socio-politically motivated songs a bit of a sickly pill to swallow, especially ones with such heavy subject matter; however, Robert Wyatt‘s cover of the Peter Gabriel song Biko – a song documenting the fatal treatment of Stephen Biko, who was tortured to death by South African police in his prison cell in 1977...

Following my previous entry from the Fuzz Dance catalogues, Trophy‘s Slow Dance is a bold, poppy italo record from a guy who seems to have done very little else with his music career bar a bit of cheeky guitar work here and there. One of those great italo one-hit-wonders that you can expect to empty the coppers...

Rare as a hen’s gum shield and pricier than a return ticket to Glasgow (possibly) this a real gem of a record. Even the bootleg costs upwards of £40. It’s just one of a number of superlative releases on the Italian Fuzz Dance label, which put out a number of records from owner Maurizio Dami...

Shameless Italo disco with a hint of the sinister about it, thus making its title somewhat apt. Not sure I can imagine a witch quite this groovy, but then I’ve never seen a picture of Helen. The track is in a somewhat off-piste 6/4 time signature during the “verses”, which for music boffins is enough to get the chin-stroking gloves out....

Bit of a cheat this one because I already featured it on our latest Glittermix. Still, in researching the thing it occurred to me just how good this actually is, so I wanted to give it a little solitary flag-up. Frankly it may as well not be a Christmas song at all, aside from the lyrics. Regardless, it’s a Scientist produced slice...

There’s not much I could tell you about Shriekback that I won’t have taken from Wikipedia as I more or less discovered them just the other day. Of instant interest to me, however, is that the bassist, Dave Allen, was formerly of Gang of Four, performing on their first two albums (“Entertainment” and “Solid Gold”),...

Pretty confidently bonkers slice of American industrial here from Ministry. Shunning drum dynamics in favour of just virtually pounding the crap out of some drum pads, it’s quite obvious that samplers were still a pretty new invention. There’s also a rather paranoid pseudo-acid bassline worming it’s way underneath and some high-pitched Prince-esque vocals in a...

A delicious pouring of 80s electro Francopop. There’s a moment at around the 2 minute 20 mark where Isabelle Antena‘s vocals drop out and the rhythm section starts to develop that is sheer Balearic bliss. Je l’adore!