A new double album, Out Of All This Blue, is out now and they tour the UK in October.
MARVIN GAYE: Let’s Get It On (Motown)
Maybe the sexiest, most sultry music ever made, with that incredible silken voice floating over it.
Funk originally meant the smell of skin after sex and you can feel the funk in every groove of this record.
It’s romantic too. If I Should Die Tonight and Distant Lover are swooners.
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THE VELVET UNDERGROUND: The Velvet Underground & Nico (Polydor)
The Velvets taught me the glory of the two-chord song, represented here by Heroin and imitated by a thousand bands.
They proved that what you choose to play is more important than the skill with which you play it.
I sang half the songs on this album with my early bands.
JOHN LENNON: Imagine (EMI)
Not just Lennon’s best collection of post-Beatles songs but a masterclass in musicianship with Nicky Hopkins’s piano and Jim Keltner’s drums on Jealous Guy hitting stratospheric heights of empathy and soul.
I’ve been lucky enough to work with Keltner but I wish I’d thought of hiring Hopkins before he died.
IGGY POP: The Idiot (EMI)
He couldn’t have made it without Bowie’s co-writing and production but this is Iggy’s masterpiece.
His voice – crooning, growling, humorous and threatening – is at its best.
HANK WILLIAMS: 40 Greatest Hits (Polydor)
Hank was the poet laureate of country music.
He only recorded between 1947 and 1952 as he died young.
No one has written songs better than Your Cheatin’ Heart and Hey Good Lookin’.
As he used to say to his rivals: “You can’t write ’em like ol’ Hank, can you?”
VARIOUS: Motown Chartbusters Vol 3 (Motown)
The music on this compilation, like so much of Motown, is superhuman: killer grooves, great melodies, soulful singers, a sense of place and history.
As a schoolboy, I worshipped singles such as I Heard It Through The Grapevine, Tracks Of My Tears and Dancing In The Street. I still do.