Bashung ‘Play Blessures’ (Philips, 1982)

"Looking back, I see now that I spent my mid-90s university years in Colchester buying excessive amounts of music as a defence against a largely miserable existence"

The story is surely the stuff of legend: an uncompromising New York model hooks up with Burroughs and Basquiat and reinvents herself as an uncompromising musician and poet

We’ve followed the secret map of electronic music past and found a hidden chest of lost gems. This month, we’re pulling out and polishing Bel Canto’s ‘White-Out Conditions’

Thick as thieves Beastie Boys’ compatriot Money Mark is perhaps best known for his eclectic 1998 album ‘Push The Button’, but his earlier debut, ‘Mark’s Keyboard Repair’, was really where it’s at

Without any announcement at all, Alta Plana appeared in 2005 as a digital-only release and promptly disappeared.

The artists that live on the fringes, the forward (or sideways) thinkers, have always drawn me in. This fascination really kicked in at university when, in the early 2000s, I presented a radio show with Erotic Volvo of Birmingham wrong-pop band Misty’s Big Adventure. As a kind of musicologist of the weird, his selections were never predictable and often a revelation.