Bashung ‘Play Blessures’ (Philips, 1982)

We all like a bit of 80s influenced shizz, right? Listen and learn from New York’s Laptop whose cool as cubes 90s debut EP ‘End Credits’ was quite the ear-catcher

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.

Though Hefner survive in the collective consciousness as the exemplar of an indie guitar outfit, the band deployed vintage synths and drum machines on later recordings. Which means that this, The French’s ‘Local Information’, isn’t quite the without-precedent one-off it might first appear.

"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"