Bill Nelson ‘Chimera’ (Mercury, 1983)

Since the huge commercial success of Peter Jackson’s ‘The Lord Of The Rings’ movies, it’s been easy to forget the significance of the JRR Tolkien novel to the 1960s counterculture hippies.

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.

Since you can’t peel back the YouTube algorithm, there’s no telling how we wound up staring at western Canada circa the mid-80s.

In 1997, R&S Records’ UK head honcho, Bob Fisher, persuaded me to check out a new band from Japan at a small venue in Camden.

The late 1990s and early 2000s threw up a slew of Air-style ambient masterpieces – but Fragile State’s 2004 classic ‘Voices From The Dust Bowl’ was criminally overlooked. It may just well be the UK’s ‘Premiers Symptômes’ of the era