New Muzik ‘From A To B’ (GTO, 1980)

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.

You might remember them as Scott 4, but it was as The Scott 4 Free Rock Orchestra that they released ‘E-S-P’, a record that flipped from electrofunk to chillout to weirdo reggae without missing a beat

Tumbling into YouTube holes can be a risky business. One minute you’re learning about dark matter or the Italian Futurists, the next you’re watching a pseudo Professor Denzil Dexter explain how the moon is, in fact, hollow and made out of toilet roll tubes

Few music discovery anecdotes start with “I was rugby tackled by a man in a cinema because he liked my T-shirt”, but discovering Lancashire oddballs Element starts like that for me.