Alison Cotton: A Northern Soul

For more than four decades, African Head Charge have pushed the outer limits of dub, concocting an intoxicating brew of electronic exploration and live percussion. Their latest long-player continues to confound expectations – from Accra to Ramsgate and back again

Stephen James Buckley and Mark Burford are Polypores and Field Lines Cartographer respectively. Holed up together in a remote Lancashire church, their minds frequently wander to cosmic vibrations, pixelated dream states and chain-smoking ghosts…

The tragic tale of the original pop Svengali would be fantastic enough even without the black magic, gangland threats and a pill-popping climax of paranoia, rapidly declining fortunes and murder… through a series of interviews, conducted in the late 1990s and early 2000s, many with collaborators, artists and assistants who have since died, we tell the incredible tale of Joe Meek 

They’ve patched up their differenceS (again) and turned in a banger of a new album (as always) for which they enlisted the help of some morris dancers and Professor Brian Cox (like you do). You need to ask who? It can only be the brothers Hartnoll and the unstoppable Orbital

With their back catalogue being lovingly reissued via Mute, we pile into a car for a guided tour of the Manchester hotspots that shaped the influential sound of A Certain Ratio… fasten your seatbelts