"Three plus versions of the same album. It’s ridiculous, but I’m glad.” The first paragraph of Richard Hell’s text in the booklet accompanying Destiny Street Complete lays it out. There are, indeed, three versions of his and his band The Voidoids’s July 1982 album Destiny Street on this double-CD set. It seems excessive.

The First Generation 1965–1974 is a 35-CD box set dedicated to the blues maven and propagator John Mayall. As well as the discs, there are three books: one a hardback, another reproducing fan club material, and the third a facsimile of the press pack for his first album. Also included are two posters and a signed photograph of Mayall. Five thousand copies have been made. As it sells for £275, the 3.8 kilogram The First Generation will not be a casual purchase.

Two of the four CDs in this set are of a live performance taped on 16 April 1964. The other pair of discs were recorded on 9 July 1975. Each show issued on Charles Mingus @ Bremen 1964 & 1975 was captured by the north German regional broadcaster Radio Bremen.

An old saw relating to The Doors says their ambition when they formed was to be as big as Los Angeles-based garage-psych sensations The Seeds. After listening to Lost Innocence – Garpax 1960s Punk & Psych, it’s hard not to wonder where the bands heard were aiming. What’s collected is from 1965 to 1969. All these combos operated in California, generally working in and around the LA area.

In 2020, one archive release exerted a more forceful presence than any other. Live At Goose Lake August 8th 1970 caught The Stooges as they promoted their second album Fun House. The source was a previously unknown, professionally recorded tape documenting the whole album as it was played live, in its running order. Iggy Pop and the band were hard yet sloppy, tight yet rough, always blazing. Wonderful – and a reminder that musical surprises still crop up.

The winter solstice occurs tomorrow, 21 December. Stonehenge, one of this island’s most significant structures, is constructed in alignment with the setting sun on that day. After the solstice, the days lengthen and a new cycle of the year begins.

It didn’t take long for The Stooges to acquire an afterlife. They played their final show in February 1974. In May 1975, Nick Kent wrote a multi-page feature for NME on the ups and downs of Iggy Pop and Co. In September 1975, Sounds reviewed a new album by the defunct band titled Metallic KO. One side of it was recorded at that final show.

Scars’s tour de force album Author! Author! has been out of sight for too long. Originally released in 1981, it first reappeared on a swiftly withdrawn CD in 2007. Apparently, there were issues about where the rights for its reissue lay. Now, it has re-emerged.

Fifty years after their first album The Garden Of Jane Delawney was issued in April 1970, Trees seem to be better known than when they were active. Despite Françoise Hardy’s cover version of the title track a couple of years after it hit shops, the UK band’s debut album was a poor seller. Original pressings fetch upwards of £200. It’s the same with its follow-up, January 1971’s On The Shore. This one sells for at least £250.

 “During 1975, 1976 and the first half of 1977 punk was the future but, after the highpoint of ‘God Save the Queen’, London punk already seemed spent. By the time that the Sex Pistols ‘Pretty Vacant’ was tumbling out of the charts in early September, there had been two huge hits that changed the way I heard music. Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’ and ‘Magic Fly’ by Space made it clear: electronics were the future.