“I was just released from the hospital…the doctor told me that the medicine can’t do me no good. They told me what I have is beyond medical science…he told me that what I have is more serious than cancer. He told me what I have is a very, very bad case of the blues. I found out the best remedy for the blues is to be with the one you love.”

In the liner notes to the new reissue of 2001’s All is Dream, Mercury Rev’s Jonathan Donahue says it is “a weird astral album musically, and yes the symbolism lyrically runs many layers down and deep – different coloured layers of rock, soil and ash on an archaeology dig.”

If the prices fetched by original pressings are a guide, Mighty Baby are notable. Their eponymous first album, issued by the fittingly named Head label in November 1969, sells for at least £150 and has changed hands for over £500.

In a first for this column, what’s cropping up is a cassette reissue. The Clash’s third album is so familiar, going into what it is or was in any depth is redundant but it’s worth considering what’s going on here.

“It's Gonna Take a Miracle” just missed out on a mainstream US Top 40 placing after The Royalettes issued it as a single in June 1965. But the song had staying power. In 1971 Laura Nyro covered it, choosing it as the title track for the album she made with LaBelle. Deniece Williams’s version hit big in 1982.

Three years after its release, Gene Clark explained where he was heading while creating 1974's No Other. “I was strongly influenced at that time by two other artists. Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions and [The Rolling Stones’s] Goat’s Head Soup.

Rough Trade’s first album was Stiff Little Fingers’s Inflammable Material.

Arthur or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire hasn’t had the stratospheric levels of praise as the preceding Kinks album, 1968’s The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society. Yet in the band’s narrative, it’s probably more important as it went hand-in-hand with their return to America after an enforced absence and became integral to their subsequent achievements there.

The temptation with the 20th anniversary reissue of Ḣ-Camp Meets Lo-Fi (Explosion Picture Score) is to look for traces of what came earlier and pointers towards what would come in Iceland’s music. The album was credited to Dip, a collaboration between former Sugarcubes drummer Sigtryggur Baldursson and the on-the-up Jóhann Jóhannsson.

The Hollywood Stars were not shy.