In its first issue of 1979, Melody Maker included an article by Jon Savage on a Los Angeles band named Screamers. “They're ambitious, talented and they want it all NOW,” he wrote. “And they'd sell their grannies (if they have any left) to get it.” He noted their “astute combination of the right proportion of the familiar and the novel, highly, saleable. They're really quite concerned about that particular aspect.”

This blistering, fearless play about an 18-year-old black entrepreneur on the King’s Road raises a myriad of uncomfortable questions that resonate profoundly with the Black Lives Matter debate.

Back in the mid-Eighties, BBC television started broadcasting The Rock'n' Roll Years, one of the first rock music retrospectives. Each half-hour episode focused on a year, with news reports and music intermixed to give a revealing look at the development of rock culture against the context of current affairs.

Sunshine Theatre were based around Aberdare in South Wales. In 1971, they recorded their only single. Fifty copies of “Mountain” / “I Want” were pressed. The quartet also used the name Albert and gigged with fellow Welsh outfits Budgie and Man. In August 1972, they played at Malvern Festival. There was an appearance on the Welsh TV pop programme Disc a Dawn. And that was it.

Chris Petit's Radio On, his 1979 debut as writer-director, should be regarded as the first British psychogeography film.

Things got out of hand at theartsdesk on Vinyl this month and these reviews run to 10,000 words. That's around a fifth of The Great Gatsby. It's because there's so much good music that deserves the words, from jazz to metal to pure electronic strangeness.

With the Spiral Scratch EP, Buzzcocks became the first British band of the punk rock era to issue a do-it-yourself seven-inch. Everything was organised and paid for by the band: the recording session, the manufacture of the record and its sleeve, its design. It hit shops in January 1977.

Well this is rather groovy! National treasure and the man with that voice, Matt Berry has been locked away in his lair, channelling the early seventies and twiddling with lots of knobs. Save for the drums, he plays every instrument (all 19 of them) on this magical mystery tour de force – that includes piano, Wurlitzer, Mellotron, Moog, Hammond, Vox and Farfisa organs.

With over eight million copies sold in its 50-year lifespan, Déjà Vu was, as Cameron Crowe writes in the booklet accompanying this compendious four-CD edition, “one of the most famous second albums in rock history”.

At the end of 1976 Al Stewart talked to Melody Maker, contrasting how he was seen in America and the UK. He was in Los Angeles. “I haven’t played in England for nearly two years,” he told Harvey Kubernik. “The best way of looking at it was that I had Love Chronicles [his second album, issued in 1969], and I was getting a lot of good press. Then Zero She Flies and Orange were not as good, and consequently I received some bad press.