“Reaffirmation” is the sound of a San Francisco ballroom in 1968. The 12-minute long track opens mysteriously with what might be a Mellotron on the flute setting. A bubbling bass guitar arrives, along with jazzy piano. At 02.50, the tempo picks up and the guitar, which until then has delicately picked its way through the arrangement, begins to soar. There’s a vaguely funky section and, just over half-way in, a dive into an almost free-form spiralling section. This is top-notch psychedelia.

“She is a 20-year-old white New Yorker who sings like a 55-year-old black lady from Mississippi. The experts say she will do for soul pop what Dylan did for folk.” Lillian Roxon’s verdict on Laura Nyro appeared in her ground-breaking 1969 book Rock Encyclopedia, issued before Nyro’s third album New York Tendaberry.

Following the death last year from COVID-19 of keyboard player Dave Greenfield, it appears the The Stranglers’ five decade journey may finally be drawing to a close. They bucked all odds by maintaining a path after singer Hugh Cornwall left in 1990, and the last two decades, especially, have seen them hold steady, both as a live draw and with critically respected albums.

Toyah, always a one-off, has been a surprise star of the COVID-19 lockdowns. Her YouTube Sunday Lunches, kitchen-filmed cover versions with her husband, King Crimson’s Robert Fripp, have been celebratory shared moments, jaunty, unlikely, silly, revelling unashamedly in pop music (and, bawdily, in her own physical attributes!).

“Add some music to your day,” the Beach Boys urged in their song of the same name, from their 1970 album Sunflower. There’s far more than a day’s worth of music included on this immense five-CD package, which scrutinises the turn-of-the Seventies Beach Boys in miniscule detail as they made the awkward transition from their California surf-and-sand past to a more diffuse, more democratic and in many ways more interesting group.

Despite their implosion three years earlier, 1977 was a good year for The Stooges. The CBS budget label Embassy reissued their 1973 Raw Power album in the wake of their songs cropping up in the repertoires of The Damned and Sex Pistols.

A lot has changed in the 40 years since Blow Out was first released. In 1981, American critics from Pauline Kael to Roger Ebert praised to the heavens Brian De Palma’s homage to assorted Hitchcock thrillers and his script’s mash-up of 1970s conspiracies. Certainly this handsomely restored print does justice to Vilmos Zsigmond’s cinematography.

“Saunders' Ferry Lane” elegantly paints a picture of revisiting an empty, out-of-season neighbourhood to reflect on an old relationship. It’s cloudy and begins raining. The grass where the couple lay is dead. Birds have flown away. The gentle arms which held the narrator are gone. “I find no present comfort for my pain” sings a forlorn Sammi Smith. Swelling strings darken the mood, as does a plaintive pedal steel.

Beauty and the Beast? Not quite; the Czech title of Juraj Herz’s 1978 fantasy is Panna a netvor, which translates, much more fittingly, as The Virgin and the Monster. This new release has a 15 certificate, a clear hint that the film wasn’t aimed at the under-tens.

How lovely it must be to direct a documentary about your favourite musicians and have no one stop you from cramming in everyone who has ever loved them too. The British director Edgar Wright, best known for his feature films (including Hot Fuzz, Baby Driver and Shaun of the Dead) and TV work (Spaced), is a superfan of the American musicians Ron and Russell Mael.