but why did no-one tell me about 60’s East L.A. Mexican band The Village Callers? So obscure they don’t even have their own Wikipedia page, although a Wiki search reveals that their track Hector has been widely sampled; for example by Ice Cube on ‘Jackin’ for Beats’, Cypress Hill on ‘The Phunky Feel One’ and several others, but you’d need better ears than mine to be able to tell that for yourself. Just as good as Hector is their cover of Ray Charles’ I Don’t Need No Doctor, and there are a few other tracks on their album worth a listen. Get the whole story here.

If you are in the mood for something much more unusual, have you heard the fabulous zydeko Paper In My Shoes by Boozoo Chaivs? There are several recordings of this around, but the only one to listen to is the original from 1954 dug out by Bob Dylan for his Theme Time Radio Show (this is the one the link takes you to.) It meanders in and out of time, Boozoo and the band are in different keys, and, to put it politely, Boozoo sometimes struggles with his diction. But somehow it gets under your – or at least my -skin. And I’d really like to hear the takes they rejected in favour of this one.