It’s easy to dismiss Suzanne Vega as a poor man’s Joni Mitchell. But songs such as “Luka” (about child abuse) and “Book Of Dreams” (about the plight of amputees) proved she was not only a highly literate songwriter but a storyteller who was brave enough to tackle the most awkward subjects. This best-of is an expanded version of the Tried And True compilation that first appeared five years ago, and comes with a bonus CD featuring six live tracks.

In 1980 Diana Ross, Motown and Chic all needed each other. With Rick James’ breakthrough still a year away, Motown were forced to hire their biggest competitors to provide Hitsville with some hits. In turn, Diana was the last of the original sequence of classic Chic albums, the real follow-up to Chic’s 1979 milestone Risqu

A unique figure in British pop, Nick Currie aka Momus (Greek God of mockery) has maintained an unflagging output in a kaleidoscope of styles that predates Beck’s celebration of junk culture. After a debut album on Cherry Red sub-label

A solo star who charted regularly in the ’60s with big production ballads, Pitney continued to record during the ’70s but without his former commercial success. Himself a songwriter, Pitney owed much of his achievement to his ear for a good song. The Bronze Sessions consists of the complete recordings for his not particularly brilliant album Pitney ’75 plus six bonus tracks he cut in 1990. With extensive sleevenotes by Rodney Collins, this reissue is squarely aimed at lifelong fans.

In many ways, Eric Goulden was the embodiment of punk’s DIY ethic: awkward, rough, fearlessly enthusiastic, occasionally inspired. By the time of his first Peel session in October ’77?backed by Ian Dury and fellow ex-Kilburn & The High Roader Davey Payne?he’d nailed signature tune “Whole Wide World” (featured on last month’s Uncut CD) and was gaining notoriety for drunken antics on the first Stiff tour. Disillusioned by the ’80s, he was fronting the Len Bright Combo for the Saturday Live show, before decamping to France and resurfacing (post-breakdown) as the Hitsville House Band for a Mark Radcliffe session in ’86. Last year’s “Joe Meek” (from the Jonathan Ross radio show) proved that, though he never did track down that girl from Tahiti, the pleasure and pain was in the journey.

The 6ths

HYACINTHS AND THISTLES

CIRCUS

There is no one else in pop like Stephin Merritt now, and 69 Love Songs is the monument that says so. Under the names The Magnetic Fields, Future Bible Heroes, The Gothic Archies and The 6ths, he has written hundreds of songs proving the artifice and wit of the pre-rock US pop machine, from Gershwin to Sondheim, still has a place in the modern world; and that it suits sounds from synthpop to shanties.

69 Love Songs was Merritt’s arrogantly unmissable declaration of what he and the love song could do. Like a blue whale inches from your face, it’s too big to take in all at once. There are just so many songs, flitting by so swiftly and in so many styles that, heard for the first time, it’s hard to be sure if they are even any good.

The confusion is deepened by the lyrics’ lightness, their desire to make you laugh. But keep listening and the variety, ludicrousness, vanity and despair of the loves Merritt delineates becomes moving. In a project where he effectively asks himself to operate all pop’s disused production lines at once, from Tin Pan Alley to Hitsville, it is also a record about a love of love songs, and how art and emotion merge when you write them. And then, he can be this piercingly direct: “I don’t know if you’re beautiful/Because I love you too much…”

Merritt also sustains interest by switching between his baritone and other voices. With another project, The 6ths, he doesn’t sing at all, instead offering his songs to interpreters including a movingly aged Odetta, a vulnerable Bob Mould, Sarah Cracknell and Gary Numan. Released only months after 69 Love Songs, Hyacinths And Thistles is more lushly musical, bathing Marc Almond in South Seas exotica and Clare Grogan in treated strings. Together, the albums are an imposing landmark.

So instant was Inner City’s commercial success in the late ’80s that leader Kevin Sanderson’s status as a techno innovator is sometimes underplayed. Tracks like “Good Life” and “Ain’t Nobody Better” are classic reminders of a time when this music was a light and mobile antidote to ’80s stodge. Unlike Juan Atkins and Derrick May, however, Inner City slipped a little too easily down Joe Public’s gullet. Once you get past the hits, there isn’t much more by way of substance here.

“Oh, I just don’t know where to begin,” Elvis Costello swooned in the opening line to his lusciously hummable 1979 hit “Accidents Will Happen”. Not strictly true. Elvis Costello has always known precisely where to begin. Knowing when to stop, that’s been another kettle of worms. His latest batch of reissues being a case in point. Each has been fattened up for market with a mind-bending welter of bonus tracks, so that Get Happy!!, a 20-track tour de force in the first place, now weighs in at 50 tracks (with Trust at 31 and Punch The Clock at 39, see right). As if that wasn’t enough, each is accompanied by 28 pages of sleevenotes composed by the Human Jukebox himself. As exhausting as they are exhaustive, as mesmerising as they are maddening, these new editions of his early-’80s work go some way towards explaining why Elvis Costello, pop’s most modern pantheist, was ultimately denied his place in the pantheon. Destined to be remembered more as pop’s Peter Greenaway (archly ironic, overstaged, cleverly contrived) than its Michael Powell (iconic, visionary, authentic).

Swing back to 1979 and Costello was riding high on the hog. He’d just released the masterly Armed Forces, his third near-perfect album on the bounce. Having racked up a pile of hits back home, he was now relentlessly touring the States, and looked poised to crack it big. Two years into his career and he was prematurely being talked up as the punk generation’s very own Bob Dylan/Van Morrison/Neil Young. Then came the “Ray Charles” moment in an Ohio bar. In his notes to this final version of Get Happy!!, Costello reflects at length on this ugly incident, “the consequences of which I suppose I’ll carry all my days.”

Costello is not alone in supposing that his racist outburst in that Columbus bar represented a crucial turning point in terms of how he was perceived as a serious artist. Routinely, it is written that he lost our collective trust at that decisive moment and would forever be denied the right to win it back, condemned to a life on the margins as a result. The truth is that, even as Armed Forces was confirming him as the pre-eminent songwriter of his time, our trust in him had begun to get testy long before he slandered Ray Charles in a drunken lapse of reason.

For two years, Costello had moved so fast it was impossible to get a fix on him. He was everywhere and there was so much of him, all of it contradictory. He was so far ahead of himself, it was asking a bit much for the rest of us to ever catch up. The words poured out of him, each song containing multitudes of meanings, attitudes, metaphors. Like a moth trapped in a warehouse full of light bulbs, his music never stood still for a second, flitting from style to style, restless beyond belief.

Just when we managed a brief pause and finally got a fix on him, we realised that Elvis Costello had won our heads but was never going to win our hearts. His music charmed and surprised, stimulated and provoked, but it never quite seemed to connect emotionally. Maybe because there was so much in front of it, so much of Elvis Costello to get past before we reached the heart of it, that we started to wonder whether this music actually possessed a heart at all.

Given all this, an extended holiday might have been in order after Armed Forces. But, less than a year later, he blazed back with Get Happy!! And, what do you know? It was his best yet. By a country mile. Twenty first-rate songs packed into 48 breathlessly claustrophobic minutes?driven by fear, disgust, self-disdain, frustration and romantic obsession from the blaring opening gusts of “Love For Tender” to the final torched regrets of “Riot Act” (with its guilt-ridden nods to Ohio and the morally superior shit storm that followed). More than two decades after its first release, there’s still so much to take in, so much to admire, that it leaves one dizzy.

When it first arrived, deadline-panicked reviewers were quick to pick up on Costello’s remark that the songs were written after a visit to a Camden Town record store, where he ordered up a large crate of obscure soul singles. Thus, in the white heat of its release, the album was widely described as little more than a pastiche of the Motown/Stax back catalogue (an idea enhanced by the release of the first single from the album, a rendition of Sam & Dave’s “I Can’t Stand Up [For Falling Down]”). On reflection, it’s as stylistically wide-reaching as any of his work, ranging from the high-energy waltz of “New Amsterdam” to ingenious supper club examinations of sexual mores like “Motel Matches”, via the blazing “King Horse”, one of Costello’s most brilliant songs.

In fact, it’s so wide-reaching that it’s difficult to know where to start explaining. Never fear. Because Costello’s sleevenotes explain everything. Absolutely everything. He was never one to follow John Wayne’s advice in She Wore A Yellow Ribbon when he said, “Never apologise and never explain.”At least the second part, anyway. But, in these voluminous notes, he explains each song away with such obsessive, completist zeal that your own instinctive responses are worn down to a frazzle by the time you come to actually listen to the music. As amusing as it is to learn that “the song ‘Possession’ was actually written in a Dutch taxi during a five-minute journey back to the studio after I had become drunkenly besotted with the waltress in a local cafe”, the muso revelation that “Black And White World” leans towards “the narrative style of a Ray Davies song while the final recording was based on a Pete Thomas drum pattern which owed something to the style that Richie Hayward of Little Feat employed on ‘Cold, Cold, Cold'”, adds nothing to the pure enjoyment of the song while taking plenty away.

Get Happy!! arrived in January 1980 as perfectly formed as any album of that decade (give or take a Dare! or a Too-Rye-Ay). So the thought of 30 bonus tracks is enough to turn molten the blood of any true believer. No worries, though. These extras amount to no throwaway car boot sale. This version of Get Happy!! is worth the price of admission alone for a frantically souped-up “Getting Mighty Crowded”, a tub-thumping “From A Whisper To A Scream”, a hymnal “Clowntime Is Over” and a gloriously raw-boned “Riot Act”. Get Happy!!, always a masterpiece, is now nothing less than a 50-track encyclopaedia of pop and soul.

Now Dougan has been f

This 1982 ode to NYC is an urban(e) pop classic. No CBGB’s grime in evidence here, not much sleaze to speak of, but the cosmopolitan vibe and Jackson’s strident piano faithfully evoke the hyperkinetic magic of the Big Apple. The Latin rhythms still sound fresh, and there are some curiously proggy textures: “Chinatown” sounds like the meeting point between mid-period Genesis and Costello, all portentous chords and swirling synths, and is a highlight alongside the brilliant happy/sad electropop of “Steppin’ Out”. Big, brave and often deeply moving.

Duran’s debut album from 1981 created the template for the new romantic sound?funk-lite bass, sub-Kraftwerk keyboards, angular guitar and ludicrous lyrics (“fuses pumping live heat twisting out on a wire”, anyone?). Now, post-electroclash, Duran Duran feel current, particularly on the storming opening salvo of singles?”Planet Earth”, “Careless Memories”, “Girls On Film”. What Felix Da Housecat could do if he got his hands on these…

By 1983’s Seven And The Ragged Tiger, the rot had set in. The last album to feature the original line-up, it’s riddled with cocaine?all bloated production and lack of tunes (the juddering future-funk grooves of “Union Of The Snake” aside). Despite being their weakest album, Seven… broke Duran in the US, thanks to “The Reflex”. After that, it was Bond themes, side projects and new line-ups.

If John Barry scored a movie about HR Pufnstuf, it would sound something like this: swirly strings, booming timps, multi-part vocals, garage guitars. All in the service of some tooth-rottingly saccharine whimsy (“General Humpty”) but also some heart-stopping pop hooks (“Dream Street”). A reminder of that sunlit, post-Sgt Pepper plateau when optimistic dissent became as mainstream a money machine as Coca-Cola. Not quite Spanky And Our Gang, but still a wonderful, garish, Lolly Gobble Choc Bomb of an album. Third Rail’s Joey Levine would go on to be, via Ohio Express, one of bubblegum’s greatest icons.

Hip hop freaks still wave their arms in the air when ATCQ’s name crops up, and this nostalgic bean feast of rarities from the mouths of Q-Tip, Phife and Ali Shaheed Muhammad still punches the appropriate Queens, NYC buttons. The Tribe’s jazzy fusion of R&B, thoughtful rap and surprisingly commercial pop sensibilities are all over “Find A Way” and Men In Black item “Same Ole Thang”. A good time experience that Questees will file next to 1999’s Anthology.

Belfast’s Stiff Little Fingers hoodwinked London critics but Derry’s The Undertones were a much more inventive and explosive phenomenon. The O’Neill brothers matched melodic flair to humour, aggression and an acute awareness of social and sexual mores, all perfectly captured by ex-choirboy vocalist Feargal Sharkey. Between ’78 and their split in ’83 they covered all bases-heart-pounding frustration (“Get Over You”), tumescent glory (“Teenage Kicks”), social unease (the H-Block inspired “It’s Going To Happen”) and shimmering ballads (“Julie Ocean”). The reformed Tones (minus Sharkey) have a daunting legacy to live up to (their new album is reviewed on p 112).

Gaye’s adoration of his then wife Jan, half his age, oozes through every pore of his ’76 serenade. He’d met her while recording ’73’s Let’s Get It On, and if I Want You isn’t the nonpareil bedroom classic that album was, it’s pretty close. Chiefly conceived by Leon Ware and kind of co-opted by the increasingly reclusive Marvin, there’s enough ecstasy in the title song and “Come Live With Me, Angel” to keep the fillers afloat. Now over two discs with original masters, outtakes, single mixes, alternate vocals and a 28-page booklet (Ernie Barnes’ cover painting is a joy), it’s summer, it’s seduction, it’s 2am, it’s sunlight on water.

Any room at the ’80s revival for the pseuds and wallflowers of Cherry Red Records? One suspects not. These retrospectives are a predictable mixture of the label’s precious, infuriating and occasionally lovely bands, united by label visionary Mike Alway’s meticulous aesthetic.

Perspectives And Distortion is an Alway compilation from 1981 centred around what we might call an effete avant-garde, and spoiled by the lumbering quirks of Danielle Dax and Kevin Coyne.

Our Brilliant Careers harvests singles from 81-83, with the emphasis shifting to the wimpish indie that so influenced Sarah Records. Some nice moments from Everything But The Girl and the mightily jangly Fantastic Something.

A Fine Day… is more of the same from 83-85, anchored by Jane And Barton’s memorable, ingenuous song-poem “It’s A Fine Day”. A band called Grab Grab The Haddock, however, may stretch the patience of even the label’s feyest acolytes.