Coming up with a comprehensive history of the music that led up to Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88”?widely regarded as the first true rock’n’roll record?is a virtually impossible task, but this compilation makes a damn fine stab at it. Concentrating heavily on the blues but also taking in country and bluegrass, jug bands, vaudeville, gospel and old-style R&B, this boxed set features exemplary sleevenotes, painstaking track remastering, and stunning covers. One hundred tracks including Leadbelly, Sonny Boy Williamson, Alberta Hunter, The Carter Family, Frank Crumit, and Little Richard spread across four CDs?soon to be available individually.

Crucial to the development of the “Canterbury Scene” and British progressive rock in the late ’60s, Soft Machine quickly developed into a semi-improvisational, jazzy avant-rock outfit. Featuring material recorded by several different line-ups, including the classic Dean-Ratledge-Hopper-Wyatt quartet as well as the short-lived, brass-augmented septet, Backwards (so-called because the tracks are presented in reverse chronological order) does not contain any exclusive material but does capture the band at its most creative. Several of the tracks suffer from questionable sound quality, but there’s no denying the warmth and energy of these performances.

If the story is true, Nilsson conceived of this album during his first acid trip. Working on what was ostensibly a children’s project freed this sometimes over-precocious maverick from his sardonic contrariness, resulting in a work of genuine warmth and humour.

Pitched to a well-lubricated ABC executive on a long-haul flight, The Point became an animated television feature narrated by Dustin Hoffman, eventually evolving into a West End stage show featuring ex-Monkees Davy Jones and Mickey Dolenz.

Completing the first cycle of Nilsson’s albums, within a year Nilsson Schmilsson had been recorded and a brand new career begun.

Recorded in 1963 but suppressed until now for needless legal reasons, this angelic album of 10 ballads represents Scott at his peak. His Kallman’s syndrome arrested his hormonal growth, so his voice is literally androgynous. With his troubled life, he has every right to self-pity in songs like “Why Try To Change Me Now?”; that he avoids it completely is testament to his artistry.

He is an outsider who seeks love (“They Say It’s Wonderful”), and when it comes (“I Didn’t Know What Time It Was”) trembling elation has never been captured better by a voice.

This record is vital.

Following the big star Third Album aka Sister Lovers, a fine example of the art of soul-baring with all veins showing, the ever contrary Alex Chilton decided that was his dry run at a proper solo disc. Recording with James Luther Dickinson and various peripheral Big Star alumni at the legendary Sam Phillips and Ardent Studios, Chilton gathered the pieces of his occasional forays into Tennessee bars and constructed a typically bizarre burnt offering.

This 1980 album, Chilton’s solo debut (unless you count 1975’s Bach’s Bottom, which you should), starts with a lazy version of KC & The Sunshine Band’s Florida funk epic “Boogie Shoes”. Thereafter, Chilton wanders further into the dark recesses of dirty disco during “My Rival”, a gloriously splenetic counter-attack delivered with a quill full of poisoned skewers. Big Star-like in places?”I’ve Had It” and “Hey! Little Child” were leftover morsels?Sherbert also dipped into spooked Southern country on Ernest Tubbs’ “Waltz Across Texas”, “No More The Moon Shines On Lorena” and the title track, which resurrects Hank Williams’ corpse and wakes it up with a blast of Spectorish noise.

Disc 2, Live In London, is a relic from the old Dingwalls daze, 1980 to be precise. Punchy, punky and patchy, it benefits from raw takes of Chilton’s old Box Tops hit “The Letter”, a blowsy “Train Kept A Rollin'” and the inevitable “September Gurls”, knocked out impromptu with a local pick-up crew. Eager for the recognition, but never keen to have his hem touched too hard, Alex Chilton remains an enigma. Which is why we love him, presumably.

PRINTS

STEP ACROSS THE BORDER

ALL RER

Three more in a series of Frith releases. Guitar Solos is an album of guitar solos that confound all received notions of guitar solos, whose limpid abstraction and furious determination mark an imaginary mid-point between Hendrix and John Cage. Step Across The Border is a film soundtrack to a “celluloid improvisation” located at the other end of the musical stratosphere to John Williams. Prints, meanwhile, is the most accessible of these offerings, a collection of rarities including an extraordinary version of Burt Bacharach’s “Trains & Boats & Planes”.

PARACHUTE

FREEWAY MADNESS

SNAPPER

The second of three tranches of three Pretty Things reissues in gold numbered limited editions begins with the group’s most celebrated album, SF Sorrow (1968), often cited as the first ‘rock opera’ and the model for The Who’s Tommy. It’s remarkable chiefly for its conceptual prescience. Parachute (1970) is a fair-to-middling concept album about city and country. Freeway Madness (1972) picks up where Parachute left off, and is about equal in quality. These albums, all three of which come with bonus tracks, are very much for fans.

Marmalade

KALEIDOSCOPE

BOTH CASTLE

Once they’d parted company with Brian Poole, the Tremeloes not only matched their beat output, they outstripped it. This selection will appeal to lovers of the Bee Gees or Paul and Barry Ryan. Hugely influenced by The Beatles, the Trems were more than mere copyists. “Willow Tree”, “You” and a version of “Good Day Sunshine” indicate the general direction. They played with the experimental mood of the era before going into cabaret, but their toytown psychedelia sounds great now.

Another entrant in the excellent Psych-Pop series, Marmalade (originally called Dean Ford And The Gaylords!) graduated from the cheesier pop side of the time into a pretty fair hippie act with CSN&Y leanings. Fixed somewhere between the irksome Dave Dee style and Badfinger, Marmalade did punk rock (“Hey Joe”) and freaked out politely in the manner of the Moody Blues. Tuneful and never too taxing, Kaleidoscope is a colourful summary of their fine cut preserve.

TRAVELOGUE

BOTH VIRGIN

Of all the post-punk industrial groups, The Human League were always the closest to pop. Their 1979 debut, Reproduction, remains musically futuristic but lyrically dwells on the past (“Almost Medieval”) and inadequacy (“Empire State Human”). Bonus tracks include the original “Being Boiled” single and the Dignity Of Labour EP.

Travelogue, released in 1980 and recorded before the departure of Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware to form Heaven 17/B.E.F., contains still highly pertinent commentaries on the increasing commodification of pop in “The Black Hit Of Space” and “WXJL Tonight”. Extras here include the “Holiday ’80” EP and the League’s brilliant foray into avant-disco, “I Don’t Depend On You.”

In the wake of Jam Master Jay’s murder, there have been effusive tributes to Run-DMC, and rightly so. These combative, dressed-down homies did knock down walls the way they did in the video for “Walk This Way”, establishing a strangely logical and enduring coalition between hip hop and heavy metal. They were also responsible for stripping away the degrading sequins’n’starsigns bullshit that hampered early rap. Their street-tough approach on “It’s Like That” reconnected rap with the sidewalks, while their minimalist backbeats established the early template for hip hop. Grandmaster Flash had been the last of the ’70s funky show people. Run-DMC was where it really started.

Cuts like “Sucker MCs”, “King Of Rock” and “Can You Rock It Like This?” were formidable exercises in muscle flexing and turntable technique, ripping the cut like no one else. “Peter Piper” was a brilliant piece of rap virtuosity, while “My Adidas” set the new sartorial tone.

Run-DMC were rap revolutionaries on various fronts. In 1987, at the height of their powers and having conquered MTV, they blew the Beastie Boys away on their joint UK tour. Yet, by 1988, as this collection demonstrates, they went into steep decline. There were other acts on the block?Eric B & Rakim were slicker, Public Enemy were dropping polemical bombs, NWA upped the gangsta ante. Meanwhile, Run-DMC gave us “Mary, Mary”. Their work was done and the world was done with them. They’d built the chassis for hip hop but it would be for others to provide the interior and upholstery. Cruelly, they were dispensed with, and the ’90s would prove a grim decade for the band. Run became suicidal, DMC battled alcoholism. Sadly, it’s taken Jam Master Jay’s death to remind us of Run-DMC’s achievements.

From the same Sub Pop stable as fellow Seattlites Nirvana, Mudhoney and Soundgarden, The Walkabouts’ black strain of elegiac country roots and avant folk immediately branded them sore thumbs among grunge contemporaries.

With string-laden moodscapes more akin to noir cinema, they found European ears more receptive, releasing often superb albums through Glitterhouse and others. The breadth of their appeal is highlighted by the guests here?R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, Mary (Madder Rose) Lorson, Brian Eno, the Warsaw Philharmonic?while the music, despite underselling classics Satisfied Mind (1993) and Setting The Woods On Fire (1994), captures perfectly their haunted experimentalism.

Not just the perfect antidote to the McCarthy witch-hunt era, Lenny Bruce destroyed the false moral majority. A jazz age counterculture hero, Bruce’s scattergun approach demolished smug ideas about race, sex and the politically-correct taboos we take for granted. His so-called ‘sick’ humour was the stand-up rap of its day?he took the N and F words and beat them to death with wit. His own life balancing on the edge, Bruce simply went further with berserk interior monologues.

This second volume of carefully improvised verbal mayhem includes “The Palladium”, which fuses dope, porn and disease into an abbatoir for scared cows.

Crazy and unique.

When the Aphex Twin consents to do a remix, only the na

REGATTA DE BLANC

ZENYATTA MONDATTA

GHOST IN THE MACHINE

SYNCHRONICITY

ALL UNIVERSAL (ON DUAL-LAYER SA-CD HYBRID)

Sting has been so jeered at, derided and reviled since going solo and amassing a fortune that, like one of the ecosystems to which he has drawn our attention, the global supply of bile is fast in danger of running out.

Sting has certainly become musically turgid and self-important in recent years. Yet none of this should retrospectively obscure the truth that The Police were an excellent band, their excellence either begrudged or taken for granted. Reviled by some for ripping off the punk-reggae hybrid initiated by the likes of The Clash or for bleaching their hair to obscure some dubious credentials, they were nonetheless responsible for some of the most effective, well-informed and silvery pop tunes of their, or indeed any other, era.

Bless old Joe, but when The Clash attempted reggae it was often like they were wearing lead boots. The Police prettily filtered through the lightness of reggae, lending their music a helium quality that elevated it to places their contemporaries could only envy. Meanwhile, they drew from punk its speed and economy. Outlandos d’Amour (1978) showcased hit singles “Roxanne”, “So Lonely” and “Can’t Stand Losing You”, but they peaked with 1979’s Regatta De Blanc, featuring “Message In A Bottle”, a faultless dose of existentialist pop, “The Bed’s Too Big Without You” and “Walking On The Moon”, both of which introduced heart-stopping air bubbles of dub into the pop mainstream.

By the end, Sting’s earnestness was weighing them down as he assumed the mantle of global pop star. But even 1983’s Synchronicity is worth having for “Every Breath You Take”, its obsessive menace misunderstood by Puff Daddy in his still-ubiquitous cover version.

Like their On The Floor At The Boutique mix disc from 2000, The Lo Fi Allstars’ AFT collection explores the diverse origins of their acid techno-rock. Similarly eclectic bands feature here, with alternative country chamber pop from Lambchop and neo-psychedelic indie from Mercury Rev snuggling up alongside the smooth urban soul of Bill Withers, funky hip hop from New Flesh, Balearic beats from AJ Scent and Detroit techno from Derrick May’s Rhythim Is Rhythim, all topped off with Al Wilson’s classic Northern Soul floor-filler, “The Snake”.

Like Lee Hazlewood, the smooth-toned country pop of Glen Campbell sounds more acceptable today than it ever did back in the ’60s, when the cultural battle lines were more rigorously drawn. At the core of his greatest work remain “Galveston”, “By The Time I Get To Phoenix” and “Wichita Lineman”, the most evocative trilogy of songs ever written around American place names. All came from the pen of Jim Webb and, without him, Campbell’s song selection was often less assured. But amid the schmaltz, there’s at least one more timeless classic in “Guess I’m Dumb”, probably the best non-Beach Boys song Brian Wilson ever wrote. Worth the price of entry for those four songs alone.

Townes Van Zandt spent much of his last decade revisiting the masterful odes to loss, melancholy and America’s frontier history he’d etched in his earlier career. Bloody vendettas (“The Hole”), death bed blues (“Lungs”) and elemental wonder (“Snowin’ On Raton”) are recreated with steely resolve at a solo 1994 Irish show. Five previously unreleased sides recorded in 1996, just before his death, including a rendition of Ewan MacColl’s “Dirty Old Town”, make this a Zandtophile’s delight.

This disc consists of 21 covers of Beatles songs by American soul and jazz artists from the Atlantic and Warner stables in the ’60s and early ’70s. The approaches vary from the emulative to the freely reinterpretive, but the abiding impression remains that much of what The Beatles recorded only made sense when done by them. Among the more successful efforts assembled here are covers by Aretha Franklin, King Curtis and The Meters, but the abiding question is “why?”