Razorcuts formed after Tim Vass discovered Alan McGee’s Living Room club. In the booklet accompanying the reissue of his band’s first album Storyteller, Vass says of the weekly London promotion that “The headline act would often be someone like The Membranes or Alternative TV, but it was the unknown support acts that blew me away: The Jasmine Minks, The June Brides, The Loft.”

Why don’t you have children? Why aren’t you married? Why don’t you own your own home? Why are you a failure? These are the societally enforced questions that, as a 34-year-old woman, Nadine Shah finds inescapable. Much like the rest of us. When talking to friends who also considered themselves “non-achievers”, she realised something was very wrong.

Orange Crate Art makes most sense in the context of Van Dyke Parks’s solo career rather than that of Brian Wilson’s. For the former it was preceded by Tokyo Rose, an orchestrated set tackling the intersections of American-Japanese cultural and socio-political relations. All the way back to his debut album, 1967’s Song Cycle, Parks has created albums with American signifiers as their pegs.

John Lee Hooker’s recording career began on Friday 3 September 1948. He’d attracted the attention of the Kiev-born Bernard Besman, who was in Detroit after his family moved there in 1926 following five years in London’s East End. By the 1940s Besman, who played piano, was a veteran of dance bands and also worked as a booker. In 1946 he began working with records.

Music, as the sociologist Simon Frith long ago pointed out, is “an experience of placing: in responding to a song we are drawn, haphazardly, into affective emotional alliances with the performer and with the performer’s other fans”. Music makes you feel things, it’s about shared emotional experiences. And while, since the invention of the Walkman, those experiences are possible in the isolation of one’s own headphones, nothing can begin to touch the communal concert experience.

There’s something wrong with the picture above. It’s the sleeve of a French EP issued in August 1966 credited to a surly looking band called “Them”. The chap standing in the middle has what appear to be bullet holes in his shirt, but where’s the band’s frontman and main songwriter Van Morrison?

Ghana was visited by two British musicians in the early Eighties. One was Mick Fleetwood, who recorded the Visitor album in Accra during January and February 1981. The other was Brian Eno, who came to the country in late 1980 to attend the National Festival of Arts and Culture (NAFAC). While in Ghana, he also produced The Pace Setters, the first and only album by local band Edikanfo.

“Collector of the Light” is based around what sounds like a treated bass guitar. As the neck is moved up and down, multiple notes are plucked at once. The instrument’s sound is subaquatic, wobbly. Over this, a distant, echoey voice sings of being the “collector of light”, restoring dreams and “silver points of wonder”. Atmospherically and structurally, a parallel is the 1968 13th Floor Elevators’ single “May the Circle Remain Unbroken”.

Outside his home country Madagascar, Damily was first heard via a couple of tracks on the 2004 French compilation album Tsapiky, Panorama D'une Jeune Musique De Tulear, an overview of the tsapiky dance music of the south-west of the island. He’d moved to France in 2003. His first internationally issued full-length album, Ravinahitsy, followed in 2007. Since then, there’s been three more albums: the last of which was 2018’s Valimbilo.

After C19 delays theartsdesk on Vinyl is back. My initial policy, reckoning that new vinyl would dry up under COVID conditions, was to do regular lockdown mini-editions with the material already set aside here, until it ran out. That didn’t work out. The vinyl, to my surprise, kept on coming. Global crisis be damned! A backlog grew! Thus, theartsdesk on Vinyl 57 is a catch-up on the past couple of months. Due to these factors, a few more records I’d like to have covered were missed and a couple I should have covered this time are held back until June.