Off-topic Sunday on a Saturday. I heard a version of this song on the excellent free music stream Ichiban Rock n Soul from WFMU and immediately stopped the work I should have been doing and investigated. The first path led me to this version by Billie Davis, recorded for the German TV Show Beat Club (which featured in an earlier blog post about The Monks). The presenter, who looks like a juvenile Rwandan mountain gorilla with a shaved face, is a British DJ called Dave Lee Tra

How long did it take to get that sound? asks American Bandstand host, Dick Clark. 'I hate to even say,' replies Electric Prunes frontman, James Lowe. Immediately my mind is thinking of the crack-addled Happy Mondays trying to record an album in Barbados for months on end, or Guns n' Roses taking 13 years to finish an LP no one wanted. 'About two or three hours. It was quite an involved process.' Ha! That sums up why I love 60s garage punk, and this tune, that veers into very

Off-topic Sunday! There is so much sex in this 1969 Italian recording of Tina, Ike and the Ikettes, that my laptop started breathing heavy. Could those mini dresses be any shorter? Could that hair be any straighter? Could those go-go moves be any tighter? And that finale! Then there's the backing band. They would fail a drugs test from 300 yards. Ike is wearing a helmet of human hair and a physiognomy of pure, only here-for-the-paycheck boredom, despite playing behind a line-

Off-topic Sunday! Yes, it's back. It's all been motorbikes, motorbikes, motorbikes around here for a while, but I found this shocking 1960s documentary online and had to share it. It's not the complete film, but it's a sobering fly-on-the-wall depiction with unprecedented access to a US cult, led by a deranged medical practioner that enslaved women forcing them to, well, dress like women. Thank god views like that have changed over the last 50 years and the American patriarch