Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band - Gorilla (1967)

Vivian Stanshall would have been 68 this week if he was still with us, so let's salute the great man by digging out the Bonzos' debut LP and reveling in all its gloriously silly and surprisingly influential absurdity.

Gorilla probably isn't their best album (I'd call it a dead heat between The Donut In Granny's Greenhouse and Tadpoles for that particular accolade), but it's a great snapshot of their curious roots, sending up while also celebrating their obvious love of trad jazz, music hall and vaudeville.

Despite being a comedy band with anachronistic musical tastes, the Bonzos' influence has cropped up in all manner of strange places over the intervening years, from Jarvis Cocker's stage moves to The Fast Show's Jazz Club to Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells to Iggy Pop's New Values LP.

The Bonzos' most obvious debtors remain the Monty Python crew, with Michael Palin, Eric Idle and Terry Jones working with them on the TV show Do Not Adjust Your Set, where the band's love of satire and surrealism blended perfectly into the mix during the show's 18-month run, which ended just prior to the Flying Circus opening its doors in October 1969..

But their original big break came courtesy of the Beatles, who invited the Bonzos to perform Death Cab For Cutie in the Magical Mystery Tour, which was broadcast by the BBC on Boxing Day 1967. It's well worth watching the Bonzos' cameo again - and not just to see where Jarvis Cocker got most of his moves from. At least he acknowledged the point by including Stanshall in the video for Do You Remember The First Time.

It's no coincidence that both the Bonzos and Ivor Cutler appeared in the film, with their love of absurdity, non-sequiturs, word play and surrealism highly appealing to the Beatles as a lighter British take on the kind of more literary experimentalism of people like Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs.

This humour even seemed to leak into the following year's White Album on tracks such as Bungalow Bill, Piggies, Rocky Raccoon, Why Don't We Do It In The Road, Everybody's Got Something To Hide and Savoy Truffle.

If the Bonzos' influence on the Beatles is up for debate, the reverse is less so, with 2 of Neil Innes' tracks on Gorilla - Equestrian Statue and Piggy Bank Love - sounding heavily indebted to the Fabs, particularly Paul McCartney. Both are satirical looks at small town life, not a million miles away from Eleanor Rigby or She's Leaving Home, but with humour replacing the pathos.

Innes' love of the Beatles (and perhaps his limitations as an excellent musical imitator rather than an innovator) would lead to McCartney producing their one major hit, I'm The Urban Spaceman, and ultimately to The Rutles.

However, Stanshall's tastes were rather more quixotic. Death Cab For Cutie is an Elvis pastiche set to sleazy rockabilly whle Look Out, There's A Monster Coming riffs on calypso while taking a rather prescient look at the plastic surgery culture we're awash with nowadays. They performed the song blacked up on Do Not Adjust Your Set, which may have been lampooning the Black and White Minstrel Show or may just be a horribly dated idea of humour. It's interesting that Innes seems to have refused to join in.

Big Shot is a jokey take on film noir, with horn players Rodney Slater and Roger Ruskin Spear indulging in a blast of hard bop reminiscent of Duke Ellington's Anatomy of a Murder soundtrack. Stanshall's artful way with words just about overcomes the silliness of it, though the way the protagonist lusts over Hotsie's "enormous boobs" clearly hit a chord with a young Kenny Everitt.

Jollity Farm is an old 1920s music hall number that gets a run out and Mickey's Son and Daughter (a chirpy ditty about Mickey Mouse) would have been equally at home on kids TV - you can see where the Beatles of When I'm 64 and Yellow Submarine would have found common ground here.

Jazz, Delicious Hot, Disgusting Cold is part mocking/part affectionate nod to the Bonzos' origins as a trad jazz band on the college circuit and Cool Brittannia is a swinging take on the Swinging Sixties, lasting less than a minute but still long enough to launch a flotilla of Tony Blair-era hyperbolic headlines.

Side 2 starts with The Intro And The Outro, with Stanshall's mock-posh tones introducing the band before spiralling into ever more unlikely guests ('looking very relaxed on vibes, Adolf Hitler.... nice!'). The Fast Show gang were obviously taking note and the idea also led to Stanshall getting the master of ceremonies role on Tubular Bells.

Music For The Head Ballet is a harpsichord instrumental that came with its own choreographed 'dance' moves and I'm Bored finds Stanshall swimming against the Summer Of Love vibes with a gloriously cynical take on self-indulgent ennui. Iggy Pop's 1979 song of the same name echoed the ideas with a garage rock facelift to similarly fine effect.

Throw into a handfull of brief sketches, including a cacophanous take on The Sound Of Music, and the result is 35 minutes of ludicrous fun. A little more of Innes' fine songwriting might have tipped the balance slightly away from a comedy album towards something with a little more mainstream appeal, but Gorilla has proved surprisingly durable nevertheless.

Seefeel - Seefeel (2011)

Such was my enthusiasm for Seefeel's 1993 debut LP, Quique, that I once spent five minutes of interview time trying to convince Noel Gallagher of its worth.

After listening to me rabbit on about how rather than the usual chords, solos or verse/chorus, the guitars were all sampled, phased and generally smothered in effects while being smeared around an ambient techno undercarriage and seasoned with a sprinkling of dub, Noel asked: 'So they're a shoegaze band?' He then tried to convince me of the charms of Grant Lee Buffalo's Fuzzy album - I don't think either of us came away convinced.

Noel's reaction was far from unusual at the time and Seefeel's response to such negative pigeonholing (the rapturous enthusiasm that greeted Slowdive's early EP's in 1991 was a world away by 1994, with grunge and Britpop now in the ascendancy) was to abandon uber-indie imprint Too Pure to shack up with Warp and ingest a large amount of new label-mates Aphex Twin and Autechre's mangled electronica.

Their original USP of those molten motorik guitars got rather shoved to one side and their two subsequent LPs were far darker, more fractured affairs, lacking the blissful dreamy throb of Quique.

By the time I got to interview Seefeel when they supported Spiritualized in Manchester in late 1994, their was already a hint of tension in the air between the band. Guitarist/primary songwriter Mark Clifford did most of the talking while singer Sarah Peacock, bassist Daren Seymour and drummer Justin Fletcher sat on the other side of the room. It was all very civilized and Clifford was careful to parcel out praise to all corners but the joy seemed to be ebbing away.

Seefeel stopped touring after 1995's Succour LP and wound down altogether shortly after 1996's Ch-Vox, with Clifford heading off on his own as Disjecta and launching his Polyfusia label, while the rest of the band released a trio of albums as Scala.

Quique may not have sold many copies (in 2004, Clifford claimed total sales were around the 17,000 mark, approx 1,500 per year since its release) but it made a lasting impression with those who did hear it, even being used as a birthing soundtrack and a teaching aid for autistic children. A 2-CD reissue in 2007 drew glowing reviews and the band agreed to play a one-off gig to mark Warp's 20th anniversary, sparking the decision to record together again.

Last year's Faults EP has now been followed by a full album, with Peacock and Clifford drafting in former Boredoms drummer Iida Kazuhisa and bassist Shigeru Ishihara, previously known for making Game Boy-sampling hardcore gabba as DJ Scotch Egg and a sure sign that the band have no plans to head off in a more mainstream direction.

Having made the decision to move away from guitar-based music after Quique due to their dislike of the shoegaze label, Clifford has now thankfully returned to what made them stand out in the first place. Not that Seefeel sounds like Quique 2, far from it in fact. Those Aphex Twin and Autechre influences now feel fully absorbed into the band's sound, taking Clifford's guitar and Ishihara's bass in ever more bizarre and twisted directions. Perhaps the technology has just caught up with what Clifford wanted to do back in 1995.

The embryonic ambience that ran through Quique still lurks but is counterbalanced by endless variety of grittier, distorted, decaying sounds that have been wrung out these most conventional of rock instruments. Slow squalls of feedback and distortion unfurl like strange flowers, but the sometimes harsh noises never actually descend into ugliness, anger or frustration. The band still sound strangely dreamy, seemingly intent on seeing how far they can push this sound without it collapsing into unpleasantness.

Faults (revived from last year's EP), Rip-Run and Making all sound like tracks that were recorded for Quique and have spent the last 18 years stuck in an airing cupboard, slowly warping from the heat. Where songs would ebb and flow they now seem to swim in and out of focus, smeared with abstract blobs of sound.

Peacock has moved further forward in the mix than at any time during their original incarnation, even if you can rarely make out any words. When she distinctly sings the phrase 'Is everything clear?' on Airless you have to suspect her tongue is stuck firmly in her cheek. She also sounds more like Slowdive's Rachel Goswell than ever before, a comparison they'd have run a mile from back in 1994 but not such an issue nowadays.

Dead Guitars probably sets out the Seefeel 2011 agenda most clearly, with Clifford and Ishihara coercing their instruments into all manner of feedback, distortion, sighs, screechs and whispers, all set to Kazuhisa's plodding beat (much of his playing on the album is so minimalist it manages to make Mo Tucker sound like Lars Ulrich) and Peacock's drifting vocal, which never actually coheres into lyrics but still sweetens the pot considerably.

The longer tunes are peppered with 4 shorter song sketches that help to vary the mood. Album opener O-on One and companion pieces Step Up/Step Down are Clifford solo efforts, blowing up drifting clouds of feedback and echo-drenched sweetness. Gzaug starts out with strange itchy little sounds scurrying about, before drifting into Enoesque ambience.

The album closes with 3 long songs that grow ever more spaced out, giving the impression of slowly decaying into silence. Airless circles round on itself, Peacock's vocal failing to make anything clearer with each repetition, before Aug30 disconcerts with its mix of slow ambient washes and feedback squeals. Closer Sway takes a trip to the echo chamber, as Clifford's swerving guitar zigzags through Peacock's hazy sighs and Ishihara's distorted bass throb. Those itchy little sounds from Gzaug return before it slowly descends into a crackling buzz, sounding like those guitars have finally died after all.

This feels like the album Seefeel should have made after Quique. It may have taken 18 years to get there but it's well worth the wait.

Ashra - New Age Of Earth (1976)

Manuel Gottsching was the closest krautrock had to a guitar hero (the concept was considered a bit too old hat, a bit too American) but possibly his finest album is virtually all synthesiser based.

New Age Of Earth was his eighth official LP, recorded in the spring/summer of 1976 when he was still only 23, and showcases a man bathed in deep contentment - rarely has music sounded more peaceful, more blissful than this.

Having formed Ash Ra Tempel in 1970 as a teenage prodigy with Klaus Schulze and Hartmut Enke, Gottsching spent much of the early Seventies creating fearless krautrock epics, including their fabulously OTT self-titled 1971 debut LP and 1973's collaboration with Timothy Leary (Seven Up).

Ashra started out as a solo project after Ash Ra Tempel fizzled out as a group, with 1974's Inventions For Electric Guitar released under his own name inbetween.

Gottsching decided to follow up the epic guitar trance-outs of Inventions... by switching his focus to keyboards, completely abandoning the kosmiche wildness of his ART days for a more measured melodic approach.

New Age For Earth may be a terrible album title (naming LPs was never his strong point) but this is an underrated ambient masterpiece that deserves to sit alongside Cluster's Zuckerzeit, Popol Vuh's In Den Garten Pharaos and Eno, Roedelius and Moebius's After The Heat.

The Peter Baumann-era Tangerine Dream had become a major influence at this point, but with a warmer sound to replace the grandiosity (sometimes slipping into emotional sterility) that permeates some of Edgar Froese's work.

Opener Sunrain is Gottsching's first foray into the proto-electronic trance sound that he would later fully explore on 1984's E2-E4. By far the liveliest track on the album, undulating synth lines weave mesmerically to create a lush sonic landscape reminiscent of early Orbital.

Listening to Ocean Of Tenderness feels like slipping into a hot bath at the end of a long day, massaging your temporal lobes to perfection. After a long intro of bubbling and drifting synths, a gentle but insistent guitar rhythm slips quietly into the scene to propel you along. When a Hawaiin guitar drifts in around the eight-minute mark you may find your toes starting to tingle with pleasure.

Deep Distance is more playful, again built around the gentle but insistent pull of a simple guitar motif, with dreamy melodies drifting in and out over the top.

Gottsching's interest in Tangerine Dream is most blatant on closing track Nightdust, a beautiful 21-minute drift through space that meanders like TD at their most light-hearted, featuring no recognisable guitar at all until the final three minutes.

Originally released as an Ash Ra Tempel LP on short-lived French label Isadora in late 1976, New Age Of Earth was soon picked up by Virgin Records and re-released under the Ashra moniker the following year. With punk now flavour of the month, it's not surprising that the LP didn't get the attention it deserved in the UK.

Gottsching's time with Virgin was also to prove an unhappy experience. Three further Ashra albums followed of diminishing quality, with the German announcing his decision to retire from the record business following 1980's Belle Alliance, preferring to focus on providing music for fashion industry events and producing other bands.

He'd had trouble with record companies before after he'd attended Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser and Gille Lettman's infamous 1973 acid party recording sessions, where musicians were offered drugs in exchange for recording tracks.

The sessions were then edited down and released in a series of five Cosmic Jokers album during 1974, with the musicians photos appearing on the album covers despite none of them being approached for permission. Gottsching only found out about this when he heard one of the LPs playing in a record shop and asked the bemused staff behind the counter what they were listening to.

Thankfully he relented and returned from his self-imposed exile in 1984 to release E2-E4 (three years after he recorded it) but his distaste for the industry meant he failed to fully capitalise on the massive influence this remarkable LP had on the more ambient end of the techno scene. Steve Hillage seemed to gratefully step in to take the spot of scene elder stateman with his System Seven project but the position should rightfully have been Gottsching's.

Not that the man himself seems to be complaining. His album releases have been few and far between since his 1970s heyday but Gottsching continues to play live sporadically when an offer intrigues him. Listening to New Age Of Earth, he sounds like a man too busy enjoying life to waste it on regrets.

The Young Gods - Play Kurt Weill (1991)

A post-industrial rock band draw on folk, heavy metal and classical music - much of it bacon sliced through an early sampler - while covering the songs of innovative socialist composer Kurt Weill in German and English. I guess 'Play Kurt Weill' was never going to be The Young Gods' breakthrough record.

Coming from Switzerland, it probably all made perfect sense to the band themselves. Their homeland has a long history of folk and classical music, and when they started out in 1985 metal bands such as Krokus, Celtic Frost and Hellhammer represented the country's most recent musical exports.

Taking a more new wave-orientated approach, The Young Gods rejected guitars in favour of the sampler and just as Switzerland has no unifying language, with French, German and Italian all commonly spoken, they decided to mix it up when it came to their lyrics.

Despite being associated with the post-industrial genre best known for coruscating, brutal sounds welded to fierce rhythms, and having lifted their name from a song on the Swans' charmingly titled Raping A Slave EP, The Young Gods thankfully infused their music with a sly sense of humour - as highlighted by the cover of Gary Glitter's Hello, Hello, I'm Back Again (retitled Did You Miss Me) from their 1987 debut album.

Play Kurt Weill was the band's third album, which appeared two years after they had performed the songs on stage at a tribute concert held in Switzerland.

The belated decision to record them seems to have resulted from original keyboardist Cesare Pizzi's decision to quit the band in favour of a job in IT in the wake of second album L'Eau Rouge. Given the richly ferocious weirdness of the band Pizzi had created with gravelly vocalist Franz Treichler, this unlikely career switch must rate up their with James Williamson abandoning Iggy Pop to design computer chips.

When Pizzi quit in 1989 he was replaced by the band's sound engineer, Alain Monod, but having created much of the band's sound to date, songwriting seemingly ground to a halt.

Play Kurt Weill is a stop-gap album in truth while the band work out how to write songs together and sounds like the end of the Pizzi era rather than the beginning of a new one. On the MySpace site for the Ludan Dross alias he occasionally performs under, Pizzi claims he was 'present' on the first three Young Gods albums, though he had been out of the band for two years by the time Plays... was released.

Presumably Pizzi was heavily involved in arranging the songs for the original concert but the only mention he gets on the album itself is in the 'Thanks to' section on the inner sleeve, where he appears 18th on a list of 19 people. It seems safe to say he and Treichler weren't on the friendliest of terms at that stage.

Whatever the troubled genesis of the album, it's a surprisingly strong piece of work. The band clearly respect Weill (pictured left), whose Threepenny Opera with Bertolt Brecht had caused a major stir across Europe in 1928 with its songs about thieves, prostitutes, corrupt policemen, killers and beggars.

However, that doesn't stop them from taking a hammer to the melody and meter of the songs, conjuring up their own arrangements that restore the darkness to the likes of Mackie Messer (Mack the Knife) and Swing Low, which have been covered a thousand times in a swinging jazz fashion, losing much of the true meaning along the way.

Side one begins with a run of three songs from The Threepenny Opera, starting with Prologue which Weill and Brecht had themselves adapted from John Gay's 1728 work, The Beggar's Opera, and Treichler barks out through a megaphone over ominous drones and samples of crowds booing and cheering.

Salomon Song starts with a fairground organ and Treichler rolling his Rs as he sings in German about the prostitute Jenny's rejection of mankind's lust for glory before the chorus bounces in full of cavernous bass and swirling orchestral samples.

Macker Messer chops up hard rock samples into strange shapes before charging into the chorus on the back of a double bass drum kick. You couldn't further from Louie Armstrong's take on the song - this shark really is baring his teeth.

Speak Low, which comes from Weill's time on Broadway, is mutated into towering twisted techno, Treichler switching to English to deliver the lyric with real pathos. The moment when he moans 'Tomorrow is near/ tomorrow is here/ always too soon' before a massive landslide of sound overwhelms you both reinvents the song and cuts it back to its original core at the same time.

Side two starts with Alabama Song, best known by many from The Doors' cover on their debut album. Jim Morrison made it sound like a night on the town in search of whiskey and women but The Young Gods take it to a darker place, filled with addiction and desperation rather than fun.

The music is transformed into a strange, sickly oompah waltz and when Treichler growls 'Show me the way to the next little girl' as a roll of thunder looms through the speakers you want to alert the authorities immediately. The chorus eventually arrives nearly two and a half minutes in as Treichler howls at the Alabama Moon about blotting about his pain with drink and women.

Seerauber Jenny marks a return to The Threepenny Opera and German lyrics, with the disillusioned heroine dreaming of a warship sailing into harbour to obliterate all her oppressors. The band pull out all the stops for this one, starting with another strange oompah waltz that disintegrates into explosions before military drums, a plucked bass, a spidery violin and mournful horns soundtrack the destruction.

Overture is an unexpectedly laidback instrumental, with sitar and tablas entwining with slow drones to leave the listener slightly non-plussed but pleased nontheless.

Finally, September Song maintains the mellow mood with Treichler capturing the loss and regret beautifully. Following in the footsteps of Bing Crosby and Lou Reed, among many others, isn't easy but the autumnal vibe rounds off the album nicely.

Needless to say, Plays Kurt Weill didn't sell by the bucketload and The Young Gods moved in a more commercial direction for their next LP, 1992's TV Sky, which smoothed off some of their more interesting edges but won them a US audience.

The band are still going today, having experimented with orchestras, ambient and even acoustic guitars along the way, but The Young Gods Play Kurt Weill remains an underappreciated gem in their back catalogue. By the way, is it just me or does Kurt Weill really look like Roy 'Chubby' Brown?

Elvis Presley - Elvis' Christmas Album (1970)

Glitzy, ostentatious, overindulgent and thoroughly warped by the clammy hand of commercialism - Elvis and Christmas go together rather well.

Listening to Elvis inevitably comes with an unfortunate dash of irony - he's just been lampooned too many times for both his fashion excesses and singing style not to seem slightly cartoonish. But cut through all the hubris and the man still had a glorious voice. Tender, raucous, pleading, defiant, playful, devout - it's all there.

Elvis' Christmas Album originally came out in October 1957 and featured a religious and a secular side. Despite the controversy just a year earlier when the Ed Sullivan show would only broadcast pictures of Elvis from the waist up, his choice of traditional songs such as Silent Night and Oh, Little Town Of Bethlehem caused scarcely a stir.

The same could not be said for his cover of White Christmas, however, which composer Irving Berlin lambasted as a 'profane parody', despite the fact that Elvis' version drew heavily on The Drifters' take on the song, which had come out three years ealier.

Berlin (a Russian Jew) rated White Christmas as one of his finest works, reportedly telling his secretary in 1940: "I want you to take down a song I wrote over the weekend. Not only is it the best song I ever wrote, it's the best song anybody ever wrote." 

The public certainly agreed - Bing Crosby's version has now sold north of 50million copies, making it the most popular single of all time. Though a few of those may have been by people simply determined to stop Achy Breaky Heart from taking that particular accolade.

Elvis' Christmas Album was a solid seller at the time but it didn't get the cash registers jingling at full pace until 13 years after its originally release when RCA Camden put out a budget version that ditched the 4 gospel songs (Peace In The Valley, I Believe, Take My Hand Precious Lord and It's No Secret), added the 1966 single If Every Day Was Like Christmas and then padded out the running order with the 1970 B-side Mama Liked The Roses, a maudlin song about his dead mother than isn't in any way festive.

Despite the reduction from 12 to 10 songs and the rather slapdash way it was put together, the RCA Camden reissue proved massively popular, going on to sell 9million copies.

As well as finishing with the gloomy Mama Liked The Roses, the LP also starts with a cover of Ernest Tubbs' 1949 country hit, Blue Christmas. However, Elvis and the Jordanaires gave this tale of pining for a loved one at Christmas a few rock'n'roll embellishments that hint of good times just around the corner. If you want a gloriously maudlin version of Blue Christmas, head straight for Low's Christmas LP.

Silent Night is another song previously cover by Crosby, and Elvis gives it a beautifully devout reading, his voice at its most softly angelic.

Following the controversial take on White Christmas, Elvis decided the time had finally come to really rock out with Santa Claus Is Back In Town, one of two original numbers on the album. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who had previously supplied him with Jailhouse Rock and Don't, as well as writing Hound Dog for Big Moma Thornton, apparently knocked the song together in minutes in the studio and Elvis rips through it gleefully, revelling in the sly innuendo lurking in the lyrics.

I'll Be Home For Christmas is yet another tune popularised by Crosby, particularly hitting a note with servicemen based overseas and their families. Twelve months after releasing his own version, Elvis was drafted into the army himself.

Side 2 starts with If Every Day Was Like Christmas, a towering slice of smaltz given a Phil Spector-style Wall Of Sound production job that betrays the fact that it was recorded nine years later than most of the other songs.

Here Comes Santa Claus (Right Down Santa Claus Lane) is a jaunty take on an old Gene Autry hit from 1947, Elvis again tipping his stetson to his old country heroes.

A respectful take on Oh, Little Town Of Bethlehem is followed by a perky new number, Santa, Bring My Baby Back (To Me), written by Claude Demetrius and Aaron Schroeder, the latter of which also wrote It's Now Or Never, A Big Hunk O'Love and the theme tune to Scooby-Doo.

Despite Mama Liked The Roses providing a slightly odd finale, Elvis' Christmas Album still nags you into repeated plays. It's less than 25 minutes long but still manages to cover rock'n'roll, country, blues, traditional seasonal songs and some old-school crooning. Just like that tin of Quality Street you've got in for the holidays, it's hard not to keep dipping in. After all, if you accidently pick a Toffee Penny you can soon follow it with a Strawberry Cream to get rid of the taste.

Slade - Slade In Flame (1974)

Flame is one of those great moments in cinema that really shouldn't work but does, like Ben Kingsley's gangster turn in Sexy Beast or Tom Cruise as the bitter and neurotic author of 'Seduce and Destroy' in Magnolia.

Those hirsute purveyors of blunderbuss glam rock starring in a gritty kitchen sink drama in the tradition of Billy Liar, Taste Of Honey and Kes? If you haven't seen the film then it probably sounds like a particularly fanciful Reeves & Mortimer sketch.

But then it's easy to forget what big stars Slade were by the end of 1974. After a three-year run during which they had 12 Top 5 hit singles in succession, they were just about the biggest band in the country.

Their manager Chas Chandler (the former Animals bassist and Jimi Hendrix manager) decided making a film was the next step, after all it hadn't done The Beatles or Elvis any harm. Well, The Beatles anyway.

They must have known The Who were turning their 1969 rock opera Tommy into a film with Ken Russell at the helm, and perhaps they saw this as an opportunity to earn a little gravitas and stretch themselves.

Social realism probably didn't seem that odd a choice with the TV popularity of Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads? and the success of 1973's That'll Be The Day, in which David Essex had taken the chance to prove he was more than just a pop pretty boy by starring alongside Ringo Starr in the tale of an aspiring rock star.

The 1974 follow-up, Stardust, took a slightly more jaundiced view of fame, with Essex ending up a bloated, over the hill star wasting his life hanging around in a castle with Adam Faith.

To an extent Flame seems to amalgamate many of the ideas from both That'll Be The Day and Stardust with its tale of the fall and rise of a band, their dreams and friendships steadily ground down by the venal characters of the music business.

The band all make a decent fist of acting, particularly Noddy Holder (Stoker) and drummer Don Powell (Charlie), with guitarist Dave Hill (Barry) just appearing to play himself and bassist Jim Lea (Paul) tending to stick to the background.

The whole film also captures the incidental details of the early 1970s brilliantly - all battered, smoke-filled nightclubs, bad fringes, bushy facial hair and muddy fabrics.

The scenes shot outside in Sheffield are full of post-industrial decline, with dirty canals, pigeon lofts, closed factories and neglected terrace streets that make The Full Monty look like it was shot in Manhattan.

Despite some knockabout humour along the way, the film ends on a decidedly downbeat note as the the band split up unable to deal with the hassles any more.

Flame came out in February 1975, just a month before Tommy, and many of Slade's young fans were left pretty baffled, forcing the band to repeatedly assure crowds that they didn't actually hate each other during the subsequent tour.

The album Slade In Flame had come out four months earlier, with the gatefold inner sleeve providing a teaser for the film with a series of stills.

The band signalled their intention to experiment with opener How Does It Feel?, which starts as a piano ballad before the horns and guitars roll in, with a nice bit of flute playing thrown in for good measure. It's a good song but not really what most Slade fans were after at the time. When they released it as a single to mark the film opening, it only reached No.15, their worst chart placing for four years.

Not that Slade In Flame deviates too much from the template elsewhere. Horns feature on a few songs and there's a sax solo on Standin' On The Corner but the songs still stomp along and the choruses are still rousing.

Holder's voice really is a remarkable thing, both high pitched and gruff at the same time. He belts through the likes of Them Kinda Monkeys Can't Swing and OK Yesterday Was Yesterday leaving you wondering how he didn't blow his voicebox out.

So Far So Good brings to mind Oasis's Roll With It, with an mid-paced anthemic tune about taking success in your stride, and Far Far Away celebrates life on the road, managing to smuggle the lines 'I've had a a red light off the wrist/ Without even being kissed' onto the radio.

Considering the cynical trajectory of the plot, the band never sound melancholy or bitter. Them Monkeys... is about the snake-tongued double-dealers of the music business but seems to celebrate more than despise them, and This Girl starts by bemoaning a woman's untrustworthiness before Noddy comes to the lascivious conclusion that he should give her a call.

The public's perception of Slade nowadays is mainly coloured by Merry Christmas Everybody, which has been jamming seasonal jollity in our ears for the last 37 years, leaving the rest of their career deep in its shadow - including five other No.1s and a further ten Top 10 hits.

But you shouldn't underestimate the influence of Slade on Oasis, a fact partly acknowledged by their cover of Cum On Feel The Noize.

Another band inspired by the boys from the Black Country were Kiss, with Gene Simmons admitting: "The one we kept returning to was Slade. We liked the way they connected with the crowd, and the way they wrote anthems. We wanted that same energy, that same irresistible simplicity, but done US-style."

Despite their influence, it seems a strange twist of fate that most of Slade's career has now been largely forgotten due to a Christmas single. Still, the royalty cheque must ease the pain when it arrives in January.

Delaney & Bonnie & Friends - Motel Shot (1971)

It was the presence of Gram Parsons and Bruce Botnick (engineer/producer for Love, The Doors, Buffalo Springfield etc) on the credits that drew me to have a £2.99 punt on Motel Shot.

The Eric Clapton connection had previously put me off checking out Delaney & Bonnie, and I must confess that my prior knowledge of the duo largely consisted of the 1979 bust-up between Bonnie and Elvis Costello, when the nerdy English rocker made some incredibly offensive remarks about James Brown and Ray Charles, resulting in a slap across the chops from Ms Bramlett and being chucked against a wall by one of Stephen Stills's road crew.

Bonnie's career was on the slide by this point but she'd been feted by bigger stars than Costello in her day, with her former husband Delaney Bramlett a magnet for fellow musicians even if mainstream success largely eluded him.

Clapton was a particularly keen cheerleader for Delaney & Bonnie, insisting that they were better than his own band Blind Faith when the couple supported them on tour in 1969 and later joining them as a sideman on the road, as captured on the 1970 D&B live album On Tour With Eric Clapton.

Delaney co-wrote six of the songs on Clapton's self-titled debut solo album of the same year and also joined him in hanging around with George Harrison around the time All Things Must Pass was being recorded, apparently teaching the former Beatle how to play slide guitar.

Chumming up with Clapton came with a cost, though, when he pinched Delaney & Bonnie's backing band (keyboardist Bobby Whitlock, bassist Carl Radle and drummer Jim Gordon) for his own Derek & The Dominoes project. Still, they got off lightly compared to Harrison, who ended up losing his wife to Clapton.

Whitlock and Radle returned to the fold for Motel Shot, along with a host of famous friends keen to help out on an album recorded in one long night at Botnick's house in Los Angeles.

The deal was that you had to show up by 7pm when the door was locked and everyone got on with capturing whatever happened during the night.

Presumably Botnick had a pretty big living room because attendees included Buddy Miles, Joe Cocker, Jim Keltner, Dave Mason, Duane Allman, Eddie James, Leon Russell, Jay York, Sandy Konikoff, John Hartford, Kenny Gradney and Ben Benay, along with the previously mentioned Parsons, Whitlock and Radle.

Delaney's mother's Iva Bramlett was also present, which may have at least moderated everyone's behaviour and helped ensure 12 good takes were safely in the can come sunrise.

The thinking behind Motel Shot probably stemmed from the reputation Delaney & Bonnie had for being a better live act than they were in the studio. Their three previous studio albums had all sold in moderate amounts and they were considerably more respected by their peers than by the public at large.

Motel Shot is designed to reflect the kind of loose, joyful sessions musicians enjoy together after the show when the pressure is off and they just want to have fun together.

In Delaney & Bonnie's case that meant running through some old gospel numbers, mixing in some country and blues, and then sprinkling in a few originals just for good measure.

Admittedly half the fun here is trying to spot the famous guests - Cocker's croak on Talkin' About Jesus, Duane Allman's slide guitar on Sing My Way Home, Parsons drifting in the mix on Rock Of Ages - but Motel Shot definitely isn't about big stars stepping up to make guest appearances.

The decision not to record the album in a regular studio is also reflected in the choice of instruments, with Leon Russell playing a central role on piano, while acoustic guitars and tambourines are pretty much the only other instruments.

Bonnie later revealed that there weren't even any proper drums at the session, with Buddy Miles improvising with a large suitcase he found lying around while Cocker took to whacking the side of the piano. On Going Down The Road (Feeling Bad), Bonnie, Parsons and Allman provided percussion by slapping their thighs.

Side one is dominated by gospel, particularly the opening trio of Where The Soul Never Dies, Will The Circle Be Unbroken and Rock Of Ages, the first two of which sound like everyone in the room had been handed a tambourine and a Salvation Army instruction booklet. The vibe is rough, simple and soulful with everyone obviously giving it their all.

Long Road Ahead was written by Delaney with Carl Radle, but the testifying tone and mass vocals on the chorus fit in perfectly with what's come before.

Faded Love changes the mood by beautifully transforming Bob Willis's country lament into a soulful piano ballad with a stunning vocal from Delaney. But he doesn't keep everyone waiting on the sidelines for long, and the full-on gospel call and response of Talkin' About Jesus, which lasts nearly seven minutes, soon has the aisles rocking.

Side two heads off in a bluesy direction, with a great cover of Robert Johnson's Come On In My Kitchen and a so-so take on Chuck Willis's Don't Deceive Me (Please Don't Go), which sadly loses the barrelhouse piano and Bonnie sings in a husky voice that sounds a little Janis Joplin lite rather than her best Deep South soul tones.

From this point, Russell takes a deserved break after sterling work on the piano and Delaney's experiences hanging around with Harrison come to the fore. Never Ending Song Of Love is crammed with acoustic guitars and massed vocals not a million miles away from the Beatles' All You Need Is Love or Harrison's My Sweet Lord. The result was Delaney & Bonnie's biggest hit single in the US.

Sing My Way Home is equally laidback and joyful with slide guitar from Allman adding nicely to the atmosphere. Going Down The Road (Feeling Bad) brings back Russell on piano, along with the gospel feel, so it ends up sounding considerably more upbeat than the song title might suggest.

Closing song Lonesome And A Long Way From Home was written by Bonnie and Russell but had already appeared on Clapton's solo album of the previous year. They reclaim it as their own in a laidback, soulful manner with beautiful fiddle from John Hartford.

The album ends with the words 'Y'all come back soon' and the closing of a door as Botnick concludes a fine night's work.

Delaney & Bonnie were riding on a high at this point, with the Carpenters also enjoying massive global success in the same year with the Delaney-penned Superstar (which Sonic Youth later also covered on a rather splendid red vinyl single). However, it didn't last long. Motel Shot failed to sell, Russell and Jim Keltner left to join Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs & Englishmen tour and then Delaney & Bonnie's marriage foundered, leading to a split in 1972.

Both went on to experience problems with drink and unsurprisingly, considering the heartfelt gospel aspects to Motel Shot, both went on to become born-again Christians. Delaney died in 2008 but Bonnie is still going strong, which ensures Elvis Costello continues to mind his manners if nothing else.