Backing their haunting, sub-gothic cover of Michael Carr’s ‘Man Of Mystery’ (recorded at the stroke of midnight at Abbey Road, just to heighten the effect) came something possibly darker than the Edgar Wallace Mysteries the A-side was used to soundtrack. Written by hitmakers Bill Crompton and Morgan Jones, ‘The Stranger’ evoked a parched and lonesome cowboy surveying a desolate prairie with a look of heightening despair, as he pondered the big existential questions. With its mystical drums and resonant bass blues topped by Hank Marvin’s typically bendy, slightly dry lead lines, it surpassed the previous B-side gold of ‘The Quartermaster’s Store’ (chugging flip of the unbeatable ‘Apache’) and retained its tight-lipped creators slightly unknowable air. A great double-header that helped sustain the Shadows early 60s chart run, although any notion that they the public no longer viewed them as Cliff Richard’s backing group would be put to bed by the incoming Beatles. Within a few years they putting in two panto stints a day together in Aladdin at the London Palladium.

There was a terrifyingly brutal impact to Killing Joke’s second single, whose pounding rhythmic blitz evoked the end of the world. The hard-edged, Ladbroke Grove-based disrupters were convinced nuclear annihilation was just around the corner – if anything the ominous groove of A-side ‘Wardance’ might help usher it in, abetted by the distortion on frontman Jaz Coleman’s half-ranting vocals and a bassline beamed in from another planet. Recorded in a tense session, with the band routinely screaming demands at untried engineer Phil Harding over the mixing desk, ‘Pssyche’ was its perfect bedfellow. Equally dense and unstinting, it addressed street tensions and a barrage of societal ills as Coleman’s paranoid musings coiled around Geordie’s slashing guitars, Youth’s driving figure and Big Paul Ferguson’s unconventional heavy-heavy drums. But there was nuance too. In the genuinely disturbing last verse’s evocation of Nazis, rapists and priests, Coleman offsets the startling accusation “You’d wipe out spastics if you had the chance” with a pungent disclaimer of Christian guilt. It cemented Killing Joke’s theatrical and threatening image, achieving the band’s brief of creating “sounds from a primeval world”.

Picking up the lyrical baton from Last Poets’ ‘When The Revolution Comes’, Gil Scott-Heron’s most celebrated number shovelled more grievances into a three-minute song than anyone had previously managed. Written as he watched a televised baseball game while studying at Lincoln University, he first laid it down on 1970’s live debut Small Talk At 125th And Lenox, accompanied by congas and bongos with a similar feel to the Last Poets. Re-recorded for 1971’s Pieces Of A Man with a band driven by the masterful rhythm section of Ron Carter and Bernard Purdie, it effortlessly married social commentary with song, directing a searchlight on the deteriorating conditions in US inner cities over Hubert Laws’ affecting flute. Scott-Heron’s no-nonsense proto-rap spat out half-digested TV commercials (Coca Cola, Ultra Brite, Xerox), cross-referenced Richard Nixon, Jackie Onassis, Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck, Steve McQueen and contrasted TV trivia with an incisive image of “pigs shooting down brothers on the instant replay”. Issued as the B-side of his brutal account of broken homes and drug addiction, ‘Home Is Where The Hatred Is’, the influence of this B-side can’t be overstated – its title adopted by political movements from the Arab Spring to Tahrir Square and Black Lives Matter, its sentiments blazing the way for conscious hip-hop, although its author would still bridle against being called ‘the godfather of rap’.

“The Weather Prophets were particularly good at putting out our best songs on B-sides,” observed main man Pete Astor in a 2024 interview with Louder Than War. While he cited his one-chord tale of the eternal showbiz hopeful ‘Chinese Cadillac’ (on the 12-inch flip of this single) as a case in point, ‘Joe Shmo And The Eskimo’ underlines it. Bruised after his band’s dalliance with Elevation (Alan McGee’short-lived label with WEA) effectively destroyed all the indie cred Astor’s first band The Loft had built up on Creation, the Weather Prophets’ second LP Judges, Juries & Horsemen found them flying by the seat of their leather pants, as the distorted, unshackled A-side proves. Its intimate B-side is the definition of a hidden gem. Relayed above a bare, simple Casio keyboard-sounding chord sequence, it’s left to Astor’s deflated croon and some lovely guitar fills to carry its high-stakes tale of a Las Vegas love affair in peril, highlighting his mastery of the bittersweet lyric. The seven-inch was also a steal, issued amid Creation’s run of limited edition 99p singles in the Doing It For The Kids charm offensive.

Aspiring rapper/producer Robert Diggs was still conflicted about his identity when he unleashed the 12-inch single that paved the way to the Wu-Tang Clan and hip-hop’s next dynasty. Having narrowly beaten an attempted murder charge in Ohio, and witnessed his cousin GZA (Gary Grice) issue his debut LP Words From The Genius earlier that year, Diggs’ sole focus was on wedging his foot in the door. While Tommy Boy were game, it was an inauspicious start. Trading as Prince Rakeem, the A-side was an enthusiastic, slightly goofball shower of fake modesty as Diggs complained about being irresistible to the fairer sex, a lyrical formula he extended to B-side ‘Sexcapades’ as he mused about how many ‘freaks’ he could bag in a week. Nonetheless, it hit harder, thanks to an early Easy Mo Bee beat that sampled Sly & The Family Stone and went heavy on low horns and churchy organ stabs. Despite ending with a tortuous acronym (“Power Equality Allah Cees Equality and that means P.E.A.C.E”) typical of the time, it also boasts the first lyrical reference to Wu-Tang. Issued in July 1991, the single bombed terribly and Tommy Boy soon cut him loose. But out of that adversity came the lightbulb opportunity to form the Clan and tear up the rap rulebook with a roughshod mix of boombap beats, vintage soul and kung-fu samples. It took just 16 months for the Wu-Tang Clan to appear, fully formed, with the self-issued ‘Protect Ya Neck’, the biggest sonic hint of what was to come surfacing on this maxi-single’s other B-side, the freestyle ‘Deadly Venoms’.

A duo from West-Flanders, Charles Dumolin and Freddy Demeyere scored European hits with soft-rockers ‘America’ and ‘Sing Sing’ straight off the bat. In tune with the piano-led symphonics of third single A-side ‘Angela’ – a desperate plea to their lover not to leave – it’s lovelorn B-side suggested she’d endured enough of their incessant whinging and left them in the lurch at Christmas. Driven by a winding organ refrain with a hint of ‘Nights In White Satin’ about it, ‘If You Love Me?’ settles into a slow-pulsing jam after its spoken word introduction, Dumolin’s quavering voice pleading for his lover to come back: “Days are long/Full of loneliness/Nights are burdens/And a cage.” And while it was as mawkish as the A-side, the sheer emotional intensity made it too sincere to doubt. Although the duo’s chart tenure proved short-lived, Dumolin went on to pen hits for Micha Marah, Ann Christy and Art Sullivan before transitioning into a sculptor. By the early 80s he was sharing his Ostend house with Marvin Gaye – where the Motown legend wrote his final hit ‘Sexual Healing’ – and even created the bronze statue of Gaye that resides in Ostend’s Casino-Kursaal.

A reluctant pop star who once told his horrified manager Simon Napier-Bell he wanted “the profile of a French Left Bank poet”, David Sylvian made the transition from a teenage pinup (in new romantics Japan) to a serious solo artist look easy. The vehicle that made it possible was 1984’s solo debut Brilliant Trees, a slippery, stark departure from his past that coincided with a period of intense self-questioning and private cocaine addiction. One of the songs that failed to make the cut was ‘Blue Of Noon’, a beautiful instrumental Sylvian omitted because he always conceived it as a vocal track. Nonetheless, he worked closely with pianist Ryuichi Sakamoto composing its busily changing jazzy score, the late keyboardist recording his parts live in the studio to the textured drums of Sylvian’s brother Steve Jansen and Wayne Braithwaite’s unobtrusive double bass. Belatedly issued on the flip of a key track from 1987’s elegant Secrets Of The Beehive, it’s a whirl of evocation that gets more fragmented and freeform in the final third as subtle Sakamoto synths ladle on the mystery. Sylvian may not play a single note on ‘Blue Of Noon’ but his ethereal spirit runs through it.

Crass’s radical, hard-line approach was epitomised by their first self-issued single. A-side ‘Reality Asylum’ – a mix of spoken word with Penny Rimbaud’s sinister musique concrete – was an outcast from their ‘Feeding Of The 5000 EP’ for Small Wonder, left in the cold when record plant workers refused to handle its blasphemous content. While Crass found another pressing plant willing to do the job, its impact on listeners – for many, the first time they’d heard an adult denouncing religion – would result in a police investigation that doubled as impromptu PR, alongside their extensive stencilling of London tube stations. Its impact was matched, pound for pound, by its thrillingly atonal B-side ‘Shaved Women’. Just as the A-side wasn’t punk as anyone knew it, nor was the flip’s twisted funk and machine-like industrial pulse, topped by an animated Eve Libertine screeching unfaltering repetitions of its title. A comment on how women were conditioned by capitalism to shave themselves to look attractive (not that long after French women who slept with Nazi occupiers were publicly shamed by the act), it remains musically discrete from much of Crass’s oeuvre, its angular guitar groove faded down midway to allow field recordings (shuffling trains?) to the fore. And although this single’s fold-out sleeve legend ‘Pay no more than 45p’ backfired when they forgot to factor VAT into the equation, its great Gee Vaucher collages remain indelible.

Proving himself one step ahead of the incoming goth pack, this B-side suggested John Cale was the Velvet Underground’s true agent of chaos (a theory supported by the relative prettiness of Reed’s songs on the last two Velvets albums). Based around a stark drum machine pulse, jerky Wurlitzer gasps and a descending staccato bassline, a very sinister, actorly, Welsh-sounding Cale (distorted in parts) regales listeners with an account of a tired Virgin Mary dealing with “the parasitic scream of whores” hailing from next door. A splintered, drawn-out exercise in slowly building menace that gradually loops back in on itself, it’s among the most outré of Cale’s already offbeat catalogue (reflecting his great comment to Can’s Irmin Schmidt: “I’m a professional musician, but at heart I’m an overstudied amateur”). A non-album outlier, Cale shuffled the song onto the B-side of US single ‘Mercenaries’, a studio version of his anti-war anthem from 1979’s Sabotage/Live set, but has largely left it alone since. Northampton’s dark destroyers Bauhaus immediately included it in their live set, the start of a love affair that found them putting it on the B-side of their cover of T. Rex’s ‘Telegram Sam’ just nine months after its original release.

Forever ranked as one of the greatest singles of all time, the US chart failure of ‘River Deep – Mountain High’ was a catalyst for Phil Spector to start withdrawing from the world. Years ahead of its time in merging of black and white pop aesthetics, its maximalist wall of sound cost the producer a whopping $22,000 to realise, so Spector was understandably livid that his magnum opus fell foul of what he saw as racial profiling at US radio stations. With both R&B and white stations largely refusing to play it, the single scraped into the Billboard charts at a lowly 88. Even success in Europe gave Spector no succour, who pulled the parent LP from US release in a further fit of pique. Having withstood his wildest orchestral arrangements for the A-side (albeit recording numerous vocal takes while “drenched with sweat”), B-side ‘I’ll Keep You Happy’ was a relative stroll for Tina Turner as she promised her man lifelong fidelity over honky tonkin’ pianos and jaunty brass fills. Spector had a well-publicised aversion to B-sides, often filling them with sappy instrumentals that few DJs would play, but Turner’s upfront voice transforms this dashed-out sounding runt into something with real pedigree. Incidentally, although credited, Ike is not featured on either side.

Having risen through the ranks of Wu-Tang Clan affiliates with guest spots on Gravediggaz’ 6 Feet Deep, Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s Return To The 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version and GZA’s Liquid Swords, Killah Priest made a deep impression with 1998’s sprawling, metaphysical 74-minute debut Heavy Mental. Backed by dark beats, lush strings and well-chosen soul samples from 4th Disciple (the RZA’s most able understudy), the spiritually-minded Priest proved himself a hypnotic swordsman, his agreeable low gruff flow smuggling in acute lyrical reference to all manner of religious and historical myths with a side order of pre-millennium tension. Someone who never rhymed for the sake of riddlin’ and rapped as if he was reciting doctrines, the prolific Priest still had two powerful album offcuts put aside to grace the flip of his second solo single ‘One Step’ (a laidback takedown of wack emcees that starts with a reference to Lakim Shabazz B-side ‘Your Arm’s Too Short To Box With God’). With its upfront flip of the horn break from Mary Wells’ ‘It Had to Be You’, ‘Moanin’’ was commercial enough to be an A-side as Priest traded rhymes with Shanghai the Messenger and Killa Sin. A universal anthem of pain, it found him he admonishing the “blasphemers, adulterers and drug schemers” as he stood “strong like a black pope” against the crack addiction ravaging his community

Lawrence seemed to revel in his role as pop’s biggest undiscovered superstar. While in the press he was unguarded about his desire for fame at almost any price, he made wayward commercial choices with his music. Take 1986’s Creation debut Let the Snakes Crinkle Their Heads To Death. Lawrence spent a small fortune on its minimalist instrumentals, only to confound the new fans who’d come onboard after 1985’s UK independent chart-topper ‘Primitive Painters’. Having just about got them back on board with organ-heavy jangle masterpiece Forever Breathes The Lonely Word, ‘The Final Resting Of The Ark’ was another leftfield turn. Artful acoustic space-folk, lit up by Richard Thomas’s echoed soprano sax, it was never going to win Radio 1 airplay beyond old supporter John Peel, or nab him the Top of the Pops exposure he felt he deserved. Featuring just Lawrence on guitar and vocals, with undulating bass from Mick Travis, ‘There’s No Such Thing As Victory’ (one of four short B-sides) is as super-hushed as a Dictaphone confession in the wee small hours. Delicate as a spider’s web, it feels as if a draught of wind would blow it to smithereens. For an artist increasingly lionised for his failure to make it big (see Corin Johnson’s marble bust or Will Hodgkinson’s Street-Level Superstar book), its words about a person unhappily immobilised by wealth (“See my life that’s how it’s meant to be”) strike a poignant chord.

A band with a chip on their shoulder about the suburban origins, the Members built their following on the pub circuit in Staines, Finchley and Woking before penning the knowing, relatable A-side anthem that helped them escape. Written by bassist Chris Payne, B-side ‘Handling The Big Jets’ tapped into ‘The Sound Of The Suburbs’’ taut energy (and weary evocation of Heathrow jets “crashing over our home”), but added a textural diffidence. It’s snaky instrumental interplay proved that the Members weren’t some fly-by-night, here’s-three-chords-we-formed-a-band merchants riding punk’s second wave but proper musos with chops – and yes, lead guitarist Jean-Marie Carroll could really shred. Both capture nascent producer Steve Lillywhite (brother of drummer Adrian) learning his craft on the job, while Virgin’s decision to press most copies on clear vinyl in a die cut Malcolm Garrett sleeve (designed like a TV screen) undoubtedly helped the Members onto the gogglebox for Top of the Pops. They joltingly swerved into cod reggae on follow-up ‘Offshore Banking Business’, ensuring it was a relatively short-lived stay.

When Kiss AMC recorded ‘A Bit Of U2’ they had the charts in their sights. A cultured rap-rock crossover that interpolated the chorus of U2’s ‘New Year’s Day’ into its break, there was only one problem – it hadn’t been cleared by the band. A legal grey area in the same year the Turtles sued De La Soul for sampling them on 3 Feet High & Rising, Kiss AMC wisely decided to withdraw the single. Then, against most odds, the Irish stadium rockers granted approval. Reissued with an appended title omitting U2, and housed-up massively on its 12-inch mix, it brought Kiss AMC a minor UK hit and a small measure of fame in mainstream Europe. Written by their ‘brother’ group Ruthless Rap Assassins (featuring Christine’s sibling Kermit, later of Black Grape), the B-side was no idle remix but a discrete offering. It found producers David Holmes and Greg Wilson slamming bossanova beats and multiple scratches into a raw, lyrically acerbic flip of Lou Reed’s ‘Walk On The Wild Side’ that practically parachuted listeners into the notorious North Hulme estate in Manchester, where AMC and the Rap Assassins both lived. It wasn’t the first time Ruthless crew had stepped in with a killer B-side, the trio debuting on the flip of Kiss AMC’s eponymous 1989 single with shameless old school throwback ‘We Don’t Care’.

Prince Buster had multiple strings to his bow. The man who introduced the guitar chord on the afterbeat to birth ska allied his career as a singer, producer, bandleader and soundsystem owner with a second one as a consummate boxer (even converting to Islam after meeting his idol Muhammad Ali). The infectious and energising sound of Buster’s All Stars dominated young Jamaican listeners in the early 60s, his ear for a hit meaning he wasn’t shy of effectively giving gold away free on his B-sides. The mostly instrumental take on ‘One Step Beyond’ centres on the super-breathy saxophone solo antics of Roland Alphonso, undercut with a cutting trumpet finger and enhanced by Buster’s chirpy mouth-play – a human beatbox before there was any such thing. And while many will recall the B-side of Buster’s biggest-selling single from Madness’s more or less faithful 1979 cover smash, the A-side ‘Al Capone’ (the second Jamaican solo hit in the British top 20 after Millie Small’s ‘My Boy Lollipop’) was similarly appropriated by the Specials for 2 Tone’s big breakthrough single ‘Gangsters’, making Buster uniquely responsible for both ska’s arrival and its revival.

Zeke Manyika’s solo turns have been criminally overlooked. Responsible for the percussive sophistication of Orange Juice’s cosmopolitan 80s pop and propulsive rhythm of The The’s ‘I’ve Been Waitin’ For Tomorrow (All Of My Life)’ – who he’s back touring with right now – the self-confessed rhythm addict started working towards his solo goal on 1985’s Call And Response, fusing pop melodies with South African rhythms before Paul Simon took it to the bank on Graceland. Flush with direct political messages, Manyika’s 1989 follow-up Mastercrime was an apartheid album that the Rhodesian-born musician “had to get out of my system”. While first single ‘Bible Belt’ made international waves for its striking video (filmed in the Beira Corridor connecting Zimbabwe to the Indian Ocean via Mozambique), the funk really landed on its B-side. ‘Huya Ne Kuno’ found Manyika weaving highlife guitars and flutey-sounding synths through a kinetic wall of his own percussion, his honeyed croon effortlessly melding with his backing singers’ chorus exhortations. A lost gem, it sounds perfectly at home alongside its parent album’s expansive rock, funk and industrial fusions.

A master at incorporating disparate idioms into a singular musical vision, all Ziad Rahbani’s finer qualities come to the fore on this single (which I sadly don’t own – original copies flutter around the £300+ bracket). Rahbani was far from a one-trick pony, earning equal respect as a playwright and political commentator as for his boundary-breaking compositions. Both sides here max-out the 12-inch single’s extended format, the ney-laced A-side weaving eastern string motifs around slap bass, choked funk guitars and patterned hand drums. At nearly 13 minutes, the voluptuous ‘Prelude (Theme From Mais El Rim)’ trumps it by the slimmest of margins. Written for a play by his father and uncle that originally starred Rahbani’s mother (revered Lebanese singer Fairuz), it marries disco beats with jazz vamps, timely blasts of sax, synth improvisations and perfectly drilled horn and string sections. An epic taste of Rahbani’s never dull soundtrack work (see also 1978’s Bennesbeh Labokra… Chou? and 1980’s ambitious three-hour The American Motion Picture) Rahbani makes difficult transitions seem easy and effortless. Reissued on Record Store Day by wewantsounds in 2019 (the label pictured in this post), ‘Prelude…’ is a glittering disco ball B-side that never you never want to stop spinning.

When the Birthday Party released their penultimate EP inter-band relations were at a low, tempers running at a druggy fever. Lyrically darker than anything on the previous year’s Junkyard LP, The Bad Seed crackled with chaotic brio and ill intent, reaching its apex on skewed gothic country ballad ‘Deep In The Woods’ as the combustible Melbourne outfit backed up their discordant experimental sonics with songwriting depth. Starting with just singer Nick Cave’s voice and Roland S. Howard’s guitar, it slowed down their assault (hinting at the former’s next incarnation with the Bad Seeds), Tracey Pew’s great sludgy bassline and Mick Harvey’s forceful drums underlining its second verse’s theatrical allusions to Edgar Allen Poe. The singer is at his most forthright at its salty denouement (“Love is for fools and all fools are lovers/It’s raining on my house and none of the others”), mixing up black humour with something more deeply and darkly profound, before chipping in a post-modern finish by simply intoning “End” at the death. A killer B, literally.

With his bandaged head, top hat, white dinner suit and impenetrable shades, Nash The Slash looked like a reanimated Biograph Company ‘trick’ film lead. The alter ego of Jeff Plewman, veteran of 70s Toronto progressive rockers FM, the singular Slash’s fortunes shifted from cabaret curiosity to WTF notoriety in 1980 when the world’s first electronic superstar Gary Numan chanced upon his act in a nightclub on the eve of his first Canadian tour. Numan was so bowled over he offered Slash the support slot on the spot. Slash went on to support Numan worldwide on his subsequent Telekon dates, snagging a deal with DinDisc on the way. Its first bloom was the A-side’s relatively restrained take on Jan & Dean’s surf-death anthem ‘Dead Man’s Curve’, B-side ‘Reactor No 2 was much more akin to the head-swirling live Slash experience – a crazed one-man band wildly live-looping a sequence of homemade ‘devices’ long before anyone else had worked out how-to – to conjure a heavy-heavy wall-of-sound that he offset with fizzing theatrical strings, played alternatively on electric violin or mandolin. Omitted from his Steve Hillage-produced UK debut Children Of The Night, ‘Reactor No 2’ echoed the timbre of Plewman’s other creative outlet as a film composer (creating scores for Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, later working with director Bruce McDonald), its foreboding sense of menace matching his noirish name and image to a tee.

Months before the Velvet Underground gained New York infamy, Lou Reed was churning out ten-a-penny songs for supermarkets and convenience stores. An in-house songwriter for Pickwick, required to churn out trifles by rote, Reed started to subvert the process with his made-up band the Primitives, co-writing and singing 1964’s minor hit ‘Do The Ostrich’. A parody of novelty songs like ‘The Twist’, it arrived, typically, with a much more brutal accompanying dance (“You put your head on the floor and have somebody step on it,” Reed later revealed). Brought in to play bass was jobbing Welsh music student John Cale who, after turning down Reed’s sexual advances, slowly struck up a strong friendship, the pair composing ‘Why Don’t You Smile’ one drunken evening. Recorded by the All Night Workers, a trio of Reed’s old buddies from Syracuse University, the B-side’s sinister guitar drones and plodding rhythm suggest a sonic blueprint for the Velvets, but with a much more forthright vocal lead. A miss at the time, the A-side eventually enjoyed a second life on the northern soul circuit while ‘Why Don’t You Smile’ helped pad-out Downliners Sect’s 1966 album The Rock Sect’s In before being lovingly reimagined as Spiritualized’s third single in 1991.

He only released one single, but millions have heard Melvin Bliss’s music without realising it. A singer in naval bands with superstar aspirations, Bliss final got his break when New York songwriter/producer and ex-Exciter Herb Rooney sequestered him into a studio for his sole single. While A-side ‘Reward’ was a cultured slice of soulful yearning that brought Bliss’s vocal chops to the fore, B-side ‘Synthetic Substitution’ was an ahead-of-its time critique of a computerised future, it’s heartfelt plea “I’d be suspicious of a modern day scheme/Replacing a woman with a love machine” tapping into a similar android paranoia as Tubeway Army’s ‘Are ‘Friends’ Electric?’ six years later. While the single flopped, and Bliss’s label Sunburst soon went bankrupt, its instantly recognisable Bernard Purdie drum break gave it a second life, sampled so heavily by 80s rap producers – it’s the basis of Ultramagnetic MCs ‘Ego Trippin’’, Naughty By Nature ‘O.P.P.’, De La Soul’s ‘Potholes In My Lawn’, the Pharcyde’s ‘Ya Mama’ and Onyx’s ‘Throw Ya Gunz’, to name just five – it’s practically part of hip-hop’s anatomy. While Bliss told The Guardian in 2010, just before his death, that he was yet to receive any recompense (“I’m sure I’ve got a lot of royalties coming from somewhere”), he was also endearingly modest about his and Rooney’s aspirations (“We just needed a B-side”), selling way short his incredible curveball creation – a great song in its own right, beyond all the heavy lifting its done for others.

Hirsute flare-wearers with an Aldous Huxley fixation, fun-loving Texans Bubble Puppy were slightly less unhinged then their labelmates the 13th Floor Elevators and Red Crayola. After lashing the Billboard top 20 with the forthright three-part vocal harmonies of 1969’s misspelled first single ‘Hot Smoke And Sasafrass’ the innocuously named, poorly styled quartet (check the cover to debut A Gathering Of Promises) struggled to summon a second winner from the pack. So they started afresh on this non-album single, although A-side ‘Days Of Our Time’ looked a little too closely to Britain’s chart invaders for inspiration. ‘Thinkin’ About Thinkin’’ more than compensated. An acid trip in microcosm, its filthy fuzztone riffs, manic drums and crazed organs offset by forthright inter-band operatics. It even crams in a laidback middle-eight before Rod Prince and Todd Potter’s feral guitars lock in to the fadeout. Dropped by their label in 1970, Bubble Puppy quickly resurfaced as the progressively-minded Demian, but failed to create anything quite as cool as this hairy slab of groovy fun.

Playing the geek image to his advantage, the one-time Barnes & Noble staffer’s aim to rejuvenate hip-hop’s spirit kicked off when he started writing absurdities for emcee friends at the Rhode Island School of Design. After sending him 1998’s self-pressed EP ‘Postgraduate Work’, he won the backing of De La Soul producer Prince Paul for the haphazard sex musings of 2000’s ‘It’s Very Simulating’ EP. Yet it was a different Prince – PM Dawn’s late Prince Be, operating under the pseudonym All Those Mutha Fuckin’ Reasons – let loose on this B-side. In contravention of Be’s hippy image, his throwback beat is every bit as inventive as Paul’s, with multiple scratches and a cheeky DJ Yoda-like voice-over at the start (“We’re now going to progress to some steps which are a bit more difficult”). Capturing Barman at his most fluid and animated, ‘Housemate Troubles’ is jammed with nasal disses of the football jock he shares his student flat with, the acid reflux of sniping couplets like “I make rap masterpieces/You can’t complete your crap Master’s thesis” offset by an acute A-side that makes great hay parodying Bad Boy’s millennial hip-hop/R&B fusions.

Chris Carter’s proto-techno, fashioned from homemade electronic devices, defined the sound of Throbbing Gristle just as much as their abrasive beats, sheeting guitars, bleak churning tape loops and the tuneless whining of frontman Genesis P-Orridge. Damned by Tory MP Nicholas Fairbairn as “wreckers of civilisation” Throbbing Gristle’s reputation rests as much on their outrageous performance art live shows – something the late Stephen Wells called “trying a bit too hard” in 2007’s Primer for The Guardian – as their punishing, apocalyptic template for ‘industrial music’. Their second consecutive B-side about masturbation (after 1979’s impenetrable ‘Five Knuckle Shuffle’) ‘Something Came Over Me’ was one of the few early TG releases with an identifiable tune, unlike the A-side’s primitivist sludge. And if a milkman might balk at whistling its repeated references to something else that’s ‘white and sticky’ and P-Orridge’s faux-dumb ignorance thereof (“I don’t know what it was/But I rather like it/So I’m doing it again”), it was relatively light relief against the Nazi concentration camps, burns victims, mutilation and serial killers that litter their catalogue. After they etched “WHiTE STAiNS” into the runout groove like cocky adolescents, this B-side took on a more subversive hue when Throbbing Gristle played Oundle, one of England’s biggest boarding schools.

Having written 1961’s transatlantic smash ‘Runaway’ alongside Musitron pioneer Max Crook, Del Shannon spent much of the decade trying to recreate its elusive magic. More popular in Britain than his native US, Shannon scored self-written hits with ‘Hats Off To Larry’, ‘So Long Baby’ and ‘Cry Myself To Sleep’, songs whose fatalistic lyrics showed he was far from happy, even if his performances hid it well. If the A-side here was an exception to that rule, with its promises to make a jilted lover’s dreams come true (over yet another tune that didn’t waver that far from ‘Runaway’), its B-side tapped into the melancholy air that distinguished the dashing yet troubled Shannon from the throng. Written by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman and driven by a stop-start guitar riff, punchy brass and sprinkled strings, ‘You Never Talked About Me’ came on like a more jaunty Shannon original, bolstered by the force of his great falsetto. The first US artist to cover the Beatles (‘From Me To You’), while they were still in the charts with the original, after the hits dried up Shannon met psychedelia head-on on 1968’s The Further Adventures Of Charles Westover, a cinematic suite that featured his most haunted creations but failed to revive his fortunes. He descended into alcoholism in the 70s, a downward spiral that tragically ended in suicide.

Often derided in punk quarters for their preening and pretentiousness, the B-side of Skids’ biggest hit was as basic as it comes. The Dunfermline band headed by singer Richard Jobson and buzzsaw guitarist Stuart Adamson (long before he made it sound like bagpipes) weren’t shy in proclaiming their differences from the throng, second wavers who wrote about futility of war and processing past emotional traumas. But not here. After a bit of onstage ‘banter’ (“This is the political part,” says Jobson, “speaking politics to you today”) and an introductory ode to Stanley Ogden and Eddie Yates (Coronation Street’s greatest window cleaners) they launch into a list of 12 names drawn from the Street and fellow ITV soap Crossroads. There are two exceptions – DJ John Peel (who’d previously played a session version on his Radio One show) and Kenny Dalglish (Liverpool footballer) – but it all revolves around the chorus hook, a chant-along shout-out to Weatherfield’s most obstinate curmudgeon, Albert Tatlock. And while the rousing A-side has lived on as the theme song for Jobson’s beloved Dunfermline AFC, ‘TV Stars’ has remained a cult favourite, a rollicking reminder of the thin gruel served up on British television in the 70s. It’s a great ball of fluff, but that’s one of the things B-sides are for.

Paris was ever the savvy operator. The second single from his debut LP The Devil Made Me Do It proved the former stockbroker could live up to ‘the Black Panther of hip-hop’ mantle he’d given himself. On the A-side, his tightly-wound wake-up call about the racist murder of 16-year-old Brooklyn teenager Yusuf Hawkins rode a bass-enhanced rumble through James Brown and Lafayette Afro Rock Band samples that proved three times as long as its hyper succinct LP version. “Who’s bad?” asked Paris on its B-side (which shared a title with a Suicidal Tendencies’ LP that year), forsaking his usual self-produced fix of funk for minimalist synths that put the emphasis squarely on his relentless voice and baritone flow, tossing off rhymes about “a brother with a grudge who can’t be nudged or budged or stopped or stepped aside” – no guessing who – with calm and easy assurance (paving the way, stylistically, for 1994’s Guerrilla Funk). While his unapologetic stance against the powers that be meant Tommy Boy pulled the plug on his next album Sleeping With The Enemy – the incendiary sentiments of ‘Bush Killa’ were never going to flow in the wake of Body Count’s ‘Cop Killer’ furore – Paris deftly milked it for maximum publicity, calmly explaining: “It was intended so we could have access to the media.”

James were on a roll when their second Factory single came out in 1985. Hand-picked to support the Smiths on their Meat Is Murder tour, they seemed in tune with their Mancunian counterparts’ world view. For all their similarities, whirring dervish frontman Tim Booth was a much more cryptic, elliptical lyricist than Morrissey, and his band regularly embraced chaos by swapping instruments or trying out deliberately obtuse set lists to keep them on their toes. If this single’s A-side ‘Hymn From A Village’ was a pealing protest against the second-rate pop lyricists (advising them to “read a book, it’s so much more worthwhile” and slamming plagiarists ahead of Moz’s ‘Cemetry Gates’), ‘If Things Were Perfect’ was packed with just the right level of twitchy tension, Booth’s stuttering existential wanderings backed up by Jim Glennie’s meaty bass chords, Lorry Gott’s highlife guitar flourishes and Gavan Whelan’s tempo-twisting backbeat. Although James’ early years were cursed with major label misfortune – a tale best told in their own words on ‘Burned’ – their B-side game has rarely wavered, be it ‘Out To Get You’ [‘Lose Control’, 1990], ‘Gone Too Far’ [‘Tomorrow’, 1997] or ‘Stolen Horse’ [‘I Know What I’m Here For’, 1999]. It’s also telling that the Smiths covered ‘What’s The World’ [‘Jimone EP’, 1993] most nights of that first British tour.

Four years after their defining smash ‘Telstar’, the Tornados were all but finished when ‘Is That A Ship I Hear’ emerged in 1966. Bereft of original members and out of favour, their brilliant but troubled in-the-closet producer Joe Meek pressed every novelty sound effect imaginable in a doomed quest to get pirate stations back onside. While that failed, something far more radical lurked on its B-side. ‘Do You Come Here Often?’ was the first overt reference to homosexuality in pop, although you had to be a patient to catch it. A full 2:25 minutes pass, as guitarist Robb Huxley and keyboardist Dave Watts let loose their jazzy side, before a camp spoken word exchange cuts in, with two seemingly club-bound queens cattily assessing their possible conquests before promising to meet “down the Dilly” (a barely coded ref to the gents at Piccadilly Circus – a bold move since Meek had been convicted for cottaging three years earlier). And while it possibly flew over most listeners’ heads, it can also be read as a veiled suicide note from its creator – Meek’s declining mental state and mounting drug/money troubles culminated in him shooting his landlady before turning the gun on himself in February 1967.

West coast indie rap arguably peaked in the mid-90s with the likes of the Pharcyde, Aceyalone, PUTS, Freestyle Fellowship and the Hieroglyphics crew all in ascendency. Formed at the University of California, the duo of Chief Xcel and Gift of Gab slotted right into the prevailing positive mode, with acts prioritising old fashioned lyrical skills and beat innovations above overly serious polemicising. Absorbed into the wider Solesides collective alongside Lateef the Truth Speaker, Lyrics Born and DJ Shadow, the latter produced this great EP track which, like most of the ‘Melodica’ EP, is an assertion of Gift of Gab’s versatile talents as an emcee and dedication to his craft. Gab had every reason to boast. His slick, quick-fire rhymes, technical savvy and sticky, unpredictable cadences were an antidote to the mediocrity slowly seeping into the hip-hop mainstream. Sadly, the nimble rhyme acrobat died in 2021, after years of poor health, with Shadow hailing him “the most preternaturally gifted MC I’ve ever worked with.” Listen to 1999’s gradually speeding-up B-side ‘Alphabet Aerobics’ if you don’t believe him. As for ‘Rhymes…’ it’s “all of that and a plate of chitlins”, just like the man said.

Minnesota’s ‘Surfin’ Bird’ creators hit paydirt at the first time of asking. Taking a leaf from the Dick Dale songbook, their no-thrills mash-up of the Rivingtons hits ‘Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow’ and ‘The Bird’s The Word’ slalomed straight into the US top five. Pressed into a swift follow-up, ‘Bird Dance Beat’ played it safe, milking the same formula as far as it would go – up to number 30. Proof that The Trashmen were no one trick pony ultimately arrived on its speedier, full-throttle flipside. Over Bob Reed’s sublimely echoed bass twin frontmen Tony Andreason and Dal Winslow pay homage to a customised automobile, a “way-out wailing type of boss machine” whose technical spec includes “a bang shift hydro with a big shillelagh” capable of leaving Cobra and Stingray drivers standing still. Andreason’s gut-punching electric guitar solo is something else, suggesting a more instrumental future option that they ultimately failed to drive down. Follow-up singles brought only diminishing returns and the cash-in kids’ charting days were over.

Best remembered for 1969’s breezy international smashes ‘Early In The Morning’ and ‘Hitchin’ A Ride’, Kent-based dandies Vanity Fare lacked a distinct musical identity, possibly because their A-sides were all penned by outside writers. Nonetheless they managed to let themselves go on their self-written B-sides, the freedom to roam revealing a more rugged side than their artfully dishevelled neckerchiefs only hinted at. For proof check the stylised harmonies of ‘Waiting For The Nightfall’ [‘Highway Of Dreams’, 1969], the Doobie Brothers-sounding ‘Stand’ [‘Where Did All The Good Times Go’, 1971] or wah-wah driven ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Band’ [Better By Far, 1971]. ‘Megowd (Something Tells Me)’ is the jewel in their B-side crown. Kicking off with Barry Landeman’s crazed organ riff, guitarist Tony Goulden and bassist Tony Jarrett quickly lose the leash, create a truly groovesome backing for Trevor Bice’s stylised wailing (with Landeman shining again on its wigged-out coda). Think Traffic, think Zombies, think great. Despite coming off the back of two million-selling hits, the A-side’s unlucky dip into Mike Leander and Eddie Seago’s songbook badly misfired, blanking in all territories. And although Vanity Fare kept chugging along, they were conspicuously free of original members when they auditioned for Eurovision in 1986.

In contrast to the lightly orchestrated A-side or the wild garage rock that made their name, Andover’s cutting edge export the Troggs truly let their hair right down on ‘Maybe The Madman?’ A fragmented B-side, written by guitarist Chris Britten, its descent into full-blown psychedelia takes a few listens to fully connect. Riding the distorted tide of Pete Stable’s upfront bassline their droned, spaced-out backing is a suitably disturbing backdrop for Reg Presley’s spoken words pondering the meaning of life, while its distorted robot chorus seems to come from another song entirely, zoning in with questions about whether “rain drops are just condensation our tears cry for children that lie”. If the A-side was a naked attempt to replicate transatlantic mega hit ‘Love Is All Around’ the public saw right through it, the single just scraping the UK top 40 and missing the US charts altogether. It was the start of a slow, gradual fall from grace that found them arguably become better known for The Troggs Tapes, a heated, expletive-heavy argument satirised in This is Spinal Tap, than their output. Either way, it never diminished the Troggs’ appetite for the game.

Tricky’s collaboration with the Gravediggaz was never going to be for the faint of heart. The unconventional Bristol rapper’s team-up with the horrorcore supergroup founded by Wu-Tang Clan producer RZA came hot on the heels of his debut Maxinquaye, a critically garlanded hit that brought its creator unwanted celebrity, the publicly shy and uncomfortable Tricky damning his own debut as “coffee-table” and dissing the wider trip-hop movement it birthed. If ‘The Hell E.P.’ was first part of a campaign to move his music into the leftfield (a process fully realised on 1996’s Pre-Millennium Tension), ‘Psychosis’ was its sprawling, hard-to-fathom peak. Over a hazy loop impregnated with ghostly words, husky hums and half-heard murmurs, Tricky’s racked gasped whisper ponders whether he is “the devil’s son/Outta breath and on the run”. The laughing raps of minister’s offspring Grym Reaper supply an even creepier rejoinder, his apocalyptic sing-song oratory about a rain-less landscape that is “petrified, terrified, horrified” delivered with snickering disregard. The cloying static of RZA’s production underlines both his genius and his sustained ability to unnerve – in 1995 everything he touches turns gold – on an ambulance-chasing B-side that’s hard to unhear.

On her one and only country single Joyce Cobb added quivering conviction to Bobby Lewis’s curt tale of heartbreak, tapping into the four years the Orlando siren spent working at Opryland and on the Nashville circuit. For all its scrupulously studied regret, B-side ‘Lonesome Time In Memphis Town Tonight’ – the first song ever placed by late songwriter Lionel Delmore (best known for his country hit-strewn partnership with John Anderson) – bested it by some distance. Subtly orchestrated, with an uncredited guitarist adding spooky lead lines over its rousing chords, the conviction of Cobb’s delicately judged vocals freighted with emotional gravitas. Brilliantly succinct and breathlessly good, it’s a small wonder it’s not been widely covered since (Adele would surely have a field day). While Billboard crowned the A-side ‘Best potential hit’ and Cobb graduated from Jim Stewart’s offshoot Truth label to its parent Stax, they hit bad times before she could capitalise. She eventually resurfaced on Hi in 1979 with the self-written disco shaker ‘Dig The Gold’, the song that bought the house she lived in thereafter.

As with close compatriots the Jazz Butcher, the Woodentops didn’t fit neatly into the prescribed 80s indie scene. Too upbeat and energetic to be explicitly indie, with a clearly identifiable electro-acoustic pulse, their early run of singles was genre-slippery pop at its most unabashed, epitomised by the rousing climax to A-side ‘Move Me’, a crowd-pleaser for the ages. With its moddish beat, stutteringly rapped verses, acoustic strum and intricate lead guitar detailing, the flip was joy incarnate, any semblance of sturdy structure upended by a swarm of buzzing bee horns after its tender middle eight. The joyous rush of Alice Thompson’s frantic organs glitch into an all-round hyper speed loss of control so breathless that the early fadeout feels like butchery. Apparently frontman Rolo McGinty’s first composition, ‘Do It Anyway’ nodded towards the blissed out, more danceable direction they’d pursue later that decade. The Woodentops early run of singles was an experimental B-side goldmine, from the undigested grief of three-chord death song ‘Steady Steady’ (on this single’s 12-inch) to the slow-pulsing otherness of ‘Cold Inside’ [‘Well Well Well’, 1985] and tripped-out psych of ‘Plutonium Rock’ [‘It Will Come’, 1985].

Slade’s B-sides were often as good, if not better, than their A-sides. The flip of the Walsall wanderers’ second UK number one underlined the point. In contrast to the stomping bootboy rhythms and relentlessly churning guitar riff and of ‘Tak Me Bak ’Ome’, a high-energy vehicle for singer Noddy Holder to turn on the brutish charm, ‘Wonderin’ Y’ was a pensive ballad driven by Jim Lea’s whirling bass figure and plangent piano chops. It caught Holder at his most wistful, singing rather than shouting as he reminisced about being “Pushed around/Kicking stones along the ground” over choral backing harmonies that presaged Queen and Chas Chandler’s sophisticated production. At the time Slade seemed all set to become the biggest band since the Beatles, yet a subsequent four-year run of top tier UK hits, largely written to the A-side’s boisterous formula, utterly failed to translate in America. A whole string of B-side gems such as ‘My Life is Natural’ [‘Coz I Luv You’, 1971], ‘Man Who Speaks Evil’, [‘Mama Weer All Crazee Now’, 1972] and ‘Forest Full Of Needles’ [‘Gypsy Roadhog’, 1977] have lost none of their charm, showcasing an outfit far more eclectic than their terrace chant heyday hinted at.

A goth band that time forgot, Gene Loves Jezebel did their greatest work in the shadows. It may be their Welshness but the band fronted by identical twins Michael and Jay Aston were outliers even in their heyday, eschewing regulation black rags for colourful dresses, robes and scarves, their long manes intersected with knitting needles, panda eyes smeared with kohl. Their music was slightly to the left too, as the A-side’s woozy, lopsided mix of organs and glockenspiel proved. Like many of their early B-sides, ‘Stephen’ felt loose and improvised, a mystical semi-dirge whose detuned guitar figures resembled drunken jews harps. Packed with yearning, the burnished homo-erotica of its chief refrain (“When Stephen smiles my heart just seems to grow”) cast lead singer Michael as a grittier, more ragged Bono. GLJ clearly felt an affinity for ‘Stephen’, reprising it on their second LP Immigrant with more mannered intent as its more obvious highlights (‘Shame’, ‘The Cow’) began to impact on US college radio. As with other rock siblings, the road ahead proved bumpy, the Aston brothers parting ways in 1989 and forming two ongoing variants of Gene Loves Jezebel that are billed differently in the UK and US, following litigation in 2008.

A hit when jazz was widely considered out of style, ‘Cast Your Fate To The Wind’ set the course of Vince Guaraldi’s career. The long-time sideman for vibraphonist Cal Tjader needed to pad out his cover versions of Luiz Bonfá and Antônio Carlos Jobim on the 1962 soundtrack to Michael Camus’s Brazilian film Black Orpheus, so inserted a rare original. An intimate three-way with bassist Monty Budwig and drummer Colin Bailey struck through with a trademark hint of melancholy, the Californian pianist’s unforgettably placid looping verses proved as distinctive as his generous moustache, working in sharp contrast to the song’s swinging yet serpentine solo. Unlike the bossanova breakdowns of A-side ‘Samba de Orpheus’ it became a radio sensation after a disc jockey at Sacramento’s KROY put it on rotation, its success snagging Guaraldi a Grammy. Afterwards TV producer Lee Mendelson asked him to write the music for a TV cartoon special he was working on, which ultimately became festive perennial A Charlie Brown Christmas. Guaraldi would go on to pen all the Peanuts music until his sudden death in 1976.

If Bob Geldof shamelessly wrote the A-side with a hit single in mind, it’s one whose chorus lyrics (“She’s so 20th century/She’s so 1970s”) dated as fast as its cartoon bombast. The Boomtown Rats at their most punky, before smouldering Springsteen-homage ‘Rat Trap’ supplanted John Travolta and Olivia Newton John at the chart summit, it came with an equally fervent flipside. Self-produced alongside Steve Brown and with the label annotated “second verse same as the first”, ‘Lying Again’ made the most of the Rats’ group harmonies – drummer Simon Crowe to the fore again, spending much longer in the vocal booth than notorious one-take Johnny, Geldof. Unusually for him the lyrics are a little oblique – an early dig at flaky politicians? – compensated for by a middle eight that inverts afterlife perceptions (“When I was a boy and I was told that heaven was hot and hell was cold/If I told lies I’d freeze my soul”) driven along by Johnny Fingers’ staccato organ and Gerry Cott and Garry Roberts twin guitar attack. It’s on par with their other greatest B-side, the bloody psychodrama of ‘So Strange’ [‘Rat Trap’, 1978].

Pretensions in the revamped camp Ultravox went far beyond singer Midge Ure’s angular sideburns and Burberry raincoat. While the A-side is a case in point – a moody love song to an imaginary girl, given an air of romance by Billy Currie’s romantic, Max Reger-influenced viola – many at their new home Chrysalis felt it a bit of a dirge, far surpassed by album standout ‘Mr X’ (a coded reference to ex-leader John Foxx? Its verses share the same melody as Metamatic track ‘Touch And Go’, issued six months earlier). Having successfully lobbied to put it out, 12-inch buyers got a double B-side, the futuristic posturing of ‘Passionate Reply’ alongside the German version of ‘Mr X’. Robotically narrated by drummer Warren Cann, with help from producer Conny Plank’s wife Krista on pronunciation, the mysterious tale of a man who may or may not be on a bridge accompanied by sparse Kraftwerk-like repetitions, it’s lost little of its creepy air. And while ‘Vienna’ would famously peak at UK number two, held off for a month by a dead John Lennon and novelty hit irritant Joe Dolce, ‘Herr X’ would belatedly become a 7-inch A-side in 2020, courtesy of a new Steven Wilson 2.0 mix via issue 69 of Electronic Sound.

It’s easy to see why Philadelphia indie imprint Arlen imprint plumped for ‘Deep Inside Me’ as the Tams first single. A relatable tale of told-you-so heartbreak it made the most of Joseph Pope’s resonant lead and the backing orchestra’s hooky descending string refrain. Joseph put in an even stronger turn on B-side ‘If You’re So Smart…’, a far from snarky look at the vicissitudes of romance that embellished his furrowed concerns with subtle woodwinds, banging Timpani and fulsome supporting harmonies (its sentiments are effectively the crux of the Smiths’ ‘I Know It’s Over’). But despite their charms, both sides passed under the radar. The Atlanta beach music group would crack the charts later that year with the open arm embrace of ‘Untie Me’ but had a hard time breaking Motown’s stranglehold, regularly swapping labels in pursuit of further success. The band who took their name from the Tam o’shanter hats they wore onstage would win again though, notably with ‘Be Young, Be Foolish, Be Happy’ and ‘Hey Girl Don’t Bother Me’, songs whose resolute cheeriness was hard to dim.

MC 900 Ft. Jesus voyaged through several different worlds over his curtailed three-album career. The alter-ego of Kentucky multi-instrumentalist Mark Griffin, his early dispatches married beatnik storytelling gifts – Bigfoot stealing his car (‘Truth Is Out Of Style’) or a murderer’s interior dialogue (‘Killer Inside Me’) – to DJ Zero’s industrially-tinged yet funky hip-hop beats. Griffin veered farther out-there on 1994’s third LP One Step Ahead Of The Spider, a free-flowing full-band jazz set redolent of Miles Davis circa In A Silent Way, its more sophisticated and organic backdrops offset by his way with a wry tale of the unexpected. ‘Regression Session’ was the jazz motherlode though, a ten-minute pseudo psychotherapy session with Griffin’s tinny voice imploring his subject “Tell me, tell me, what you see” over textured percussion-driven improv – all wah-wah guitars and funky bass, Griffin’s trumpet wilding out towards its denouement. Easily his most impactful other side, it reached plenty of homes after Spike Jonze video treatment for the A-side featured on Beavis and Butt-Head.

It’s hard not to be terrified when you first hear ‘Asylum’. A huge contrast to the enigmatic A-side’s futurology – Numan’s first solo single, released just three months after Tubeway Army’s ‘Are ‘Friends’ Electric?’ freaked to the top – it evoked a still, drum-less dread that made his young fan base distinctly uneasy. Starting with low, deep drone offset by Polymoogs at their most scything and stringy, its steady pulse makes way for a recognisable but off-centre melody. The creeping dread comes from Numan’s turn on an out-of-tune piano – measured in the first movement, frantic and desperate in the second, as if seeking absolution. Every bit as scary as the first Halloween soundtrack, the John Carpenter influence was undeniable. Although ‘Cars’ would also motor Numan into the American top 10, US buyers were given The Pleasure Principle track ‘Metal’ as an alternative B-side – an unlikely breakdance anthem after it was embraced by Afrika Bambaataa’s Zulu Nation. ‘Asylum’ also suggested alternative career diversions for Numan that he would belatedly pick up in 1991 as his pop career waned, scoring the soundtrack to Rodman Flender’s low-budget horror flick The Unborn. But it was nowhere near as unsettling as this.

Orange Juice were in a difficult place after making their chart breakthrough with ‘Rip It Up’. Discordant third album sessions with dub dab hand Dennis Bovell were upended when guitarist Malcolm Ross and bassist David McClymont abandoned ship (citing age-old ‘musical differences’), the remains boiled down to 1984’s bijou 20-minute mini-LP Texas Fever. Nonetheless Polydor lifted its opening number ‘Bridge’ for a single. But while its snarky sophistication and Chic-like sheen should have ensured another huge hit, it shambled to a desultory 67 in the charts. Pocket money investors were amply rewarded with gorgeous B-side ‘Out For The Count’, a smouldering old-fashioned love song, with a melody to match, disguised by a slick quiff, leather trews and dark shades. An exemplar of their fusion of pop and soul, emotion and intellect, it caught singer Edwyn Collins at his most smoky and soulful, his poetic evocations of Venus and Bobbie Gentry (“She said she’d never fall in love again/At least not for a while”) packed with the sort of foppish wit and longing that Morrissey would mine thereafter. Drummer Zeke Manyika was in particularly fine fettle when Orange Juice showcased this B-side on the Old Grey Whistle Test – a reminder of a band whose finest triumphs often happened in the shadows.

The Tone Bender guitar pedal took the rock world by storm in 1965. Already used to add a bit of aural sandpaper by Keith Richards (on the Rolling Stones ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’) and Jeff Beck (the Yardbirds’ ‘Heart Full Of Soul’), Steve Winwood’s sheeting lead on energetic A-side ‘Keep On Running’ was au courant with the fuzzy times. It was an equally defining feature of keyed-up B-side ‘High Time Baby’, the precocious teenage frontman setting it to ridiculous peaks as he cut through ringmaster Spencer Davis’s choppy rhythm, brother Muff’s thundering bass and Peter York’s attack dog drums with a bluesy tale of betrayal. Just to be sure, he finessed this mod all-nighter with a great barrelhouse piano solo two thirds through. Every bit as peppy and urgent as its more celebrated companion (which was adapted from a ska demo by labelmate Jackie Edwards), the single’s number one success did much to establish manager Chris Blackwell’s publishing wing Island Music on the home front. Sadly, the British beat revolutionaries blazed all too briefly, Winwood jumping ship to Traffic just two years later.

Glam rock may was on the wane – Bolan out of ideas, Bowie embracing soul, Sweet turning metal – when the Mael brothers stoked its dormant fire and reanimated a seemingly lost cause. While the ‘stampeding rhinos’, gunshots and dramatic falsettos of the A-side broke the California misfits across Europe, B-side ‘Barbecutie’ was just as operatically out-there and startling. It caught singer Russell riding a chugging metallic bass riff and strident piano vamps with a sinister paean to tossing an unwilling guest onto the barbeque (much more wholesome than a shrimp). And while Sparks got to promote the A-side on Top of the Pops they refused to play it straight, singer Russell a theatrical jack-in-the-box, drummer Dinky Diamond a wide-eyed menace, although most younger viewers were transfixed by static keyboardist Ron, impenetrable behind his piercing stare and Hitler moustache. That may have scared off some – the Rubettes’ conventional throwback ‘Sugar Baby Love’ held firm at number one – but neither side of this single has lost its cart-upsetting lustre, the disorienting ‘Barbecutie’ a mind-blower as vital as anything on Kimono My House.

In terms of hip-hop ages, there’s before and after Wu-Tang Clan. While first pressings of the Staten Island crew’s self-financed first single ‘Protect Ya Neck’ were sold from the trunks of their cars in late 1992, it impacted farther afield when it hit the airwaves. A shady bolt from the blue marrying cryptic wordplay with murky pianos and muffled JBs beats seething with ill portents, A-side ‘Protect Ya Neck’ let eight highly individualistic mic stylists (all of Wu, bar Masta Killa) 12 bars to make a defining impact. For its major label re-release, Loud replaced original B-side ‘After The Laughter Comes Tears’ – the first Wu-Tang song recorded – with one of only two solo tracks from their incoming debut LP (rumour has it that all nine members duked it out for the honour). It allowed their most instantly charismatic member Method Man to excel, his eponymous B-side propelled by gravelly quotables as he playfully referenced Fat Albert, ‘Rappers Delight’, Mary Poppins and Humpty Hump over a jaunty piano lift. It was not his only reward. After the multiple bomb drop of Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), Meth was first out the blocks with a solo album, 1994’s Tical ending with another remix of his signature track. Within months of this single’s release east coast rap shifted to a more rugged sound, a new season of darkness.

‘Breaking Down The Walls Of Heartache’ was the Dexys Midnight Runners hit that never was. Spotlighted as a potential A-side by their label Parlophone, their sped-up cover of 1964’s only hit for Johnny Johnson-led New Yorkers the Bandwagon, pushed their swirling Hammond organs right to the fore, Dexy’s treating it with respect if not reverence as they doubled down on the organic sound that infused their debut album. Super speedy, restlessly urgent, Dexy’s living up to their chemical name, they would win the phoney war with their paymasters, with ‘Breaking…’ becoming the B-side to their northern soul homage to ‘Geno’ Washington. Based around a true story – Rowland saw Washington at Harrow’s Railway Hotel when he was just 15 – the latter came loaded with meta detail. Beyond sampled crowd noises from a Van Morrison live LP and a sax riff half-inched from 1966 Washington B-side ‘(I Gotta) Hold On To My Love’ (plus a lyrical nod to its A-side ‘Michael’), there was the grubbed-down dockworker image, lifted wholesale from Scorsese’s Mean Streets. As the old cliché goes, talent borrows, genius steals…

Having sculpted boho art rock, jazzy longing, keening ambience and leftfield funk to her own purging ends on the spellbinding Miss America three years earlier, Mary Margaret O’Hara would issue one last original song, on this festive EP, before electing to sit out her contract with Virgin. Weary from protracted label disputes and unbothered by industry machinations, the mysterious Canadian singer took a tender axe to some well-worn festive staples to prove her love of Christmastime (underlined at Barbican’s Twisted Christmas concert in 2008). While her haunted lap-steel take on ‘Silent Night’ and soothing bass clarinet murmuration through ‘What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve’ work wonders, ‘Christmas Evermore’ went into deeper ethereal territory, letting O’Hara’s intimate torch skills excel over lazy acoustic strums, multi-tracked harmonies and loose supper club percussion. A wistful conclusion to troubled times, at moments she edges into the howling coo affected in the spooked mid-section of Morrissey’s ‘November Spawned A Monster’.