So famous you've never heard of them, Fanny were one of the first all-female rock bands. This track is a cover of a Beatles song (who you probably have heard of). It is from an episode of Beat Club, the legendary German sixties and seventies music programme. It has a treasure trove of performances from the period.
Reworking your old material is risky - not just in music - but when Gene Clark turned this track from a speedy psychedelic Byrds song in to a country rock ballad he produced something very different and very tender. Much feted now, it never really happened for Gene as a solo artist in his lifetime. A familiar story.
'Steal Away' is a 19th century spiritual composed by Wallace Willis, a slave of a Choctaw freedman. These songs often contained hidden messages about joining the Underground Railroad which took the slaves to freedom in the north, as seems the case in the lyrics of this track. It is now a gospel staple, here in the mellifluous tones of Sam Cooke.
Sometimes a piece of music is so familiar you don't listen to it. Sergei Rachmaninoff's second piano concerto is one example, not least because of its appearance in films and other artists' work. But forget all that and listen to a romantic masterpiece. This is the adagio played by Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili.
PS: Sergei is 150 this year.
Some nihilism for the weekend courtesy of one of the first recordings made by the original Buzzcocks line-up on 28th December 1976. Given that boredom was one of the themes of punk's 'rebellion', including against the 'boring' 15 minute album tracks of the time, you might think this fitted perfectly. But in fact it is about boredom with the punk movement itself even though it was only a few months old in the UK.
The guitar solo features two notes repeated 66 times.
Hip-hop is 50 this month. The story goes that it began when Cindy Campbell hosted a jam in the rec room of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx to raise money to buy school clothes (you can do take a hip-hop tour of key locations). Hip hop has blurred into and inspired many other genres, notably rap and drill, but at its heart is the DJ, the MC and the B-boys and B-girls (dancers) as well as the graffiti (think New York subway trains).