My Best Tunes

A rowdy live album from 1967 which was not actually captured at New York’s Madison Square Garden and therefore should not have been subsumed by booming audience mayhem – it was actually recorded in a nightclub in New Jersey.

Just groove to the statistics: 70 CDs containing 52 Miles albums from 1949 to 1985 in new or expanded editions containing rare or unreleased bonus tracks.

The fear, when you hear that an artist has handed last year’s album over to remixers, is that they’re suffering writer’s block and stalling for time.

Usually when an album compiler is mining a limited supply of music (in this instance funk, jazz, calypso and cumbia from Panama in the 1960s and 1970s) a law of diminishing returns operates that ensures that each subsequent collection is inferior.

The return of Shakespears Sister isn’t quite what it seems. Marcella Detroit, the operatic songbird of “Stay”, isn’t involved, leaving just the “foghorn” half of Newman & Baddiel’s cruel-but-hilarious parody.

In case you’re wondering what happened to Jay Sean, the British-Asian singer from Hounslow, since his initial success in 2004, the answer is that he got dropped by Virgin, continued having modest hits on an indie and has suddenly become massive in America, where his single “Down” has sold two million copies.

Cosy and reassuring as a crackling log fire, the Clientele’s sixth album is as redolent of autumn/ winter in London as its title suggests.

A rowdy live album from 1967 which was not actually captured at New York’s Madison Square Garden and therefore should not have been subsumed by booming audience mayhem – it was actually recorded in a nightclub in New Jersey.

Rain-streaked spiritual jazz from Manchester.

Things you need to say in any review of Hoop’s debut album: she has a stint as nanny to Tom Waits’ children on her CV. Things you don’t: Björk and Kate Bush. That’s that out of the way.