Fifty-one tracks and not a single one you would hear on the radio. This is the Prince catalogue below the waterline, and it is where the real argument lives. The problem of abundance Prince recorded relentlessly. The Paisley Park vault reportedly holds thousands of unreleased recordings, enough for decades of posthumous releases, and even within his official catalogue the sheer volume means that dozens of superb songs never got near a single. That creates a specific pleasure for listeners: almost nobody has heard all of it, and a well-assembled deep-cuts playlist can genuinely surprise people who have owned the albums for forty years. He died in April 2016 of an accidental fentanyl overdose, and the reissue programme since has been unusually generous — the Sign o' the Times and 1999 super-deluxe editions in particular have released genuinely important material. What to listen for "When We're Dancing Close and Slow" is from For You and Prince -e...

Fifty-four tracks tracing what happened after nine men from Staten Island signed a deal that let each of them sign somewhere else. The solo-deal clause Wu-Tang Clan arrived in 1993 with Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) and a business arrangement that had no precedent: RZA negotiated a group deal that explicitly allowed every member to sign individually to any label they chose. It was, in retrospect, one of the smartest moves anyone in the genre has made. What followed was an extraordinary run of solo albums — Method Man's Tical , Raekwon's Only Built 4 Cuban Linx , GZA's Liquid Swords , Ghostface Killah's Ironman , Ol' Dirty Bastard's Return to the 36 Chambers — mostly produced by RZA, and collectively more influential than the group albums. This playlist concentrates on that solo material and on the R&B crossover records, which is the right emphasis — it is where the Clan's reach is widest. What to listen for "I'll Be Th...

Twelve tracks from a guitarist who studied the Wes Montgomery method so closely that he became the most convincing inheritor of it. Norman Brown Norman Brown is from Shreveport, Louisiana, raised in Kansas City, and studied at the Musicians Institute in Hollywood, where he later taught. He was signed to Motown's jazz imprint MoJazz in the early 1990s. The defining technical feature is the octave technique — playing a melody in two octaves simultaneously, with the thumb, which Wes Montgomery developed and which almost nobody else has made their own. Brown uses it constantly, and it gives his lines a warmth and thickness that a single-note player cannot achieve. After the Storm (1994) was his commercial breakthrough and remains his best-known record. He later won a Grammy for Just Chillin' . What to listen for "That's The Way Love Goes" is the Janet Jackson song, and it is the track that made the album — a genuine crossover hit for an instr...

The Foreign Exchange is probably one of the most melodic & funked-up Hip Hop groups in the underground scene today. It’s a real shame that more people don’t know the crazy talent the members of this group possess. The combination of Phonte’s inventive lyricism & soulful falsetto and Nicolay’s ambient grooves and brilliant sequencing is really impressive stuff.

Thirteen songs by one writer. If you know soul music at all, you know at least eight of them — and you probably have never said his name aloud. One of the finest R&B songwriters who will always be remembered through his timeless hits. Skip Scarborough (1944–2003) Clarence "Skip" Scarborough wrote or co-wrote a startling number of the ballads that define seventies and eighties soul, and he did it as a working songwriter rather than a star. He died in 2003, and his name still means almost nothing to general listeners while the songs remain in constant rotation. What is most striking about his catalogue is its consistency of temperature. Scarborough wrote warm songs — not sentimental, not showy, but generous. The melodies sit comfortably in the middle of a singer's range, the chord movements are richer than they first appear, and there is almost always a turn in the bridge that lifts the whole thing. What to listen for Bill Withers'...

Twenty-eight tracks connected by one man's pen. If a soul record from the last forty years has strings that make you sit up, Clare Fischer probably wrote them. Clare Fischer Clare Fischer (1928–2012) is one of the most consequential musicians almost nobody outside the profession can name. He was a serious jazz pianist and composer — his tunes "Morning" and "Pensativa" became standards, and he was a pioneer of Latin jazz and bossa nova in America. Herbie Hancock has said flatly: "I wouldn't be me without Clare Fischer." That is not a small statement. From the 1970s he became the most sought-after orchestral arranger in popular music. His longest and most productive relationship was with Prince , from 1984 onward — and by most accounts the two men never worked in the same room. Prince would send tapes; Fischer would return arrangements. The distance seems to have suited both. He received thirteen Grammy nominations and won...

Twenty-seven tracks from a songwriter who had one of the biggest debut albums in history and then spent thirty years refusing to repeat it. Tracy Chapman Tracy Chapman grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, raised by a single mother, and studied anthropology and African studies at Tufts. Her self-titled 1988 debut was released into a pop landscape dominated by synthesisers and sold twenty million copies on the strength of a woman, a guitar and a set of songs about poverty, domestic violence and political change. The record won three Grammys, and its success owed something to an accident: when Stevie Wonder's equipment failed at the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute concert at Wembley, Chapman was sent back out to fill the gap, alone, in front of a global television audience of several hundred million. Sales went vertical within days. She has released sparingly, given almost no interviews, guarded her privacy absolutely, and declined to perform live for long stretches. In 202...

Thirteen instrumental tracks by Sade's band, made without Sade. It is a considerably stranger and more adventurous record than that description suggests.   Sweetback Sweetback is Stuart Matthewman , Andrew Hale and Paul Denman — the three musicians who, with Sade Adu , make up Sade. The band is genuinely a band rather than a backing group, and Sweetback is what they do between albums. Their self-titled 1996 debut is largely instrumental, built on dub bass, jazz guitar and trip-hop-adjacent drum programming, with guest vocals scattered across it. It arrived at the height of the British downtempo moment and fits alongside Massive Attack and Portishead more than alongside anything Sade released. Matthewman in particular has had a substantial parallel career — he produced most of Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite , which is one of the most important neo-soul albums ever made. What to listen for "Au Natural" and "Softly Softly" are the two that m...

Fifty-seven tracks from a south London singer who became one of reggae's biggest international stars without ever leaving the tradition behind. Maxi Priest Max Alfred Elliott was born in Lewisham, south London, to Jamaican parents — one of nine children, in a Pentecostal household. He took his stage name after converting to Rastafari, and came up through the Saxon Studio International sound system, the legendary south London operation that also produced Smiley Culture and Tippa Irie. What he became is unusual: a British singer working in lovers rock — the romantic, soul-influenced strain of reggae that is genuinely a British invention — who then broke internationally on a scale almost no reggae artist from anywhere has matched. His cover of Cat Stevens' "Wild World" and the American number one "Close To You" made him a global star. He has kept working for four decades and remains one of the most respected voices in the music. What ...

Forty-two tracks spanning six decades of a career that has no real equivalent. Quincy Jones died on 3 November 2024, aged ninety-one. Quincy Jones (1933–2024) Quincy Jones was a trumpeter, then an arranger, then a film composer, then a record executive, then the producer of the best-selling album ever made — and he was genuinely first-rate at each of those jobs in turn, which is the part that beggars belief. He arranged for Count Basie and Frank Sinatra. He wrote film scores when Black composers were almost entirely excluded from that work. He ran a label, produced television, and then in his late forties took on a former child star's solo career and reorganised popular music around it. His method was consistent across all of it: hire the best musicians available, give them room, and edit ruthlessly. He treated a pop single with the same structural seriousness as an orchestral chart. What to listen for The Michael Jackson material is the centre and needs no...

Fifty-seven tracks and the most ambitious volume in the series — a set that moves between Lagos, Johannesburg and Kingston without ever changing temperature. African ChillZone IV The fourth volume is the one where the series stops being a mood playlist and becomes a survey. Fifty-seven tracks is a lot of music, and the sequencing is doing something specific with it: rather than grouping by country or genre, it moves by feel, so that Nigerian afrobeats, South African amapiano and Jamaican dancehall sit side by side as though they were always part of the same conversation. Which, increasingly, they are. The great story of the past decade in this music is not any one scene's rise but the traffic between them — producers in Lagos working with Johannesburg vocalists, Jamaican artists cutting over amapiano logs, London acting as the switchboard. What to listen for Master KG's "Jerusalema" in the Burna Boy remix is the global moment — a South Afric...

Five remixes, officially licensed by Motown, in which a Bronx hip-hop producer takes the most famous catalogue in American music apart and puts it back together his own way. Lord Finesse: Motown State of Mind This is a rarer object than it appears. Lord Finesse — a founding figure of the D.I.T.C. collective, one of the great New York producers, and the man behind Notorious B.I.G.'s "Suicidal Thoughts" — was given official access to Motown's masters and released the results through Motown/UMe in June 2020 as a box of seven-inch singles. Hip-hop has been remixing Motown unofficially for forty years. Getting the label's blessing and the original multitracks is another matter entirely, and it means these are not mashups over the finished records: they are rebuilt from the stems. Finesse's approach is reverent in an unexpected way. He does not modernise. He applies the specific drum weight and low-end of early-nineties New York hip-hop to songs rec...

Twenty tracks from a singer who was a child television star, then spent thirty years making some of the most adventurous R&B anyone has released. This Sade cover was never released which I always found strange as he does an incredible job with it: Rahsaan Patterson Most people who know Rahsaan Patterson's face know it from Kids Incorporated , the eighties children's television series that also launched Fergie and Martika. Very few child performers survive that start with their artistic ambition intact. Patterson is the exception. From his 1997 debut onwards he has made records that sit awkwardly against commercial R&B in the best way: harmonically restless, heavily influenced by seventies Stevie Wonder and by rock, with a countertenor that goes somewhere most male soul singers never attempt. He has also been openly himself in an industry that made that expensive, and the cost is visible in the size of his audience relative to his talent. What to list...

Twenty-four tracks from Compton's most musical producer — a man who has spent thirty-five years proving that West Coast rap was always a musicians' genre.   DJ Quik David Blake is frequently described as underrated, which is odd for someone with a catalogue this deep. The more accurate description is that he has been consistently undersold: a rapper good enough to carry albums, and a producer, arranger and mixer whose ear puts him among the best America has produced in any genre. What separates Quik from his contemporaries is that he plays. Where much of G-funk was built from loops of seventies records, Quik replays parts, writes horn charts, and treats the drum programming as a live performance. His records swing in a way that sampled tracks generally do not. He is also an exceptional mix engineer, which is why his productions sound louder and clearer than their neighbours without being harsher. What to listen for The Quik's Groove instrumentals are th...

Forty-one records assembled in the summer of 2020, arguing that reggae had been making this case for fifty years before the slogan existed. Black Lives Matter: A Reggae Tribute Protest playlists made in 2020 mostly reached for the obvious American canon. This one does something more interesting: it goes to Jamaica and Britain, and it demonstrates that a complete vocabulary for talking about state violence, dignity and resistance had already been built in reggae — and had been in continuous use since the early seventies. The sequencing makes the argument chronologically as well as musically. Roots reggae, dub poetry, dancehall and the contemporary revival all sit together, and the continuity of concern across five decades is the point. What to listen for Linton Kwesi Johnson opens the set, and that is the right decision. Britain's foremost dub poet wrote about policing, deportation and racial violence in London with a precision no song has improved on, and hearing h...

Twenty-two tracks from the most technically gifted rapper of his generation, caught at the point where the rest of the world was starting to notice. JID Destin Route came out of Atlanta by way of Hampton University , where he was on a football scholarship, and by way of Spillage Village , the collective built around EARTHGANG that also drew in 6LACK and Mereba. He signed to J. Cole's Dreamville in 2017. What makes him remarkable is purely technical in the first instance: an extremely high, nasal delivery, an ability to switch rhythmic patterns mid-bar, and breath control that lets him rap at speeds where most people lose diction. Then, underneath that, the writing — dense, funny, and far more interested in specificity than in flexing. This playlist catches him mid-ascent, which is a good time to hear an artist: enough catalogue to judge, not yet enough fame to distort it. What to listen for "Off Deez" with J. Cole is the technical showcase and the one...

The brother was a fucking genius! Who else can combine Pop, Gospel, Funk & Rock like this & command the stage??

Nineteen records from the guitarist who wrote the rhythm part that half of modern pop is still trying to copy. Nile Rodgers Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards formed the most efficient hit factory of the late seventies and then, unusually, kept going. Their working method as the Chic Organization was unlike anyone else's: they wrote, produced, arranged and played the records themselves, treating each act they took on as a separate creative brief rather than a chance to repeat the formula. Rodgers' guitar style is the most imitated element — that clipped, percussive chord figure he calls chucking, played high on the neck with almost no sustain, functioning as a rhythm instrument rather than a lead one. It works because it leaves a hole exactly where Edwards' bass wants to be. Then came the second career. When disco collapsed and the Chic name became commercially toxic, Rodgers reinvented himself as a producer for hire and made career-defining records for artis...

Seventeen tracks from the producer who built the sound of SOLAR Records — and, through it, a large part of what the early eighties sounded like on the radio. Leon Sylvers III Leon Sylvers III came out of a family act. The Sylvers were a large, talented Memphis-born family group whose hits he wrote and played on, and his younger brother Foster Sylvers had a hit of his own as a child. Where he mattered most, though, was as the in-house producer at SOLAR — Dick Griffey's Sound of Los Angeles Records — where between roughly 1979 and 1984 he was responsible for an extraordinary run of records by The Whispers, Shalamar, Dynasty and Carrie Lucas. His signature is instantly identifiable once you know it: a hard, clipped synthesised bass, bright keyboard stabs, handclaps on the backbeat, and an arrangement that keeps the midrange almost empty so the vocal sits forward. It is one of the most heavily sampled sounds in hip-hop, precisely because there is so much ro...

Sixty-six records for the hours after midnight, sequenced by someone who understands that the point of a late-night set is patience. Til The Break Of Dawn Jamz Vol. 1 The quiet-storm set is one of the hardest formats to get right, because the failure mode is so obvious: string enough slow songs together and you produce wallpaper. What keeps this one alive across sixty-six tracks is that it refuses to stay in one decade, and it keeps changing the kind of intimacy on offer. There are seventies Philadelphia ballads next to 2020 R&B, smooth jazz instrumentals next to neo-soul, and the transitions work because the sequencing is matching feel rather than tempo or era. What to listen for The Isley Brothers' "Don't Say Goodnight" in both parts is the centrepiece of the older material — eight minutes of Ernie Isley's guitar and Ronald's falsetto that essentially defines the format. Maxwell's "This Woman's Work" is the bravest inc...