No, purists, it isn’t cheating to stick a Peel Sessions collection on a “favourite albums” list. Sure, either of the Only Ones’ first two LPs would have comfortably made this list (it’s considered polite not to mention “Baby’s got a Gun”: by this time the band couldn’t stand the sight of each other while CBS, who now trusted them as far as they could throw Demis Roussos, imposed an unsympathetic producer) but John Perry ,who should know, has always said that these sessions or the superb “Live in London” best capture what the band really sounded like.

JP had a point, clearly. Forget all the traditional drugs blah blah dissolution waffle which normally obscures this band’s story and just listen. From the first chord-slash of “Oh Lucinda”, an intro of which Townshend in his prime would have been proud, this shows the Only Ones for what they were (and, miraculously, are again since 2007) – four great musicians thriving in the few hours allowed to a Peel gig, hitting just the right blend of improvisation and tightness time and again. Signature tune “Another Girl, Another Planet” is present with a variation on its famous guitar solo, while for “Oh No” the nice BBC engineers miked things up perfectly for Perry to hurl his Strat at the wall to maximum effect. Just two highlights out of a choice 14. And the lesser known “Prisoners” is what I’d play to anyone who wants to know why I love this lot – Kellie and Mair’s rhythm rolls and tumbles generously, John throws in half a dozen short, punchy solos that work individually and add up to a perfect whole, and well, five words for Peter Perrett? Conversational, acerbic, genuinely tender, unique. There really isn’t another band like them. ¹

I first heard that when I was 18 (praise God for reissue programs; the band themselves had been defunct for nearly a decade). Two years earlier, while avidly courting an Australian girl staying at the Victoria League hostel in Bayswater, I’d stopped into the Virgin Record Store – or was it an Our Price? – at the top of Queensway in search of some Springsteen to feed my youthful dreams. The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle was more than I bargained for. A buddy of mine still characterises Bruce as a singing sheet-metal worker in a dirty vest, Sly Stallone with a backing band, and from “Born in the USA” and much else you can draw that conclusion if you want to miss out on a lifetime of musical thrills – but how to explain this cavalcade of soul, doo-wop, jazz improv and, frankly, classical piano?

I still reckon the title track is hokum, but “Rosalita” had me believing that with a silver tongue and a heart big and bold (and silly) enough you really could get the girl, and then the fun really begins. The four-song arc ² starting with the very-strange-indeed “Wild Billy’s Circus Story” (closer to Tom Waits than Southside Johnny) is a deep, affecting concept album in itself. The concepts? Adventure, Love, Hope, The City… “Incident on 57^th Street” draws all of that into 7:45 of piano-led romantic epic and may be his finest song of all, his great New York musical novel. ³ It runs seamlessly into “Sandy” – the same bruised but unbowed dreams on the smaller canvas of the New Jersey boardwalk – and then we play out with “New York City Serenade”, which somehow lives up to its grandly ambitious title. “Serenade” sweeps and banks over the great city, picking out several little stories before panning out again to the call-and-response soundtrack of the junkman starting work at dawn: “He’s singing… singing… singing…” It seems like piano man David Sancious threw everything he had into his final E Street contribution, his jazz-classical background melding with Bruce’s ever wider visions to produce something you’d think was more likely to turn up as a lost cut from “Astral Weeks” than on any Springsteen album, ever.

Phew. The only thing to do after all that, really, is to play it again (missing out the title track, if you’re me). And please, please, if you’ve never heard them, listen to those last four tracks EVEN IF YOU THINK YOU HATE SPRINGSTEEN AND EVERYTHING HE STANDS FOR. (Hi, Mark!)

Reader, I followed that girl all the way to Sydney, and I did not bring her back. I did see a charmingly odd video of some guys pushing a big rock around a beach, to the sound of something called “Heavenly Pop Hit”. (At least two-thirds of that title is justified, and you can probably guess which bit isn’t.) It leads off Submarine Bells by The Chills, an album and band who are post-punk only in the same way that really small mobile phones are. Really, there’s everything here: regular-ish indie (“Tied up in Chain”, “Singing in my Sleep”), barely-there lo-fi reveries (“Don’t Be – Memory”) and the weird but welcoming twin singalongs “Dead Web” and “I SOAR” which could have been written on Tatooine rather than, presumably, New Zealand: “Silver sisters fill the horizon/The cream of Autumn’s violet skies/ At dusk the land will quietly shed its disguise/As both moons rise/feigning surprise at the meeting of eyes”.

All eloquent, all warm-hearted, all imaginative, and never more so than the title track, as unusual in its way as the “modern classical music” Scott Walker deals in nowadays. “Submarine Bells”, the song, has lyrics (though it takes a while to discern them) but is closer to whalesong than any regular kind of singing, and is one of the most touching things I’ve heard in my whole life.