Track Eight : Richard Hell - Blank Generation

Mix the Velvet Underground with rap and you get something a little like Richard Hell & The Voidoids, Founder of two of New York's seminal punk bands (Television and The Heartbreakers)

From the opening choppy guitar intro that leads into an awkward tempo change there is something special about this song.

The guitar solos are discordant, off-key and utterly perfect. Just the thing to save a seventeen year old me from the terminal dullness of prog rock. Hell, i'd even bought Tales From Topographic Oceans!

Better known among my school friends for his seminal "Love Comes in Spurts" this is Hell's classic track. Born Richard Meyers, Hell was, according to some sources the original punk, with spiked hair and safety pins holding torn jeans together. Malcolm McLaran has said that his look was the basis for the clothing he sold in his shop Sex.

Meyers was a childhood friend of guitarist Tom Miller (Tom Verlaine), having run away from school together in 11th grade. They were arrested and charged with arson and vandalism shortly afterwards. Moving to New York in 1973 they formed The Neon Boys who recorded Love Comes in Spurts as a demo in 1973. A year later they added an additional guitar player and became Television.

Blank Generation was one of the highlights of their live shows at CBGBs, the home of New York Punk. In 1975 Hell left Television after falling out with Verlaine over control of material. At the same time Johnny Thunders and Gerry Nolan left the New York Dolls, together they formed the Heartbreakers, who would go on to make one of the best of the early Punk albums LAMF - but without Hell.

He left again to form the Voidoids and to record Blank Generation for Stiff Records. The Voidoids recorded one half decent album and a dreadful one, which Hell has rerecorded and was due to release last year.

Track Seven - Smokey Robinson & The Miracles: Tears of a Clown

Originally recorded in 1967, this is perhaps the first song I remember getting really excited about hearing. I clearly recall spending a rainy day at home reading "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" and listening to Radio One on a huge black Bush Trannie (a type of radio, youngsters) in the hope of hearing the song again. I'm going to claim that it was my inate good taste that drew me to the song, but it might just have been the mention of clowns.

The song had a unique origin. It began life at the 1966 Motown Christmas Party when Stevie Wonder brought an instrumental track he had written with his producer, Hank Crosby for Smokey Robinson to listen to.

They had failed to find a lyric to go with the tune and wanted Smokey to see what he could come up with.

Robinson seems to have taken themes from his song 'My Smile is Just a Frown (Turned Upside Down)', which he had written for Carolyn Crawford in 1964- see the alternative takes playlist - and added the clown theme from the opening calliope motif which reminded him of a circus. Indeed he even reused one line from his earlier song, "just like Pagliacci did/I'll try to keep my sadness hid", a line that stands out for its elegant awkwardness.

The song was not released as a single at the time and it was in 1970 when, starved of any new Robinson material, the UK Motown office remixed the album version and had a huge hit with it. Finally released in the US it was the Miracles one and only number one single with Smokey.

It was a hit all over again in 1976 when it was re-released in the UK and was later covered by Ska group, The Beat. There are also echos of the song in ABC's tribute song, When Smokey Sings.

But I still hate clowns!