The name Lemuel Strongtrout may not mean a lot to you, but it means even less to Strongtrout himself, who has spent much of the past 50 years trying to escape it. A member of Toronto psych-prog outfit Mit Avec in his late teens, he recorded one album with them as lead singer, before all his bandmates tragically died in a series of murders that he himself definitely didn't commit, and for which he had a series of watertight alibis. Strongtrout left his native Canada - with his head held high and reputation unsullied - to lie low for a while, and, in time, to record the seminal 'Galapagos' album, released under the pseudonym Chester Forfeit , which made him an international star and indeed an unlikely sex symbol. With its capricious licks and plunging fuck-funk basslines, it was a record that literally everybody owned in the late 1970s, and under some jurisdictions non-ownership was actually punishable by imprisonment. Forfeit had the world at his feet - at his foref...

  It is perhaps the greatest irony ever to befall the much-misunderstood electro-proto-funk-o-lectro genre that Morecambe duo The Repeat Offenders failed to release a follow-up to their 2007 debut, Loon Bran. Some might argue that it's not just an irony but an outright tragedy that the three-and-a-half Moog synthesisers used on the album now lie abandoned and gathering moths; Richard Ralts and Colin McCrombie having long since turned their back on the music business and sworn to never lay down another beat for the rest of their lives. But this music was a product of its time. Strangulated, condensed, some might even say deeply unpleasant to listen to. The opening track 'Versatile Log' does away with any pretence of tonality, rhythm or other such trivial conventions, while the 13 minute epic 'Rupert done toilet' was described by McCrombie as "trivial noises, performed and recorded in a critically important way". Other artists - Elf Conversion Syndrome , Cam...