Back in stock: Soul

Review: We love it when French label Wagram puts out another compilation because they are invariably excellent and can every much make your record collection and therefore digging credentials seem maybe a touch better than they are without doing much work yourself. This one, after loads that have focussed on everything form techno to soul to protest songs, is simply called Groove Diggin. It is another sublime los at some red hot and impassioned soul sounds put together with love by some serious diggers. Cortex, The Heads of the Family and more all feature.

Review: Paul Weller is perhaps one of the best non-soul musicians to ask to compile a rare soul compilation. Rather than documenting soul music as it proliferated in the 1960s, Ace Records' soul aim was to capture a genre, fashion and style as one man saw it in retrospect, in light of his involvement in the mod revival of the mid 1970s. Weller would later go onto form and front The Jam, but in late 1974, shortly before his involvement in the punk movement, he was about none of that business at all. Punk partly grew on febrile tissues of mod, which was in turn an offshoot of 60s soul; and it is true that we may hear a foetal form of the sound in the brasher cuts on this record, be it Billy Stewart's 'Summertime' or James Carr's 'Pouring Water'. Also clock Brother To Brother's 'In The Bottle', a super-early drum machine blues gem perfect for the house heads.