Recently by Graeme Whitfield

Good God: look at Lyle Lovett's hair in the video for Walk Through The Bottomland - it's magnificent!

(A duet with Emmylou Harris must be a rite of passage for male country singers, I think: by my reckoning, Lyle Lovett joins Gram Parsons, Ryan Adams, Elvis Costello, John Denver, Neil Young and Willie Nelson to name but a few.)

When I tell you that I bought the first Strokes EP in a little record shop in Greenwich Village, it probably makes me sound a whole lot cooler than I really am.

Anyway, I did and splendid it was too. The Strokes went on to produce a great debut album, a decent follow-up and a not very good third album. Since then they seem to have been on hiatus, with most of them producing solo records.

But last week I was in a shop and heard Last Nite and remembered just how great it sounded.

In the early 1980s, film director Francis Ford Coppola was so inspired by a Tom Waits song (a duet with Bette Midler) that he decided to make a film around some of his music.

The result was One From the Heart, a film designed to be a small production after the excesses of Acopolypse Now but which went on to cost $26m and bankrupted Coppola after he insisted on filming it all on sound stages to create an air of artificiality.

The film itself is at best so-so, but there's some great Tom Waits songs on it. Midler wasn't available to do the music so Crystal Gayle did the female parts instead, with Take Me Home just the most beautiful song imaginable.

(Sorry, can't find an online version of the duet, but I have found Waits singing it on a TV show!)

It seems odd that singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman seemed so revolutionary in 1988, but after a decade of overblown excess, a woman with an acoustic guitar was a refreshing change.

Fast Car was the song that (briefly) shot her to fame when she played it at the Nelson Mandela tribute concert.

More than 20 years on, it still seems like a great bit of storytelling (as well as a cracking tune.)

I don't often do requests, but for a friend who spent her holidays re-acquainting herself with the Rolling Stones' Greatest Hits, here's Jumpin' Jack Flash.

(I am led to believe that he is a gas, gas, gas...)

Best Madonna single of the century, anyone?

OK, that's not saying much but I'd put Celebration among her best work (some of which are celebrated in the accompanying video).

Cracking little pop song, I reckons.

I think by now we should all be agreed that Bruce Springsteen is completely marvellous.

I'll Work For Your Love is a relatively new song - from the Magic album of 2007 - but from its opening lines - "Pour me a drink Teresa in one of the glasses you dust off/And I'll watch the bones in your back like the stations of the cross" - it is an absolute classic.

I like this home video that someone has put on Youtube to accompany it. Someone has left the message: "Great video. The song matches perfectly. Does this Bruce Springsteen guy have any other good songs?"

Arf.

Last night I watched Gregory's Girl for about the 21st time. I do believe it to be the best film ever made.

The music in Gregory's Girl is a bit wretched but the film does feature the fabulous Claire Grogan before she formed Altered Images.

Here is their great song I Should Be Happy.

No, honest. Patrick Swayze.

I don't often take requests, but for a mate who's a big Dirty Dancing fan, today's Song of the Day is She's Like The Wind.

As a song, it encapsulates pretty much everything that made the 1980s the decade that music forgot: it's overblown, silly and pompous and has saxaphones on it, for starters. Yet at the same time it's hard not to like it just a little, especially today.

Nobody puts Swayze in a corner.

Keep Me In Your Heart is the final song from the posthumous album of the great singer-songwriter Warren Zevon.

In that context, it's a bit heartbreaking. I particularly like the line "I'm tied to you than the buttons on your blouse" which seems all the more affecting for it's slight clumsiness.

I've mentioned this before, but Zevon was interviewed shortly before his untimely death in 2003 by David Letterman and had enough humour to be able to quip: " may have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years."

Asked on whether he had gained any insight into life and death, he said: "Enjoy every sandwich," which seems a pretty good epitath.