Various

More From The Other Side Of The Trax

KENT. CD The second volume of B-sides from the Stax/Volt labels spanning 1960-68. Reissued here for the first time, these flips from Stax/ Volt’s blue period, went largely unnoticed – apart from Rufus Thomas’s 1964 hep blues, All Night Worker, which became a UK Mod club hit. Often, though, they could have been the plug sides – Carla Thomas’s 1964 selfpenned The Puppet, for instance, one of six tracks here by Rufus’s daughter, sets the label’s then 22-year-old queen against a backdrop of dramatic, stirring strings. Barbara And The Browns’ I Don’t Want Trouble from 1965 and William Bell’s What’cha Gonna’ Do from 1963 were surely winners too. The former captures Barbara’s boisterous R&B shout and her sisters’ gospel harmonies behind her, the latter, written by Bell and Steve Cropper, is a heartbreak ballad, both immense and intense.