The story goes that Grace Slick once tried to smuggle LSD into a White House garden party with the intention of spiking President Nixon’s tea! Thankfully, or not depending on your political point of view, Tricky Dicky’s security guards recognised her immediately as a member of The Jefferson Airplane and refused her entry.

After all, there was no way these CIA-types were going to let the outspoken singer with a top psychedelic rock band – who openly and shamelessly urged fans to ‘tune in, turn on and drop out’, trash traditional US values and burn the flag along with their draft cards – get anywhere near the leader of the western world. Not even if she had attended the same private finishing school as his daughter Trisha!

Alongside Janis Joplin, Grace Slick was the poster girl for San Francisco’s flower power counter culture. Where one came on like a force of nature, the other was more of an aloof aristocrat. Variously known as The Acid Queen and The Chrome Nun, Garce Slick looked like a fallen angel and on the Airplane’s momentous 1967 Top Ten single White Rabbit (from their RCA album Surrealistic Pillow) she sang like one too.

Slick claimed it only took her an hour to write. But by mixing references to Alice In Wonderland with the weird chord sequence at the core of what was essentially one long, bolero-like crescendo, White Rabbit did more than merely take all existing folk rock conventions and throw them out of the window. It mapped out a musical acid trip like no other in the history of rock.

Although they were never to reach such an artistic nirvana ever again, Slick and husband / co-singer Paul Kantner continued to record and release some 13 gold or silver status albums over the next decade and a half. Various members came and went as the Airplane morphed into the Jefferson Starship until, in June 1984, after an acrimonious row, Kantner finally stormed off leaving Slick alone with the name Starship.

Whether he had been holding her back or keeping her honest is open to conjecture. But within a year Slick’s Starship was arguably the biggest act in America thanks to chart topping singles like We Built This City and Sara.

However with industry standard producers like Peter Wolf, Dennis Lambert and Narada Michael Walden at the controls, it was a case of goodbye acid rock, hello AOR. And by the time Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now came along the transformation was complete.

This is the toe-tapper which soundtracks Talk Talk TV’s current cartoon commercial. Written by top Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths Dianne Warren and Albert Hammond – for a Hollywood movie Mannequin starring Kim Cattrall which sank without trace – Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now is about as smooth and radio-friendly a slab of stadium rock you could possibly imagine. So safe in fact that you’ll have to listen hard to hear even the merest hint of menace in Grace Slick’s voice.

Nevertheless young Americans lapped it up – as indeed did their counterparts in the UK where it also topped the singles chart in May 1987. Three years short of 50, it also rocketed Grace Slick into the record books as the oldest woman to hit the Number One spot stateside until Cher and her auto tuner came along with Believe in 1999.

But for the hippy heads in the audience there simply wasn’t enough in Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now to really get ‘em off! And sadly there still isn’t.

Unlike The Chemical Brothers’ block-rockin’ Setting Sun. Now there’s a record which belies its age and still sounds as explosively ecstatic as ever it did when it was first released on the band’s Freestyle Dust imprint through the noted dance independent Junior Boys Own back in 1996.

So a big shout should go out to Hyundai for licensing it into an exhilarating spot which is down on the timesheet as Falling Stuff – for no better reason than a host of disparate objects including shopping trolleys, plastic frogs and an electric guitar fall from the sky and come together to create the Japanese car company’s latest ix 35 model.

No, it doesn’t make real sense to us either. But then we’ve never really understood what the song is actually about since co-writer Noel Gallagher’s vocals were FX’ed from here to eternity and back again – making it virtually impossible to hear the words.

But while few records of any age remain as simultaneously in-your-face and totally out there as Tom Rowlands’ and Ed Simons’ psychotic masterpiece, did it really rip off Tomorrow Never Knows, the final cut on The Beatles’ 1966 album Revolver?

Listening to it now it’s hard to hear anything more than the host of other vague similarities with the Fab Four’s canon which infused Gallagher’s work on Definitely Maybe or (What’s The Story) Morning Glory. And, lest we forget, were among the key reasons why Oasis were the darlings of the music press and the toast of the town at the time.

But that didn’t stop lawyers representing the three remaining members of the Moptops’ from trying to slap a charge of illegal sampling on the Chems and have the single – which had gone straight to Number One on week of release in March 1996 – taken off the shelves. Luckily a quickly-commissioned musicologist’s report, paid for by Virgin (who were about to sign the band), exonerated the lads and Setting Sun went on to become not just any old eClassic but a million-selling eClassic.

Which isn’t bad going for a tune our Noel reputedly threw together in an evening over a backing track which Tom and Ed might otherwise have thrown away because they really didn’t know what to do with it!