Know You Wanna (Parlophone) & Sean Paul: Gimme The Light (Atlantic)

In a different version of the world, your correspondent spends the afternoon tripping down Brixton High Street with teenage-summer abandon, Top Shop and Rimmel gleaming from every body-surface, one ear permanently corked by the hands-free kit. The ringtone, on such a day, might then be the mindless but weirdly contagious high-street Brit’n’b of ‘Know You Wanna’, its slick but impressively soulful production sadly not done justice by the phone’s polyphonic-tone capabilities.

Several years later, that girl graduates to the taut, spare bounce of Sean Paul’s quite brilliant old-meets-new-school dub ragga. Elsewhere, things called indie, alt.country and new-garage happen.