Drive Baby Drive

Very smart clean vinyl, looks unplayed with a nice cover showing minor shelf wear.

Shona's album South which also sprung the radio singles Drive Baby Drive, the title track and Soviet Snow, the latter the equal of Kennedy in all respects – she was back, 17 years after she'd first been that young but commanding presence on the small screen.

Perhaps this much is familiar biography to some, but what needs to be said is just what a gifted songwriter and committed performer she has been.

Her writing has reached effortlessly from synth-pop to spare and affecting acoustic folk, the latter represented on her 97 album Roadworks where she readdressed some songs from her back-catalogue including the insightful Highway Warriors about the human cost of our road toll, the moving Mercy of Love and her whimsical I Love My Feet.

In the broad spectrum of her work we can take the measure of Shona Laing's gifts. She can be the achingly sensitive poet, a furiously astute social and political commentator (yes, she wrote a song called White Colonial Middle-Class Anarchist) or a woman speaking plainly of the power of passion and love.