I'm Simon Tesler, back with you again for another hour of great tracks on the theme of ROYALTY, kicking off with The Stranglers.

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Princess Of The Street by The Stranglers from their debut album Rattus Norvegicus. As with so many of their songs, the brilliance of the music -- especially Jean-Jacques Burnel's barracuda bass and Dave Greenfield's swirling keyboard -- was almost but not quite enough to distract from the slightly grubby misogyny of some of the lyrics. What a piece of meat, indeed! 

The song was penned by Jean-Jacques Burnel before The Stranglers even got together, and it's a love song to an old girlfriend, also the subject of a couple of other songs including Choosey Susie. In the book The Stranglers Song By Song by Jim Drury, Hugh Cornwall said "It's John at his most romantic. It's about someone he had a very strong relationship with pre-band. He was with her for quite a long time... she was a lovely girl but I think he had his ups and downs with her. She was really one of his first loves."

Cornwall also points out in that book that the unorthodox time signature of the song means it's actually a jazz swing number. "We all enjoyed playing it live because it was so different from anything else we did. It was pretty radical to be playing a jazz swing number. Dave had a great chance to be inventive on his keyboards. I could do some psychedelic guitar and emulate my hero Robbie Krieger from The Doors. John could pretend to be Jim Morrison and Jet could get into his jazz drumming."

The Stranglers as the jazz romantics you never realised they were! 

Let's stay in the punk era with our next song, one of the anthems of the period. You can probably guess what it is. The theme is royalty after all. In the book Art Of Noise: Conversations with Great Songwriters, John Lydon -- the former Johnny Rotten -- told interviewer Daniel Rachel, "That song was running around in my mind for months, long before joining the Sex Pistols; the idea of being angry, of the indifference of the Queen to the population and the aloofness and indifference to us as people. I had to work on building sites to get the money to go to college because I wanted to further my education and yet I was taxed to hell. Why am I paying for that silly cow who couldn't give a damn about me? Along come the Pistols and just one morning over baked beans I wrote it down in one go on Mum and Dad's kitchen table."

After that I'm going to play a song John Lydon probably hates, Deep Purple's Speed King, which opens with a wall of guitar from Richie Blackmore that's pretty punk in its own right. But that's in a few minutes. This is God Save The Queen. 

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God Save The Queen from the Sex Pistols and then Deep Purple with Speed King, released in 1970 on their seminal album In Rock. That wall of guitar that opens the song and then the breakneck tempo of the last the three quarters of the song must have sounded pretty extraordinary back then. Led Zeppelin had pioneered a harder style of rock on their first two albums, released in 68 and 69, but then Deep Purple took it to new extremes following the arrival of new singer Ian Gillan and new bassplayer Roger Glover a few months before. "Let's have a go at being really heavy," Ritchie Blackmore told his bandmates.

Funnily enough, though I've known that song since I was a teenager, I'd never actually realised that all the verses are lifted from early rock n roll classics. Mostly Little Richard: There are bits of Good Golly Miss Molly, Tutti Frutti, Lucille and  Rip It Up, but also Elvis's Hard Headed Woman and Chuck Berry's Some People. It was the first song written by Ian Gillan after he joined the band, and at first he was a bit stuck for inspiration. He said later "The first things that came into my head were Chuck Berry and Little Richard words, so I just stole them."

Two more kings now. In a few minutes, Generation X with King Rocker, but first the King himself, Elvis Presley. Here's a neat little coincidence. As I mentioned, Ian Gillan's Speed King lyrics steal a couple of lines from the Elvis song Hard Headed Woman. And where does that song come from? Yup, the soundtrack from the Elvis movie: King Creole released in 1958.

And, unlike their punk peers, Generation X's Billy Idol and Tony James never made any secret of their admiration for Elvis and the other musicians thewy grew up listening to. Idol told the Telegraph later 

We were saying the opposite to the Clash and the Pistols. They were singing 'No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones,' but we were honest about what we liked. The truth was, we were all building our music on the Beatles and the Stones. ... We wrote 'King Rocker' about John Lennon and Paul McCartney having a fight with Elvis about who was the king of rock and roll."

That's in a couple of minutes, but first Elvis and King Creole.

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We just had two Kings there, so let's even it up with a couple of classic Queens. In a few minutes, David Bowie. But first up is Bob Dylan with Queen Jane Approximately from the album Highway 61 Revisited, released in 1965. This is Bob Dylan just after he completed what was then an incredibly controversial transition from acoustic folk singer to electric guitarist. In fact the album was recorded in two sessions on either side of his appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival, when he performed live with electric instruments for the very first time and was booed by the audience. 

If you saw the recent Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown with Timothee Chalamet you'll probably remember the recreation of that show. It's hard to believe now but at the time, his followers were shocked and outraged by his decision to go electric, and also to abandon political songwriting in favour of more traditional rock music. At a gig in England the following year, one audience member actually shouted "Judas!" at him. 

All of this feeds into the many many theories about the meaning of Queen Jane Approximately. One of these is that he is in some form addressing his former lover Joan Baez, still firmly embedded in the acoustic folk movement. Won't you come and see me Queen Jane, when you're tired of yourself and all your creations. Who knows? But what's clear is that the singer has moved on and is warning Queen Jane that she still lives in a false and superficial world that he has left behind. Maybe, Dylan's even addressing his former self. He said in one interview that "Queen Jane is a man".

There's no mystery about the identity of the Queen Bitch David Bowie was singing to in the song of that name on his album Hunky Dory. It's Lou Reed. That's also a transitional song since it's widely regarded to be Bowie's first step towards the glam rock of the Ziggy Stardust album that followed a year later. 

But first Bob Dylan and Queen Jane Approximately.

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I snuck another one in there unannounced. That was Led Zeppelin with Royal Orleans, from the Presence album. It is, if you like, Zeppelin's answer to The Kinks' Lola, in that it was inspired by the memorable encounter between a member of the Zeppelin entourage with a drag queen in New Orleans' French Quarter. Stephen Davis, in his scandal-raking unauthorised biography The Hammer Of The Gods, suggested that John Paul Jones was the Zeppelin team member involved, and that he didn't know the drag queen was a man. Jones angrily set the record straight in an interview with the website Lemon Squeezings in which he also had a go at Robert Plant for being uncomfortable back then around the gay scene. The drag queen in question was an acquaintance of the band's famously wild-living tour manager Richard Coles.

"That stupid book," said Jones. "It got all its facts wrong. No, everybody knew who those people were. They were friends of Richard's. And yes, we knew they were transvestites. We were friends. Her name was Stephanie! We'd see her every time we'd go to New Orleans. But Robert was a bit provincial. He and Bonzo weren't like big city boys. They didn't like all that sort of thing. Whereas Richard and Jimmy and I … "

Let's slow down the tempo now. In a few minutes we're going to welcome Sade for her track King Of Sorrow, from the album Lovers Rock. Released in 2000, it was Sade's first new work for eight years and it shows a much more soulful and stripped down atmosphere than her previous albums. 

But first, the Swedish jazz and soul bandleader Nils Landgren, sometimes known as the Man With The Red Horn because he plays a strikingly unusual red trombone. If you've heard some of my earlier shows you'll know I'm always a sucker for cover versions that completely reinvent an earlier song. A couple of weeks ago I played Post Modern Jukebox's old-school jazz version of Wham's Careless Whisper; here's a track in a similar vein. I'm not going to tell you what the song is, but you definitely know the very different original. I wonder how long it will take you to realise what it is.

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Lovely. To close the show, we're going to stay slightly funky but with an unmistakable worldbeat edge. Allez Allez were originally a Belgian new wave band called Marine who'd released a few successful singles on the local indie label Les Disques Du Crepuscule during 1981. That earned them a booking from BBC Radio 1's very influential John Peel Show to come to London and record a session. However, the band's singer jumped ship just after they arrived, leaving the band in the lurch. At short notice, they signed up British singer Sarah Osborne to fill in, and went ahead with the session under the new name Allez Allez. A mini-album followed. Here's the standout track from that release, written in honour of Grace Jones. This is African Queen.