If it were true that you don’t mess with perfection then there would be several careers – and hello to you Michael Bolton, Human Nature, anyone involved with Glee, and that’s just off the top of my head – which would still be back in music school. Messing with perfection, or at least taking another run at some great songs and trying to if not improve on, then at least recontextualise them, is part of the DNA of popular music. Still, it is a brave bunch who think to themselves

MERCURY REV Bobbie Gentry’s The Delta Sweete Revisited (Bella Union/Inertia) There wasn’t enough Bobbie Gentry music back in the day. Not nearly enough. With a career over by 1980 – voluntarily, happily, and so decisively that she’s barely been seen and certainly not heard since – and a recording career effectively done by the early ‘70s, we have only seven studio albums and a stray late single to keep us company. And one of those albums is a “duet” album with Glen Campbell w