Ooh, what am I supposed to do

By the time Jocelyn Brown finally put her own name on a sleeve, she had already been the voice behind a stack of dancefloor records — Musique’s “In the Bush”, Inner Life’s towering disco reading of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”. “Somebody Else’s Guy”, from 1984, was the hit she got to keep: a song she co-wrote with Annette Brown about loving a man she knows full well isn’t hers, sung like the realisation is happening in real time.

It opens with that wail — “ooh, what am I supposed to do” — before the beat has even sorted itself out, and the whole record stays at that pitch of gorgeous, self-aware trouble. It climbed to number two on the US R&B chart and into the UK top twenty, and it has never really left a good DJ’s crate since. This is the full twelve-inch version, which is the correct dose.

When it’s done, go look up her live take with the New Amsterdam Orchestra — three decades on, strings and horns behind her, and the voice hasn’t surrendered an inch.