Marco Rossi continues the list of his 100 favourite singles of all time

FORTY-TWO years on, the jury's still out as to what the name Wimple Winch' signifies exactly, although the consensus generally seems to be that some kind of witch's hat is involved.

It's a memorable if fairly unfortunate name whatever its provenance, and hardly a significant advance on this Stockport quartet's previous appellation, The Four Just Men - which in itself was confusingly amended to The Just Four Men.

Still with me? It's worth staying the course for this one, honestly, because Save My Soul is one of the finest and most highly-prized examples of UK freakbeat. I sold my copy some years ago during a moment of weakness and penury, and even then my nowehere-near-mint copy fetched £160 on eBay, so Yahweh alone knows what price copies are changing hands for nowadays.

Why all the fuss? Well, quite simply, for all of their obscurity The Wimple Winch were masterful performers with a grasp of dynamics which was way ahead of its time. Save My Soul builds from effectively nothing - a skeletal, minimal four-chord sketch - into a monstrous, stomping, slavering beast, topped off with throat-tearing vocals which sound like the inmates of Bedlam howling at each other in the night.

The last minute of the song is about as exciting as anything I've ever heard, wherein the band - already steaming along at full strength - double up the tempo, then with nowhere to go from there simply resort to trampling every beat of the bar into the ground.

It's an extraordinary, blazing racket, a real speaker melter, belligerently alive and fuelled with first-take swagger.

Appropriately enough given such a combustible performance, Wimple Winch's equipment went up in smoke in 1967, followed in short order by their career.

What a great, great pity - and what a great, great band.