The Backroom Boys: Booker T & the MGs

IF EVER THERE WAS a piece of music that deserved the epithet "timeless", it’s Booker T. & the MGs’ ‘Green Onions’. The most basic of blues instrumentals, set to a walking 2/4 beat, it doesn’t amount to a whole hill of beans. And yet after almost 40 years it remains astoundingly funky, a vehicle for the most sinuous of Hammond organ grooves and for the vicious Fender Telecaster licks of Steve Cropper, in the fine words of Gerri Hirshey "cutting across the top like a sugarcane machete".