Mark Ronson and the leaking material

At its best, Mark Ronson's Record Collection is a giddy, freewheeling scamper around planet pop. When you're not toasting Q-Tip with a cup of warm champagne, you're swapping hair gel with Simon Le Bon or taking stupid polaroids with The Pipettes' Rose Elinor Dougall.

In other words, it's a Gorillaz album without the massive superiority complex.

Despite Record Collection's generous running time and, let's be honest, the presence of a few stinkers (eg the useless-but-thematically-important Introducing The Business) there are plenty of quality tracks left over from the recording sessions.

Ronson premiered one of them on his East Village Radio Show last week. Brilliantly titled Taste of a Samurai, it was co-written by Cathy Dennis and Christian Karlsson of Miike Snow and features guest vocals from Jarina De Marco.

The song was considered strong enough to be part of the tracklisting as recently as August, when NME got an exclusive first play, so it'd be interesting to find out why it was culled at the last minute. I have four theories:

1) Licensing problems with the featured artists' publishers and labels.
2) Holding back a few tracks for the inevitable special edition.
3) Unfortunate similarity to dodgy racial stereotyping chart topper Japanese Boy.
4) The intro is totally ripped off Especially For You.

Here's a rip of the song from Mark's endearingly ramshackle radio programme - which is always worth a listen. You can subscribe to the show here if you like.

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