His Life In England

One of those treats that light up your life- got home yesterday, long day at work, exam season, had some tea, pottered round the kitchen loading the dishwasher and other mundane chores, went to the computer and opened up my emails and sitting in the middle of the unread pile in my Inbox was one from Heavenly Recordings that read, 'Dexys Midnight Runners Announce New Album LOVE/ My Life In England Pt. 1 single and video out now'

And on clicking on the link you find this blast of life affirming joy that is Kevin Rowland in full flight...

How much fun is that? The song, the singing and the video.

My Life In England Pt 1 is the story of Kevin's childhood, his Irish immigrant roots, his father and brother, the Irish community in Wolverhampton, rebel songs in social clubs and being taught to fight and love, and then on moving to North London discovering the joys of clothes, music and dancing. The song was originally recorded for a Dexys compilation in 2003, written by Kevin and Jim Patterson- the new version opens the new album, called Love because Kevin realised that all the songs one way or another were about love. It's produced by David Holmes, who had been wanting to work with the band since being eleven years old when his sister gave him a Walkman and his first cassette was Searching For The Young Soul Rebels and the first band he saw live. 

Back in 1985 Dexys released one of the great misunderstood albums of that decade, one that over time has grown to be recognised as a masterpiece. In 1997 after years out of print it was re- issued by Creation and Kevin renamed some of the songs including Listen to This, a song just packed to the brim with passion and feeling. 

I Love You (Listen To This)

Oblique Saturdays

A series for Saturdays in 2026 inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's set of cards, Oblique Strategies (Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas). Eno and Schmidt created them to be used to unblock creative impasses and approach problems from unexpected angles. Each week I'll turn over an Oblique Strategy card and post a song or songs inspired by the suggestion. 

Last week's Oblique Strategy was this- Towards the insignificant- and my song choices went all existential, Pixies, Julian Cope and Tim Burgess. Suggestions from readers (Ernie, Khayem, JC, Walter and Chris) took in Talking Heads' Road To Nowhere, Nic Roeg's film Insignificance and its soundtrack song by Glenn Gregory and Claudia Brucken, The Indelicates and The Last Significant Statement To Be Made In Rock 'n' Roll, John Martyn's Solid Air, Richard Norris' Music For Healing series, anything by Nick Drake, and Frazier Chorus' Nothing (Land Of Oz Mix). That's as good a playlist about insignificance as we're ever going to assemble. 

Today's card is this- Put in earplugs. 

Which made me laugh out loud when I turned it over. 

Friends of mine attended the recent My Bloody Valentine gig at Factory Aviva Studios in Manchester (I missed out on tickets). They all wore earplugs, all found it deafeningly, unbelievably loud and couldn't tell, despite being confirmed and long time MBV fans, which songs were actually being played. Their account made me regret even more that I missed it in a way. 

You Made Me Realise

The loudest gig I've attended in recent years was Bob Mould at Manchester Academy 2 in March 2019, a gig that in retrospect I should have worn earplugs for. The hearing in my right ear has not been the same since. I wrote about it at the time...

Bob Mould at Manchester Academy 2 on Sunday night, twenty years after I last saw him play there. Back in 1998 he played almost entirely solo stuff, promoting his then new record The Last Dog And Pony Show, with just a Sugar song held back for the encore. This time around, promoting his current new album Sunshine Rock, he plays songs from the last forty years of playing and making records, from their earliest recordings to his latest. Backed by a high kicking bassist and a drummer engaged in a one man war of attrition with his snare drum Bob hits the stage loud and fast and doesn't really let up. His guitar/pedals/twin amp set up makes Bob sound like two or three guitarists and it's loud, really loud, with those crystalline melodies fired off within the sheets of distorted riffs. 

There are few gaps between the songs, no light show to speak of, no projections or backdrop- just songs from the Bob Mould back catalogue. He opens with 2014 song The War and then blasts straight into Sugar's A Good Idea, the bass riff on its own for a few seconds before being submerged in Bob's wall of guitars. Three songs in and we're into I Apologise off Husker Du's 1985 New Day Rising. There is then a liberal smattering of songs from Sunshine Rock, Bob's self-willed optimistic, happy album, an album written in the aftermath of the death of both parents and Husker drummer Grant Hart, songs like Thirty Dozen Roses and Sin King, and highlights from Sugar's 1992 album Copper Blue (Hoover Dam sounds enormous, bigger than the guitars and keyboards of the album version). People around me are adjusting their earplugs. 

Husker Du's 1982 hardcore single In A Free Land has been dusted down and in Trump's wake sounds no less relevant and no less alive. Bob has been unwell in recent days and on antibiotics for a chest infection, not that you'd guess- Sugar's If I Can't Change Your Mind roaring out of the amps, noise plus melodies, punk plus choruses. He pauses three quarters of the way through to thank us for coming and introduce Jason Narducy and Jon Wurster on bass and drums and then its back to business. Something I Learned Today, one of Husker Du's most vital songs, is a ferocious blast, spitting fire and piss and from this point, for the final fifteen minutes or so Bob and band go off setlist, launching into one Husker Du song after another, almost a medley- Chartered Trips, their cover of The Mary Tyler Moore theme Love Is All Around Us, a beautiful and raging Celebrated Summer with Bob stretching out the pause into the guitar picking section at the end, finishing with Makes No Sense At All, the single that paved the way for Pixies and Nirvana to name but two. No encore. Lights on. Ears ringing. Home.

Hoover Dam

Chartered Trips

Neither of those mp3s give any idea of how loud Bob was that night. At one point people were physically flinching and stepping back from the stage. I remember moving forwards into a gap and turning my head sideways on at one point as Bob turned the single guitar he was playing into three, all at max volume. 

Bob recently announced Sugar's reformation and a new single, Long Live Love. And gigs including one in Manchester at the end of May. Put in earplugs. 

Magpie Eyes

The latest release on Tici Taci is a three track EP by LCBC, the combined talents of Lloyd Jones and Bob Salmond (who record separately as The Long Champs and Mr BC). On Magpie Eyes they purloin their song title (I'm presuming) from The Loft's legendary 1985 single Up The Hill And Down The Slope (and Dave Cavanagh's Creation records biography My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry For The Prize) and some influence from mid- 80s New Order- chugging rhythm, Hooky bassline and one finger synths playing off against the guitars. 

There are two remixes, one by Black Fades and one from Rude Audio. Black Fades go even further into the heart of the chug, spaced out, dubby cosmische, New Order if they'd been produced not by Stephen Hague but by Justin Robertson. 

Rude Audio take the Magpie Eyes down a South London dub route, stripping the track back to a skeletal electronic rhythm, some isolated topline melodies, whooshes, FX and the ghost of the bass. Addictive stuff. 

While we're here it seems appropriate to head back to 1985 and The Loft. Up The Hill And Down The Slope is definitive early Creation, the group's second single, released on 7" and 12". Pete Astor's lyric pleads for a run in the music industry, 'Once around the fair/ So I know' despite knowing that it'll ruin him and the band, as the guitars jangle and riff. 'Please don't say no...'

Up The Hill And Down The Slope

Snubbed Again

Another dip back into the world of late 80s alternative culture as filtered through the lens of Snub TV, an early evening independent music show of the kind that seems inconceivable now. In December 1988 The House Of Love were filmed playing live at Top Rank in Brighton- the seven minute clip opens with a ferocious take on Destroy the Heart, Terry Bickers' guitar and Guy Chadwick's vocals in some kind of war to be the most ragged and fraught. Bickers was a really talented guitarist, capable of slow burning shimmer and understated pyrotechnics. The clip then has an interview with a fresh faced Chadwick. The rest of the band look like they'd rather be anywhere else. Snub then cut back to the gig with Man To Child. 

I loved The House Of Love, saw them live several times in the late 80s including one occasion at the Queen's Hall in Widnes just a few days before they kicked Terry out of the band, abandoning him at a service station as they were driving to Wales. Relations were fraught and Terry called Guy a breadhead and set fire to a £5 note and then drummer Pete Evans punched Terry in the face- I might be misremembering the details but it was along those lines. The first album, released on Creation in 1988, was possibly the last gasp of this kind of indie guitar music before acid house and indie dance came along the following year. 

Road

Throwing Muses were on Snub in 1988, filmed live at The Town And Country Club in Camden in May. There's a brief interview section at the start of this clip, step- sisters Kristin Hersh and Tanya Donelly, facing the questions and Kristin talking about feminism. The clip then goes to the gig, an intense performance of Downtown (a song from their 1988 album House Tornado). They were a powerful live band- they'd been going since 1981 so by '88 they were pretty seasoned performers. 

Manic Depression is a cover of The Jimi Hendrix Experience song. This is a live instrumental version, no vocals- I've no idea where or when it's from but a version of the song was on 1992's Firepile EP. 

Manic Depression

Loop Ride

More from the Snub TV archives, indie and alternative culture from the late 80s and early 90s as filtered and recorded by the BBC 2 youth culture team. First up, Loop, walls of guitar noise from Croydon, South London, formed by Robert Hampson along with his girlfriend Becky Stewart and James Endeacott. John Wills replaced Becky and Endeacott left to work at Rough Trade where he played a key role in launching both The Strokes and The Libertines. He's also a crate digger with some interesting compilations out (Unlock Your Mind With Morning Glory from last year is a good starting point). Some of the photos of early Loop touring the UK are in Sam Knee's photo book The Scene In Between are definitive shots of the era. Loop are on the cover and a certain subset of indie '88 encapsulated- narrow black jeans and winkle pickers, brown suede, long bowl cuts, leather biker jackets, amps, guitars and Transit vans. 

In 1989 they appeared on Snub, a seven minute clip with interviews, visuals and their music. The interview with Robert is very of its time, maybe the origin story for the 'we make music for ourselves and if anyone else likes its a bonus' line but the music is a blast, overloaded guitars, single minded riffs and glorious repetition. 

Other band members came and went. Loop released three albums of loud, very noisy, psychedelic space rock, all volume, fuzz and three chord riffs- 1987's Heaven's End, Fade Out in 1989 and Gilded Eternity in 1990. The Stooges, Krautrock, late 60s counter- culture re- imagined in late 80s south London. Can you imagine this being on early evening, mid- week BBC 2 now? 

Got To Get Over It was the final song on Fade Out, a blaze of guitars playing the same riff over and over while sludgy drums and distant vocals compete in the background. It breaks down into a swirl of FX and noise, thunder and feedback, a guitar wailing as a weather system closes in around it. Simplistic and purist, an idea taken to its end point.

Got To Get Over It

Also on Snub in 1989 and also very much into distorted guitars and noise but a little younger, were Ride- their first TV appearance was on Snub, the Oxford teenagers playing live at The Town And Country Club. The clip shows them playing Drive Blind, released on their first EP on Creation in January 1990. 

Drive Blind is a Mark Gardener song, one the reformed band still play live now, a little more able to hear themselves and each other now than they were back then. God, how young they were. And we were. 

Drive Blind

Forty Minutes Of That Drum Break

Back in December I posted I'm Not The Man I Used To Be by Fine Young Cannibals and then more recently Madonna's Justify My Love, both songs driven by a very famous drum break- the Funky Drummer, a drum solo played by the legendary Clyde Stubblefield on James Brown's 1970 single Funky Drummer (actually from the B-side Funky Drummer Part 2). Digging into My Bloody Valentine's back catalogue over the last two weeks brought me back to a B-side from 1988 titled Instrumental No. 2, the flipside to a 7" single given away free with the first 5000 copies of Isn't Anything. 

My Bloody Valentine and Madonna (with co- writers Lenny Kravitz and Ingrid Chavez) both built their songs around a short interlude track by Public Enemy from 1988's It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back. PE's Hank Shocklee denies that the drum break on Security Of The First World is a sample from Funky Drummer but both My Bloody Valentine and Madonna sampled Public Enemy- Kravitz denied it saying it was a drum break that was 'just lying around the studio'. Kevin Shields was getting into acid house in 1988 as well as developing MBV's guitar noise and there's a good argument that Instrumental No. 2 is the first indie- dance track, ahead of The Soup Dragons, ahead of The Stone Roses and ahead of Primal Scream. Admittedly Happy Mondays might want a word.

Anyway, the whats and wheres and who's firsts aren't what I'm here for today. I started piecing these tracks together and thought I'd try to get them and a handful of others to work together in a mix. Forty minutes seemed enough- there are literally thousands of songs that have sampled the Funky Drummer and hundreds of hip hop records including Boogie Down Productions,  LL Cool J, Eric B and Rakim, Run DMC, Beastie Boys and NWA. In fact I might come back and do a hip hop Funky Drummer Sunday mix. But in the meantime, this one is those records above and a couple of others. 

For a while Shadrach by The Beastie Boys were in the mix but it's a different drum break, more likely from Hot & Nasty by Black Oak Arkansas and I dropped Fool's Gold in too but it's not the same break either- it's a funky drummer but not the Funky Drummer. DNA and Suzanne Vega did make the cut but I don't think it's actually the Funky Drummer, it's more likely sampled from Soul II Soul, but it felt like it fitted. 

It's probably worth remembering that Clyde Stubblefield, the man whose drumming is the Funky Drummer, got nothing more than the session fee as the drummer in James Brown's band. 

Forty Minutes Of The Funky Drummer

• Public Enemy: Security Of The First World
• My Bloody Valentine: Instrumental No. 2
• Madonna: Justify My Love
• Sinead O'Connor: I'm Stretched On Your Grave
• Fine Young Cannibals: I'm Not The Man I Used To Be
• DNA and Suzanne Vega: Tom's Diner (DNA Remix)
• Radio Slave: Amnesia (Instrumental)
• James Brown: Funky Drummer (Album Version)

Security Of The First World is from side two of It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back, the greatest hip hop album ever made, Chuck D, Flavor Flav and The Bomb Squad writing the book on how to splice noise, funk and rap, politics, race and music. Security Of The First World is a one minute twenty loop, the Funky Drummer, a pulverising bassline and some bleeps, that changed music. 

Kevin Shields sampled Public Enemy for Instrumental No. 2. The pitch drops a little and it sounds scratchier- maybe they sampled it from vinyl. Over the top Kevin plays ghostly guitar chords and layers of wordless vocals to create something that would inform later MBV tracks- Soon is surely born here. 

Madonna's Justify My Love was a 1990 single, banned by MTV due to the S&M, voyeurism and bisexuality on display in the video. I wrote about it earlier this month here. Madonna and Lenny Kravitz wrote and recorded it in a day according to Lenny, very quick and in his words 'authentic'.

Also from 1990 is Sinead O'Connor's I Am Stretched On Your Grave. Sinead was a huge Public Enemy fan. The lyrics are from a 17th century poem, Taim Sinte Ar Do Thuama, translated into English by Irish poet Frank O'Connor and set to music in 1979 by Irish artist Philip King. Sinead's vocal is stunning, alone over Clyde's drumming. Some bass bubbles in, there are some drum crashes and at the end there's a dramatic fiddle part by Waterboy Steve Wickham. 

In 1989 Fine Young Cannibals released I'm Not The Man I Used To Be as a single (the fourth from their album The Raw And The Cooked). They sped the Funky Drummer up and there's some house music in the chords and production. A song that bears repeat plays. Roland Gift was a star who reused to play the game. 

DNA sampled Suzanne Vega's a capella version of Tom's Diner (from here 1987 album Solitude Standing though it dates from earlier, it's on a 1984 Fast Folk Music Magazine album). DNA played it over the drum break from a Soul II Soul record. DNA pressed it up and released it without permission and it took off. Suzanne's label A&M decided to release it officially rather than sue (Suzanne liked the version) and it became a massive hit. It's not the Funky Drummer but it felt like it fitted with Sinead and Madonna and the whole 1990 drum break sampling vibe. 

Just to show that you can't keep a good drum break down, Amnesia is from 2023, a track by Berlin DJ and producer Radio Slave and a tribute to the Ibiza club Amnesia and partying under the stars in the mid- to- late 80s, something Radio Slave admits is a romanticised notion. 

I was in two minds about including the source material. Funky Drummer was released as a single by James Brown in 1970, split over both sides of the 7" with Part 2 being the source of the drum break. This is a nine minute studio version, released on a 1986 album In the Jungle Groove- surely the source for many of the hundreds of artists who followed Public Enemy's lead after 1988 who sampled it. 

To Here Knows When

A few weekends ago No Badger Required posted about My Bloody Valentine's 1988 album Isn't Anything as part of the weekly Almost Perfect Albums series. Isn't Anything is indeed almost perfect, the band finding their way towards the noise and sound that existed inside Kevin Shields' head- walls of guitar noise, half asleep vocals, loud guitars, distorted guitars, hazy, gauze- like guitars, woozy guitars that lurch sounding like a tape that's been stretched and is spooling out of control, a swooning, out of body trance inducing set of songs that was like little else in 1988. Noise as beauty. 

Despite all of this, Isn't Anything isn't the follow up, 1991's Loveless. The recording of Loveless is legendary. It was recorded almost entirely by Shields with drummer Colm O'Ciosoig recording drum loops for Shields to work with and Debbie Googe and Bilinda Butcher largely leaving it up to Kevin after realising they were going to spend a lot of time waiting around in recording studios (Bilinda contributed vocals and lyrics). At first Creation were confident that the album would be recorded in five days. It soon became clear that wouldn't happen. 

Shields worked his way through nineteen studios and a slew of engineers, circumnavigating London's various recording studios for two years. Alan McGee claimed it cost £250, 000 and almost bankrupted Creation. Loveless is an amazing piece of work, a record that stands in a field of its own. Desperate to get some product out and to give Shields the nudge McGee believed he required to complete the album, McGee got MBV to release four songs as the Glider EP in April 1990. The lead track was Soon, a highlight of late 20th century guitar music, a track Brian Eno said reinvented pop music. 

Soon

There's a story that by 1990 Shields was giving his songs titles that were actually gnomic answers to Alan McGee's increasingly desperate questions about the album's readiness- Soon, Don't Ask Why, To Here Knows When, Sometimes, What You Want... 

In February 1991 My Bloody Valentine released another four track EP, Tremolo. In reality Tremolo is a seven track EP, with three extra, untitled pieces of music but chart rules prevented EPs from counting for the singles chart if they had more than four songs. Shields added the three extras in between the other songs, untitled. The first track on Tremolo, which would also turn up on Loveless later in 1991, was To Here Knows When, surely the strangest song to ever enter the UK Top 30 singles chart.

To Here Knows When (EP Version)

Woozy ambient guitar music from the middle of the night, a gentle noise that is both soothing and a little unsettling. Play it loud, really loud, and it engulfs you completely. Loop it round and round on a tape and it becomes the centre of everything for the time its playing. The guitars were Shields' self- named 'glide guitar' technique, playing chords while bending the strings using the tremolo bar. Kevin said that despite what it sounds like, there's actually little in the way of FX pedals. Bilinda's vocal is barely there, sunk in among the layers of guitar sounds. It's as if they recorded a song and then took the song away, leaving just its shadow, the remains of the guitars and vocals. The ghost of a song. 

The coda section, an untitled extra piece of music on the EP version but not the album version, is a different but similarly ethereal thing, lops of guitar and reverb. To Here Knows When wasn't just guitars- there are samples from a BBC sound effects album that created the track's bottom end and there may be a tambourine in there too. 

On Tremelo this segues into Swallow, a song constructed around a sample from a Turkish belly dancing cassette, four minutes of the prettiest, most magical distortion over a drum break. A song that suggests a million things and creates something entirely new, the samples and drums providing some ballast for Bilinda's voice and Kevin's layers of glide guitars. It also sounds like Shields had been touched by acid house, had taken on board what Andrew Weatherall had given Soon with his remix in 1990. This also has one of Shields' extra tracks attached to its ending, a coda that shifts and spins, that has no centre and is all swirling, loose edges. 

Swallow

There were three more tracks on the other side of the 12", Honey Power, a third untitled coda and then Moon Song, each one an essential part of Tremolo, all linked but different. The Glider and Tremolo EPs and Loveless are the My Bloody Valentine legend, the result of Shields's obsessive pursuit to record what he could hear in his head alone late at night. Whatever it cost Creation, however long it took, whatever it did to the relationship between the band and the record company, it was worth it. 

Oblique Saturdays

A series for Saturdays in 2026 inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's set of cards, Oblique Strategies (Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas). Eno and Schmidt created them to be used to unblock creative impasses and approach problems from unexpected angles. Each week I will turn over an Oblique Strategy card and post a song or songs inspired by the suggestion. 

Last week's card read 'Allow An Easement (An easement is the abandonment of a stricture)' and I posted Strict Machine by Goldfrapp and Birge- Risser- Mienniel's improvisational track inspired by that Oblique Strategy card and named after it.  Further responses via the comments took in Let It Out (Let It All Hang Out) by The Hombres from Ernie. Khayem suggested Take It Easy On Yourself by Jerry Butler. Spinoutz dropped in Billy Woods and Yolanda Watson's A Doll Fulla Pins and Jesse suggested Neighbours by Shack. 

Today's Oblique Strategy card suggestion is this...

Go slowly all the way round the outside

I did wonder briefly if I should go slowly with this one, sit on it and wait, see what happened, but this song had already jumped to the front of my mind. 'Two buffalo girls go round the outside/ Round the outside/ Round the outside' had already started circling in my head...

Buffalo Gals

Malcolm McLaren, Trevor Horn, the World's Famous Supreme Team, scratching (making me itch), square dancing, Rock Steady Crew, New York in 1982... what's not to like? Malcolm definitely had talent and on this record he showed it wasn't just as the owner of a clothes shop and as the manager of Sex Pistols. 

I've been listening to My Bloody Valentine recently too- more to come next week- and the go slowly part of the Oblique Strategy took me to this from the You Made Me Realise EP,  a 1988 game changer of a 12" single if ever there was one...

Slow

Slow is a grinding, disorientating stew, led by filthy, grinding bass with head spinning tremelo guitar noise on top and lyrics about licking and sucking and wanting it slow, placing 'my head on your hips' and how 'I'll make you smile'. I think it might be about sex. Which, I've just realised, links it to Malcolm's shop and to his band. 

Feel free to pop your Oblique Saturday suggestions in the comments box. 

December

A day late with the December songs but better late than never. The obvious starting point is this one...

December

December was on Teenage Fanclub's 1991 album Bandwagonesque, a song about lost or unrequited love and 'wanting to assassinate December'. I know how they feel. 

Those guitars though... perfect. 

Creation labelmates Pacific, very much a forgotten Creation band, released a couple of albums and had a song on Doing It For The Kids. their 1990 album Inference was a compilation and probably the best entry point. This song came as one track on a split flexidisc cover mounted on The Catalogue, a music trade magazine. Indie pop with violin and doleful vocals. Very late 80s indie, rather endearing and about to be swept away by Manchester and by Creation releasing Screamadelica, Bandwagonesque and Loveless on the same day. 

December, With The Day 

Finally, from 2019 and Belfast's The Vendetta Suite is this two minute slice of nostalgic, psychedelic December...

Three Days In December

Forty Five Minutes Of Autumn Songs

Some songs with the word Autumn in the title for a Sunday mix in late September, a day ahead of the autumn equinox- tomorrow, Monday 22nd September at 7.22 pm, a day which marks the end of astronomical summer and the onset of astronomical autumn. Buckle up. Winter's coming. 

Autumn definitely seems to bring out the melancholy and downbeat in songwriters- the songs on my hard drive in the mix below are firmly in that camp- it's OK to wallow in that sometimes and I think by the time we get to the end there's some catharsis.

Forty Five Minutes Of Autumn

• The Small Faces: The Autumn Stone
• Lee Hazlewood: My Autumn's Done Come
• Jaymay: Autumn Fallin'
• Pacific: Autumn Island
• Yo La Tengo: Autumn Sweater
• Higamos Hogamos: Harold/ Autumn Equinox Sunset
• The Prisners Dream: Autumn Days
• East Village: Black Autumn
• Marcel Slettern: Autumn
• Brian Eno: Dunwich Beach, Autumn 1960
• Coldcut : Autumn Leaves (The Irresistible Force Remix)

The Small Faces song The Autumn Stone is from their later period when they'd shed their initial skin and become a little more hippy, a little more reflective, they sound a bit... earthier and woodier. Written by Steve Marriot and recorded in September 1968, The Autumn Stone is a ballad with a beautiful slow glow. The Small Faces were such a great band weren't they.

Lee Hazlewood's autumn isn't just seasonal, it's a lifetime thing sung by a man who seemed to be permanently found in the autumn of his life. This song was the flip side to Sand, a 1966 7" single. 

Jaymay is an American singer/ songwriter, an indie/ folk artist, whose song You Better Run was a music blog song back in the early 2010s golden days of music blogging. Her 2007 album of the same name, Autumn Fallin' is a lovely pun for those on the US side of the Atlantic. 

Pacific were on minor Creation records band in 1990. Their song Jetstream was a favourite with me and a friend who went into a flat share in 1992, a song that sampled the sinking of the Belgrano. Autumn Island was on their 1990 album Inference which is probably Creation's least heard album, undeservedly so but in 1990 Creation had many other irons in the fire and some bands just fell through the cracks. 

Yo La Tengo's Autumn Sweater is one of my favourite songs by anyone, ever. Everything about it- the words, the singing, the drumming, the tone, the feel, the longing to be gone, to be moving on... it's all just perfect. 'We could slip away/ Wouldn't that be better/Me with nothing to say/ And you in your autumn sweater'. 

Higamos Hogamos are/ were Hackney based Steve Webster and various assistants and collaborators. I first heard them when Andrew Weatherall played some krauty/ cosmische tracks by them on a radio show in the dim and distant past- I think I followed up by going to the Higamos Hogamos MySpace page (which dates it). The track on this mix comes in two parts, the first half a lovely experimental instrumental and the second a field recording of the autumn equinox at sunset. 

The Prisners Dream (sic) were one of those American garage rock bands who made the grand total of one sole 7" single, released on Rene Records in 1967. They came from Canonsberg, Pennsylvania. Autumn Days is a gorgeously melancholic folk rock song, backed with You're The One I Really Love. Autumn Days was on a double album compilation from a couple of years ago called Ghost Riders, seventeen songs for a North American road trip with sleeve notes by Sonic Boom. I reviewed it at Ban Ban Ton Ton in 2022 and it's a record I still recommend highly. The Prisners were all between 17 and 19 years old when they recorded the song and sound utterly bereft, a state of being before they've even reached adulthood. 

East Village were on Heavenly, caught out in that short period between late 80s indie and early 90s indie- dance. Their album Drop Out has been re- issued several times, on each occasion to rave reviews. They made little in the way of waves at the time but every time Drop Out comes out again they attract a few new followers. 

Marcel Slettern is from Athens, Georgia,an electronic producer, writer and visual artist who goes for the single word title here- autumn, a few minutes of piano playing. I have no idea why or how this song ended up on my hard drive or where it came from but I'm glad it did. 

Brian Eno's Dunwich Beach, Autumn, 1960 is from his 1982 album On Land, a landmark ambient album. Dunwich was a Suffolk port that feel into the sea due to coastal erosion. It's one of those Eno ambient tracks which is absolutely beyond compare. 

Coldcut's cover of the jazz standard Autumn Leaves has been released in various versions and at various times. None of the versions quite matches The Irresistible Force's remix, a Balearic masterpiece and one which provides an ending that takes us to a better place. 

Forty Five Minutes Of Teenage Fanclub

A few weeks ago I was suddenly struck by the urge to hear a load of Teenage Fanclub and I binged on them for a couple of days. They wrote some of the best guitar songs of the 90s and their sound the guitars and triple songwriters and lead vocalists- set them apart from most of their peers. I got on board with Bandwagonesque (but was already familiar with A Catholic Education via housemates) and then followed them through the 90s before drifting away from them some time in the 00s but from A Catholic Education, Bandwagonesque, Grand Prix and Songs From Northern Britain they rarely put a foot wrong. They really nailed that Glasgow indie via 60s and 70s America thing and a lot of their songs carry an emotional heft too. Big Star were often referenced by the music press in the early 90s but I think the Fannies have taken as much influence from Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Love and The Byrds as Big Star. Anyway, the Sunday mix series came calling for them and here it is, forty minutes of Teenage Fanclub songs, sequenced together, one running into another like a dream TFC gig but with no gaps between the songs.

Forty Five Minutes Of Teenage Fanclub

• Don't Look Back (Have Lost It Version)
• Star Sign
• Everything Flows
• It's A Bad World
• Ain't That Enough
• Alcoholiday
• I Don't Know
• Sparky's Dream
• Planets
• The Concept
• Don't Look Back

In 1995 Teenage Fanclub released a 7" single titled Teenage Fanclub Have Lost It with acoustic versions of four songs, one from each of their then four albums. As well as acoustic guitars there are organs, recorders, sampled sounds, melodica and banjo- much more than just the songs done on acoustic guitars. Gerald Love's Don't Look Back, a genuine TFC and 90s guitar band peak, opened the EP. The singing and playing are glorious and the lyrics beautifully romantic, 'I'd steal a car to drive you home/ But don't look back on an empty feeling'.

Star Sign is from Bandwagonesque, released in November 1991 (on the same day as Screamadelica and Loveless- Creation really cleaned up). Star Sign fades in with guitar amp feedback, Neil Young style, and then explodes, drummer Brendan O'Hare thumping away, Gerald (again) singing and shrugging, 'big deal... seen it all before'. Alcoholiday is from the same record, a gloriously fucked, end of a love affair song.  I Don't Know is Raymond McGinley's sole Bandwagonesque song. The Concept opened Bandwagonesque, a Norman Blake masterpiece about being in a band and a girl. The freak out coda is pure Neil Young. 

Everything Flows is from 1990's A Catholic Education, the band's sound ragged, looser and darker, borrowing more from US 80s indie punk (Sonic Youth, Pixies et al), proto- grunge than their later 60s sound. Norman sings and writes, admitting to a very turn of the 90s aimlessness.

It's A Bad World is from 1997's Songs From Northern Britain, pound for pound and song for song their best album. Every song could be a single. There was a time in the late 90s when we were waiting for Isaac to have a bone marrow transplant to treat the rare genetic condition he was born with, a wait to find a matching donor that seemed to go on for months. I would drive home listening to either Songs For Northern Britain or Primal Scream's XLRTR and certain songs really, really struck me, they were almost too much. Raymond McGinley's It's A Bad World was one of them- the triple harmonies, crunchy guitars, Neil Young lead line and love lorn lyrics hit me hard and it really did feel like it was a bad world. A beautifully sung bad world. Ain't That Enough is from the same album, its first single and a wide eyed look at the world and its wonders. Planets saw them look up and add strings to the mix- it seems very at odds with 1995's hedonism- 'we're going over the country/ Into the highlands/ To look for a home'. 

Sparky's Dream is from 1995's Grand Prix, released at the height of Britpop, a sugar coated pure pop rush. Don't Look Back was also in its original form on Grand Prix and takes us back where we started, those chugging Big Star guitar chords and harmonies and the driving into the sunset lyrics that marry euphoria and loss- don't look on an empty feeling.

Midnight Versions

Much of what I've posted here over the last month has been new music. It always used to seem that August was a bit of a quiet time, a dead zone in the music industry, nothing much released, everyone waiting for the big rush of autumn releases- but over the last month I've posted new music from Adrian Sherwood, Jezebell, Statues, The Lemonheads, The Charlatans, The Orb, ddwy, Jazxing, Puerto Montt City Orchestra, 100 Poems, Sewell And The Gong, Daniel Avery, Factory Floor, Number, Jay- Son, Byron Carignan, Luke Schneider, Florecer and senses remixed by GLOK. There's probably loads I've missed too and I've got several other new releases noted down to be posted in the upcoming days and weeks. 

All of this is a good thing obviously, new music to be enjoyed and absorbed, but it also possibly makes the posts a little perfunctory sometimes- there isn't always a lot of context or narrative, just me saying, 'here's some new music, I like it, I think you might like it too', and then some kind of attempt at describing said music. The sheer amount of new music also means that sometimes it feels like one listens to something new a lot for a few days and then move on to the next new thing and then on again, a flow that can feel like a flood, and there's a danger that stuff gets lost further upstream behind me/ us. 

This came out yesterday, a new version of a Daniel Avery single that came out two weeks ago. Rapture In Blue is the first single from his new album that comes out at the end of October (with a gig in Manchester the same night). It has Cecile Believe on vocals and guitar from Andy Bell and sounds better with each listen, a 2025 goth- pop/ dance rhapsody, a slow burning rush. The Rapture In Blue (Midnight Version), out at Bandcamp, is a re- imagined version,, made for darker corners and specifically for the club, to shake the floor in DJ sets- that doesn't stop it from sounding good at home though. The pop dynamics and mid- 80s film feel is dialed down and stripped back, with drums and bass toughened and isolated and Cecile's vocal isolated on top. There are whooshes, industrial clangs, shuddering synth breakdowns and stuttering vocal parts. I already like it as much as the original. I'm anticipating that as the album release draws nearer and more songs are released ahead of it, there may be more Midnight Versions too. 

Midnight occurs in thousands of song titles- a search of my downloads folder brings up hundreds. In May Peaking Lights and Coyote released an EP called Love Letters/ So Far Away, three beautifully hazy, dubby tracks. Back in 2012 Peaking Lights remixed their entire Lucifer album as a dub version and Midnight Dub is as good as anything they have done before or since. Gloriously blissed out, wonky dub- pop. 

Midnight Dub

Baltic Fleet is a one man band from Warrington, named after a famous waterfront pub in Liverpool. Paul Fleming played keys and synths for Echo And The Bunnymen and built up a repertoire of songs that he released as a self- titled debut album, Towers, in 2008, followed by Towers (2012), The Wilds (2013) and The Dear One (2016). Midnight Train is from Towers, a chiming, synth- led instrumental, the autobahns of mid- 70s West Germany crossing over to the M62. 

Midnight Train

Finally, a third midnight song, this one from 1987, a single by Creation group The Weather Prophets- Midnight Mile was the B-side to Why Does The Rain although by this point they'd jumped from Creation to Elevation, a Creation offshoot label that Alan McGee set up in conjunction with major label WEA- a major label funded indie that was supposed to benefit from better distribution, and hoped that the better sales would siphon money back to Creation to invest in other artists. 

Midnight Mile is very typical of the period between the end of The Smiths and the dawn of acid house/ indie dance, Pete Astor's '87 jangle- pop confessional produced by Lenny Kaye. 

Midnight Mile

Elevation eventually folded. WEA expected an instant return and hit singles, something The Weather Prophets didn't/ couldn't provide and singles by Primal Scream and Edwyn Collins didn't either. McGee later said setting up Elevation was the biggest mistake he made. Such was the indie scene in 1987 that bands who left the indie nest often lost their original fans who saw major label money as evidence of selling out.  Nowadays everyone and anyone can release songs immediately via Bandcamp (or other services), on their own and cut out the middle man/ record label completely- although the returns are pretty low and not everyone, or many, can make a living out of it. 

Monday's Long Songs

Over at Ban Ban Ton Ton last week Dr. Rob wrote a post about various Sabres Of Paradise remixes, Selected Sabre Cuts. One of his selected cuts was the Sabres remix of Primal Scream's Jailbird, part of a 12" single released in June 1994. 

Jailbird was the second single from the album Give Out But Don't Give Up, an album released in March 1994 that was it's fair to say, a tad divisive. In 1991 Primal Scream with some production and remix assistance from Andrew Weatherall and Hugo Nicolson as well contributions from The Orb and Jah Wobble released Screamadelica, an album that saw Primal Scream go day- glo acid house, long haired converts to the new sound (although the album contained some more trad Scream rock music too in the shape of the Jimmy miller produced Moving On Up and the strung out ballad Damaged). They followed it with the Screamadelica 12", Moving On Up plus the album's title track, a huge piece of symphonic wide screen acid house and a beautifully downbeat cover of Dennis Wilson's Carry Me Home. When the band returned in 1994 they had gone full on Rolling Stones, first with Rocks and then Jailbird (which opens Give Out...). The album came with a Confederate flag on the cover (a William Eggleston photo) and got the band the tag 'Dance Traitors'. Having rewritten what an indie guitar band could do on Screamadelica they went into reverse and indulged their Rolling Stone fantasies. At this point some of the Scream were living like Keith Richards and if you live like Keef long enough, you'll start writing like Keef. 

I didn't take to Give Out But Don't Give Up when it came out. I was in the Dance Traitors camp although I liked Rocks just because it was so brazen. In 1994 I wasn't too fussed about bands who wanted to be in 1973. If I wanted to listen to Sticky Fingers I'd put Sticky Fingers on. Some years later I found it to be a better album than I did at the time but in 1994 it was too retro, too backwards looking. 

The remixes on the other hand were where the action might be- after all Mr Weatherall had played such a key role on Screamdelica that surely the Weatherall remixes of any of the Give Out... tracks would be what we wanted. The Jailbird 12" was highly anticipated in this household and when I got it home and put it on, there was again, a sense of 'this is not what I expected..' about the pair of Sabres Of Paradise remixes clad in a bright red sleeve shot of Throb live on stage, guitar and crotch plus amp and Confederate flag. The first of the two Sabres remixes was this one...

Jailbird (Sweeney 2 Mix)

The songs drumbeat looped up and running for thirty seconds, then a squiggly distorted noise, presumably Throb or Innes' guitar amp. Huge single descending piano notes, slowed right down and then some organ doing the same. An oscillating synth line kicks in, similar to the theme tune from The Sweeney (presumably where the remix title came from). This is Jailbird gone slow mo, out of it, no longer higher than the sun but very much damaged. We were indeed a long way from home.

The second remix (and the one Rob chose for his post last week) was a big one, nearly thirteen minutes long and where Andrew, Jagz and Gary went fully in with the dub... 

Jailbird (Dub Chapter 3 Mix)

The Dub Chapter 3 remix took some getting my head around too. Now, thirty- one years later, it's an example of Andrew's genius, his way of taking a song and deconstructing it completely, taking one or two elements from the original and constructing something entirely new from it (something he'd done on Screamadelica with Loaded and Come Together). 

Dub Chapter 3 is long, dubbed out and full of production tricks that the three Sabres had been honing during '93/ 94. Echo, FX, rattling drum machine loops, a three note synth part, acres of time and space, whole galaxies of time and space, and eventually, half way through something from the original song turns up, not one of Throb's guitars but a snatch of Bobby's vocal used as a sound rather than a voice. It's an epic Sabres Of Paradise remix, with King Tubby and Lee Perry was the inspiration, a million miles from Screamdelica and a million miles from Jailbird too. 

Further remixes were on the 12", one from Kris Needs and one by The Dust Brothers (later Chemical Brothers) and (I'm Gonna) Cry Myself Blind single had remixes from Portishead and Kris Needs again, but none of them go anywhere near what Sabres did with Dub Chapter 3. Stick it on a playlist/ CD/ mixtape along with the Sabres Gaelic dub remix of Peace Together's Be Still and the Squire Black Dove Rides Out version of One Dove's Breakdown, both ten minutes long and both from '93, and Sabres own productions Edge 6, Return Of Carter, Ysaebud and RSD, and you've got Sabres In Dub, a Sabres Of Paradise album that never was. 

Forty Five Minutes Of New Order- ish

I heard Your Silent Face on Friday night- not for the first time obviously- and it floored me once again. There's something about it that is very special- the rippling Kraftwerk inspired keys and synths, Hooky's bass and the mechanical drumming, Bernard's serious lyrics completely undercut by the 'why don't you piss off line', the way it gloriously skips between euphoria and melancholy. It's much more than all of that, one of those songs that is way more than the sum of the parts. It inspired me to start a New Order mix for my Sunday series but then I changed tack almost immediately. Rather than just sequence of load of my favourite New Order songs (almost all of which would be from the 1980s) I thought it might be more interesting or more fun to do a Your Silent Face/ New Order inspired mix and see where it took me. It took me here...

Forty Five Minutes Of New Order- ish

• New Order: Your Silent Face
• Galaxie 500: Ceremony
• Gorillaz ft. Peter Hook and Georgia: Aries
• The Liminanas and Peter Hook: Garden Of Love
• Ian McCulloch: Faith And Healing
• The Times: Manchester 5.32
• Ride: Last Frontier
• New Order: Isolation
• Mike Garry and Joe Duddell: St. Anthony: An Ode To Anthony H. Wilson (Andrew Weatherall Remix)

Your Silent Face opens side two of Power, Corruption And Lies, New Order's second album, released in May 1983. It's now seen as a New Order classic, a landmark album, the fusing of dance and rock, light and shade, a band stepping out of the shadows of Joy Division and the first NO album Movement. Your Silent Face had the working title KW1 (the Kraftwerk one). Funny story about New Order and Kraftwerk- the Dusseldorff robots visited New Order in their Cheetham Hill rehearsal space/ HQ and sat open mouthed as the band showed them the kit they used to make Blue Monday. 'You made that record using... this?' 

Galaxie 500's cover of Ceremony is a beauty, a slowed down, slow burning version, ringing feedback, the guitars gathering in intensity, and Dean's upper register voice smothered in echo. Ceremony was New Order's first single (and in a way, Joy Division's last). It was released as a 12" in 1981, twice, with different sleeves and slightly different versions. Galaxie 500's version came out as a B-side on their Blue Thunder 12" in 1990. At the time the nine year gap between 1981 and 1990 was an eon, the 1981 world and 1990 world two totally different eras- for New Order as much as anyone. 

Gorillaz got Hooky to play bass as part of their Song Machine project in 2020. Aries is I think the best 'New Order' song of the 21st century. Murdoc, Noodles, 2D and Russel Hobbs/ Damon Albarn together with Hooky's bass totally nailed what NO should be sounding like now. 

Four years before Gorillaz got Peter Hook to sling his four string guitar around he hooked up with French duo The Liminanas. Garden Of Love is (again) a great 21st century 'New Order' song, slightly fragile, slightly woozy, psychedelic garage rock, the bassline wending its way to the fore and staying there. 

Ian McCulloch's Faith And Healing is virtually a New Order cover- it sounds so much like a off cut from Technique he probably should have given them writing credits. It came out as a single in 1989, taken from Mac's solo debut Candleland. 

The Times was one of Creation mainstay Ed Ball's projects. In 1990 as The Times he released Manchester as a single, a hymn to a city at the centre of a youth explosion. Hooky's mentioned in the lyrics. It's also a tribute to the sound New Order had on 1985's Lowlife. It couldn't be more Lowlife unless it came wrapped in a tracing paper sleeve. I sometimes it think skirts the line between ridiculous and brilliant. I can imagine it making some people cringe but I think it has charm. Once, driving through France it came on the car stereo on one of the mix CDs I'd burned for the trip and made me briefly, stupidly homesick. I got over it- I mean we were on holiday in France for fuck's sake.  

Last Frontier was on last year's Ride album, Interplay. It's an Andy Bell song, soaring, chiming guitars and on the money drums. It sounds like a close cousin of Regret (the last truly great New Order single, released back in 1993. Although actually, I'm happy to listen to arguments for Crystal, released in August 2001). 

Isolation is a Joy Division song, from their second/ final album Closer. It's a stunning song, the collision of electronic drums and real ones genuinely thrilling, along with the synth and bass. Ian's words are bleak, a man at the end of his tether. This version is by New Order, recorded for a John Peel session in 1998. They still play it live- they did it at Wythenshawe Park last August. 

Mike Garry and Joe Duddell's St. Anthony: An Ode To Anthony H. Wilson is a song I come back to often, Mike's A to Z of Manchester music endlessly listenable and at times very moving. For his remix Andrew Weatherall, a huge fan of Factory, turned the song into a nine minute Weatherall tour de force, complete with a version of the Your Silent Face bassline. Which is where I came in. 

Never Understood

One of the things I was able to do while ill last week was read and I ploughed through the recent Jesus And Mary Chain autobiography, Never Understood, in just a few sittings. Their story, from childhood in a Glasgow tenement next to Parkhead to the move to East Kilbride, their discovery of underground and outsider music that bound the two brothers together and then the formation and rise of the band, is told by William and Jim alternating, and often contradicting each other.  It's revealing, hilarious at times, and also an account of how two men on different drugs (Jim alcohol and cocaine, William alcohol and weed) managed to function as a band and then gradually in the 90s stop functioning and tear themselves, the band and each other apart. Each brother is open about their personality traits and addictions, but there's also a sense that each one is telling part of the story through clenched teeth, a sense of 'we'll talk about this once and then pack it away again'. In a recent interview Jim was asked what he learned from doing the book and reflecting on the last forty years. 'Not to reflect on the last forty years of your life', was his answer. 

William says that he thought firstly alcohol and then secondly being in a band would give him the confidence to talk to girls. Jim says that he thought that alcohol would give him the confidence to talk to anyone and to stand on stage and be the frontman- he was and is shy and socially anxious in the extreme. From their teens they formed a united front, finishing each others sentences, sharing clothes and a record collection, utterly dedicated to the sound they conjured up in 1984 and after. They recount growing tired of Alan McGee's revelling in the chaos of the early gigs, the contentious statements and violence at the gigs but also the sheer excitement of it all happening and happening quickly in 1984/5. They also recognise the massive error they made in signing to Blanco Y Negro (a subsidiary of Warners, one of the biggest labels in the world) with whom they had constant friction, the label always trying to force 'world class producers' onto them. They regretted snubbing Rough Trade who would have been a much better fit. 

At every step along the way, everything that happens seems to reconfirm their outsider status, the outsiders' outsiders. Jim recounts the numerous occasions his inability to make small talk or just relate to people scuppered encounters with the people who were in his favourite bands- The Cramps, The Ramones, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, the people who inspired him to pick up a guitar in the first place. They are all shunned, were rude to or avoided. When offered the chance to meet Lou Reed, the man whose first album, the Velvets' banana album, is the cornerstone in the Reid's world, he passes up and and goes away knowing he hasn't made a mess of it. The end comes live on stage in 1998, partway through a US tour, ill advisedly booked after the tortuous recording of the album that became Munki. There is a fistfight in a Transit van on the road in the US. Sometime before there was a disagreement about a bowl of nuts backstage. Both men at the end of the road as brothers and as a partnership.

By the time they reform in 2007 both men know that they need to reform to put the extremely messy break up to bed. They both look at it all candidly, William sometimes a little tongue- in- cheek, but both seem to have grown as people. It's conversational in tone, the result of writer Ben Thompson interviewing each Reid extensively and then painstakingly constructing it as a narrative. One thing that comes across strongly, amidst the forty years of arguments, drugs, booze, friction with record companies, the comings and goings of bandmates, riots and violence at the early gigs and seemingly never ending chaos that swirls around them, is their love of music- the seriousness of their task, of writing, recording and playing songs in exactly the way they want to. More power to them. 

Upside Down

I found this on Youtube, a compilation of various Mary Chain TV appearances, shambolic miming, stumbling around on Top Of The Pops, a general sense of not giving a fuck but also giving a massive fuck, some blistering live performances too, ending with the band filmed live for the legendary Snub in 1990- a good way to spend thirty five Reid Bros minutes. 

• Happy When It Rains 0:00
• April Skies 3:33
• Never Understand 6:44
• Teenage Lust 9:35
• Far Gone And Out 12:33
• Come On 15:23
• Head On 18:06
• In A Hole 22:06
• Just Like Honey 25:17
• Inside Me 27:58
• Take It 30:35

Forty Five Minutes Of Jah Wobble

Like much of the rest of the country I was outside on Thursday night taking in the spectacle of the northern lights. To the naked eye not much more than a faint flicker but when seen through a camera on night setting giving us a dazzling display of the aurora borealis. This photo was taken from our loft window by my daughter Eliza and is better than any of the ones I took. 

Today's mix has a similar cosmic vibe, seven songs from the bass playing legend Jah Wobble. His back catalogue is so wide and deep that it would take several mixes to pay justice to Wobble's music so this is just a selection of post- PiL Jah Wobble tunes with an emphasis, as always in Wobble land, on the dubbier end of things. 

Forty Five Minutes Of Jah Wobble

• Angels
• King Of The Faeries (Avengers Outer Space Chug Dub)
• Visions Of You (Pick 'n' Mix 1)
• Higher Than The Sun (A Dub Symphony In Two Parts)
• Post Lockdown Dub
• Inspector Out Of Space
• Everyman's An Island

Angles is from Jah Wobble's Invaders Of The Heart 1994 album Take Me To God, an album with twelve different vocalists, the voice on Angels belonging to the Senegalese singer Baaba Maal, the song underpinned by one of those lovely fat dub basslines that only Wobble can conjure. 

King Of The Faeries is by Dub Trees, a Martin Glover/ Youth project with Wobble and Daniel Romar in 2016 with some loop and beats consultancy by Andrew Weatherall and Nina Walsh. The Dub Trees album is an excellent collision of dub and folk with a pagan angle. 

Andrew Weatherall is also present on the 1992 remix of Visions Of You, a single from 1991's Invaders Of The Heart Rising Above Bedlam album. Visions Of You was the first time Andrew worked with Jagz Kooner and Gary Burns, a partnership which would lead to Sabres Of Paradise. On the 12" there are three AW remixes of Visions Of You, Pick 'n' Mix 1 and 2 and then The Secret Love Child Of Hank And Johnny, twenty five minutes of dubbed out excellence with the beautiful voice of Sinead O'Connor. Everyman's An Island is also from Rising Above Bedlam. 

More Weatherall! This time from Primal Scream's Screamadelica. In an interview for the Classic Albums series Andrew describes sitting in the producer's chair and realising what this version of Higher Than The Sun needed, reaching for the phone with the words, 'Get me Jah Wobble'.

During lockdown Jah released a series of tracks onto Bandcamp, recorded at his home in Stockport (I know! How did Jah Wobble end up in Stockport right?!). Post Lockdown Dub is self explanatory. 

In May 2020 Youth and Jah Wobble released an album called Acid Punk Dub Apocalypse, a selection of dub songs with various singers- Hollie Cook, Rhiannon, Aurora Dawn, Durga McBroom- plus appearances from Richard Dudanski, Roger Eno, Nik Turner and some of the beats and programming courtesy of Mr Weatherall and Nina Walsh. 

Ride Live At New Century Hall And A Forty Five Minute Mix

I saw Ride at New Century Hall on Friday night- they are a superb live band right now, powerful and punchy, light and shade both represented, noise and melody. In an interview Andy Bell once said that his vision for the band came to him when at home listening to The Beatles while his mum was vacuuming, that blend of 60s melodies (with twin vocals) and a wall of noise and fuzz. Tonight they have plenty of all of that. They open with Monaco from this year's Interplay album, straight ahead modern rock with a glossy sheen, Mark Gardener centre stage and in good voice. They finish the main set an hour later with Seagull, the huge shoegaze tour de force that opened Nowhere in 1990, the song where they transcended their MBV and JAMC influences.

In between there are songs from almost every point in their back catalogue- new ones like the sweeping, Byrdsy Last Frontier and anthemic Peace Sign with its spirit of 1969/ 1989 chorus, 'Give me a peace sign/ Throw your hands in the air/ Give me a peace sign/ Let me know you're there' stand out.  Future Love from 2019's This Is Not A Safe Place album. The crushing, wall of noise teen angst of Dreams Burn Down. 1992's Cool Your Boots, the Withnail And I sample kicking it off and the band powering into it, Loz and Steve proving they were indie rock's secret best rhythm section, Andy's squally guitar at the centre of the storm. The last two are Seagull and before that Vapour Trail, Andy's epic, romantic song from 1990 that closed their debut Nowhere, the crowd singing the cello part, a sea of middle aged shoegazers and indie kids la la la la- ing as the band wind down and stop, grinning at us and each other. 

The encore spans the years again, in reverse. Light In A Quiet Room followed by Leave Them All Behind, twin guitars and vocals, distortion and thunderous drums, the one where they left all their peers behind. Then Chelsea Girl, from their first EP, the red roses one on Creation when they (and we) were barely out of our teens, young and full of dreams. 

After the gig we have a chat with Andy Bell in the bar downstairs. I thanked him for giving us his cover version of Smokebelch for our Sounds Of The Flightpath Estate Volume 1 album and said he was honoured to be part of it. 

In October 2022 I put together a mix of Ride songs from the re- union years. You can find it here. To complement it I've done an early years for today's Sunday mix, from the first EP to Going Blank Again, singles, album songs and EP tracks/ B-sides. Two sides of a c90 tape. 

Forty Five Minutes Of Early Ride

• Cool Your Boots
• Seagull
• Sennen
• Like A Daydream
• Dreams Burn Down
• Taste
• Leave Them All Behind
• Vapour Trail
• Chelsea Girl

Cool Your Boots is from 1992's Going Blank Again. The album was very much a step on from the debut Nowhere, confident and wide screen, shoegaze but buffed up. Leave Them All Behind is a single from the same album- it reached number nine in the charts and got them onto Top Of The Pops. On release it had a statement feel, Ride are back and have left the others behind. Hammond organ intro, Mark and Andy on twin vocals, tumbling rhythms and endless guitars (especially in the full nine minute version).

Seagull opens Nowhere, the fastest song on the album and a ferocious piece of indie guitar rock. Nowhere is in some ways a classic debut from that period, 1988- 1993- eight songs in forty minutes with ebb and flow, a sound that permeates every song, a sleeve image that hints at what lies inside, a self contained piece of art. Dreams Burn Down comes from the same album (and was the A-side on the Fall EP, out in October 1990 with three new B-sides, the third of four four song 12" EPs, a run of records and songs that stand alongside Nowhere) . Vapour Trail is the last song- 12 string guitar intro with a repeating chord pattern that keeps resurfacing throughout the song, Loz's brilliant on- the- note drums, Andy's voice and love song lyrics and then the two minute coda with cello. A proper last song on the album feel. 

Taste was on the Fall EP, a new song along with Here And Now and Nowhere (the title track from the album that wasn't on the album). Three minutes of noisy indie rock with a vaguely euphoric vocal. 

Sennen was on Ride's EP Today Forever, four new songs released in March 1991. A video album was made for the EP, each song getting its own video. The video for Sennen is exactly what some of us looked like in 1990/ 1991- fringes, long sleeved t- shirts, baggy jeans, hooped tops, desert boots. The song is all strummed guitars and a stop start rhythm, stoned harmonised vocals, the Byrds the morning after a night at Phuture. 'The memory fades away', Mark and Andy murmur, the vocals themselves sounding like a memory fading. Sennen is I assume named after Sennen Cove in Cornwall. 

Chelsea Girl is from the Ride EP, released in January 1990. A new decade. The first song on the first release on Creation to make the proper charts. The first Ride song most of us heard. A two and a half minute thrashy marriage of noise and pop, the Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine in there for sure, but its own thing too. 

V. A. Saturday

In 1991 Creation records began issuing a series of five volumes of early and deleted Creation singles dating right back to the label's first release, CRE01 by The Legend. The compilations were called Creation Soup and were also put out as a box set, Creation Soup: Volumes One To Five (The First Fifty Singles). All the 80s Creation names are present and correct- Biff Bang Pow, The Jasmine Minks, The Pastels, The Loft, The Bodines, Primal Scream, Meat Whiplash, Felt, The Weather Prophets, Slaughter Joe, Nikki Sudden, The House Of Love et al. 

On Volume One a message from Alan McGee read, 'This record is part of an overall series of releases documenting the now deleted early Creation singles. The first twenty came in hand folded sleeves which Joe Foster and I used to stay up and fold all night four or five times a week. This series is meant for the obsessive Creationist. Now it's all available again... stop writing us your letters! -The President, January 1991" and another, "Creation Records acknowledges the following: Dan Treacy, Joseph Foster, Edward Ball, Bobby Gillespie, Jeff Barrett, Jerry Thackeray, The Living Room bands and clientele and absolutely no one else.

The desire to give the Creation fans who missed out in the mid- 80s what they wanted was one reason for the albums' existence. In David Cavanagh's account of the label, My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry For The Prize, he says that the five various artist compilations were as much about generating cash flow as anything, money coming in to pay debts at a time when both Primal Scream and My Bloody Valentine were in the studio, MBV particularly racking up bills while attempting to realise Kevin Shields' dream. Creation was constantly hard up- Screamadelica, Bandwagon- esque and Loveless would all be out by the end of '91. The cash rich days of Oasis were a few years away. But no matter, the music contained within the five volumes of Creation Soup is reason enough for their existence. These two songs by Pete Astor are shining examples of why Creation had a back catalogue worth re- issuing. 

The Loft's Up The Hill And Down The Slope is a 1985 indie- pop classic, all jangly guitars, trebly and Pete Astor's vocals, pleading for a spin around the fair. It appears on Creation Soup Volume Two. 

Up The Hill And Down The Slope

The Loft split up on stage in 1985. Pete Astor then formed The Weather Prophets whose single Almost Prayed is as good as any anyone on Creation wrote and released, a genuine peak. It was a 1986 single and then on Creation Soup Volume Three.

Almost Prayed

V.A. Saturday

In 1986 NME issued a cassette compilation that spawned an entire scene, a twenty two track tape called C86. It invented indie pop, a subculture that was DIY, inwards looking, amateurish and underground and lo fi, it celebrated underachievement and became eventually a millstone around the necks of some of the bands involved. The indie scene that grew from it was all 60s anoraks, scruffy black 501s, lovebeads and bowl cuts, buzzsaw guitars, sing song vocals, gig posters and fanzines with photos torn from magazines and text done by Letraset, badly photocopied by whoever had access to a work photocopier- 60s guitar pop crossed with early 80s post- punk, defining itself partly by what it was against as much as anything else. It was anti- Phil Collins, anti- stadium rock, anti- Elton John and Queen, anti- big 80s gated snares, anti- rock star, anti- Thatcher and anti- heavy metal. All of these are good things to be anti. 

Funnily, given that the indie scene that burst out of it became quite homogenous, the original line up of bands on C86 is by no means all classic C86 indie pop. Standard bearers Primal Scream are present (in their pre- rawk indie phase) hit the payload with the thrilling rush of their early B-side Velocity Girl (for some fans, still the best Primal Scream song). The Shop Assistants, The Wedding Present, The Bodines and The Soup Dragons are all classic C86 indie pop. But some of the bands are outliers in sound or outlook, unrepresentative of the jangle pop sound that came from the tape- Stump, Bogshed, bIG fLAME, A Witness, The Shrubs and The McKenzies are all more abrasive and less indie pop. 

In some ways it's a great document and it has a real cultural significance in the history of British independent music, both as the springboard for a scene and then later as something to react against. It split the NME writers at the time, many of whom were pushing the paper towards covering hip hop and then house. The indie pop/ jangle pop scene was the starting point for several bands who'd go on to bigger things and was a scene in which women were heavily involved- as singers, musicians, fanzine writers, promoters and at labels. 

The Soup Dragons would leave the indie ghetto, the new dance music sounds of the late 80s hitting the band hard. It's a continuing annoyance for the band, singer Sean Dickson especially, that they were branded dance music bandwagon jumpers when they were eighteen months ahead of Primal Scream's conversion to acid house. On Pleasantly Surprised they sound like the next step on from Buzzcocks.

Pleasantly Surprised 

The Bodines were from Glossop, a town nestled into the Pennines east of Manchester. Therese is indie pop gold, a breathless, trebly guitar pop swoon, by four young men with Doctor Martens shoes, flat tops and fringes, denim jackets and 501s with turn ups of exactly the right size. 

Therese

C86 ended with This Boy Can Wait by The Wedding Present, breakneck guitars and Gedge's gruff vocal delivery and a classic indie pop boy- girl song. 

This Boy Can Wait

bIG fLAME were a post- punk/ indie pop three piece from Manchester, a band who would take the phrase 'viciously trebly' as a starting point. The speed, velocity and attack have more in common with Minutemen and Husker Du than the shambling groups in some ways, and their angular, slashing chords more like Gang Of Four and a hundred post- punk singles. The song on C86 was New Way (A Quick Wash And Brush Up With Liberation Theology) but I don't have that on my hard drive at the moment so this one will do instead (and is from a 2006 expanded version of C86 called CD86 The Birth Of Indie Pop)

Why Popstars Can't Dance

The Close Lobsters, Mighty Mighty, The Mighty Lemon Drops, Half Man Half Biscuit, Miaow, The Pastels, We've Got A Fuzzbox And We're Gonna Use It, McCarthy, The Wolfhounds, The Servants and Age Of Chance all appeared on C86 too and there's no doubt it was instrumental in influencing various people who emerged from the indie scene in the early 90s- Bob Stanley of Saint Etienne, Manic Street Preachers and Heavenly Records all have origins that can be traced back to C86 in some way. The intense weekly pressure of four music papers competing against each other, jockeying to find bands, is one of the reasons C86 existed in the first place, NME placing a flag in the ground with the release of this cassette. Most of the bands, despite some negativity towards the album and the indie scene that grew out of it after 1986, have made peace with it now. In 2019 Primal Scream, who had long ignored their pre- Loaded records when playing live and when compiling Best Ofs, re- released Velocity Girl for Record Shop Day, a ninety second song that started life as the B-side to Creation Records release Crystal Crescent and has proved to have a very long tail.

Velocity Girl