The 21st December is the winter solstice. After today, it starts getting a little lighter every day. It may not be noticeable tomorrow but in a month or two it will. Something that is always worth noting I think.
In 2006 Rough Trade celebrated a significant birthday by releasing a double CD compilation titled The Record Shop: 30 Years Of Rough Trade Shops. Across the two CDs, packaged in an expensive looking hardback book complete with dust cover and sixty pages of text and photos, were a wide range of leftfield and alternative music- thirty songs chosen by thirty different Rough Trade and adjacent people, from Geoff Travis to james Murphy, Daniel Miller and Seymour Stein to Jon Savage, Bjork and Jeff Barrett. Bobby Gillespie, Thurston Moore, Jarvis Cocker, Stewart Lee, Ana Da Silva and Erol Alkan all get selections, as Rough Trade punters. In the book it says that the selectors are all Rough Trade customers, and asked to choose a favourite record from the 30 years before 2006 and a memory or tale to go with it. As a result, it's wildly inconsistent as a listen but great fun and does actually sound like what a proper record shop staffed by obsessives could sound like on a busy Saturday if everyone got one go on the instore stereo.
The songs include late 70s punk cuts from The Modern Lovers, Swell Maps, The Mekons, Blue Orchids and The Rezillos, 80s indie from Mighty Mighty, Bongwater and Pixies, 90s alt from Bikin Kill, Stereoloab and Matmos and 00s randoms such as SchneiderTM vs Kpt. Michi. Gan's cover of The Smihths, The Carter Family and James Luther Dickinson and LCD Soundsystem. I've cherry picked four tracks, two from each disc, more or less randomly with two artists who have never appeared at Bagging Area before.
Holger Czukay's Persian Love is from 1979 and was chosen by Don Letts. The Can man is in fine form on this track, sampling Iranian singers from short wave radio while his bass bumps along underneath, with a guitar line and some percussion. It's all rather lovely and sounds very contemporary, it could easily be slipped into an afternoon DJ set.
Erol Alkan picked The Power Of Lard by Lard, a 1988 song from Ministry's Al Jourgenson with Paul Barker and Jeff Ward. Late 80s US Industrial rock that hit deep with the skateboarding crowd.
Gary Walker, the founder of Wiija Records, chose Bikini Kill's Capri Pants, a song that first appeared in the 1996 as a US import single, a period when punk was revitalised and kicking in all directions. Kathleen Hanna and Bikini Kill sound cool as fuck on Capri Pants, buzzsaw guitars, crashing cymbals and white hot vocals.
Lastly, Jeff Barratt's choice. As founder of Heavenly Records Jeff knows his musical onions and he plumped for Karen Dalton and a 1969 song re- issued in 1997, folk blues of the sort that, as Jeff says in the sleeve notes, 'you ain't never going to hear on the radio- word of mouth is the only way'. Word of mouth and record shops.
In The Evening (It's So Hard To Tell Who's Going To Love You The Best)