Twenty One Minutes Of Two Minute Tracks

I had an idea that I would do a Sunday mix of all those short electronic/ ambient tracks that appear on albums, the intros and outros, the bridging tracks, found sounds, brief ambient pieces and short one minute ideas that never got worked up into a full track but that the artist clearly liked. I realised that to make it forty minutes long would require at least twenty tracks and time constraints this week meant that I started the mix but haven't got anywhere near forty minutes- it's just shy of twenty one minutes, fourteen tracks from a variety of sources. I need to give it more thought really and gather together some more and either do a part two or expand this one out but in the meantime, here it is...

Twenty One Minutes Of Two Minute Tracks

I decided early on that two minutes was the cut off (although there are a couple here which just tip over that time). I was going to go totally beatless but that didn't work out. It's almost completely without vocals too. I wasn't sure it all worked but playing it back last night I was pretty happy with it. An expanded edition/ part two is definitely on the cards. 

• A Man Called Adam: Easter Song (Gospel Oak FX)
• Two Lone Swordsmen: Tiny Reminder No. 1
• Four Tet: This Is For You
• Sewell And The Gong: MYND
• The Orb: Snowbow
• Ultramarine: A Year From Monday
• A Man Called Adam: Easter Song (Hi- Tech)
• M- Paths: Calm
• Polypores: Mystery Energy Score
• Aphex Twin: Avril 14th (reversed music not audio)
• Pandit Pam Pam: Interludio
• Daniel Avery: First Light
• Sydney Minsky Sargeant: Intro
• Andrew Weatherall: Intro

A Man Called Adam's Easter Song is one of their best, a triumphant piece of optimsitc, life affirming Balearica. In 2017 the duo put out a special edition on Bandcamp to celebrate the song's 20th birthday which came with two new very short versions, the found sound intro of Gospel Oak FX and the ambient with beats of Hi- Tech. Both appear on this mix. 

In 2000 Two Lone Swordsmen released their electronic triple disc opus Tiny Reminders, Weatherall and Tenniswood's pursuit of  techno/ bass purism followed through to its end. Each of the three disc opened with a burst of static/ quiet noise called Tiny Reminder and numbered 1, 2 and 3. 

Four Tet's Sixteen Ocean's was a 2020 highlight, three sides of vinyl that soundtracked those early days of lockdown in March/ April 2020 of that year. This Is For You is one of five short tracks on it- the others are Hi Hello, ISTM, 1993 Band Practice and Bubbles At Overlook 25th March 2019- any/ all of which I was going to include here and didn't.

Sewell And The Gong's Patron Saint Of Elswhere is one of my favourite albums of 2025, a Balearic  folk/ motorik beauty with MYND a short one minute fourteen seconds of sound sandwiched between much longer excursions. 

The Orb tend to do long tracks. Snowbow is from 2005's Okie Dokie It's The Orb On Kompakt, an album I only found recently and have been enjoying. Snowbow is the closing track, two minutes and fourteen seconds.

A Year From Monday gave me the idea for this mix. It's on an album of Ultramarine recordings from 1997/ 8 that sat unreleased until this year. I posted it a few Monday's ago and listening to it in the car I wondered how it would work with a load of other very short tracks around it. 

M- Paths' Calm was on their album Hope, released on Mighty Force in 2023, a rippling melody line and drums. 

Polypores released an album in June, Cosmically A Shambles. I posted a song from it on Friday. The slightly hyperactive and bleepy Mystery Energy Score is in the middle of the album and this mix. I couldn't decide if its energy was a good change of pace or not and nearly took it out. In the end I thought it just about worked.

Aphex Twin's Avril 14th is his most streamed track, a Satie like piano piece smothered in reverb. THis version, the music reversed not audio version, is from user18081971's Soundcloud page, widely acknowledged to be Richard D James' outlet for all manner of unreleased music. 

Pandit Pam Pam is from Sao Paulo, Brazil. Interludio is from Dot, an EP from January this year, six tracks recorded while caring for a young baby, Diogo. 

First Light is the opening track on Daniel Avery's Song For Alpha, a 2018 album that was the start of a run of outstanding albums that isn't over yet. One minute and forty seconds of wodnerful ambient drones. 

Sydney Minsky Sargeant's album Lunga came out last week, an autumn 2025 highlight. Intro is the opening track (obviously), a short ambient piece that eases us into Lunga. And out of this mix.

Andrew Weatherall's Intro was the very short first track on Convenanza. 'I seem to have got in with the wrong crowd', the voice says, setting Andrew's stall out. 

NYE 23

Let's wave goodbye to 2023 with the final Sunday mix of the year, this one stretching out with an hour and thirteen minute's worth of tunes from this year, not exactly a Best Of 2023 (although these are among the best of this year) more of a Some Of 2023. A mixture of trippy, dubby electronic music, throbbing dance tunes, chuggy indie dance, Balearic pop and Dublin guitar slinging sturm und drang. 

Happy New Year. Have fun tonight however you're choosing to celebrate. Thank you to everyone who's come here this year, to read and comment. I don't think I write this thing with an audience in mind but it helps to know that there is one, and that the people that populate it and places like this one are defintely a community. The comments and responses, particularly to some of the more personal, grief related posts, are genuinely much appreciated and a real support. Thank you, all of you. 

Onwards into 24. 

2023 NYE Mix

• Aphex Twin: Blackbox Life Recorder 21f
• Four Tet: Three Drums
• Khidja: Do You Know This Record Marius?
• Psychederek: Test Card Girl
• 10:40: Little Black Dress (Undressed Dub)
• A Man Called Adam: The Girl With The Hole In Her Heart
• David Holmes: Stop Apologising (Horse Meat Disco Vocal Remix)
• Marshall Watson and Cole Odin: Just A Daydream Away (Hardway Bros Remix)
• Islandman: Godless Ceremony (Hardway Bros Remix)
• James Holden: Common Land
• JIM: Still River Flow
• Fontaines DC: 'Cello Song

Bank Holiday Monday Long Song

 

The first day of May, a bank holiday and a new feelgood song from Balearic heroes A Man Called Adam. The Girl With The Hole In Her Heart in it's album version is six minutes plus of upbeat, pulsing, house with Morodor keyboards, early 80s Sheffield rhythms and a slice of electro- pop thrown in. It's one of those songs that will get played through until the autumn. Lyrically the song draws from Sally Rodgers' earliest memories and overhearing an adult talking about the girl next door having a hole in her heart, 'a wildly visual and evocative image for a child to comprehend' as Sally says. 

At the band's Bandcamp page Sally writes about how their new album walks 'the ugly, lovely industrial coastline of the North East of England, stopping to soak up the breathtaking scenery and watch everyday life carrying on in the face of rapid deindustrialisation'. One of those beaches, Crimdon, is in the picture above from our visit last month and Sally is absolutely spot on. 

Saturday Live

1991, A Man Called Adam (Sally Rodgers with a superbly '91 bowl cut and body warmer, Steve Jones on keys, synths, samples and long sleeved t- shirt and Leftfield's Paul Daley on congas, bongos and bucket hat) kicking up a Balearic storm at The Town And Country Club. Part One opens with Barefoot In The Head, the song that when all's said and done is the one they'll be remembered for, a genuine classic. 

As ever with these things, the crowd are as much the stars as the performers on stage- lots of dilated pupils and baggy jeans, bobbing and shuffling from left to right, hands pumping and shoulders rolling. Part Two raises the temperature with Ameoba, 808s, warm synth sounds, jazzy/ Latin melodies and some very late 80s/ early 90s sentiments in the lyrics- 'All we want/ and we need / Is something better to believe'.

Ameoba

Part Three is only a couple of minutes completing things, Sally and the crowd frugging to the beats and piano. Weirdly but brilliantly, the YouTuber's upload suddenly cuts into N- Joi doing Anthem on Top Of The Pops, that video cassette that he kept by the VCR ready to tape anything of interest turning into a long compilation of late night TV and early evening music programmes. We all had some of those didn't we?

Anthem (Original Mix)

Half An Hour Of A Man Called Adam

 
A Man Called Adam have been making wide eyed, chilled out dance music/ electronic pop since their first single in 1988 and their debut album, The Apple, in 1991. They are two of the stars of the documentary A Short Film About Chilling, Steve and Sally interviewed on the beach in Ibiza. Their Barefoot In the Head single is one of the mainstays of the period. They continued to record and release through the 90s and into the 2000s.  In recent years they've both gained doctorates- Sally Rodgers got her PhD for research the impact of recording technology on lyric forms and Steve Jones's PhD was in New Media. They worked with the British Museum, recorded a tribute to the unsung women of electronica and in 2019 released a new album Farmarama. 

That's all the biographical stuff. I bought The Apple in autumn 1991 and played it throughout the winter of that year, an album that sounds like the opposite of a British winter- fresh, widescreen, optimistic, technicoloured dance- pop, from the opening song/ title track to the sumptuous Chrono- Psionic Interface to the 60s/ 90s hippy/ Balearica of Bread, Love And Dreams. The seven minutes of Barefoot In The Head with its Rod McKuen and The San Sebastian Strings sample about 'putting a seashell to my ear'. Remixes by Andrew Weatherall followed. After that I bought their releases as and when I could, the Cafe del Mar compilations and second album Duende, songs like Estelle and Easter Song. The mix below is half an hour of summer bottled taking in ambient drones and found sounds, dubby acid house, loved up remixes and Balearic pop.

Half An Hour Of A Man Called Adam

• Easter Song (Speaking In Tongues Version)
• Easter Song (North Star Dub)
• The Book Of The Dead (British Museum Mix)
• Paul Valery At the Disco (Prins Thomas Remix)
• C.P.I. (Andrew Weatherall Godiva remix)
• Estelle
• Barefoot In The Head

A Man Called Adam have a new single out now, Ammomite (Hold On To That), an infectious modern piece of house music with a tough edge, inspired by the Jurassic coastline of the north east of England. You can buy it here. 

Along The Rusty Ribbon

Sally Rodgers and Steve Jones of A Man Called Adam have put together a mix for Caught By The River, forty minutes of music and found sounds inspired by walking along the Teesside coastline, a place where land, beach, the North Sea and post- industrial Britain rub up against each other. Field recordings of the sea, ambient music, Nordic folk songs, some downtempo dance music and a bit of classic northern indie from New Order in 1983. Sally's words and mix are at Caught By The River and Along The Rusty Ribbon is at Mixcloud too, a really evocative and immersive way to spend three quarters of an hour. 

Mystic Estelle

A Man Called Adam are releasing a second volume of oddities and rarities called Love Forgotten Part 2, an eighteen track digital compilation of remixes, dub versions, film commissions, a cover of Captain Beefheart, Andrew Weatherall's legendary Godiva remix of CPI and a collaboration with sadly missed South African singer Brenda Fassie. As a teaser they've put out an instrumental of the blissed out, Balearic beaut Estelle, a song that first saw the light of day in my household on the first volume of the Café del Mar compilation series back in 1995. The Mystic Beats instrumental foregrounds the children's voices, the jazzy brushed drumming and perfectly understated bass and piano, the sound of summer - or spring maybe- just around the corner. Buy Love Forgotten Oddities And Rarities Part 2 here. 

Andrew Weatherall

A year ago today Andrew Weatherall died. I was sitting in a pub in Didsbury, back in the days when pubs were open and popping into one was the most normal thing you could do. We'd been for a walk around Fletcher Moss Gardens and were having a half term lunchtime pint when I got a message. Within an hour social media was a torrent of outpourings of loss and also of love and affection for the man, and his music filled the internet (or at least the parts of it where I tend to go). In the eleven and a bit years I've been writing this blog I've tagged 567 posts with his name. One in ten posts have been about the man and his music. It could easily be more- I realised this when writing about the Two Lone Swordsmen remixes of Texas recently, a pair of fairly overlooked deep house/ electro remixes from a time (1997) when he was in the shadows (a self imposed shunning of the limelight), a long way from the glory years of Screamadelica and all those early remixes and from the elder statesman/ national treasure status he'd acquired in more recent years. Nearly six hundred posts in and there's so much more in his back catalogue to throw some light on and to write about.

As a DJ he was untouchable. His skills on the turntables weren't just his undoubted technical prowess or his peerless tune selection or his unerring capacity to take a crowd on a journey but the fact that he could play across a wide variety of genres and make all of them sound like his specialism.  There are many very successful, well respected and well paid DJs but most of them stick within their field. Andrew could play house or techno or Balearic or dub or electro or exotica or trip hop or rockabilly or ambient and other genres besides and be the expert in the room. A purist with wide tastes, he had a range of interests but had mined each one deeply. The last ten years saw the creation of the travelling club night A Love From Outer Space, a never exceeding 110bpm cosmic disco, a sound he described as 'drug chug', but it constantly evolved, the next night different from the last. Despite this, everything felt like it was joined up, it all came from the same source. The internet is awash with his DJ sets and mixes, a huge, long trip around the styles and nights he played (you can find over one thousand hours of them at the Weatherdrive if you're so inclined). 

His monthly residency at NTS radio, his two hour programme called Music's Not For Everyone where he played whatever was tickling his fancy that week, was full of avenues and back alleys for you to disappear down, artists and albums and singles and compilations to uncover and explore. It never felt thrown together, but planned meticulously. Again, on these shows, his taste took in so many styles of music from weird jazz to African funk, 60s psyche and 80s post- punk, acres of dub, his own remixes and the work of people who'd put a CD into his hands at a club or in a pub. Many obscure and unknown artists will attest to him playing their music without them knowing he was doing so, because he'd discovered it somewhere and loved it. He seemed to be endlessly open to the new, to the undiscovered and unheard. In the 90s he often gave records away straight from the turntable at club nights to punters who'd asked him what it was he'd just played. 

I've written about his remixes endlessly and the sheer variety is headspinnning: the everything- and- the- kitchen- sink euphoria of the early 90s remixes; the dub in two halves deconstructions; the Sabres Of Paradise remixes that could be rave meets techno, stoned grooves or two a.m. deconstructions; the Two Lone Swordsmen remixes that took a snatch of vocal, twisted it into an unrecognisable shape and built a bassline- led deep house track around it; and the glorious widescreen remixes of the last decade- to pick a handful almost at random, just cue up these ones and see the range and depth of his work, the wide open spaces and giddy ecstasies of his Moby and Wayne Coyne remix, the controlled chaotic noise plus huge rhythms of his Fuck Buttons remix,  his grin inducing remix of Out Of The Window by Confidence Man and the deep space glide of his remix of Emiliana Torrini. 

Speed Of Dark (Andrew Weatherall Remix)

In 1991 Andrew and fellow travellers A Man Called Adam met in 'a shitty hotel in Coventry' and Sally and Steve asked him to remix their song The Chrono Psionic Interface. It is one of those early 90s beauties, infused with the spirit of the times, music that suggests endless possibility, open minds and freedom. A Man Called Adam have made it available at their Bandcamp page as a pay- what- you- want deal but if you can pay for it all monies raised will be going to one of Andrew's chosen charities, Thrombosis UK. Get it here.  

I was wondering what he might have done with the past year if he'd lived. Lockdown has stirred lots of creativity out of people. Last year's A Certain Ratio album Loco would surely have been accompanied by a Weatherall remix given the links between the two. The monthly W.R.F. EPs carried on without him but eventually he'd have gone back to one of the Facilities and made more music. Maybe he'd have started those memoirs that Lee Brackstone at Faber had suggested to him. Possibilities, maybes and what ifs. 

Throughout 2020 I did a series of hour long mixes, most of which were a response to lockdown and the situation we all found ourselves in almost a year ago now. This one, Weatherdub, was a bunch his dub infused productions and remixes stitched together (featuring tracks recorded under his own name and  as Sabres Of Paradise with remixes of St Etienne, Steve Mason, Richard Sen, Lark and Meatraffle and the one off recording with David Harrow as Planet 4 Folk Quartet). I did a pair of mixes of songs that came to me because he'd played them, talked about them or listed them in a magazine chart, a brace of tributes to his ears, his record collection and his taste- Songs The Lord Sabre Taught Us One and Two. In December I did a collection of songs from his back catalogue titled Audrey Witherspoon's Blues. Between them I tried to sum up something of the spirit of the man and his music. A year ago in one of the many obituaries and tributes that appeared online as the world ground to a complete halt came from London based magazine Time Out and it's worth quoting the final section in full-

'It’s been pointed out that, spookily, you can still see the man on Google Street View – walking purposefully up Kingsland Road, looking customarily fantastic in smart brown shoes, wide-legged camel-coloured trousers and tats galore. It’s just one of many beautiful perspectives on Andrew Weatherall – a street-pounding, eye-catching local London legend. 

He is survived by his partner, his family and about 7 million children of the acid-house revolution. Rest in peace.'

Lockdown Mix

I got the bug for putting a mix together again recently and this is the result, an hour of largely ambient and Balearic with some 80s Manchester and 90s Liverpool dropped in. Despite the promise of the vaccine the situation still seems pretty desperate. Everyone seems determined to celebrate Christmas despite the fact that if it goes ahead 'as normal', people will surely die within weeks and a further lockdown in January will be inevitable. Taking refuge in music often seems to be the answer. I still can't get Mixcloud to embed but you can find my Lockdown Mix here. 

Tracklist

• A Man Called Adam: Book Of The Dead (The British Museum Mix)
• Two Lone Swordsmen: Ink Cloud
• Steve Roach: Spiral Of Strength
• Richard Norris: Music For Healing 12
• Moon Duo: In A Cloud
• The Charlatans: Trouble Understanding (Norman Cook Remix)
• Andy Bell: Cherry Cola (Pye Corner Audio Remix)
• Future Beat Alliance: Tell Me About These Dreams
• Big Hard Excellent Fish: Imperfect List (Uncensored Original Mix)
• Nuel: Vibration
• Durutti Column: Take Some Time Out
• Tabula Rasa: Sunset At The Café del Mar

 

Still Waters

I've got a lot of time for for dance music veterans A Man Called Adam and it's not just due to us sharing a name. In the summer of 1990 their laid back Balearic house song Barefoot In The Head stuck a chord with me as did their album a year later, The Apple (rhyming slang I think, the apple corps = the score, as in 'do you know the score?'). In the last few years they've had a bit of renaissance with last year's Farmarama album and a slew of remixes. Sally and Steve have now followed this with a twenty track release, fresh out now on Bandcamp, a round up of rarities and oddities from the duo's whole career taking in demo versions, mixes, edits, a commission for the British Museum and collaborations with people such as the recently departed Jose Padilla, The Idjut Boys and Sensory Productions. There's so much going on across the twenty songs that it's difficult to take in in one sitting but there's a freshness and a flow in the music, ambient sounds, early 90s Ibizan rhythms and a very Balearic state of mind. Right now, this one with Jose Padilla is hitting the spot...

The album, Love Forgotten, is here. Their calling card, the endlessly giving Barefoot In The Head is present on it in a remixed form. There's a sample on Barefoot In The Head, some lines from a 1967 poem by Rod McKuen, where he 'puts a seashell to my ear and it all comes back'. Rod and Anita Kerr recorded the album The Sea with the San Sebastian Strings, a dreamlike slice of 1967, hippy spoken word and easy listening strings. This is where the sample comes from...

It's the sort of album you always expect to turn up in a charity shop or at a car boot sale. I'm sure the thrift stores and flea markets of the USA are full of copies of The Sea, dumped in the 1990s. As it is, over here, I'm still looking. 

Monday Mix

A few weeks ago I got a message from Tak Tent Radio, an internet radio station broadcasting out of Edinburgh, asking if I'd like to do an hour long mix for them. I was flattered, obviously, and said yes. Ali said musically Tak Tent is a total 'free for all so play whatever you like'. If you have a dig around on their website you'll see that it is with everything from Italo and electro to gospel and Scots folk, ragas and psyche- pop and Aiden Moffatt to Richard Youngs playing Hawkwind and Flux Of Pink Indians. In the end I put together an hour of music that follows in some kind of line from the Isolation mixes I was doing in the spring and summer, ambient and tracks with found sounds, drones and noise, some Durutti Column, some Two Lone Swordsmen and some clattering, spooked out Eno/ Byrne style stuff. The samples in Maurice And Charles's I, Carpenter and the voice of Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken gave me a title and a reference to the ongoing horror show/ political reality TV show that is going on in the USA. It went out yesterday morning  and you can find my Find The President mix to stream at Mixcloud here. 

I almost titled it after Snake's line in this clip... 

Tracklist

• A Man Called Adam: Easter Song Gospel Oak FX/ Speaking In Tongues 
• Daniel Avery and Alessandro Cortini: Interrupted By The Cloud of Light
• Glok: Pulsing (Citadel Ambient Version)
• Jan van den Broeke: Memories
• Jan van den Broeke: Who Is Still Dreaming?
• Steven Legget: Still
• Richard Norris: Water
• Rick Cuevas: The Birds
• Durutti Column: Bordeaux Sequence
• Calexico: Untitled (Two Lone Swordsmen Virus Style Mix)
• Brian Eno and David Byrne: The Jezebel Spirit
• Maurice & Charles: I, Carpenter
• Two Lone Swordsmen: Smokebelch (For Ali)
• Daniel Avery: TBW17

Sally At The Disco

Last year A Man Called Adam returned from the Balearic wilderness with their excellent Farmarama album. Various songs have been remixed, reworked and dubbed out, by Sally and Steve themselves and by others including Prins Thomas. Covid and lockdown put paid to the original plans for release but now the entire package is out, eighteen remixes and dubs plus a fifty minute mixtape pulling them all together. The full release is at Bandcamp. The Prins Thomas remix is characteristically inventive and sprightly, a snaking guitar line, some analogue synths, Sally's part spoken, part sung vocal and a complex, twisting rhythm. 

The PV Lash Up of the same song, Paul Valery At The Disco, is a giddy floorfiller, a thumping house drumbeat and wonderfully silly keyboard part guaranteed to have you both dancing and smiling. 

Earlier this year Sally recorded a vocal for a new song written by Balearic militants Leo Mas and Fabrice. This Unspoken Love had summer written all over it- now in the darker days of autumn it's still working its magic. The dub version, also available at Bandcamp, a a dark, insistent house chugger pointing its face towards the night skies. 

Bringing Me Back To Life

I posted this last Easter and I'm doing the same again today, perfect music for playing while sitting in your garden/ on your balcony/ sticking your head out of the window, to catch some of the sunshine we've been getting. A Man Called Adam's Easter Song came out in 1998, a beautiful, gently unwinding piece of late 20th century balm, Sally singing 'you're bringing me back to life' as the synths and drums pad away underneath.

The special edition at Bandcamp is a digital version of the original late 90s vinyl release and adds various downtempo, found sound and dubby versions- the North Star Dub, The Gospel Oaks FX, African Flute And Beats version, the Hi Tech and Speaking in Tongues mixes and the original Cafe del Mar eight minute version. Taken together as a package they make a mini- album that you should give to yourself as an Easter gift this year while staying in.

Isolation Mix Two

A second Bagging Area mix for lockdown, an hour of tunes starting out ambient, taking a turn toward the Balearics and some fizzing electronics before the jetstream sends it back into more ambient, melancholic lands with waves and seagulls. Having the time and space to think about putting these together is one of the upsides of social distancing and isolation.

Private Mountain: Coming Back Home v Eric Cantona ‘When the seagulls follow the trawler…

Nils Frahm: Over There, It’s Raining

Steven Leggett: Bathhouse

Seahawks: Rainbow Sun

Peaking Lights: Beautiful Dub

Circle Sky: Ghost In The Machine

The Neil Cowley Trio: Echo Nebula (Vessels Remix)

Fila Brazillia: Midnight Friends

Mark Peters: Jacob’s Ladder (Ambient Innerlands Version)

Jan van den Broeke: Memories

A Man Called Adam: Easter Song (Gospel Oak FX)

Bjorn Torske: First Movement

Bringing Me Back To Life

Here's an Easter treat for fans of A Man Called Adam, who've made their 1998 classic Easter Song available for free from their Bandcamp page- and seeing as we're currently basking in some sunshine and warmth this piece of Balearic summer fits perfectly. The special edition includes not just the radio edit of Easter Song but the Cafe del Mar version and some dubs and soundscapes, three lovely short instrumental versions to accompany it, seven tracks to celebrate the rolling away of a stone, Oestra, the hiding of chocolate eggs or just a long bank holiday weekend. It's all here.

Lose Yourself

A Man Called Adam's new album Farmarama is proving to be a popular one round here, four sides of joy and fun, both reflecting their late 80s Balearic origins and sounding pretty current too- laptop beats, BBC Radiophonic Workshop melodies and Sally's impressionistic lyrics. The closing song is this one, Paul Valery At The Disco, the one I keep skipping the needle back to the start of...



Paul Valery was a French poet, writer and philosopher- 'poems are never finished, just abandoned' is his most famous quote (see also: 'poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking'). The track Sally and Steve have married his name to is a trippy disco tinged thumper which Sally said was inspired by the death of David Mancuso, his New York club The Loft and his party philosophy, Paul Valery dropped in for good measure. A song that extols the virtues of dancing, living and losing yourself on the dancefloor.

There's a remix 12" coming out for Record Shop Day including a Prins Thomas version of this which means I may have to venture into the vinyl scrum in Piccadilly Records after all.

Farmarama

A Man Called Adam have a new album out in March with two new songs posted online as a taste of what's to come. Ou Pas has a breezy, slightly off kilter rhythm, what sounds like a looped guitar part, a squelchy bassline and some jazzy flute- the sounds that made their 1991 album The Apple and 1998's Duende but fed through some 2018 filters and with Sally singing French phrases. Album opener Mountains And Waterfalls is longer, a groover, congas and piano chords harking back to their Acid Jazz days, and then adding disco strings and breakdowns as it unfolds. Both sound half aimed at the feet and half at the head, music to stop doing whatever it was you were doing and listen. The journey they started back in the late 80s with Earthly Powers and Barefoot In The Head continues.

Monday's Long Song

Back in the long song for Monday thing after two weeks off, this time with a Balearic groover from 1996 courtesy of the combined talents of Sally Rodgers from a dream team of A Man Called Adam, Faze Action and The Idjut Boys. This starts off with pipes and waves lapping on the shore and then picks up the pace, plenty of percussion, Sally's vocals and little flourishes of Spanish guitar. There are a bewildering number of different mixes and versions of this, all worth investigation. This one is very nice indeed and likely to slow your circulation somewhat in the run up to Christmas.

Dust Of Life (Swoop Edit)

Apple

Food for Friday again today. Following on from honey, sugar, wine and lemons today I give you apples, a rich source of song titles.

Milltown Brothers were/are a five piece from Colne, Lancashire (not Burnley as was often said of them although apparently they were regulars at Turf Moor). They had bowl haircuts and an organ led sound that got them drawn into the fringes of the late 80s Manchester scene. They had some coverage from the NME including a single of the week (a much coveted award at that time), a near hit with Which Way Should I Jump? and then a major label deal with A&M in 1990. But what we're here for today are apples, specifically Milltown Brothers' 1990 song Apple Green which at this distance sounds pretty fresh, infectious 60s inspired pop, the work of a band who maybe got missed, chewed up and spat out back in the early 90s. They re-united in 2004 and have released an album as recently as 2015.

Apple Green

A Man Called Adam came through at the same time but from a different part of the country (Middlesborough, Teeside) and from a different background (dance music, 60s soundtracks, acid jazz and a Balearic epiphany). Their 1991 album The Apple is a Bagging Area favourite with several songs that are often palyed round here, Barefoot In the Head, The Chrono Psionic Interface and Righteous Life for starters. And the album's opener...

The Apple

Also from 1990 (but here in a re-edited version from 2016 by Rhythm Scholar) A Tribe Called Quest  were part of hip hop's second wave, part of the Native Tongues collective and had a real way with both tunes and words. Bonita Applebum was about a girl from high school who clearly stuck in the memory...

Bonita Applebum (Rhythm Scholar All Nite Excursion)

Manic Street Preachers burst out of South Wales in the early 90s, in a riot of mascara, feather boas and heavy rock. In 2009 they released an album called Journal For Plague Lovers which contained a song called Peeled Apples (a song I don't think I've ever heard in its original form). They commissioned some remixes and Andrew Weatherall peeled the Manic's apples further, a heavily percussive stomper with some guitar parts echoing through.

Peel Apples (Andrew Weatherall Remix)

Lastly, a Joe Strummer's song from his Mescalero years, a top ten Strummer solo song for sure. Johnny Appleseed is a joy, with a rollicking rhythm on acoustic guitars, a full throttle vocal and lyrics about bees, Martin Luther King, a Buick 49 and Johnny Appleseed (a character from the early years of the USA, a pioneer who scattered apple seeds wherever he went). This song makes me really miss Joe Strummer.



Rene Magritte's 1964 painting says 'This is not an apple'. It isn't- it's a picture of an apple. That, I suppose, is the joke.

Discrete Machines

Sally Rodgers and Steve Jones, the duo that were/are Balearic heroes A Man Called Adam, have been recording more recently as Discrete Machines using iPads and mini-controllers and an improvisational approach. A mini-album came out in 2015 and opened with this wonderful seven minute tribute to the ladies of electronica (Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram and Pauline Oliveros) set to an Afrobeat. There's something about this which is totally entrancing. The rest of the album is equally good, inventive and fresh, minimal and loungey, a bit of krautrock, some poetry- definitely from over there, outside the mainstream. It includes a song called Stockhausen's Cardigan which is reason enough to give it a go. You can buy it here.