Jul 2024 – No Badger Required

The No Badger Olympics – #6 – Cycling

See That My Bikes Kept Clean – Half Man Half Biscuit (1997, Probe Plus Records)

(I think bizarrely that might be the first Half Man Half Biscuit track ever featured on these pages, come back in March 2027 for the next one).

Cycling was one of the sports that my daughter wanted to see if we managed to get tickets for the Paris Olympics (and for those of who are late to this series, we didn’t). In fact she wanted to see two different disciplines within the cycling events (well three I wanted to watch the time trial).

First up, was the track cycling, fuelled by two things, one a thrilling race at the Tokyo Olympics in which Dame Laura Kenny sprinted her way to victory in some race and then as the celebrations rang all around her, she burst into tears live on television. I like to think that Dame Laura was just overwhelmed at being interviewed by queen of sports presenting Hazel Irvine, but I suspect I am wrong. After that victory, all my daughter wanted to do was ride around the block as fast as she could on her bike pretending to be Dame Laura Kenny. I was made to hold a stopwatch and time her laps as belted round the lanes trying to beat the Word Record.

Speed Racer – Husbands (2020, Cowboy Records)

She also wanted to see a velodrome, because she remains unconvinced that they are not flat and that the steep inclines that she saw on the telly were because of “CGI or more likely camera trickery”. This is largely because the local bike park where she learnt to cycle is flat and doubles up as a running track.

The second event that piqued my daughters interest was the BMX racing, which if you ask my dad is “just a bunch of grown ups charging about on kids bikes that they are clearly too big for”. He also told me on the phone that the day that they start doing Segway and Scooter races in the Olympics is the day we all give up and go home. He told me that after a reading an article in the Daily Star about scooter racing being considered for the 2028 Olympics. He’s 76 years of age and still thinks that bikes with gears are “high tech nonsense” so we can humour him.

Happy Cycling – Boards of Canada (1996, Warp Records)

In reality the BMX racing is fast and furious fun, bikes whizz around a track that has bumps, jumps and really sharp bends, they fly all over the place, legs dangling in the air, and high speed crashes are not uncommon. All of which make it pretty much essential viewing for the average eleven year old. It’s one of the most open of all the events and no one is guaranteed a medal due to the sheer unpredictability of it. For instance, the last time we watched this event on the television at either the Commonwealth or the World Championships one rider was yards ahead with one corner to go, they started celebrating and then came a cropper and at the exact moment their face smashed on the asphalt, three riders zoomed past him as they sprinted for glory. It was one of the greatest sporting tragedies of the modern age (and as my daughter points out, really, really really funny).

In Tokyo 2021, Britains Bethany Schriever won gold by 0.09 seconds (and instantly overtook Dame Laura Kenny in the hero stakes).

Bike – Autechre (1993, Warp Records)

Shuffle – Bombay Bicycle Club (2011, Island Records)

Tomorrow – Boats and Boards

The No Badger Olympics – #5 – Horses

Never Good with Horses – LYR (2020, Mercury Records)

In 2012, a lady called Charlotte Dujardin made the entire British nation, fall in love with, momentarily, at least, the sport of dressage, as she trotted, cantered and made her horse dance in time to various pieces of classical music on her way to Olympic Gold. Millions of people cheered Charlotte on from the comfort of their own homes as Claire Balding did her best to try and explain exactly what the horses were doing in this very intricate of sports.

Of course, there are those that will tell you that dressage isn’t a sport at all. It’s an art that is people have pursued solely for the sake of mastery for more than 2000 years.

My mother in law for one.

My mother in law is horse mad. She has lived around horses for most of her life and that horsey madness has then attached itself to my wife and then my daughter, both of whom can ride a horse better than I can. Saying that I have sat on a horse precisely five times in my life, and on four of those occasions, I had someone holding a rope attached to the horses tack so that I didn’t do something stupid and send the horse off flying into the sunset like Denholm Elliot at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

I Break Horses – Bill Callahan (2002, Domino Records)

Disclosure – I Break Horses (2014, Bella Union Records)

Anyway, if anyone ever offers you the opportunity to watch dressage, live, in a schooling ring, rather than the vastly edited highlights on the television, find something else to do, absolutely anything, that bench that needs painting or that car that needs washing. Anything.

This not because dressage is boring, it isn’t. It’s actually a really beautiful and disciplined event, it’s just that the people who are involved are massively pretentious, and wherever you stand or sit or walk, you will hear people who say things like this, and I’ve translated for you in case you don’t speak equestrian (not that I do but Google does).

“Oh, that’s a lovely flying tempi”. (basically, I like the way that horse went from trotting to cantering, or in even simpler terms, sped up)

Or things like this

“Well, I think the rider has a very good understanding of different riding techniques, her piaffe, in particular was very calm and composed.” (I like the way that rider made the horse slow down to a mere trot)

Or even,

“What an impressive capriole” (I like the way that horse jumped)

The Equestrian – Les Savy Fav (2007, Frenchkiss Records)

There are several different disciplines in the equestrian section of the Olympics, the most popular is the three-day event, which has the aforementioned dressage as day one, the cross country on day two and the final day the showjumping. The cross country event is a great event to watch even if the BBC does, once the competition is done and dusted, concentrate on the riders who get hurled into ponds or thrown backwards over logs or trampled by their horses after an ill judged manoeuvre at a particular fence, and let’s be honest that’s what we pay our licence fees for, so that we can see unedited near death experiences.

Fences – Phoenix (2009, V2 Records)

Tomorrow – Cycling

STOP PRESS – I wrote this before Charlotte Dujardin pulled out of the Olympics for what she calls a ‘Serious error of judgement’ and for what everyone else should thinks is vicious and unnecessary cruelty.

The No Badger Olympics – #4 – Basketball

Basketball – Weezer (2022, Crush Records)

Basketball was one of the sports that I had earmarked to go and watch if I got Olympic tickets. My daughter likes the sport too and proudly wears her Brooklyn Nets hat everywhere she goes these days, we regularly go to the local court just to throw some hoops, as I believe they say in Manhattan. All of which has played off a little bit, because a recent school open day, she took part in an gym obstacle course event, the last task of the event was to shoot a basket and you were given three attempts to do it. She, with an almost Ivan Toney like coolness, picked the ball up, gave the basket one look and throw the ball in the net first time to a few gasps from the older girls.

Basketball Shoes – Black Country, New Road (2022, Ninja Tune Records)

One of the best things about the Olympics is the occasional story of David beating Goliath. Events where a competitor from a tiny nation rises up and snatches gold from under the noses of a major sporting nation. For instance in the 2021 women’s triathlon, Flora Duffy (or Dame Flora Duffy to give her full name) won Bermuda’s first ever Olympic Gold medal. Her nation was so proud of her that they declared a Bank Holiday and named it after her.

If you like sporting shocks then you may not get them watching Olympic Basketball, because it is a virtual certainty that the United States of America will win gold in both the men’s and women’s events. The women’s team have won 48 consecutive games and haven’t lost a match since 1996 (they’ve won seven consecutive gold medals). The men have been equally successful, winning sixteen of the last nineteen basketball golds including every one since 2008.

He Got Game – Public Enemy (1998, Def Jam Records)

However, in Athens 2004, the world nearly got that sporting earthquake, when the Americans struggled in the basketball. In the group stage, twelves teams are split into two groups of six and play each other in a round robin tournament. In the first game the Americans played that nation of renowned sporting greatness Puerto Rico (who are actually quite good at basketball) and lost. Cue pandemonium on the streets of San Juan.

A few games later they played Lithuania and lost again. With a game to go, the American stood on the brink of elimination. A victory for the Australians against the so far unbeaten Lithuanians would mean regardless of by how many the Americans beat the groups whipping boys Angola they would be out. Sadly that didn’t happen, Australia lost and the Americans went through (only to lose in the semi final to the eventual winners, Argentina)

Michael Jordan – Kendrick Lamar (2010, Top Dawg Records)

All that rubbishness from the States caused ruffles throughout the entire game and the Americans came back in Beijing 2008 stronger and better than ever and haven’t been widely troubled since the horror of 04. Lightning doesn’t strike twice where the US basketball is concerned apparently.

Or does it?

A while ago the group matches for Paris 2024 were drawn and one particularly match stands out. On July 31^st America play Puerto Rico in their second group game. Can the impossible happen….?

I Wish – Skee – Lo (1995, Scotti Brothers Records)

Tomorrow – Horses

The No Badger Olympics – #3 – Athletics

Stars of Track and Field – Belle and Sebastian (1996, Jeepster Records)

(so today is the first day that I am using a new streaming service called Linkify. I think it works in exactly the same way as Songwhip did but it doesn’t appear to be as powerful – so you might get a few more You Tube links going forward)

I’ve written about my love of running before. It was a love that started when I was about 9 and I watched Steve Cram break the world record for the mile in Oslo. An event that made me jump off the sofa in my grandads lounge and declare to any one who was listening (my grandad, my brother and my nan) that I was going to run a mile as fast as Steve Cram. My brother laughed at me, my Nan smiled and said “you go for it dear”, my grandad went up to the spare room and returned with a Tiger Annual from 1961 which had a story about how a man called Roger Bannister broke the four minute mile. He handed it to me and said “You’d better read this first then “.

Roger Bannister was my first real hero, a man who broke the four minute mile by using science and dedication and because he was told it couldn’t be done. He broke the four minute mile whilst studying to be a doctor, and not only that he designed and helped build the track on which he did it as well. For years a poster of Bannister at the end of that race adorned my wall. In that photo he is exhausted, spent, knackered broken, as he breaks the tape at the finishing line of the Iffley Road Track with the watch stopped at 03:59:40. All around him people stare in utter astonishment at what he had just achieved.

Running For Your Life – Graham Coxon (2012, Parlophone Records)

The current world mile record is about twenty seconds quicker than Bannister managed, but still seventy years later, less than 1800 athletes have achieved what Bannister achieved, only most of them didn’t do it on a dusty track an after hour writing an essay on the best way to deliver a tracheostomy.

The youngest person by the way to run a sub four minute mile was a lad called Jacob Ingebrigsten from Norway, who broke it aged just 16 back in 2016. In the Paris Olympics, Ingebrisgten will be the clear favourite for gold in several mens races. His two brothers and his sister are also all representing Norway and are all expected to win medals.

When I was younger, the Olympics hadn’t really started until the athletics had kicked off (normally on day seven or eight) and when it did start I used to sit glued to the television watching every event from the 100 metres to the pole vault and the speed walking. I would watch the way the Kenyans ran in the middle distance races, I would watch the way that Carl Lewis sprinted, how the relay runners held their batons, what type of shoes they wore, everything.

Running – Fat Dog (2024, Domino Records)

Number 37 on the recent list of 50 people that I find inspirational was Sir Mo Farah. In 2012, Mo Farah won two gold medals in the 5000 metres and the 10000 metres, one of only a handful of people to have ever achieved that. The scenes of Farah, eyes bulging out of his head, outrunning two Kenyans and a Tanzanian down the home straight of the Olympic Stadium as a near feverish home crowd cheered him on wildly was one of the most memorable images of the whole London 2012 Olympics.

Keep Running – Stone (2020, Self Released)

In Paris, three athletes from Team GB probably hold our greatest hopes of medal glory in the athletics. They are Keely Hodginkson in the 800 metres, Cornwall’s Molly Caudery in the Pole Vault – an event I always fancied trying as a youngester, but was always petrified of the pole snapping Daley Thompson style whenever I tried it – and Josh Kerr who runs in the 1500 metres. I’ll also tip my head in the direction of Matt Hudson Smith in the 400 metres but feel he might lose out to an American or two.

Running in Darkness – Mega City Four (1988, Decoy Records)

Saw You In A Dream – County Line Runner (2019, Kid in A Korner Records)

Tomorrow – Basketball

The No Badger Olympics – #2 – Swimming

Swimming Pools (Drank) – Kendrick Lamar (2012, Top Dawg Records)

I’ve actually met an Olympic Swimming silver medallist. A chap called Nick Gillingham who once opened a swimming pool in, erm, Gillingham. I’m pretty sure I got given a signed photo of him in his UK Swimming tracksuit with his silver medal dangling around his neck. I think I might have been 14 at the time and I can’t for the life of me remember why I didn’t have something better to do.

Of all the athletes who take part in the Olympics the ones I feel sorry for the most are the 44 men and women who take part in the swimming marathon (not actually a marathon but a 10km race). Not only do they have to get up ridiculous early for their event (0630hrs splashdown) but they have to swim for nearly two hours. If you are anything like me, I’m bored of swimming after about 17 minutes of splashing and wiping water from my ears and eyes on an almost constant basis.

They don’t do it in a pool either, they do it in open water. Imagine if that was the UK, they would spend half the race avoiding floating logs and brown water that has been nonchalantly dumped in our rivers by one of our Water Companies. After the event the Water Companies would put our prices up due to the pollution caused by the swimmers.

According to the official Olympic schedule the swimming competition will run from today (27^th July) to August 9^th – so there will be some swimming activity on nearly every day of the Olympics. The main swimming events take part in the massive La Defense Arena for the first week – up until the 4^th August and then on August 8^th and 9^th the men’s and women’s marathon swimming event takes place along the Seine River.

Swim – Fickle Friends (2018, Polydor Records)

I’m not great at swimming, a mixture of a shoulder injury caused by larking about on a children’s climbing frame a few years ago and an innate fear of not being able to breath. I can do the front crawl very well because I just hold my breath and move my arms as fast as they can go and somehow end up at the end pool, exhausted and gasping for breath. So for those reasons alone, if I had to chose an Olympic swimming event it would be the 50m Freestyle. Saying that every single person who swam this event in Tokyo swam it in under 27 seconds. The current world record for the 50 metre freestyle is 21.07 seconds held by an American called Caeleb Dressel, which is not only an insanely quick swim but a great name as well. Dressel will start as the hot favourite this year but there is belief that the Brit Ben Proud can run (swim?) him close.

The Swimmer – Metz (2015, Sub Pop Records)

The women’s event is almost as ridiculously quick. The world record is 23.61 seconds held by the Swedish athlete Sarah Sjöström but the hot favourite for gold is the Australian Emma McKeown. I’m going for a swim tomorrow and I’ll time myself and let you know how I get on. If I can swim 50 metres in under a minute, I’ll be almost as delighted as I would be astonished.

Swimming – Sprints (2021, Nice Swan Records)

There are other disciplines in the swimming, including backstroke, which always looks like the most leisurely type of affair. My daughter tells me that backstroke is her strongest swimming stroke and at the ‘unofficial school championships’ that were held in amongst her school a few weeks ago, she won the backstroke race. She also banged her head on the end of pool. Twice. So, we’ll skirt over that.

Swimming Lessons – Lanterns on the Lake (2020, Bella Union Records)

Traditionally the Americans, the Australians and the Dutch tend to be the strongest swimming nations. Team GB tend to do ok, in recent years the emergence of swimmers like Adam Peaty, Rebecca Adlington, Tom Dean and others have seen an increased chance of success in the pool. In Paris, Team GB are currently predicted to come home with 12 medals of various colours but a lot depends on the fitness of Adam Peaty.

See It Out – Swimming Tapes (2019, Hand In Hive Records)

Tomorrow – Athletics.

The No Badger Olympics – #1 Paris

Paris – Friendly Fires (2008, XL Records)

Today marks the start of the twenty-ninth occasion of the Olympic Games. Sportsmen and women from all over the world will descend on Paris to compete for 329 Gold Medals across 32 sports (or disciplines as they are known as) over 18 days of competing (well technically its sixteen days – the football tournament has already started). It will see feats of super human endurance, it will see world records smashed in cycling, swimming, athletics and other sports where that type of thing matters. Superstars will be made. New heroes will emerge.

16 Days – Whiskeytown (1997, Outpost Records)

New heroes who are right now probably unknown to nearly all of us. New heroes who will become household names because that shot a target or rowed their boats or rode their horse or did their taekwondo better than everyone else. We will cheer them until we go hoarse and pretend that we’ve all be fans of dressage, water polo, rifle shooting or BMXing for ages.

We will all howl with disappointment when we come second or third or finish agonisingly fourth and miss out on the medals altogether. We will sit and dab our eyes when on the last day of competing before the closing ceremony the BBC plays us a montage of plucky losers with a sad song soundtracking it.

Paris – Taylor Swift (2022, Republic Records)

And then after the Olympics has finished the party will continue as we relive the moments as those gold medallists become minor celebrities, one or two will be on Strictly Come Dancing, one or two will be on Sports Personality of the Year, one or two will go in the jungle and eat the balls of a wallaby and will we continue to cheer them because they are winners. Probably.

I love the Olympics but it’s not just me.

My daughter loves the Olympics almost as much as I do. In 2021 during the Tokyo Olympics we sat together and watched the thrilling BMX racing. We sat on the sofa of our rented holiday home on the Isle of Wight and gasped as bikes flew around all over the place and we cheered when our chosen favourite came in third.

As it drew to a close I said to my daughter that if she wanted to we could try and get tickets for the next Olympics and we could actually go and watch the BMX racing in the stadium. We could try and get tickets for all the other events that she had taken a liking to, the swimming, the basketball, the cycling, the triathlon and the handball. She nodded her as her eyes widen with expectation. Sensing problems, “We’ll try” I said. “We can’t promise”.

And so we tried.

And we failed.

Well sort of.

We registered, we highlighted the sports we wanted and got our code for the day of the ticket release. We got very excited. That excitement lasted for three days, and then they released the ticket prices and that is when the excitement waned a bit. Flights to Paris suddenly went up in price, hotel prices skyrocketed, what rooms were left were about 50 miles from Paris, and so we aren’t going. Instead we have snacks and comfy cushions and I haven’t spent two thousand Euros on two days watching swimming and one day watching some cycling on events that don’t even decide medals.

Lost in Paris – Blaenavon (2013, Transgressive Records)

I still love the Olympics and to celebrate it over the next sixteen days, we will explore some of the sports that form part of it – each day a different sport or sports will feature, and alongside those sports will be a bunch of songs that should be in someway relevant to those sports or by bands with a name that is relevant – at least that’s the theory.

However today as we will all know will be all about the opening ceremony. So to end here are two songs that are called ‘Procession’.

Procession – Real Estate (2020, Domino Records)

Procession – New Order (1981, Factory Records)

And one cover version of a song called ‘Ceremony’

Ceremony – Chromatics (2017, Strictly Italian Records)

Tomorrow – Swimming.

A Series about the Nineties #14 – A New Decade

A New Decade – The Verve (1994, Hut Records)

My Millennium Eve was a pretty tame affair to be honest, at one of the few pubs in Exeter that refused to charge for entry or issue tickets which meant you had to stay still in one pub all night long crushed against the bar carefully cradling the one pint that the vastly inflated prices meant that you could afford. It was a pub about a ten minutes walk from my Canalside apartment in Exeter and because it was out of town it was relatively quiet. We had the adventure playground to ourselves for most of the evening. But I still had the feeling that it could have been something different, something more special.

I could have for instance done what a friend of mine, Mark, did, and spend his New Years Eve in Cardiff with 75,000 other people watching the Manic Street Preachers at the Millennium Stadium. He said that hearing the Manics play the opening chords of ‘You Stole the Sun From My Heart’ at about ten thirty on a Millennium Eve was one of the greatest moments of his life, one that he said was replaced two hours later when the Manics played ‘A Design for Life’ just after midnight on January 1^st 2000.

You Stole The Sun From My Heart – Manic Street Preachers (1998, Sony Music)

Then again I’m glad I didn’t follow the lead of Irish Mike, who spent Millenniums Eve on asleep Southport Beach, after peaking rather early. He woke up to find his wallet missing.

Another friend of mine intended to come to Exeter but got chatting to a lady at a bus stop in Bovey Tracey and ended up spending the evening with her in the Cromwell Arms. They’ve been married nineteen years in August.

Disco 2000 – Pulp (1995, Island Records)

In that pub in Exeter, however, as the minute hand crawled up to twelve, I sat with about ten mates, we ate some decent food, drank some decent beer, and played music on the free juke box and then when the time was about right we all went outside and the manager set off some fireworks. I held my (not quite) wife’s hand as the fireworks exploded around us, strangers hugged each other, and the bar staff took advantage of the confusion surrounding the Millennium Bug by dishing out free drinks from the bar. When the manager asked why they claimed that they didn’t want the machines to rise up Maximum Overdrive style and eat everybody.

Fireworks – Embrace (1997, Hut Records)

The manager raised his eyebrows and shrugged his shoulders and handed out trays of oven cooked roasted potatoes that were too good to be eaten by microwaves, blenders and famished Breville toasted sandwich makers just in case they went to waste. Around one am we all trundled back to my flat, played a few more records and crashed out. It felt like every other New Years Eve to be honest, which is because it was exactly that.

It could have been worse though,

In the morning, the TV’s which hadn’t stopped working played us footage of events around the world, it showed parties all over the world and it showed Michael Jackson apparently kicking off the Millennium by playing a huge gig in Sydney and then showed him boarding a plane which was going to fly him to Hawaii, where he would officially play another Millennium Show, the big show off. Some (rich and stupid) people followed him and went to both gigs.

Can you think of anything worse?

Tomorrow sees the introduction of a new series, the third one in July as promised. Here’s a rather obvious clue what that’s going to be about.

Olympians – Fuck Buttons (2009, ATP Records)

STOP PRESS – Just been informed that my normal streaming service, Songwhip has stopped providing a service. So, some or all of the links here may not work. I’m working on finding a new one. Apologies. I mean its not my fault, but you know what I mean.

A Series about the Nineties – #13 Catching Spongy Balls

Shakermaker – Oasis (1994, Creation Records)

As ice breaker sessions go, the one that took up most of my first ever meeting at the student newspaper takes some beating. We all sat in a circle and looked a bit sheepish before editor Jonno with his Bruno Brookes locks flowing behind him and his able assistant Al (which we found out later wasn’t short for Alan or Alistair or Alvin or even Albert but the rather posh sounding Alcuin) stood up and walked into the centre of the circle.

I was sitting next to a German chap called Holger, he was only here because his lecturers have said that writing for the student paper is good for translation skills, but all he wants to talk about is football (Leverkusen Fan). Jonno is throwing a sponge ball in the air and then catching it. He starts to speak. He waffles on about the paper, and journalism in general and about wanting it to be serious and not full of badly written content. Everyone nods in agreement, apart from Holger who looks bored.

Saturday Night – Whigfield (1994, Atlantic Records)

“You might wonder why I’m holding this ball” Jonno says. “Well, when I throw it at you, I want you to tell everyone who you are, what you are studying and what you’d like to write about and then throw the ball at some else” and with that he throws it gently as a girl called Corinne. Now, I’m not a betting man, but if I was I would have put ten quid on Jonno throwing the ball at Corinne before anyone else, because she was the most attractive girl in the room.

Delicious – Sleeper (1994, Indolent Records)

Corinne is from Oswestry and is studying French and Russian and she wants to write about politics. There is zero chance of that happening I think to myself, but I smile at her for obvious reasons, she ignores my smile and throws the ball to posh Alcuin, who drops it.

You Don’t Love Me – Dawn Penn (1994, Studio One Records)

He throws it to a Chinese guy, Lem, who wants to write about films and so it goes on. After about six throws later the ball gets thrown to me. It comes via a guy called Jeff (studying tourism, wants to be involved in production and layouts and not actual writing) I catch the ball and tell them my name and that “I want to write about music” and then quickly added “and possibly cartoons particularly Bananaman, but yeah mainly music.”

“What sort of music?” says Jonno, ignoring my cartoons request, he hasn’t asked any questions to anyone else. I’m sat there with my arm raised about to throw the ball to the second best looking girl in the room (who turns out to be Antonia, Psychology, wants to write about ‘everyday situations with a comedic slant’, and I immediately regret my choice of throw).

“Any type of music really. Well apart from heavy metal” I tell him, clocking his Iron Maiden Tshirt underneath his double denim and lob the ball quickly and rather harder than I’d intended to in the general direction of Antonia.

Within ten minutes Jonno has made me music editor of the paper. It was fairly easy choice given that no one else said that they wanted to write about music. Holger was football correspondent and Antonia was the papers weekly situational columnist. No one else had any idea what that was either so don’t worry about it. Her everyday situations were not everyday situations and neither did they have a comedic slant. I think she writes for the Daily Mail now.

I walked into Jonno’s office after the ice breaking session and he handed me a bundle of CD’s, tapes and records.

“here you go, knock yourself out” he said. “review this little lot, you have two pages of the paper dedicated to music, up to you how you fill it, but we have to review what is sent to us, otherwise the promo companies get cross and stop sending stuff, there’s a list of contacts in the top drawer, I suggest you phone them next week, introduce yourself and get some better content sent to us”.

This ‘little lot’ was a fairly rum old bunch. Most was drivel that I won’t darken your door with but a few stood out.

Like ‘Revolution on Ice’ the third and final studio album from Gumball. Which had the honour of being the first record that I ever made ‘Album of the Week’. Again, not a tricky choice.

With A Little Rain – Gumball (1994, Columbia Records)

And this, perky little dubby blues number by Skip MacDonald on 12 inch.

Ride On (Fight On) – Little Axe (1994, Wired Records)

It was a start.

A Series about the Nineties – #12 All About Grunge

Radio Friendly Unit Shifter – Nirvana (1993, DGC Records)

I had a ticket for a Nirvana show in London in April 1994. Well sort of, I never actually had the ticket, nor did I pay for it, but I was going. The show was one of several that were cancelled after Kurt’s suicide attempt in Rome a month earlier. The show I had a ticket for was the second of four nights at Brixton Academy – April 4^th 1994.

I was going with a young lady called Annie from Maidstone who went to my college. She should have been going with Sean, her boyfriend, but he dumped her a few weeks beforehand. Sean drove cars for a living and apparently was on the verge of big things in the racing world, or at least that’s what he told people.

Annie drunk in my local pub, Sean didn’t, he used to pick her up from outside in a noisy sporty hatchback with rock music blaring out of the windows. I never did see what Annie saw in him apart from his chiselled good looks, nice car and potential career in Formula One. Anyway, Sean dumped Annie in early February, apparently, he was thought she was boring because she wasn’t into cars or wouldn’t go and watch him race his car round a track. Or at least that’s what Marie told me, Marie being one of Annie’s best mates.

Number One Blind – Veruca Salt (1994, Minty Fresh Records)

A couple of weeks prior to Annie being dumped by Sean, I found myself single, I’d been seeing a girl who shall remain known as Levellers Girl, but she decided she wanted to go travelling with some New Age Travellers, and I was pretty much surplus to requirements, it hadn’t been very serious and to be honest I’d always played second fiddle to her lurcher, Elvis, that didn’t stop me being a little bit gutted though. So I’d stood there and waved her goodbye as she got into a converted ambulance and drove off into the sunset or at least in the direction of the Sussex countryside.

Enter Marie again and a Friday night in the pub. I was sat in the corner of the back room, with John, Dave, and a few others, when Marie, Annie and a couple of others wandered in and joined us. After about an hour, Marie spoke to me outside the pub as she smoked one of her thin rollies.

“Do you like Annie?”

Now I did like Annie, she was fun, had a wicked sense of humour, loved cats and her dad used to be in the Groundhogs (briefly). So, I nodded.

“She really likes you” Marie told me with a raise of the eyebrows when the word “Likes” came out.

“Oh” I said, getting what sort of like Marie was on about. “Does she…I thought she was dating that racing driver chap”

Move Out – Mudhoney (1992, Sub Pop Records)

Marie sighed and took a big drag of her cigarette, which considering how thin they wore, was quite an achievement. “Well…” she said.

Matchmaker Marie had a plan you see, two people, who were her friends, who both liked each other, (whether it was in that way or not didn’t really matter to Marie), who were single, and therefore according to Marie, should get together and so she decided to sort it.

Would Not be Denied – Buffalo Tom (1993, Beggars Banquet Records)

“You should ask her out” Marie told me with a punch on the arm and walked back into the pub.

Which I didn’t do, obviously because I’m sensitive and besides, the back room of a smoky old pub is not the sort of place to do that sort of thing. Besides, she asked me before I had the chance, or to put it another way, plucked up the courage.

I was halfway down the hill trying to catch Jon and his girlfriend up who were supposed to be driving me home. When I heard Annie’s voice behind me calling my name.

So I stopped.

There was three minutes of really awkward chit chat and just as I was going she said,

“I have two tickets to see Nirvana in London in April, if you want to come with me, if you want, you don’t have to, but I know you like Nirvana and well so do I that’s why I have tickets and….”

“I’d like that a lot” I said with a grin. Not knowing of course that within a week Kurt attempted suicide in Rome would cancel the entire tour.

Annie and I dated for perhaps six weeks.

If you happen to have an unused ticket for any of those Brixton Academy shows they sell for upwards of £1000 each nowadays.

Soul and Fire – Sebadoh (1993, Sub Pop Records)

A Series about the Nineties – #11 Spotty Little Shoegazer

In A Different Place – Ride (1990, Creation Records)

I loved shoegaze when I was a teenager. Well, I loved it for a bit. I was very fickle where music was concerned. For instance between 1990 and 1991 if you’d asked me I would have told you that I was into bands from the Madchester scene, that was until I heard ‘Nowhere’ by Ride and then I put my beanie hat in the cupboard and grew out my fringe and embraced shoegaze.

It wasn’t just the fringe though. I had the stripey top (blue and black), I had the Dr Martens boots and the converse trainers, I had the black or rather dark grey jeans and I had a sort of obsession with guitar pedals. At shoegaze gigs, I have been known to amble to the front of the stage and stare, not at my shoes, like many of the crowd, but at the wooden boards on the stage that had pedals gaffa taped to them, I would make mental notes at which pedal did what and take in the different sounds that they made. I remember trying to wangle an interview with Ride a few years later (around the time that ‘Tarantula’ came out, solely because I’ve always wanted to know about the types of distortion pedals they used whilst recording ‘Dreams Burn Down’.

Shoegaze perhaps reached its crescendo in the summer of 1991 with the Slough Festival, where several bands who were in the shoegaze scene all descended on Upton Park in Slough and took part in possible the most polite festival of all time, which considering you were in Slough was quite the achievement.

Fait Accompli – Curve (1992, Anxious Records)

What wasn’t quite so polite was the party that I went to about three weeks after the Slough Festival. We used to have our parties on a piece of public land called Darland Banks, there were a couple of old trees that had fallen down that served as seats, and there armed with a couple of bottles of cider, some cigarettes and a big old cassette player we used to gather play some music, chat and generally just relax.

The Sadman – Slowdive (1991, Creation Records)

At this particular party, one of our gang, Graham, bought a lad called Ian with him to the party. Ian worked with Graham at the new Marks and Spencers, and like all Marks and Spencers checkout assistants, Ian was a true punk rocker. Older readers will remember that about a year after this party in almost exactly the same spot, Ian the punk rocker would punch me in the face as I tried to help a friend avoid a kicking, and because I disliked the band Sheep on Drugs.

Ian, being about a year older than everyone was naturally cooler and wiser than everyone there and decided that because of that all the girls at the party would naturally want to sleep with him. Within minutes of meeting him for the first time, he called me and Richard ‘spotty little shoegazers’ in front of any of the girls that were listening, including a girl called Claire, who was a Ride fan, and as such I was trying to impress her with my shoegazeyness (and ifs that not a word, it should be).

Paralysed – Ride (1990, Creation Records)

Ian’s assessment was based largely I suspect on the fact that Richard was wearing a Revolver top and I kept banging on about types of Behringer distortion pedals that Mark Gardener probably used. I decided that Ian was a bit of dick.

Crimson – Revolver (1991, Hut Records)

Of course, three weeks later in a field just outside Reading, just as the six thirty Gatwick train trundled past the Festival site, whether I was a spotty little shoegazer (and for the record, I was a beautiful lad with perfect skin, obviously) or not was deemed irrelevant because shoegaze was finished. Its tower demolished by a whirl of feedback, crunching guitars furious drums and a raspy old chorus courtesy of a certain K. Cobain.

Negative Creep – Nirvana (1989, Sub Pop Records)

Half an hour later, as local lads Chapterhouse, possibly the most whispery of all the whispery shoegaze bands, meekly wandered on stage at the same time as roughly three quarters of their fanbase wandered off having had their heads turned and their minds blown by the sheer magnificence of Nirvana.

I stood there determined to prove my loyalty to the sonic cathedral. I lasted two songs, mouthed a sorry at them and wandered off in search of that sound that would come to be known as grunge.

Fickle, like I said (although I still love Ride).

Sixteen Years – Chapterhouse (1991, Dedicated Records)