1986 Singles # 17 Prefab Sprout

 

This didn't make the Top Forty. It was a songle too far from Steve McQueen. It makes my Top Twenty.

500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 259 Earth : Hex or Printing in The Infernal Method

 

You What ? The essential quality of the 21st Century musically at least  seems to be that it has got obscure. It's got  either very obvious or tyrned in on itself and become a trife elitist, But you don't have to embrace the elitism . You can if you prefer immerse yourself in the arcane.

Here is an album where you can do exactly that.. Apparently 'a move away from heavy drone towards spaghetti drone. Very listenable for all that.Rather like a summons to the deep sleep state. 

1972 Top 30 - # 2 Chicory Tip

 

Chicory Tip were actually the first band I ever consciously chose to like. I was six and I arrive back in England from Zimbabwe and they were the entre into the world that is sstill the most important one to me. The song for me is really What's Your Name. But this was pretty fabulous too. I vaguely remember a flexidisc of some description. 

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,461 Foo Fighters - Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace

 

Foo Fighters in 2007. They'd settled unto theur stride by now. They clearly weren't Nirvana ir Husker Di but franly they never pretended to be. This was life in the middle lane coming to an enirmodome near you and there's actually nothing wrong with that . Regardless if the naysnayers and elitist types who probably regretted Dave Grohl taking the drummer's stool way back in the mists if time..Quite serviceable.

Song(s) of the Day # 2,302 Youmi Zouma

 

A bit of wistfulness and indie guitar as I make my way to  half ten and a virtual date with Dussledorf Insurance Types. Youmi Zouma's No Love Lost To Kindness ticks the requisite boxes. It sounds like Barney Rubble out of  New Order on guitar.. Out of Christchutch, New Zealand and with a few albums under their belt. Due to tour Europe in March. This seems to offer a good night out.

1986 Singles # 18 Primal Scream

 

Primal Scream started here. Crystal Crescent was the A Side but ut should have been this. A genuine classic which the band themselves realised in time.

The NME - 1986 Year of the Triffids ? # 5 The Smiths - How Soon Is Now - Singles Review

 

'Whether Morrissey is questing romantic or bruised archangel is something I leave to your own musing. I prefer to hear the work of J.Marr as the true spirit of the Smiths. Hand In Glove to these ears their one true masterpiece, could be about legwarmers and stirrup pimps for all the difference it makes  -with that crimson flush of guitar and rhythm any words would do... sounds like an acid song,' Richard Cook

500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 260 Spoon - Kill The Moonlight

 

In terms of household objects Spoon aren't quite up there among essentialthinngs I need to listen to . Like Televiion, Magazine and Wire for example. This is alright I s'ppose.Bonus points for use of the word 'taciturn'. 

1972 Top 30 - # 3 Chi-Lites

 

The kind of thing I used to be quite sniffy about but now I pretend I've always liked.

Song(s) of the Day # 2,301 Geologist

 

Geologist's Can I Get Another Packet of Camel Lights is another Animal Collective related release in case you were missing your latest drag on Animal Collective related product in addition to fancyong a drag on a Camel Light or other nicotine related merchandise.

It's a fantastic avant gard experience. It's almost a raga rock album and there aren't nearly enough of those. There's a fair but of drone and some livelier abrasion related interludes.This may not appeal to everyone but I can certainly buy in to what's going on here.  

250 Albums- An Arbitrary Rumble Through My Record Collection # 58 Elliott Smith - XO

 

I first heard this remarkable record shortly after it came out in the late nineties un my sister's upstairs flat  above the Maid Of Honour Tearooms a short walk from Kew Green. I had never heard of Elliott Smith. I suspect we were both rather depressed . We were going through difficult periods of our lives, Depression is part of the life condition and I suspect  we are all prone to it. Even if we don't admit it. I'm always wary when people tell me they are never depressed, I suspect they have something to hide.

As soon as the music started in the dim light of my sister's bedsit I had a moment of recognition that this was something I needed. My sisrer has similar musical taste to mine.This us something that has happened to me before and since; Nick Drake, Gram, Courtney Barnett. I recognised places it came from. Beatles. Big Star.

But also a place inside that people who like music like this recognise. A way with wirds. A way with melody. A sensitivity. A poetry..I don't think of this as sad music despite what happened to Elliott Smith a few years later. When it did this was painful to people who loved his music. Oh he meant it ! Of course he meant it. That's how he made it. After a while you transcend the pain and appreciate the exquisite art

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,462 Tim Buckley - Lorca

 

Tim Buckley's an artist I appreciate more with passing time and move to his less known more obscore records. Lorca is spooky in the extreme. Ir's an experimental work that makes use if the chromatic scale. It seems like  a deliberate attempt it seems to alienate  the more conservative elemaents of Buckley's audience. It's fantastic frankly. Challenging in the way great art should be. 

There are no sing alongs or cheery choruses. Churlish critics would howl 'pretentious' Buckley made records which were more conventionally aesthetic but this is compelling in a tortured sense. More here. 

The NME - 1986 Year of the Triffids ? # 4 The Kinks - Word of Mouth

 

They didn't put scores on album reviews back in those days. Never mind Pitchfork style decimal points. You had to actually read the thing. But here at least the title gives the listener a hint. KINDA HO HUM some kind of indicator the record concerned might not be altogether a classic. There's a number on it about how Ray Davies ince fancied Lady Di. Also one about uce cream. It diesn't seem like an essential purchase. 

1986 Singles # 19 That Petrol Emotion

 

Manic Pop Thrill came out in May of 1986 and I played it a lot over the next couple if years. That Petrol Emotion were not quite like any other band on the scene at that point. They had the pop nous if the Undertones the ashes if whom they'd emerged from. But they also augmented that with a barbed art Punk approach. Television, Pere Ubu, Gang of Four, Beefheart , Stones. I took note and broadened my record collection 

500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 261 Siouxsie Sioux - Mantaray

 

Siouxsie made her mark hugely on my life at seconday school. The Bansgees statement was an incredibly powerful one and she particularly was a style statement it was remarkable to witness at my secondary school. She was a style icon but also incredibly empowering for girls going into those particular teenage years. She made a lasting artistic statement. 

 

1972 Top 30 - # 4 Neil Reid

 

There was also some fairly ghastly song in the Top Thirty and mire than likely in the Top Five that sent misoc lovers screaming from the room with their hnds clasped around their eats. Generaly the culprit had been sent to the charts by Opportunity Knocks or New Faces. Neil Reid was npt bad at all when compated to the more villainous offenders.

 

Song(s) of the Day # 2,300 Langkamer

 : 

                            'Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry and the world laughs at you.'

Getting through the day by the skin of their teeth. Bristol's Lagkamer are up and at them on tour in an Indie venue near you in support of fourth album No . 

It's old school Indie guitar joy. A kissig cousin of Courtney Barnett and Bill Ryder Jones.  Dating back to Teenage Fanclub, Pavememt, Lemonheads et al. And beyond that to XTC, Neil Young and The Velvet Underground  Attitude and swagger, And devil may care shrug,

I warmed to No immediately. It lives in the moment. And encourages you to do the same/Old fashioned fin. An excellent record. Yes from me !

1986 Singles # 20 The Weather Prophets

 

Thus is the kind of thing that I unstinctively went for in 1986. Polite Indie that was on Creation. Liked Television, The Velvet Underground. Poetry and Penguin paperbacks. Was made up of people who either wrote or could have written for the NME. Had good fringes shirts jeans and shoes, 

This wasn't a hit as it should have been and Alan McGee was obliged to look elsewhere. I saw Weather Prophets at the Hammersmith Clarendon. Supported by Pop Will Eat Itself, The Servants and a notably lairy and unhinged Happy Mondays. I liked the Weather Prophets but instinctively knew they were too polite to go where they wished to go, It doesn't stop me loving this any less. 

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,463 Neu ! -75

 

To listen to Neu! is still to speed into the futire almost fifty years after the original releases.. Germany Michael Rother claims are still catching up with the trail they blazed. Prophets without honour.This is an incredibly calming forty five minutes.

The NME - 1986 Year of the Triffids ? # 3 Lou Reed at The Brixton Academy

 

Don Watsin goes to see Lou Reed at the Brixton Academy and writes his copy. It's a proper slagging. No sacred cows here, Lou is despatched as a lamb at the slaughter. He plays perfunctory versions of the classics; Waiting For The Man, Rock & Roll, Sweet Jane, Walk On The Wid Side et al. But his heart is clearly not in it. His between songs patter minimal. 'I just got one bad habit left and that's playing pinball.' Watsin signs off, 'Put simply he's getting a bit dull these days.' The review is worth the 45p cost of the issue in itself. It's what The NME was for. And why I kept buying .it long after it stopped doing it,

500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 262 Theo Parrish - Parallel Dimensions

 

Jolly but rather aimless sampling.

1972 Top 30 - # 5 New Seekers

 

Of course this was famously the theme for a coca cola capmaignif the early seventies and also the last song on Mad Men. Leaving Dan Draper with a beatific smile of realisation and closure as the curtain fell.. You can't fault the sentiment,

Song(s) of the Day # 4,299 PVA

 

A record I was nudged towards by a recommendation a few days ago by Darren Jones best friend of It Starts With a Birthstone and that I've been playing pretty much relentlessly ever since,

London Electronic trio  PVA's second album No More Like This has an intense sense of purpose and clarity which seems set to rattle a few cages and gather some garlands while it may..

It has a fairly upfront amd striking sleeve, An immediate sensual claustrophobia that's incredibly rare, Artistically inclined but not in a forced or gruelling way but an instinctive one.  

The whole thing  has a breathy intensity I find compellingly hypnotic, Not spelling itself out like the best records,But making you want to plau it again to try to work out what it is that you like so much about it. It's the best thing I've heard so far in 2026.. 

* Thanks as always Darren. Give that man a medal

The NME - 1986 Year of the Triffids ? # 2 Hoodoo Gurus Interview

 

The Hoodoo Gurus took  a blender approach to Rock & Roll. You couldn't help but weigh them up against precedents. Richard Grabel, NME's New York correspondent thinks they're great and compares them to The Cramps and The Dolls.  

He praises their debut album Stoneage Romeos to the heavens .. Grabel is less restrained than the majority of NME's British staffers who are genrally predominantly concerned with their artistic cool, Difficult to maintain when you're chatting to the Hoodo Gurus

1986 Singles # 21 Anita Baker

 

In my second year at university I made the mistake of moving in with my best friends from the first year on the only hill in Norwich. It was an incredibly steep hill and ,made up for the lack of any others by being forbiddingly steep and a deeply depressing place to return to at the end of each university day when I really should have been with my girlfriend in her snig bedroom on campus.. The house where we loved was next to the prison where Lester Piggott the prizewinning jockey was serving a prison sentence for tax evasion. That was probably the most interesting thing about the part of town where we foolishly decided to live

My friendship with the other guys in the house didn't make it until Spring although we've since made our peace . The album we listened through to continually over our months together was Anita Baker's Rapture. Probably the greatest album ever made.concerning the sacred act of rumpy pumpy. 

500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 263 Kings of Convenience - Quiet Is The New Loud

 

 Kings of Convenience are a gentle duo from Bergen, Norway who find the soft spot between Simon & Garfunkel, The Shins and Belle & Sebastian. Works for me. .

1972 Top 30 - # 6 Al Green

 

Al Green is probably the artist I would like to have seen live more than any other.This came just after Tired Of Being Alone and both songs sung of a loneliness that people experience that can almost speak of a spiritual longing.

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,464 Oasis - Be Here Now

 

It's almost impossible to listen through to this record now. Even surely if Oasis make you happy inside. Please ask yourself why is that ? . It's so bloated.I can't begin. It's opening lyrics are ' Step off the train all alone at dawn. Back into the hole where I was born. The sun in the sky never raised an eye to me. ' Can I take it off now. Rock & Roll has always been about doggerel and nonsense but this makes so little effort that it hurts my head.immeduately and contibues as if I;ve chosen to bang said head agaonst a wall... There are one hundred minutes left. But dear reader. I leave them to you.  

250 Albums- An Arbitrary Rumble Through My Record Collection # 59 The 13th Floor Elevators - The Psychedelic Sounds of - The 13th Floor Elevators

 

'the kingdom of heaven is within'

To some degree if like me you were an avid NME reader at 17 and record collecting was almost inevitably along with books going to be the great accumulation of the next forty ears. By whuch point  t your record collection is almost predictable  by my age, You'll have loads of Bowie. Beatles and Stones to make it good to be alone. Krautrock. Soul. Funk. Jazz. Funk and obscure Art Rock. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick and tick. I am Lester Bangs vagrant son !

You'll probably alsp have a  couple of  13th Floor Elevators records though you may not have actually sat and listened all the way through to them that often.. Err tick. I've got the first one and the one with Slip Inside This House on it for the moments when I need to scare the neighbours. 

I'm listening through to The Psychedelic Sounds of The 13th Floor Elevators now and I'm damned glad I bought it. Thirty six years ago , In my last year at university at a second hand record shop in Norwich around the corner from the  halls of residence where I lived .

I met a couple of friends there. While I was about to buy it. Music friends . Neil and Linda. Music friends are the best kind of friends in life I'd say. I still have a letter from Linda where she witters on about The Hit Parade and The Sun Shines in Gerrard Cross frim the golden days when we used to write letters. Before the Internet came along to set us free..

 I can vaguely remember what we talked about that day when I bought this record. I had bought the first  Suicide album about the same time so probably that. The Family Cat; Tom Verlaine twelve inch. . I had a ridiculous infatuation with Television which has endured until today. I used to go into record ships and check whether they had it in their racks. But I suspect The Psychedelic Sounds of  - The 13th Floor Elevators was the album I bought that day

Neil and Linda were at important gigs that I attended in my last year at university, I am of an age when I refuse to call it 'uni'.. My Bloody Valentine . Pale Saints and Lush. The Norwich Arts Centre. .Stone Roses played and then took over  the NME, Top of the Pops and colonised youth culture in Britain for a couple of years.U had a cold so wasn't there that night regrettably.

Now I'm sitting in my flat in Newcastle in 2026 and lustening to the record again.  What strikes me is how utterly deranged it would have sounded to the straight community when it was released in 1967. Almost twenty five years from the day that I bought it, Almost sixty from today. It would have scared the hell out of people. These are people having a better time than anybody has a right to and the powers that be don't like them to  but also takiing genuine risks which challenge conventional perspectives and ways if thinking and living. . Much of the record is entirely unhinged.

The terror generated I imagine was entirely intentional. The band and their circle were ingesting LSD at every opportunity. Never the wisest idea. But it wasn't just the recklessness of youth  Read the sleeve notes from Lelan Rogers from a time when people wrote and read sleevenotes.because they were trying to say and learn something,  These people had a manifesto and a mission. 

Read the sleevenotes while you listen to the record. They're provicative and biblical. The band openly advocated the ingestion of mind altering substances and were targeted by the authorities subsequently. People genuinely thought society was going to change radically  and in many ways it genuinely did over the ensuing years. Listen to The 13th Floor Elevators. Listen to The Velvet Underground. The Doors or Jefferson Airplane. Listen to the Beatles. The Rolling Stones or  Pink Floyd. Led Zeppelin. The conviction is in the grooves. 

Now go to your local newagent close to where you live. Go to theshelves which house the music section and you'll see Rock & Roll encased. Enshrined as another set of shelves suggesting  recreational options and further pyrchasing options. The 200 Psychedelic Albums to hear before you die. The 200 Glam or Punk or Soul or Shoegaze records you need to own.. Rock & Roll is still incredibly fertile and exciting but in 2026 it's essentially a commodity in the same respect as other lifestyle options are..Perhaps essentially it's always been that, 

Listening to the album is still a visceral experience though. Most of the people involved in its making are now dead. But the reason people create is to attempt to make a mark. This record continue to be listened to. It offers alternatives to walking the straight path and thinking and adopting the given line. . 

Song(s) of the Day # 4,298 Tulsa

 

So do you want the good news? Or the good news? I only have good news here. What do you think this us the Daily Telegraph.? Fox News? Well where exactly should I start. It's only February and I seem to have enough great new albums on my playlist for songs of the day for the next week and a half at the very least.

Leeds Noise Pop Merchants  Tulpa are first up. and make playung guitars made me feel like I was sevnteen all over again on latest album Monster Of The Week. It's an unreconstructed alternative guitar record and you can trace the bans inspirations within seconds. But that's no burdem for anyone who loves the sounds if streamlines guitars and harmonised reflectuins on the life condution,

Pavement, Teenage Fanclub and theur cpntemporary equivalents are the reference points. We're all twenty four hours from Tulsa. Heading towards Spring.

   

February

 

250 Albums- An Arbitrary Rumble Through My Record Collection # 60 Jeff Buckley - Grace

 

Jeff Buckley was an intensely singular brooding and emotional artist and Grace, the ony completed album he released during his lifetime remains an intensely singular brooding and emotional record. Personally I drift in and out some of  it, It's occasionally overwrought and strains a little too hard. He wants to show that he can do too much sometimes. He's frequently resembles Icarus here and we all know what happened to that one. But you can't really fault an artist for ambition.There's so much here that rewards return. And it offers greater retutns if anything. It's a Golden Hour. 

1986 Singles # 22 Billy Bragg

 

'Her husband was one of those blokes. Who only laughed at his own jokes...'

The consequences of doing the wrong thing when you're too young.

Patti Smith - Bread of Angels # 5 Patti Smith

 

The Golden CBGB's years Patti drifts unto the realms of pretension as his her tendency and it's all rather wonderful but probably doesn't stand up to historical scrutiny. But that's what makes her Patti.

The NME - 1986 Year of the Triffids ? # 1 Dune

 

This copy of the NME came out on 5th January 1985. I was about to head off to Switzerland on my gap year experience. Meanwhile the NME emblazoned obscure Australian band The Triffids on the front cover and wodered whether 1985 would be their year.That probably didn't completely turn out to be the case. But they were rather magnificent nevertheless. 

Dune is reviewed inside. Richard Cook, a fine writer, slags off the book; 'no more profound on questions of life, death and the universe than any other pulp junket.' He comments on Kyle Maclachan's unfortunate resemblance to Terry Wogan. The film is entirely staffed by cameo roles and David Lynch has undersold the vast acting talent at his disposal and comments on the oedipal nature of the earthwirms that populate his Fremen desert.. He writes it off as 'a project littered with misjudgement.... a terrible, tumultuous folly.'

1972 Top 30 - # 7 Slade

 

Slade couldn't spell but they could Rok!

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,465 Love - Da Capo

 

The second side of Da Capo, was a huge abberation . A nineteen minute jam called Revelation which is not aptly named. But Side A flies. There was no band quite like them. At the time or ever since.

Freedom, technicolor, love, madness. In equal measure. They're a bewildering band. 'Laughing, glad and full of glee.' An inspiration for so much wonderful music that came thereafter, 

500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 264 Ian Hunter - Shrunken Heads

 

The customary Al Kooper Dylan organ. The voice. Well worn. Apologetic. Weathered..This has Jeff Tweedy on biard and does what you hope iy will. 

 

Song(s) of the Day # 4,297 Tessa Rose Jackson

 

If in doubt head for the lighthouse. Never a bad guiding orinciple and I have a pearl for Saturday morning. The Lighthouse a lilting and lovely Folk record by Tessa Rose Jackson that will conjur up warm reminders of Nick Drake, Bridget St. Johm and Laura Marling..And most winningly for me, Karen Carpenter.

 .

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,466 Slowdive - Just A Day

 

Slowdive are a band that I struggle with. I was around with the furst wave of Shoegaze, ascene that is lauded and hugely influentual now though it was mocked for its timidity and po faced Home Coimties grandeur at the time  wuth the probable exception of My Bloody Valentine.

Now Slowduve are hailed as  trailblazers but they just move too slowly for my liking to have a genuine claim to blazing a trail.

1986 Singles # 23 Julian Cope

 

The Teardrop Explodes were over and well in the past by 1986 but Julian Cope appeared again, dusted down from the turtle shell of the album sleeve of Fried and blinking into the Wogan and Top of The Pops headlights and The Top Twenty. My sweetheart and I bonded over his charms and went to a fabulous gig in the university gig hall when he toured in support of St Julian. .Just hearing this takes me back to love. The best place to be. 

1972 Top 30 - # 8 Melanie

 

Melanie had a rare charm and a raw. enduring sweetness.Quite right she was breaking The Top Ten back then. 

500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 265 The Holloways - So This Is Great Britain

 

Guerilla English Indie. A state of the Nation Address if the type that British groups have been prone to since the Sixties. This is a pint of lager and twenty B&H and one mire round before the last orders bell rings for my tastes.Tinny. 

Song(s) of the Day # 4,296 Clementine March

Alan Partridge the great vulgarian comic creation of Steve Coogan is never truly at ease with the artistically or creatively inspired. The artistically inspired or inclined. He tries to engage with them but will inevitably be unable to keep up and so inadvertently or quite deliberately insults ior denigrates them, in any way that he san and ends up showing himself up..

You can imagine how Partridge would react to Frenchwoman Clementine March and her exquisite new album Powder Keg. It's for 'that lot' . Chamber, Brazilian Exotica, Jazz, Folk, Avant Pop. It's totally unrestrained and completely delightful. Stereolab, Cate Le Bon and The Raincoats come to mind. You can imagine the record collections of the musicians concerned and the audience members. .

Guest appearances from Naima Bock, Katy T, Pearson,  Alabaster De Plume and many more  It's a Friday night knees up for the Rough Trade hip set. It's so hip it hurts but why ever not. Clementine is doing select dates around the country in the coming weeks. Treat yourself.    .

 

Sly Dunbar 1952 - 2026

 

Sandie Shaw

 

1986 Singles # 24 Felt

 

Felt are a band whose appeal grows with the passing of time. I was in a record shop the other day and Forever Breathes The Lonely Word was playing and it sounded incredibly allurung. It sold zip.

250 Albums- An Arbitrary Rumble Through My Record Collection # 61 Wishbone Ash - Argus

 

My brother had this on cassette in the Seventies. It felt and feels like an older brother's record to me. Older guys with long hair, beards and more acquaintance with the ways of the world; the Wizard of Earthsea. Jethro Tull. The plough. Pipe smoke and a closer understanding of a bygone, Vanishing world. 

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,467 The Black Crowes - The Southern Harmony & Musical Companion

 

The Black Crowes were already a throwback. Alman Brothers Lynyrd  Skynrd and all those good old Southern boys. This is laud back as you like. Urgent when ut needs to be. 

1972 Top 30 - # 9 America

 

A fairly shameless Neil Young steal from first to last chord but beguiling regardless of that. What strikes me going through this countdown is how rich the charts were in terms of their narratives and variety,There's good music always but this is a time when you just needed to look at the charts for evidence of its riches.