1986 Singles # 40 Peter Gabriel

 

I can't stand Sledgehammer. But it's a song with a special significance to me so I had to have it here. I went to a party with someone.  I like Gabriel a lit but don't warm to much on So. One of the big records of 1986. Bit it has a special significance to me and always will. I went to a party with someone and the host kept playing Sledgehammer. to us and going in and changing his outfit and then playing the song again. It was pretty irritating actually Then I went home with the person I was with and lost something that you can only lose once. We woke up the next morning and did what we'd done the night before but really properly and well. Really beautifully. I was 20 years old. I'm glad I waited for the person I
waited for.

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500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 283 Tom Petty - Highway Companion

 

Tom Petty. Someone in the mainstream who did something that was generally better than the average. Foo Fighters. You try it. It's nor as easy as it looks.

1972 Top 30 - # 26 Stevie Wonder

 

Well it's Srevie Wonder isn't it. So much goes on  in in it's 3.00 and I'm not remotely qualified to describe it.

Song(s) of the Day # 4,278 Jenny on Holiday

 

Jenny Hollingsworth peels off Let's Eat Grandma for an excursion of her own as Jenny on Holiday and Quicksand Heart a holiday properly in the Pop Sun. Pitchfork detects Replacements Cindi Lauper and Prefab Sprout within its grooves. I'm not sure I can but the record's groovy..

It's all rather like a helium balloon appearing in the sky on a greyer than grey day. Light as a feather. Not remotely challenging or particularly interesting lyrically but what were you expecting Knut Hamsen's Hunger. ? I imagine Nick Cave will be along with fresh product presently. The third cool new record in three days on It Starts With a Birthstone. January Blues? Not here. 

500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 284 Six Orders of Admittance - School Of The Flower

Coming in and out of focus. Weighted and poised.

 

1972 Top 30 - # 27 Sweet

 

Ludicrous. But quite fun with it.

1986 Singles # 41 Sting

 

I cared about the Top 40 until about 1984. And then it gradually became less important to me; as the Top 40 got worse and I became more interested in other things. Sting meanwhile was becoming interested in Jazz. Moon Over Bourbon Street was a variation on Autumn Leaves with Literary aspirations. It's nestled outside my Top 40. 

Song(s) of the Day # 4,277 Winged Wheel

 

Drop whatever you're doing. Run to a listening posr. Access an Internet connection. Put on  Winged Wheel, Desert So Green drift unto space. Let go.  

Winged Wheel are seasoned Indie operators with great taste and forward moment. Krautrock and ambience. Exploration and innovation. 

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,479 Morrissey - You Are The Quarry

 

People seemed to get cross with Morrissey. Because he turned out to be every bit as objectionable as he had been in the Eighties when they loved him. People are strange. Jim was right. Another divisive character in the annals of Rock & Roll. But not I imagine a vegetarian.

Morrissey it seems is a sensitive fellow when it suits him. But I never got the impression he particular minded a bit of violence if it suited him.. You Are The Quarry drags like a twenty tab a day habit. Some of his gesticualtion is somewhat anguished. . 

1972 Top 30 - # 28 Michael Jackson

 

Young Michael didn't know what he was singing about. But he knew how to sing it.

500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 285 Alasdair Roberts - Spoils

 

I went to see Alasdair Roberts  about ten years back.in the upstairs room of The Bridge Hotel . I saw Richard Dawson there and shook his hand.  The friend I'd gone with and I noticed that Alasdair didn't seem to have ironed his shirt. Some things don't matter as he clearly knows.

1986 Singles # 42 The Feelies

 

I was feeling my way towards the Feelies in 1986 without knowing. they were there. They had everything a pale anemic twenty year old was after. Velvets and Television. The sound of the suburbs. A slot as the High School Band in a pivotal scene in Something Wild which came out that year. Peter Buck in the production chair on a second album that took them out of the suburbs and out on the highway.. This wasn't a single but could and should have been.

Song(s) of the Day # 4,276 Dry Cleaning

 

'Boredom, boredom. BOREDOM' 

'I'm bored. I'm the chairman of the board....'

Boredom is ultimately the most compelling thing. How can we best occupy the still and static moments. Our vacant moments on the planet. Certainly a pertinent thing to ponder on as I make my way through a dreary January Friday, my lessons and ablutions and potentially a train back to the Arctic wastes of the North if Storm Goretti will allow me.

Dry Cleaning's third album Secret Love accompanies me as It Starts With a Birthstone 2026 officially commences. I'm not sure I'll hear a better record all year. I'm sure plenty of platters that matter will come along and supplant this in my affections but it's a great start and we're not yet at January 10th.

Jagged guitar. Sprechgesang the current Post Punk Plat Du Jour. Dry Cleaning our comfortable in their quotidian recklessness and studied vigour now. It seems to me they're the maverick middle distance athlete. Steve Ovett coming off the bend in an Olympic Final and into the final strait  with the pack chasing. Lengthening stride to power away from flailing also ran Eastern Europeans clinging on for bronze. Blowing kisses to his beloved as he breasts the tape.

Occasionally the boredom factor strikes the listener on Secret Love . But then a thrilling vista drops into view. This strikes me as one to learn and maybe not sing so much as mutter under your breath. We're off! Here comes February before you know it. See you at the barricade babe !

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,480 Dead Can Dance - Within The Realm of a Dying Sun

 

True Rock & Roll. Mystery, Drama. Scary stuff.

500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 286 Reigning Sound - Time Bomb High School

 

Old School Garage Rick & Roll which Dion, John Fogerty and Van Morrison would understand. Seventeen is a day away. 

 

1986 Singles # 43 June Brides

 

June Brides had a front cover of the NME in 1985. They released this in 1986 This was the kind of music that I was really drawn to in this period of my life. And still to a large extent actually. Earnest indie strummers. with Postcard, Television Personalities and Byrds,  Kinks , Love and Velvet Underground records. George Orwell paperbacks. Betjeman and Philip Larkin. I'll always partly be that person. I still am essentially.

1972 Top 30 - # 29 Colin Blunstone

 

Life after The Zombies. .Climbing into the low twenties.

Song(s) of the Day # 4,275 Insecure Men

 

'I'm going down to Tulse Hill Station. Going to go right down and lay my head down on the line. This time I'm going to show her. About the perfect darkness of the void.'  

The long sliding road down. 'From bar to street to bookie'  Insecure Men on latest album A Man For All Seasons understand what Pop Music is capable of. That it's not just.there to talk about how pretty everything is but can also shed light on the darkness within. What we are capable of doing to others and ourselves.

A Man For All Seasons shines a light on shades and nuances and also occasionally forgets its inhibitions and makes its way out onto the Indie Dancefloor and struts its stuff. 

1972 Top 30 - # 30 Middle of The Road

 

Another pure nostalgia countdown should keep us warm until Spring finally stirs ! And what a way to get going.

500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 287 The White Stripes - White Blood Cells

 

Almost twenty five years on. John Peel compared them to Hendrix. Odd. It did feel like they'd turned over a new rock.. 

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,481 The Smile -Wall Of Eyes

A better name than Radiohead. Wall of Eyes could easily be a Radiohead record. They plot unknown paths..

 

 

1986 Singles # 44 Cocteau Twins

 

Incense sticks. A major memory of my youthful ways and predelictions. I loved incense sticks of various. There was a shop in Norwich called Head In The Clouds which I used to frequent throughout my years at university. I was essentially a hippie I've realised.. 

Ir's still around. Established in the major city of Est Anglia but frankly looking further eastward on the map to the true Global East. I went there with my Malaysian honey towards the end of the Eighties, but that's another story for another day. In the meantime back to 1986 and the Cocteau Twins.

I never liked the band much at the because of associations really. Patchouli. Pre-Raphaelite skirts .Overdone kohl . applied with a trowel. Still I've enjoyed my time spent here, It's taken me back to Head In The Clouds and Norwich and 1986. The tarot cards and jewellery.the monks and maidens. The pyramids and mysticism.   

Song(s) of the Day # 4,274 Children of the Mushroom

 

A deep dive into an album that came out  in 1971 when I was six and largely unaware of Rock & Roll. Lady by Californians Children of the Mushroom a Santana inspired and the cauldron pot of meaty stew and anguished wails, and fruity organ that hipsters dug around the block in those heady days. 

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,482 Tori Amos - Under The Pink

 

I never liked Tori Amos. I could count the ways. But you may like her so I shan't. 

1986 Singles # 45 The Icicle Works

 

At Fifer's Lane in my first year we mostly dwelled in H Shaped Blocks. Six rooms in a corridor, So about fifty of us per block. Potential teachers, engineers, historians, journalists; retail, classroom civil service, healthcare and factory fodder. Knowing precious little. Imagining we knew a lot. 

It was mostly London and Home Counties UEA for the most part in 1985/ 86. A smattering of foreign students including my Malaysian honey but not frankly the norm. And actually not that many Irish, Scottish and Welsh students either, But there was a guy from Leeds called Paul and we warmed to each other immediately.

We were both enrolled on EAS. English & American Studies. Literature and History. Paul was into Powell and Pressburger. We did  a course on the Thirties novel. I commented in a seminar that Evelyn Waugh was rather racist . The seminar leader an American critic of note in a pastel, homely sweater, dismissed my comment but Paul afterwards in the coffee bar agreed that what I'd said was fair enough. They all were from that class at that time and it should be remembered,  

Paul roomed in the teeming, sprawling Z Block which was like the Watership Down warren by comparison with our comparative comfort. Musically he worshipped Prefab Sprout and got quite irate when townies chattered at their show. I liked Steve McQueen but actually the gig  the gig was rather anemic for my tastes at the time. 

I've warmed to Cole Porter since but frankly I was looking for a but more flesh on the bone at 20. Velvet Underground. Seven Chinese Brothers. Prefab had plenty of myth but didn't really tick all the Top Trumps boxes when it came to Rock & Roll. Jonny Thunders and Jerry Nolan would not have hung with them.

Paul later got a job in a record shop and we compared notes between its racks in my final year in Norwich. He'd moved majorly onto Neil Young  as had Icicle Works following their intensely florid eponymous debut album. It didn't help their sales. But I'll play this now in happy memory of Paul. I have his parents telephone number in Leeds. I'll give him a ring, see if I can track him down.      

500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 288 The Hives - Your New Favourite Band

 

Yeah The Hives. The Stooges updated and streamlined for millennium needs now we're no longer offended or threatened by such unruly behaviour. Fun for all the family in matching outfits,

Song(s) of the Day # 4,273 Humbug

 

'Everybody has their own good reason. Why their favourite season is their favourite season.' Echo & the Bunnymen.

Every generation must walk their own mountain path or perhaps their shady lane to be precise, even if it fairly closely resembles the paths that previous generations have stumbled  down. Take Humbug's Open Season. 

The album is a joyous, carefree ship round the shires country fields like the ones you used to have when the world was young. Kiwi Jr, Pavement, Television, The Velvet Underground and erm, yes The Beatles. Play dough. Technicolour joy.

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,483 Grizzly Bear - Yellow House

 

Grizzly Bear are a horse of a different colour. Rare artistry. The spirit of exploration. 

500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 289 St. Vincent - Actor

 

I'm nit going to complain too readily about someone who makes such an effort to be self consciously artistic. And Actor almost glows with narrative. Her Wes Anderson album. 

1986 Singles # 46 Death of Samantha

I was never very competitive. Never very good with money, This is probably why I'm skint at sixty. But strangely happy. Others pretended not to be ambitious at university but  there was enormous self love everywhere I realise looking back. If you're not going to love yourself at 19 why should you expect anyone else to love you. The strongest sense I felt in my first two years was an eerie sensation that something was not quite right. Bad Faith as Jean Paul would have it. 

Despite the pretence and assumption of left wing airs, ideals and principles there was the stench of Thatcherism wherever you looked. What many wanted despite the communal facede of 'all in it together' was the desire to be the best, Perhaps I'm unkind. But three terms in I think I knew it. I found my rich, Malaysian honey declared my feelings to her and she reciprocated  and we hunkered down together.

And listened to records like this. Though not actually this. I've only uncovered The Death of Samantha looking for options to populate this countown, tell you my story of 1986 and give you flavour of the place and the timbre of the times.  Death of Samantha is pure Santana's.

Santana's was the Norwich club we made our way towards on Thursday nights at every opportunity .Like the shepherds trooping down from the Bethlehem hillsides in search of snakebite and The Mamas and The Papas and youthful thrills.  Thursday Night was Sixties Night and we were there most Thursday nights. Three miles in. Three miles back. No need for sheep. They were what we were up against. Permanent drizzle all Thursday night..

You saw it all at Santana's. Speed Freak townies. Girl fights. I first snogged my Malaysian honey sat on the dancefloor one Thursday night in May to my friend's horror. They'd assumed I'd sold my soul to Bolshevism but I had a mind of my own and she drew me towards her me in with her invisible crook,. made off with my soul and eventually took me to Penang, But it started with a kiss. At Santana's. I wasn't the only one. There was always a shocking snog or several on Thursday night at Santana's to gossip about on Friday mornings over a fry up at The Fifer's Lane canteen. It was a feeling that felt as if it would last forever. . 

Gavin was always there. Large and unlovely. The nephew of John Braine author of  Room At The Top Apparently. He was invariably there when we arrived at nine on Thursday. Tottering malevolently in a huge fluorescent pink and black shirt which frankly should have been incinerated on a bonfire immediately to avoid contagion. He haunted the edge of the dancefloor with my pal Hippie Andy. 

I'd wander over to Gavin and his greeting was always the same. 'I've had ten pints and I'm drunk as fuck... His breath was withering. It was probably best to leave him to it. He had a mad, dead eye. A greasy, bleached fringe. He set his room on fire third term and dropped out within a year. 

Hippie Andy was a different matter,  One of the finest people I met during  my time at UEA. A true friend. The gig going pal of my lifetime .The only person I've ever met who I wanted to form a band with. Stipe and Buck. Jagger and Richard. Nation and Bax.  A West Country Bhuddist and Beat Poet. .

Over the years we bonded over The Velvet Underground, The Doors, Les Negresses Verts, Left Wing activism The Pixies, All Tomorrow's Parties and  trips to New York City and Auschwitz. We've lived together.

Andy would love  Death of Samantha. Cleveland Ohio's finest. Well Pere Ubu had cleared out by 1986.  Death of Samantha were pretty ace. Leather jackets and shades. Dream  Syndicate meets, Gun Club, Bo Diddley and The Cramps. So 1986.  

Song(s) of the Day # 4,272 Chico States

 

Great One Hand Clapping album titles of 2025 I Saw a Galloping Horse Covers No Ground by Chico Horse. And the albums pretty stately and damned graceful too. American guitars jangling through the trees. A Hickory Wind blowing.

There are so many records like this coming down the Americana pike but I'm certainly not complaining.. This is Alto Californian Romanticist Hippie Honky Tonk. That's the Spotify Bio calling.Full of wry found poetry and winning tunes/ 

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,484 Morphine - Cure For Pain

Challenging,

 

Patti Smith - Bread of Angels # 3 Puccini

 

Patti Smith has probably been the most explicit and upfront figure in the whole history if Rock & Roll in terms of parading and celebrating her heroes and influence; literary, poetic, artistic, musical. She wants to push her audience and inspire them to create themselves.

The third passage of Bread of Angels takes Patti to 1959 and thirteen. She loves her siblings and parents but sees herself as a child apart. A sense of herself as an artist. She's a sickly child and her mother wonders aloud if she is going to 'make it.'.

She plots her search for inspiration for enchantment, her fixation on the young Dalai Lama and Tibet's plight, She's clearlyseeking her path. Music rarely gets a mention as of yet.

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500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 290 OM - Conference of the Birds

 

'Wan swan. On the lake. Like a cake.of soap.' Stevie Smith

The kind of listening experience that I write this blog for, A loping dark Rock & Roll experience. Pared back bass and drums salute the sunrise. They're in the zone of The Doors, Joy Division, Spiritualised; the cool kids in the playground who hung out by the fence, chewed their mails and smoked. And you suspect went astray and headed for the rocks. 

1986 Singles # 47 The Woodentops

 

Looking back I found myself between terms one and two of my first year at university. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say I found the three people I'd been looking for since I was 14. People who liked the same things as I liked. Fancied themselves and their opinons rotten, 

For six months we had an absolute wail of a time. Nineteen and twenty year olds have probably never been happier. Or drunk more snakebite and black at the Student Bar before stumbling back and listening to What's Going On together, . It was the Brideshead Revisited university  experience that everyone longs for . We had all watched the celebrated Granada TV production which had just been televised and captured the British imagination. Sebastian and Charles. Aloysius and Nanny Hawkins. Catholicism, Anthony Blanche and bloody huge country estates. We were Socialists but thought we were due greatness. It was certainly there in our psyches, whether we acknowledged it or not.

. But our version of the Brideshead experience was different, It had Trotskyism, Post Structuralism, Filofaxes Thatcherism, The Miner's Strike, The Sloan Rangers Handbook, The Young Ones, The NME Penguin Classics James Brown and Talking Heads and more stirred into the mix. It was a truly beautiful rites of passage. Then gradually over the next six months our beautiful  alliance unraveled.

But not before The Queen Is Dead came out and we listened to it together. Every generation reclaims The Smiths . On 16th June 1986 to be precise it happened to us. The day it came out. I wasn't completely there emotionally. My heart was no longer in the corridor in Fifer's Lane but on campus five miles down the road, In Waveney Terrace to be precise. On the pillow where my Malaysian honey lay her sweet bobbed head under a poster where she'd written out the words to Manic Monday in different coloured crayons. I stood no chance as soon as I saw it, I'm sorry but Gramsci and Walter Benjamin just couldn't compete with that.

But Morrissey, Marr, Rourke and Joyce could. So I was there in Rod's room when he returned from Backs Records on the day of its release with a copy of The Queen is Dead. And we were rightly slain. I'll get back to The Smiths with a full review later on in this rundown and give the full picture of what it felt like to be young and too cool for school to such a glorious dawn. To be smitten by The Smiths,

But first a little known Rock & Roll detail, a  highly pertinent factoid. Giant the first album by The Woodentops came out the same day as The Queen Is Dead and it's pretty great too. Cool BBC children's television evoking band name, dark tribal rhythms, groovy vibes and tones. It's not catalogued as one of the greatest or even perhaps the greatest album ever made. The Queen Is Dead is. But Giant is  revered and remembered and played by the cognoscenti . The Rock & Roll snobs with too many records. People like me. 

Song(s) of the Day # 4,271 Bebel Gilberto

 

Bebel Gilberto 'daughter of Bossa Nova overlord Joao' and part of an extended clan of musical notables released  Tanto Tempo twenty five years ago. Davud Hepworth reviews the rerelease package in the pages of the current issue of Mojo.

It's an incredibly easy listen. I'll probably never go to Brazil but this makes me feel like I am there and that's a wonderful sensation to wake up to on a Sunday morning in Canterbury. Whispering of Portuguese sweet nothings. A breeze in the palms.  

Patti Smith - Bread of Angels # 2 Jefferson Airplane

 

Patti overhears a teacher saying to another teacher that she is 'an odd duck' in the playground. She fronts a neighborhood gang, Generally you sense that there is artistic lucence and embroidery on every other line but Patti Smith is someone who understands better than most that life us the great fiction.

She unlocks the intrepid imagination of the collective childhood experience. Her writing is alchemy, a metaphor Patti uses herself. It inspires you to rush yo a keyboard or a notebook and write yourself. To populate  paragraphs and sentences. She does an incredible thing. Reinvents her own childhood. Turns it into the stuff of myth, She discpvers Alice. One of her first literary steps and models.

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,485 The Incredible String Band - The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter

 

An unrepeatable time and moment. Regardless of how modern hipsters try to repeat it. Such are the indulgences of The Internet Age.

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500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 291 Espers - II

 

You get the feeling that Espers are prone to the odd bit of role playing courtmanship. Imagining themselves to be Elves and pretending we're in the 14th Century, Nothing wrong with that, 

Song(s) of the Day # 4,270 Kieran Hebden & William Tyler

 

You don't have to live like a refugee. I think increasingly a lot of us do. This is increasingly a Ball of Confusion so chancing on a record like this is welcome respite. A Silver Jews and Lambchop refugee  teams up one from the Four Tet faction member to post 41 Longfield Street Late 80s an immensely relaxing slab of guitar and ambient soft and gentle noise. Into fresh waters on It Starts With a Birthstone foe 2026. .The uncharted waters look intriguing

1986 Singles # 48 Lloyd Cole & The Commotions

 

'She had too much class to mention.'

Easy Pieces was like Rattlesnakes I'd say but not as good. Three singles. One punchy, the second riff driven, the third an appreciation of space, mood, atmosphere and poetry. Fot me personally I associate Lloyd with my formative love affair which brought me unaccountable happiness and experience. Happiness that it's actually quite impossible to measure . It began in 1986 at UEA in Norwich.

In Spring 1986 I took a seminar in 18th Century Literature. I found myself in a room in the EAS corridor. There was a Chinese Malaysian girl sitting opposite me. She was smiling at me. She was impossibly beautiful. So I smiled back uneasily. We got to know each other better . Unwrapped ourselves to one another in time. Completely. That's when things get and got really dangerous. But it's worth it, Of course it is....

It seemed she wanted to know me better. I certainly did her. Bit by bit we fell in love. We discovered one another. Her picture is under this post. That's me too. I'll tell the story here. It's one of the truly great love stories. Because it's my first important one. My journey of discovery and joy and pain and recovery. And Lloyd was always there. Cut Me Down was not a good choice for a third single from Easy Pieces. It stalled at # 38. I'd have gone for Why I Love Country Music. But what do I know?

500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's -# 292 Lucinda Williams - Essence

 

The kind of record Uncut Magazine generally likes a bit more than I do. But you can't fault the craftsmanship

Patti Smith - Bread of Angels # 1 Patti Smith

                                                      

                                                   'Obstacles are our wings '- Gogol

Patti Smit can write. Like a dream frequently. I'm tucking in to Bread of Angels like it's a sumptuous dessert at the end of a leisurely New Years family meal. I was actually given the book before a leisurely New Year's family meal. So apt. This is immediately a treat.I feel like I'm in front of a crackling open fire in a country pub with no Back to Work Date envisioned.

We, start as so often at the very beginning. In Childhood. Patti unwraps a  lost and enchanted kingdom. Growing up in Post War Chicago. With loving parents and treasured  siblings. Jesus died for somebody's sins. But not hers. Every emotion is heightened and dramatic, She takes inspiration from her literary heroes and dances onwards

Song(s) of the Day # 4,269 Erika Di Casier

 

The kind of album that Pitchfork dreams about. And if they exist one of their staffwriters would probably have to invent, Lifetime by  Erika Di Casier, Cased in a sleeve of rolling clouds and airbrushed vision of female beauty of the kind that have adorned teenage walls since the Sixties.

As for the music. Gentle, sensuous neo soul. Steam rising from a fragrant bath. 30 minutes and forty seconds of the clock paused. Sweet !

1986 Singles # 49 Jocelyn Brown

Fifer's Lane University Residences Winter and Spring Terms 1985 - 1986 terms. A series of former RAF housing blocks converted for the needs of callow 18, 19 and 20 year olds away from home for an extended stretch for the first time. All projecting an image that's hardly true to what's inside. . Would be lovers, writers, academics. husbands and wives, parents. Feet truly set on the road.

I was in N Block. Far end of the residences across the football fields Through the main doors, Guys downstairs. Girls upstairs,. Down the corridor past the communal kitchen. Turn left . Four doors.  Facing each other. There we lived behind keys to a door. Small, comfortable bedrooms with walls for posters, Plants. A sink. A wardrobe. A bed. None of us had televisions. None of us ever spoke about football. 

Ben , Rod, James and Btuce . Like The Beatles. Like the Bolsheviks. Like capital fodder. Like James Austen male characters. Mr Drake. Mt Waterman. Mr Hipwell. Mr Bax. Eligible. Without top hats or horses. Or country houses But with promise. And good hair. And plenty of books, cassettes and records. And plenty of lip and invective.

And clothes. Collarless shirts.. Levis 601s, DMs, M&S black polo necks. Soul aspirations. Aspirations to soul. Marvin Gaye. Al Green. Aretha. Nina. Next to the busts of Lenin and Boshevik posters. And Foucault. Barthes. Marx. And tunes like this. We can dance if we want to !  

   

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,486 Sisters of Mercy - Floodland

 

There are roads you only briefly walk and Goth is one such road for me. I chose and pretty much stuck with The Cure and The Banshees. Sisters of Mercy, The Mission and so forth always struck me as rather daft.

500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's -# 293 Susuma Yokota - Grinning Cat

 

                                Folktronica. A sublime fifty minutes to close off a wonderful day.

Song(s) of the Day # 4,268 Space Jaguar

 

Space Jaguar is a British French supersonic het fighter aircraft. Alternatively its a band formed by London based musician Mark Grassick who released a couple of records of good nature guitar strumming of the sort that might have been released forty or sixty years ago . It ain't broke don't fix it.

I'm listening to Every Room is an Escape Room which improves as it spins, It feels like Paisley Underground. It's open and genial. It sets out on the open road as It Starts With a Birthstone heads out into the open sea. A good start to 2026.  

1986 Singles # 50 The Lucy Show

 

'It was forty years ago today...'

Forty years ago I woke in a large three story terraced house just off the slopes in Brighton. There were many people in the house in different rooms. All of them nursing hangovers or finding themselves with unexpected bedfellows, The house had a telephone, a letter box, a television and that felt like enough. We looked to explore . The world felt like an exciting and fantastic place to discover. The Internet had not yet arrived to drive us inwards. To confuse us with too much information. The tower of babble.

I woke on New Years Day in 1986 on a double bed on the second floor in  the arms of a girl girl called Clare I'd got a bit tired and emotional with the previous evening and probably taken advantage of her feelings for me which were probably stronger than my feelings for her. It's often the way.. I'd known for a while that she liked me and I was a boy so naturally confused and a bit of an opportunist though a well meaning one. So I'd taken advantage of the opportunity as the party had gathered pace and we'd got drunker.

We'd left the student party we were at and wandered into the Brighton night, Then returned to the house  and we'd gone upstairs, stumbled towards a bedroom and tumbled into bed together as you do at that age given the opportunity. I'd been to the Soviet Union on a college politics trip with Clare a bit over a year earlier. I'd fancied her friend Barbara, but knew Clare had fancied me. It probably wasn't the best idea but life moves fast when you're unsure of yourself and other people. Everything lies before you but you don't really realise it. You don't know you're young, You don't know you're foolish

Now on January 1st 2026 I'm waking up in Canterbury. My elderly parents are in neighbouring rooms The pilgrimage has clearly gained momentum. R,E.M. cone later on this countdown. Towards the top I suspect. They're the constant on this blog. The point it started from and I keep returning to forty years and more onwards, .  I'm  looking backwards rather than forward here. 1986 was an eventful year for me. From Brighton to Trostkyism, to love to Interrail to the cusp of genuine and lasting trauma . I'll tell parts of that story here. And spin the tunes of 1986. 

First The Lucy Show. A British band named after an American TV programme  that sounded like an American group. I'd seen them supporting R.E.M. at The Lyceum with my sister in 1984. In 1986 they put out Mania. An album of twisted and literate narratives which gained some traction on American College Radio. They didn't last long but there's bravery and depth here. Mania still sounds great.. Life is the great adventure

 

 

2026