The second of eight Nick and the Bad Seeds entries here.
Thursday, August 26, 2021
Song(s) of the Day # 2,769 Bnny
Chicago band Bnny take the Velvet Underground's fhird album as their departure point on debut album Everything . Given that they have a female songer they sprinkle in a bit of Mazzy Star ennui into the mix but shift the feel from the desert loss to urban gloom.
There's not much here that's unexpected given that basic modus operandi. 'I haven't been happy in years' the singer intones at a certain point. This is rather glass half empty stuff but has a certain claustrophobic charm and there are some highly sparky moments of promise.
Wednesday, August 25, 2021
Album Reviews # 92 Saint Etienne - Foxbase Alpha
An album I appreciate a great deal more than when I bought it when it came out and first listened to it in 1991. Some records are like that. Pet Sounds, Astral Weeks, Forever Changes, Blue Lines this one. I liked it, it had the two great opening statement singles Only Love Can Break Your Heart and Nothing Can Stop Us but it also had a lot more. I didn't really understand the love and thought that had been put into it at the time. It was built to last.
Bob Stanley, certainly the mastermind behind the band was a music journalist originally and perhaps is the great example of one who made the transition from that role into making truly wonderful and significant music. Neil Tennant and Chrissie Hynde are the others that come to mind. Greater journalsts like Lester Bangs and Nick Kent never managed to do this. Though Stanley is, it needs to be said, a pretty great music journalist too.
Stanley in many ways is essentially a nostalgist. Foxbase Alpha is full of sepia tinted nostalgia for an English childhood of the Sixties and Seventies. The album is superbly presented. An Indie girl in artfully tilted cap, t-shirt and skirt carrying a banner bearing the album title on the cover. An inner sleeve with pictures of heroes set up to resemble the stickers you used to buy in childhood days in those lost decades. Hendrix, Dirk Bogarde, Arthurly (sic), Tuesday Weld, Peter Noone, Audrey Hepburn, Micky Dolenz, Francoise Hardy, Billy Fury, Brian and Dennis Wilson.
The attention to detail is meticulous and quite wonderful. The painstaking made to look easy. Almost in the same way as Morrissey had in the previous date, they itemise an alternative canon and deine themselves. Saint Etienne of course never had the staggering impact that The Smiths did when they appeared. I doubt that they are many people's favourite band, though of course I'm sure they are for some.
But they and many of the British bands who started up at around about the same time heralded a better time. It was just after the Poll Tax Riots, Margaret Thatcher was on her way and it was time for something better.
So The Stone Roses, Teenage Fanclub, Massive Attack, Ride, My Bloody Valentine, Suede,The Auteurs, Blur, Primal Scream, Rave and Acid House in no particular order. And Saint Etienne who somehow seem more significant figures on this landscape than they might have done at the time. Eventually it all led to Brit Pop, Things Are Going to Get Better and Tony Blair and New Labour.
It all proved to be something of another false dawn. But looking back and listening to Foxbase Alpha it does seem to indicate a wonderful if illusory optimism that the Sixties were possible again. It also make London seem like a quite wonderful idea.
Really, although Pet Sounds and Forever Changes are clearly totems for the band along with the equally important Sixtiesand Seventies singles and cinema and TV, there are two albums that came out just before, (both in 1989) that seem like the main departure points for Foxbase Alpha. De La Soul's Three Feet High and Rising and The Stone Roses. It's difficult to imagine this without them.
That's not to take anything away from this record. It's best heard on your record player and without headphones I'd say. Some of the production sounds a bit tinny and synthetic at this remove. On the record player it sounds fully realised, like the dreams in Stanley's head.
This starts with the band name and opening track This is Radio Saint Etienne. Saint Etienne were a French football team who briefly but magically punched above their weight in the Mid-Seventies orchestrated by the great puppeteer Michel Platini. Platini in time, like Tony Blair would come to disappoint but was wonderful, mercurial, transformative player during his career.
Foxbase Alpha, like Three Feet High and Rising and The Stone Roses accentuates the positive. It's a pick and mix of Pop, Dance and magical childhood soundbites just made for the times but also as I said built to endure. Sarah Cracknell, who came onboard after Only Love Can Break Your Heart is the ideal frontwoman for their enterprise, the missing link, the last piece of the jigsaw. Cool and unattainable like their Sixties female icons.
This is their essential album along with a greatest hits. After this I'd say they became primarily a singles band though it should be pointed out that there is nothing, absolutely nothing wrong with that. Foxbase Alpha still has a glimmering allure thirty years on. Who'd have thought it. Saint Etienne. Dark horses.
Richard Thompson - Beeswing # 4 Fairport Convention
1969. In many ways Fairport's year. That terrible, traumatic road accident, three, (count them), great albums, culminating in Liege & Lief, the ultimate British Folk Rock statement.
Best Ever Albums - Top 1,000 Albums - 903 Steely Dan - Pretzel Logic
The first of three from Steely Dan in this countdown.
Song(s) of the Day # 2,768 Lorde
New Zealand's Lorde, one of the pop sensations of recent years is back, with Solar Power, her first album since 2017's Melodrama. It's full of thoughtful ruminations on the travails of being a Modern Pop Star. Full of great Pop songs too, so not one that will disappoint her legion of fans but also an admirable record of a young artist stating that she will be the one who decides where she wants to go next.
Being from and living in New Zealand must be a boon in this respect. This is a record that her devotees will recognise while also being obliged to realise that she's not someone who's content to run on the spot. This though is a slightly more laidback but also strangely assertive one than what they've been used to.
In some ways it seems to be a rejection of the surface glamour and veneer of supermodels and the trappings that LA represents as much as anywhere else. Why would you want to fall for all that when you have all of the natural beauty that surrounds you on your doorstep.
I haven't completely found a way in to Solar Power on my first couple of plays but I do recognise it as a very strong record. Not in retreat by any means but taking a different route from the one that might be expected of her towards her self realisation as an artist.
Tuesday, August 24, 2021
Parquet Courts - Walking at a Downtown Pace
Interesting new Parquet Courts song ahead of a forthcoming album. They keep moving in their own direction.
Richard Thompson - Beeswing # 3 Fairport Convention
'If you come from Tufnell Park you'll never be Howlin' Wolf, Otis Redding or Buck Owens...'
Fairport find their feet and their voice.
This is Uncool - The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk & Disco # 383 Nirvana
Very possibly the greatest rock and roll single in this book.
Song(s) of the Day # 2,767 Vern Matz
Smoking Sun, the opening track of Vern Matz's second album Perennial is something of a misnomer. It sounds like a disgruntled, cry for help, the kind the likes of Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Patrick Fitzgerald and Joe Jackson used to specialise in during the late Seventies. It's great.
But it's definitely a misnomer. Because from here the record slips into laidback, reflective Wilco mode. Wilco is such a useful reference point, because like Pavement, Stereolab and Broadcast, their influence is all over so many 2021 alternative records. It's interesting to see which bands endure.
This is altogether a rather lovely album of songs contemplating the nature of universe. Another good reason to keep an eye on the likes of Bandcamp because otherwise you might miss out on small gems like this.
Monday, August 23, 2021
Richard Thompson - Beeswing # 2 Fairport Convention
'Like a group of mountaineers roped together, we were isolated and interdependent, focusing on the summit.'
Strangely, given that he's describing the early days of Fairport and 1967, the next 25 pages get somewhat less thrilling due to Thompson's natural modesty and reserve. However, it's still a fascinating telling of what those incredible days must have been like from the inside. Outside gigs with hippies, market workers and young couples dressed to the nines in black tie and evening gowns on their way to the Royal Opera House. A riot in Rome, playing on a bill with The Nice and The Move. Hendrix joining them onstage on a regular basis. Lennon, wandering around art happenings. Thompson is not remotely starstruck, for he experienced it. It also gives me an excuse to listen to the first Fairport album, one of my favourites of theirs and a fascinating document..Meanwhile, Sandy joins the band as the 50th page turns.
Personal Long Players # 12 John Coltrane - A Love Supreme
The last of this particular series. I don't know if everybody is like me in this respect, but I imagine a lot of people are. The records that mean the most to me are the ones that hit me between the ages of fifteen and twenty five. By that point you should be fully formed. Or at least fully formed enough to cope with the world. I wasn't quite, But I was on my way.
I bought, or at least listened to A Love Supreme during my last year at university after a couple of years out, for reasons I won't bother you with. I listened to it in my residence flat in Norwich city centre. I blame it for starting me smoking, not my best life decision and certainly not the record's fault, but I used to lie and sit on my bed and listen to it and smoke.
I was nursing a wound in that year of the end of my first important relationship. I managed to put it aside and get myself togther sufficiently to get a decent degree grade and then move on to the next stage of my life. I've since probably moved in terms of my affections from John to Miles but why on earth should you need to choose.
Best Ever Albums - Top 1,000 Albums - 905 Simple Minds - New Gold Dream (81, 82, 83 & 84)
One of my favourite albums of all and Simple Minds only posting in this particular chart. It's the right one.
Song(s) of the Day # 2,766 Nathan Salsburg
One of the most original and interesting concept albums of the year. Psalms a record by Kentucky based musician and archivist Nathan Salsburg. A devotional journey into the nature of his Jewish faith, it's a series of baroque and intricate songs, mostly given the title of one of the Psalms.
Beautifully played guitar in the Folk tradition of Bert Jansch and accompanied by singing in Hebrew and English by Salsburg and his collaborators, it's a rather lovely, meditative study, Best listened to right the way through. Like the Psalms themselves, every track here seems to tell a different story.
Sunday, August 22, 2021
Songs About People # 1,297 Caligula
Stately Indie Pop from New York band Constant Companion. Something of an instant classic.
Covers # 173 The Five Stairsteps
Rather winning cover of Dear Prudence from Chicago family band who signed to George Harrison's Dark Horse label.
Richard Thompson - Beeswing # 1 Les Paul
Beeswing, the first part of Richard Thompson's memoirs is an immediately magical experience. He focuses from the get go on the music, within twenty five pages Fairport Convention have formed and are seeking their own path. The opening chapters are a rich, heady evocation of growing up in London's leafy suburbs.
Album Reviews # 91 Tim Buckley - Blue Afternoon
Tim is still a special one. Over forty five years after he made his last, terrible mistake. Almost twenty five years after his poor, neglected son made his. There's something deeply haunting about both of these great talents, one fully realised, one not quite.
Yesterday was a very good day in my life. I woke and had a great Zoom chat with my best friend and a former student Salvo, from my year in Catania, Sicily over twenty years ago. Then, I had another good phone chat with my mother about that and my impending meeting with Mustafa from Baghdad, another former student, but now just a friend, who I taught online for a couple of terms earlier on this year and is now in Newcastle embarked on his engineering PhD. .He's just completed his quarantine and asked if we could meet. My mother told me to tidy my flat and invite him round next time as mothers are wont to do. I agreed to do so. We both laughed.
Then, to look presentable, I had a Turkish Shave from an Iranian barber just round the corner from me. He did the shave thing, then wrapped the faceclothes round my face and left me there, prone on the swingseat with the gorgeous heat and perfumes soaking into my face. Great job. I gave him a tip, though he certainly wasn't asking for or expecting it.
I still had some time to kill before meeting Mustafa so I wondered down to RPM Records, my favourite record shop in Newcastle,. There was an offchance that the copy of Sophtware Slump by Grandaddy which I'd ordered a couple of weeks back, to my mind their finest album and ultimate statement, might be there. It wasn't. But I'm sure it will be eventually.
So, being something of an expert on record shops and how to behave in them, I tried another tack, probably at the core of why I'd wandered down there in the first place. A few weeks previously I'd marvelled at the low cost of the Tim Buckley albums in their racks. Richie, one of the guys behind the counter had told me that they'd broken up a boxset that had been released and no one had bought and sold the individual albums off at affordable prices.
Which brought me to the reason my feet had brought me down to RPM . The Tim album that had driven my feet down to RPM in the first place and the one I really wanted wasn't there. Blue Afternoon, an album that has special personal memories for me from over twenty five years ago. I asked if they might have or could track down an affordable copy. Rich said he'd go upstairs and have a look.
In the meantime, I had a chat with Duncan, the other RPM regular assistant on our feelings about Starsailor often considered to be Tim's greatest, certainly his most far out album. With an artist of this calibre, it's difficult to opt for just one. Record store small talk. There are no awkward silences.
Richie came down not much later with a copy of Blue Afternoon. Not just any copy but an original release with a fabulous gatefold sleeve. For just 10 pounds. A steal. He gave it a clean, we gave it a play and I was on my way.
Forty five minutes later, after a great catch up with Mustafa, so incredibly grateful and polite and having given me a wonderful gift that connected immediately to our teaching / learning experience, we parted and I wandered down to my new local The Telegraph for a couple of pints and some jukebox action and then returned with my plunder. Mustafa's gift and Blue Afternoon. I've been playing it ever since.
Blue Afternoon may not be Tim's best album. How do you judge these things. But its my favourite. It has special memories for me and a certain cadence that will never be supplanted in my affections. It remonds me of a couple of the best years of my life, when I was in Dortmund between 1992 and 1994.
On Friday's I used to go round to a friend Matt's flat. We'd chat and drink beer and smoke and eat and listen to music. I seem to remember he had mentioned Tim Buckley the very first time I met him. He certainly played him a lot. One sunny afternoon he put this golden record on.The moment has stuck with me ever since.
Matt is no longer with us. He passed in painful circumstances a few years back. So glad to have finally tracked down a copy of Blue Afternoon. It's utterly transcendent in a way very, very few records are.
Personal Long Players # 11 Van Morrison - Astral Weeks
Astral Weeks is not a record I remember having an enormous emotional impact on me when I first bought it at some point in the mid-Eighties. I probably did so at that point because I felt it was something that I should do given its already formidable reputation.
Its effect on me since has been more than anything a collection of cumulative experiences and moments over the next thirty five years in which I've been listening to it on a consistently regular basis. One time in Izmir while I was teaching there with a smart guy from Derby who said it had been a major source of inspiration for him to break out of a soul crushing factory job and do something with his life. My brother driving me somewhere in Costa Rica when The Way Young Lovers Do came on and transfixed us both. Listening to it with a really special friend I'd bought the record for fairly recently.
Van doesn't really understand the enduring power of this so why should we. It's just an album that's there whenever you need it and it always sounds both fresh and familiar. It encapsulates the sheer wonder of the universe, its happiness, sadness, and mystery probably better than any other album I know.
Best Ever Albums - Top 1,000 Albums - 906 Elton John - Captain Fantastic & The Dirt Brown Cowboy
I have a vinyl copy of this. With all its original inserts. It is indeed a fantastic record and object.
This is Uncool - The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk & Disco # 381 A Tribe Called Quest
'Slow, laid-back, with a full and ward 'low end' bass that entered your bones.'
Song(s) of the Day # 2,765 Orla Gartland
'Don't compare your face to the other faces. It's not worth it...'
I liked this record a lot. The debut album from Dublin native Orla Gartland Women on The Internet, a DIY statement that shakes its fist at the world defiantly about every subject you might possibly hope it will.
Immediate Pop songs that give reminders of Alanis, Billie, Lorde and others while carving out Gartland's own space. Insecurity, fear of love, the way that the internet can make women feel, the way that life can make you hurt. The moment that occurs sometimes when you just need to dance around your living room.
I really liked it mostly for its low fi charm and invention and the way it made familiar tropes seem fresh. In some ways coming across as an internet age Sinead, and that's not unjustified praise, Gartland has some voice when she really lets rip. A lot of these songs are so classy that they sound like hits to me though I confess I'm not sure how these things work these days.
An excellent exercise in the worth of exorcising chanelled rage, Women on The Internet does exactly what it aims to do. A statement of youtful expression and disquiet with wisdom beyond its years and not one that caves in to self pity, a finely realised album.
Saturday, August 21, 2021
Things Found on My Local's Jukebox # 483 The Clash
Sometimes it's best to let the algorithms choose the songs that play on the jukebox. Sometime it's an idea to put something on yourself.
Covers # 172 Kut Vile
A great prospect coming up. A set of covers of the Velvet Underground & Nico album. Here's the first I've heard. A fairly faithful take on Run, Run, Run from Kurt Vile, even down to the Reed vocal mannerisms. Can't wait to hear the rest.
Personal Long Players # 10 Marvin Gaye - What's Going On
During my furst year at university, me and three of the guys in my corridor bonded majorly, largely over music. NME, which we pored over at the time, brought out a list of 100 albums they considered the best ever released. Instead of the usual suspects What's Going On by Marvin Gaye was Number One and Van Morrison's Astral Weeks Number Two. It's still my favourite list of this type. It probably pretty much reflects my own taste.
We listened to What's Going On a lot during this year. I bought my own copy. It was my entre into a whole new universe. Gaye himself had fairly recently been shot. But this wasn't the Marvin of Sexual Healing. On this record he's almost an alien being in a similar way to how Bowie is on so many of his Sevemties records. There's a sadness and wisdom to this album that still and always will endure. The photo of him on the cover says it all. What have we done? What are we doing?
Best Ever Albums - Top 1,000 Albums - 907 Vashti Bunyan - Just Another Diamond Day
A truly wonderful record. In its own space.
Song(s) of the Day # 2,764 Martha Wainwright
I haven't followed Martha Wainwright's career as closely as I have her brother Rufus and father Louden's. I'm aware of the nature of her voice and style so listening to her latest album Love Will Be Reborn yesterday didn't surprise me much but I did enjoy the experience.
She's not really an easy listening artist. Her songs are turbulent things of struggle and unease, as she puts it in opening track Middle of the Lake she specialises in little songs of 'love and pain.' By this point of her career she is, as you'd expect, very good at what she does.
So as I've said my lack of familiarity with her back catalogue make me unable to place it in comparison with what has come before but this is certainly well worth a listen. This apparently is the soundtrack of divorce and rebirth and it certainly sounds like it. She does the experience justice. Some of the notes she hits and the anguished moods of joy and anguish she taps into are rather extraordinary.
In some ways the artist I'd compare her with is neither her brother or father but Jeff Buckley. Love Will Be Reborn is full of the durm and strang that so characterised Grace.
So, not an album to put on when your aunt comes round perhaps but a rewarding record nonetheless. The title track in particular is exceptional and none of its bedfellows let the side down. She's a craftswoman who may never quite get the credit she's due. I'll go back from here.
This is Uncool - The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk & Disco # 380 Public Enemy
'a broiling, yelping, even jaunty monster groove aimed at reminding us why Afro-Americans were American.'
Friday, August 20, 2021
Personal Long Players # 9 The Triffids - Born Sandy Devotional
' 'The children are walking back from the beach...'
I think Born Sandy Devotional meant so much to me when it came out and ever since because it was a memory of the sun that I'd come from. I was born In Zimbabwe, and spent my first six years there and that's always within me, and Born Sandy Devotional gets over the vivid, intense glow of living under a true sun and the almost limitless universe it endows in you forever, better than any other record I know.
The Triffids sun is an Australian one of course, not an African one. It makes no odds. but it's not just the intense heat that this album gives off that make it so extraordinary. It's the vividly realised characters that populate its landscape and the fiercely emotional obsessions that drive them. Every song is a beautifully realised short story worthy of Paul or Jane Bowles, Faulkner, Hemmingway or Scott Fitzgerald. The Triffids did pleanty of other great stuff but Born Sandy Devotional is the one you really need.
Best Ever Albums - Top 1,000 Albums - 908 Temple of the Dog - Temple of the Dog
Supergroup composed of members of Soundgarden and Pearl Jam.
Song of the Day # 2,763 Care
Care were a collaboration between Ian Broudie and Paul Simpson. Flaming Sword reached # 48 in 1983. It should have been higher.
Thursday, August 19, 2021
Album Reviews # 90 Fun Boy 3 - Waiting
The Fun Boy 3, the band Terry Hall, Lynval Golding and Neville Staples formed after fleeing the nest of The Specials in 1981 were not all about fun by any means. They brought some of the mischief that band were known for but also plenty of its mordant, intense sense of scrutiny, and had plenty of hit singles over the next couple of years, always keeping in mind that the best Pop music could and perhaps should be both frivolous and throwaway but also serious business.
Second album Waiting, from 1983 is gallows humour and social commentary at its very best. Britain was in a mess at that time and The Fun Boy 3 were well aware of the fact. The election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 had truly sent the cat amongst the pigeons and four years on, feathers were continuing to fly with The Falklands War, social unrest and the impending Miners Strike further muddying the waters.
Waiting perhaps doesn't provide all of the answers but it does ask plenty of the right questions and manages to have a lot of fun and be deeply listenable at the same time. Hall, Golding and Staples were the front line of The Specials and make and convert plenty of goal chances here. Not many Pop bands, who were equally welcome in Smash Hits and The NME were operating on the same level in 1983.
The album probably isn't a classic on the same level as the first three Specials album but it's not far off. Fun Boy 3 were probably working as artists between single and album realms and they perform this balancing act remarkably adeptly here.
The Tunnel of Love was the biggest hit single from the record and sounds like something of a classic in itself. It punches to the solar plexus in the way that the best Specials singles, Gangsters, Too Much Too Young, Stereotypes, Gangsters and well, all of them did.
Thematically it's a retread of Too Much Too Young, but in its way just as good, reminding the listener of how lucky they are to be listening to this on the radio, or watching it on Top of the Pops rather than having to face the consequences of dealing with mistakes like this that you've made when you were too young really to realise the awful places they might take you.
But there's plenty else to wonder at here too. Our Lips Are Sealed, the song Hall wrote with Jane Wiedlin of The Go-Gos and already a hit for that band, gets a well deserved second run out. You also get Ireland, drug dealing what they like to do in their free time, a cover of Murder She Wrote, plenty of what made The Specials so wonderful and groundbreaking at the time but from a different angle and point of attack.
Nothing seems out of place. Bedroom existentialism, good humoured jesting and they save the hardest hitting moment untile last Well Fancy That the story of how Hall was sexually abused repeatedly by a teacher, on a school trip to France.
I really remember being shocked by it at the time as a pretty innocent seventeen year old and it hasn't lost anything of its impact almost forty years on. Fun Boy 3. The jesters in the pack. They never lost sight of the fact that this is all actually deeply serious and deeply important stuff.
Personal Long Players # 8 Patti Smith - Horses
After Television, or perhaps at round about the same time came Patti Smith and Horses. The two albums seem to go together even though their dates of release were two years apart. It's the definitive Patti release, just as Marquee Moon is the definitive Television one, even though she's done plenty of utterly timeless stuff since.
Like Marquee Moon it's a statement of being, in this case female being. Patti was something of a tomboy but she was and is all woman. In many ways it's a definitive album with a definitive opening statement: 'Jesus died for somebody's sins. But not mine...' Just as Marquee Moon set off with See No Evil's 'What I want. I want now...' What more could you want.
Both records fulfilled all the promises of their opening declarations and more. They're both still gifts that keep on giving a few years short of fifty years on. Patti is still working and still striving. She's a true inspiration. An artist.
Song(s) of the Day # 2,762 Charles Spearin
One of the inevitable plethora of Lockdown / Covid albums that are now hitting the streets. The utterly gorgeous, largely instrumental My City of Starlings from Charles Spearin also of Broken Social Scene.
Full of time and space as you might expect, given that reflection is one of the things that this particular experience has allowed us all, it's a record full of spectral wonder.
With surely some of the best song titles you will see on any album this year; Sympathy & Vegetation, Portrait of the Artist as a Tuesday, Sometimes it Hurts to be Alive, The Morning Dew Lay Heavy on the Grass. My City of Starlings lives up to its name and takes genuine flight.
Spearin spent much of his time over the last year walking through deserted city streets. As for so many of us it clearly gave him a glimpse of beauty he'd never quite seen before.
Best Ever Albums - Top 1,000 Albums - 909 Tim Buckley - Goodbye & Hello
The second highest Tim in this chart. The other comes along shortly.
Wednesday, August 18, 2021
Songs About People # 1,296 Rainer Wener Fassbinder
Cool Jazz pice for troubled German Film Director.
Astral Weeks - A Secret History of 1968 # 12 Van Morrison
Finally finished this wonderful book yesterday. Van the Man, the ultimate contrarian and his ultimate statement. It established such incredible connections between his, the Boston and America of the time, the strange brew that forged this phenomenal record.
Personal Long Players # 7 Television - Marquee Moon
R.E.M. led me to a lot of things, including Television, and most particularly to their definitive statement, debut album Marquee Moon. Along with those first three R.E.M. albums it's probably the most enduring album in my whole record collection, though it's difficult for me to entirely nail down, even almost forty years after first hearing it. Perhaps Nick Kent did so best in his utterly glowing review of it in the NME when it first came out.
I have no idea how often I listen to and have listened to it. Probably every month, either the whole thing or parts of it. I never regret doing so, think I've finally worn out this obsession and fancy hearing something else. I'm always entirely rapt. Entranced. It's the sound of a band utterly staking out their own place in the scheme of things. They never really needed to record a single further note after releasing this. I liked Adventure and also the eponymous return in 1992 but Marquee Moon is of course the one.
Hugely influential, as it marked out a different way of thinking and a different way of being in the same way as Suicide's debut and Pere Ubu's The Modern Dance did. It was Punk but also not truly so, perhaps the most genuinely Punk statement of all.It showed the value of steering clear of the herd It also has a good claim to be the first Post Punk album. Hearing and learning about Television marked a definite but indefinable change in me. Very few albums change you. This one changed me.
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