Mansun were truly runts of the Brit Pop litter. For the odd teenage boys who hung around the library on gloomy afternoons and spent their teenage years with their collars turned up against the wind.
Friday, February 20, 2026
1979 Top 40 - # 27 The Jags
'You only come here when you're feeling blue. You tell me I don't pay attention to you...'
We didn't know what one hit wonders or that Jags were they. We knew that they sounded like Elvis Costello and that they had your number written on the back of their hand. They were a bit more Ford Fieta than Jaguar to be frank but the sog hung around for months. Quite right too.
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Song(s) of the Day # 4,317 Cardinals
Cardinals the Cork band and their debut album Maverick have everything I would wish for if I was 16 rather than 60. They're the kind of band you could fall in love with which let's face it is what you should be doing when you're 16. They have a front row of the grid understanding of Pogues, Libertines and Fontanes D.C that bodes very well. After all. There's no beating. A little Catholic angst and guilt.
U2 are at the far end of the Rock & Roll pike now but I think sensed the value of all this went they set off too. And they understood too that you need Wilde, Joyce and Yeats and the luck of the Irish, insouciance, a quality bookshelf, a sense of where they came from, a taste fora drop of the hard stuff and a drop of mischief. Here's mud in your eye and a bit of what you fancy for the weekend.. Maverick is a rather beautiful set of songs and no mistake.
Thursday, February 19, 2026
250 Albums- An Arbitrary Rumble Through My Record Collection # 52 Madder Rose - Bring It Down
One of the beauties of having a large record collection like this. To pluck a record as beautiful and unexpeccted this out of it and to put it on for its annual play as the February shadows darken.
Attitude and style of mid ranking American nineties guitar band that take me back to Dortmind in 1993 and 1994 when I was young and this was the kind of music me and my friends listened to because ut made sense to then. . I had no classes in the afternoon so I'd nip off to a bar and drink a beer and smoke some cigarettes or go to the Dortmund arcade and play pinball. Wait for a while and then go meet meet friends.
This spins me back, Madder Rose aren't hugely remembered but judged on this they deserve to be. They ride the wave of life with no little aplomb for thirteen self written songs.here that say there are better things to do in life than what the boss would have wanted you to do,
Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,448 Dinosaur Jr.
Bug seemed lihe a pass for all the rides on the funfair.This blasted open a door.
1979 Top 40 - # 28 Lena Martell
As you get older you realise the essential truth of this song. This doesn't make the damned thing any easier to listen to. It was a cruel joke on Terry Wogan's prt on the rest of a poor nation. He wouldn't stop playing it on hisRadio 2 morning show. It went to Number One for a month.
1986 Singles # 5 The Go Betweens
I went to see The Go Betweens at Kingston Poly with friends in the Easter Break in University April 1986. It cost a pound. A week earlier I'd squited a beautiful young woman around the maze at Hampton Court. She's invited herself to my parents for Synday Lunch. I walked her from my famoly house in Teddington, across Bushy Park and back. A month later we were together. Sometimes the times are with you. The wind is in your sails.Just Like Spring Rain.
500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 247 Sonic Youth - Murray Street
My day is done. I've git Murray Street on. Mid career Sonic Youth which is a good place to be.This is masterful record. Everything you associate with the band but beaitifully restrained. Almost glacial.
Song(s) of the Day # 4,316 Would Be Goods
The Would Be Goods hail from the same enchanted neck of the woods as The Monochrome Set. A world where a new Connery Bond will be in the cinemas a couple of weeks, Joe Meek is still in the charts and Profumo hasn't faded from memory.New album Tears Before Bedtime is seven shades of charming.
Wednesday, February 18, 2026
1979 Top 40 - # 29 Racey
There was something about Racey that made even a sensitive 13 year old like myself recoil in horror, There had to be more to life than they offered.
500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 246 Tom Waits - Orphans Brewlers & Bastards
Orphans Brewler or Bastard? Which are you/ All welcome here clearly. Tom Waits wrote the book of this stuff/. Here's a chapter.
Song(s) of the Day # 4,315 Beverley Glenn-Copeland
'The wind blows over hillsides. The day greets the dawn.'
Let is dance down the road. A sensitive album. In a sensitive tradition. Beverley Glenn-Copeland' Laughter In Summer. An eighty two year old Candian singer songwriter who wrote for Sesame Street.
Not just that, He's had a long and distinguished musical career in Jazz and Folk and undergone gender tradition An artist who has been diagosed with demntia on the LGBT com with a female partner, if any of this stuff matters.
This is a fragrant beautiful record that celebrates the essential renewal of life and the peaceful valies which we should all share. That's the end of today's sermon. Just listen to the record. Peace will descend.
Tuesday, February 17, 2026
1979 Top 40 - # 30 The Dooley Sisters
For those that tend to get dewey eyed about how music used to be better in my day. They conveniently forget. The Dooley Sisters were always somewhere in the charts.
500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 247 Pictures & Sound - Pictures & Sound
Rather Coldplay-ishl We have Coldplay for these moments,
1986 Singles # 6 Jesus & Mary Chain
Jesus & Mary Chain came to UEA ehere I was in the middle of my glorious first year experience. But I didn't go. I suspect I didn't approve of their name. Having had a church upbringing where I was largely pressganged by devotional parents but it still left its brand of vague belief and esential innocence
But I didn't like the idea if them. Their rudeness. Or their hair. Preferring Echo & The Bunnymen's. At least they made an effort in the Dissolute Bohemian department. And I didn't like feedback. That took a while. I was in thrall to bands who didn't stoop to dissolute rage and f- ing and blinding and could play full sets and not adopt a year zero rage approach because it made newspaper headlines.. .While they hid behind their fringes and acne and pretended to be The Velvet Underground when actually they really just wanted a nice girlfriend and an NME cover. .
Of course when they played was a 'legendary experience' which those who went still speak of in awed reverential whispers 40 years on. My own future honey was there. Snapping away on a pricey camera like some refugee from Warhol's Factory in her smart pork pie hat and smart blue coat. She took some great shots and gave one to the guy who roomed next door to me in an effort to win his friendship.. I'm not sure it worked. She certainly won my undying love.
I still don't really listen to Psycho Candy that often.. I had my own Creation Road to Damsacus moment when My Bloody Valentine came to Nowich Arts Centre three years later and I found myself swimming in a sea of ecstatic youth that was altogether that was like a spell being cast and suspended like the best gigs and will always be one of the most memorable musical experiences of my lifetime.
As forJesus & Mary Chain. I WASN'T THERE ! But I do like this. It captures the claustrophobia. The desire; The spell. The desire ti be more daring than you actually are or ever will be because essentially uou have too mych sense. These three minutes have everything you want from Rock & Roll frankly. Perhaps I should have made more of an effort and gone..
Song(s) of the Day # 4,314 Mariachi El Bronx
The Bronx understand the essence of being in a Rock & Roll band . That it's a license and a liberty but also a responsibility and a duty to those who are chained to the Nine to Five. What bands like these provide is the opportinity. The idea. That you could be in a hardcore band called the Bronx one part of the evening. Then change into ponchos and loud tops and start fure eating and jugglingand do the full Mariachi thing later in the evening .
Mariachi El Bronx (IV) does exactly what you want it to do. The same thing. The thing that (i) (ii) and (iii) did. The corona and tequila are flowing. The burritos are as hot as the senoritas. The sun us always shining unless its setting, High Chaparal ! Vamos ! And other cultural cliches.
Monday, February 16, 2026
The NME - 1986 Year of the Triffids ? # 9 George Jones - White Lightning Review
The NME was a place to learn about music. In a small corner of the Albums Reviews is a write up of a George Jones collection by veteran staffer Fred Dellat. I wouldn't have read it at the time but it's packed with genuine knowhow.
1979 Top 40 - # 31 Sister Sledge
Sister Sledge went down this week. TBH Lost in Music should never go down in the charts. It's as powerful as hypnosis.
Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,450 Iron Maiden - Brave New World
Heavy Rock of this kind is a pleasure denied me .It just never struck a chord and still doesn't register I'm afraid . Let's just move on.
1986 Singles # 7 XTC
XTC were strangers to the singles charts and Top of the Pops from this point onwards. But Grass hits big here.
500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 248 Morrissey - You Are The Quarry
Morrissey has established his attitude and stance on virtually everything. Let's face it he did so within pretty six months of taking his place at the barricades at some point in 1983 and now listening to three minutes of the opening of You Are The Quarry you can't help wondering if there is anything left to say.
Song(s) of the Day # 4,313 Greg Weeks
Last night I sat in my living room in near darkness with a beaker of tea and bar of chocolate and listened in complete stillness to Greg Weeks Folk / Prog album If The Sun Dies . It's a quite spectacular album frankly. Enchanting in many respects and I'll do my utmost to do it justice here.
In terms of its chords and mood you're very much in Neil Young's world.. The Neol of the early Seventies. Harvest, After The Gold Rush. At a certain point in the evening I stopped listening to this went off to the stove and cooked myself a bowl of mushroom soup and listened to Everyone Knows this is Nowhere while I cooked ,consumed it and then washed the bowls and pan.
Then I returned to my desk put my headphones on and started lstening to If The Sun Dies again. The mood of the evening and process frankly was quite seamless. You hear quite a lot of records like this now. Ones that utterly try to replicate the mood, ambience and very texture of bygone times. But few which are so immaculate in their conceit as If The Sun Dies. It belongs in April 1972; Or the 15th Century,
Weeks of course was in Espers and knows his Gentle Giant from his Drake and Steeleye Span, But this is not an academic exercise. The songs are heartfelt and this is an meticulous, heartfelt exercise rather than a labour of love.
Sunday, February 15, 2026
Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,451 Susanne Sundfor -Ten Love Songs
Ten love songs. Fifty minutes. An album sleeve that looks like an abstract painting in a modern gallery. The fuel of love is the thing that we all try to fill our tanks with but its an elsuive and rare fuel, These songs take various pathways to the same goal.This is a very easy record. to listen to. In much the same way as ABBA records used to be and Volvos are comfortable albums to take a drive in the country un. Is it the Swedish thing kanske?
1986 Singles # 8 Public Image Ltd.
What Pop Music is there for. For risk takers and statements that go beyond the ordinary. Our cultire allows for it, A song for Nelson Mandela who the Prime Minister of the UK in 1986 considered a terrorist lest we forget. Anger is indeed an energy. May the road rise with you.
500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 249 Modest Mouse - Good News For People Who Love Bad News
First off. Good title but I started off on this without high hopes. A general modesty and lack of ambition was my fear having listened to Modest Mouse records previously and the record soon slipped into self effacement and ennui which I don't really understand.
It becomes a little bolder as it stretches its legs and rounds the bend. But there's no real identifying personality that I can identify and I throw in the towel five tracks in.
The NME - 1986 Year of the Triffids ? # 8 Biba Kopf reviews Fans by Malcolm McLaren
Like Benny Hill and Bee Bumble before him, Tackie Mackie makes novelty records.' You can tell this is not going to be a good review. It's actually not a bad record listening to it now but McLaren didn't really invite the NME to take him seriously.
I saw Nick Kent give his eulogy at the Laugharne Festival the day after he died and Kent said he was a pimp essentially. McLaren didn't exactly discourage this epitaph. Kopf comes not to praise Fans but to bury him 'McLaren can't sing he can't write, he is a most pedestrian arranger,,,' He's not a patch on ZTT..' ;Fans is shoddily done. ; 'The record reeks of Gilbert & Sullivan.' Ouch !
* For the record I've really enjoyed listening to Fans this afternoon. It's a very enjoyable car crash. The place where low culture meets high culture.
250 Albums- An Arbitrary Rumble Through My Record Collection # 53 ABC - Lexicon of Love
'I don't know the answer to that question. If I knew I would tell you...;
Valentine's Day is done but 15th Februry still feels like a great day to play Lexicon of Love and transport me back in time to 1982. The year it came out amd the year I left secondary school and graduated from Elvis Costello regulation NHS frames to cooler John Lennon specs and became a candidate for kisses, lovehearts and poisoned arrows myself.
I didn't particularly like ABC at the time. I didn't know my Motown from my Stax ir my Temptations from my Velvelettes. I didn't realise exactly how skilled Lexicon of Love was. That it started with a west End musical with the orchestra warming up in the bear pit and climaxed to gasps and swoons and a standing ovation from a full house. everyone coming onstage for the curtain call in glitter and sequins.
This is a funky record too but not one where any song ever outstays its welcome. Trevir Horn is all lightness and strings to contrast Martin Hammett's with sturm und drang..Martin Fry understands Harpers & Queens and the stock market and was equally comfortable on the cover of NME, The Face and Smash Hits. This is knowing but also incredibly graceful. .
People made records like this in those days. Dare, Rattlesnakes, Sulk, Tin Drum, Imperial Bedroom, Penthouse & Pavement, Ocean Rain. We didn't realise there was am expiry date on the New Pop party. That Thatcherism essentially would reel this stuff in and records like thes would be a rarity by 1985. But New Pop was great while it lasted and it's great to look back at now. Personally I sometimes wonder whether the human imagination is slightly poorer now. There are plenty of great records still being made. But this kind of record seems like its made without a safety net.
Song(s) of the Day # 4,312 Voka Gentle
Domestic Bliss? Surely an oxymoron A vain imagining. But in this case it happens to be the latest album from Voka Gentle a band for London who may be in the gutter and poseurs of am expressive dayglo sort but at least they're looking at the stars as they head for the hills as Dr.s Wilde and Bowie would prescribe, Even if the album cover is bad Salvador Dali and no mistake !
This is a bit of a ragbag but isn't lacking in daring or ambition. Even though occasionally I'm reminded of The Thompson Twins. Doctor Doctor !!! It's not running on the spot at least. It might be lacking in shape and substance on occasion but its decorative, varued and throws shapes. I give it 7.5, it's It Starts With a Birthstone's song / album of the day. I salute its bravura. Who precisely is Torpedo Mike and why are Voka Gentle staring back down my telescope ? Your guess is as good as mine.
1979 Top 40 - # 32 Donna Summer
Dim all the lights. If you insist Donna. Eternal summer. Let's get on the dancefloor. A tune that makes you feel like your transported onto a yacht with Warren Beatty, Farrah Fawcett and the rest of the Seventies A Team.. Even if it's coming out of your cheap transistor and sink us full of unwashed plates.
250 Albums- An Arbitrary Rumble Through My Record Collection # 54 The Best of the Inkspots
'Don't you tell it to the breeze . Cause she will tell the birds and bees . Then everyone will know. Because you told the babbling trees. Yes you told them once before. Because you told the blabbering trees.'
Sometines you need some eternal truths. The best of The Inkspots is a good place to go to in these moments for an instant remedy. We werem't the first to feel these raging emotions beating like ancient passions in our chest. And we won't be the last. This is a place where you can hear of emotions that were lived before you came to the planet and will be experienced way after you've departed it. These songs express emotions that are sometimes greater than our ability to express them.. Let the Ink Spots spo and express them for us all. Then move on with your day..
Saturday, February 14, 2026
100 Miles - Mojo Magazine # 1 Miles Davis
A new last thing at night series. A Miles Davis related CD with the latest issue for the centenary of his birth
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Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,452 Todd Terje - It's Album Time
It's always album time roind here. This ome doesn't particularly appeal to me. It seems to invent a new shade of artificial. I feel I'm on a cruise across an ocean that may never come to an end.
1986 Singles # 9 The Pretenders
One of the most effecting of Pretenders songs. Apparently written for John McEnroe.
1979 Top 40 - # 33 The Skids
Arch shape shifting and allusions of Mittel Europa and decadent themes. The late Seventies and early Eighties were a wonderful period for playing with risque subject matter and imagery and The Skids were never far from the front of the queue. This one had Bill Nelson production to boot..
500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 250 The Magnetic Fields - i
The Magnetic Fields I imagine are a point of obsession for many but I've never particularly beem drawn into their orbit. There's lots of arch, chamberplay on show on i.. A deep baritone. Clever word play. A viola sawing in the background.. You always got heart as well as brain with Lou, David and Bryan. You never sense thatThe Magnetic Fields are going to bleed at any point. We parted company a few tracks in when I decided I was more interested in their wardrobe, record and book collection than whatever might be coming next on i.
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Song(s) of the Day # 4,311 Remember Sports
Remember Sports? I'll say I do. And not fondly frankly. Trailing round on Cross Country afternoon runs at the back of the pack with the rest of my geeky mates across muddy fields and fields in PE lessons in wintry months of unremitting rain in the early Eighties. Coughing my guts up. Lungs clogged with phlegm from the asthma condition which plagued my childhood and teenage years.
Always among the last to be picked at football. Unable to master the javelin. Doing my best to grit my teeth for the trials of rugby tacklse and avoiding the indignities of a boot in the face from the fat boy in the pack of the school team. . At least I was OK at tennis where it was pretty much all about the serve which you hoped would land in the right box as you advanced to the net to volley the return into the open court, 30 love. But generally mine is not a glorious sporting narrative..
Anyway eniugh about me becasue here are Remember Sports are from Gambier Ohio,.and have relocated to Philly and released albums at intervals from 2021 and are on their way to Europe presently to support their latest The Refrigerator.
It's the brew which seems in vogue among young Alternative American Guitar bands currently. The Refrigerator frankly is heady stuff. Diaristic and intimate vocals. What sounds like a hurdy gurdy churning in the background, Well written songs that aren't afraid of discussing heartbreak. Guitars chiming and C&W inclined but also harking back to Replacements and early R.E.M. Darren Jones. You may like this one. I certainly do.
Friday, February 13, 2026
The NME - 1986 Year of the Triffids ? # 7 Swans Way Interview
One evening at Titanic in London, NME journalist Simon Witter catches and is blown away by a pretentious band from Birmingham on Phonogram called Swans Way. You know - Marcel Proust . They clearlt read books and jolly well want you to know it. He's so impressed he gets on a train to Birmingham with photographer Bleddyn Butcher and takes the band out to tea and cake at a classy brasserie on expenses.
The band witter on to Witter without sayong much at all and get a page in NME while they wait for Smash Hits and The Face to notice them. They insist in the interview they are not the same as more successful local lights, Dexys, Fashion and Duran Duran, are not the same as Sade or Working Week either and that they like books and films as much as they like music.I'm listening to their 1984 album The Fugitive Kind now. It's of its time and pretty irritating after a while. Blue Eyed Poseur Soul. History records that The Blue Nile do what they wished to do and become less than a footnote on Pop annals..
Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,453 Emerson, Lake & Palmer - Brain Salad Surgery
Kind of preposterous right from the off. Makes Punk seem inevitable. Everything is essentially an act of grandiosity and show. I listened to half an hour of this at a struggle and couldn't really follow a narrative. I felt it aspired to classical status but couldn't really make a consistent case. I didn't like it in short.
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1986 Singles # 10 Gwen Guthrie
Bill collecters at my door. What can you do for me....
It's always the same.Gwen has the bottom line and the tune has it all.And off we go into the Top Ten..
1979 Top 40 - # 34 Errol Dunkley
There was always some cool Reggae tune like this in the charts. It was one of the great features of the times.
500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 251 Fall Out Boy - Infinity On High
Emo. So everything but the kitchen sink. Strong on intense feeling. A paucity of tunage,
Song(s) of the Day # 4,310 Dirt Buyer
It's Friday morning and like little Jack Thorner I'm sat in the corner. Alright, hold your horses. I'm not eating my curds and whey. I cant buy these at Sainbury's at Newcastle Central Station where I live. But I've certainly put in my thumb and pulled out a plum this morning for you. What a good boy am I.
Dirt Buyer's Dirt Buyer III. ticks requisite grunge related boxes of Great American ntrospection and undolence for those who can't get out of bed and aren't even sure if they're planning to do so. It's a mellow record for duvet days. It strays sometimes to feeling overly sorry for itself but hey, that's all part of the Rock & Roll quilt.
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