I become more prone to Prog. This is one of the more ridiculous records I've heard this week. 'Go to work on an egg' as the expression went. Unusual time signatures and apparently a strong Stravinsky inclination.Out with the Clockwork Cuckoos.
Monday, November 2, 2026
500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 12 PJ Harvey - Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea
The most urban PJ. I sense it came as rather a relief to the faithful.
A Song(s) of the Day # 4,559 Heathers
Shades. Youth. Attitude. Fringes. Noise. It's not so hard. Heathers eponymous album. Out of Missouri. Sounds pretty much as if it could have come out in any year with a 1 or a 6 in it. The ghosts of Slade, Big Star. Primal Scream and erm The Beatles haunt its grooves.
Sunday, November 1, 2026
Coveted # 33 Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan - Ballad of The Broken Seas
A classic image. A woman gazing at her reflection at a motel dressing table. Pinning up her hair. Behind her on the bed a slightly more unkempt type in trainers frowning, sullenly. Where are they going. Where have they been. Does anyone significant not know they are together now. What would they think and say.And do?
Ballad of The Broken Seas is classic Nancy & Lee, Johnny & June, Nick & Kylie balladry. Songs to die for and possibly die to. Off we go to war. Never knowing what we're fighting for The confusion of life. The record keeps spinning. Then the stylus rises, returns to its sentry post. Descends again. Click.
200 Albums for 2026 It Starts With a Birthstone # 56 The Cat's Miaow - When You Smiled & Turned Away
A Monday afternoon. Grey and overcast in Canterbury. Nothing better to than listen to When You Smiled & Turned Away the latest album from Melbourne Indie stalwarts, The Cat's Miaow. A band that have taken a 25 year hiatus after first putting out cassettes on the small Australian label Toybox. Anglo strumming in the vein of The Velvet Underground, The Go Betweens and The Sundays. Heaven clearly is a place on earth.
500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 13 Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes
Now this is a record which is incredibly important and which I covet too and I could easily have had two entries for today on It Starts With a Birthstone. But this will do, 'It's a pilgrimage in which an American band asked direcions from English Folk, got lost and found themselves lighting campfires in an undiscovered land.'
There's something quite gripping about the first Fleet Foxes album. It harks back. To Laurel Canyon and Haight Ashbury, but further too.It heads forward from 2008 to a time when albums like this would become commonplace. It has a cover with an image of a Pieter Bruegel the Elder/ Pastoral Life. The album plants you directly into that existence. 'the sound of ancient voices ringing on your ear..'
A Song(s) of the Day # 4,558 Kali Malone
It's November. It's a beautiful day where I am. I've got up and gone for a walk. The leaves are falling but the light is strong. I'm back and am breakfasting. Listening to a track called Grieving Figure from an album called Burning Song. I don't fancy its chances of the Christmas Number One slot let's put it that way.
What is the sound of one man clapping? Search me readers. Your guess is a good as mine. It Starts With a Birthstone doesn't really deal readily with the deep stuff. This is mainly just a bloke trying to write something worth reading about music on a daily basis.Still, here is a record I really like so here goes....
A couple of years ago I became deeply engrossed with Malone's album All Life Long. And now I'm undergoing a simlar spell, cast by her latest record. They're not the kind of thing I would have listened to ten years ago; never mind twenty, thirty or forty years back. But I suspect they're exactly the kind of records I'm going to find myself increasingly drawn to from now on.
You find yourself talking about 'The drone' and 'tonality'. Wondering whether you need to invest in a subscription to The Wire. This is a record which is not immediately accessible to those who like Rumours. I like Rumours as much as the next person but couldn't listen to it all day.
I've really been primarily guided by melody, by verse and chorus for most of my life but this is music to get lost in and get carried away by. The undertow. Here's a link if you're interested in a more considered and informed response. Otherwise just immerse.
Saturday, October 31, 2026
Coveted # 32 Foghat - Foghat
Dazed & Confused was a pivotal film for me. Music is the fundamental thing for me. Hence... erm .... this blog. Dazed & Confused helped me understand to a much greater degree what it must have been like to grow up in the Mid West in the mid Seventies rathe than on the edge of London as I did.It's a film it's tempting to inhabit.
It's easier after watching it to comprehend why Americans like Kiss. Aerosmith. And some band called Foghat who I'd never heard of until I watched the film. Foghat must have been in the record collection of pretty much every kid in the cast of Dazed & Confused. And Foghat's debut album sounds a lot better to me having heard Foghat by Foghat,
It's consistent. And follows its own internal logic. Foghat are actually an English band though they certainly don't sound like one. They signed a deal with Bearsville Records and headed on the road which in many respects they're still on although several members have dropped off the map down the years.
200 Albums for 2026 It Starts With a Birthstone # 57 Fruit Bats - The Landfill
'Look at that mama spider crawling on the bouganvillea'
Day Two of the World Cup. And while I eagerly await witnessing the best football team Canada have ever produced at 8 o'clock according to reports. In the meantime, I'm listening to The Landfill Fruit Bats twelth album. It's a comforting record. Distinctly old school. As if Dylan and Van the Man and Harry Nilsson are still in their prime and putting out excellent product. The same record forever. Not the worst idea.
500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 14 Arcade Fire - Funeral
Funeral was a big deal and so were Arcade Fire for quite a while. Never ones to shy way from melodrama. the quixioic. The grand gesture. It was one of those albums that came out and you sensed it has changed things in some respect. It had tremendous ambition. It still feels like a classy Art film
A Song(s) of the Day # 4,557 Queen Of The Stoneage
Queen of the Stoneage don't lose their ability to plunge in the knife when that's what the scene and the moment require. Life after all's a walking shadow as The bard 'quilled' and it always makes sense to have some dramatic flair. To have some semblance of fun while you're on alive if you can.
On Perfecth their latest and ninth album in all they strut and fret their hour upon the stage once more and it's just shy of forty minutes short of beaudacious guitar wizardry. and preening. One foot on on the speaker stand and grurning into the moshpit on their forthcoming global tour of ghastly enormodomes.
I took a while with this band but there comes a point at which you click into their pitch. And that moment has come for me. I doff my hat to them. They walk the highwire that describes how deeply and scary life can be. But how the best response is to get yourself up and dust yourself down. To stand up and spar until you hear the bell.
Friday, October 30, 2026
Coveted # 31 Fleetwood Mac - Then Play On
The original incarnation of Fleetwood Mac are the rare kind of band that make you long for a bygone time.There's a fluidiy and flair, a capcaity to slow down time that is quite peerless
500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 15 The Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots
The turn of the century was definitely a turning point you realise ,usically. Musically bands like Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev came into their own. Perhaps they feel like transitional artists now. John The Baptists for the younger generation. Yoshimi is an awestruck album. Struggling with fragility and wonder.
200 Albums for 2026 It Starts With a Birthstone # 58 Lamplight - Lick The Spoon Let It Soften
'INTENSE1' A Repo Man's life is always intense.' Repo Man
If you like intensity you might like Lamplight. Their records burn with a rare intensity. I liked their album Lamplight, from 2024. I like their current one Lick The Spoon Let It Soften.Here was a paragraph from my review of Lamplight,
In the sway of a rural breeze, Ian Hatcher -Williams vocals soothe and enchant the listener on his self-titled debut album as Lamplight which recounts his odyssey from a child raised in a Virginia cult to a burnt out tech worker in New York, then back to Virginia, happily married to his childhood friend, Throughout the album Hatcher -Williams explores how identity as it relates to where a person is from and evolves with where they live, and how that facet of self is further compounded by the agency one has over where they call home. To some extent Lamplight is about learning when to take the reins and when to let go - discovering what parts of yourself should be pruned so new branches can grow.'
Some backstory. Lick The Spoon Let It Soften. has literary qualities, which I realise is what I'm most inclined to. There are the slow determined qualities of Red House Painters. Making our way up a hill. Pushing your shoulder to the wheel. It uses personal narrative as fuel. It isn't afraid to burn,
* Thanks again to Darren Jones
A Song(s) of the Day # 4,556 Spacemoth
When I was nineteen I went for six months to a hotel in Switzerland. It was pretty much the best six months of my life though I've had plenty and am anticipating plenty more. But this was a special time. A golden period. I was young and falling in love for the first time. It's always a good idea to fall in love.
The hotel I worked in was in Locarno in Ticino, Switzerland. On the slope of the alps above Locarno. Looking over the Lake Maggiore and across to Italy. To get to the hotel here you took a funiculaire up the mountain side. The journey was the stuff of dreams; as is the memory of it now as I close my eyes at the end of a long day. Memory can do that if you have the right soundtrack and I'm experiencimg the right album.
This is exactly the right album for this endeavour. It's Spacemoth's Inward Eye and its motorik rhythms and instincts are wrapping me in the cotton memories of forty one years and more. This is very clearly School of Stereolab and there's a very clear utopian centrifugal flow and momentum to music of this kid. An integral logic and coherent and purposeful pulse. 'A journey through inner and outer worlds' as it says on the tin.
Thursday, October 29, 2026
200 Albums for 2026 It Starts With a Birthstone # 59 Shredded Sun - Never Odd Or Even
Shredded Sun come motoring out of Chicago, Illinois with waterpistols blazing on latest album Never Odd Or Even. They trip through the tulips, unpack their hamper of Indie tricks and picnic in a field. Another suggestion of loveliness from Darren Jones / First Mate Starbuck. Thanks Darren.
One moment the Velvet Underground , (who provide the essence and base ingredients and moral and artistic compass for projects like these) are chugging in the slowlane. Next C-86 pick up the batons and press down on the accelerator. Never Odd Or Even. strike a good balance and lasts the course.
500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 17 Arctic Monkeys - Whatever People Say I Am That's What I'm Not
'It's been a long time since...'. Our Space. Twenty years to be precise. There are people who went to school with the Arctic Monkeys who are grandparents now. This was in conversation with The Smiths who were in conversation with The Beatles and The Stones who were in conversation with Dylan Thomas who was in conversation ...
It talks about a rites of passage we all go throuugh. Where we speak too loud and its always coming up to closing time and we don't really listen to each other as well as we might. It's never too late...
t
A Song(s) of the Day # 4,555 Improvement Movement
It's always interesting to find a band that seems to be bending Rock & Roll into fresh shapes, seventy years an more down the road.Improvement Movement work out of Atlanta and are not entirely disimilar to acts like Omni and Canada's defunct Ought.But latest album Your Perfect Real Life yesterday marked out fresh territory to my ears.
Drawing from. on the surface. incongruous ingredients from Prog and Post Punk but the results here are consistently intriguing.There were moment where I found myself drawn back to some of the horrors of listening to late Seventies AOR Easy Listening Radio but the band have a routinely deft touch which hauls the coles from the fire time and again. It's a record that demands little from the listener save for an apprecition of open teritory and minimal clarity. This is unfailingly restless is the bestest fashion,
Coveted # 30 Buffalo Tom
Buffalo Tom chimed and clanged like a Paisley Underground band reborn throughout the early Nineties.Dream Syndicate. True West. True values They never had the personality or the pure firepower to make the front page but they lit the fire in the bellies of honest triers like me who appreciated the real stuff. Creedence Clearwater Revival, Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Dinosaur Jr. .
There's a lot of heartbreak in Buffalo Tom songs. Hearts on sleeves. Men behaving emotionally. There's something valiant about the band. Emotionally courageous They never let up, or desert the banner. their songs sweat buckets and I imagine they did most nights onstage. They don't short change which is all you can ask from anyone.
Big Red Letter Day is their Valentine's Day album. The one where you get the sense that they drop to their knees and pop the big question.. I haven't heard this album for probably thirty years and the years just fall away. The way I feel hasn't changed.
Wednesday, October 28, 2026
500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 18 Bob Dylan - Modern Times
If you read many Uncut Magazines publications you are likely going to be directed to a lot of Bob Dylan product. You may well have made up your mind over whether you're inclined to heed these directions.
Coveted # 29 Madder Rose - Panic On
I'm in the mood to listen to little remembered second albums by mid ranking little remembered left field American bands who surfaced and joined the circuit in the early Nineties and I recall from my time in Germany from 1992 to '94. A fondly remember time. Of going to Cologne and Dussledorf. with my best friend from these times. Seeing bands at the weekend or during the week.Making a point of catching the support, Drinking and smoking as if there was no tomorrow.
Madder Rose's Panic On will serve the purpose for today It's their second album and came out in March '94. I was about to leave Dortmund and head out to Izmir, Turkey for an aborted sojourn with a job that never materialised before heading on to Warsaw as the snow started to fall. Panic On was recorded in Hoboken, New Jersey and has a poetic, arresting quality. A bittersweet essence which drew me back to the record throughout today. Essentially calming. An essential sense that everything will be alright.
200 Albums for 2026 It Starts With a Birthstone # 60 Angela Autumn - Believer
Yes, yes, yes. it's my autumn almanac. All the leaves are brown. And the sky is grey. But the great records keep flowing up the pike . Not least Angela Autumn's new one. An unholy mix of Adrianne Lenker, Karen Dalton and Janis J. New album Believer is as rich and ripe to fall as you could possibly want.
A songwriter and banjo player based in Nashville Tennnessee although she hails from an appalachian region of Pennsylvania. Believe is the sound of someone raised in bluegrass roots music. A brave, bucolic and heady record,
A Song(s) of the Day # 4,554 Grumpy
Grumpy. Nobod'sy favourite of the Seven Dwarves. But a canny band from Brooklyn. They swagger and sway in the queasy Southern sunlight on latest album Unfindable Ring a record which draws from the likes of Big Thief and Wednesday and feels rather 'Now'.Singer and songwriter Heaven Schmitt has a lilting presence. 'I'm so hapy I could die' she intones on opener title track. I'm not sure about that but I'm more than content to listen on.
Occasionally this tips over into a queasy, giddy recklessness as if the whole thing is about to fall apart but the incoherence is clearly deliberate and has a giddy steeliness throughout which is rather impressive. Thanks once more to Darren Jones (Starbuck to his friends) for nudging me here.
Tuesday, October 27, 2026
Coveted # 28 John Cale - Vintage Violence
Cale's first album sounds like sloppy early Glam before the event on Colombia Records. Cale himself is dismissive of the album saying essentially he's trying on clothes in an attempt to find a voice. but it works for me. It's artistic, bohemian has a set of great tunes which swing from melancholy to whimsy.
500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 19 Joanna Newsom Ys
There's an unorthodoxy about Joanna Newsom's work which in itself is remarkable and noteworthy. But then you listen to her records and surely the central kernal of her charm and appeal is clear. It's childhood itself.
200 Albums for 2026 It Starts With a Birthstone # 61 Steff Chura - Dancing Alone On The Concrete
Steff Chura has a good pedigree. She's from Detroit, Michigan.Tight band .Neat formula. Three or four minute New New Wave songs that hark back to the sharpest parts of previous decades. Chrissie Hynde, Liz Phair. Steff Chura.
She first made a record because a good friend died and she decided she needed to do so. This strikes me as a good basis for decision making, She's on Saddle Creek Records which also seems a fine idea. Dancing Alone On The Concrete is her third album and her first since 2019.
She exhibits control of the form and how she wants to project it on all of her nine innings here.She has the Art and the Smarts. Peter Buck and Mike Mills contribute and everything shines. Songs of the street. Songs of how broken hearts have a remarkable knack of healing.
A Song(s) of the Day # 4,553 Crayon Angels
When you were young you could hold a shell to your years. And hear the murmur of the oceans. The enchanted state of childhood. Chancing upon astonishing new music is not unlike this sensation. The low door in the wall The beckoning finger to the golden chamber of youth.
Listening to the eponymous debut album from Crayon Angels out of Northwest Territories, Canada last night at the end of a long day's work felt something like this. It's an extraordinary record. Not their first but the first that's come to my attention.
Thanks to.... Darren Jones for this. Again. thanks Darren. I've no idea of your source for many of your albums you send my way but you certainly add another dimension to It Starts With a Birthstone.
Back to the record. The band are named after a Judee Sill song but this sounds nothing like Judy Sill except for its vaulting ambition and imagination. It recalls Arcade Fire. Another ambitious, Canadian band. But I find this purer. More open hearted. Less stentorian . In fact quite the opposite. This is a very gerous record and doesn't show off as arcade fire generally do, as good as they get.You can sense the terrain. The glory..This has some of the wild eyed rapture of The Children's Crusades.
Monday, October 26, 2026
Coveted # 27 Judee Sill - Judee Sill
Not the happiest person by all accounts. But a supernova talent. Influenced by Bach. Sounded like the Karen Carpenter of the drugged Underground. Made records not quite like anyone elses. Lived a quite extraordinary life and committed armed robberies of liquor stores and gas stations in her youth. Discovered heroin early and set her hand to sex work and fraud before deciding on a music career. Came to the attention of Crosby, Stills and Nash and signed to David Geffen's Asylum label . There's an intense purity to her work, astonishing intricacy and condensed mystical passion for the rapture but I wouldn't recommend the lifestyle. She died of a drugs overdose . Her reputation will surely endure
200 Albums for 2026 It Starts With a Birthstone # 62 Arab Strap - Half-Told Tales
I kind of dig Arab Strap. They come from Falkirk .They're drawn to the darkness. The bleak. The disturbing and uncanny. .They drag me relentlessly back to te Nineties . The vibes and moment of Trainspotting. But they have a voice that endures. Latest album Half-Told Tales (their ninth I think) sticks to the script . It's a minimal, relentless, pulsating record which will make few converts but appeal to admirers.
500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 20 The White Stripes - Elephant
This is 50 minutes long. A pretty ideal length for a vinyl record. I bought it at the time on CD and played it a lot and liked it a lot though I never fell hard for White Stripes. I always found them easier to respect than adore. But this is pretty mean Rock & Roll and is difficult to knock in terms of its design, its appetite and execution.
A Song(s) of the Day # 4,552 The Cat's Miaow
A Monday afternoon. Grey and overcast in Canterbury. Nothing better to than listen to When You Smiled & Turned Away the latest album from Melbourne Indie stalwarts, The Cat's Miaow. A band that have taken a 25 year hiatus after first putting out cassettes on the small Australian label Toybox. Anglo strumming in the vein of The Velvet Underground, The Go Betweens and The Sundays. Heaven clearly is a place on earth.
Sunday, October 25, 2026
200 Albums for 2026 It Starts With a Birthstone # 63 American Football - American Football
I've surprised myself by falling hard for American Football's self tutled fourth album over the last couple of days. It's spacey and grandiose. In The Smith and Radiohead's ballpark. Incredibly inventive and slightly remote and withdrawn. The band are pegged as Emo and hail from Urbana, Illinois. It makes sadness feel slightly stately.
500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 21 The Streets - A Grand Doesn't Come For Free
Intertextuality. Texts feeding in to other text. A Grand Doesn't Come For Free feeds off The Oddysey, Ulysees, Good Fellas, Eastenders. A track closes . Another one begins. This is how we all live The sun rises. The sun sets. It starts again.
A Song(s) of the Day # 4,551 Shabazz Palaces
Hip Hop takes different pathways. I confess I sometimes find its narrowness slightly difficult but Shabazz Palaces stand apart from the herd and latest record It's a Style Sport is a pathway to the stars. I listened last thing last night and got lost there. Astral
There are so many ideas here on every track. It's pure ingenuity. bravery and wonder. A spectral journey to return to and incorporate into your day. I felt like I was in a Star Trek episode. The original gang.I sailed through its thirty eight minutes then went back to the top of the slide.
Saturday, October 24, 2026
200 Albums for 2026 It Starts With a Birthstone # 64 The Heavenly Bodes - Green Hills
It's July. But frankly it's hotter than July. I've just taught three online classes in a flat where it sometimes felt like I was teaching in an actual tin can and headed into Newcastle to make the most of the day. Dropped in to Reflex and this took my fancy. Green Hills the debut album from Falmouth's The Heavenly Bodes. Now I'm back at my desk listening to it on my headphones and I'm gripped.
Apparently emerging from South Cornwall's Grassroots Psych scene. This is instantly recorgisable to anyone with a certain record collection; Sonics, Cramps 13th Floor Elevators, Yardbirds, Troggs, Allah Las. Add your own suspects. An utterly thrilling ride.
Coveted # 26 The Cardigans - Life
I was in Marks & Spencer's in Canterbury today. Lovefool was playing on the retail sound system. It made me think of my oldest nephew who had loved the song as a little boy. He came round unexpectedly today with his wife and young and utterly charming baby boy. All the old stories came out. Baby stories. This is what families are for.
Now I'm listening and coveting Life, The Cardigans second album. Jonkoping's finest; the band came sailing in on the taste for the easy going and kitsch which had a palpable resurgence at a certain point when Brit Pop was in full swing. It was a CD that I played relentlessly throughout the second half of the Nineties and I wonder whether I need a vinyl copy now.
It's a record that wallows in longing for both the Fifties and Sixties and their classic and clockwork arrangements and also for the bands own childhoods I suspect. It has any number of ingenious narratives and moods. It's a masterful record in every respect.
500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 22 Lambchop - Nixon
An artist who mkes life rich. Where every album feels like an event. Meeting up with an old friend after a couple of years of down time. Nixon has multitudes.
A Song(s) of the Day # 4,550 Sour Widows
Well it certainly feels like it. The evenings are drawing in. The sky is darkening. The rain is falling and so are the leaves. Never fear. Because Sigil, the second album from Oakland, California's Sour Widows is here. 'Every crack in the ceiling. Let's another angel in....'
It's pure witchy wonder. There's a swan on the cover, struggling with the snow and trying to rise to the heavens. Sigil documents this constant struggle. The agonising towards epiphany. Throwing Muses provide the guiding pilot 'Light the candle.' 'put a candle in the window.' we're bound for home.
Friday, October 23, 2026
500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 23 Gillian Welch - Time (The Revelator)
Uwinds like a hot afternoon on the porch with a pitcher of something potent shared between friends.
200 Albums for 2026 It Starts With a Birthstone # 65 Jenny Gillespie Morton - In The Saftey Of The Light
So many album like these come out on a regular basis these days. Albums made by willowy artists in flowing dresses summoning back the golden age of Folk.
A Song(s) of the Day # 4,549 Michael Kiwanuka
Michael Kiwanuka's latest album Fudge is immediately a sunlit meadow and a great way for the weekend to begin. Soul flecked utopian semiments and melodies. I'v never really found a Kiwanuka' album to wallow in.
i'm doing just this as four closes in upon five .. It's a record that sends the message that labour is done and its time to restore .Fudge is staggering mellowness.
Thursday, October 22, 2026
Important Gigs in My Life # 1 The Thompson Twins & Tears For Fears - November 2nd 1982
Another day, another series. I plan twenty of these and haven't made my list yet. Just a set of evenings and experiences that stick out in my mind for one reason or other. Starting with this, my very first gig, and ample evidence that this is not some late bid for credibility. I was seventeen when I went, a late developer emerging from a spotty undistinguished teenage phase, looking for ways of constructing a self.
Hammersmith was a bus ride away from my family home in South West London. Still my favourite part of that city. Even now, I dream about being on that and other local bus routes. I went to this on my own. Not ready for a girlfriend to share a particular teenage rites of passage with at this moment. Thompson Twins and Tears For Fears were both set to embark on what turned out to be sustained assaults on the British and global pop charts which would bear decidedly mixed fruit though we were none of us to know that at the time. The pop world, particularly in Britain was about to change, reflecting the times. Undoubtedly for the worse. I'll brook no arguments with that
Tears For Fears first. I had quite a bit of time for them at round about that point. Their debut album The Hurting was out and I'd bought it. All exaggerated teenage mannerisms and psychodramas but I was a bit like that at that moment and still have the diaries to prove it. Late developer as I said.
I'm listening to it now. I'd maintain it's a reasonable record but that may be my teenage self confusing me. Still, some fine melodies, magpie thievery and the title track, Mad World and Pale Shelter, some opening salvo. The singles are generally the ones that stand the test of time best. I stood a few rows back from the stage in my John Lennon specs and curly mop of hair, probably swaying slightly. Lost in irredeemably teenage thought.
The record overcomes me now eventually in terms of it's non-stop angsty projections, particularly when the pace drops. Some tracks actively repel me. I no longer have a Holden Caulfield fixation. They had tunes but little depth. Still, they were right for me at the time. I enjoyed them and they were probably one of the best support bands I've ever seen, all these years later.
Now, after a tea break to come down from Orzabal and Smith's emotional contortions I'm back to reflect on Thompson Twins. They had just made one of the most remarkable transitions in all of pop history. From a seven piece, Talking Heads fixated political seven piece to a mop haired trio of almost cartoon-ish quality, probably better suited to their name, derived from the moustachioed detectives in Tintin
I was unaware of the complete nature of the band's metamorphosis when I bought the ticket for this. I think I would probably have preferred to witness their earlier incarnation. Listening to the record this gig presaged, their breakthrough album Quick Step & Side Kick now is frankly a much more harrowing experience than getting through The Hurting, which is at least supposed to be distressing. The pop version of the Thompson Twins were one of the most conspicuous attendees of the garish pop party of the early Eighties. Duran Duran and Nik Kershaw were also there along with numerous other fortunately mostly forgotten arriviste ghouls. It was an unedifying spectacle. As for Quick Step & Side Kick, it was at the time and is still a deeply vacuous and frankly upsetting listening experience. I'm not a snob. At least not completely. There is always space for pop records that don't appeal to Velvet Underground fans like me. Some of them are just fabulous. But this is an affront. Listen to it yourself if you don't believe me. On second thoughts don't. I wouldn't wish it on anyone.
I think I enjoyed them well enough. The sound was certainly impressive for a trio. Then they put down their instruments and started dancing around the stage. The music continued. It was an early lesson for me, both about the nature of the music business and about life itself. Thompson Twins and I pretty much parted company when I left the venue. Tears For Fears and I a couple of
years down the line when I heard the singles from their world conquering second album Songs From the Big Chair and they left me utterly cold. Still, for better or worse, these two were my first. Oh good, I can take Quick Step & Side Kick off now. The things I do for this blog...
200 Albums for 2026 It Starts With a Birthstone # 66 TV Buddha - Hallelujah Anyway
Cometh the hour, cometh the sound and the scene. Chicago's TV Buddha's debut album Hallelujah Anyway is unhinged on any number of levels but rather loveable. Garage Nuggets if you're looking for a peg to hang this on. Beach Boys meet 13th Floor Elevators down by the corner. Post Pandemic Pop of the kind that young Chicagoans like National Photo Committee Horsegirl, Sharp Pins are highly conversant in.these days. Urgency, abandon and slightly tone deaf joy. This is loads of fun ! Playing New York next March. Be ahead of the herd.
Coveted # 25 Badly Drawn Boy - The Hour Of Bewilderbeast
I find myself coveting albums I never imagined myself coveting. And in vinyl form. The act of ownership is something we couldn't really explain to ourselves or anyone else. I'm long past the point of buying records because the NME tells me to. Or because I feel the need to impress anybody. This just strikes me as very good. Something I had no real realisation of when it came out. I wasn't really interested.
The Hour Of Bewilderbeast seems easier to place within a context now to me than it did when it came out in 1999. Things seemed to be slowing down in the UK after Brit Pop and the great, slightly depressive and mordant slabs of OK Computer, Urban Hymns and Mezzanine.
This was a smalller statement. Homier. A Baby Bird with a stab at the Mercury Prize which it won in 2000.. Something to buy alongside Travis, Belle & Sebastian and Elbow. Now it feels significant and bold and slightly poetic. Damon Gough. An Elliott Smith who would stay the course.
500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 24 The Killers - Hot Fuss
You see it quite often in Rock & Roll. Quite a lot in life. John The Baptist and Jesus Christ. Two thousand years down the line Television and The Cars. Echo & The Bunnymen and U2. Orange Juice and Haircut 100. Pixies and Nirvana. The Strokes and The Killers.
It's how the record companies and the music business works but its how bands work too. Hot Fuss is Hot Stuff. It keeps the executive behind the desk happy and the kids on a first date at the back of the Midwest Arena happy too. You can't fault this. It hits its marks. It rings the cash tills. It's great Pop Muisc.
A Song(s) of the Day # 4,548 Meryl Streek
Stories They Don't Teach You At School where should we start. How about Meryl Streek's latest. A one man rant from Dublin. Twelve songs. Thirty eight minutes. Motormouth mindset . This will more than do for Donnerstag.It's not quite clear what the message is but a great time is had by all !
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
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