What drives somebody to get onstage and try to make a group of strangers laugh. I was stull no wiser once I'd read the interview. Henry is funny,honest, genuine and likeable .Richard Prior is his favourite comic. He had just come out of ITT which was a pretty awful attempt to mix light tabloid sexism and humour which was prevalent in the Eighties . He's moving as are many of his contemporaries towards non sexist non racist comedy,as we head into the mid Eighties.
What's great is that The NME devotes so much coverage thaat is way beyond the band playing ar toyr local venue on a Wednesday evening. It has a mission to entertain but also educate and inform that frankly is unmatched and missed now. At least by me.
The Housemartins played my university Lower Common Room in my first year there. I didn't go. There was too much to choose from and I couldn't see it all. A shame because they were a wonderful band and they got the times right, The tunes were great and the message consistent. The Thatcherite tide was coming in good and proper and would take much with it despite resistance.
What Housemartins advocated was resistance from those who kept money in jars to those who owmed oil tankers. Nothing changes. They still say the right things forty years on. There's genuine soul and it hails from Hull.
I have no memory of this at all. I expect Jason Burby and Raymond Capon , the kids in my class who delighted at such dubious Metal gems danced and frolicked to it of an evening. The Tommy Vance Friday Rock Show. It wasn't for me. I certainly didn't ! I don't remember this ! It has been utterly expunged from my memory and cast into a deep pit. A mine in Mawdor where orcs make mischief. Take it away. I'm scared !!!!
I beg your pardon Lee Anne Womack? You might not have promised me a rose garden. Byt this is Old School C & W of the most lachrymose and most fattening decription, and I fear for my fillings.
Porland Oregon's Blackwater Holylight's Not Here Not Gone is a dark album straining upwards to the light, Like a distant young generational relative of Soundgarden's Superunknown or Amin Duul II's Yeti with dark angels harmonising at the mic to the rafters.
This is a dark mass but one that's drenched in melody . It draws on a heavy legacy Sabbath, Zep and Purple to to pleasingly light effect. Blackwater Holylight are coming to Newcastle in May and I'm tempted to book a pew in the congregation.Not Here Not Gone grows on me like moss on a rock.
I'd like to write a book about important people in my life and how I happened to meet them. The moment of meeting can be a revealing one I'd say in many respects. . I'd quite like to write a lot of books really but it seems I'm embarked on this blog instead and I'll make do with that. This anyway is how I met James.
I met James in 1985. He lived in the room opposite me at the halls of residence where we both housed in our first year.at university halls of residence. Neither of us were very hard working . We both came from protective middle class stock. Both knew it. And relished the fact that we probably didn't have to struggle much in life. So why develop a chip on your shoulder of claas driven ngst. Why not endeavour to live instead. That's what we've both proceeded to do.
My abiding memory of the moment we met was that we were both in the communal kitchen one afterniin and James was grinning relentlessy from ear to ear. I've felt looking back at the Trotrskyite line that his companion Ben who roomed in the room next door to James and who I was meeting for the first time too was feeding me. As if he were fishing for political souls and he'd cast his hook deep into the briny and I'd swallowed his line hook line and sinker. Like some gratefil guppy. Closed my gills sloppily and ardently round his bait and find myself being reeled in swung promptly on deck and having my fishy brain promptly bashed about the planking while I thrashed my sorry last. Ben cheers was never sctually that naive,
Ben's hardline barricade spiel was complete guff I've since realised. OK we were all people with political ideals which I'd stand by and stull hold as I know James still does, But not much excuses the Trotskyite line , Particularly when you;re all pretty privelidged which we were. . . That's permanent revolution whether you like it or not whuch means little time for Smokey Robinson & The Miracles. ouzo. taramasala and all that. Doctor Martens and living on Hampstead Hill which it transpired Ben had a great appetite for too,.Middle class trappings. Revolutionary reading and preaching matter,
I knew what I liked. Collarless shorts uncense sticks. R.E.M , Penguin Paperbacks and Marxist iconography. A bust of Lenin which I'd brought back from Moscow with me from a college trip a couple of years earlier from Andropov's Soviet Union and Ben eventually asked me to give to him as he was clearly a better socialist than me. I demurred and still have the bust of Laughing Len in a sharp suit, sharp tie and shirt in a hollow silver cast in front of me at my desk as I write, I'm not really a Bolshevik either. Just a poseur, let's be frank,
James meanwhile it transpired liked sleeping.James Brown and sloanes. Probably in that order .He was quite right to do so . He;s done alright for humself since . Well ditch the Sloanes. All you really need is Jimmy B.. So here he is....
Simon & Garfunkel albums are incredibly resonant, sturdy things. They take you through all the passages of your life. Memories. Back to a beloved sister who loved them forty years back. Her illness and premature early death. Through love affairs. To a mother thinking her husband might be dying one Christmas after over sixty years and wanting simething calming to listen to in the living room in between bouts. Those are just my memories. What are yours? .
Back to The Graduate. One of the finest films I kniw. A film that says almost everything like the best cultire should. And back to the records. All of thse songs are Dangling Conversations. Uncompleted kisses. They'll still be here when the reat of us are not. They're in their time and place. Listen to A Simple Desultory Phillipic . But they transcend them with emotions that transcend the context of time effortlessly amd become the eternal. Listen to almist anything else. Like a fleet footed inside left, darting into space.Paul Simon on the sleevenotes it's written us planning to write a book.
Magellan is a term reated to AI data analytics. I won't go into that as here seems neither the time or the place. It was previously most readily a surname used in application with Francesco Magellan the Portuguese maritime explorer famously renowned for hs journeys ir duscveries,
Alternatively there's Swing Lo Magellan a rather tirsome geek fuelled album by Dirty Projectors/ Geeky and ridiculously prog inclined, Two tracks in it started to annoy me intensely and I had to take it off immediately !
'When I get to the bottom I'll go back to the top of the slide . When I stop and I turn and I'll see you again....'. The Beatles Helter Skelter
Such is the nature of life. We awaken. The sun goes up. We start another day. So with me. I finished a rundown yeaterday in 1972 at 6 in shorts in Zimbabwe. I wake and start again at the top of anither slide. Into another chart. It's 1979 and the 30th September. My 14th birthday, It's a Sunday. So my family are probably off to church.Into Richmond and off to Duke Street near the green. I dutifully tag along.
The Police are Number One and eventually we'll get to Message In A Bottle. Philosophy in a bottle. But in the meantime we'll start at the bottom of the Top 4p. When You're in Love with a Beautiful woman its hard apparently. Especially if you've got a dodgy eye patch, a worse for weat cowboy hat and you're only role is to grab a pair of maracas and grin inanely at the camera.. .
Like The Radiohead who decide they'd prefer to stay underground. Formed in 2014 in the environs of Reading EXPO is their fourth album which by any standards is slow going but they've been active on other projects in the meantime.
EXPO is slightly more interiorised in tone than 2023's Compact Trauma which still has my ears ringing three years after its release.. But it's a fascinating record on its own terms. Rhythmic and subtle. Easing me into Saturday's tributary. Flowing on to the ocean.
I find Ulrika Spacek comforting. they're like the mechanism of a precisely governed wrist watch. The tick tock mechanisms never missing a thing.
A lpt of the best msic from 1986 came from Australia and New Zealnad though sometimes you had to search hard foe it. This was # 4 in New Zealand that year. It chugs like so much of my favourite music does. It didn't chart in the UK.
Emil Svanangen '.a kind of synth pop Bon Iver'. Judging by Loney Now an enchanting thing tto be. This is a wonderful album heralding in Friday evening and the reason again why I write this blog.
January in Newcastle has finally succumbed to an equally unpromising February whuch if today is anything to judge by is going to be highly demanding. Spiritually. No signs as yet of Spring. So Sophie Bridgers Stranger In The Alps has been my go to.record all week . I wonder if she actually went out to look at the Alps on her holiday on Swirzerland or Austria.. Frankly I suspect she stayed in and moped in the ski lodge, Nick Drake without the walk in the woods.
Depresesed teenage years drift into depressed twenties. Settle down towatds depressed thirties and start a family and bring some depressed offspring onto the planet. This stuff has been gettimg more introspective and mopey since the turn of the millennium. Travis wondered in 1996 Why it always rained on them. 25 year on we're not alone . We await. the deluge.
It's a relentlessly cheerless record but quietly comforting at the same time with little chance of respite or a break in the clouds pn either side. Like Edward Munch on mogadon. But introspection has always been a part of the human condition and this has always been an album that's on relatively frequent rotation on my record player. Along with Belle & Sebastian, Radiohead, Nirvana, Joy Division, Magazine, Smiths, Bowe (whose mentioned early here, another reason to be sad. A long list is made) . Dylan, Leonard Cohen Simon & Garfunkel and the Beatles too, Once they decided they wanted to do more than hold your hand and started wondering where all lonely people came from and why that girl made Lennon crawl off and sleep in the bath..
The depressed state of white Rock & Roll,'Jesus Christ I'm so blue all the time.' On and on Sophie drones but somehow it's all rather like being under a warm blanket..All this relentless post millennia drifting into Z Gebration atrophy I love this record despite myself, Meanwhile Sophie and pal are staying in at The Chelsea Hotel.You can't help wondering what Sid and Nancy might wonder about the fate of The Ghost of Rock & Roll. It's under the blanket Sid.
Telegram Sam is the kind of song that should always be at Number One. 'He's a natural born poet she's just out of sight...'. 'Me I funk but I don't care. I ain't no sqyare with my corkscrew hair.' Mauc Bolan changed the English language . We short all be grateful.
What is the Sound of one Hand Clapping? Your guess is as good as mine. Never mind that; The Sound of Trying? Give up? Well it's the new album by Sotto Voce the alter ego of Brooklyn's Ryan Gabos.
I've been listening to this on / off for a week now and it's compelling. Trying in the best sense of the word. Engaged rather than annoying. Bringing something to the table. Low fi sinew..
You What ? The essential quality of the 21st Century musically at least seems to be that it has got obscure. It's got either very obvious or tyrned in on itself and become a trife elitist, But you don't have to embrace the elitism . You can if you prefer immerse yourself in the arcane.
Here is an album where you can do exactly that.. Apparently 'a move away from heavy drone towards spaghetti drone. Very listenable for all that.Rather like a summons to the deep sleep state.
Chicory Tip were actually the first band I ever consciously chose to like. I was six and I arrive back in England from Zimbabwe and they were the entre into the world that is sstill the most important one to me. The song for me is really What's Your Name. But this was pretty fabulous too. I vaguely remember a flexidisc of some description.
Foo Fighters in 2007. They'd settled unto theur stride by now. They clearly weren't Nirvana ir Husker Di but franly they never pretended to be. This was life in the middle lane coming to an enirmodome near you and there's actually nothing wrong with that . Regardless if the naysnayers and elitist types who probably regretted Dave Grohl taking the drummer's stool way back in the mists if time..Quite serviceable.
A bit of wistfulness and indie guitar as I make my way to half ten and a virtual date with Dussledorf Insurance Types. Youmi Zouma's No Love Lost To Kindness ticks the requisite boxes. It sounds like Barney Rubble out of New Order on guitar.. Out of Christchutch, New Zealand and with a few albums under their belt. Due to tour Europe in March. This seems to offer a good night out.
Primal Scream started here. Crystal Crescent was the A Side but ut should have been this. A genuine classic which the band themselves realised in time.
'Whether Morrissey is questing romantic or bruised archangel is something I leave to your own musing. I prefer to hear the work of J.Marr as the true spirit of the Smiths. Hand In Glove to these ears their one true masterpiece, could be about legwarmers and stirrup pimps for all the difference it makes -with that crimson flush of guitar and rhythm any words would do... sounds like an acid song,' Richard Cook
In terms of household objects Spoon aren't quite up there among essentialthinngs I need to listen to . Like Televiion, Magazine and Wire for example. This is alright I s'ppose.Bonus points for use of the word 'taciturn'.
Geologist's Can I Get Another Packet of Camel Lights is another Animal Collective related release in case you were missing your latest drag on Animal Collective related product in addition to fancyong a drag on a Camel Light or other nicotine related merchandise.
It's a fantastic avant gard experience. It's almost a raga rock album and there aren't nearly enough of those. There's a fair but of drone and some livelier abrasion related interludes.This may not appeal to everyone but I can certainly buy in to what's going on here.
I first heard this remarkable record shortly after it came out in the late nineties un my sister's upstairs flat above the Maid Of Honour Tearooms a short walk from Kew Green. I had never heard of Elliott Smith. I suspect we were both rather depressed . We were going through difficult periods of our lives, Depression is part of the life condition and I suspect we are all prone to it. Even if we don't admit it. I'm always wary when people tell me they are never depressed, I suspect they have something to hide.
As soon as the music started in the dim light of my sister's bedsit I had a moment of recognition that this was something I needed. My sisrer has similar musical taste to mine.This us something that has happened to me before and since; Nick Drake, Gram, Courtney Barnett. I recognised places it came from. Beatles. Big Star.
But also a place inside that people who like music like this recognise. A way with wirds. A way with melody. A sensitivity. A poetry..I don't think of this as sad music despite what happened to Elliott Smith a few years later. When it did this was painful to people who loved his music. Oh he meant it ! Of course he meant it. That's how he made it. After a while you transcend the pain and appreciate the exquisite art
Tim Buckley's an artist I appreciate more with passing time and move to his less known more obscore records. Lorca is spooky in the extreme. Ir's an experimental work that makes use if the chromatic scale. It seems like a deliberate attempt it seems to alienate the more conservative elemaents of Buckley's audience. It's fantastic frankly. Challenging in the way great art should be.
There are no sing alongs or cheery choruses. Churlish critics would howl 'pretentious' Buckley made records which were more conventionally aesthetic but this is compelling in a tortured sense. More here.
They didn't put scores on album reviews back in those days. Never mind Pitchfork style decimal points. You had to actually read the thing. But here at least the title gives the listener a hint. KINDA HO HUM some kind of indicator the record concerned might not be altogether a classic. There's a number on it about how Ray Davies ince fancied Lady Di. Also one about uce cream. It diesn't seem like an essential purchase.
Manic Pop Thrill came out in May of 1986 and I played it a lot over the next couple if years. That Petrol Emotion were not quite like any other band on the scene at that point. They had the pop nous if the Undertones the ashes if whom they'd emerged from. But they also augmented that with a barbed art Punk approach. Television, Pere Ubu, Gang of Four, Beefheart , Stones. I took note and broadened my record collection
Siouxsie made her mark hugely on my life at seconday school. The Bansgees statement was an incredibly powerful one and she particularly was a style statement it was remarkable to witness at my secondary school. She was a style icon but also incredibly empowering for girls going into those particular teenage years. She made a lasting artistic statement.
There was also some fairly ghastly song in the Top Thirty and mire than likely in the Top Five that sent misoc lovers screaming from the room with their hnds clasped around their eats. Generaly the culprit had been sent to the charts by Opportunity Knocks or New Faces. Neil Reid was npt bad at all when compated to the more villainous offenders.
'Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry and the world laughs at you.'
Getting through the day by the skin of their teeth. Bristol's Lagkamer are up and at them on tour in an Indie venue near you in support of fourth album No .
It's old school Indie guitar joy. A kissig cousin of Courtney Barnett and Bill Ryder Jones. Dating back to Teenage Fanclub, Pavememt, Lemonheads et al. And beyond that to XTC, Neil Young and The Velvet Underground Attitude and swagger, And devil may care shrug,
I warmed to No immediately. It lives in the moment. And encourages you to do the same/Old fashioned fin. An excellent record. Yes from me !
Thus is the kind of thing that I unstinctively went for in 1986. Polite Indie that was on Creation. Liked Television, The Velvet Underground. Poetry and Penguin paperbacks. Was made up of people who either wrote or could have written for the NME. Had good fringes shirts jeans and shoes,
This wasn't a hit as it should have been and Alan McGee was obliged to look elsewhere. I saw Weather Prophets at the Hammersmith Clarendon. Supported by Pop Will Eat Itself, The Servants and a notably lairy and unhinged Happy Mondays. I liked the Weather Prophets but instinctively knew they were too polite to go where they wished to go, It doesn't stop me loving this any less.
To listen to Neu! is still to speed into the futire almost fifty years after the original releases.. Germany Michael Rother claims are still catching up with the trail they blazed. Prophets without honour.This is an incredibly calming forty five minutes.
Don Watsin goes to see Lou Reed at the Brixton Academy and writes his copy. It's a proper slagging. No sacred cows here, Lou is despatched as a lamb at the slaughter. He plays perfunctory versions of the classics; Waiting For The Man, Rock & Roll, Sweet Jane, Walk On The Wid Side et al. But his heart is clearly not in it. His between songs patter minimal. 'I just got one bad habit left and that's playing pinball.' Watsin signs off, 'Put simply he's getting a bit dull these days.' The review is worth the 45p cost of the issue in itself. It's what The NME was for. And why I kept buying .it long after it stopped doing it,
Of course this was famously the theme for a coca cola capmaignif the early seventies and also the last song on Mad Men. Leaving Dan Draper with a beatific smile of realisation and closure as the curtain fell.. You can't fault the sentiment,
A record I was nudged towards by a recommendation a few days ago by Darren Jones best friend of It Starts With a Birthstone and that I've been playing pretty much relentlessly ever since,
London Electronic trio PVA's second album No More Like This has an intense sense of purpose and clarity which seems set to rattle a few cages and gather some garlands while it may..
It has a fairly upfront amd striking sleeve, An immediate sensual claustrophobia that's incredibly rare, Artistically inclined but not in a forced or gruelling way but an instinctive one.
The whole thing has a breathy intensity I find compellingly hypnotic, Not spelling itself out like the best records,But making you want to plau it again to try to work out what it is that you like so much about it. It's the best thing I've heard so far in 2026..
The Hoodoo Gurus took a blender approach to Rock & Roll. You couldn't help but weigh them up against precedents. Richard Grabel, NME's New York correspondent thinks they're great and compares them to The Cramps and The Dolls.
He praises their debut album Stoneage Romeos to the heavens .. Grabel is less restrained than the majority of NME's British staffers who are genrally predominantly concerned with their artistic cool, Difficult to maintain when you're chatting to the Hoodo Gurus
In my second year at university I made the mistake of moving in with my best friends from the first year on the only hill in Norwich. It was an incredibly steep hill and ,made up for the lack of any others by being forbiddingly steep and a deeply depressing place to return to at the end of each university day when I really should have been with my girlfriend in her snig bedroom on campus.. The house where we loved was next to the prison where Lester Piggott the prizewinning jockey was serving a prison sentence for tax evasion. That was probably the most interesting thing about the part of town where we foolishly decided to live
My friendship with the other guys in the house didn't make it until Spring although we've since made our peace . The album we listened through to continually over our months together was Anita Baker's Rapture. Probably the greatest album ever made.concerning the sacred act of rumpy pumpy.
Kings of Convenience are a gentle duo from Bergen, Norway who find the soft spot between Simon & Garfunkel, The Shins and Belle & Sebastian. Works for me. .
Al Green is probably the artist I would like to have seen live more than any other.This came just after Tired Of Being Alone and both songs sung of a loneliness that people experience that can almost speak of a spiritual longing.
It's almost impossible to listen through to this record now. Even surely if Oasis make you happy inside. Please ask yourself why is that ? . It's so bloated.I can't begin. It's opening lyrics are ' Step off the train all alone at dawn. Back into the hole where I was born. The sun in the sky never raised an eye to me. ' Can I take it off now. Rock & Roll has always been about doggerel and nonsense but this makes so little effort that it hurts my head.immeduately and contibues as if I;ve chosen to bang said head agaonst a wall... There are one hundred minutes left. But dear reader. I leave them to you.
To some degree if like me you were an avid NME reader at 17 and record collecting was almost inevitably along with books going to be the great accumulation of the next forty ears. By whuch point t your record collection is almost predictable by my age, You'll have loads of Bowie. Beatles and Stones to make it good to be alone. Krautrock. Soul. Funk. Jazz. Funk and obscure Art Rock. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick and tick. I am Lester Bangs vagrant son !
You'll probably alsp have a couple of 13th Floor Elevators records though you may not have actually sat and listened all the way through to them that often.. Err tick. I've got the first one and the one with Slip Inside This House on it for the moments when I need to scare the neighbours.
I'm listening through to The Psychedelic Sounds of The 13th Floor Elevators nowand I'm damned glad I bought it. Thirty six years ago , In my last year at university at a second hand record shop in Norwich around the corner from the halls of residence where I lived .
I met a couple of friends there. While I was about to buy it. Music friends . Neil and Linda. Music friends are the best kind of friends in life I'd say. I still have a letter from Linda where she witters on about The Hit Parade and The Sun Shines in Gerrard Cross frim the golden days when we used to write letters. Before the Internet came along to set us free..
I can vaguely remember what we talked about that day when I bought this record. I had bought the first Suicide album about the same time so probably that. The Family Cat; Tom Verlaine twelve inch. . I had a ridiculous infatuation with Television which has endured until today. I used to go into record ships and check whether they had it in their racks. But I suspect The Psychedelic Sounds of - The 13th Floor Elevators was the album I bought that day
Neil and Linda were at important gigs that I attended in my last year at university, I am of an age when I refuse to call it 'uni'.. My Bloody Valentine . Pale Saints and Lush. The Norwich Arts Centre. .Stone Roses played and then took over the NME, Top of the Pops and colonised youth culture in Britain for a couple of years.U had a cold so wasn't there that night regrettably.
Now I'm sitting in my flat in Newcastle in 2026 and lustening to the record again. What strikes me is how utterly deranged it would have sounded to the straight community when it was released in 1967. Almost twenty five years from the day that I bought it, Almost sixty from today. It would have scared the hell out of people. These are people having a better time than anybody has a right to and the powers that be don't like them to but also takiing genuine risks which challenge conventional perspectives and ways if thinking and living. . Much of the record is entirely unhinged.
The terror generated I imagine was entirely intentional. The band and their circle were ingesting LSD at every opportunity. Never the wisest idea. But it wasn't just the recklessness of youth Read the sleeve notes from Lelan Rogers from a time when people wrote and read sleevenotes.because they were trying to say and learn something, These people had a manifesto and a mission.
Read the sleevenotes while you listen to the record. They're provicative and biblical. The band openly advocated the ingestion of mind altering substances and were targeted by the authorities subsequently. People genuinely thought society was going to change radically and in many ways it genuinely did over the ensuing years. Listen to The 13th Floor Elevators. Listen to The Velvet Underground. The Doors or Jefferson Airplane. Listen to the Beatles. The Rolling Stones or Pink Floyd. Led Zeppelin. The conviction is in the grooves.
Now go to your local newagent close to where you live. Go to theshelves which house the music section and you'll see Rock & Roll encased. Enshrined as another set of shelves suggesting recreational options and further pyrchasing options. The 200 Psychedelic Albums to hear before you die. The 200 Glam or Punk or Soul or Shoegaze records you need to own.. Rock & Roll is still incredibly fertile and exciting but in 2026 it's essentially a commodity in the same respect as other lifestyle options are..Perhaps essentially it's always been that,
Listening to the album is still a visceral experience though. Most of the people involved in its making are now dead. But the reason people create is to attempt to make a mark. This record continue to be listened to. It offers alternatives to walking the straight path and thinking and adopting the given line. .
So do you want the good news? Or the good news? I only have good news here. What do you think this us the Daily Telegraph.? Fox News? Well where exactly should I start. It's only February and I seem to have enough great new albums on my playlist for songs of the day for the next week and a half at the very least.
Leeds Noise Pop Merchants Tulpa are first up. and make playung guitars made me feel like I was sevnteen all over again on latest album Monster Of The Week. It's an unreconstructed alternative guitar record and you can trace the bans inspirations within seconds. But that's no burdem for anyone who loves the sounds if streamlines guitars and harmonised reflectuins on the life condution,
Pavement, Teenage Fanclub and theur cpntemporary equivalents are the reference points. We're all twenty four hours from Tulsa. Heading towards Spring.
