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 dpn'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.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. TWhen 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.
Jeff Buckley was an intensely singular brooding and emotional artist and Grace, the ony completed album he released during his lifetime remains an intensely singular brooding and emotional record. Personally I drift in and out some of it, It's occasionally overwrought and strains a little too hard. He wants to show that he can do too much sometimes. He's frequently resembles Icarus here and we all know what happened to that one. But you can't really fault an artist for ambition.There's so much here that rewards return. And it offers greater retutns if anything. It's a Golden Hour.
The Golden CBGB's years Patti drifts unto the realms of pretension as his her tendency and it's all rather wonderful but probably doesn't stand up to historical scrutiny. But that's what makes her Patti.
This copy of the NME came out on 5th January 1985. I was about to head off to Switzerland on my gap year experience. Meanwhile the NME emblazoned obscure Australian band The Triffids on the front cover and wodered whether 1985 would be their year.That probably didn't completely turn out to be the case. But they were rather magnificent nevertheless.
Dune is reviewed inside. Richard Cook, a fine writer, slags off the book; 'no more profound on questions of life, death and the universe than any other pulp junket.' He comments on Kyle Maclachan's unfortunate resemblance to Terry Wogan. The film is entirely staffed by cameo roles and David Lynch has undersold the vast acting talent at his disposal and comments on the oedipal nature of the earthwirms that populate his Fremen desert.. He writes it off as 'a project littered with misjudgement.... a terrible, tumultuous folly.'
The second side of Da Capo, was a huge abberation . A nineteen minute jam called Revelation which is not aptly named. But Side A flies. There was no band quite like them. At the time or ever since.
Freedom, technicolor, love, madness. In equal measure. They're a bewildering band. 'Laughing, glad and full of glee.' An inspiration for so much wonderful music that came thereafter,
If in doubt head for the lighthouse. Never a bad guiding orinciple and I have a pearl for Saturday morning. The Lighthouse a lilting and lovely Folk record by Tessa Rose Jackson that will conjur up warm reminders of Nick Drake, Bridget St. Johm and Laura Marling..And most winningly for me, Karen Carpenter.
Slowdive are a band that I struggle with. I was around with the furst wave of Shoegaze, ascene that is lauded and hugely influentual now though it was mocked for its timidity and po faced Home Coimties grandeur at the time wuth the probable exception of My Bloody Valentine.
Now Slowduve are hailed as trailblazers but they just move too slowly for my liking to have a genuine claim to blazing a trail.
The Teardrop Explodes were over and well in the past by 1986 but Julian Cope appeared again, dusted down from the turtle shell of the album sleeve of Fried and blinking into the Wogan and Top of The Pops headlights and The Top Twenty. My sweetheart and I bonded over his charms and went to a fabulous gig in the university gig hall when he toured in support of St Julian. .Just hearing this takes me back to love. The best place to be.
Guerilla English Indie. A state of the Nation Address if the type that British groups have been prone to since the Sixties. This is a pint of lager and twenty B&H and one mire round before the last orders bell rings for my tastes.Tinny.
Alan Partridge the great vulgarian comic creation of Steve Coogan is never truly at ease with the artistically or creatively inspired. The artistically inspired or inclined. He tries to engage with them but will inevitably be unable to keep up and so inadvertently or quite deliberately insults ior denigrates them, in any way that he san and ends up showing himself up..
You can imagine how Partridge would react to Frenchwoman Clementine March and her exquisite new album Powder Keg. It's for 'that lot' . Chamber, Brazilian Exotica, Jazz, Folk, Avant Pop. It's totally unrestrained and completely delightful. Stereolab, Cate Le Bon and The Raincoats come to mind. You can imagine the record collections of the musicians concerned and the audience members. .
Guest appearances from Naima Bock, Katy T, Pearson, Alabaster De Plume and many more It's a Friday night knees up for the Rough Trade hip set. It's so hip it hurts but why ever not. Clementine is doing select dates around the country in the coming weeks. Treat yourself. .
Felt are a band whose appeal grows with the passing of time. I was in a record shop the other day and Forever Breathes The Lonely Word was playing and it sounded incredibly allurung. It sold zip.
My brother had this on cassette in the Seventies. It felt and feels like an older brother's record to me. Older guys with long hair, beards and more acquaintance with the ways of the world; the Wizard of Earthsea. Jethro Tull. The plough. Pipe smoke and a closer understanding of a bygone, Vanishing world.
The Black Crowes were already a throwback. Alman Brothers Lynyrd Skynrd and all those good old Southern boys. This is laud back as you like. Urgent when ut needs to be.
A fairly shameless Neil Young steal from first to last chord but beguiling regardless of that. What strikes me going through this countdown is how rich the charts were in terms of their narratives and variety,There's good music always but this is a time when you just needed to look at the charts for evidence of its riches.
This seems to be an extended love letter to London, a city that I have lived un bit tired if. But Madness do a good job of extolling its virtues and this is all familiarly Madness from its earliest chords. I've just spoken to my best friend who turns 60 today.We grew up on the fringes of London together.Those important years. There's something very comforting about Madness. The band, not the condition
Searows Death in the Business of Whaling. An album that I was naturally disposed to warm to given that I've adopted the pursuit of whaling as a metaphor for the journey, guiding principles and momentum of this blog. We drive into the coming storm prow aloft head onwards in the face of it because it's all we can do. Where was I? Ah yes Searows,
This is folk essentually and dispenses atmosphere and tenacity in spades. This record has precedent; Big Thief, Alex G, Phoebe Bridgers and Ethel Cain.Glum resilience and digged and admirable durability. I'm much taken with this.,
The Mighty Lemon Drops were everywhere in 1986. Everywhere in Norwich anyway which is where I was and where they played regularly over the course of the year.. They were clearly in awe and in thrall to Echo & The Bunnymen, The Teardrop Explodes and The Doors. But those were all good things to be. Certainly for me at the time.
They were the subject of a fall out conversation that I had in Autumn between me and an important friend of mine who told me I wasn't allowed to like them anymore. It was one of the most preposterous conversations I ever had but it taught me something about people and the way they can tr tocontro; others. It was a parting on the waves. I realised in retrospect that it was one of those conversations that don't happen very often in life. That he thought he was the alpha male friend. I didn't see it like that.
This is a song that means an enormous amount to me. Because my dearly loved and still dearly missed older sister had a copy of this album and when I play it I think of her and the pain she went though over so many years and the reaction in me is still frankly visceral.
Patti Smith throws herself into everything she does with the most sincere and hearfelt gusto. This is a slightly hit and miss affair. But you can't fault the endeavour.There are some spectacular surprising moments. She has an ability to take me out of myself like nobody else I know.
.After a day out of It Starts With a Birthstone owing to Internet downage we're back in the saddle and riding the dunes with Imarhan their train and their latest Essam over the rising dunes towards the dawn of February.
You can't help but be transported. This is a familiar sound now of North African guitar driven folklore blues. But it doesn't make this record amy less transformative and magical. 'Riders on the storm. Into this' Err. Maybe that was someone else !.
When the Strokes arrived I pretty much listened to them non stop. I seriously considered moving to New York for a while. Just thinking of them brings memories flooding back, Comedown Machine is not a record I've listened to before. It sounds to me like a funky repositioning of the brand.
People are startimg to make a big thing of the 40th anniversay of the C-86 movement. It produced plenty of great records and bands but it didn't look at the time like a scene that was likely to have a lasting legacy. Actually it has. Kids will always want to be in bands. Shuffle onstage, mutter into a mic and make some unholy row.
From Television City in Hollywood. We now relise that all was not sun and laughter on Sonny & Cher's estate on Acedemia Drive. Still these cutesy ballad duets watm the heart despite thc flap of cheese on the accompanying burger.
