The NME - 1986 Year of the Triffids ? # 10 Africa Albums Review

 

Mark Sinker reviews 15 albums. Mostly from Central Africa. This suff is such a publuc service that it makes you wonder. How were you expected to tell your Soukous from your Makossa?Well, you could try reading the NME. Exquisite music journalism.

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,446 Big Black - Songs About F ******

 

Not one to leave at the front of a row in your room for your mother to walk into your room and notice.

1986 Singles # 3 Prince

 

When you're young, (and for the record I no longer, at sixty consider myself  really young), you really have no sense that things won't continue forever and songs like this won't just keep pouring out of the taps.

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500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 242 Hal - Hal

 

The kind of Singalong Pop that made the world go round in the early Seventies.  Rather saccharine and ersatz after five or  six of Hal's variants on this. 

1979 Top 40 - # 25 Boney M

 

Boney M were a complete fixture in the singles chart throughout the Seventies and looking back you realise that this was a completely great thing because they were invariably wonderful ! ABBA, Blondie and Boney M  ticked all the boxes. Pay no attention to NME types although I confess I am one of that number myself.

Song(s) of the Day # 4,319 Mandy, Indiana

 

I had a severe Industrial Noise episode when I went to see Mandy, Indiana live at Zerox on Newcastle Quayside de just over a couple of years back. But it seems I'm a glutton for punishment as I'm back in the queue for my latest dose of medicine. An album called.... wait for it.... URGH.

I love Mandy, Indiana's schtick. They're a band called Mandy, Indiana, from Manchester who sound like a French railway announcer having some kind of fit at the height of the rush hour at Paris Nord.. These aren't tunes so much as shots to the couer and Mandy, Indiana are to blame! They give love a good name !  Get in line if you know what's good for you, . 

ABBA

 

1986 Singles # 4 R.E.M.

 

R.E,M.for five years consecutively span my world in terms of my consciousness. That's no exaggeration, They were my imaginative life. I drove  my love half mad as we fell helplessly in love because I never ever stopped playing them to her. My imaginative debt is incalculable,

i went on a interrail in the symmer of 1986. One of the great imaginative journeys of youth. The time when you mught to all intents and purpises actually be a Scott F. Fitgerald charracter, Paris, Nice Barcelona, Florence, Rome. Geneva Locarno, Munich (where I slept in the station and was woken by police dogs, Stuttgart, Tubingen, Frankfurt and home. An unrepeatable imaginative journey. And all the time dreaming of the arms of Venus de Milo. 

100 Miles - Mojo Magazine # 7 Miles Davis - Weirdo

 

1979 Top 40 - # 26 Randy Vanwarmer

 

There was something beyond horror. Even at 13 about this.

500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 243 The Fall - Imperial Wax Solvent

 

Whenever I come across a Fall album on one of these countdowns it feels rather like work . The same applies when Nick Cave pokes his head round the office door. It feels like work.My heart sinks and I' m back on the conveyor belt. Back on the chain gang. Back in the typing pool . Under someone's thumb. In the name of the novel. Under the frog. As low as it gets.

I realise what seems like ten minutes through the opening lumpenproletarian dirge Alten Towers which for thousands of others this sems like the height of ecstasy and adrenalised thrill.  Imperial Wax Solvent has its moments. But I've been here to may times pn this mortal coil and I've given my take on The Fall here too often too. That man in the corner of the pub is shouting at me again. 'I'm a fifty year old man. What are you going to do about it?' Leave the pub mate,. 7/5.

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,447 The Wrens - The Meadowlands

 

An album that has come to be seen in mythic dimensions  in the eyes of believers likr a great coming of age novel or film that you must experience before you die. Catcher In The Rye in 12 inch form. It's the sound of failure essentially and what exactly it i that's so appealing about it.

Released in 2003 by an independent guitar band from New Jersey. Formed in the late eighties and infamous for their prevarications and intense intrigue and struggles with erm just about everything. The Meadowlands represents everything that makes Rock & Roll so intriguing and remunerative. It's why I write It Starts With a Birthstone. Why I return to the mine seam with a pick and shovel on a daily basis.

Any album that starts with The House That Guilt Built is unlikely to concud with I am the Resolution. The Wrens sensed that the New Millennium  was not likely to be fitted for such gestures. The precedent for this as with so much that I write on on It Starts is Murmur.

The guitars are sturdy if the vocals bleaat somewhat. But instrumentation provide solid foundations and tetify to why this album had had such an enduring and powerpful legacy 

Song(s) of the Day # 4,318 Hen Ogledd - DISCOMBOBULATED

 

Spring has sprung. It Starts With a Birthstone can officially proclaim. DISCOMBOBULATED from Hen Ogledd has landed for ousisders and refuseniks to pretend that they are a tree or fish ir whatever it is they wish to. In the words of The excellent Guardian review: 'What to do when the word's falling apart ? Take to the streets? Run to the hillsThe latest album by this British folk-rock quartet suggests that a blend of fantasy and realism can provide a better way of living.'

DISCOMBOBULATED is the gentlest and most regal unravelling. The album is certainly barmy . But frankly, aren't we all. We have been since childhood amd here is a record that recognises this better than Boards of Peace which break International Law and seek to oppress, divide. The centre cannot hold as the adage tells us. Perhaps the margins can.

This is certainly a good place to start a Saturday morning.  Bard Rap (in Welsh when it chooses) apparently decrying capitalism and celebrating grass roots resistance. Hen Ogledd are pitching their tent and inviting you to join their pagan happy hour. 

500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 246 Mansun- Little Kix

 

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.

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.

.

  

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.  

100 Miles - Mojo Magazine # 6 Coleman Hawkins All Stars

 

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. 

100 Miles - Mojo Magazine # 5 Miles Davis

 

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,449 MF - Doomsday - Operation Doomsday

 

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. 

100 Miles - Mojo Magazine # 4 Charlie Parker's Allstars

 

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.

 

100 Miles - Mojo Magazine # 3 Sonny Rollins

 

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.

100 Miles - Mojo Magazine # 2 Sarah Vaughan

 

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?

 

Songs About People # 1,421 Morrissey

 

?!?

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..