Sunday, February 15, 2026
Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,451 Susanne Sundfor -Ten Love Songs
Ten love songs. Fifty minutes. An album sleeve that looks like an abstract painting in a modern gallery. The fuel of love is the thing that we all try to fill our tanks with but its an elsuive and rare fuel, These songs take various pathways to the same goal.This is a very easy record. to listen to.In much the same way as ABBA records used to be and Volvos are comfortable albums to take a drive in the country un. Is it the Swedish thing kanske?
1986 Singles # 8 Public Image Ltd.
What Pop Music is there for. For risk takers and statements that go beyond the ordinary. Our cultire allows for it, A song for Nelson Mandela who the Prime Minister of the IK 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 actuayll not a bad record listening to it niw but McLaren didn't really invute 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 it. 'McLaren can't sing he can't write, he is a most pedestrian arranger,,,' He's not a patch on ZTT..' ;Fans is shoddily done. ; 'The record reeks of Gilbert & Sullivan.' Ouch !
* For the record I've really enjoyed listening to Fans this afternoon. It's a very enjoyable car crash. The place where low culture meets high culture.
250 Albums- An Arbitrary Rumble Through My Record Collection # 53 ABC - Lexicon of Love
'I don't know the answer to that question. If I knew I would tell you...;
Valentine's Day is done but 15th Februry still feels like a great day to play Lexicon of Love and transport me back in time to 1982. The year it came out amd the year I left secondary school and graduated from Elvis Costello regulation NHS frames to cooler John Lennon specs and became a candidate for kisses, lovehearts and poisoned arrows myself.
I didn't particularly like ABC at the time. I didn't know my Motown from my Stax ir my Temptations from my Velvelettes. I didn't realise exactly how skilled Lexicon of Love was. That it started with a west End musical with the orchestra warming up in the bear pit and climaxed to gasps and swoons and a standing ovation from a full house. everyone coming onstage for the curtain call in glitter and sequins.
This is a funky record too but not one where any song ever outstays its welcome. Trevir Horn is all lightness and strings to contrast Martin Hammett's with sturm und drang..Martin Fry understands Harpers & Queens and the stock market and was equally comfortable on the cover of NME, The Face and Smash Hits. This is knowing but also incredibly graceful. .
People made records like this in those days. Dare, Rattlesnakes, Sulk, Tin Drum, Imperial Bedroom, Penthouse & Pavement, Ocean Rain. We didn't realise there was am expiry date on the New Pop party. That Thatcherism essentially would reel this stuff in and records like thes would be a rarity by 1985. But New Pop was great while it lasted and it's great to look back at now. Personally I sometimes wonder whether the human imagination is slightly poorer now. There are plenty of great records still being made. But this kind of record seems like its made without a safety net.
Song(s) of the Day # 4,312 Voka Gentle
Domestic Bliss? Surely an oxymoron A vain imagining. But in this case it happens to be the latest album from Voka Gentle a band for London who may be in the gutter and poseurs of am expressive dayglo sort but at least they're looking at the stars as they head for the hills as Dr.s Wilde and Bowie would prescribe, Even if the album cover is bad Salvador Dali and no mistake !
This is a bit of a ragbag but isn't lacking in daring or ambition. Even though occasionally I'm reminded of The Thompson Twins. Doctor Doctor !!! It's not running on the spot at least. It might be lacking in shape and substance on occasion but its decorative, varued and throws shapes. I give it 7.5, it's It Starts With a Birthstone's song / album of the day. I salute its bravura. Who precisely is Torpedo Mike and why are Voka Gentle staring back down my telescope ? Your guess is as good as mine.
1979 Top 40 - # 32 Donna Summer
Dim all the lights. If you insist Donna. Eternal summer. Let's get on the dancefloor. A tune that makes you feel like your transported onto a yacht with Warren Beatty, Farrah Fawcett and the rest of the Seventies A Team.. Even if it's coming out of your cheap transistor and sink us full of unwashed plates.
250 Albums- An Arbitrary Rumble Through My Record Collection # 54 The Best of the Inkspots
'Don't you tell it to the breeze . Cause she will tell the birds and bees . Then everyone will know. Because you told the babbling trees. Yes you told them once before. Because you told the blabbering trees.'
Sometines you need some eternal truths. The best of The Inkspots is a good place to go to in these moments for an instant remedy. We werem't the first to feel these raging emotions beating like ancient passions in our chest. And we won't be the last. This is a place where you can hear of emotions that were lived before you came to the planet and will be experienced way after you've departed it. These songs express emotions that are sometimes greater than our ability to express them.. Let the Ink Spots spo and express them for us all. Then move on with your day..
Saturday, February 14, 2026
100 Miles - Mojo Magazine # 1 Miles Davis
A new last thing at night series. A Miles Davis related CD with the latest issue for the centenary of his birth
,
Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,452 Todd Terje - It's Album Time
It's always album time roind here. This ome doesn't particularly appeal to me. It seems to invent a new shade of artificial. I feel I'm on a cruise across an ocean that may never come to an end.
1986 Singles # 9 The Pretenders
One of the most effecting of Pretenders songs. Apparently written for John McEnroe.
1979 Top 40 - # 33 The Skids
Arch shape shifting and allusions of Mittel Europa and decadent themes. The late Seventies and early Eighties were a wonderful period for playing with risque subject matter and imagery and The Skids were never far from the front of the queue. This one had Bill Nelson production to boot..
500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 250 The Magnetic Fields - i
The Magnetic Fields I imagine are a point of obsession for many but I've never particularly beem drawn into their orbit. There's lots of arch, chamberplay on show on i.. A deep baritone. Clever word play. A viola sawing in the background.. You always got heart as well as brain with Lou, David and Bryan. You never sense thatThe Magnetic Fields are going to bleed at any point. We parted company a few tracks in when I decided I was more interested in their wardrobe, record and book collection than whatever might be coming next on i.
.
Song(s) of the Day # 4,311 Remember Sports
Remember Sports? I'll say I do. And not fondly frankly. Trailing round on Cross Country afternoon runs at the back of the pack with the rest of my geeky mates across muddy fields and fields in PE lessons in wintry months of unremitting rain in the early Eighties. Coughing my guts up. Lungs clogged with phlegm from the asthma condition which plagued my childhood and teenage years.
Always among the last to be picked at football. Unable to master the javelin. Doing my best to grit my teeth for the trials of rugby tacklse and avoiding the indignities of a boot in the face from the fat boy in the pack of the school team. . At least I was OK at tennis where it was pretty much all about the serve which you hoped would land in the right box as you advanced to the net to volley the return into the open court, 30 love. But generally mine is not a glorious sporting narrative..
Anyway eniugh about me becasue here are Remember Sports are from Gambier Ohio,.and have relocated to Philly and released albums at intervals from 2021 and are on their way to Europe presently to support their latest The Refrigerator.
It's the brew which seems in vogue among young Alternative American Guitar bands currently. The Refrigerator frankly is heady stuff. Diaristic and intimate vocals. What sounds like a hurdy gurdy churning in the background, Well written songs that aren't afraid of discussing heartbreak. Guitars chiming and C&W inclined but also harking back to Replacements and early R.E.M. Darren Jones. You may like this one. I certainly do.
Friday, February 13, 2026
The NME - 1986 Year of the Triffids ? # 7 Swans Way Interview
One evening at Titanic in London, NME journalist Simon Witter catches and is blown away by a pretentious band from Birmingham on Phonogram called Swans Way. You know - Marcel Proust . They clearlt read books and jolly well want you to know it. He's so impressed he gets on a train to Birmingham with photographer Bleddyn Butcher and takes the band out to tea and cake at a classy brasserie on expenses.
The band witter on to Witter without sayong much at all and get a page in NME while they wait for Smash Hits and The Face to notice them. They insist in the interview they are not the same as more successful local lights, Dexys, Fashion and Duran Duran, are not the same as Sade or Working Week either and that they like books and films as much as they like music.I'm listening to their 1984 album The Fugitive Kind now. It's of its time and pretty irritating after a while. Blue Eyed Poseur Soul. History records that The Blue Nile do what they wished to do and become less than a footnote on Pop annals..
Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,453 Emerson, Lake & Palmer - Brain Salad Surgery
Kind of preposterous right from the off. Makes Punk seem inevitable. Everything is essentially an act of grandiosity and show. I listened to half an hour of this at a struggle and couldn't really follow a narrative. I felt it aspired to classical status but couldn't really make a consistent case. I didn't like it in short.
,
1986 Singles # 10 Gwen Guthrie
Bill collecters at my door. What can you do for me....
It's always the same.Gwen has the bottom line and the tune has it all.And off we go into the Top Ten..
1979 Top 40 - # 34 Errol Dunkley
There was always some cool Reggae tune like this in the charts. It was one of the great features of the times.
500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 251 Fall Out Boy - Infinity On High
Emo. So everything but the kitchen sink. Strong on intense feeling. A paucity of tunage,
Song(s) of the Day # 4,310 Dirt Buyer
It's Friday morning and like little Jack Thorner I'm sat in the corner. Alright, hold your horses. I'm not eating my curds and whey. I cant buy these at Sainbury's at Newcastle Central Station where I live. But I've certainly put in my thumb and pulled out a plum this morning for you. What a good boy am I.
Dirt Buyer's Dirt Buyer III. ticks requisite grunge related boxes of Great American ntrospection and undolence for those who can't get out of bed and aren't even sure if they're planning to do so. It's a mellow record for duvet days. It strays sometimes to feeling overly sorry for itself but hey, that's all part of the Rock & Roll quilt.
Thursday, February 12, 2026
1979 Top 40 - # 35 The Tourists
Pop Singles were art statements with power chords. Take this. It's a song about loneliness and misery. It didn't break into the Top Thirty but still strikes a chord almost fifty years on.
Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,454 Swans - Children Of God
I know my limits, I'm not outside of society, I'm just drawn to its cultural margins. So I've always been slightly wary of the likes of Swans who insist in dropping their trousers and baring their backsides at God and making am emormpis self-righteous meal of it. That just strikes me as exhibitionism.
This is a record that tries ... very hard.There are things I find more amenable. It covers a lot of ground. But sometimes it seems as if it's imagining itself in a gallery to a degree where it forgets about providing an entertaining rather than a cerebral, self satisfied experience.
250 Albums- An Arbitrary Rumble Through My Record Collection # 55 Melanie - Born To Be
I don't really need much to be happy. Or at least content. Work done mid way through a Thursday afternoon. A couple of good lessons taught. Paperwork done. Newcastle cold. But out there. Beyond the window frams. The days lengthening. Assuming their natural shape.
A large mug of tea in front of me and a bar of chocolate. No immediate money worries. A Melanie album on the stereo. It feels like she's barefoot in my living room. She takes possession of songs . Inhabits them . Drags them into her carefree realm. She has a sense of genuine freedom about her. Comes from a time when you sense that they didn't agonise about being free. Just assumed freedom... .
500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 252 At The Drive In - Relationship Of Command
Every generation needs its moment when things spin out of control and the angry youthful masses get their chance to spin out if control and shriek at the sun and stay behind and sulk in detention. At The Drive In were The MC5, The Damned, Rage Against the Machine, Rocket From the Crypts for the Millennial fireworks.
Song(s) of the Day # 4,309 Ellur
'You were pushing 100 down the 62. ....you don't want to live in shadows the rest of your life...'
I certainly don't ! Currently featuring on a 6 Music C Playlist near you. Not perhaps the most urgent recommendation It Starts With a Birthstone is likely to make this week. But I've got my headphones on as I motor towards my 8.00 online with Insurance Compliance Professionals in Dissledorf and Ellur's debur album At Home In My Mind is amicable company.
Ella is from Halifax and is the daughter of Richard MacNamara, guitarist of Embrace. Her Spotify bio suggests that if you like Sam Fender and The War of Drugs you may like her. Always nice to have a slot to pop something into for easy classification. This is all highly generic and rather disposable but it's passed forty minuetes as I bathed, dressed and fed and I found my heart lifting and twirling momentarily.
Wednesday, February 11, 2026
Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,455 Ray Charles - Ray Charles
I don't use the term 'Genius' lightly but in the case of Ray Charles it's difficult to know what else to do.
500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 253 Isolee - Rest
The kind of record you pretend to have been into since it came out in 2000. Even though actually you're hearing it for the first time rught now.The spirit of Kraftwerk and House for Millennial groovers.
1979 Top 40 - # 36 Roxy Music
Some are incredibly dismissive of the reformed Roxy but this is incredible on any number of levels. The ladies on the harps. Ferry's croon and the way he scrunches up his face like Icarus in agonised ecstasy descending to the depths. The suits. Manzanera back in wraparounds. Mackays sax. Tibbs bass. Roxy are like a high quality five a side team powering goals from impossible angles from the starting whistle, And all becaise the lady loves milk tray.
Song(s) of the Day # 4,308 Ratboys
'Baby you're my Ringo Starr,,,'
The Rats are back ! No kids . I'm not talking about the Boomtown Rats. I mean Chicago's Ratboys. Frequent suspects on It Starts With a Birthstone going back over ten years and six albums and planting a flag early in 2026 with latest album Singin ' To an Empty Chair.
It's an object of purity, risk and wonder. Ratboys specialise in this currency. They approach songs as if they're lifting curious objects from a desk and holding them up to the light and observing them from a range of angles. Shaking a snowglobe. Holding up a child's kaleidoscope to ceiling and re-experiencing the wonder of being a child.
Another early contender . 2026 is only forty days in and already I have 30 LPs on My Albums of the Year playlist. We may not have made it to Spring technically but judging by this we have a collective spring in our step.
Ratboys continue to punch above their weight and be contenders. This is a blistering record. Last Splash meet Courtney Barnett at the crossroads. And the consequence was; a fine time being had by one and all.
Tuesday, February 10, 2026
1979 Top 40 - # 37 B.A. Robertson
The charts were always full of this kind of knowing end of the pier stuff
.
1986 Singles # 12 Janet Jackson
Janet Jackson parked in the Top 10 pretty much globally for much of 1986and istening through to it niw it's pretty clear why..
250 Albums- An Arbitrary Rumble Through My Record Collection # 56 Beth Orton - Trailer Park
'Birds that scream fir territory can learn to sing euphorically '
I don't claim to know much about life. We none of us do, do we? Generally I trying to orient myself against the forthcoming gale of modern existence which feels perilous to me. This isn't negativity I wouldn't say. Just reality. Anyway, whenever I need to do that these days I generally put a record on and play it throughout the day A mast against the ongoing day. Usually something that yakes me back in time.
Today my mast against the day is Beth Orton's Trailer Park an album I originally bought on CD when it came out in 1996 just after I moved back to England after a few years abroad in Germany, Poland, Czech Repunlic and a brief jaunt in Barcelona. You could do that in the days before freedom was frowned on and we began to fear dinghies on the horizon spotted through binoculars from the turrets at Dover Castle and launched the gunboats and submarines into the briny yo go out and meet them.
Brighton. Autumn 1996. England had marched through the European Championships to inevitable surrender to Germany in the semis on penalties. Tony Blair and New Labour were exultant. I decamped from my parents home in Canterbury and went to live in Hove. I got myself a cool flat at the top of a stout building close to the seafront. My father drove me over with my record players, tv and an answerphone and I signed on, having foolishly arrived out of the teaching season meaning there was no work at the the language schools I had hoped would supply me with gainful employment through the winter months.
1996 felt post everything. I was post girlfriend. I'd been ditched fairly brutally at the start of the year and nursed a broken heart and damaged ego over someone I realised in retrospect was not worth it, at all. We had not been suited and had three very happy months in Warsaw to look back on .when we'd truly experienced Love. You learn this in time. The ongoing goal.She the extraneous.
Loaded magazine and Chris Evans were in their pomp. Frankly it seemed desperate and slightly craven. A friend of mine from my German days was doing his PGCE in Brighton and had ditched the girl he had been with in Dortmund who thought they might marry for a New Labour business glamourpuss who I tried but couldn't like. Radiohead, Manic Street Preachers and The Verve grabbed the batons from Oasis, Blur and Pulp and the mood and sky palled.
I was fairly brassy. Doing voluntary work at an old people's home of old aged pensioners who played bingo and had sing songs. 'Oh Oh Antonio. He's gone away.' On Friday lunchtimes and into the afternoon.I went back to my flat and put Trailer Park on. I never stopped listening to it
And I've put it on today. All day thirty years on as I've made my way through another winter's day of relentless rain..Fimic dislocation. Taught my lessons and turned over the vinyl Kept turning it over all day. It's a feast. .Folk and Chill Out room. A lasting statement. I can't think of another album quite like it. Introspection refection, poetry. Brightness shade, gloom. Wonder. Watched from my second foor window on Newcastle as people stamp down the pavement in macs and cagouls, crouched under plastic transparent, brolleys. They'll all be home soon. Eastenders and Masterchef are on.
Song(s) of the Day # 4,307 Dustbunny
Great things about youth . Sitting on the sofa wearing your shades with your besties. Making a melodrama out of absolutely everything . When you can be bothered. Forming a Rock & Roll band , Releasing your second album on January 2nd , Calling it Offerings For Weary Dogs. Heading out in the riad as if you're the first ones ever to have thought of doing so.
Offering For Weary Dogs takes some guitars. Sime grunge moves. Some indifference. Some heart . Some soul. A bit if Nirvana. A bit of Bettie Serveert . Female ennui. Male tenderness. Songs which are done in 180 seconds. That will do .More here.
Monday, February 9, 2026
1986 Singles # 13 Madonna
So two True Blue's on here. It was a basic expectation of Madonna album that it was jam packed with hit singles gold. That something was playing from a radio playing you at every moment, That was the case with True Blue This one took you straight to the sun.
Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,457 Madonna - True Blue
It's always fun listening to a classic Madonna Eighties album once in a while. It makes you realise quite how good she was at what she did she was and what she must have meant to so many people.It would be churlish to sniff in this case.
500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 255 Beirut - Gulag Orkestar
When I graduated in 1990 I got my first teaching job in Czechoslovakia on the Hungarian border in a town called Komarno..Komarom on the other side of the bridge over the Danube in Hungary .I think the division was a product of the Treaty of Triannon. There wasn't much to do in Komarno of an evening. I used to wander down to the Europa Hotel sometimes for supper. It was on the corner of the high street on the edge of the bridge.
It was a grim old place in many ways in those days. With a cigarette kiosk in the lobby. There was a lady with blue hair and gold teeth behind the kiosk selling cigarettes which made my teeth brown. . I would go in and sit in the retaurant which was pure Third Man. And smoke them
Unside there was a cafe prowled by Gypsy spivs with wallets full of Czech crowns. Plunder from dealings on the Black Market which was rife in those immediate Post Soviet days, A cafe and a grand ballroom cum restaurant area, A splendid house band made up of gypsy musicians who would come to tour tables and arch their heads and bow down to your table sawing their violins at your plate while you made your way through your evening meal.
Chicken and chips a brothy stew. A bottle of beer. A cigarette at your table once the plates were cleared surrounded by the music of dream and myth. It feels like a dream now frankly thirty five years on. Listening to Beirut always take me back to that Post Communism year in Komarno and my expeditions to the Hotel Europa . There's both jubilation and memory in what Beirut do. They're a rare band. They tell us why we travel. To learn and give witness. Collective Consciousness.
1979 Top 40 - # 38 The Charlie Daniels Band
Now this was a fantastic record. Even to the 14 year old imagination which is all I had when it came out. in 1979 . It was on Top of the Pops for months. Ot's a wondrous narrayive and tune. A dispute over a shining fiddle made of gold ,a man's soul and the devil himself. With extraordinary fiiddle solos, each one outdoing the last in terms of ingenuity and derring do, I'm amazed it wasn't Number One frankly.
.
Song(s) of the Day # 4,306 Jo Passed
Jo Passed is a Canadian musician based in Toronto and Vancouver who has just returned after extended hiatus with a new album Away and Darren Jones (best friend of this blog) has directed me its way. Thanks once more Darren !.
It's a record that's full of deft chord changes and weird, inviting atmospheres..Jo Passed - Away. Geddit !?!
Sunday, February 8, 2026
The NME - 1986 Year of the Triffids ? # 6 Lenny Henry Interview
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.
1986 Singles # 14 The Housemartins
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.
Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,458 Muse - Drones
Queen exist. They are there already. There is no earhly excuse for Muse and what they do.
1979 Top 40 - # 39 John Du Cann
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 !!!!
500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 256 Lee Anne Womack - There's More Where that Came From
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.
Song(s) of the Day # 4,305 Blackwater Holylight
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.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)