A Look Back At The Smiths Debut Album

It's all about sex you know!
No really…it is! Listen:

Early 1984, Interviewer; "It's been said that your songs are not so much 'love songs' as 'sex songs'…"
Morrissey; "Yes….though it sounds almost brutal, but….yes".

See!

Ask anyone what The Smiths greatest album is and more often than not will come the reply 'The Queen Is Dead'. Morrissey and Marr both claim that it's 'Strangeways, Here We Come', but they're both well off the mark. For me, everything that is great about The Smiths, everything that raises them well above any…

'Barnoon Hill' by Pacific

Her name was Amy.
I never found out her second name, nor much else about her, yet, like Proust's petit-madeline dipped in linden tea, just the sound of her name transports me back to time of innocence when EVERY night seemed like some entrancing experience. In truth I only knew her for a few hours but somehow I can visualise almost every second of the time I spent with her.

It was a Saturday in very early 1989. My friends Douglas and Sharon were going to a party in Glasgow and asked me to come along.…

'60 Minutes In The Anorak City' - A dissection of a mix-tape.

The mix-tape!
So quickly did they become retro. Mix-Cds, I-pods and Online Playlists all rapidly eradicated the art of the mix-tape, an art so smugly and erroneously eulogised in Nick Hornby's 'High Fidelity'.
I used to love mix-tapes….not necessarily making them for friends or potential girlfriends, but really just for myself. Small, compact, contained snapshots of a time and place. Reminders of a Summer, or of a girl…..or both! Of all the myriad mix-tapes I've scattered across the land there is still one that I have and still…

'Slowly Goes The Night' by Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds

It was over!
This time it was beyond doubt…we were finished.
As I stood there in her room all I could feel was an aching hollow sense of dread, knowing I'd have to face the rest of my life without her. I should have seen it coming. Just like Kurt Cobain's death in 1994, there had been a very obvious warning sign just a few weeks before. A shot across the boughs that I'd somehow ignored, somehow failed to even acknowledge.
And now, here in the inky blackness of…

In our Blog so far, we have dealt mainly with some of our favourite records from the past….in this Blog however we have decided to look at three very recent releases; current singles by PaddlePOP, The Humms and Hearts!Attack.
To avoid any sense of favouritism we have decided to review them in alphabetical order.
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'If You Were Dead' three track EP by Hearts!Attack

This is pretty much a home made affair, housed in a personally designed sleeve created with acrylic paints and boasting the legend; "This record was made from two bedrooms, in two continents, by three people", already…

Remember when Creation Records ruled the school? I mean, like, REALLY ruled the school!!! Long before they got bogged down with all the beige sludge that is 'the O word'. I could write page upon page about how much I hate 'the O word' but this Blog is here to celebrate music, not to pick at the scabs of those who stifle music with their bland ordinariness.
So, yeah, let's look back at when Creation were pretty much the cat's nadgers and look at three singles in particular which sum up that exciting and revolutionary time.

It all began, for…

I never liked The Primitives!!
I don't know why. I just found them to be a bit too polished, too corporate, too….knowing, like they had been created in some Pop-lab from loose cuttings of (spit!)Transvision Vamp. A lot of my friends liked them but I think they really just liked Tracey.
So, it was with some surprise that I found myself falling in love with The Darling Buds, a band once described as Primitives-lite, to the point that, in the wake of the recently demised Smiths, they became, for a period, My Favourite Band.

It all began with '…

From a distance of 22 years now, I can't fully recall whether it was 'First Day' or 'I Heard You The First Time' that was my introduction to Razorcuts. It was one side of that single, I remember John Peel playing it and I thought it was just beautiful. The next day I bought it and it became a permanent fixture upon my turntable…..it must have been 'First Day' as that's the track that's on my favourite mix-tape from that period.

'First Day' begins with the gentlest 12-string strumming before the sharp, tambourine heavy drums crack in…

Celebrating The Best Indiepop Records #3:
"Going To England" by Cleaners From Venus

Escape….

That's what all the best Pop Music is about…..escape. Escape from the drudgery of real life and the grind-to-five. Brain Eno once said that Pop Music allows us to create other worlds, and that's exactly what Martin Newell and Giles Smith did on their wonderful 1987 album 'Going To England' under the guise of Cleaners From Venus
"For the next 38 minutes you will be England" boasts the back sleeve….and we are!! But not contemporary England, nor even the England of 1987, but the…

Celebrating The Best Indiepop Records #2: "Emma's House" E.P. by The Field Mice

"Where is that chaos that usually flows from me?"

How can a 7" 4-track EP contain all the clout, imagination, and life-affirming beauty of a triple LP concept album? Simple….when it's the "Emma's House" EP by The Field Mice, or Sarah Twelve to the anoraks!!
This is quite simply one of the GREATEST records ever made….I love it, I absolutely LOVE it!!! This is the record that soundtracked the golden Summer of 1989, the record that created a backdrop of warm twilights, giddy headrushes, broken hearts and…