The Beautiful Kids On The Coast

Kim Deal's debut solo album Nobody Loves You More came out two years ago next month, an album I didn't pick up on until the end of year lists started to mention it- and then when I got a copy, I fell in love with it. Kim's voice and guitar playing, the breezy nature of some the songs- some of them indie rock, some bossa nova, some with horns- and the personal and clearly heartfelt nature of others, won me over on the first play of it. I went back to it recently and found that I still love it and that it's one of those perfect little albums, eleven songs in under forty minutes- turns up, sounds great, does its job. 

The title track comes in with a burst of strummed guitar and then throws you off a little, sweetly sung with an string quartet backing, and then goes all bossa nova pop in the middle. 

Nobody Loves You More

On Coast a trumpet and trombone parp away and the song sways about, lost in itself. Kim sits on a bench by the sea, looking out and reflecting. 'Abandoned plans for the good times', she sings and, 'Clearly all of my life I've been foolish', but, as she sees the young people playing in the surf she relaxes into the moment, watching, 'the beautiful kids on the coast'. 

Coast

Belfast Two Pack

A double serving of musical goodies from Belfast for Tuesday. First comes Black Bones (Timmy Stewart and Aaron Black) and an EP with Bradford producer Miles J Paralysis where they take two tracks each over two sides of a 12". Timmy is a Belfast veteran, cutting his teeth with a residency at David Holmes' Art College and since promoting various nights of his own around the city. Black Bones have released a slew of tracks in the last year, dark and thundering electronic music with dub and techno always close to the surface. On the Black Cross EP they serve up Psychic Rain Dance, slo mo industrial rhythms and acidic synth wobbles with bursts of unintelligible vocals, and Low Voltage Dreams, an even slower slice of atmospheric dub techno, with insistent percussion and a bassline that bangs at your front door and demands to be let in. 

Miles pitches in with Twilight, serious industrial acid house with ominous vocal samples, and Two Up, a more minimal ambient techno sub- bass dive. The payoff line at the Bandcamp page (where you can get vinyl and digital) is, 'Weapons grade DJ tools for the margin travelers', which is good but I don't think you need to be a DJ to enjoy this quartet of tracks. They work equally well as home listening or out on the move. 

Deeply Armed are a Belfast band I saw them play at The Golden Lion earlier this year and I really enjoyed the single they put out last year, The Healing. They have returned with Black Ice, a confrontational and swaggering song that rides in on a bassline that sounds so close and so live, that the bass guitar itself could right there in the room with you, bass amp speaker overloaded and vibrating while singer Michael sounds like a young Ian Brown. 

The EP comes with two remixes, one a stripped down, skeletal outing by Sleaford Mods Andrew Fearn and the second a reworking by Mad Professor. The Mad Professor Cold Black Dub is a monster, the song turned inside out, the bass guitar unanchored and a psychedelic dub blur of FX throwing the rules out of the window. Everything- vocals, chords and bass- sounds like someone playing PiL's Metal Box from inside a washing machine in the next room. Get all three here. 

It Looks Better From A Distance

From decades old psychedelic veterans Mercury Rev at The Ritz on Friday night to two young and unknown bands on Saturday night at Low Four on Deansgate. Low Four is a recording studio/ gig space, two connecting rooms with a bar. We were there on Saturday night to see Wing!, an artist/ band recommendation via Daniel Avery that Martin from The Flightpath Estate picked up on. I wouldn't say the three of us were the oldest people in the room but we were in the top four and there was then a large, several decades gap to the rest of the crowd. The support act, Surprise!, were ridiculously young, two young men and a young woman, two guitars and keys, occasionally drum machine and three way vocals. When they clicked, the three singers all in unison with the softly strummed guitar chords, they had a definite sound, reminiscent of The Orielles quieter moments. 

Wing! are from South London and are also very young, a little older than Surprise! I think, in their mid- 20s maybe. Wing! are built around Adam Swan and his laptop, layers of ambient techno chords, wordless vocals and noise. In the room on Saturday night Adam stands on the left, headphones on, bringing in chords, music and static drones from his device. In the middle is Kai Charlton, laid back but nimble bass guitar work and occasional synth, and on the right drummer Joe Killick who is a revelation, a seriously good drummer who manages to sound both like an 808 brought to life and a very real human being who can switch from jazz to techno in an instant. 

Post- hip hop, post- rock, post- techno, post- trip hop post- everything.... they make a massive, entrancing sound, beat driven electronic music with nods to jazz, instrumental hip hop and Detroit. They've had a few EP releases. This is It Looks Better From A Distance from earlier this year which sounds like Tortoise and Carl Craig getting it on at a trip hop night. 

Wing! were very impressive on Saturday night and went down well with the small but enthusiastic crowd. The sheer force of the live sound- layers of atmospheric laptop textures and the kick and swing of the drums- was very persuasive. 

They've played at the Green Man festival and won the Green Man Rising award. Last year there was an EP at Bandcamp called Missed It Just the Once, four slices of rhythm heavy instrumental music that sound like samples and loops played by a live band. Get it here. The Worth Scanning For EP came out this year on Memorials Of Distinction and is at Bandcamp here. 

Explodes Like A Fractal, Pops Like A Light Bulb

Mercury Rev are touring to celebrate twenty five years since the release of All Is Dream, an album that came out on the day of the Twin Towers attacks. 2001 is a long time ago now and in some ways All Is Dream doesn't seem like an album that's a quarter of a century old although the time it was released into was a different world in all sorts of ways. I can distinctly remember buying it in September 2001, an album that for me was in the space between Isaac being in hospital a lot (two bone marrow transplants in 2000 and a year in isolation afterwards) and Eliza being born (2003). It got played a lot in that time. Revisiting it recently, it struck me that it's as good as 1998's Deserter's Songs, the album that is uaually held up as their masterpiece. The band had planned to record All Is Dream with Jack Nitzsche but he died just before they were due to begin and in part they attempted to record what they thought he might have done with the songs. They were also down to a core of singer Jonathan Donahue and guitarist Grasshopper. 

The support act at The Ritz on Friday night was former Bad Seed Mick Harvey with Mexican singer Amanda Acevedo. I only caught the last three songs of their set but the last one, built around a Mick Harvey one chord rhythm guitar clang, had the DNA of The Bad Seeds running through it. They have an album out, Psychedelia In White, which might be worth checking out on the basis of what we heard. This song as far as I know wasn't played but comes from a 2024 Mick Harvey solo album and is very touching, a tribute to those from his youth who have gone. 

When We Were Beautiful And Young

Mercury Rev start out with some psychedelia, a Ravi Shankar cover, as is their way. Donahue prowls the front of the stage gesturing to us, 60s beatnik cap and reefer jacket, every inch the poet/ frontman. They don't do the obvious thing and play All Is Dream in full and in order, but dip in and out, pushing that album's orchestral sounds, fever dream poetry and psychedelic chamber rock to the limits. From Deserter's Songs they play the quirky The Funny Bird and follow it with a surging, dark Hercules, All Is Dream's closing song, which is segued into There's Always Been A Bird In Me (from last year's Born Horses). The songs all flow into each other, no gaps between them. Donahue breaks off from the mic to conduct the group, arms waving around, throwing the music from side to side, leaning ver the drumkit to encourage the drummer. It's theatrical- there's something about Mercury Rev that always reminds me of 1940s Disney, the overblown symphonic melodies, the weirdly trippy Fantasia psych and at times the singer could be the 1940 Fantasia film version of Mickey Mouse, dressed as a 60s beatnik, breaking off from throwing shapes and conducting his colleagues into forlorn vocals. 

Lincoln's Eyes is a treat, powerful and spooky, overblown chamber psyche that halts suddenly on the line, 'comes to a dead stop', a jump scare even though you know it's coming. 

Lincoln's Eyes

They go from there into a long cover version of The Modern Lovers' She Cracked. After that they lose me for a while with a section where they play a medley of Dream Of A Young Girl As A Flower, Patters and Runaway Raindrop (none from All Is Dream), their 1940s cinema/ psyche going prog including a drum solo, and finishing with Donahue throwing in the Tears In Rain monologue from Blade Runner via a children's voice changer toy. 

They recover for the ending, the final four songs a Mercury Rev masterclass, Grasshopper soloing and the band (two synth players and the krauty drummer) on fire. They summon all that early 21st century energy and darkness with Tides Of The Moon...

Tides Of The Moon

...and then hit us with two Deserter's Songs classics, Holes and Goddess On A Hiway, both sounding glorious, before finishing with All Is Dream's magnificent opener The Dark Is Rising, a song that I can clearly remember listening to back in autumn 2001 (and since) and being affected by it more than once- it finishes with Donahue singing the line, 'I never dreamed I'd lose you/ In my dreams I'm always strong', centre stage, foot on the monitor, arms raised either side of his head in mock body builder pose. 

The Dark Is Rising

Oblique Saturdays

A series for Saturdays in 2026 inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's set of cards, Oblique Strategies (Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas). Eno and Schmidt created them to be used to unblock creative impasses and approach problems from unexpected angles. Each week I'll turn over an Oblique Strategy card and post a song or songs inspired by the suggestion. 

Last week's Oblique Strategy suggestion was In total darkness, or a very large room, very quietly.

I responded with bands I'd seen in large rooms- Lou Reed, Nick Cave, The Charlatans, Bob Dylan, Beastie Boys and Prince, and also with Jamie Xx and John Talabot. 

The Oblique Saturdays community chipped in with Gram Parsons, The Deep Dark Woods, Fatima Mansions, Cave In, Rage Against The Machine, The Youngbloods, Bonnie Prince Billy, Idlewild, Pauline Murray and the Invisible Girls, The Twilight Sad and The Durutti Column. Thanks to Ernie, Rol, Chris Yardley, Al G and Mrs G, SRC, C, JC and Eddie Largely Anonymous. 

This is Pauline Murray and The Invisible Girls in 1980, Martin Hannett on production, Vini Reilly in the band and Peter Saville on sleeve art. 

Screaming In The Darkness

This week's card says this- Get your neck massaged.

I mused on this for a while and came up with nothing much.  I decided to engage my housemates (wife and daughter) into the Oblique Saturdays world and said to them, 'I'm going to say a phrase and I want you to tell me what song or songs it suggests.' They responded as follows-

Wife- 'Nothing'

Daughter- 'Nothing'

Wife- 'Stress'.

Stress Waves

Oneohtrix Point Never in 2010. If you're stressed it's good to try to find ways to relax. Here come Frankie...

Relax (Sex Mix)

Listening to relaxing music helps too, especially music with a vocal sampled from a relaxation tape. Maybe Love Corporation can assist. 

Palatial 

Feel free to drop your own responses to Get your neck massaged into the comments box. 

Post script: Spencer sent this to me earlier this week. I'm adding it here as an Oblique Saturday extra. It's from an interview Brian Eno gave in 1980

'The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation - particularly in studios - tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach. If you're in a panic, you tend to take the head-on approach because it seems to be the one that's going to yield the best results. Of course, that often isn't the case - it's just the most obvious and - apparently - reliable method. The function of the Oblique Strategies was, initially, to serve as a series of prompts which said, "Don't forget that you could adopt *this* attitude," or "Don't forget you could adopt *that* attitude." 

The first Oblique Strategy said "Honour thy error as a hidden intention." And, in fact, Peter's first Oblique Strategy - done quite independently and before either of us had become conscious that the other was doing that - was ...I think it was "Was it really a mistake?" which was, of course, much the same kind of message. Well, I collected about fifteen or twenty of these and then I put them onto cards. At the same time, Peter had been keeping a little book of messages to himself as regards painting, and he'd kept those in a notebook. We were both very surprised to find the other not only using a similar system but also many of the messages being absolutely overlapping, you know...there was a complete correspondence between the messages. So subsequently we decided to try to work out a way of making that available to other people, which we did; we published them as a pack of cards, and they're now used by quite a lot of different people, I think.''

Nocturnal Stealth Mode

Techno albums as tributes to much loved cats are thin on the ground- the genre has been expanded a little by the release last week of The Adventures Of An Amazing Boy Cat by M- Paths, out on Mighty Force. Across thirteen tracks M- Paths explores the range of electronic sound- techno, drum 'n' bass, ambient and vocal samples, all expertly brought together into a whole. 

The first track is just seven seconds long, the cat of the album's title saying 'hello'. It's followed by M- Paths revisiting his own Emotivated track, a Kennedy sampling track from December 2025, the former President's, 'we do these things not because they are easy but because they are hard', speech accompanied by headspinning electronic melodies and thumpy techno. The eight minute Forever In Our Hearts is a centrepiece, a vocal sample FXed and chopped up and laid over sleek, gliding Berlin techno. On Boy Cat's Nocturnal Stealth Mode the drums get tougher and distorted, dub space and scratchy synths sounds competing with more cut up vocals, sometimes not much more than syllables and parts of words dropped in. 

Sirens arrives, disruptive and in your face with rapid fire drums and speaker bothering bass. Towards the end of the album Climbing rides in on a machine rhythm and skittering synth FX that dance across the top, layers of sounds repeating as snares fire off and clatter away. Climbing (Part 2) brings the drum 'n' bass drums back with more sampled speaking voices and intense synth squiggles. At the end Play & Rest calms things down with some ambient techno chords (briefly) before the drums kick in. After a couple of minutes, the drums disappear, the ambient chords resurface and then it fades to static and the sound of waves hitting a pebbled shore. A most satisfying ending. 

The album can be found at Mighty Force here.

Nayar

Four years ago Tigerbalm released an album called International Love Affair, a record in love with the possibility of sounds from other places, a trans- continental dance record combining London with Bali, Africa, New Zealand, Brazil and Morocco- house music and global sounds jammed together in a completely organic sounding way by Tigerbalm (Rose Robinson). Apart from anything else, it was a massively fun album. Riad De Lister sounds like Tom Tom Club pitching up at a 21st century basement party in Dalston. 

Riad De Lister

A remix album followed with new versions by a slew of artists including The Emperor Machine taking on Riad De Lister and then by way of return Tigerbalm remixed The Emperor Machine on an EP of tracks from his Island Boogie album (that also included a pair of Hardway Bros remixes). Tigerbalm's remix of La Cassette with Severine Mouletin on vocals, is day glo, sci fi/ Afro- pop, dub disco. Impossible not to enjoy. 

La Cassette (Tigerbalm Remix)

Between that release and this autumn I lost touch with Tigerbalm's music but found it again recently. By happy coincidence Tigerbalm released an album in June this year, Bubblegum Discos, that opens with this infectious and vibrant piece of futuristic Latin/ synth pop, Nayar (recorded with Napoli resident Giorgio Lopez). 

Nayar originally out as a single in July 2025 and was followed by two more singles- Pura Vida and then Coco Makako. Those and the rest of Bubblegum Discos can be heard/ bought here. 

Queer The Pitch

Rich Thair has a main job in Red Snapper, a role as a member of Sabres Of Paradise live band, a spin off duo with Sabres bassist Nick Abnett (Spraycan) and a Red Snapper offshoot called Number with his long term musical partner Ali Friend. You'd think all of this would keep him busy enough but he also has a solo project, Dicky Continental, based out of his studio Buntys in Swansea. Dicky blurs trip hop, dub, soul and breakbeats, an urban and after hours sound. The first album Un... came out on Acid Jazz in 2023. Last year he had a track on Sounds From The Flightpath Etstae Volume 2 and this year has released a single and been involved in some remixes, all leading up to a new album, Queer The Pitch. 

Queer The Pitch came out recently on Margate label Ramrock. Dicky reunites with singer/ songwriter Jo Sims (from Un...) on opening song The Grain, an echoey, breakbeat affair with crunchy drums and an acoustic guitar, and vocals that drift in and out. It works very well as a lead in and sets up what comes next. Across the rest of the ten tracks that make up the album Rich provides the musical backdrop for a range of young vocalists, singers, rappers and poets- Tia Zakura, Ioan Omar, Laila Woodward and Asher Carroll, drawn from a local youth project and talent pool Rich leads called Future Blood. 

Tia Zakura's laid back, easy delivery doesn't hide the personal nature and unsettling feel of the words- Rust is coming from an uneasy place, examining the world and Tia's place in it, being young and black in 2026 Britain. 'Thoughts drive me insane so I've just been thinking thinking', she says on Rust. Tia returns on the summer single Hostile Environment, a fantastic dub/ blues spoken word/ poetry track. 

Big Red Button marries live jazz and trip hop with Ioan Omar's voice. His voice is also on the fractured hip hop of It Was Just You and the synth bass and electric piano, soulful sounds of Flying. Asher Carroll sings on Take A Deep Breath And Let Go, a cinematic song that suggests a world of underground clubs and basement cafes. On Yeah We Do there are seagulls and a long horn note, drums and the voice of Laila Woodward, who brings a folk/ ambient hypnosis and haunting to Queer The Pitch. 'Save your soul for another day', she advises. 

Pirate Love arrives halfway through Queer The Pitch, a tribute to pirate radio with fuzz bass, strings, FX and a rare groove radio sample, and the alubm finishes with Sweet Equity, a late night jazz/ blues track, more cinematic sounds with bass by Andrew Wal Coughlan, to whom the album is dedicated. 

Rich has pulled off something really special on Queer The Pitch, a showcase for some young and emerging talents- singers, songwriters, rappers and poets- whose voices and words find a home in and among the experimental and evocative tracks Rich has created as Dicky Continental- 21st century, South Wales, dub/ spoken word blues. 

You can find Queer The Pitch at Ramrock's Bandcamp page and at Dicky Continental's website. 

Luster

Back in April 2025 4AD released an album by Irish musician and songwriter Maria Somerville, an album called Luster. At the time I slept on it a little, not giving it the time it deserved (despite a couple of people raving about it to me. Then, about a year ago I caught up and became mildly obsessed with it. Now, a year on I go back to it every now and then and find something new in it every time. 

Maria is from Connemara, Ireland, and picked up singing and playing guitar at an early age from family members. She uploaded some songs in 2013 and got some attention and then self released her debut in 2018. She got a show on NTS radio (a station who are very on the ball with leftfield and non- mainstream music, DJs and selectors) and she would weave field recordings and spoken word tracks into her selections of folk, ambient, shoegaze and dreampop. This in turn seems to have fed into Luster, an album which found its way to the right home with 4AD. 

In just under forty minutes Maria pulls together the sounds mentioned above- folk, ambient, shoegaze, dreampop- with some seriously emotive and affecting music, songs that have an indefinable quality but that also speak straight to you. Most of them, I don't know what they're about as such, but I feel as if I know exactly what she means. 

There's something mythical about the songs on Luster, something otherwordly and in tune wiht the elements and nature. Halo sounds like its coming in from out at sea, drifting in on a sea mist- a gauze of drones and FX and an unseen choir, an abstract ambient/ shoegaze sound that the words seem to appear out of and then disappear into. 

Halo

On Trip the metal strings of the guitar chords clang away, coming roughly through the amplifier and an Irish folk influence is there, part of the vocal melody, a nod to the past. 

Trip

Monday's Long Songs

Walking in the woods and meadows round the River Mersey is one of our local rituals. There are a some well worn paths and across on the other side of the river the Riverbank Cafe, set up during lockdown and still thriving today. The sausage rolls are highly recommended. But if you stray off the path a little and head down towards the Urmston part of the meadows there's a maze of tracks and paths that wind their way round a couple of riding centres, fields with horses and semi- derelict caravans and a farm. It was walking down there a few weeks ago that we came across this entrance to a half submerged chamber. 

No, of course I didn't go in. We all know how those films finish. Makes you wonder though. 

A pair of Monday long song releases for your enjoyment today, one from Brighton and from San Francisco via Leeds. Brighton DJ and producer Gordon Kaye has been playing and making music since the mid- 80s. This year he's released three singles- Galactic Ride and Garbage In Garbage Out were the first two, now joined by a third, Something Real. 

Something Real is the pick of the bunch for me, an eight minute long cosmic chugger, synths and drum machine providing a deeply addictive acid house/ sci fi backdrop to the dreamy vocals (courtesy of Gordon's daughter Gabriella, singing of neon planets and silver shadows, midnight rhythms and laser rays). A piece of summer sounding psychedelic Balearica for October. Get it at Bandcamp.

Over at Paisley Dark Marshall Watson has an EP out, Tougher Than Disco, two new tracks and four remixes. Never Coming Down is eight minutes of slo mo, acidic chug with echo drenched voices low in the mix. The remixes come from L.A. Dysto who pitch up the beats and the tension and Mr B.C. who brings the warp factor and delay- and then the big chords. 

The second track is Mesmerise, seven minutes of acid house hypnosis led by a post- punk/ indie bass guitar, some spacey synth notes and a trippy vocal from Alona. Remixes are by Viper Patrol (stripped down and thumpy) and Airsine (machine funk). Find all six tracks at Paisley Dark's Bandcamp page. 

Forty Minutes Of Richard Norris And Friends

Richard Norris has a prodigious work rate, a seemingly endless source of musical creativity and productivity. This year alone he has continued his monthly deep listening Music For Healing series (a pair of twenty minute ambient pieces released on the 1st of the month, themed for 2026 around patterns), release a double album of remixes, a solo album inspired by Super 8 home movie footage, an album with Lol Hammond as Moon Dust, an ambient album with Mark Barrott (Nocturnes Vol. 1) and a track released on Martin Luther King Day in January called The Corn Is Coming. There are still two and a half months of 2026 to go- there could be much more to come. 

This is a forty minute mix, a selection of tracks from some of those releases, that starts out ambient and picks up the pace into dub and Balearic areas. If you aren't already a member, his monthly subscription means that most of this music drops into your digital world throughout the year and often comes through your letterbox as well in physical formats. You can find all of this and more at Richard's Bandcamp. 

Forty Minutes Of Richard Norris in 2026

• Richard Norris: River's Song
• Richard Norris: Nocturne No. 6
• Moon Dust: Scarlet Traces
• Moon Dust: Wide Open Space
• Katy J Pearson: Willow's Song (Richard Norris Ritual Mix)
• Gulp: Wildflower (Richard Norris Remix)
• Hollow Hand: Before Tomorrow (Richard Norris Avalon Remix)
• Warpaint: Disco// Very (Richard Norris Remix)

River's Song  came out as a single back in May ahead of the 8mm album, a wobbly and affecting piece of hauntology, inspired by 8mm cine camera films and home movie footage from the pre- digital era. River's Song sounds exactly like watching a flickering film of kids playing in the summer sun, the film clicking as it whirrs round and the past flashing by. Nocturne No. 6 is also from 8mm, a piano piece that uses a different piece of film to spark the music. 8mm is here. 

Moon Dust is Richard and Lol Hammond (Spiral Tribe, The Drum Club). Their album Memories, Dreams, Reflections comes from a similar place as 8mm, thirteen largely piano- led tracks that fall somewhere between ambient, neo- classical and soundtracks. Scarlet Traces is a slow mo, melodic synths and keys track. Wide Open Space is gentle drones, sci fi/ cosmische ambient. You can find Moon Dust's album here. 

Richard's remix work is legendary and cherry picking to compile the highlights onto one album must have been a headache. The remixes on Re- Make: Re- Model go back over a decade with twelve on the vinyl edition and nineteen on CD and download. Narrowing it down to just four remixes for this mix was a problem in itself. The ones I didn't include but easily could have take in Mark Peters and Dot Allison, Pale Blue Eyes, Jagwar Ma, Joe Goddard, Saint Etienne, A Mountain Of One and Andy Bell and there are plenty more as well as those. Re- Make: Remodel is here. 

Richard's dubbed out remix of Katy J Pearson's version of Willow's Song is originally from 2023, a remix of a cover of Paul Giovanni's song from The Wicker Man film, a celebration of the summer solstice, disappearing policemen and pagan goings on. There's a bit of a collision as that track segues into the next one, all my fault I'm afraid.

Gulp are Super Furry Animals Guto Pryce and Lindsey Leven whose album Beneath Strawberry Moons came out last year with Richard's remix on a 12" of Wildflower. Psychedelic folk transported into Balearic- psyche. 

Hollow Hand are from Brighton, a three piece that also play as Caitlin Rose's house band. 60s pop/ indie folk and country rock. Richard re- models them in shimmering  dubby/ folky/ electronic style.

Warpaint's Disco// Very came out in 2014, a track from their self titled 2014 album. Richard's remix is a seven minute floor shaker- I played it at The Golden Lion earlier this year and it hit the late Saturday afternoon/ early evening spot very nicely.

Oblique Saturdays

A series for Saturdays in 2026 inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's set of cards, Oblique Strategies (Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas). Eno and Schmidt created them to be used to unblock creative impasses and approach problems from unexpected angles. Each week I'll turn over an Oblique Strategy card and post a song or songs inspired by the suggestion. 

Last week's Oblique Strategy suggestion was The tape is now the music. 

I went through my collection of tapes and spooled up Billy Bragg, The Wedding Present, One Dove and Sabres Of Paradise, Klangkollektor and Rentamax 2000. Out in the Oblique Saturdays community the suggestions came thick and fast, everyone rewinding their cassettes with pencils to save battery life- Bow Wow Wow from C, This Heat from Walter, Martin Newell and Ephrem Tamiru via Ernie (who also had a photo of his small but perfectly formed collection of tapes with The Cleaners From Venus, Mikey Dread, Richard Hell and Joe Ely all featuring), Mrs G with The Smiths (How Soon Is Now. She also revoked her National Trust membership), Coldcut from Craytezboi, Tapes 'n' Tapes and The Lucksmiths from Al G, mixtapes of the BBC Essential Mix from Jase especially Felix da Housecat and also Brian Wilson's mid 60s tape experiments, The Pooh Sticks (Rol and Gullybully), Julian Cope from Khayem and Died Pretty courtesy of The Swede. And again I'm left thinking, what a mixtape that collection of tracks could turn out to be.

The Pooh Sticks in 1988 with a celebration of tape culture- this song was very much a precursor to LCD Soundsystem's Losing My Edge. 

'I've got all The Velvet Underground albums... on tape/ I've got The Monkees head soundtrack... on tape'. 

On Tape

This week's card is this- In total darkness, or a very large room, very quietly.

My mind focused on the very large room part. I wondered what the largest room I'd ever been in was and what the largest room I've ever seen a band in was. The first large room gig I attended was Lou Reed at Wembley Arena, 4th July 1989. I traveled down to London to stay at my friend Al's (we met that year when we both pitched up Liverpool university the previous autumn. We're still friends today). We went from his parents' house in Ealing to Wembley Arena to see Lou play his then current New York album in full and then a second set of hits. The venue seemed huge to me (at the time used to seeing bands in much smaller rooms), the seats on the venue floor were stackable chairs and the audience was largely a generation older than us. There were a few people our age, all in our 1989 clothes and haircuts, indie kids, goths and acid housers. Lou proclaimed at one point that 'everything you hear is being made by real musicians with real instruments, no samples or tapes', which made him sound like an out of date, punk rock Grandad. According to Setlist.FM the last five songs of the encore were Sweet Jane and Walk On The Wild Side (both of which I remember), Vicious, Satellite Of Love and Waiting For the Man (none of which I do). 

Romeo Had Juliette

The next two gigs in large rooms were both GMex. The December 1989 New Order, Happy Mondays and A Certain Ratio party and Pixies supported by The Real People and Cud gig of June 1991. 

Since then I've seen a few gigs at Manchester Arena (formerly Nynex and the MEN now the AO) most recently Nick Cave on his Wild God tour and before that Pet Shop Boys, Prince, Beastie Boys (twice), The Who with Joe Strummer, Bob Dylan and The Charlatans. Sometimes arena gigs can be a dispiriting, expensive and passive experience and they're not my favourite rooms to see bands in.  

Nick Cave shrunk the arena, making the room feel smaller and bringing the audience into his wild celebration of forty years of Bad Seeds music and the post- grief world of Wild God. The Mercy Seat is played at the end of most Nick Cave gigs and has lost none of its power since its first appearance back in 1988, the tale of a convicted killer going to his death in the electric chair, the condemned man confusing his own story with that of Jesus' and opening us to the possibility that he may have lied. 

I could divert here to two current news stories concerning the USA and its use of the death sentence, the botched attempts to kill Christa Pike and Peter Hegseth's recent announcement that Nidel Malikk Hasan, a disabled man, will be executed by firing squad and that it will be live streamed. In both cases, one is tempted to ask, for a nation and government that claims to be guided by Christian principles, what do you think Jesus would have done in this situation? Hegseth would probably say that Christ would have pulled the trigger. 

The Mercy Seat (Live 1992)

Pet Shop Boys know exactly how to play a very large room- with over the top staging, costumes, dancers, graphics, screens, lights, smoke and mirrors and a non- stop parade of wall to wall bangers. 

Prince in 2014 didn't have much of a stage show, just himself and his band 3rd Eye Girl and a set including Let's Go Crazy, Raspberry Beret, U Got The Look, When Doves Cry, Sign O' The Times, I Would Die 4 U, Purple Rain, 1999, Little Red Corvette, Paisley Park and about two dozen other songs. Pretty incredible really. Also, it was the most culturally diverse crowd I've ever been to a gig with, young and old and every point in between- dressed up Asian couples, middle aged Mums and Dads, musos, hardcore Prince fans, teenagers with chaperoning uncles/ aunties, hippy pensioners... everyone was there. 

Raspberry Beret

I saw the Beastie Boys play the arena twice (1999 was the Hello Nasty tour, an absolute peak, and the other was 2004 it seems- I thought it was earlier). Both times they were superb, a three way energy hit of rap, hip hop, lounge, funk, punk and stoner rock, ably assisted by Money Mark and Mix Master Mike. On the 1999 tour they played in the round on a specially constructed circular stage. Great fun. I'm off to see Mike D in a couple of weeks at the much smaller Albert Halls in Manchester.

The Who was in November 2000 while John Entwistle was still alive. I can't imagine I'd have much interest in going to see them now, Brexit Roger and internet Pete have both sullied their track record a bit. Joe Strummer and The Mescaleros supported playing to a half empty arena, Joe clearly enjoying himself, with Tymon Dogg wheeling around on violin and finishing with a dub version of White Riot. 

The Charlatans was twenty five years ago, in 2001, at the peak of their hits period, the Tellin' Stories and Us And Us Only albums. They were blistering and although the arena wasn't full, it felt full, they gave it their all and got it back from the crowd. 

Tellin' Stories

The Charlatans have made multiple Oblique Saturdays appearances.

Bob Dylan played Nynex in May 2002. We were at the far end of the room, a quarter of a mile away from the stage. There were no big screens, no show at all really, just Dylan and three musicians playing an arena as if it was a club gig. Setlist.FM tells me he started with Maggie's Farm and ended with All Along The Watchtower. The setlist looks like a great gig but I don't remember it being that great. 

All Along The Watchtower (Live 1974, Before The Flood)

Those are the largest rooms I've seen music performed in as far as I can remember. None played in total darkness or very quietly (although Tricky played in near total darkness at the Aviva Factory earlier this year). 

For some reason all of this mention of large rooms and total darkness also suggests this song from Jamie Xx's In Colour album, a beautiful song with bandmate Romy on vocals about a couple drifting apart due to their love of different social scenes.

Loud Places

There's also this John Talabot remix which is as good as anything you'll hear today... 

Loud Places (John Talabot's Higher Dub)

I only realised recently that two lines in the chorus are sampled from Idris Muhammad's Could Heaven Ever Be Like This, covered on the new Birds Of Pandaemonium album that I wrote about here and here.  

Anyway, these Saturday posts are getting longer and longer, more and more wordy. Maybe I should try to reel it in and be more succinct next week. It all depends on Eno's card I suppose. 

Feel free to drop your own responses to In total darkness, or a very large room, very quietly into the comment box. 

Leave It All Behind

Looking back at 2026's album releases the Le Carousel album The Humans Will Destroy Us is standing out, a ten track concept album (the concept being human capacity for our own destruction... via, ooh take your pick... climate change, AI, nuclear weapons, psychotic leaders, war, ...) that blends dancefloor electronics, synth soundtracks, kosmische and Weatherall inspired sounds into a single, coherent whole. 

Le Carousel's Phil Kieran released an EP this week, two versions of a track called Leave It All Behind that he felt didn't quite fit on the album. The first version rides in on electronic percussion and soft female vocals singing the track title, looped and overlapping. Synths add to the blurry psychedelic feel. Halfway through the rhythm hits the foreground and an organ joins, the track becoming more driving, more upfront, before the drums drop out completely. 

The second version, the Le Carousel Mix, has a guitar and bass thrown in, the rhythm tougher and more live, an electronic/ live band stomp with a vocal by Phil, the vague promise of escape with a lack of regret. The Le Carousel mix kicks on, a drone/ psyche/ post- punk version of the song equally at home at a messy indie night as out clubbing. You can buy both at Bandcamp. 

Time & Space

Time & Space is the new album from Nottingham's Shrinkwrap, out now on Notts label Delia Recordings. It's a thirteen track double album and almost all the tracks are over five minutes long. It's an album that demands your full attention, not an album for cherry picking or flicking through or for those with short attention spans (and doesn't that affect us all at times these days- a short attention span seems to be a symptom of modern life). Time & Space is an album to get lost in, to surrender to, to give oneself up to. There's no sense in rushing it. You need to let the music work its magic in its own time.

The first four tracks take in a beautiful marimba led opener (Vibra Marimba), layered and sonically rich Balearica (Call Me When You Get There), the languid and soulful Beautiful Thing, and then a short neo- classical piece called People Passing Through You. The hum of electricity and the dreamy haze of FX are everywhere, tying the tracks together. Shrinkwrap mention Cocteau Twins, Talk Talk, Massive Attack, The KLF and Ryuichi Sakamoto as influences and all of those feel on the money. 

Time & Space drifts into dubby areas and into more uptempo ones. On 54 Blues Pt 1, drums and energy kick in. The follow up, 54 Blues Pt. 2, flips it, downtempo, Bristolian blues. Throughout, there are both live instruments by a variety of guest musicians and the Shrinkwrap duo's samples, synths and machines, a blurring that makes for an organic and alive sound. 

As it moves towards the final four songs Time & Space wanders into ambient territory. Calm Your Mind takes a vocal sample, 'Let your mind wander... calm your mind', and wraps it in rain forest sounds, double bass, pedal steel guitar and fluttering synths. The title track jolts us with a synth wobble and electronic drums. Blind Side is journey into ambient techno and they finish with Acoustic, a track built around an acoustic guitar and FX, a trip into sound and feeling. 

There's so much going on on Time & Space hat you need several sittings, ideally some with headphones, to let it reveal itself fully. Mark Raynor and Matt Horobin have poured several decades of listening to music and making music into it, a head music album that is rich and rewarding in lots of ways.

You can find Time & Space in various formats at Bandcamp. 

Coming Up For Air

Robin Guthrie, ex- Cocteau Twin, has a Bandcamp page where he uploads what he calls his 'orphan tracks', some of them orphaned from the album he was working on back in 2015 (Universal Road, recorded with Mark Gardener of Ride). Robin must have been on a creative spurt because as well as the ten songs on that album there have been several that have seen the light of day on Bandcamp. The latest, out last week, is Coming Up For Air, three minutes of rippling guitar lines over a sheen of warm FX and some beautiful lead lines. It glides by in a shimmer, instrumental shoegaze/ dream pop recorded on the French Riviera. 

According to Robin, 'Elvis was in the building'. You can find it, listen and buy here. Well worth it. 

It doesn't sound at all like Elvis to me.

Back in May Robin released Cherokee, a song from 2012 that began life in Mexico City in 2008. Those familiar guitar sounds, rising chords and FX pedals, with an injection of guitars at just after one minute and then drums a few seconds later- it could be a lost Cocteau Twins track, his guitar playing is so signature and recognisable. The falling notes at three minutes forty sound like lush, warm droplets falling, all very lovely. Again, find it at Bandcamp. 

What If No One's Calling?

Over at The Vinyl Villain JC spent September counting down 800 songs that span the parameters of the blog and his musical world. Near to the business end of things was a song by Echo And The Bunnymen, a band who were a formative Vinyl Villain influence. The song was Heads Will Roll, from 1983's Porcupine. It was a choice that made me smile- out of all the songs from the classic four man line up, from Crocodiles to Ocean Rain, all those songs and moments, all those singles, JC went for a Porcupine album track. 

I spent some time going back to Porcupine and Heads Will Roll. The album was described by those involved in making it as 'horrible'. They'd been on tour and hadn't had time to write new songs. The songs they were writing didn't flow as easily as the Heaven Up Here songs. Mac doesn't like singing the Porcupine songs, as he feels the words are too personal, that he gave too much away. Will didn't like the record company telling him first version of the songs and the production weren't good enough and resented them having to be re- worked and re- recorded. Les didn't like the record industry full stop. Pete had been producing The Wild Swans, spent some time doing other things, and was a little isolated from the other three Bunnymen (as he often was). Not ideal conditions. That they made Porcupine at all is a miracle. 

The Cutter and The Back Of Love are songs one and two- two massive Bunnymen singles, adorned with Shankar's strings- and after that the album does become a bit heavy and self obsessed. My White Devil and Clay are both serious songs. The title track too. 

Side two opens with the drama and psychedelic post- punk of Heads Will Roll though and suddenly we're back down at the front, the band blazing and the violas and cellos linking 1967 with 1983, headspinning swirly psyche and Mac singing of 'partly politic' and 'no one calling', meetings in private places where he will 'stare you into the ground'. It's gripping and exhilarating stuff, psychedelic Bunnymen with verses and choruses. 

They recorded a longer version, the Summer Version, which eventually came out as a B- side on the post- Porcupine standalone single Never Stop, a song that broke the gloom. Lay down thy raincoat and groove. The Summer Version is longer, Will's spindly guitar at the fore and Les' bass powering everything along, before the viola comes in. It ends with Shankar's strings and Pete's drums going off on one for forty seconds,a section which could easily have been stretched out for longer. 

Heads Will Roll (Summer Version)

This clip of the Bunnymen on Dutch TV miming to Heads Will Roll demonstrates what was so great about them, the 1983 Bunnymen in all their pomp. 

The 2003 CD release of Porcupine (and the other canonical 80s albums) featured various B- sides and extras. Porcupine's extras included four previously unreleased versions from the original studio recordings, produced by Kingbird (Ian Broudie, who produced both the original and re- recorded songs for Porcupine) and before Shakar's strings were added. When you listen to them it's easy to see why Will was pissed off at them being rejected- there's nothing wrong with them, they're sparser and possibly less dynamic but still good takes. WEA/ Korova rejected them as 'too uncommercial'. I'm not sure Will was too bothered about being commercial. When they'd recorded The Back Of Love in 1982 tensions were so bad Drummond got them off to Scotland, a tour of the highlands and islands, to rebuild band relations, a tactic which didn't entirely succeed. The Porcupine sessions were tense and that can be heard in the original versions I think. Shankar's strings which added so much to The Back Of Love and The Cutter were brought back. This is the original version of the album's title track...

Porcupine (Original Version)

Ian's lyrics to the Porcupine song Higher Hell were inspired by seeing a Hieronymus Bosch painting while on tour in Madrid, Ian lost in the detail and crazy world of the 16th century Dutch painter. The lower heaven and higher hell of the song were Ian's version of Bosch's psychedelic/ religious freakout world of God, animals and monsters, birds swallowing people whole and bodies piled up after final judgement.

Higher Hell

Hieronymus Bosch appears on the new Bunnymen album Apples For Isaac, a link between the worlds of 1983 and 2026. 'What would Hieronymus say?', Ian sings in the single Brussels Is Haunted, a genuinely great late period Bunnymen song, Ian back at the top of his game, sounding good and writing lyrics that are memorable. 

It's difficult to listen to the album and hear it as a full Bunnymen album in some ways- Will only appears on a few songs and Ian has said that Will's 'weird stuff' didn't get used. It feels more like an Ian McCulloch solo album but the name Echo and The Bunnymen will get greater attention and sales. But even so, it's good, I like it. It feels weirdly personal due to the title but that's not the only reason. At least half the songs are much better than you might expect at this stage in proceedings and the fact that there's been so long between this one and the previous one (ten years) suggests Ian has worked at it, chosen his best songs, got them recorded as he wants them and not just rushed out some mediocre product. It feels like he cares. 

Clem Burke's drums give it some wallop, the guitars and synths sparkle, it sounds Bunnymen but not deliberately so, not chasing or reviving the classic sound- it's just that this is what they sound like. First song Take Me By The Hand charges in at a pace and Can't Be Sold follows, bold and confident in itself. Brussels Is Haunted is a beauty. On some of the songs Ian sounds his age, the voice a bit worn and weary- not in a bad way but in a way that works for the songs. 

An Unstoppable Force opens side two, Velvets acoustic guitars and Ian at the fore, wiser maybe, a man who knows time and tide wait for no- one. 

There are a couple more that stand up- Asimov has clipped guitar chords and some drama and The Light That Surrounds You pulls at the heartstrings. Lab Rats Ran has sax that recalls Roxy Music. Apples For Isaac ends with We Prayed In The Dark and by the time it finishes I've spent forty minutes listening to eleven new Echo And The Bunnymen songs and not wished I had Ocean Rain, Porcupine, Crocodiles or Heaven Up Here on instead. It's not any of those albums either but it's definitely, on its own terms, a minor triumph. 

Monday's Long Songs

The last two Spiritualized albums were released in 2018 and 2022, songs recorded at the same time and split over two records with titles that joined up to form a phrase courtesy of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5, Everything Was Beautiful And Nothing Hurt. 

There's an argument, not least in the pair of album titles, that the sixteen songs demonstrate that Jason has finally found some inner peace and buried the demons that were on his trail for the previous three or four decades and that dominated his songwriting. The songs were worked up on Jason's laptop with Jason playing a huge range of instruments- sixteen I read somewhere- and it is incredible what can be done on a laptop. The songs are huge, fresh and vibrant, a definite addition to the Spiritualized back catalogue after a couple of previous albums that didn't do as much for me (2008's Songs In A&E and 2012's Sweet Heart Sweet Light). If ...And Nothing Hurt and Everything Was Beautiful... end up being the full stop on Spiritualized, they're a good place to finish. 

Jason's no stranger to long songs. The longest song on 2018's ...And Nothing Hurt was The Morning After which blasts off with organ drone and Johnny B. Good guitar, totally Velvet Underground too, and then Jason's slightly broken voice, 'Jane said she had a problem with the modern world/ All the boys she ever loved are in love with another girl...' 

The Morning After

There's a view on various Spritualized forums that Jane is Jason, reflecting on his own problems with the modern world. The song is a blast, nearly eight minutes of rock 'n roll as catharsis, the ending overdubbed with free jazz sax and a pile up of instruments putting Jason's laptop through its paces. 

The longest song 2022's Everything Was Beautiful... was The A Song (Laid In Your Arms), seven minutes and seven seconds of exhilarating psych/ space rock. 'These are the words, they're as old as the hills/ Cooked on a diet of mushrooms and pills/ One man's crime is another man's thrill/ And we're gone'. Some kind of acceptance there. Guitars, horns, organ, drums, all weigh in, layered and distorted and all contributing to a mass musical delirium. 'We're laid in your arms'. 

The A Song (Laid In Your Arms)

Forty Five Minutes Of Post- Factory Durutti Column

More Durutti Column- there's already quite a lot of Vini here this year, hopefully you can stick with it. There's so much to find in his back catalogue, always a track you hadn't heard or noticed properly before. 

Today's mix is a post- Factory selection. Factory folded in 1992, debts killing off a fourteen year art experiment. Tony Wilson moved on and with typical bravado launched Factory Too (Factory 2) in 1994 with The Durutti Column the first band to sign up (Wilson was Vini's friend, mentor and manager so it seemed obvious Vini would follow Tony- everyone else had gone to London Records or elsewhere because under the rules of engagement at Factory, 'the artists own everything, the label owns nothing', a beautiful artistic stance that left the label nothing to bargain with when the creditors began banging on the doors and they tried to save the label in 1991/ 2). 

Factory Too/ 2, Wilson with original Factory co- director Alan Erasmus, also signed Hopper and The Space Monkeys (I recall nothing about Hopper but The Space Monkeys play a few times including a good gig at The Boardwalk). The Durutti Column released two albums for the label before it too folded- 1994's Sex And Death and 1998's Time Was Gigantic... When We Were Kids, and one in between on Le Disques de Crepuscule, a Factory Belgian offshoot. 

After that Vini's albums came out on Kooky or Artful leading to the 2010's tribute to Tony Wilson, A Paean To Wilson. In 2012 Vini suffered a series of strokes and that was that it seemed until this year's comeback, Renascent. The eleven albums he made after 1994 and the various recordings that came out as a series of CD only albums called The Sporadic Recordings are a treasure trove of lesser known and obscure Durutti Column songs. This mix only scratches the surface.

Forty Five Minutes Of Post- Factory Durutti Column

• Or Are You Just A Technician?
• It's Wonderful
• Fidelity
• Fado
• So Many Crumbs And Monkeys!
• Longsight Romance
• Nile Reprise
• Diazepam 5mg
• Drinking Tune (Version)
• Requiem
• Fate

Or A You Just A Technician? is the opening track from 2010's Paean To Wilson, recorded for Tony after his death in 2007. The track is a minute of sound manipulation, Wilson interviewing Martin Hannett about his role as a producer, ever the provocateur. Requiem is from the same album, a long eulogy for Vini's friend.  

It's Wonderful is a glorious explosion of sound from 2006's Keep Breathing, a huge and life affriming piece of music. I saw Durutti Column at Manchester Academy, in the small room at the top of the student union, around this time playing a set of songs mainly from the 90s albums and finishing with some Stooges style raw power. It's Wonderful was superb. In the 90s and 00s we saw them play several gigs in Manchester, a couple in unusual places- one at Atlas Bar where Vini and Bruce played in the window, their backs to Deansgate and another at the Comedy Club on Deansgate Locks around 2003/ 4 where Vini made some jokes about how he should be telling jokes and played the first two songs just him, his guitar and a ghetto blaster, before the band came on and joined him. It wasn't sold out- funny how patchy attendance was a some of the Factory related stuff in the 90s and 00s. I went to an afternoon at the Cornerhouse where Wilson introduced 10 videos that made Manchester or Factory, with a Q&A after. There were about twenty people there including The Other Two (sat in front of us). Memory tells me the Comedy Store gig an afternoon gig too. 

Fidelity is from 1996's album of the same name, a John Bonham sampling tune. Both track and album are very much lost DC. Eley Rudge guests on vocals with Vini on guitar, synths, piano and samples. 

Fado is from Sex And Death, a twelve track album that was his first for four years when it came out in 1994. Vini goes all over the place on the album, a real pick and mix job, with tracks in a dozen styles. In 1991 The Durutti Column played at Factory's Cities In The Park festival in Heaton Park, partly a tribute to Hannett. It was a hot day and the line up was strong- Durutti Column, Cath Carroll, ACR, De La Soul, New FADs, Revenge, Electronic (with Pet Shop Boys appearing on Patience Of A Saint) and Happy Mondays. One of those gigs you have to pinch yourself actually happened and cost less than £20. The version of Fado we were privileged to listen to in the afternoon heat was as good as anything else we heard that day. Fado is named after the traditional Portuguese music Vini heard on tour in Lisbon, music all about sadness, loss and longing. 

So Many Crumbs and Monkeys!is from 2008's Sunlight To Blue... Blue To Blackness, an acoustic, folk sounding song with a drum machine and Vini's guitar playing a total joy. Vini sings in the second half of the song.

Longsight Romance is from 2001's Rebellion. Longsight is a mile south of Manchester city centre on the A6 towards Stockport. The song is full of delay and FX, several guitar parts, hand drums and Vini's voice. The album takes in Irish folk, a song with a rapper, various guest vocalists and a banjo.

The Sporadic recordings came out in 1990 followed by The Return Of... in 2002 and a third volume, Sporadic Three, in 2007. The CDs are full of archival recordings, demos, lost tracks, experiments, all manner of rare and unreleased songs. Nile Reprise and Daizepam 5mgs are both from The Return Of The Sporadic Recordings and Drinking Time (Version) and Fate are from Sporadic Three. All three are typically Vini- inventive, expressive, off the cuff, and melodic. According to the sleevenotes, written by Vini, Drinking Time was an offcut from Time Was Gigantic... and has 'Laurie Laptop pulling all the FX he could find on the track'. Fate is described as  a 'little Portastudio tune from around the time of Tempus Fugit' (which was released in 2004). Fate is acoustic guitar with plenty of delay, notes echoing round the mix, a blur of background sound, an electric guitar drippling notes into the foreground and Vini's soft vocals. It's a gorgeous, lilting, middle of the night kind of song, the sort of thing it seems Vini was recording almost as an afterthought. 

Oblique Saturdays

A series for Saturdays in 2026 inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's set of cards, Oblique Strategies (Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas). Eno and Schmidt created them to be used to unblock creative impasses and approach problems from unexpected angles. Each week I'll turn over an Oblique Strategy card and post a song or songs inspired by the suggestion. 

Last week's Oblique Strategy suggestion was What are you really thinking about just now?

I was thinking about various things, both trivial and more important. Musically it took me to The Charlatans. There was an inspired response from the OSS (Oblique Saturdays Squad) which included Otavio August Fernades Cardoso (Ernie), Kurt Vile and The Charlatans (Al G, and a different Charlatans song from mine), The Housemartins, Broken Chanter, Happy Mondays, The Colourfield and Hifi Sean and David McAlmont (all JC), National Trust membership (Mrs G), the England 1970 World Cup squad (Jase), The B52s (Rol), Jake Thackray (The Swede), Jonathan Dee (A Telepathic Fish) and NOZZ (Chris Zen Arcade).

W.F.L. (Think About The Future)

At the start of this series in January I thought I might pull all the songs together into a mix or series of mixes but the sheer volume of them has left me a bit overwhelmed by the prospect. An end of year job maybe. 

Anyway, this week's card is this- The tape is now the music. 

A few weeks ago a friend who's moving house sent me a message to ask if it was worth trying to sell a box of old cassettes, 'mainly 80s pop' he said, 'Springsteen, Dire Straits, that kind of thing'. I said it was, the cassette revival was very much a thing and 80s pop was probably much sought after. I recommended Fountains records in Stretford. He came back with £50 in his pocket and promised to buy me a pint to say thank you (I've not had that pint yet it occurs to me). 

The photo at the top of this post and the one below are the tapes I still own, bought at various points since the late 80s. I sometimes bought cassettes back in the day- cheaper than vinyl, portable, often contained extra tracks, some bought for car listening- many of these pictured here were owned on vinyl as well (and possibly later on on CD too). A couple are magazine freebies, one is a bootleg of Andrew Weatherall DJing at Cream bought in a clothes shop in Wigan (funny the things you remember), a couple are promos from a magazine in Manchester I contributed a few things to in the mid 90s, a handful are very recent (products of the tape revival) and there's a few C90s in there too which for sentimental reasons I've never felt able to part with. I could probably equal my friend's £50 windfall by taking many of these up the road but I think I'd miss them. I do actually still have a cassette player too but am cautious about playing them in case they get tangled and snagged. 

Some tracks from a handful of the tapes pictured.

Waiting For The Great Leap Forwards

Possibly Billy Bragg's best song, certainly one of his most loved. I adored it when it came out and it evokes the world it was released into very much- the me as an 18 year old world and the wider world of 1988.

A Million Miles

See also The Wedding Present and George Best. 

The cassette single (they tried to make the word cassingle a thing and it didn't really take off) was a cheap way of picking up extra tracks and B-sides for Walkman listening, especially if you picked them up from the bargain bin in Woolworths after they'd dropped out of the chart. The 1993 One Dove cassingle of Breakdown cost me less than a quid and has the sublime Squire Black Dove Rides Out version of Breakdown on it, ideal for listening to on the move at a time when I didn't have the facility to tape from my vinyl. Andrew Weatherall and the Sabres boys with a ten minute cinematic dub odyssey, remixing One Dove and sampling Shades Of Rhythm and Tranquility Bass to fine effect. 

Breakdown Squire Black Dove Rides Out 

Klangkollektor is from Nuremberg and releases records on Jason Boardman's Before I Die label. Thoroughly recommended. The cassette release of The Stockport Tapes captures Klangkollektor playing live in Lower Hillgate, Stockport, two summers ago. Dubby Balearica with Roland Space Echo and tweeting birds. 

Evening Post (Live In Stockport)

Rentamax 2000's Straight To Tape came out in September 2025, the sound of the future past, Tomorrow's World, dial up and the 80s tape revolution.

Polytechnic

The tape is now the music. Feel free to drop your own responses and recommendations in the comments box. 

The Girl Of Our Dreams

One of the wheels set in motion by The Sex Pistols and the birth of punk in the UK in 1976 was the appearance of regional scenes where creative people suddenly saw a route to making music in a different way and didn't feel the need to go to London to do it. Don't ask for permission, don't wait for someone to offer you a contract, just get up and do it. In Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Bristol bands began to act. Another of the wheels was the realisation by some that you didn't need to sound like The Sex Pistols, you could funnel all sorts of other influences into your DIY sound. 

This was as true in Bristol as anywhere else. The Pop Group gave themselves the most generic name they could think of (only A Pop Group could have been a little more generic), a name dripping in irony. They took their influences- punk but also jazz and free, dub, funk- and fused them with radical politics to come up with some of the most uncompromising, intense and intuitive post- punk records. 

She Is Beyond Good And Evil was their debut single, released in March 1979. Mark Stewart was a didactic and intense frontman and lyricist. The song is about love as an unconditional force, a force where according to Mark, 'idealism and energy mix poetic, existential, and political yearnings with the romantic idea of passing through nihilism and emerging on the other side with something positive, something beyond'. 

She Is Beyond Good And Evil

The Pop Group were not making pop music, certainly not the chart bothering stuff. The guitars are vicious and trebly, similar to the scratchy sound ACR were brewing up in Manchester. The bass is from dub. The drums too. There is dub space and FX and Mark delivering with lines like, 'Western values mean nothing to her', and, 'She is the one thing you can't buy/ With zero reasons for living'. 

On We Are All Prostitutes, their second single, also released in 1979, the band sound angry, disturbed, raging, alienated and violent, the band hewing around, the sound veering from left to right, never settling for a moment with a skronking sax solo interrupting the middle of the song. 

We Are All Prostitutes

The B-side was titled Amnesty International Report On British Army Torture Of Irish Prisoners. 

The Pop Group released two albums, Y and For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? and then split in 1981. The members went on to influence pop music further in all sorts of ways- between them they were instrumental in Rip Rig And Panic (and beyond that in Neneh Cherry's solo career), Pigbag, Maximum Joy, The Slits and with Adrian Sherwood and On U Sound. They reformed in 2010 at the instigation of Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons. Mark died in 2023 bringing the reunion to an end. Guitarist John Waddington died in the same year. 

Live In October

October already. I was going to welcome in the tenth month of the year with a post of songs with October in the title but on checking lat year's 1st October post I did that a year ago- Chris and Cosey's October Love Song, Pet Shop Boys' October Symphony, The Gentle Waves' October Sky and Maria Somerville's October Moon. It doesn't seem like a year since I wrote that post but tempus does bloody fugit these days. 

Instead here are some songs by a pair of Manchester bands recorded live in Octobers past, both at Polytechnics in Yorkshire, a decade apart.

First in October 1990 (the 25th to be precise, my wife's birthday although we hadn't met at that point) and The High caught live at Sheffield Polytechnic, part of a tour to promote their debut album Somewhere Soon. Four days earlier they played Liverpool Poly, a gig I was at. The song below shows what a good live band The High were, Andy Couzens guitar playing sparkling and John Matthews soft voice sounding really good, the rhythm section (Chris Goodwin on drums and Simon Davies on bass) punchy and dynamic especially during the end section of the album's title track where they take off.  

Somewhere Soon (Live at Sheffield Polytechnic 25th October 1990)

Ten years and two weeks earlier The Durutti Column played at Leeds Polytechnic, Vini introducing the calling card from his debut album, The Return Of The Durutti Column, the always majestic sounding Sketch For Summer...

Sketch For Summer (Live at Leeds Polytechnic 7th October 1980)

Also from the first Durutti Column album is this live version of Requiem For A Father, Vini's fingers running up and down the fretboard in tribute to his dad who died when Vini was just 16, a man he admitted later he did not nearly well enough. This song seems to suggest a lot went unsaid. 

Requiem For A Father (Live At Leeds Polytechnic 7th October 1980)