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Showing posts with label the real people. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the real people. Show all posts

Sunday, 27 September 2026

Thirty More Minutes Of Lost Baggy


Side B of last Sunday's limited edition tape, Never Change (Baggy- The Lost Tracks 1988- 1993)- as requested by readers last weekend. Side A was a blast with a blur of indie dance, rap, acid house and sampledelica. Side B follows suit. The tape was a follow up to Jon Savage's compilation Perfect Motion, released on Caroline True Records in 2015, Jon's joining of the dots between The Stone Roses backwards tape experiments, Deee Lite's day glo grooves and Sabres Of Paradise's Clock Factory, finding a secret second wave of psychedelia. 

Never Change Side B

  • Primal Scream: Come Together (Hypnotone Brain Machine Mix)
  • Golden: Anglo American
  • Honey Smugglers: Listen
  • The Satyrs: Oh Yeah!!
  • The Real People: Window Pane (Remix)
  • Unknown: Unknown White Label
  • The Honey Turtles: Don't You Know (Shoegazer's Weirdo Remix)
  • The Stone Roses: Fool's Gold (Down To The Clown Edit)


Come Together was the second of the singles that led into Screamadelica, the 12" featuring Weatherall's epic ten minute mix, 'gospel and rhythm and blues and jazz', and Terry Farley's Suspicious Minds influenced version with Bobby's blissed out vocal. Less well known was the Hypnotone remix (which came out on a second 12" and on the seminal Creation dance compilation Keeping The Faith). Hypnotone were briefly great, a Mancunian DJ/ producer called Tony Martin who made Dream Beam (with the late and much missed Denise Johnson on vocals) and a self titled album that hit all the right spots- spots that often started with an E. Hypnotone's remix of Come Together is a technicolor riot of sounds and samples, Primal Scream sent into a spin- I've always thought it sounds like Primal Scream and Public Enemy playing two different songs on the same stage at the same time, at a rave at 3am. 

Golden were on Saint Etienne's Ice Rink label and released Anglo American in 1992, three young women with Saint Etienne and associates playing and producing which explains why it sounds like a lost Saint Etienne track- think 7 Ways To Love and Join Our Club and this one fits in perfectly. 

Honey Smugglers released a few singles and an album (on cassette only) in 1990, a London indie dance group. Listen's inclusion on a recent From Baggy To Britpop box set has seen all their music uploaded to Bandcamp and the band reforming. Listen is a very 1990 sounding song, that bassline, those drums and a vocal that could easily be Julian Cope. Moreso when the organ comes in. In fact, more and more you can hear Cope and the Teardrops as a key influence in the 1988- 1993 period. 

The Satyrs, a trio, made just one record, a 12" with Oh Yeah!! on the B and Shooting Air on the A. 60s sounding psychedelic indie dance, very Liverpool sounding but actually from London. 

Whereas The Real People were actually from Liverpool, a band who Noel Gallagher has said were a huge influence on the early Oasis- which you can definitely hear in Window Pane with its Beatles vibes, chunky guitars, driving drums and vocal lines. The Real People were formed by a pair of brothers, Tony and Chris Griffiths, in 1986 and by the late 80s were playing regularly round Liverpool. I saw them at least once at The Flying Picket (I think), a trade union owned concert venue and studio on Hardman Street. I also saw them supporting Pixies at GMex in summer 1991, a massive venue for them but the crowd who gathered together down the front got into it and the band responded. Window Pane and some of the debut album, a self titled 1991 release, were produced by Stephen Street but they never made the break through that the songs deserved. 

Unknown. I dunno. Wah Wah guitar, Funky Drummer backbeat, Hendrix and Syd Barratt guitars. Could be 5:30, could be Blur, could someone entirely unknown. 

The Honey Turtles- another band with just one single release, a 12" called Don't You Know in 1991 on Pulse- 8 records. Indie dance gone rave with a dash of early Blur. Pulse- 8 was a London based rave/ hardcore label. 

Fool's Gold is clearly not a lost track. It is one of  The Stone Roses best known, their chart breakthrough, it got them on Top Of The Pops and on the front of the NME on a Swiss mountain top and sent them all over the world. The edit that closes the tape isn't from the 1988- 1993 period either as far as I'm aware and seems to be credited to Frequent Flyers. It's inclusion as the tape's ending is therefore a bit of an outlier in more ways than one but the edit's pretty good, the looped part at the start is nice, it's all a bit irreverent and it brings the C90 to a point where all you want to do is turn it over and start again with Side A. 


Saturday, 6 June 2026

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 is the reality of the situation?

My Oblique responses were a new song from Mike D and The Aloof from 1994. The Bagging Area Oblique squad came up with some excellent suggestions. ilradz4evuh suggested a slew of Happy Mondays songs, all benefiting from the input of a producer (John Cale, Martin Hannett, Paul Oakenfold and Steve Osborne, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, and Sunny Levine and Howie B). Al G suggested Liverpool's The Real People (a band I saw twice back in the day, once in their home town and once at G- Mex supporting Pixies). This is the song Al G proposed, from The Real People's 1991 self- titled album...

The Truth

Rol went with Soul II Soul and The Beautiful South. Ernie plumbed for Gil Scott Heron's B Movie. JC came up with The Jam and Crass (a second Oblique Saturday showing for Crass) and Edinburgh's Sons Of The Descent. Over on social media Chris threw African Head Charge and Professor Stretch in. 

The variety of responses and the sheer range of songs thrown up by a short Brian Eno penned cryptic remark is ace. 

This week's Oblique Strategy card says this- Emphasise differences.

In 1973 Iggy Pop had a third roll of the dice with The Stooges, now Iggy and The Stooges. The monstrous groove of the original band had become something more akin to hard rock with the addition of new guitarist James Williamson. The failure of the first two albums, the debut and Funhouse, had seen the band spiral into chaos and addiction. They broke up, Iggy was on smack, Dave Alexander was an alcoholic. Singing as a solo artist with Colombia he moved to London with Williamson to make an album. Once there they failed to find a rhythm section that worked and so they flew former- Stooges the Asheton brothers over, with Ron reluctantly accepting he'd play the bass. With Bowie producing they recorded an album- Raw Power. 

Raw Power is a high octane blast of, well, raw power. From the opening frenzy of Search And Destroy it rattles and shakes, roars and thunders, proto- punk, one of those albums that inspired a thousand others. It ends with Death Trip...

Death Trip (1997 Iggy Pop remix)

'Sick boy sick boy going wrong/ Memory losing grip/ Girl I wanna take you out with me/ Come along on my death trip'

Iggy was on a one way trip at this point, heading towards the exit door. A death trip.

Incidentally, the version above is from Iggy's remixed/ remastered 1997 version, an opinion splitting version. Bowie's original 1973 version was often criticised for being muddy and unclear. Iggy redid it, in an attempt to compete with late 90s rock radio, everything pushed into the red but clarified for radio. Lots of people hated the new version- both Asheton brothers for two, Robert Quine and Don Fleming for two more and David Bowie himself. 

The Iggy mix does emphasise the differences, the distortion is audible but the instruments are separated and punchy. For two generations brought up on Bowie's 1973 mix though the wound up tension and ferocity of the original would always be the one. 

From Death Trip in 1973 to Lust For Life in 1977. 

Lust For Life

In between Iggy had finished off the second version of The Stooges on tour, the band and a bunch of bikers coming to blows while the band played (captured on Metallic K.O.). Iggy's drug issues deepened and he checked himself into a mental institution. Bowie rescued him, took him on the Station To Station tour and the pair then relocated to West Berlin in an attempt to wean themselves off their respective drug addictions (Bowie cocaine, Pop heroin). I guess it made some sense at the time but West Berlin was one of the strangest places in the world in 1977. Going there to get off drugs was a brave decision. It paid off. The made two of the best records of Iggy's and David's careers. Of anyone's careers in fact. The Idiot and Lust For Life (both should really be seen as part of Bowie's Berlin trilogy).

The road from Death Trip to Lust For Life is in itself an exercise in emphasising differences. Bowie and Pop were too, Bowie cerebral and arty, a megastar, a life as a work of art while Pop was a washed up rocker, an exercise in living as hard as you can all the time, primal.

'I'm worth a million in prizes/ I'm through with sleeping on the sidewalk/ No more beat my brains/ With liquor and drugs/ I got a lust For Life'.

Another way of emphasising differences is to look at where a band starts and where they finish. In the seven years between 1976 and 1983 The Clash went from this...

White Riot

...to this...

Death Is A Star

I'm not sure many bands ever traveled as far musically and stylistically as The Clash. Strummer, Jones, Simonon and Headon emphasising the difference, between White Riot and Death Is A Star, between ferocious two chord punk and impressionistic cinematic modern jazz. 

Feel free to drop your own emphasising differences suggestions in the comment box.