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)

Ride The Train

The Coral's album from earlier this year, their thirteenth, is a good album that demonstrates their strengths and versatility. Also, their ability to follow their collective noses and the best part of three decades in still come up with the goods. For 388 they went back to the music they listened to as teens- ska, reggae, dub and rocksteady- and used it as a starting point. 1960s and 70s Jamaican and Ethiopian jazz crossed with West Kirby. The playing sounds live and rich and the nicely loose. 

'Play that song again/ You know the one/ The one we used to smoke to/ When we were young', the album opens with on Let The Music Play and James Skelly transports himself back to that time but singing with the voice of a middle aged man. There's no cod reggae on 388, it's not white men pretending to be Jamaicans but it's an authentic musical bedrock to their latest batch of songs. I can't promise it will change your life but its a cracking album, good songs, played and sung with feeling. 

Try this one Ride That Train...

Back in 2001 The Coral, still in their late teens and early twenties, released a debut album that veered between pirate songs about skeleton keys, mad 60s psyche, sea shanties and whatever else they fancied. It was exciting and weird, a psychedelic Wirral on black vinyl. They made Magic And Medicine fairly quickly after, slightly ironing out some of the crinkles and going 60s pop- Dreaming Of You was a deserved hit.

Dreaming Of You

The follow up, Nightfreak And The Sons Of Becker went back to the freak music, Beefheart and Love and gently surreal psychedelia of Super Furry Animals. In 2005, only four years after their debut hey released their fourth album The Invisible Invasion. It was produced by Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley of Portishead, a stripped down version of the 60s psyche they'd been refining over the previous four years with some folk and pop thrown in. This song was everywhere for a while, a gorgeous tune with a real lightness of touch, Wirral psyche- pop.

In The Morning

On the album it's preceded by A Warning To The Curious, all reverb and echo, low key weirdness and with a hint of the Bunnymen lurking inside it.  

A Warning To The Curious

Eudaemonia

 

Eudaemonia is the title of the new album by New York group Birds Of Pandæmonium . The word Eudaemonia comes from Greek, translating as 'living well' or flourishing by living a good and moral life. The band are a duo who met in Brooklyn's club scene and have brought a love of folk, disco, Balearica, jazz and electronics together in an eight track debut out now on Manchester's Sprechen label. I've alreayd written about the first single, a cover of New Wave group New Musik's On Islands, a joyous slice trippy Balearica and their cover of NY loft classic Could Heaven Ever Be Like This, the Birds Of Pandæmonium pair bringing synths, acoustic guitars, FX and drums into a nine minute epic (with Hifi Sean remixes to boot). 

The album goes further. It's not all covers but there are plenty, all reworked into the Birds Of Pandæmonium soundworld. You may not know that you were missing a cosmic disco version of Underworld's Born Slippy from your life but you do now. Blue Jeans is slo mo Yacht Rock version of Lana del Rey's song, a cruise down by the marina looking at the boys and girls as the sun goes down. The last two songs on the album have been occupying a lot of my time. The first is the shortest on the album, a cover of Latin Quarter's 1985 song Voices Inside, a stripped down but musically rich torch song, orchestral with what sounds like a blissfully happy Lou Reed on vocals. Eudaemonia ends with I Want To Believe, a self penned Birds Of Pandæmonium song which, well, just listen to it and improve you journey to work, day and life for the next seven minutes....

Massive blissed out, end of the night, lights down, pulsebeat euphoria, psychedelic dreampop, spirit of Screamadelica vibes, a real come over here and give me a hug and maybe this moment could last forever kind of song. 

Eudaemonia is out now on vinyl and digitally. Get it here. 

Monday's Long Song

Another release that comes all the way ffrom Sao Paulo, Brazil and another one to add to the ambient works of Pandit Pam Pam. The latest is a three track EP, Etangs De La Loge, the third part being a seven minute tribute to a barely moving French pool of water. The music, synth ripples and soft drones, is very much water music. Best to take all three tracks Etangs De La Loge 1, 2 and 3 as one longer ambient piece. Get it at Bandcamp. 

While you're there you can dip back to July and the seven minute track La Fourche- soft chords, notes bending slightly, a distant whirr, things shifting, the sense of weightlessness but at the same time one that becomes a little uneasy. Ambient music is often about the detail and there's lots more going on here if you really listen to it, concentrate on the music rather than just have it on as background ambience. La Fourche is also at Bandcamp. 

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.