An hour long mix for New Year's Eve featuring solely music released in 2025, ambient and largely instrumental although some voices creep in to the Keith Tenniswood remix of Deeply Armed's The Healing and Mogwai's God Gets You Back.
I was going to do a second mix to go with it, a more uptempo, more vocals based hour long mix but time and circumstances conspired against me. It'll follow at the weekend hopefully. In the meantime this one gives some low key shimmer and emotion to the last day of the year.
Death In Vegas: Lightning Bolt (Live at EartH, 2025)
Jamie Lidell and Luke Schneider: The Story Of Your Life
SUSS and Six Missing: Old Mission
Robin Guthrie: Her Name Is Dulcinea
Deeply Armed: The Healing (Keith Tenniswood Remix)
Klangkollektor: Isle Of Stonsy
Mogwai: God Gets You Back
Andy Bell: Pinball Wanderer
Sewell And The Gong: Communion Phase
Kieran Hebden and William Tyler: Secret City
Daniel Avery: Neon Pulse
Moon Dust: The Glow (Slowed + Reverb)
The Death In Vegas track Lightning Bolt dates from 2011 and the Trans- Love Energies album but this version was recorded live when DIV played at EartH in Dalston this year, fragile, drifting ambience.
Jamie Lidell and Luke Schneider released A Companion For Spaces Between Dreams, Luke's pedal steel ambient- Americana crossed with Jamie's modular synths and tapes effects. Psychedelic inner voyage music.
SUSS are also from the ambient- Americana/ cosmic country scene, a trio from New York. This song with Six Missing's electric guitar came out in November.
Robin Guthrie occasionally tidies up his unreleased files/ shelves and releases music onto Bandcamp, tracks that didn't make albums released in the past- orphan tracks. Her Name Is Dulcinea is one of those, from 2012, that saw the light of day in November this year. Ambient shoegaze/ dream pop for which the word 'ethereal' seems a cliche but also very apt.
Belfast's Deeply Armed released a 12" called The Healing in the spring complete with remixes by Death In Vegas, Andrew Innes with Brendan Lynch and lone swordsman Keith Tenniswood. The original is ghostly, shamanic psyche/ kraut. Keith strips it down with a primitive drum machine and heartbeat pulse. Low key beauty.
Klangkollektor's Balearic/ dub instrumentals have been present in two releases in 2025- Dubtapes Volume 2 and The Stockport Tapes (recorded live at Bruk). Isle Of Stonsey adds pedal steel or Hawaiian guitar to the soundscape, a very chilled out, beatific excursion.
Mogwai's The Bad Fire opened with God Gets You Back, stellar guitar picking and FX that builds, going supernova in the second half when the synths, drums and vocals join in.
Andy Bell's Pinball Wanderer album came out in February and has been played round here every month since. The title track marries late 60s acid folk guitar and cosmische rhythms with Andy's spacious, warm production.
Sewell And The Gong's Patron Saint of Elsewhere has been one of my favourite records of 2025 and this track, Communion Phase, is as good as any from it- psychedelic, motorik and folky with an optimistic feel.
Kieran Hebden and William Tyler's 41 Longfield Street Late 80s splices Kieran's laptop beats and productions with William's acoustic and electric guitars to make one of the most affecting albums of 2025- hypnotic, engaging, with an eye on the past (and on Kieran's Dad's record collection in the late 80s, alt- country and Nashville) but avoiding dewy- eyed nostalgia to create something entirely their own.
Daniel Avery's Tremor album was a departure from his ambient techno of recent years and a swerve into channeling his early 90s industrial rock influences. He toured the album with a full band, guitarist, bassist and drummer kicking up a right old noise alongside his synths and machines. On the album's opener, Neon Pulse, he lulls us into a sense of ambient security, two minutes of gorgeous floaty sci fi synth ambience.
Moon Dust is yet another Richard Norris project this time with Lol Hammond from The Drum Club. Piano and FX, a slowed down and reverb laden way to drift out of this hour's worth of music.
Death In Vegas' album Death Mask is one of 2025's highlights round this way, a techno tour de force spread over four sides of vinyl, imperious machine music with a human, emotional soul. Earlier this month Richard Fearless released an EP to close the year, two tracks recorded live at EartH in Dalston, London. COUM is a 2011 Trans- Love Energies era track reworked into the 2025 DIV set, huge sounding squeaky reversed synths and a big old Linn drum battling through a tense techno storm.
On Lightning Bolt Fearless is in dubbier/ ambient territory, slow moving sounds, spacious and celestial. Both tracks can be bought digitally at Bandcamp and a two track 12" follows in January
Back in 2011 when Trans- Love Energies was being released Death In Vegas turned up at Lauren Laverne's BBC 6 radio show and played two tracks, Your Loft My Acid and Medication.
In its original Yo La Tengo form Autumn Sweater is a beautiful, organic song with woody drums, organ/ synth and a hushed vocal about the changing of the seasons, a couple slipping away, moments frozen in time, love and longing. Tortoise don't remix the song so much as completely reinterpret it, a languorous seven minute instrumental that defies description. Electronics with live drums, from jazz but not jazz, indie but not indie, not really post- rock but definitely not rock. Not rockist at all. Lovely, understated, a mood as much a piece of music.
Tortoise released an album at the end of October, Touch, their first since 2016. It's a 2025 joy that I overlooked slightly and have only really grown to appreciate it recently. It's intricate and layered, instruments working out their roles in the space around them- lots of little shifts and changes but all feeling like a unified whole. Cinematic. An album that gives a little more away each time. Find it at Bandcamp.
I went to sixteen gigs in 2025, a pretty good number, and several of them were very memorable- Sabres Of Paradise (twice!), Iggy Pop, and Mercury Rev all stand out in my mind and The Beta Band were really good too though spoilt slightly by the crowd. In early May I saw Shack at The Ritz which as far as good gigs go was right up there, the Head brothers in sparkling form. This song wasn't on the setlist that night but I've been playing it loads recently, a 1990 standalone single.
Mick Head's songwriting chops are very evident, the sound is pure 1990 guitar band (Mick has said he was massively inspired by The Stone Roses debut album) and it marries 1966 Beatles (the bass from Taxman, the Revolver style acid guitar lines) with spacious, indie dance beats. The section from two minutes fourteen seconds is psychedelic Scouse and then the breakdown at two minutes thirty is indie dance heaven.
Mick also nods his head to his biggest musical hero, Arthur Lee of Love, with the line, 'All God's children gotta have their freedom', a line from Love's The Red Telephone. When I saw Shack at The Ritz in May they encored with one song, a cover of Love's A House Is Not A Motel. I haven't posted nearly enough Love at Bagging Area. This pair of songs are from Forever Changes, an album that shows Arthur Lee's disillusion with the hippy dream, an album released at the height of flower power, but where Lee could see it was built on sand. Forever Changes is a lament in some ways, for a new age that wasn't going to arrive.
Alone Again Or is utter beauty, complete 1967 brilliance. It was written by Bryan MacLean. Arthur Lee wasn't in the studio when it was recorded and reportedly grew jealous of people's praise for it. Lee then added the word 'or' to the song's title and re- recorded it with his voice to the fore on co- lead vox. These things contribute to bands splitting up- it led to Bryan quitting the group after the reelase of Forever Changes- but listen to the acoustic guitars, those horns, the orchestral flourishes and the bittersweet lyrics, and bask in it. What a song.
Andmoreagain is an Arthur Lee song, sumptuous psychedelic folk with sweeping Burt Bacharach style strings and LA's Wrecking Crew playing (Carole Kaye on bass, Hal Blaine on drums, Billy Strange on guitar and Don Randi on keys). Bewilderingly good. Lee's lyrics are a stream of consciousness about addiction, temptations and defence mechanisms.
Mani's funeral took place just before Christmas, an outpouring of love and respect for The Stone Roses bassist, a man that no one seems to have had a bad word to say about. This song appeared on Soundcloud at the same time, a wonderful cover of Shoot You Down by Alfie and kids from Crowcroft Park Primary School in Longsight that dates from a north west BBC TV show at some point in the early 00s. Listen here.
There's something about the massed choral voices of primary school children singing the words to Shoot You Down that is a bit counter- intuitive and also very affecting. 'I'd love to do it and you know you've always had it coming... I never wanted/ The love that you showed me/ It started to choke me/ And how I wish I said 'no'/ Too slow/ I want you to know/ I couldn't take that too fast/ I want you to know'.
The recording is from a cassette tape, taped off the radio (BBC Manchester) so sonically it's not the best but it doesn't really spoil it too much. The hunt for the masters is on apparently. Also, at the end it cuts into the show and Terry Christian's voice appears, something you don't necessarily want to hear every time you listen to the song.
Here's the original from 1989, nestled away towards the end of side 2 of The Stone Roses, between Made Of Stone and This Is The One, a song where the rhythm section of Reni and Mani show their strengths, subtle and blues/ jazz influenced, and John finds a smoky, low key Hendrix vibe, all three building while Ian croons sweet kiss offs and rejections.
Alfie were a Manchester band, formed in 1998, who made four albums before calling it a day in 2005. They were part of a late 90s/ early 00s scene that included Doves, I Am Klute and Elbow. Doves and Elbow especially both went onto big things. It never really happened for Alfie.
These pair of songs are from their 2005 album Crying At Teatime. The first, Your Own Religion, is the albums opening song, punchy and melodic, guitars and pianos powering out of the speakers, cymbals splashing and singer Lee Gorton drawling and cool.
On Wizzo they sound superb, confident and full of life. They split up not long after the release, Lee saying 'it's hard to keep the faith when it feels like no- one's listening'. The major they'd signed to, EMI, wanted a Coldplay style song from them and they didn't feel like they could do it.
The period between Christmas Day and New Year's Eve (increasingly known as Twixtmas) is the best bit of the festive period for me- the big day has gone and you're into a vague hinterland, not quite sure what day it is. Normal rules regarding eating, drinking and socialising don't apply. Time expands and contracts. It could be Thursday afternoon, it could be Tuesday morning, it doesn't really matter. Things kick in again on 30th December as people begin to ask what you're doing on New Year's Eve but for a couple of days, it's very much a slowed down life.
A Boxing Day double for you. In 2015 Courtney Barnett had the Boxing Day Blues. She had them pretty bad...
Two years before that Dark Horses and Justin Robertson's Deadstock 33s found an altogether livelier and more acidic way to spend the first day of Twixmas- drones, motorik drums, lysergic synthlines, a bassline to shake you out of your torpor and a numbed out vocal. One to put on when the relatives you haven't seen yet pop round later and you want to raise the Boxing Day intensity levels a little.
In December 1981 Belgian label Les Disques Du Crepuscule out out a compilaiton album called Chantons Noel, aimed at the niche post- punk/ ambient/ experimental/ neo- classical Christmas market of record buyers. Among the thirteen artists were some very obscure names- Swinging Buildings and Soft Verdict were both Belgian bands and groups like The Names and Thick Pigeon only ever really bothered Factory completists. Paul Haig and Cabaret Voltaire, Michael Nyman and ex- ACR singer Simon Topping all featured as did Aztec Camera.
At the end of side 1 is this song by The Durutti Column (Durutti Column have been present quite a lot at Bagging Area recently). Vini's guitars sound as good as they ever did, minor sevenths, little runs up and down the neck and the chorus and delay FX pedals working their magic as the drum machine pads away somewhere in the background.
I was going to start off this post by saying I've been trying to feel a bit more positive towards Christmas this year, having not found much to enjoy in it for the last three, but the songs I'm about to post would suggest otherwise. It's good to be on holiday though and to have some time to socialise and spend time with people and it's good to be feeling a little bit more positive about it as an event.
Over at My Top Ten Rol's been wondering whether some Christmas songs should be cancelled. Rol and fellow bloggers dissected A Fairytale Of New York here and then Do They Know It's Christmas? here.
In place of the awful annual succession of Christmas songs you can currently hear being piped out in shops and on TV here are a trio that give a different slant on the festive season.
In 1978 Tom Waits released Blue Valentine, an album which included the song Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis, a first person sketch which revels in the low life street level characters Waits loved and wrote about and which comes with a lyrical twist at the end.
In 2000, as they prepared for the release of their third album This Is Happening, LCD Soundsystem contributed some songs to a Ben Stiller film, Greenburg. Oh You (Christmas Blues) is a raw and distorted blues song, sounding like the result of a collision between 70s Pink Floyd and James Murphy coming down hard at the end of a very long session.
The Five Techniques is a David Holmes project which sees music and art as an act of resistance. Holmes played at a gig for Gaza, put together by Paul Weller. Holmes and Weller decided to make a song, available as a digital and 7" single, with vocals by Roisin el Charif, singing in Arabic, 'If my voice will falter/Yours should remain'. Douglas Hart's video is a powerful and discomforting watch. The bass drives the song on, there is a chaos among the noise, Weller's voice echoes Roisin's but in English, an acid rock guitar solo cuts through, the voices return, 'In no light/This resistance grows strong', the music swirls and urges before fading out leaving just Roisin and the voices of some Palestinians. It's strong stuff. You can get it at Bandcamp. All profits will go to Medical Aid for Palestine.
David Holmes grew up in Belfast during The Troubles. The name of the project, The Five Techniques, refers to interrogation practices used by the British in Northern Ireland: prolonged wall standing to induce stress; hooding detainees; subjection to long periods of intense noise; sleep deprivation; and food and drink deprivation. In 1978 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the UK government was in breach of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights and a 2021 Supreme Court judgement ruled that if they were used today they would be classified as torture. There are some mainstream politicians in UK politics currently who want to take the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights. Make of that what you will.
Resistance In The Dark is a song that it is easy to imagine Sinead O'Connor singing on, if she'd lived. Sinead was recording a solo album with David after the pair met at a concert for Shane MacGowan's 60th birthday. They'd never met previously and Sinead knew nothing about David but he introduced himself and proposed making an album together, him producing and her singing, about healing- and she agreed. The album was to some extent contemporaneous with David's solo record Blind On A Galloping Horse so it's fair to assume similarities would exist between the two sonically and musically. The only released fruit of their work together is a one- off single with David's band Unloved, a cover of Mahalia Jackson's Trouble Of The World. Sinead putting the vocal down in one take, at 5 am at his house in Belfast. Given what happened to Sinead subsequently- the death of her son Shane in 2022 aged 17 and the circumstances of it, Sinead's anger and grief, and her own death in July 2023- the song sounds like a premonition, 'Soon I will be done/ With all the trouble of the world'.
Between 2018 and 2023 Holmes and Sinead recorded eight more songs at David's house and in 2021 Sinead announced that the album would be called No Veteran Dies Alone. The album was a major work for both of them, Sinead moving into David's house for periods. David has said that he wants to see the album released, describing it as 'extraordinary, a very special album... up there with her very best work'.
David wanted the album to be specifically about healing and it seems Sinead delivered- songs about being reunited with her mother, about God and Mary Magdalene, about her children, about dreams of being in heaven and the value of a soul, about pain, loss and grief, injustice and suffering, addiction and mental health, redemption, survival and about no veteran dying alone. It could be seen as Sinead's final statement, her last will and testament, her reckoning with the world. Unfortunately it has become mired in wranglings and music business murkiness. Its release is outside David Holmes' control and in the hands of Sinead's estate and record company. Maybe it'll come out, maybe it won't.
In 2023 David's Necessary Genius single listed the misfits and dreamers, outsiders and radicals that have inspired him ending with the line 'I believe in Sinead O'Connor/ I believe in refugees'. Which takes us back to The Five Techniques and Resistance In The Dark.
Joe Ely died last week aged 78. He'd been unwell for a while, diagnosed with Parkinson's and Lewy body dementia and it s pneumonia did for him in the end. Joe was a key figure in the Austin, Texas scene in the mid- to- late 70s. He started out in Lubbock, birthplace of Buddy Holly, and as one of The Flatlanders played a country and rock 'n' roll hybrid. Joe released his first solo album in 1977. In 1978 Joe and his band played in London and hit it off with Joe Strummer and Mick Jones, playing with each other when The Clash toured the USA in 1978 and 1979. The two Joes especially became good friends, finding plenty of common ground in their respective record collections.
The photos on the back of London Calling are from a Clash gig at The Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin, a nod of the black fedora to Joe Ely from The Clash and a raucous gig they played just before the release of London Calling, Ely supporting The Clash and then appearing with them. Joe appears on Should I Stay Or Should I Go (on backing vox) and when The Clash played The Tribal Stomp at Monterrey in 1979 they played Fingernails, a Joe Ely song, with Joe guesting on vocals.
On Sandinista!, The Clash's 1980 triple album (which I wrote about only last week on the occaison of it's 45th birthday) Joe Strummer included a line about Joe Ely in the song If Music Could Talk- 'Well there ain't no better blend/ Than Joe Ely and his Texas Men. If Music Could Talk is Sandinista! at it's most experimental, the music from Shepherd's Delight, a Clash/ Mikey Dread track from the session at Pluto in Manchester (that resulted in Bankrobber) with a stream of consciousness Strummer lyric split between the left and right channels. Joe Ely is in good company- the song also name checks Bo Diddley, Errol Flynn, Isaac Newton, Buddy Holly, Elvis, Jim Morrison and Samson. Gary Barnacle's jazz saxophone drifts in and out. Is talking blues crossed with experimental dub jazz what people wanted or expected from The Clash in 1980?
Joe Ely's career resulted in a steady stream of albums, twenty studio albums and a handful of live ones. In 1992 he released Love And Danger which included this song (written by Robert Earl Keen), The Road Goes On Forever, country and rock 'n' roll
A mix for the winter solstice, the longest night and shortest day, and to celebrate the fact that we'll start to get a little more daylight every day. Songs with winter in the title are plentiful and there are quite a few that didn't make it into this mix for various reasons- I wanted to keep this mix largely ambient/ ambient inspired (although that goes a bit off piste in places as you can see from the tracklisting below). Aztec Camera's Walk Out To Winter, The Bangles/ Simon and Garfunkel's Hazy Shade Of Winter and Teenage Fanclub's Winter just didn't fit and A Certain Ratio's ten minute drone epic Winter Hill was too long and cutting it down/ fading it out didn't seem right.
Michael Head And The Red Elastic Band: Winter Turns To Spring
Stockholm Monsters: Winter
The Pictish Trail: Winter Home Disco
Saint Etienne: Her Winter Coat
Neil Young and Crazy Horse: Winterlong
Vashti Bunyan: Winter Is Blue
Glass Candy: Warm In The Winter
Winter Chimes is from a 1980 Joanna Brouk album, The Space Between. It is atmospheric and enchanting, just chimes and piano sitting somewhere in the space where ambient crosses into New Age.
Pye Corner Audio's Winter Drone For Christmas- the title is exactly what it is- is from Christmas Eve 2023, five minutes of low key synth loveliness.
Winter Light is from Promise, the 2020 album by SUSS, an ambient Americana trio from New York. Highly recommended.
Sketch For Winter is from The Durutti Column's 1980 album, The Return Of The Durutti Column album, Vini Reilly's debut long player. Vini was pushed into Cargo Studios in Rochdale by Tony Wilson during a period when he was suffering from severe depression. Tony thought it might save Vini. In the studio was Martin Hannett and a van load of new equipment. The album, Fact 14, was housed in a Situationist inspired sandpaper sleeve, and contains ten tracks of Vini playing guitar and Martin playing 'switches' (as the sleevenotes say). It's recently been remastered and re- issued and sounds better than ever, a foundational album for Factory and UK post- punk (not that it sounds post- punk but it is- Vini says, doing what he did could only have happened in the space that opened up after punk).
Trentemoller's 2006 album The Last Resort was the Danish producer's debut, an electronic album that sounds very live.
Michael Head and The Red Elastic Band's Adios Senor Pussycat still sounds like one of the best albums of 2017 and of that entire decade. Winter Turns To Spring is Mick on piano and singing, a change of sound from the rich, full band scouse folk rock that makes up most of the album.
Stockholm Monsters were from Burnage and signed to Factory. Winter is from 1984's Alma Mater, a record produced by Peter Hook and largely ignored in 1984, one of those albums that is a lost gem. A dark, monochrome sound, led by the bass guitar, very poetic and very Factory.
The Pictish Trail is Johnny Lynch, who operates out of a caravan on the Isle Of Eigg, Scotland and was part of the Fence Collective and the man behind Fence Records, an open minded, folk influenced label started by Lynch and King Creosote. Winter Home Disco kicks in with a drum machine but the folk and psyche follow quickly. A rather beautiful song from 2008 which all of a sudden seems a long time ago.
Her Winter Coat was a 2021 single by Saint Etienne, Pete Wiggs creating a Christmas sounding song without going full Xmas cheese. Icy and quietly epic.
Neil Young and Crazy Horse's Winterlong came out on Decade,a triple lp compilation from 1977 that was only the start of Neil's career long trawl through his unreleased vaults and shelved projects. Thinking about it, I'm pretty sure I heard the Pixies cover of Winterlong, released on a 1989 tribute album called The Bridge, before I heard Neil's. Neil and Crazy Horse recorded Winterlong in 1973 at Neil's Broken Arrow Ranch. It is perfect in the way only Neil and Crazy Horse can sound- slightly frazzled, slightly out of tune, ragged and dreamy and psychedelic, searching for something- love, fulfillment- before concluding, 'it's all an illusion anyway'.
Vashti Bunyan's Winter Is Blue is lyrically dark- winter and loss of love, life having no meaning. The guitars and arrangement are deceptively jaunty, a trick folk music often pulls. This is the Immediate version, recorded it for Andrew Loog Oldham's label in 1967 and unreleased until 2007. Vashti re- recorded it for her 1970 album Just Another Diamond Day, a record so poorly received that she packed it all in and went to Scotland by horse and cart and then to Ireland for several decades before its rediscovery in the 21st century.
Warm In The Winter is a joy- Glass Candy released it as a single on Italians Do It Better in 2013. Giddy synth pop, a song in love with life and with itself, 'Crazy like a monkey/ Happy like a new year'. Partway through Ida sings, 'You're beautiful. You came from heaven. We love you!' and the synth arpeggios build, and the song skips and swoops, and the darkness gets pushed out and, once again, winter passes. Happy solstice.
Today marks the fifteenth Bagging Area end of year list- let's get the album above out of the way first. Sounds From The Flightpath Estate Volume 2, put together by myself, Martin, Dan, Baz and Mark with sleeve art by Rusty and released on Golden Lion Sounds, came out in the summer. It opens with a previously unreleased Sabres Of Paradise track, the full length, thirteen minute techno skank of Lik Wid Nit Wit, and then goes on to showcase brand new tracks by Dicky Continental, Unit 14, Richard Fearless, A Certain Ratio and Number, Red Snapper, Richard Norris, David Harrow, Bedford Falls Players and a cover of Two Lone Swordsmen's Sick When We Kiss by Sleaford Mods.
Piccadilly Records put it at number 12 in their Top 30 Collections in their end of year booklet (sandwiched between Pink Floyd and The Fall). If you take out the re- issues and just include the compilations, we came in third. Phonica, a very fine record shop in Soho, put it at number five in their compilations chart. It still makes me shake my head in disbelief sometimes that we have accomplished it- the quality of the music is so high, everyone involved is at their very best.
The entire enterprise is a tribute to Andrew Weatherall, his music, life and work, and given that Andrew's standards were so high, it's no surprise that the people he worked with and who are inspired by him- like the artists on Volume 2 (and Volume 1)- are all also people who produce and create such good music. There are a handful of copies in some record shops- Piccadilly, Stranger Than Paradise, Phonica- and there might still be a few at Golden Lion Sounds but it's close to selling out its entire run of 1500 copies and once they're gone, they're gone.
Another compilation album I've enjoyed this year is Sean Johnston's A Love From Outer Space, a celebration of the travelling cosmic disco started by Sean and Andrew Weatherall in 2010 and still going boldly to this day. The album starts with a Neville Watson dub of The Blow Monkeys and takes in Phil Kieran (remixed by Andrew), Laars, Secret Circuit, Duncan Gray, Das Komplex, Brioski and many more. Cosmic chug, never knowingly exceeding 113 bpm.
The third compilation album that has rocked 2025 is Ein Null: 10 Years Of Sprechen, a ten track round up of the Manchester label's artists with new tracks from A Certain Ratio, Psychederek, The Thief Of Time, The Utopia Strong and more.
The best new old music of 2025 includes Husker Du's The Miracle Year: 1985, a huge live album showing Husker Du at their mid- 80s peak, on fire. I loved R.E.M.'s re- released Radio Free Europe EP which included the semi- legendary Mitch Easter Dub Mix. The Richard Sen remixes of John Grant, sitting unreleased since 2017, finally saw the light of day. My year started with Bob Dylan and the film A Complete Unknown and I've been dipping in and out of Dylan all year as a result. I haven't committed to the latest edition of The Bootleg Series, Volume 18, but have played his 1962 song Rocks And Gravel repeatedly (unreleased in 1962 and part of this year's Bootleg Series Through The Open Window, 1953- 1962). The Return Of The Durutti Column, a comprehensive and remastered re- issue of the 1980 Durutti Column debut is stunning too. Aphex Twin's continued visits into his vaults saw him put Zahl am1 live track 1 up on Soundcloud, a typically brilliant AFX track. Volcanic Tongue, a compilation of obscure, outsider bands from David Keenan's label of the same name was a winner too, with 20 slices of eclectic, underground music dating from 1968 to 2013.
Albums of 2025
All of these abums have been somewhere near my various listening devices this year and all are albums I'll come back to again- Reverb Delay's The Ghosts Of Dawn, David Harrow's Accelerated Life, a pair of albums from 100 Poems, Rodeo Disco and Let The Horse Run Free, Evan Dando's Love Chant, Sonar// Radar's Weak Sun, Sonnenspot's Sonnenspot, SubDan's Innerleben, Anywhere by Causeway, Red Snapper's Barb And Feather, Decius Vol. II (Splendour & Obedience), Daniel Avery's Tremor, Five Green Moons' very recently released and probably should be in my top ten Moon 2, Rose City Band's Sol y Sombra, Dub Syndicate's Obscured By Version, The Orb's Buddhist Hipsters, Faded by The Liminanas, the vinyl releases of Thought Leadership's Ill Of Pentacles and Ace Of Swords albums, Coyote's Wailing To The Yellow Dawn, Half Man Half Biscuit's All Asimov And No Fresh Air, Jezebell's Jezebellearic Beats Volume 2, KiF's Still Out, Warrington- Runcorn New Town Development Plan's Public Works And Utilities, Tortoise's Touch, Pye Corner Audio's Where Things Are Hollow and Stereolab's marvelous comeback Instant Holograms On Metal Film.
10 Death In Vegas: Death Mask
Four sides of emotional and purist machine techno from Richard Fearless- side four in particular with Your Love and the title track is an immersive, psychedelic techno trip.
9 Dean Wareham: That's The Price Of Loving Me
On the former Galaxie 500 songwriter, singer and guitarist's fourth solo album, he got back with producer Kramer and they caught Dean at his best- reverb drenched guitars, a dreamy production and a set of reflective, witty and wise songs. Understated but I kept coming back to it.
8 Mogwai: The Bad Fire
Released at the start of the year, Mogwai are always an essential listen and this album is as good as any they've made- walls of guitars, huge melodies, songs that scrape away and soar. Some members of the band were going through tough times when it was recorded and you can hear the catharsis in the grooves of the album. Fanzine Made Of Flesh may be song title of the year too (although Half Man Half Biscuit's Horror Clowns Are Dickheads runs it close).
7 Syd Minsky Sargeant: Lunga
Syd's solo album, a switch from the tough, electronic beats and rhythms of Working Men's Club, is a folky, downbeat treasure trove of song, with Nick Drake and Syd Barrett both sounding like they're there inside the songs. Try Long Roads for a taster of Lunga's delights...
6 Adrian Sherwood: The Collapse Of Everything
Adrian Sherwood doesn't release many albums under his own name and on the basis of The Collapse Of Everything he should do it more often. Dub is the foundation (as ever) but The Collapse Of Everything rolls and tumbles between all kinds of sounds and genres, a free flow of sound and texture with a supporting cast including Brian Eno, Keith Le Blanc and Doug Wimbish, and mostly sounds cinematic, like it's the soundtrack to something. An On U Soundtrack.
5 Escape- Ism: Charge Of The Love Brigade
Ian Svenonius and Sandi Denton's fourth album is short and sweet, just ten songs and just a little over thirty minutes long but it's been near my turntable since its release in March. Minimal sounds, fuzz guitar, vintage synth drones and hissy drum machine, lyrics pared back to key ideas and delivered with drop dead insouciance- on Last Of The Sellouts Ian is both tongue in cheek and deadly serious. One Of The Greats performs the same dead pan trick. On Fire In Malibu he sounds like he's been tipped over the edge. For a while I thought this might be my favourite album of 2025.
4 Brian Eno and Beatie Wolfe: Liminal
The third of a trilogy recorded by Eno and Wolfe, Liminal is a joy, Liminal is an album that melds songs with ambience and comes up with something very beautiful- the soundtrack to a dream, a simple sounding but very deep record.
3 Sewell And The Gong: The Patron Saint Of Elsewhere
I've listened to Sewell And The Gong as much as any other artist this year and the album, Patron Saint Of Elsewhere, could easily have topped this list. Seven tracks with pastoral roots, folk melodies and motorik rhythms, bridging the space between the bucolic and the cosmic. Sumptuous and wondrous and a little frayed at the edges.
2 Kieran Hebden and William Tyler: 41 Longfield Street Late 80s
41 Longfield Street Late 80s is a wonderful record- William Tyler's guitar playing and Kieran Hebden's ambient laptop production complementing each other and bouncing off each other, from the extended free form cover version of Lyle Lovett's If I Had A Boat, to the more Four Tet sounds of Spider Ballad through to the album's closer, the intense distortion and acoustic guitars of Secret City, it never lets up and keeps giving.
1 Andy Bell: Pinball Wanderer
Andy Bell bounces around from Ride to GLOK to his solo records, finding time to record with a slew of other artists, and spent much of 2025 on the road with Oasis. In February he released Pinball Wanderer, the title a nod to his musical ricochets, an eight song album that he completed under the influence of extreme jet lag. Dot Allison and Michael Rother appear on his cover of The Passions' I'm In Love With A German Film Star. On Apple Green UFO he channels The Stone Roses, a song they should have written after they made Something's Burning and elsewhere he travels cosmische. His guitar playing is lighter than air, krauty and glistening, and on the title track he transports the spirit of Bert Jansch and Pentangle from the late 60s to 2025, folk melodies married with 21st century psychedelia and shuffly drums.
I've tried to not just repeat tracks from the albums in the list above in order to make this list a standalone one. All of these singles/ EPs/ one off releases were of note in 2025...
Hugo Nicolson's Black Stick, M- Paths' Emotivated, Matt Gunn's Nowhere, Dirt Bogarde's Pihkel, a clutch of Richard Norris releases including his remix of Pale Blue Eyes' How Long Is Now and his remix of Wildflower by Gulp, Puerto Montt City Orchestra's And We'd Be So Happy, Florecer's Breathy Drops, Statues' The Pilina Experiment, several Pye Corner Audio tracks including Galaxies and the Matrix EP and Saint Etienne's Glad.
And here's 25 for 25...
25 Factory Floor: Between You
24 The Moonlandingz ft. Iggy Pop: It's Where I'm From
23 Andy Bell ft. Dot Allison and Michael Rother: I'm In Love... (Justin Robertson's Deadstock 33s Remix and Dub)
22 10:40: An Alternative History
21 Joao Leao: One Of These Things First
20 Raz and Alfa: Windowlicker
19 Rude Audio: Strange Phenomena EP
18 Factory Floor: Tell Me
17 Psychederek: Thinkin' Bout U
16 Pandit Pam Pam: The Senator
15 Le Carousel: We're All Gonna Hurt
14 Saint Etienne: Alone Together Remix EP
13/ 12 Various remixes of The Cure's Songs For A Lost World but especially the Four Tet remix of Alone and the Orbital remix of Endsong
11 Daniel Avery ft. Cecile Believe: Rapture In Blue (Midnight Version)
10 Coyote: Battle Weary
9 Adrian Sherwood: The Grand Designer EP
8 Coyote and Peaking Lights: Love Letters/ So Far Away
7 Deeply Armed: The Healing (plus the remixes by Keith Tenniswood and Richard Fearless)
6 Sewell And The Gong: Quiet Storm Remixes (Ruf Dug, Chris Coco)
5 Alex Kassian x Spooky: Orange Coloured Liquid
4 Black Bones: Album Sampler (this release is some kind of blending of an EP, an album, a compilation of 12" singles- whatever it is it's fantastic)
Sheer joy from Four Tet, sampling/ reworking a Mazzy Star song. It was released in June and it lit up summer. It's still doing it in the depths of winter, Hope Sandoval's voice spinning against Kieran Hebden's skippy rhythms- emotive, trippy, endlessly rewarding. If you buy it on 12" there's a stripped down, subtler version of the B-side which hits a slightly different spot.
I've probably missed something and there will inevitably be a record, track or album I pick up on in early 2026 which should be part of one of these lists. The nature of lists is that they're incomplete. Hopefully 2026 will continue to throw up more great music and more pop culture for us to listen to, dance to, obsess over and dissect. And maybe there will be a Sounds From the Flightpath Estate Volume 3...
Earlier this year Matt Gunn released an EP titled Nowhere, three tracks long and led by the long drifting dubby electronics/ guitars of Something Ain't Wrong If Something Ain't Right- a track that sounded a little like early Verve produced by Adrian Sherwood. Matt's finishing the year with a new EP, four tracks brought together as Electric Dub Cuts. Big Static has a digital reggae bounce, long slow synth chords and the kind of space and feel of The Orb. Wicker Dub is credited to Gordon and Gunn, a seven minute odyssey with chopped up voices from TV adverts, an oompty sounding kick drum, the kind of bassline that gets a nervous system response and synths that prickle the skin and make the hairs on the nape of your neck stand up.
The third track- Someone Else's Dream (Matt Gunn Dub Mix) by Electric Wood- is a woozy, bluesy, late night howl with a thumping dub rhythm. Electric Dub Cuts concludes with Dub Electric- eight minutes long and the sort of dubbed out indie dance that used to take up all of side B of a 12" single, the results of a guitar band sent spinning into the cosmos by a talented remixer. Lovely stuff. Get all four over at Matt Gunn's Bandcamp treasure trove.
Out on Duncan Gray's Tici Taci today is the latest EP from Uj Pa Gaz, four tracks out of Tirana, Albania. It's an Adriatic delight, the blissed out feel of Balearica crossed with the chuggy Tici Taci sound and something else, the Tirana magic ingredient. Outerdubelic is expansive and led by a wonderful guitar topline over twinkling synths and chunky drums. Simple Brain is cut from similar cloth, optimistic and forward thinking psychedelic dance music, long synth chords and bursts of acidic squiggle.
Dissimilar Function is a slo mo treat, a heady, dancing under the stars kind of track, an acid undertow with a two note refrain that splatters itself across the mix, grin inducing, ecstatic stuff. ALFOS via Albania. Shok cuts the tempos again and shuffles in, a voice buried somewhere in the, keys and synths, maybe a guitar, chuggy drums, sunsets... wonderful. Get it at Tici Taci.
Edit: due to an admin error the release of Outerdubelic is delayed by a few weeks. There are some clips of each track at Soundcloud.
In Leeds Paisley Dark continues to put out high quality releases. The latest comes from Viper Patrol, a wonky acid/ dark disco track called Dancing Voices. The original comes with two remixes, one by Cosmikuro and one by A Space Age Freak Out. Cosmikuro heads for the darker edges of the dancefloor, shimmering shards of guitar and funky clipped riffs lighting the way. A Space Age Freak Out freaks out, a psyche dub extravaganza.
The second track is Def Charge- more dark disco with a trippy edge. The remixes of this one come from Ian Vale and Airsine. Ian Vale's is bass heavy and percussive. Airsine's is propulsive and insistent, punctuated by rippling synths and shouts. The whole package is at Bandcamp.
Earlier this year Demise Of Love released an EP, four tracks by the combined talents of Daniel Avery, Syd Minsky Sargeant and James Greenwood (Ghost Culture). Last week they released an EP of remixes (called Reworks) with one by each member of Demise Of Love, one third of the whole remixing the whole.
Daniel remixed Carry The Blame, a sleek techno rework of the source track with rattling drums, sci fi synths, a distant vocal and a feel that is somewhere between Demise Of Love and Daniel's own work (but without the crunching industrial guitars of his new solo album Tremor). It sounds like a robotic New Order, stuck inside the machine (that's a compliment by the way).
Syd has adopted his Working Men's Club for his remix of Be A Man, a mid- 80s EBM resurrection version- think Nitzer Ebb or more recently Factory Floor. Sirens, tough beats, muscular bass. It breaks down for the line, 'The demise of love is real/ For the energy I feel', and then kicks back in with the statement, 'God the shit really hit the fan/ God I've really gotta be a man'.
Ghost Culture remixes Strange Little Consequence with Syd's vocal sounding even more numbed out and alienated than on the original. The bass buzzes and the drums punch and a gnarly acidic squiggle works its way in and to the fore. Intense.
Twice recently I've had one of those periods of a couple of days where I become obsessed with a song from the past and play it endlessly. A few weeks ago it was Fine Young Cannibals' I'm Not The Man I Used To Be. Last weekend it was The Boy In The Bubble by The Blue Aeroplanes.
In 1991 Bristol's Blue Aeroplanes were signed to a major and were half expected to crossover. In 1989 they'd supported R.E.M. on the UK leg of their Green tour (I saw them in Liverpool at the Royal Court- they were outstanding and played a memorable supporting set to a full house, Gerald ending it at the lip of the stage arms outstretched. R.E.M. were next level. It was quite a month for gig going- I saw The Stone Roses on 4th May and R.E.M. on 21st). In 1990 they released Swagger and a year later Beatsongs.
The Boy In The Bubble is a cover of a Paul Simon song, the only one he wrote a lyric for while on his controversial, sanctions busting trip to South Africa that led to Gracelands in 1986. The line, 'The way the camera follows us in slow mo/ The way we look to us all', was written in South Africa. The rest was all done back in the USA.
The Blue Aeroplanes cover, which I must have played twenty times last weekend, is a riot, a blast of early 90s indie guitar rock. The riff and the clang of the guitars make Paul Simon sound like The Clash (appropriately enough as Strummer was a big fan of Graceland). Vocalist/ poet Gerard Langley spits the words out, reveling in Simon's lines about bombs in baby carriages, distant constellations, long distance calls, how 'every generation throws a hero up the pop charts' and the chorus payoff, 'These are the days of miracle and wonder/ Don't cry baby/ Don't cry'.
The video is a lively affair, lots of movement and energy, various guitarists twirling and riffing, dancer Wojtek doing his things, action painting on a glass screen happening while the film is being shot and lots of black denim.
Paul Simon's video is similarly, mid- 80s video FX- collage and colour to mirror the cross cultural nature of the song, African rhythms, accordion and Adrian Belew playing a synth guitar solo.
Like I say- obsessed. I'm still playing it a couple of times a day. The Blue Aeroplanes have recently released two career spanning albums- a best of called Magical Realism and an alternative best of titled Outsider Art.
Today is the fourth anniversary of Isaac's funeral. For some reason this anniversary doesn't carry the same emotional weight and dread as the anniversaries in November do, his birthday on the 23rd and his death on the 30th. I can remember aspects of the funeral as if it was yesterday, events and conversations and emotions too. The sheer dread I had waiting to read the eulogy we'd written and the pause when I stood at the lectern to collect myself and try to get the first line out of my mouth. I remember thinking that if I got the first line out, I'd be able to read the rest but getting the line out seemed to take an age. Lou has told me that she and Eliza were sitting on the front row willing me on silently. The first line was, 'They say it takes a village to raise a child...'
Heck, what a fucking day day that was.
We chose this Billy Collins poem for the celebrant to read at the graveside. I read it again last night while putting it into this post and it has lost none of its power in the last four years- if anything it means more now than it did then.
'The dead are always looking down on us, they say, While we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich, They are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven As they row themselves slowly through eternity.
They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth, And when we lie down in a field or on a couch, Drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon, They think we are looking back at them,
Which makes them lift their oars and fall silent And wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes'
My contact in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Eduardo, sends me music from his Boston Medical Group label along with updates from his life. He records as Pandit Pam Pam and at the start of this year released Dot, experimental ambient music recorded on modular synths (on at least one occasion with his infant son Diogo asleep in his arms).
In April Pandit Pam Pam released a single track, The Senator, a track that moved towards the dancefloor, the modular synths joined by a drum track and a lovely trumpet, three different sounds converging into a unified whole. Inventive and totally hypnotic, a 2025 highlight, a treat from Sao Paulo. Go on, listen to this...
In November he put out Newsun, an album fusing field recordings and ambient sounds using analogue synths and Ableton. Pandit Pam Pam's tagline is 'unsettling punky ambience' and that's definitely part of the story and the sound.
Pandit Pam Pam has released an ambient Christmas EP for the last three - Equipe Exploratoria Papai Natal I, II and III. Volume IV came out yesterday, four tracks for an ambient Christmas.
Italian Brain Rot Xmas sounds like it was recorded live in a busy shopping centre, a busker with an organ annoyingly close by. A minute in Eduardo's modular synth sounds weave their way in and we're onto more familiar ground, analogue ambience, rising and falling notes, ticking echoes, whispers and space.
More Christmas music should sound like this.
The second track is Unconditional Love, a shorter piece, only three minutes long, minimal synth notes and some light background drone. Christmas Arrived (Theme) is an interlude, just forty seconds, the self service machine at the checkout having a pre- Christmas breakdown. Santa Sitting On The Kerbside Wondering What's Next finishes the EP off, three minutes of synths and a heavy background thump that fades out into bubbling water and bird squawks. For Pandit Pam Pam, Christmas is whatever you want it to be.
There are things going on in Stockport. Luke Una called it, not entirely seriously, 'the new Berlin'. Not only does Stockport have the largest brick built structure in the UK (as seen partially in my photo above), a viaduct constructed from 11 million bricks, and a 60s modernist shopping centre (the Merseyway) that used to have outdoor escalators, and a car park with a lovely Alan Boyson concrete frieze as its wall, but it also has the Underbank. The Underbank is a maze of old streets directly below the old market hall and the Robinson's brewery that dominates the skyline. In the last few years the Underbank has become a regeneration area with independent businesses (clothes shops, a magazine and book specialist, SK1 records) and a growing number of bars and restaurants. In one of these bars, Bruk, Nuremberg dub artist Klangkollektor played, back in August. The set was recorded and released recently as The Stockport Tapes.
Klangkollektor's twin albums Dubtapes Volumes One and Two, came out on Jason Boardman's Stockport based Before I Die label- both are wonderful albums and Dubtapes Two is sure feature highly in my end of year list. When he played at Bruk, Klangkollektor played tracks from both albums, turning up the echo and the bass and stretching the already dubby tracks out into seriously heavy dubbed out pieces with their lovely Balearic melodies stripped back but still dancing around on top. Baund, from Dubtapes Volume One, completes the live set, an eleven and a half minute deep dive into sound, opening with speaker feedback and guitar chord noise. From this the bass drum emerges and the Space Echo burps and wobbles. The sounds converge, gradually,running into line with each other, the rhythm picks up and the noise flutters around, ricocheting round the room it was recorded in. Its an absorbing and heady trip.
Baund live at Bruk is at Bandcamp here. This is the original version from Dubtapes Volume One.
The Stockport Tapes is available digitally at Bandcamp. There was a small run of cassettes complete with a hand drawn front cover showing the Underbank and its famous bridge but they've all gone. The Stockport Tapes album in full is here.
Klangkollektor's Dubtapes Volume Two is four tracks that have helped light up 2025. The last track on the EP is Isle Of Stonsey, a rich and detailed nine minute excursion into blissed out charm with slo mo beats, acres of dub space and a pedal steel guitar that sounds like its gone to Hawaii and isn't planning to come home any time soon.
2025's year long Saturday series Soundtrack Saturday has reached the final reel but before the credits roll it seemed that a Sunday mix of various songs and scores from the various film soundtracks I've written about would make a good Sunday mix. This is the result, seventeen tracks from sixteen films, sequenced with something approaching a narrative arc- it starts out in the desert with Harry Dean Stanton tramping round the dust, stays out west for while and then shifts to Tokyo, sleeplessness and jet lag. We jump around some other locations- Long Island, France, Memphis- and have visions of a post- apocalyptic USA before the climax, a death, some levity and then Rutger Hauer in the rain.
The photo at the top is of Stretford Essoldo, a former cinema just up the road from me, a beautiful 1930s building that has been sadly empty and unused for decades.
Cancion Mixteca is from Paris, Texas, Wim Wenders' 1984 film, a Ry Cooder soundtrack with some dialogue from the film that stands up as an album in its own right.
Watch Chimes is from Sergio Leone's For A Few Dollars More, the second installment of the Dollars trilogy, released in 1967.
Billy is from Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid, Sam Peckinpah's 1973 Western, Bob Dylan contributing the soundtrack and appearing in the film.
Joe Strummer did the soundtrack for Walker, Alex Cox's 1987 Western- one of Joe's best 'wilderness years' songs.
A Jockey Full Of Bourbon appears in Down By Law, Jim Jarmusch's 1986 film- Tom Waits is one of the three stars of the film as well as being a key part of the soundtrack.
Intro- Tokyo and City Girl are from Lost In Translation, Sofia Coppola's 2003 film, Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson lost in Tokyo.
Mick Jones provided three tracks for the 1993 film Amongst Friends- Long Island is the most complete, a Jones solo song.
I Think You Flooded It is from Out Of Sight, the first of many David Holmes- Steven Soderbergh soundtrack collaborations, released in 1998.
John Lurie's score for Mystery Train had to compete with some big hitters- Elvis' Mystery Train for one, Roy Orbison's Domino for another. A second Jim Jarmusch film in this mix- the use of music is central to Jarmusch's films.
Gabriel Yared's guitar playing is from the soundtrack to Betty Blue, another late 80s film that made a deep impression on me- Beatrice Dalle made quite an impression too.
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis' soundtrack work spans all sorts of movies and documentaries. They began with the soundtrack to 2009 film The Road, a harrowing version of Cormac McCarthy's equally harrowing novel.
Theme From Midnight Cowboy is gorgeous, a John Barry highpoint from a composer who recorded dozens of soundtracks. That harmonica. Stunning.
Brian Eno's soundtrack work is wide and varied and an Eno only soundtrack mix would definitely work- Deep Blue Day is from the 1996 film Trainspotting but originally on Another Green World, Eno's 1975 album.
Son House's Death Letter Blues is from 1965, just Son and a metal bodied resonator guitar. It's a stunning song and performance, Son's lyrics and performance can chill to the bone. It appeared on the soundtrack to On The Road, the 2012 version of Jack Kerouac's novel.
B.J. Thomas' Raindrops Keep falling On My Head was a worldwide smash following its appearance in the 1969 film Butch Cassady And The Sundance Kid. The song is probably what the film is best known for, along with the two stars- Robert Redford and Paul Newman- and the famous shoot out ending.
At the end of Blade Runner, Ridley Scott's 1982 sci fi/ film noir version of Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, Rutger Hauer sits on top of a crumbling building in the rain, holding a dove and improvises a farewell speech as Harrison Ford slumps in front of him, his life saved. 'All these moments will be lost in time', Hauer says as Vangelis' synth score plays. But they're not are they- they replay endlessly, equally moving each time.
Forty five years ago yesterday, 12th December 1980, The Clash released Sandinista! London Calling is the best Clash album, the received wisdom goes (and I can't really disagree), the punk purists might go for the self- titled debut and in terms of sales and going global Combat Rock brought the band to a mass audience and hit singles (eventually even a number 1, thanks to 1991's Levi's advert) but Sandinista! is for me the band's greatest achievement, a huge piece of work that shows how far and how fast they were moving, demonstrates their ambition and refusal to be boxed in by punk orthodoxy, their willfulness and sense of adventure and experimentation. Thirty six songs spread over six sides of vinyl recorded in London, Manchester, Jamaica and New York, it is, as Joe Strummer said in Westway To The World, 'a magnificent achievement, warts and all... I wouldn't change a thing about it'. The greatest triple album of them all.
Releasing a triple album in mid- December might not have been the wisest move- print journalists with weekly deadlines struggled to get their heads around it or even listen to all of it. It got some poor reviews and adverse reactions but the band reveled in it. Joe liked to believe they were getting one over on CBS, a triple album for the price of a single one (although the band had to forego royalties on it until it hit 200, 000 sales in the UK and took a 50% cut everywhere else). Mick said it was an album for people who couldn't get to the record shops very often, people working on 'oil rigs or Arctic stations'. It is an album which gave up its rewards gradually, revealing something different on each and every listen. Some songs could be completely overlooked, unheard almost, until one day, they suddenly connected.
It is Clash democracy at its height. Every member of the band has a lead vocal. All four members have song writing credits. It is self- produced, with London Calling's Bill Price mixing and Jerry Green engineering. Mikey Dread, who worked with them at Pluto in Manchester recording Bankrobber (arguably the genesis of Sandinista!) is on hand for the dub tracks (and they make up a good chunk of the album with much of side six and various other dub and reggae influenced songs). Mick's girlfriend Ellen Foley sings, Joe's old mate Tymon Dogg plays and sings, two Blockheads play (Norman Watt- Roy deputising for an absent Paul Simonon on some songs and Mickey Gallagher from the live gigs and London Calling plays keys), Voidoid Ivan Julien plays guitar and cartoonist Steve Bell contributed to the enclosed newspaper/ lyrics sheet The Armagideon Times. Even Mickey Gallagher's kids sing on two songs. It's a monster, bigger even than it sounds when described in writing. It's a mixtape, a compilation album by one band, an audio diary, a radio show, two and a half hours of music that skips from one genre to another with ease... 'it's triply outrageous', said Joe.
It covers every style of music the band could throw at it and some more besides. Side one bounces into earshot as soon as the needle hits the groove, the rap- rock of The Magnificent Seven showing where they were at. Mick was inspired by the hip hop sounds he heard while in New York, by pirate radio and block parties. He began wearing baseball caps and Cazal 607 glasses. Joe's words are surreal and superb, a riot of phrases torn from newspapers with a cast including Martin Luther King, Karl Marx, Freidrich Engels, Mahatma Gandhi, Richard Nixon, Rin Tin Tin and Plato. The grind of work, Italian mobsters, TVs in cars, cheeseburgers, vacuum cleaners sucking up budgies, police brutality... it all flies by in a blur, a Joe Strummer live commentary while channel surfing. It's followed by Mick's tribute to UK indie labels Hitsville UK, a Motown backbeat and Ellen Foley on lead vox and then Joe's cover of Junco Partner, revived from 101'ers days with Style Scott on drums (future Dub Syndicate/ On U Sound). Topper sings the lead on Ivan Meets GI Joe, the Clash imaging a Cold War face off at Studio 54 (and if I'm honest the one song I could probably lose from Sandinista! without really missing it). The Leader, a two minute rockabilly rumble about the tabloid press and the Profumo affair comes next, the band crooning the chorus, 'Cos you gotta give the people something good to read/ On a Sunday.
Something About England closes side one, a truly great achievement of a song, the history of the 20th century as seen through the eyes of a homeless man (Joe), trading lines and verses with Mick (as a man leaving the pub and tripping over 'a dirty overcoat'. The opening lines run as true in 2025 as they did in 1980, more so in fact- 'They say the immigrants steal the hubcaps of respected gentlemen/ They say it would be wine and roses/ If England were for Englishmen again'. I'm willing to bet that there's a significant number of middle aged men in this country who support Farage, Robinson, the flag and roundabout bullshit and rising tide of racism in this country while also claiming to be Clash fans. I wonder if they've heard Something About England.
Rap, disco, rockabilly, Gumbo blues, music hall, Motown... side 1 throws itself around like a radio station on shuffle mode. Side two picks up the baton and sprints. Rebel Waltz, a beautiful Joe Strummer lament for young men enlisted to wars and destined to never come home, drifts by, between sleep and wakefulness, waltz crossed with folk dub. Rebel Waltz is the spirit of Sandinista! bottled. Look Here, a cover of Mose Alison jazz passes by and then Paul's bass rumbles in with The Crooked Beat, a dub tribute to South London blues parties, Paul doing his best gap- toothed vocal. As The Crooked Beat dissolves in Mikey Dread dub FX, Mick's guitars squeal in, tyres screeching and engines racing, the sleek modern rock of Somebody Got Murdered, inspired by a sight Joe saw in New York, the straightest rock song on the whole album and a band at the height of their powers. Side 2 ends with the double punch of One More Time/ One More Dub, Clash dub reggae at its finest, Mikey Dread at the controls and Joe invoking the civil rights movement, 'One more time in the ghetto/ One more time to be free'.
Put disc one back in its sleeve, make a brew and come back for disc two. The needle settles onto side three and we're back into New York rap/ funk Clash, Lightning Strikes (Not Once But Twice). Then there's another minor Clash gem, Mick's Up In Heaven (Not Only Here), a spiky punk rock song with a lovely lead guitar line and lyrics about 'the towers of London', crumbling tower blocks, social housing, unloved walkways, piss filled lifts, cages for families to live in. Three verses, no chorus, Mick sounding as good as he ever did. Corner Soul is more heartfelt Clash, off kilter reggae rock, Ellen Foley's voice underlining Strummer's. Let's Go Crazy is the result of the band thinking they could record in any style they wanted- in this case, gospel, bringing Caribbean church music and Notting Hill carnival into The Clash's world. If Music Could Talk is more dub but with Gary Barnacle's saxophone, two vocals, one in each channel, and the drums from Bankrobber. Side three ends with The Sound Of The Sinners, more gospel, Joe as the preacher singing call and response with the choir. Side 3 is Sandinista! to the max, The Clash throwing everything at the wall and seeing what would stick. It turns out, forty five years later, almost all of it sticks.
Side four is heavy duty Clash, all six songs complementing each other, a run of great and largely under acknowledged tunes. It kicks off with a cover of The Equals' Police On My Back, Mick singing breathlessly, and then we get the Midnight Log shuffle, rocking drums from the 1950s, harmonica, two minutes of pre- 60s murkiness. The Equaliser has Tymon Dogg's fiddle on top of serious dub grooves, Jamaican influences to the fore- one of those tunes that Sandinista! suddenly throws up as a lost gem. Three beauties follow- The Call Up, Washington Bullets and Broadway- sequenced together at the end of disc two, lost in the middle of Sandinista! Songs about conscription, the Cold War, Victor Jara's murder in Chile at the hands of US sponsored death squads, the FSLN (the socialists who overthrew the dictator Somoza in Nicaragua and then faced an uprising by armed guerrillas, the Contras, backed by Reagan's CIA, with Joe finding the album's title at the end of the song as he sings out, 'woah oh Sandinista!'. On Broadway Joe is lost and alone in a bar in New York at six in the morning. He sounds exhausted, as the band play a late night tune, somewhere between blues and jazz, a bit Tom Waitsian. You can hear Manhattan- the lights, the taxis, misted up windows and rain bouncing off pavements, pianos and jerky rhythms- and then it all clicks and snaps into focus, Joe eventually hitting the groove, 'I can't see the light... I can't see the light... give me a push give me a pull...' The song gives way to a burst of Mickey Gallagher's kids singing Guns Of Brixton before one of them says, snippily, 'that's enough singing now'.
Loads of bands would have left it there. Four sides of vinyl and Broadway works as a final song as well as any, a full stop, an ending. The Clash though had decided they were making a triple album. They obsessed over the number three- three discs, six sides, thirty six songs. Disc three steps up to the turntable and side five offers plenty more to discover, more lost gems, deep cuts and secret best songs. Lose This Skin is possibly the least Clash sounding song they ever recorded, Tymon Dogg's violinin the lead and Tymon on vocals. Someone once said it's the most skipped Clash song. Hmmm. Maybe. Charlie Don't Surf is next, inspired by Apocalypse Now! with a dubbed out, backwards intro, helicopter blades and gliding funk rock. Then there's Mensforth Hill, Sandinista's most out there song, Something About England played backwards with FX dropped in. No stone unturned in their quest for breaking new ground. No idea to daft to try. Junkie Slip is urgent and tense. Kingston Advice is more Clash dub reggae, a lost gem and one of their best dub tracks. The bass bumps, Topper's drumming swings, Joe sounds at his best. There's even better to come, tucked away at the end of side five is The Street Parade, a hymn to anonymity, a song about the joy of being lost in the crowd. On The Street Parade they invent some new kind of new musical genre, a Latin American/ Caribbean/ punk/ dub hybrid, joyous but with a edge of melancholy, horns, marimba, guitars and Topper's kick drum, with a rousing vocal from Joe and the sense that the band are saying, 'here we are, thirty songs in and we're still giving you something you've not heard before, are you still listening?'
Side six is dub, Mick and Mikey going for it in the studio, Joe in the Spliff Bunker (a hideaway constructed from flight cases where he could write lyrics) and the clock ticking into the small hours. It starts with Version City, a strange song that opens with tapes slowing down and speeding up and a radio announcer and then what becomes a slightly haunting song, a bit of jazz and some blues. Living In Fame is a dub of If Music Could Talk with Mikey Dread toasting. Silicone On Sapphire is a dub of Washington Bullets, the rhythm track stretched and bent, the tune mangled and a voice dimly audible. It comes to a halt and Version Pardner rides in, a dub of Junco Partner (from side one), Style Scott back on drums. The kids, Luke and Ben Gallagher, appear for a brief run through Career Opportunities. Two and a half hours have slipped by, thirty five songs, taking in rock, jazz, blues, gumbo, disco, rap, reggae, dub, gospel, punk and more besides, and the end has come- Sandinista! concludes with Shepherd's Delight, more dubbed out weirdness, noises and FX, tissue paper on a comb, the hint of a tune, the suggestion of the chords from 1977's Police And Thieves, a low key, mellow way to finish this mammoth undertaking and in some way, utterly fitting, totally 1980 Clash. Sandinista! runs out with a small burst of noise, fading away. Viva The Clash! Viva Sandinista!
Richard Norris has a work ethic second to none, continually creating and producing new music. His latest venture- Moon Dust - is a project with Lol Hammond (of The Drum Club and Slab) and their sole release so far is a three track EP, a trio of versions of a track called The Glow. On the main version Lol plays piano and Richard produces, applying filters, sounds and layers of ambience. It's very much part of Richard's exploration of Deep Listening and ambient sounds, a furrow he's been ploughing for several years now. The two further versions are self explanatory and add more ambience and beauty to something already rather lovely- the Ambient Mix adds a warm drone as a backdrop and halves the piano while the Slowed + Reverb Mix drops an octave or two, slows it right down and adds acres of spacey reverb. Find The Glow at Bandcamp.
Gulp are a Welsh two piece, Guto Pryce (a Super Furry Animal) and Lindsey Leven. Richard has remixed their single Wildflower, the duo's psychedelic folk pop repurposed as an Ibizan sundown moment, Balearic beats and bouncy bass, lovely piano chords, horns and Lindsay's vocal re- imagined as classic Balearica, everything coming together like peak A Man Called Adam. The EP with original, remix, instrumental and a Ben Chatwin mix is here.
Back in 2018 Richard remixed Gulp's Morning Velvet Sky, a throbbing electronic disco folk extravaganza. The dub is a supercharged, percussive, repetitive delight.
