Cluttered Like My Head

  I saw a post a while back on Emma Anderson's Instagram. Emma, for those who don't know, was one of the members of UK band Lush back in the day, and has recently been releasing material under her own name.  The post mentioned that she was featured on a track on a new album by somebody called Stefano Guzzetti, and that she would be signing copies of the CD at her local record store with her friend, and another featured singer on the song, Heidi Berry.  Back in the 80s / 90s, the UK label 4AD (whose fans can tend to be a little obsessive, and I count myself amongst their number) put out a series of albums under the name "This Mortal Coil". As far as I remember, these were basically an opportunity for the head of the label (Ivo Watts-Russell) to get his favourite singers to work with him to cover some fantastic legacy tracks. They're most well known for the cover of 'Song to the Siren' featuring Liz Fraser on vocals, but all of their work is fantastic.  Anyw...

Lots of talk in the past week about the upcoming solar eclipse, and that, although its only a partial one, its the best one in the UK since August 1999, and that the next full eclipse visible from here isn't until 2080, or 2081.  I remember exactly where I was on that last eclipse in 1999, not because I made a big deal out of it, but because I'd been on holiday with a mate, and we were flying back from LA. My memory tells me that it was a Virgin Airlines flight, that they handed out glasses to view the eclipse on the flight, and that it was visible from one side of the plane and they encouraged everybody to go to that side to get a look. Obvs it would have been more effective if you had a window seat on that side, but I do remember getting a quick glimpse, and obviously we weren't as impacted by the low clouds which blighted much of the rest of the UK.  We saw REM at the Greek Theatre on the 9th August, and then flew back to the UK the following day. Ever since, my mate has...

Yesterday I went down south to see Idlewild at the Wedgewood Rooms. When I lived down that way, we used to see quite a few bands at that venue, and, according to my Setlist stats, the last band I saw there was Idlewild themselves back in 2009.  Roddy himself alluded to this - he said that he reckoned it was their 9th time in Portsmouth as a band, which, as he said, is pretty impressive for a band from Scotland. I reckon they've only been to Northampton 2 or 3 times so Portsmouth has been really lucky.  They were great of course - they mixed up their set with a few tracks from their most recent album, but it was mostly the big songs that you'd expect, and the band, now set as a 6 piece, with Rod Jones and Allan Stewart anchoring the stage with a guitar at each side, muscles through a raucous and energetic set.  It won't come as a great revelation that, as you get older, time seems to be speeding up. I only spent 4 years living down there, and moved back to Northampton in 2...

  Mew played a show last night at the Camden Roundhouse. It was brilliant.  Technically it wasn't just any show though - frontman Jonas Bjerre announced that after 30 years, he felt it time to move on from the band, so they were going to play some farewell shows in Copenhagen.  This then became a farewell tour, which was due to end in London.  Towards the end of the year, he lost his voice, so the shows got rescheduled, and the final show remained as London but it moved to February.  I go back a long way with this band - they've been important to me off and on throughout the last 20 years or so, and I wasn't going to miss this show.  I guess they were important to a lot of people there - it was an emotional show.  It's weird going to a farewell show when it's only the singer saying farewell.  In 2003, I spent a month or two in ny sisters spare room between houses - they had Sky, and there was a new music channel called 'The Amp', which played a lo...

  There's a website called setlist.fm where you can catalogue the gigs you've been to, get to build up your history, compare setlists and stuff like that. Obviously for new gigs its pretty comprehensive - you buy the tickets online, lots of other people sign up to the website - people record bits of it own their camera and the setlist is detailed dynamically, either as it happens or pretty quickly afterwards.  But its not as good for older gigs - cos its relying on attendees making contemporaneous notes, either because they grabbed a setlist from the stage at the end of the set, or they noted it in a diary or something like that.  I used to have a Gene website, and there was a spell where I went to a few gigs over a short spell, and I reviewed them and recorded the sets. I used this to build out the detail on setlist.fm for those shows - but there's loads of other gigs I've been to that don't have that sort of info. I saw the Pale Saints, Pixies, All About Eve and T...

  I read the recent biography of REM, "The Name of this band is REM" by Peter Ames Carlin. I've read a lot of books about the band in the past, but much as my interest in the band dwindled towards the end of their career, so did the biography industry, and most of the books stop at their peak rather than afterwards. This book carries on to the breakup of the band, and has been well reviewed over the past year or so, and with my interest in the band renewed following the Shannon / Narducy Fables tour in 2025, I put it on my Christmas list and have devoured it since then. First things first - the band aren't interviewed for the book, so any words from them are from contemporary interviews or as told by other people. It's at its strongest in those early years - capturing the contradiction between a band that was willing to put the hours and the legwork into becoming a great band, and one that didn't want to appear in its videos and have decipherable lyrics to sin...

  There's a popular music listening app that, at the end of the year, looks at your listening stats and tries to summarise it for you. It tells you who your favourite artist is - how many hours you have spent listening to them, and stuff like that.  Last year, it told me that my favourite song was something that I'd probably listened to about 5 times. I can't even recall what it was but I probably listened to it 5 times on day of release and never again - It probably told me that I didn't really listen to a lot of music (on that app at least) and so it gave me cause to doubt the reliability of the data.  It did also give me the opportunity to change things around. It mentioned a streak - you listened to a particular song 3 days in a row (or something like that) - I decided that this year, I was going to try and listen to one song every day of the year, and see what that did for my stats. I didn't quite make it for every day but I came pretty close. I chose to listen...

 Back in the midst of the pandemic, I was meant to be going to see The National at Brixton Academy. There was a lot of talk about how they were going to probably play "High Violet" in full to mark the 10th anniversary of the LP. It didn't happen. The gigs got rescheduled and then cancelled, and although they did come over last year for a few outdoor dates, I didn't want to pay the big prices to see one band.  This year, they announced dates at Alexandra Palace. They first announced a date for this Tuesday, and then followed it up with a Wednesday show as well and I bought tickets for both shows, partly to compensate for the in-between years, and partly because I thought something special might happen.  The shows finally came around this week, hard on the heels of a surprise second LP of the year. You'd expect shows focussed on those new LPs but the setlists of recent have shown a willingness to mix it up, and long long sets. The first show was fantastic - they pla...

 As it's now 40 years since its first release,REM decided to mark the occasion by re-releasing the first version of "Radio Free Europe" as close to the original as they could. Let's call it a facsimile edition. It's pretty cool.  Even more excitingly (for the purposes of this blog at least) they also decided to release a version of their first demo tape, limited to 1,500 copies, and only available by jumping through an expensively placed hoop.  Naturally I bit, so I am now the proud owner of a set of REM button badges, a new REM t-shirt, the 7" of "Radio Free Europe" and the demo tape, titled "Cassette Set" Following on from the 7", it's very close (I guess) to the original release. There's 3 tracks on side 1 of the tape, although it takes a couple of goes for the first one (Sitting Still) and there's a snippet of White Tornado after the actual full track of the same name, as if they taped over their first attempt at the s...

 This is a glorious tape. As well as their various releases, Sonic Cathedral also has an excellent track record at putting on shows, and back in 2013 they hosted a show with Luna / Galaxie 500 lead Dean Wareham at St Pancras Old Church.  Dean and his band (Britta, Anthony & Jason) played a set including material from both of his (then) previous bands as well as solo material from his forthcoming album (also released by Sonic Cathedral) and the label released this cassette version of the show in 2014, around the same time as that very solo album.  Now - the curious thing is that the tape version of this show has 12 tracks and whilst there was also a CD version (which I think was available as a promo with the solo LP) that only has 6 tracks, making the cassette version the one to get. It's never been re-released, nor has it ever been available on vinyl.  The tape was available as either a green shell or a red shell. As the picture shows, this is obviously the green...

 When I was first getting into music, I had a mate in the Sixth Form who had similar tastes and we'd occasionally swap tapes with each other. I did him a tape of the Pixies - he did me a tape of the Brilliant Corners. Even that far back, it's fair to say that he was trawling a slightly more indie branch of indie than I was.  Maybe 30 years later, we bumped into each other again on Facebook, and naturally our talk went often to music. When I mentioned earlier this year that I'd bought the tape deck and started going through my tapes, he dug into a box, found a load of tapes that he thought I might be interested in, and sent me them to have a listen.  Naturally his tapes are far more efficiently catalogued than mine. We're not going to get into a situation here where there's nothing on the inlay card. But they're not my tapes - so although it's going to be a different voyage of discovery, I like to think that it will still be a voyage.  The first tape I dug ou...

 Some tapes in the stash aren't labelled at all - there's no clue as to the contents, and this one is a case in point. A nice BASF Type II with a sturdy casing - what jewels could have been given the privilege of residing on such a quality tape?  The reason I dug this one out is because I remember taping some Pixies Peel sessions back in the day, and I thought they were on a tape like this. Although I've since purchased those same sessions on a dodgy bootleg CD and the subsequent official release, I thought that this might be the motherlode.  But no - it turns out that it's a tape containing pretty much the entire recorded output (at that time) of Fleet's tweepop legends, Jim Jiminee. At the time I loved this band. I listened a lot to their debut LP "Welcome to Hawaii" and the singles that were released to support it, and I guess I made this tape to let me listen to them when there wasn't a record deck around. Home taping is killing music and all that....

 Maybe ten years ago, I started picking up the odd tape from Fred Thomas' tape label, Life Like. Because of the per unit shipping costs, this only really allowed me to pick up the ones from his various ancilliary projects, a City Centre tape here, a SLGTM live tape there. I love the DIY feel of it - the way that it allows him to put out something a little less polished, a little less ready for prime time, a little more intimate.  And that's how I've got an Anna Burch tape. Fred and Anna have collaborated a fair bit over the psat few years, notably on the side project "Failed Flowers" so when Anna's first solo LP came out a few years back, there was a tape released around the same time on Life Like.  I'm not really sure what it is. It might be demo versions but there's audience noise. It might be a live show, but the audience noise doesn't exactly seem adjacent to the songs. What I can tell you is that it's stripped down versions of 6 of the son...

 Tape 3 again shows my capacity for putting tapes into mismatched boxes and not labelling them at all. In a BASF "Sound Level 1" Box, we find a garishly styled Memorex dbs 1 cassette, with no indication as to what might be on it.  Pressing Play, and we find the unmistakeable sounds of the Radio 4 show, "Whose Line Is It Anyway?", specifically Episodes 2 and 3, featuring Hugh Laurie and Jimmy Mulville as well as series regulars John Sessions and Stephen Fry. I don't know when these were dated - I know I became aware of the show when it transferred to TV, so these must have been repeat shows, and I know they are taped from the radio because both episodes also have a snippet of "Today in Parliament" afterwards, though annoyingly, neither of them mention the date.  Side 1 also, after the extra snippet of Radio 4, segues into a few tracks from Mercury Rev. The first one is the tail of "Girlfren", a jam from the end of their second LP "Boces...

 So, to a second tape. Although it was in a different case, this is a solid looking Type II tape from Maxell, with a label on side 2 proclaiming Chris Isaak's 1991 compilation LP, 'WIcked Game'. Turns out that the label is actually correct and the tape does contain that LP from our 80s/90s throwback crooner, released after the title track was featured in David Lynch's 'Wild at Heart' and propelling him to (short-lived) stardom on this side of the pond.  This LP, made up of tracks from his first three LPS (which, I believe were only available on Import at that time) is an excellent primer to his work, with all the obvious standouts ( Heart Shaped World, Blue Hotel, Heart Full of Soul) and I know that it encouraged me to dig deeper once the albums became more widely available. I suspect that my sister had this on CD and I taped it off of her, so at least I can understand why I made this tape.  I'm less sure about the other side though. There's no label on ...

Our first tape is a C90 in a rather special clamshell type box, emblazoned with "Limited Edition" blurb, bragging about the "Unique Design" and which for some reason I have given the title "Really Very Good Songs". What delights could this tape possibly hold?  Unfortunately, I think I must have had the idea of making a killer mixtape and then got bored pretty quickly. The first side is a bit of a hotchpotch, which somehow manages to find space for two live tracks by All About Eve. The second side saw me just recording some tracks from some of my favourite EPs at the time. There's a couple of tracks by Ride, followed by a couple from the Pixies, and a few from the Primitives before the revelation that these tracks were probably recorded over Act's "Laughter, Tears and Rage", the remains of which survive to close out Side B.  An early lesson in hype - it's a good reminder of the sort of thing that I was listening to at the start of the ...