1. Ana Ng – They Might Be Giants
2. Lenny Valentino [Album Version] – The Auteurs
3. No. 13 Baby – The Pixies
4. Cannonball – The Breeders
5. Rebound – Sebadoh
6. Trigger Cut / Wounded Kite at :17 –
Pavement
7. Arms Control Poseur [Album Version] – The Fall
8. Ghost Highway – Mazzy Star
9. Capital Letters – Moonshake
10. Marbles – Tindersticks
11. Transona Five – Stereolab
12. Tearing Apart My World – Beatnik Filmstars
13. Water – Automatic Dlamini
14. White Shirt – The Charlatans
15. For Tomorrow – Blur
16. Line Up – Elastica
17. Columbia – Oasis
18. His ‘n’ Hers – Pulp
19. Red Right Hand – Nick Cave and the Bad
Seeds
20. Hand in Glove – The Smiths
21. Ever
Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve) –
Buzzcocks
22. Naked Cousin [Peel Session] – PJ Harvey
Bonus Tracks:
23. Bike
– Pink Floyd
24. The Gift – The Velvet Underground
25. Ballad
of a Thin Man – Bob Dylan
26. Outer Temple – Gong
27. Inner Temple – Gong
28. The
Chain – Fleetwood Mac
29. Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five – Wings
30. Reflections in a Flat – Half Man Half Biscuit
29. Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five – Wings
30. Reflections in a Flat – Half Man Half Biscuit
The Sounds of Baden Pearce: ‘Baden
Pearce’ being the name of my hall of residence at my West London university, 'The Sounds'
being a collection of tunes encountered over the academic year I resided there. Baden Pearce tended to be the domicile for people who came through
clearing – ‘clearing’ being the system whereby you applied anew for a place at
a particular college or university after receiving your A-level results, maybe because you
did better than expected and wanted to explore other opportunities, or worse
and were obliged to. (I had done better.)
Our rooms were meagre cuboids: a tiled floor, a rug, a single bed, a
wardrobe, a desk come chest-of-drawers, a shelf and a large cork notice board
with room enough for a couple of posters.
Boys were slept on the ground floor, girls on the first in what was a
two-storey building. There were no en-suite bathrooms; sinks, showers and toilets were shared. My lodging
overlooked portacabin-style classrooms. Ducks used to congregate outside my
window some mornings. There was a television, piano and table tennis table in
the common room. It was a lot of fun but there were only two washing machines
and no tumble dryer to speak of. One’s radiator took on a more vital dimension.
Eager to expand
my knowledge of all things ‘indie’, I made an association with a guy who was well
acquainted with the genre. He had tapes of the stuff and seemed to make a new
purchase almost every week, which we would listen to in his room.
Sartorially, indie music could be hard to pin down but appeared to have little to do with fashion. Footwear and
jeans might be bought new but T-shirts, jumpers and coats were typically found in charity shops and weekend markets – Camden and Portobello in our
case. Brands and labels were meaningless conceits. Having much money did not
make you a better dressed person. Clothes were not worn to reflect status or
hierarchy; indie was supposed to be beyond all that. The attitude was that
anything was permissible, both with regards to music and a band’s image:
alternative, lo-fi, shoegaze, grunge, baggy, dream pop, chamber pop, jangle
pop, art pop, drone pop, noise pop, slowcore, sadcore, hardcore, post-hardcode,
post-punk, straight edge, industrial rock, garage rock, gothic rock,
experimental rock, art rock, noise rock... The indie scene was a very broad
church.
This being said, there were a number of identifiable looks. Fans of American indie generally favoured plaid
shirts, Converse trainers, suede jackets, well-worn
denim and long hair. Skateboarding gear would also feature – apparel for the 'slacker generation'. The British scene was more eclectic and slightly smarter. With
their mop-top hairdos and roll-neck jumpers, Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs of St.
Etienne and Bobby Gillespie from Primal Scream appropriated the 1960s long before Britpop laid claim to it. In the wake of their album Modern Life is Rubbish, Blur came up with a sort of Mod/Skinhead hybrid involving Fred Perry polo shirts, blazers, Harrington
jackets, desert boots and Dr. Martens. Pulp had also developed their own style, a retro, charity shop get-up
comprised of nylon and corduroy. Tindersticks wore suits. V-neck jumpers were
doing the rounds. I rummaged through my dad’s old clothes and found a few, as well as a brown leather ‘car coat’ that Luke Haines (of The Auteurs) might have worn.
The Sounds of Baden Pearce was the name
I whimsically came up with when I began collating the music I had on cassette
and transferring it onto MiniDisc in and around the year 2000. In actual fact,
there was no cassette carried over from this period. I would certainly have
thrown something together during that time – possibly a number of tapes
pertaining to various genres – and I’m confident that many of these tunes would
have appeared on one compilation or another, if only because of the strong
association they still hold.
I already possessed a copy of Flood by They Might Be Giants (taped from a friend during my A-levels) but 'Ana Ng' comes from an earlier album
entitled Lincoln that I borrowed from
the guy who owned all the indie tapes. They Might Be Giants were by now old
hat, but I was playing catch-up and did not know this.
I’d read about The Auteurs and was persuaded
to buy Now I'm a Cowboy on the
strength of the single 'Lenny Valentino' – the album version is even better.
Unfortunately, Now I’m a Cowboy
didn’t live up to the expectation that The Auteurs’ debut album, New Wave, foisted upon it, but I liked their vibe.
Every aspiring indie-kid listened to the Pixies and the Breeders, most to
Sebadoh and some to Pavement (as well as Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, Nirvana,
etc.). If any specific sound defined indie music back in the early ‘90s it was
expressed via groups like these. The guy with the tapes provided The Pixies, The
Breeders and Pavement, while I bought Sebadoh’s 4 Song CD – on vinyl – on his advice. All the songs worth hearing
on this EP later appeared on the album Bakesale,
rendering it obsolete.
The Fall were at the height of their popularity after 1993’s The Infotainment Scan had entered the
album charts at no. 9. I borrowed Extricate
from the guy with tapes, which was the only Fall album he had, and played it to
death. Come the end of the academic year, I’d own This Nation’s Saving Grace, The Wonderful and Frightening World Of..., The
Frenz Experiment, Bend Sinister, Shift-Work,
Code: Selfish, The Infotainment Scan and Middle Class Revolt. 'Arms
Control Poseur' is my favourite track off of Extricate, although frustratingly it isn’t included on the abridged
vinyl copy I picked up years later.
Tapes guy purchased the Mazzy Star LP So
Tonight That I Might See as soon as it came out (October 1993). It made
such an impression that I quickly bought their earlier record, She Hangs Brightly (May 1990). We
journeyed to the Mean Fiddler intent on seeing them play live only to find
the gig had been cancelled. If we had tried to buy tickets in advance we would have found found this out, but as it was we had no way of knowing – no
internet, no mobile phone, no anything.
Moonshake utilised samples and had odd drum patterns. Tapes guy had a copy of their first album Eva Luna, and on a visit to Bristol to
see family I purchased the mini-album Big
Good Angel, from which 'Capital Letters' is derived. This was last release featuring the old line-up, before
band member Margaret Fiedler left (or was kicked out) to form Laika. Tapes guy and I went to see them play at the Highbury Garage, I suppose to promote their third album, The Sound Your Eyes Can Follow. All I remember of it was a loud brass section, tapes guy chatting to a member of The Family Cat, and Lætitia Sadier from Stereolab asking me if I had a spare cigarette.
Tindersticks were from Nottingham and seemed older and more sophisticated
than many of their peers, which they were. Their music could be described as
dark chamber pop, incorporating string arrangements, woodwind instruments, horns,
Spanish guitar. Tindersticks’ eponymously titled debut was nominated album of
the year by the magazine Melody Maker, and deserved to be. [When it was suggested by Melody Maker (March 18 1995) that their look was contrived, Stuart Staples retorted, 'It's not that we wouldn't be able to make the music we do in jeans and T-shirts, it's that if we were the sort of people who did wear jeans and T-shirts, we wouldn't make the music that we do.']
The passage of time has tricked me into associating
Stereolab with a period of my life it can’t have had much to do with. I
purchased the Ping Pong EP in July
1994, which was almost as soon as I returned to Plymouth for the summer
holidays, and the LP Mars
Audiac Quintet in August. Regardless, this music has a strong association
with that which surrounds it, lending weight to the theory that I did indeed
compile something representative during this period, perhaps in Plymouth.
The Beatnik Filmstars had a hard, lo-fi sound more akin to American
indie-rock, but with the softer vocal inclinations of British jangle pop/shoegaze.
Automatic Dlamini was John Parish's gig, but their second album, 1992's From a Diva to a Diver, included contributions from Polly Harvey. Both groups where part of a Somerset and
Bristol based indie scene that the guy with the tapes was also part of, by way
of his involvement with a band called The Tony Head Experience.
As well as hanging
out with the guy with all the tapes, I was friendly with a Welsh lad who looked a
bit like Keanu Reeves. I possessed the Charlatans
12" 'Weirdo' but nothing other than that. Welsh
lad had The Charlatans’ first album, Some
Friendly, on vinyl, and we both bought Up
to Our Hips on tape when it was made available in March for the paltry sum
of £3.99 (tapes normally retailed at around £8, give or take, while CDs would set
you back about £12). 'White Shirt' is
my favourite tune from Some Friendly and better than anything off of Up to Our
Hips, which isn’t The Charlatans’ best work.
The Charlatans would later find themselves co-opted into the Britpop movement, but the zeitgeist that was to beget the scene had yet to be given its name. You sensed something was happening but didn’t know what
it was. The term new wave of new wave (NWONW) was being bandied about,
with regards to groups like Elastica, S*M*A*S*H and These Animal Men, but it never
really caught on. In any case, Pulp and Oasis couldn’t have sounded more unlike
each other. The scene as it was, there was plenty of room for both and no obligation
to align yourself this way or that. If you stopped the clock here – 1993
running into 1994 – you might think British indie music was a wonderfully
diverse and multi-faceted thing.
'For Tomorrow' by Blur correlated with my impression of London: Portobello Road on a
Saturday, the Notting Hill Record and Tape Exchange, Kensington Market, all-you-can-eat buffets at Deep Pan Pizza on Leicester
Square, Hammersmith flyover, HMV Megastore on Oxford Street, the District Line, Camden Town. It wasn't just their music but Blur's image, which felt more urbane than many of their contemporaries, Suede included. This impression was probably enhanced by repeated viewings of the tour documentary Starshaped, which tapes guy acquired on video. This was a very different Blur on display to the one that would trade punches with Oasis, and all the better for it: less calculated, more immediate, whimsically humorous, if somewhat jaded. For a while they were my favourite band and Modern Life is Rubbish one of my most listened to albums.
I perceived Elastica to be a more
local concern. Lead singer Justine Frischmann grew up down the road, and tapes guy and I once ran into her shopping with
her mother in Richmond. Tapes guy wasn't shy, so he introduced
himself and informed her we were both fans, to which she responded with good grace. We then proceeded to creepily follow her back, at a distance, to her parents' house in Twickenham (not my idea).
A couple of weeks before Blur released Parklife, Oasis unleashed their debut single, 'Supersonic'. Whereas Blur’s game changer shot straight to number one in the UK album charts, Oasis’s single only made it
as high as number 31 in the concomitant ranking. 'Supersonic' was a good song, but 'Columbia', which was only included on the CD iteration, was even better. The next two singles
leading up to the album ('Shakermaker'
and 'Live Forever') fared much better,
and by the time Definitely Maybe hit
the shops in August Oasis were easily as popular as Blur.
Meanwhile, Pulp’s His ‘n’ Hers
had almost slipped under the radar, although it still peaked at number 9 in the
charts, which was more than respectable. The title track wasn’t actually
included on the album but surfaced on The
Sisters EP released in late May, just in
time for my 19th birthday (a present from the guy with tapes). I could have just as easily have included 'Staks' on this compilation, the B-side to the single 'Razzmatazz'. I found it on Intro – The Gift Recordings, which was as good an introduction to Pulp as anyone could've asked for.
I didn’t take to
the front cover of Let Love In by
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds but trusted that the guy with the tapes knew what
he was buying. I don’t actually recall much of the album other than the track 'Red Right Hand', but it’s quite some
track and one that Cave plays live to this day.
I picked up a copy of The Smiths’ debut in an indoor flea market in
Richmond that no longer exists for about £3 (along with the 12” of 'Hey! Luciani' by The Fall). The tapes guy
had Hatful of Hollow on tape so this
purchase was by no means out of the blue, but having a vinyl copy of that album
felt significant somehow.
Another one of my university chums owned a compilation entitled The Sound of the Suburbs, all about punk
and new wave. This is where the Buzzcocks tune came from, and it also put me in
touch with The Jam, The Undertones, The Stranglers and Blondie. Actually, I was already getting into Blondie on account of a girl who was a massive fan, and whom I had a bit of a thing for. (She would go on to provide me with a copy of Definitely Maybe on the day of its release.)
As well as lending me his cassettes, the guy with the indie tapes
introduced me to a number of other things, such as the NME and Melody Maker,
suede as a viable material, the films of Woody Allen and John Peel’s Festive 50. I
must concede to having never listened to John Peel up until this point in my
life, and although I didn’t suddenly start tuning in religiously I did make a
point of recording that year’s Festive 50. This allowed me to obtain a copy of 'Naked Cousin' by PJ Harvey, which hadn’t featured on any of her records and was only made commercially
available in 2006 when she collated her Peel Sessions onto an album.
It became evident that to fully
appreciate indie music you had to know a bit about the history of alternative
music in general and some of the acts that comprise the cannon: The Beatles,
The Velvet Underground, The Byrds, Syd Barrett, Bowie, the Stones, and so on. The
Welsh lad who looked vaguely like Keanu Reeves was very into The Beatles, and many
evenings were spent listening to Abbey Road and ‘The White Album’, as well as Paul McCartney and Wings. My parents used
to play these records when I was younger, but it was revelatory listening to it
now as a teenager, earnestly in a darkened room. I was also introduced to what
might be called progressive psychedelic rock: bands like Gong, Caravan,
Camel, Focus. I never really liked this music enough to bother recording any
of it, although I did enjoy Angel’s Egg
by Gong. The same cannot be said of Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, which I obtained from the lad who lent
me The Sound of the Suburbs. There are
far better songs than 'Bike' on the album, but when I was putting this compilation together I felt I needed to
convey some of the more humorous aspects of the music I was being introduced to (see also Half Man Half Biscuit).
Indie tapes guy obliged with
the first VU album but I never gave it the attention it warranted; all I cared for was 'Venus in Furs' which had
recently featured in an advert for Dunlop tyres. However, tapes guy also had a
recording of 'The Gift' off of Velvet
Underground’s White Light/White Heat.
It tells the improbable tale of Waldo Jeffers who, lovesick, mails himself to
his long distance lover, Marsha Bronson, only for her to inadvertently skewer
him with a sheet-metal cutter as she struggles to open the box that transported
him. The plot is not so much the thing, it’s all about the language, the
phrasing and John Cale’s delightful Welsh lilt.
The Welsh lad who looked like
Keanu Reeves – who didn’t have a very strong Welsh accent, come to think of it –
also liked Bob Dylan and Fleetwood Mac. My old man liked Bob Dylan too, but his music had never left much of an impression. Repeated
listens in Welsh lad’s room to Highway 61
Revisited and Blonde on Blonde
saw this right. Fleetwood Mac I was more familiar with, but again I’d never made any effort to properly engage with them. Welsh lad had Rumours, and I borrowed my father’s copy
of Greatest Hits (the 1971 edition).
Over the years I have included both 'The
Chain' and 'Dragonfly' on this
compilation, but never at the same time, so take your pick. Similarly, anything from Band on the Run by Wings will do.
The
calm before the storm. I’d seen The Breeders supported by Luscious Jackson at The Forum in
Kentish Town, The Fall at the same venue (different night), The Fall again at The Fridge in Brixton, Moonshake at
The Garage, the Moonflowers somewhere between Fulham and
Hammersmith – all in the company of the guy with the indie tapes – and These
Animal Men at Connections in Plymouth. The criteria for going to these gigs
were just fancying it and the availability of tickets. There was never any
question of being part of something, of it being a communal experience. When
did it all change? When did indie music become embroiled in another scene?
Britpop’s ascendancy was gradual and by no means
assured. The received wisdom is that it started with 'Popscene' by Blur in the spring of 1992. If that’s true then nobody
really noticed. Besides, it was Suede who were making waves. Their debut
single 'The Drowners' was voted single
of the year in the NME, although it only reached number 49 in the charts, which
isn’t the stuff movements are made of.
How about 1993? Did that April issue of Select Magazine –
the one that’s wheeled out every time the origins of Britpop are being
discussed, with the serpentine Brett Anderson on its cover – not signal the
start of something? To a degree: both Suede’s eponymous debut album and Blur’s
second made
it into NME’s top 10 albums that year. But then so too did Black Sunday by Cypress Hill, Come
on Feel the Lemonheads by the Lemonheads, Siamese Dream by Smashing Pumpkins, Star by Belly, and Bjork’s debut, Debut. (Cannonball by The
Breeders was voted best single.)
What about April 1994, the month that saw the release of
two of Britpop’s defining albums: His ‘n’
Hers by Pulp and Parklife by Blur?
Possibly, but the effect was not as immediate as one might assume. Britpop’s
prime movers were still sharing a fair proportion of airtime, the front covers
of magazines and placings in polls with acts as diverse as R.E.M., Manic
Street Preachers, The Stone Roses, a recently deceased Kurt Cobain, Morrissey, Primal
Scream, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, The Auteurs, The Prodigy, Jeff Buckley,
Beastie Boys, NAS, Public Enemy, Johnny Cash, Pavement, Sebadoh, Pearl Jam.
You have to hand it to Oasis. It was Definitely Maybe that promulgated
Britpop’s arrival as a populist movement. The lads who had been grooving away
to The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, and Inspiral Carpets just a few
years earlier were not the sort to be seduced by the likes of Suede, Pulp and
Blur. But know this: it took until 1995, maybe even 1996, for the aggro vested
upon fans of alternative music – or towards people with alternative lifestyles
in general – to finally settle down, for the jibes and the dirty looks and the
threats of violence to subside, the objections towards how you wore your hair or how thin you were, or something as innocuous as a leather jacket or a roll neck
sweater.
Great article. I was in college 1992-1995 and had so many of those records. Remember my flatmate bringing home Modern Life Is Rubbish. On cassette. The Fall were in a difficult bind then; fractured live. The Reckoning and its "hippy half-wit" lyric though - class.
ReplyDeleteMark E Smith's 'whiskey period', so I've heard.
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