1. Airbag – Radiohead
2. One of These Things First – Nick Drake
3. God Only Knows – Beach Boys
4. Cotton Dress – Catchers
5. Gentle Tuesday – Primal Scream
6. ABBA on the Jukebox [Album Version] – Trembling Blue
Stars
7. Come to Me – Bjork
8. Picnic by the Motorway – Suede
9. Travelling Light – Tindersticks
10. Mile End – Pulp
11. Father to a Sister of Thought – Pavement
12. I Stopped Dancing – Marion
13. Afrodisiac – Powder
14. Storm Injector – Tiger
15. Richard III – Supergrass
16. That’s All You Need – Faces
17. Movin’ On – Blur
18. Bitter Sweet Symphony – The Verve
19. She’s a Rainbow – The Rolling Stones
20. Ooh La La – Faces
21. Still Cold – Mazzy Star
22. Happiness is a Warm Gun – The Beatles
23. The Passenger – Iggy Pop
24. Bad Behaviour – Super Furry Animals
25. Piku – Chemical Brothers
26. No Awareness – Dr Octagon
27. Revenge of the Prophet (Part 5) – Jeru
the Damaja
28. Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain – DJ Shadow
Chronology does not determine the order, the tenor of the individual tracks does. Radiohead’s OK Computer was released in June 1997
yet its opening track is also Bully for Bulstrode’s, a
compilation intended to reflect what I was listening to from August 1996
through to August 1997. Blur’s 'Movin' On'
is taken from their eponymously titled album, released in February
1997, but I’ve included it as track 17. Tiger’s massively underrated album We are Puppets went on sale in November
1996. Suede’s Coming Up was issued in
September of the same year. I’m not even sure when
it was I committed this itinerary to tape but it could feasibly have been as late as 1998.
These are the tunes I
was listening to while living at 215 Bulstrode Avenue, the longest residential road I’ve ever
lived on. Ours was the house second along from its western approach. It took nearly 10 minutes to walk the street’s length, towards Hounslow Central tube station.
In the other direction Hounslow West, which was pretty
bleak, its meagre high street populated with fast food establishments
and betting shops. In among them could be found a Morrison’s supermarket,
Boots Chemist, Iceland, Blockbuster Video, maybe a carpet shop, and the Earl Haig (a flat-roofed pub best avoided). There
was also an off-license that I can only assume offered some sort of deal on a
four-pack of lager, because I’d happily walk the extra hundred-odd metres rather than
buy my beer from the newsagent opposite the Windsor Castle. Our house backed onto the Piccadilly Line that in turn abutted onto Lampton Park, which was bigger than Inwood Park but with a similar sort of feel; not
unpleasant in itself but displaying signs of licentious activity.
Post-university tension. I was still a student, having changed courses at the end of my second year, but the people I now lived with weren't: a feller who worked at HMV in Heathrow Airport, a girl we used to refer to as No Eyes because when she laughed you couldn’t really see her eyes (both had previously shared a house
with 'the pretty girl across the road' who I was now seeing), and the guy who passed out in Debenhams. We watched a lot of television. For breakfast/lunch, the fried egg sandwiches I’d formerly relied upon were replaced with Heinz Baked Beans with Pork Sausages on toast. A slightly more tempered lifestyle came to pass, a cleaner, tidier living
environment and a garden worth spending time in. The Windsor Castle
was our local – not a bad pub – but we’d still venture into Hounslow, to The
Chariot, The Noble Half or The Rifleman. The Bulstrode (Pub) was just at the end of the road but
it was never much of an evening boozer, more a quick pint on a
Saturday afternoon type of place.
Epic
walks to catch the tube into London, keeping in touch with
the Hounslow diaspora. The former cohabitant from Brighton was now living in
Tottenham, endlessly watching Apocalypse
Now, listening to The Doors and trying to make movies. The guy with
the tapes was residing in Islington with a trendier set (in his eyes, at least). The lad who used to beat me at snooker had moved back up
to Batley, from whence he came. The chap who introduced me to Sarah
Records was dossing in Hounslow somewhere with the girl who was a massive Blondie fan.
215 Bulstrode Avenue
OK Computer is an overrated record. It
is not as good as Radiohead’s second album – The Bends, which is also overrated in some quarters – but it is still a good album. Radiohead make good albums and sometimes great songs, but I
don’t think they have recorded a record that could be described as great in the
way that Forever Changes or Pet Sounds are, or even the way The
Verve’s A Northern Soul almost is. Never
mind, very few albums are genuinely great, but everything about 'Airbag' is just wonderful: the bass line,
the off-the-beat drums, the shrill guitars, the vocals, the lyrics, the
sentiment.
A dumped crate of vinyl outside of 129 Bulstrode Avenue, an implicit invitation to help yourself. I was on my way into to London to meet my lady
friend, probably to drink In The Crown on Brewer Street, but paused to take a look at what was there. I came away with Bryter Layter
by Nick Drake, who was supposed to be rather good, prepared to stand
the inconvenience of carrying the album around with me for the rest of the evening. It is rather good, and a Nick Drake revival of sorts was just
around the corner.
People talk of Pet Sounds’
legacy, but how many albums really sound anything like it? And is not an insult
to Brian Wilson’s talent to suggest that a record like Pet Sounds is so easily imitated? I’m not convinced that a lot of
people appreciate it as much as they say they do, for it is quite an odd album.
Only the brevity of the individual tracks makes it in any way palatable to the mainstream,
otherwise why aren’t we all listening to Surf’s Up? But 'God Only Knows'
is sublime. Unfortunately, after a session down the pub, the residents of 215
Bulstrode Avenue identified a similarity between its non-lexical vocables to those harmonised
on the theme tune to Jim'll Fix It, and started singing them, loudly.
'Cotton Dress' by Catchers, 'Gentle Tuesday' by Primal Scream and 'ABBA on the Jukebox' by Trembling Blue
Stars – all the work of the chap who got me into Sarah Records and The
Pastels and Love. Trembling Blue Stars was Bobby Wratten’s latest project (after splitting up The Field Mice and then Northern Picture Library). A tour de force of nostalgia and longing, 'ABBA on the Jukebox' might be his finest
moment. Has to be the album version, though.
Bjork almost passed me by. I liked her first and second singles very much
– 'Human Behaviour' and 'Venus as a Boy' – but I’d never bothered
with the affiliated album, Debut. The
drummer who worked at HMV had a copy and so lent it to me.
I'd always been ambivalent towards Suede, but I liked their third
album, Coming Up. It struck me as
less histrionic and more concise than their previous efforts. I also began to
find humour in singer Brett Anderson’s lyrics, and new keyboardist Neil Codling
had good hair. They were also resisting any temptation to soften their look with trainers and baggy jeans, as other Britpop practitioners were doing, which I respected. But then Suede were never really a Britpop band, despite what the people who write about it like to tell you.
Tindersticks’ eponymously titled second album isn’t as good as their
eponymously titled first but wasn’t as far off as the chap who got me into
Sarah Records liked to make out. My brother bought it for me in 1995, and yet
it somehow bypassed that year's compendium and instead made it onto this one. Save
for the odd track, the first two Tindersticks' albums possess a quality that
detaches them in my mind from any specific time and place. My Cornish friend
who passed out in Debenhams alighted upon the song 'Travelling Light' after we'd moved to Bulstrode Avenue, and so a
connection was made, just as it had been with 'Marbles' three years earlier.
'Mile End' was on the soundtrack
to Trainspotting, a movie synonymous with Britpop, and was as good as anything
off of Pulp’s last LP. Pulp were anomalous. Their
music owed nothing to the mod-rock revivalism or new-wave pop of their
peers, yet visually they were the most ardently retrospective and distinctive
group of the whole movement. They had more in common with a band like Saint
Etienne, or even Suede, but Pulp’s success staked them as bedfellows to Oasis
and Blur. Jarvis Cocker was that strange thing: a plebeian aesthete who
appealed to the both the arty crowd and the man on the street.
As
with The Fall, The Sounds of Baden Pearce
could very well have included many songs by the band Pavement, with three
albums to pick from: Slanted and
Enchanted; Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain;
and the compilation of EP tracks and singles Westing (By Musket and
Sextant). Pavement’s
third album proper, Wowee Zowee, was
released in April 1995 but had again passed
me by. The drummer employed at HMV had a recording of it, which he again lent
to me.
'I Stopped Dancing' by Marion and 'Afrodisiac' by Powder are included because I now had access to a
video player and could watch my recorded copy of the slightly cringey BBC 2 showcase Britpop Now (first broadcast in August 1995) at will. Somebody had a copy of the Marion album, but it would be a number of years before I was able to download the Powder tune (probably from Soulseek). They are very good tunes by very average bands
who none the less exuded a darker aesthetic than many of their Britpop-by-numbers
contemporaries.
Tiger was a marvellous band,
possibly ahead of the curve, maybe behind it, depending on your perspective.
Unfortunately for them enthusiasm for Oasis was at an all-time high; they’d just
played Knebworth that August dressed up as the Happy Mondays, and the record
buying public was in no mood for a band that appeared to take sartorial
inspiration from 1980s comedy-drama Auf Wiedersehen, Pet.
Supergrass had effected an about face.
Despite the inclusion of the catchy 'She’s
so Loose' on Carrington Classics, I’d written them off as just another
Britpop also-ran. Their second album, In
It for the Money, was far heavier than their first. They’d also managed to reconstruct their image without
resorting to either the laddish baggyisms of Oasis or the skateboarder chic of Blur. Nothing fancy: shirts, leather boots, simple T-shirts,
straight-legged chords, all in muted shades. Kind of like Suede but without the stigma of wearing too much black.
The chap who introduced me to Sarah
Records didn’t tend to like anything approximating heavy rock, but somehow the
Faces avoided this charge. I expect it might have had something to do with the
notion that the Faces didn't take themselves too seriously, as opposed to the
impression conveyed via the earnest posturing of groups like Led Zeppelin or the camp theatricality of the Rolling Stones. On one of his rare Bulstrode visits, the chap brought around his copy of the double-album Best of the Faces, although the
first disc was missing, which might be why he never asked for it back. The
Faces evoked a certain melancholy congruent to the environment I was living
in – the feeling we were living on the periphery of things, in limbo
between Hounslows East and West. This might not make much sense if you're
listening to 'That's All You
Need' but may well do if it’s 'Ooh
La La'.
Blur’s fifth LP was
supposedly a reaction to their fourth, a conscious rejection of the populism
they had embraced and an attempt to reclaim the noisier ground of their youth, when they were called Seymour. Blur has aged well but to
claim it’s some sort of homage to American lo-fi indie music – as was proclaimed
by the music press, and to some extent by the band itself – is complete
nonsense. 'Look Inside America' carries
on where 'End of the Century'
left off. 'Beetlebum' sounds like Let it Be era Beatles. 'Strange News from Another Star' is 'Starman' meets 'The Bewlay Brothers' by David Bowie; 'Movin' On' is 'Queen Bitch'. Often, Damon
Albarn plays his Hammond organ like he’s working the end of a pier. In short, it's all
about as British as Blur ever get.
You couldn’t help but be
taken with The Verve’s 'Bitter Sweet
Symphony'. Unfortunately, the album that followed was effectively a dry run
for Richard Ashcroft's career as a solo artiste. Turned out ‘Mad Richard’
wasn’t so mad after all, as the jittery, ragged character that inhabited both A Storm in Heaven and A Northern Soul was jettisoned and some blokeish balladeer
materialised in its place. Nick McCabe’s guitar must have gently wept.
I wasn’t done with the
sixties, hadn’t even scratched much past the surface. I picked up the Rolling
Stones compilation Through the Past,
Darkly (Big Hits Vol.2) on one of my excursions to Plymouth. I bought
it for the tracks '2000 Light Years from
Home' and 'Jumpin’ Jack Flash'
because I wanted them on vinyl. I didn’t actually own any Stones’ records at
this point and had been getting by on a taped copy of Hot Rocks 1964–1971
since my first year of university. I was still listening to The Beatles but not so much. The former cohabitant from Brighton dropped by and I put on 'The White Album' at his request. It can't have been the first time we'd listened to this record together, but 'Happiness Is a Warm Gun' had us in hysterics. I think it was McCartney and Harrison's doo-wop backing vocals during the final section that did it.
A few years before the film Trainspotting came along to remind
people of Iggy Pop’s existence, there was Passengers,
a ‘youth TV’ show on Channel 4 which used Iggy Pop’s 'The Passenger' as its theme tune. I never saw it but imagine
it made for pretty bad television, as these things often do. At the time, I was
only vaguely aware of Iggy Pop’s place in punk and alternative music’s canon –
his band The Stooges and the close musical partnership with David Bowie during
the late 1970s. After Trainspotting,
and the re-release of 'Lust for Life' off
the back of it, Pop’s contribution came to the fore and people like me started
putting his songs on their mixtapes.
Super Furry Animals because my partner liked them and they made a loud noise, The Chemical
Brothers because some of this big beat stuff was all right really, and Fatboy
Slim left me cold.
1996 was the year that I reacquainted myself with the Beastie Boys, by way of the albums Ill Communication, Check Your Head and Paul's Boutique. I had also been exposed to Enter the Wu-Tang (36
Chambers), which seemed to me an improvement upon the product
offered by Snoop Doggy Dog, Dr. Dre, Notorious B.I.G. and the like. At any rate, my fondness for the genre
was stirred, and by the end of the
year I’d acquired Wrath of the Math by Jeru the Damaja, Dr.
Octagon’s debut album (the Mo’ Wax edition), and Entroducing by DJ Shadow, which I'd been introduced to in the
Embassy Rooms in Islington drinking with the guy with the tapes on a random Sunday afternoon.
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