LINER NOTES: I NEVER HAPPENED [2025]

      1.   Mrs Ladyships and the Cleanerhouse Boys – The Smashing Times

      2.   SuperHwy – Big Supermarket

      3.   Get Found Out – Publicity Department

      4.   Map Like a Leaf – Autocamper

      5.   Ivanhoe’s Twopence – The Fall

      6.   Roman Litter – Felt

      7.   Blue Shadows – Lower Plenty

      8.   Cupid Come – My Bloody Valentine

      9.   Dreamhorse – Workhorse

    10.   Doggerland – Vehicle

    11.   Mariella – Khruangbin featuring Leon Bridges

    12.   Comet 4 – The Soundcarriers

    13.   Listen Here – Eddie Harris

    14.   The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll (Live, Montreal Forum) – Bob Dylan

    15.   On Parade – Electrelane

    16.   Explosions – Devo

    17.   Teen Beat – Automatic

    18.   Year of the Books – The Green Child

    19.   Colour Television – Stereolab

    20.   Spike Island – Pulp

    21.   Baader Meinhof (Das Capital version) – Luke Haines

    22.   I Never Happened – Comet Gain

    23.   Trees – Pictureframes
 

December 2024. The Clientele have not long ago played a double set at the Village Underground, a wonderful music venue in Shoreditch that I've never previously been to. Within days of the event they then announce a gig at the Moth Club – another great venue – in Hackney, as The Butterfly Collectors, which was what the group called themselves before becoming The Clientele. They are to play material from their retrospective anthology It's Art Dad, with a few tracks from Suburban Light thrown in, and shall be accompanied by their original drummer, Daniel Evans. It’s on a Tuesday but to hell with it, I’m there, although my partner, who accompanied me to the Village Underground, will give it a miss.

London’s train network is undependable at the best of times – I reckon about one in three services are disrupted to some extent. Accordingly, when I travel across town I err on the side of caution, which on this occasion meant I arrived in Hackney with plenty of time to spare. I went for a drink at The Cock Tavern, which was part of the plan anyway, but didn’t get on with the beer nor the crowds. With nearly an hour left to kill, I decided to dodge the showers and take refuge in the JD Wetherspoon across the road: Baxter’s Court.

Whatever you might think about JD Wetherspoon and its extravagantly coiffured founder and chairman Tim Martin, a pint there is about half the price it is anywhere else. For a lot of people that's the difference between going out and not being able to afford to. Moreover, their pubs tend to be well run. What they aren't is pretty. Although quite tidy, Wetherspoon's pubs are generally stuck in a 1990s time warp. I say generally because sometimes they occupy grander buildings that were once something else, such as a bank, an old cinema or post office. Baxter's Court is none of these things, it’s purpose built, and so you have wall-to-wall carpet, low ceilings, overly bright lights, fruit machines, and too many bar-high tables and chairs. (The best pubs in the 1990s were the ones that hadn't undergone any significant change since the 1970s, which is as true now as it was back then. See also cafes and motorway service stations.) So I didn’t stay long, dodged more showers on my way to the Moth Club, and readied myself for the support act.

I am guilty of not always paying supporting acts the respect they often deserve. Had the Cock Tavern been less busy and less keen on serving up obscure IPA, or if Baxter’s Court was more like Hamilton Hall in Liverpool Street, I may have missed The Smashing Times, which would have been a shame. ‘Mrs Ladyships and the Cleanerhouse Boys’ was the third of sixteen tracks they managed to squeeze in before the headline act, and the first off of the album of the same name.

Big Supermarket are/were from Melbourne in Australia, and released their only record, 1800, on the Hobbies Galore label in 2018, limited to just 300 copies, re-issued on green vinyl the following year on Tough Love Records, again limited to 300 copies, of which I now own one. That seems to be that. You can’t find a copy anywhere, not even on Discogs. Bizarre to think it was on Spotify that I discovered this band, because Spotify’s algorithms, be it by accident or design, aren’t usually so imaginative. I’m guessing it had to do with The Clean and the other antipodean groups that I’ve been listening to over the last couple of years.

Publicity Department are equally obscure, the solo project of someone by the name of Sean Brook, who’s also in a band called Brunch. You can't buy any records or CDs, but there are cassettes. In some instances there’s no physical artefact at all, and yet it’s all available on Spotify. Quality music readily available from the most high profile audio streaming provider in the market and yet almost impossible to own on any tangible format. It's all there on Bandcamp, and I do use Bandcamp, but I'd rather buy a record, or at least a compact disc.

Autocamper are selling actual records. I know this because Monorail Music said so on their social media. Autocamper are from Manchester and appear to take inspiration from the sort of ‘indie pop’ you used to get a lot of in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. Kind of like The Umbrellas, so perhaps it's making a comeback.

Satisfied that I'd now heard everything by The Fall up to and including the 1994 album Middle Class Revolt (see It's Raining Today) I decided to listen more closely to what they'd recorded since. Aside from compilation that would result – The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall, Volume 4 –  I was determined to add a track to this playlist, and ended going for 'Ivanhoe's Two Pence' from the 1998 CD single 'Masquerade'. Considering the alternatives, my choice may confound die-hard Fall fans. Steve Pringle describes it as ‘languid’, which is not meant as a criticism. It’s certainly one of Smith’s more laid-back vocal performances, complimenting the sampled film dialogue chuntering away in the background.

For my 50th birthday, The Wilkinsons presented me with a copy of Street-Level Superstar: A Year With Lawrence by Will Hodgkinson. It would be fair to describe Lawrence as something of an eccentric, and this eccentricity can often carry over into his music. Take 'Roman Litter' as an example: the breathy ‘heys’ after every third line of the verse, or the way he stretches out ‘all right’ at the end of the chorus. These are not usual inflections, and yet they’re what makes the song interesting. (Incidentally, in June I found myself standing very near to Lawrence at an Escape-ism gig downstairs at The Dome in Tufnell Park, which makes me think his reputation as a recluse may have been overstated.)

The Lower Plenty are another Australian band from Melbourne. ‘Blue Shadows’ is taken from their album No Poets, released in 2023, and reminds me of the Irish indie-pop group Catchers, who were active in the 1990s, so perhaps this type of stuff already has made a comeback?

I'm not convinced half the people who own Loveless by My Bloody Valentine ever listen to it, or if they even like it all that much. 'Sometimes' is fairly easy going but the rest of it is a wash of dissonant noise. Which is not say it’s a bad record, just that it requires a bit of effort. The group's first album, Isn't Anything, is more forgiving, at least by comparison. 'Cupid Come' reminds me of a more abrasive version of 'City Girl', a song Kevin Shields wrote for the film Lost in Translation, which I love.

More Australian music, this time from Adelaide. Workhorse are fronted by Harriet Fraser-Barbour, who cites Julee Cruise, Chris Isaak and Mazzy Star as influences, which are not bad influences to have. On 'Dreamhorse' I'm hearing The Handsome Family, so we’ve got that alternative country thing going on too.

Vehicle look to be in the same boat as Publicity Department. I wrote last year about how hard it was finding out anything about Vehicle, on account of their name, but there doesn't seem to be any physical product whatsoever. They even have an album out, entitled Widespread Vehicle, but it’s only available on Spotify or as a download from Bandcamp. I utilised both facilities, and in April I went to see them at the Sebright Arms just south of Hackney, but what I really want is an object I can actually hold. The gig was rather shambolic (technical issues, not the band's fault). They didn't play 'Doggerland' either, although they did finish with 'Uncle Roy Orbison'. I suspect the reason 'Doggerland' didn’t feature is because of its arrangement and Spector-ish production. That's the same reason you find it placed here, approaching the halfway mark, following on from the alternative country of Workhorse and before the laidback tones of ‘Mariella’ by Khruangbin.

I heard ‘Mariella’ down The London Apprentice, drinking with my Cornish friend during Sunday Service earlier in the year, and we then listened to it when I visited him in at his flat in Plymouth a few months later. I’m also fairly certain that The Florist played it in his van on the drive to Alabarracin in 2024. I’m not sure where The Soundcarriers came from. I’ve been aware of them for a while, maybe because they’re often compared to bands like Stereolab and Broadcast. ‘Comet 4’ suited the mood, and I needed something that could work alongside jazz.

As mentioned, 2025 was the year I turned 50. What a diabolical thing to get your head around. Not that I feel particularly old, but I’m starting to look it. To celebrate being closer to death than birth – although this was more than possibly true the day I hit 40, even 30 – I headed down to Brighton and put the word out to anyone who might wish to join me and my partner there (which turned out to be my Cornish friend, the former cohabitant from Brighton, No Eyes and, albeit briefly, Teleport Man). We had a few pints at the Heart in Hand, ate at Cote, drank some more at the White Rabbit and The Prince Albert, my coterie of friends leaving gradually as the evening progressed. My partner and I then finished off with a nightcap on the balcony of the Artist Residence overlooking Regency Square, the seafront just beyond.

The next morning my partner turned on the radio, which happened to be tuned to Jazz FM. That was fine by me, and so I drank my morning coffee to the sound of ‘Listen Here’ by the tenor saxophonist Eddie Harris, while watching a dense fog roll in off of the English Channel.

Harris was known for playing an electric Varitone saxophone, developed by a company called Selmer. The Varitone – essentially an electronic amplifier – allows the user to manipulate the sound in a number of ways. The function that Eddie Harris liked was the ‘octamatic’ setting, which adds a pitch one octave lower to that emitted by the instrument itself. The effect is a full-bodied, humming bass sound. From what I can gather, jazz purists weren't keen on any of this and Harris's reputation suffered as a result, although he is more well regarded nowadays.

Antica Stuzzicheria

Bologna, to watch football with a couple of old friends. On the first night of three we find a nice little Osteria called Antica Stuzzicheria run by a chap named Antonio, who's quite a character. We return there on the second night as well as the third, whereupon he as on The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings by Bob Dylan. It suited the environment, which was traditionally decorated and dimly lit yet lively and welcoming. Dylan's voice can grate at times, but not here, he really belts it out.

Because ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’ is recorded live, I was unsure of where it should go on my playlist. As I often do (but not always) I found myself implementing Stanley Kubrick’s theory of non-submersible units. Whereas Kubrick typically split his films into six to eight narrative components, I usually go for four or five, depending on the length of the compilation. With regards to this one, the delineation between the first and second quarter isn’t so distinct – more of a gradual wind down, starting with the Lower Plenty and culminating with Khruangbin. As the year progressed, I’d amassed a number of more upbeat tracks that I realised would have to be grouped together in what would become the third segment. The question then was how to bridge over from the mellower tunes that comprise the second quarter to the upbeat ones that were to form the third. ‘Listen Here’ begins this process and ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’ finishes it; while neither track has a particularly high tempo, they’re both more urgent than The Soundcarriers' tune that precedes them, but less so than what comes next.

In truth, I’m not sure if the transition works. ‘On Parade’ by Electrelane is all high energy, comparable to ‘Sisters’ by Cate le Bon, maybe with a bit of Kleenex/Liliput thrown in. The segue into Devo’s ‘Explosions’ isn’t perfect but works better. In any case, we’re now firmly into the playlists’ third non-submersible unit.

‘Explosions’ is from Devo’s fifth album, 1982’s Oh, No! It's Devo, which I wasn’t overly familiar with. That all changed in February, around the same time as that trip to Plymouth I alluded to, after I put together a Devo playlist to listen to on the journey. Which is apt because it was a girl from Plymouth who implored me to listen to Devo in the first instance, even if it did take me several years to heed her advice.

I saw Automatic play at 2022’s Wide Awake festival and liked them. I don’t think their second album, Excess, could have been out yet, because I only remember having listened to their first – Signal. Excess is an improvement on Signal. Their third album, Is it Now?, was released earlier in the year, but I’m still catching up with Excess, from which 'Teenbeat' is taken.

The Green Child are yet another band from Melbourne, Australia. Boomkat product review: ‘Originally the recording project of Raven Mahon (member of Grass Widow, Rocky) and Mikey Young (Total Control, Eddy Current Suppression Ring, Shutdown 66), The Green Child now boasts Shaun Gionis (Boomgates) on drums and Alex Macfarlane (who runs the label Hobbies Galore) on guitar and synth.’ You can begin to see how Spotify goes about its business. At 5 minutes and 58 seconds, and falling apart towards the end, this is the compilation’s climax, rounding off the third non-submersible unit.

Different Stereolab records evoke different times and different places. Mars Audiac Quintet reminds me of the summer of 1994, specifically the walk from my parents’ old house into Plymouth city centre. Emperor Tomato Ketchup recalls Hounslow, as does Refried Ectoplasm. Dots and Loops, the dive I lived in off Hanworth Road in 1996-7, Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night and Aluminum Tunes, the poky flat my partner and I rented in Brentford. Will their most recent album, Instant Holograms on Metal Film, ever prompt me to think about St. Margarets and the apartment I’ve resided in for the last 20 years? I doubt it. My circumstances don’t fluctuate as much as they once did, and nothing’s really gone on this year to distinguish it from the last. Not even turning 50.

What may end being more firmly entrenched is the memory of seeing Stereolab playing at the Electric Brixton. Prior to the event I had a couple of drinks in the Trinity Arms and The Prince Albert – pubs I’d not been to before. I had been to the Electric Brixton, but only in its previous incarnation as the Brixton Fridge (to see The Fall in 1994) and it looked nothing then like it does now. Unfortunately, Stereolab didn’t see fit to play ‘Colour Television’ but they did ‘Household Names’, which they hadn't done on any of the previous five occasions I saw them.

Another Britpop affiliated band with a new record out were Pulp. Pulp have fared better than many of their contemporaries, and it’s hard to imagine any of them producing an album that sounds so much like themselves without crossing over into pastiche or parody. If we overlook Jarvis's waning powers as a vocalist (which is understandable, given his age) 'Spike Island' could have been recorded 25 years ago. This is not to say that it sounds dated, just that Pulp's music hasn't dated much, if at all.

Pinakothek der Moderne

Munich isn’t as ‘German’ as I thought it would be. I’ve been to Berlin, Cologne and Hamburg, and I was expecting Munich to feel more ‘German’ than any of them. Sure, there’s plenty of lederhosen and Bavarian iconography knocking about, but it feels like an international place, probably on account of the city’s prestigious universities and research centres, the art galleries and museums. Munich is also home to the Olympiastadion, which Luke Haines once stood outside of to promote his side-project, Baader Meinhof. What you find here isn’t the iteration of the title track off of the self-titled album but an orchestral reworking that appeared on Das Capital – The Songwriting Genius of Luke Haines and The Auteurs in 2003, seven years after the original.

Comet Gain had a new record out: Letters to Ordinary Outsiders. It’s a grower, but the songs themselves are tied together by way of a series of spoken-word vignettes and sampled dialogue and don’t lend themselves to being put on miscellaneous compilations. No bother, because in the Comet Gain binge that followed I came across ‘I Never Happened’: 'a Rock and Roll Hymn to all the failed aspirations and the nobody feelings as we scream helplessly into the void in the busy streets where we disappear [sic].'

That was supposed to be the final track, but then a band called Pictureframes released an EP entitled Event on the Downs. Again, there’s no physical product, just a platform on Bandcamp. ‘Trees’ sounds a bit like the mellower end of Yo La Tengo, but what really interested me was the instrumental coda that kicks in after about three minutes, reminiscent of Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac – maybe ‘Dragonfly’. Let’s hope they, and Vehicle and Publicity Department, can get the support they need to press some actual records.

[Listen to here.]

LINER NOTES: JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE MIND [2003]

1.  Adeus Maria Fulo – Os Mutantes
2.  Turn! Turn! Turn! – The Byrds
3.  In Another Land – The Rolling Stones
4.  Heart Failed (In the Back of a Taxi) – Saint Etienne
5.  Femme Fatale – The Velvet Underground
6.  Harmonic Generator – The Datsuns
7.  Incense and Peppermints – Strawberry Alarm Clock
8.  Good Fortune – PJ Harvey
9.  Willow’s Song – Magnet
10.  A Man Needs to be Told – The Charlatans
11.  Old Man – Neil Young
12.  Everything Flows – Teenage Fanclub
13.  For You – Big Star
14.  Hanging Around the Day – The Polyphonic Spree
15.  Journey to the Center of the Mind – The Amboy Dukes
16.  Freddie’s Dead – Curtis Mayfield
17.  Sing This All Together – The Rolling Stones
18.  Citadel – The Rolling Stones
19.  Lonesome Tears – Beck
20.  LA Women – The Doors
21.  The Girl I Knew Somewhere – The Monkees
22.  Let’s Make this Precious – Dexy’s Midnight Runners
23.  The Trees – Pulp

On arriving in Bangkok, November 2002, I purchased a pair of small, cheap speakers for my old Sony Walkman, which I deemed to be expendable (unlike my MiniDisc player). I brought along only a couple of tapes, including an extended copy of Come On Let's Go. I utilised this apparatus just once, in Haad Yao on the Island of Koh Phangan, before deciding that carrying these trashy amplifiers around in my undersized backpack wasn't worth the bother and leaving them behind in the next hotel room I vacated. In any case, it became increasingly clear that a soundtrack of sorts was writing itself and I would need to compile something from scratch once I returned home.

There were four artistes that seemed to prevail during my travels: Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix, and The Doors. I can't stand the Red Hot Chili Peppers, can take or leave Bob Marley, don't mind a bit of Hendrix, quite like The Doors. Beyond that, what you heard predominantly was dance or chill-out music. Very occasionally something else would break on through, maybe via a television in an internet cafe or in a bar off the beaten track. I started taking notes, but when it came to collating this material I found I hadn’t accumulated nearly enough to compile a playlist of the requisite length. I was thus obliged to source tunes from elsewhere; my compilation would have to represent the whole of the year, and not just the part of it that was given over to travelling.

The friend who passed out in Debenhams ended his travels prematurely, returning in early January. My lady friend and I came home in April as planned. By the end of May we’d located to a flat on Gibson Close off of Bridge Road on the border of Hounslow and Isleworth. Natural light was in short supply, as was furniture, but Douglas Bader House was a clean and decent sized dwelling. The Royal Oak was our new local, a pub that I’d frequented often during my first year at university and sporadically since. With its low ceiling festooned in rugby memorabilia, it used to be one of the cosiest boozers in the whole of West London.

Having exhausted the supply at Hounslow's library I decided to defect to Richmond's. One of my first withdrawals was the Brazilian Tropicalia of Os Mutantes by Os Mutantes. I‘d read about them in a magazine – more than likely Mojo – and they sounded right up my strasse, offering up ‘tropical psychedelic rock’. Looking back I'm surprised I chose to begin my compilation with a tune with no direct link to my long holiday (although an erroneous association has formed retrospectively), but once it finally kicks in 'Adeus Maria Fulo' comes across like a statement of intent.

The inclusion of 'Turn! Turn! Turn!' by The Byrds was inspired by the five weeks we spent in New Zealand. I heard it there on numerous occasions, nearly always on a nearby radio. It's not my favourite Byrds' tune, but I can picture myself listening to it in a hostel in Taupo to this very day. Moreover, it inspired me, on my return home, to give the album Mr. Tambourine Man a proper listen and to acquire other albums by The Byrds thereafter.

A common friend who owned a flat in Lynton, North Devon, offered the property for a shared holiday: to myself, my lady friend, the guy who used to own a pager and Roz Childs. As well as evenings in The Crown, games of crazy-golf in Lynmouth, night walks to the Beggars Roost and hikes across Exmoor, we spanned time listening to music and playing table football in the flat itself. I can’t recall which tunes I brought along, but the guy with the pager came up trumps, providing the Rolling Stones' albums Their Satanic Majesties Request and Beggars Banquet. So taken was I with Satanic Majesties that no less than three songs made it onto Journey to the Center of the Mind, which is unprecedented. 'In Another Land' was written by Bill Wyman, and hats off to him, not just for the quality of the track but for managing to get it approved by Jagger and Richards.

Exmoor

White Sands Beach on Koh Chang. At the shore’s southern point there is a restaurant called Thor's with a splendid view over the Gulf Of Thailand. We dined there thrice, and on each occasion the same ambient/chill-out compilation played out in the background. Catching the dulcet tones of Sarah Cracknell, I asked ‘Thor’ if he/she/they could provide me with the track listing, which he/she/they did, and 'Heart Failed (in the Back of a Taxi)' was duly noted. The Saint Etienne album it’s taken from (Sound of Water) has a more ambient feel than their earlier work, but 'Heart Failed...' could have sat quite comfortably on 1993's So Tough.

Like Os Mutantes, The Velvet Underground & Nico was another post-travel acquisition loaned from Richmond Library. When I'd borrowed the same cassette during my first year at university, from the guy with the indie tapes, it had been mainly because I wanted a copy of 'Venus in Furs', and so I never gave the record the attention it deserved. The album is a fairly even split between experimental and discordant songs, such as 'Venus in Furs' and 'All Tomorrow's Parties', and more mainstream moments, like 'I'll be Your Mirror' and 'Femme Fatale'. I would have preferred to have included 'All Tomorrow's Parties' on this compilation but at 6 minutes it was just too long. 'Femme Fatale', on the other hand, lasts a mere 2 minutes 38 seconds.

The Datsuns emerged out of the post-punk thing that The Strokes kicked off (although credit should perhaps also go to Swedish band The Hives who'd nailed their colours to the mast a whole year before The Strokes did). Deprived of my record player, I bought 'Harmonic Generator' as a CD single. Before embarking on my travels, I left most of my possessions with my brother and told him that if he was pushed for space he could ditch the hi-fi but should keep hold of my speakers. In the intervening period he moved from Acton to Wandsworth and was indeed pushed for space. The garage rock revival of The Datsuns compliments the authentic garage rock of Strawberry Alarm Clock, courtesy of the ex-cohabitant from Brighton. Neither track was heard on my travels.

I noticed when Polly Harvey adopted a more glamorous image to accompany her new single, 'Good Fortune', in late 2000. I should have more than noticed, I should have bought the album Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. If you’re not aware of it, the video for 'Good Fortune' sees PJ Harvey nocturnally flitting around London in a black dress. The cover of the album saw her in a similar get-up, this time swanning around what looks to be New York. One only notices because PJ Harvey didn’t ordinarily wear stuff like this. She’d previously presented either an austere image or a very garish one: black leather with no makeup; luminous dresses and jumpsuits with lots of makeup. I allude to all this because while drinking in an ‘Irish pub’ in Koh Samui the video for 'Good Fortune' appeared, courtesy of MTV, on the modest television hanging off of the wall. I allude to this because at the time I was feeling slightly out of sorts, stuck in Lamai, surrounded by expats and sex tourists, drinking pints of imported draught lager with my fainting friend. PJ Harvey came to me as some sort of vision, not so much of loveliness but of a kind of sophistication totally lacking within the present milieu.

I noticed when Tim Burgess adopted a falsetto vocal style on The Charlatans' new single, 'A Man Needs to Be Told', in late 2001. I allude to this because while having lunch at Anong Villas in Mae Nam the video appeared, courtesy of MTV, on the modest television hanging off of the wall. My lady friend could also hear it from her position of the beach directly behind me, as could my fainting friend from the balcony of his bungalow straight in front. It was a wonderful shared moment between the three of us.

In between is 'Willow’s Song' from The Wicker Man soundtrack. While working for the audio-visual wholesaler in Brentford, who sold plasma screens and LCD/DLP projectors to high-end retailers and private customers, the friend who used to own a pager availed himself of the opportunity to purchase through me an ex-demo projector on the cheap. One of the first films we watched on it was The Wicker Man, which inspired the guy who bought the projector to buy The Wicker Man soundtrack. It consists of folk music mainly, much of it amusing, and some of it sinister.

The folksy ambiance of Willow’s Song complements the country feel of 'A Man Needs to Be Told'. Tim Burgess’s vocal may take its lead from Curtis Mayfield but the steel guitar is pure country rock, which is why I've followed on with Neil Young. I first heard 'Old Man' in the car of our friends from Acton, driving down to the New Forest to watch Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me on our other friend's projector. Alas, the generator we hired to facilitate this scheme ran out of petrol not even half way through. It was still worth the effort of digging a shallow trench for the generator and breaking our backs lugging the thing through the woods to find an appropriately remote clearing to set the whole thing up, if only because I can barely believe we attempted such a thing.

On returning to England I discovered that our fainting, Cornish friend had purchased Four Thousand Seven Hundred and Sixty-Six Seconds - a Short Cut to Teenage Fanclub, which introduced me to 'Everything Flows', one of their earlier records – their first, in fact – and not so typical of the sound they would become more associated with. Teenage Fanclub are big fans of Big Star, whose song 'For You', which I have included here, is neither particularly representative of their sound. Nor have either group’s musical aberrations strayed in the same direction: 'Everything Flows' is more abrasive than the work that followed, whereas 'For You' is gentler than what preceded it. I was coming at Big Star from the wrong angle, but their third LP, entitled Third (aka Sister Lovers), was all that Richmond Library had. 'For You' aside, I recall feeling a little underwhelmed by the album, and I haven’t listened to it since.

The nascent Acton and Chiswick scene of 2001 really started to take off in 2003. It was to do with a friend of my lady friend and her boyfriend moving to Acton (let’s call them by their now married name: ‘The Wilkinsons’) and friends of theirs subsequently moving to Chiswick. Two of these other friends shared a house, known to us as The Grosvenor, just west of Turnham Green. Its position brought us into contact with other drinking establishments: The (World Famous) John Bull, The Pilot, The Bell & Crown down by the river in Strand-on-the-Green, as well as The Raven up the road in Stamford Brook. Parties at The Grosvenor became a thing of legend. When I think of that house now I am reminded of The Flaming Lips and The Polyphonic Spree. I never got around to recording a copy of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots by The Flaming Lips, but I did The Beginning Stages of... by The Polyphonic Spree. Within the context of this compilation, 'Hanging Around the Day' provides a bridge across from 'For You' by Big Star to...

The sixth episode of the first season of the television series Six Feet Under – entitled The Room – sees Nate finding out that his late father used to occasionally trade funeral services for favours, among them the supply of marijuana and the use of an apartment above an Indian restaurant. Having been completely oblivious to any of this when his father was alive, Nate visits the room in question and has a look around before placing the needle onto what was presumably the last record his old man ever listened to, which turns out to be 'Journey to the Center of the Mind' by The Amboy Dukes. Diegesis fades into non-diegesis as Nate imagines what his father might have got up to there: getting stoned with a group of hell’s angels, being pleasured by a hooker, firing a high powered rifle from the window at passers-by below. The song itself is comprised of a poppy melody backed by 60s garage-rock guitars and frantic drum work.

The Grosvenor

Vang Vieng, Laos. While having lunch in Xoyoh Cafe I’m privy to the music playing in the restaurant across the road, which will include the Beastie Boys, Curtis Mayfield, all of Rubber Soul by The Beatles, and 'Wild Horses' by the Stones. I am already familiar with much of this music but not so much Curtis Mayfield, although my Cornish friend does own a compilation of his, which I assume is from where I obtained 'Freddie’s Dead'.

          Back to North Devon. I couldn’t decide which I liked more: 'Sing This All Together' or 'Citadel'. The fact that a split-second separates them on the album gave me a mandate to include them both. They are very different tunes. The former is indicative of the experimental psychedelia that was fashionable at the time, the latter points towards the rock that would occupy the Stones for the foreseeable future.

          I am mostly indifferent to Beck, but I think Sea Change is good record. My lady friend bought a copy on the Khao San Road in Bangkok. It wasn’t long before this cheap forgery started jumping and twitching, but not before I’d recorded 'Lonesome Tears' onto my MiniDisc, preserved for posterity. (This was also how 'The Trees' ended up here, off of a dodgy copy of Hits rather than the original We Love Life.)

         As I’ve said, I like The Doors, but I didn’t own any of their records prior to travelling. This was probably a good thing because they might otherwise have been deprived of any previous association. Instead, The Doors recall bars in Bangkok and beaches on Koh Phangan and driving around New Zealand’s North Island, which are nice connotations to have. Indeed, there was an actual ‘Doors Bar’ in Haad Rin, which offered welcome sanctuary from the relentless dance music that played in the surrounding establishments. Furthermore, the song 'LA Women' is in keeping with the strain of Americana that features throughout this compilation: Neil Young, Big Star, The Byrd’s and The Amboy Dukes, as well as Beck and The Charlatans doing country and western. And then there’s The Monkees, although I’m not sure they’re imbued with so much Americana, given the band’s conceptual nature. A toss-up between 'For Pete's Sake' and 'The Girl I Knew Somewhere', derived from some greatest hits collection, possibly borrowed off of my de facto in-laws.

After wandering around Southeast Asia for just shy of four months (encompassing two weeks in Laos, almost three in Cambodia, and the rest in Thailand) my lady friend and I flew to New Zealand, which was a culture shock in reverse. The first week in Auckland was all well and good: the America’s Cup was wrapping up, the sun was shining and there was a buzz about the place. The girl who used to live with my lady friend on the Isle of Dogs flew in from the UK to embark on her latest round of travelling, and after a few days of mild revelry we hired a car together and headed south.

By the time we got to Rotorua it was teeming it down. Everything seemed very bleak all of a sudden. I began to suffer a mild depression, not to mention alcohol withdrawal; it was too expensive to drink like I’d done in Southeast Asia, which was excessively. I was tired of living out of a very small rucksack, always wearing the same shabby clothes – attire geared towards a sunnier climate. At the same time the idea of returning home wasn’t very appealing either, to find a job and to live nine-to-five and endure the British weather and all the rest of it. I wanted to be back in Hua Hin, sat out on a jetty late in the evening, watching electrical storms creeping along the horizon.

We were sat in an Irish bar in Rotorua, me nursing a solitary pint, when 'Let’s Make this Precious' by Dexys Midnight Runners began to play. It meant something, although I’m not sure what. Let’s make this precious. New Zealand is a beautiful place and I enjoyed my time there, just as I would eventually go on to enjoy the company of friends, and maybe even the British weather, once I returned home and settled down to it.

Rotorua

[Listen to here.]

LINER NOTES: HOUNSLOW TO BRENTFORD, PART 2 [1998-99]

1.  Holes – Mercury Rev
2.  S.Y.M.M. – Manic Street Preachers
3.  Help the Aged – Pulp
4.  (Tonight) Are You Trying to Fall in Love Again – Tindersticks
5.  Fan Mail – Blondie
6.  Wild Wild Life – Talking Heads
7.  Slapstick Girl – The Dylan Rabbit
8.  High Street Love – The Dylan Rabbit
9.  Boys Better – The Dandy Warhols
10.  Folk Jam – Pavement
11.  Real Time – Delta
12.  Get Carter – Stereolab
13.  Free Arthur Lee – Make Up
14.  Rama Lama Fa Fa Fa – MC5
15.  Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem) – Jay-Z
16.  Murmur One – Add N to (X)
17.  Jump n’ Shout – Basement Jaxx
18.  Dusted – Leftfield
19.  Magnetizing – Handsome Boy Modeling School 
20.  Grass Skirt and Fruit Hat – Them
21.  Kontakte – Les Rythmes Digitales
22.  Come and Play in the Milky Night – Stereolab

My lady friend has secured a job in Northfields, which lies in the centre of a triangle – like a Masonic eye – that can be drawn between Hanwell, Ealing and Brentford. We are to move in together and shall occupy a small flat in a housing block located directly behind Griffin Park football stadium in Brentford.

Brentford is a strange place, with a high street marginally less depressing than Hounslow West’s but slightly more threatening. The only emporium of note is the furniture store P Goddard & Sons on the corner of the high street opposite The Beehive pub. Aside from that, there are a few cafes and restaurants, a pharmacy, a couple of hardware stores and not much else. There are however many pubs, although the standard varies considerably. The Griffin, The White Horse and The Waterman’s Arms become semi-regular haunts, but we avoid The Royal Oak, The New Inn and The Bricklayer’s Arms.

I am working in conference and banqueting with the friend who passed out in Debenhams, at the hotel I occasionally worked at while living on Penderel Road. We are employed on zero-hour contracts, which means we can take Fridays off whenever the fancy takes us. We are able to justify this because it’s not unusual to accrue 40 hours from Monday to Thursday. As Christmas nears, we’ll often find ourselves working in excess of 60 hours a week. Occasionally the system will backfire and there won’t be enough work to satisfy an eight hour shift. We invariably clock on at 15:00, so whenever this happens there’s normally enough time for a few drinks before heading home, either in The Three Magpies across the road or in Delaney’s, the hotel bar.

Plastic Letters

Part 2 of this playlist is a complete fabrication. I certainly did listen to Mercury Rev, Manic Street Preachers, Pulp, Pavement and Tindersticks (who I saw live at the Hammersmith Palais in November '99) but not necessarily together on the same tape. The Dylan Rabbit tracks were taken from their 1999 release Musicali Obskura 1: Das Chimp, but these songs would not have featured on any compendium. Other components were acquired years earlier. I’d purchased Blondie’s Plastic Letters from the Plymouth’s Pannier Market in 1995 with the intention of giving it to the girl who was a massive Blondie fan, but never got around to it. For some reason, it had great appeal in 1999. Similarly, I had access to ...The Dandy Warhols Come Down on its release in 1997, but only really took to it during my time in Brentford. The Talking Heads’ tune is from their album True Stories, which was derived from the film of the same name, written and directed by David Byrne. I'm fairly sure I bought it from a stall in Spitalfields Market in the company of the guy with the indie tapes, who was living in Whitechapel, but I couldn’t say exactly when.

The content thereafter is more rooted in the time this playlist is supposed to represent. Folk Jam comes from Pavement’s last studio album, Terror Twilight, released in June 1999. It’s not their best work and maybe the band’s subsequent liquidation shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise, but it's a good record nonetheless. 'Real Time' is taken from Delta's Laughing Mostly, a collection of B-sides, outtakes and various odd and sods; an album proper, Slippin' Out, would materialise the following year. Stereolab’s Aluminum Tunes is a similar sort of collection, the third instalment in a series of three. (Switched On Volume 1 and Refried Ectoplasm [Switched on Volume 2] are the other two.) 'Get Carter' stood out by virtue of it being a cover of the Roy Budd penned theme tune to the film of the same name, and one of my favourites.

Make Up featured twice in the NME’s 100-strong ‘highest rated albums of 1999’: the album proper Save Yourself and the singles compilation I Want Some. I figured that the double LP I Want Some would serve as a better introduction to this mysterious band, and besides, it contained a song that pleaded for the release of the incarcerated Arthur Lee. The record proved to be money well spent. I could not say the same for Teen Age Lust, a live recording by MC5, although the riff throughout 'Rama Lama Fa Fa Fa' almost compensates for the terrible sound quality.

I don’t know what inspired me to get into Add N to (X) but I do know that Leftfield and Basement Jaxx were getting airplay on the radio, and that I have a copy of 'Dusted' on 12”. I became acquainted with 'Kontakte' by Les Rythmes Digitales and 'Grass Skirt and Fruit Hat' in the year 2000. The former was introduced to me by my brother when I visited him in Rotterdam in February, the latter I bought on a whim after I heard it playing in Beggars Banquet, Kingston. I have included them on this transitional compilation because I did not include them on the playlist I put together later that summer, and yet they evoke strongly the memory I have of living in Brentford and deserve representation.

'Come and Play in the Milky Night' is the final track off of Stereolab's sixth studio album, Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night (which was vastly underrated at the time of its release, and maybe still is). Stereolab didn't play it when I saw them at Heaven in November 1999, but they have done on every one of the three occasions I've seen them since: as a final encore in 2001 and at the start of their set in both 2006 and 2019. I prefer it as an encore.

Rotterdam

Towards the end of the year 2000, I ditched my cassette tapes and converted to MiniDisc. Thereafter, every playlist remains largely faithful to its original incarnation. If you were to go to the effort of compiling any one of my playlists then I’d hope you wouldn’t start with this one. For one thing, its artificial nature probably hampers the flow. More importantly, it is clear to me now looking back that it wasn’t only my circumstances that were subject to change but my taste also. I was in a state of flux, disillusioned with indie music and with only a passing interest in electronica.

But who would even know? It was never my intention to chronicle music that was being made at the time but to merely collate what I listened to at various stages of my life. That late 1997 through to early 2000 saw my enthusiasm for the playlist presumably wane is neither here nor there. Hounslow to Brentford, parts 1 and 2, is a collection of songs just like any other, and how it works as a playlist is largely a matter of taste. Nonetheless, as an act of creation it is impaired. I obliged myself to work with whatever fragmentary memories I have of these three years and took it from there. Moreover, it spans too long a period of time in my life to be in any way intelligible to my own ears, so I how can I expect it to cohere to anyone else’s?

[Listen to here.]

LINER NOTES: BULLY FOR BULSTRODE [1996-97]

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.

The Rifleman

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.

[Listen to here.]