LINER NOTES: IT'S RAINING TODAY [2023]

 

       1.   Elm Grove Window – The Clientele

       2.   Lovefingers – Silver Apples

       3.   It’s Raining Today – Scott Walker

       4.   Do Rainbows Have Ends – The Brian Jonestown Massacre

       5.   Templeroy – Felt

       6.   Along – Ghost Woman

       7.   Lose The Game – Holiday Ghosts

       8.   What I’m Missing - GracieHorse

       9.   Bell of Silence – Color Green

     10.   Child of the Moon – The Rolling Stones

     11.   Solicitor in Studio – The Fall

     12.   Dead Pool – Mission of Burma

     13.   When You Say - FACS

     14.   2 Lines – The Big Moon

     15.   Desert Nights – Lonnie Liston Smith & The Cosmic Echoes

     16.   Lwonesome Tonight – PJ Harvey

     17.   The Fool – Nighttime

     18.   Good Living Is Coming For You – Sweeping Promises

     19.   Mine Forever – Lord Huron

     20.   Strange Overtones – David Byrne & Brian Eno

     21.   Stars – Angel Olsen

     22.   Ballad of a Vision Pure – Cinema Red and Blue

     23.   Point That Thing Somewhere Else – The Clean

     24.   Chained to a Cloud – Slowdive

‘I Had to Say This’ by The Clientele was one of my favourite discoveries of 2019. Found on its own, as part of a compilation entitled Tim Peaks (Songs For A Late-Night Diner), I intended to follow up on my interest, but never did. In the end, it has taken a playlist on Spotify, compiled by the chap who introduced me to Sarah Records, for me to finally get around to it.

The methodology the chap employs when putting together such things appears to be unsound (or rather, I see no method at all). Yet the song that kicks off his anthology is the same that I’ve used to start mine. ‘Elm Grove Window’ is from The Clientele’s fourth album, It’s Art Dad, a collection of the band’s earliest recordings. On hearing it I immediately abandoned the chap’s playlist and proceeded to work my way chronologically through The Clientele’s entire back catalogue. Then I went back to the beginning and did it all over again. For a couple of weeks I listened to nothing else. When it was announced that the group were releasing a new album – their first in six years – I pre-ordered a copy, along with a ticket to see them play live at Rough Trade (East) in July.

‘Lovefingers’ by Silver Apples reminds me of trying to book a holiday in April, poring over google maps, searching for a suitable destination. The reason I was listening to them in the first place had to do with somebody on Twitter comparing them to Stereolab. I don’t think they sound much like Stereolab, but what they do share is a fondness of electronic oscillators and pulsating rhythms. Silver Apples got there first, and were probably the first to get there. Released in 1968, their eponymously named debut album was considerably ahead of the game – only the vocals in any way date it. Indeed, Simeon and Taylor’s voices are the group’s weakest link, displaying a naivete at odds with the music. (Their second album, 1969’s Contact, addresses this issue somewhat.)

‘It’s Raining Today’ by Scott Walker doesn’t remind me of anything specific. Either Mark Radcliffe or Stuart Maconie played it on their weekend show in January, telling us that it was a favourite of Thom Yorke’s. You can see why, although Walker’s baritone is in a different league to Yorke’s mumbled whine. ‘It’s Raining Today’ is taken from Scott 3, which was Walker’s third solo album. Upon further investigation I decided I preferred Scott 4, his fifth, but ‘It’s Raining Today’ hit a chord.

There is a connection in my mind between The Brian Jonestown Massacre and Brighton. This might be because the first record of theirs I bought – Tepid Peppermint Wonderland: A Retrospective – was from Rounder Records on Brighton Square, back in 2007. So it seemed fitting to go and see them play at the Concorde 2, rather than the Kentish Town Forum, especially considering my Brightonian friend (the former cohabitant) is also a fan.

Whether you thought it was a good gig would depend on whether or not you find the antics of temperamental artists entertaining or irritating. I've been lucky enough to witness Mark E Smith throwing microphones at sound engineers, but as amusing as it initially was it got boring pretty quickly. And so it was with Anton Newcombe, who aborted one of his songs less than a minute in to berate his band for their supposed lack of enthusiasm, which I doubt anybody in the audience had noticed. A few others were then dropped from the setlist entirely. But it was a good a gig, and we made a good day of it. The latest BJM album was released a few weeks later, and I was able to identify some of the new songs we’d heard. 'Do Rainbows Have Ends?' was one of them and sits nicely between Scott Walker and Felt.

‘Templeroy’ is the second track off of Felt’s first album to feature on one of my annual compilations, the other being ‘Cathedral’ in 2018. Why it took me that long to listen to the whole thing I’ve no idea, but it rounds off what amounts to a rather sombre introduction to this year’s almanac.

At the beginning of March, myself and a couple of friends flew to Milan to watch Inter play Lecce at football, walk around the place, and to marvel over Italian abstract art at the Museo del Novecento (highly recommended). The next month I was in Nice with my partner, to walk around the place, eat and drink, and to contemplate International Klein Blue at the Musée d'art Moderne et d'art Contemporain (don’t bother). There was plenty of sunshine in both instances.

Meanwhile in England, it rained a lot. February had been largely dry but March was the third wettest on record and April wasn’t much better. The end of the month was all right, but the rain returned in May, in time for the coronation of Prince Charles and his transmutation into a king.

Unless you believe in divine right, which hasn't been a thing since the Glorious Revolution of 1688, then there's no excuse for not recognising monarchy for what it really is: showbusiness. The pageantry, the pomposity, the costumes, the capes... it’s nothing more than light entertainment. The problem with all this mummery is that there are a lot of people who take it quite seriously and are intolerant of those who don't. And yet king, queen, emperor, et al. are just words, just job descriptions. Charles Mountbatten-Windsor is just a human being, as was his mother. If such people represent us they do so out of expediency, not because there's anything inherently special about them, let alone sacred.

On the day, I met my brother and a common friend in Croydon to embark on a pub crawl. They’d been following London’s Tramlink, starting in Mitcham, working their way to Beckenham, before turning back towards Croydon, so they were well ahead of me when I joined them at 'Art & Craft CR0' on Surrey Street. From there we moved on to the Dog & Bull, Riff Raffs, The William Morris Pub in Merton Abbey, The Sultan in South Wimbledon, and finished up at The Alexandra in Wimbledon proper. It rained almost continuously, but we were at least successful in our bid to evade the royal sideshow.

Amongst the gloom, Spotify presented me with Ghost Woman and Color Green. I then found Holiday Ghosts on one of Contraflow’s Mixcloud playlists. Ghost Woman had a new album out – Anne, If – but I listened to their self-titled debut as well, which is where ‘Along’ comes from. Holiday Ghosts also had a new album out, had also made others, but I got stuck into their latest offering, Absolute Reality. Originally from Falmouth, their record was the best I heard all year. In fact, I came close to including two tracks on this compilation: ‘Lose the Game’ and ‘B. Truck’.

‘Bell of Silence’ is from Color Green’s debut LP, released in 2022. When I heard Gracie Horse in June, I choose to put it before Color Green, given that they both make what could be described as ‘alternative country’ music. Together they round off the compilation’s second non-submersible unit, consisting of four relatively new songs.

It’s not often you discover an old track by one of your favourite bands, but this year it happened to me twice. ‘Child of the Moon’ by the Rolling Stones was the B-side to ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ and came with its own video, directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg and featuring Eileen Atkins done up to like Lyn Redgrave in Gregory’s Girl. They made one for the A-side too but it’s not as interesting, lacking any sort of obvious narrative. Digitally enhanced restorations were issued in August 2022, but I didn’t get wind of this until April 2023.

The Stones were at the time (1968) a band in transition, moving between the psychedelic experimentation of Their Satanic Majesties Request towards the rootsier blues and folk of Beggars Banquet. In between stood 'Jumpin' Jack Flash', which was neither of these things. 'Child of the Moon', though, wouldn't have felt out of place on Satanic Majesties. It might not be their finest moment, but that the Stones could afford to use it as a mere B-side speaks volumes.

The situation with The Fall was slightly different. 'Solicitor in Studio' is taken from the group's fifth (or sixth if you count Slates) studio album, Room to Live, which is not highly regarded. Knowing this, I'd steered clear, although I did already have a few of the tracks that comprise it, most notably 'Hard Life in Country'. Reading Steve Pringle's excellent book You Must Get Them All – literally a track-by-track breakdown of The Fall's entire canon – I was compelled to fill in the gaps. Room to Live isn't actually a bad record. More than anything, its reputation suffers because of that which preceded it: Hex Enduction Hour, released earlier in the same year and considered to be one of The Fall's best works, if not their best. 'Solicitor in Studio' is the standout track on Room to Live, both musically and vocally. Karl Burns adds a second layer of bass to what’s already a pretty thick bassline, and Marc Riley provides some pleasing flourishes on keys. Mark E Smith's villainous cackle near the end suggests he’s having ball. (I am now fairly certain that I've listened to everything The Fall have ever recorded up to and including 1995, but I could be wrong.)

‘Dead Pool’ by Mission of Burma is the third and final tune on this anthology to be released in 1982 (the others being ‘Solicitor in Studio’ and ‘Templeroy’). Mission of Burma was a Spotify suggestion: it proposed ‘Trem Two’ off of Vs., their first album, but I preferred ‘Dead Pool’. ‘When You Say’ by a group called FACS appeared on another one of Contraflow’s playlists (Sticks & Stones – Tomorrow’s Hits Today). That was in February, so when the Mission of Burma tune turned up I determined it would sit well between the jovial tone of ‘Solicitor in Studio’ and the bass-heavy groove of ‘When You Say’.

I heard ‘2 Lines’ by The Big Moon on the radio while driving through Teddington. I heard it again around at The Wilkinsons, in their souped-up garden shed over a game of pool. ‘2 Lines’ is the first song off their album Here is Everything, which came out in 2022. It’s quite a ‘big’ song and I did wonder whether it would be better placed further down the list, but I think it works here, bringing to a close the compilation’s third non-submersible unit.

It pains me to give Spotify any credit because I would rather not use it. The issue is I’ve been working from home a lot, on a different laptop to the one my music’s on, in a separate room to where my record player is kept, and it’s a convenient thing to use Spotify. I might go for one of my existing playlists or I might try something new – an artist I’ve heard of but not heard. What I won’t do is listen to one of the playlists that Spotify has thrown together for me, such as ‘Shoegaze Classics’ or ‘Alternative 70s’.

My last two compilations have included a number of jazz and instrumental tracks, and I was hoping for more of the same this year; a change of genre can give a playlist shape and direction. I had a couple of other tunes waiting that I felt needed to come later, and jazz or funk would be a good device by which to get to them. After giving McCoy Tyner a go I put on some Grant Green. Spotify then figured I might like Lonnie Liston Smith. I accepted its advice, selecting specifically Expansions, recorded in 1974. I was familiar with the opening track because the guy who used to own a pager would use it whenever he DJ’d at parties or bars. But why did he never play ‘Desert Nights’?

My next discovery was ‘The Fool’ by Nighttime, a band put together by an American singer-songwriter called Eva Louise Goodman. According to her Bandcamp page, Nighttime is a project that ‘locates itself on a musical tree planted on the British Isles, perched atop the branch of folk leaning into sixties rock,’ although there’s a flavour to it that’s very much American. The album, Keeper Is The Heart, is worth the money, and the video for ‘Curtain is Closing’ is also worth a look.

‘The Fool’ begins too abruptly to follow on from ‘Desert Nights’, and so I needed something else to place in between. PJ Harvey offered a solution, although it’s not the most satisfying passage in this collection. ‘Lwonesome Tonight’ [sic] is as slow as it needs to be but exhibits tension, whereas ‘Deserts Nights’ does not. I didn’t even know Polly had a new record out, her first in seven years. I did know Sweeping Promises had an album on the way, and a European tour too. As explained in my liner notes for Here Comes that Beat Again, Sweeping Promises were supposed to play at 2022’s Wide Awake festival in Brockwell Park but had to cancel due to insurance issues pertaining to Covid. Confident that they wouldn’t be pulling the same stunt twice, I purchased tickets to see them.

Café de Levante, Cadiz

It was about now – the beginning of August – that my partner and I flew to Cadiz. After a sultry June, July had been a complete washout and I was looking forward to a spell of uninterrupted sunshine and warmth. I was simultaneously apprehensive about the journey itself: an aeroplane to Seville and then a pre-booked train to Cadiz. We had a three hour window to get from the airport to the train station, which would more than likely be enough, unless there were severe delays.

There were delays, although not severe. Our (Easyjet) flight left an hour later than scheduled. However, the bus from the airport to Seville-Santa Justa took no more than 20 minutes, leaving plenty of time for something to eat and a quick beer. Outside it was baking hot. The train itself was running late, so we had another beer. Our locomotive was then overtaken by the one behind it, which had my partner speculating as to whether or not we could get on that one. We couldn't. Tickets are non-transferable and the Spanish rail services don't sell more than their trains can cater for, as they do in the UK. This would ordinarily be a positive thing, given how clean, comfortable and reasonably priced they are. Unfortunately, as our train got within 20 minutes reach, they wacked on another 15, and did so repeatedly. Over an hour and a half and several beers later, our train finally arrived. We booked into our hotel at quarter to midnight.

Never mind, Cadiz is a lovely place, and owing to its coastal proximity not nearly as hot as Seville. The food is of the highest quality and anything you drink tends to cost exactly €2: beer, coffee, wine, lemon soda, whatever. There aren't hordes of tourists and those who are there are themselves from Spain, so it makes little difference. On the way home we stopped for a day and a night in Seville, where I saw a roadside thermometer reading 46 degrees Celsius. It was all right as long you didn’t move.

Our Spanish vacation cut through summer like a knife. It was only August but when we got back it felt more like September, the record-breaking temperatures of June a distant memory. It wasn’t cold but it certainly wasn’t hot, and sunshine was in short supply.

'Mine Forever' by Lord Huron and 'Strange Overtones' by David Byrne & Brian Eno were those couple of tracks I had hanging around, waiting for an appropriate juncture. I chanced on both in The London Apprentice during Sunday Service (a few afternoon drinks in Isleworth with my Cornish friend, a custom that predates Jarvis Cocker's radio show of the same name by a good few years). Lord Huron – a group, rather than an entitled individual – are from Los Angeles. 'Mine Forever' reminds me of The Handsome Family. ‘Alternative country’ in other words.

The version of 'Strange Overtones' we heard was actually a cover by an American band called Whitney. It's a good effort but I read an interview with the group's two core members that rubbed me up the wrong way, so I went with the original. The London Apprentice isn’t cheap, the service is slow, and on a Friday night there’s usually some goon with an acoustic guitar banging out renditions of everybody's favourites, other than mine. But on a Saturday night or Sunday afternoon it’s not a bad place to drink, especially when they get the music right, as they had in this instance.

By the end of the month the weather was showing signs of recovery. Just as well, as I had a bank holiday date over in Wapping with my Cornish friend and the former cohabitant from Brighton. We were to repeat the previous year's pub crawl, but with minor alterations: The Prospect of Whitby and the Captain Kidd in Wapping, The Mayflower and The Angel in Rotherhithe, the Old Justice and Anchor Tap in Bermondsey, and one for the road in The Shipwright Arms, London Bridge.

The following evening I was in the St. Margarets Tavern’s, enjoying what I feared might be the last of the warm weather, when something caught my ear: ‘Forgiven/Forgotten’ by Angel Olsen. I had no way of telling who it was – the staff there wouldn’t have had a clue – and so I had to remember what words of it I could and then search online when I got home. It turned out to be the lead single off of Angel’s second album, 2014’s Burn Your Fire for No Witness, which sounds like a collaboration between Roy Orbison, Patti Smith and Leonard Cohen, in the best possible way. At first I was going to put ‘High & Wild’ on here but went with ‘Stars’ because I thought it would work better with what I was placing either side of it.

The next two tracks were added in July. Cinema Red and Blue is a musical collaboration centered around David Christian from Comet Gain, and it’s a lot of fun. ‘Ballad of a Vision Pure’ is a hard and fast number and kind of operates as the compilation’s climax – or in conjunction with ‘Stars’ it does. I was lucky enough to find a near-mint copy on eBay for £10.99, with free delivery, which considering how few were pressed is an absolute steal.

I’d found out about The Clean a month or so earlier but couldn't decide what song of theirs to include: ‘Billy Two’, ‘Anything Could Happen’ or ‘Point That Thing Somewhere Else’, all taken from the Boodle Boodle Boodle EP, released in 1981. In the end I went with ‘Point That Thing Somewhere Else’, despite it being less representative of the group’s output; a bit Velvet Underground, whereas their other stuff is more Modern Lovers. In any case, The Clean were pioneers of what’s been termed the ‘Dunedin Sound’ – Dunedin being the second-largest city on New Zealand’s South Island, the sound being a rough conglomeration of post-punk and psychedelic pop. [Incidentally, The Clean’s co-founder and drummer, Hamish Kilgour, contributes spoken-word vocals to the Cinema Red and Blue album track 'Jesse Lee Kincaid'. Sadly, Hamish passed away in 2022.]

Wapping

In mid-September, after a spell of unusually hot weather that just about made up for the tripe we were served up in July and August, I got myself to Banquet Records to purchase the last remaining copy of Keeper Is The Heart. The new record by Slowdive was playing – Everything Is Alive. I presumed my playlist to be complete at this point but decided I may as well stick ‘Chained to a Cloud’ on the end of it. Unfortunately, it has been brought to my attention that Slowdive have not been performing this song on their recent tour, which may influence whether or not I go and see them.

Before making a decision about that, I had a few of gigs lined for October. First up, Make Up at The Dome in Tufnell Park (where, slightly drunk, I accused Rachel Evans of being the 'Comet Gain girl', which of course she is). Then Sweeping Promises at Studio 9294 in Hackney Wick, overlooking the River Lee Navigation, surrounded by dilapidated warehouses, newbuild flats, artisan workshops and bars selling ‘craft’ beer. Whether by design or by accident, Studio 9294 has great acoustics. Either way, the gig was one of the best I’ve ever been to and more than made up for their absence at the Wide Awake festival.

A couple of days later and I was in Plymouth, with my partner, my Cornish friend and a few local associates, to watch Holiday Ghosts at the Underground on Mutley Plain. I can only think Holiday Ghosts were playing there due to their Falmouth connections, because bands like theirs don’t normally play in Plymouth, a city lacking in decent small-to-medium sized music venues. Another brilliant show, although I wouldn’t have got to hear ‘Lose the Game’ if I hadn’t uncharacteristically called out for it towards the end of their set.

When we left the venue it was raining heavily, as it had done throughout much of the time we were there and would continue to do on our return to London.

[Listen to here.]

LINER NOTES: HARMONY IN MY HEAD [2007-08]

1.     No Pussy Blues – Grinderman

2.     Big in Japan – Tom Waits

3.     The Decision – The Young Knives

4.     Evergreen – The Brian Jonestown Massacre

5.     What Have I Said Now? – The Wedding Present

6.     Wings – The Fall

7.     House of Cards – Radiohead

8.     The Rip – Portishead

9.     Sugar Mountain – Neil Young

10.   Brides of Jesus – Little Feat

11.   The Pink Room – Angelo Badalamenti / David Lynch

12.   Pânico – Mercenarios

13.   Give It Lose It Take It – Field Music

14.   Bennie and the Jets – Elton John

15.   Contact – Bridget Bardot

16.   Lucky Number – Lene Lovich

17.   Harmony in my Head – Buzzcocks

18.   On My Radio – The Selector

19.   Gangsters – The Specials

20.   Pull Up to the Bumper – Grace Jones

21.   Let’s Dance – David Bowie

Bonus Tracks:

22.   L.E.S. Artistes – Santigold

23.   Black Magic – Jarvis Cocker

24.   Prodigal Son – The Rolling Stones

25.   Bird of Beauty – Stevie Wonder

26.   Cracked Actor – David Bowie

27.   Wordy Rappinghood – Tom Tom Club

28.   The Hungry Saw – Tindersticks

In his book A New Time for Mexico, Carlos Fuentes affirms that, 'Religious temperament without religious conviction has branded some of the greatest works of the twentieth century.' He offers up Luis Buñuel, Albert Camus, Ingmar Bergman and Graham Greene as examples of artistes who have attempted to make sense of suffering in the absence of Christ, to comprehend that which might be deemed sacred when divested of doctrine. Theism is antediluvian – predates the profits – and contemporary morality is derived, consciously or otherwise, from scripture, vouchsafed by the supernatural. In other words, you can’t get shot of God all that easily.

Fuentes might also have cited Nick Cave, who is not a man of proclaimed faith but nonetheless likes to make reference to Judeo-Christian subjects in his work. But not so with Grinderman. The album Grinderman is the sound of midlife crisis conveyed with such humour that you probably shouldn’t assume that the midlife crisis in question is necessarily Cave’s – or if it is then viewed from a distance. According to Cave, the song 'No Pussy Blues' was inspired by the negative reactions his Zapata moustache received. Cookie dusters are divisive at the best of times, so the result in and of itself is no firm indicator of middle aged angst, but the fact that Nicholas grew such a thing in his late 40s/early 50s maybe is.

I hadn’t made the connection when I put this compilation together – both tracks were provided by the lad who lent me The Sound of the Suburbs, so I might have expected to – but Tom Waits was also 50 years’ old when he recorded 'Big in Japan' and also appears to be railing against his advancing years. Whereas Cave just isn’t getting any, Waits can at least console himself with the fact that he’s doing business in Asia. Despite Tom’s gruff incantations that form the spine of the song, 'Big In Japan' is a far more buoyant tune than 'No Pussy Blues' but still rough enough to perpetuate a sense of anxiety.

'The Decision' by The Young Knives ensues, a continuation of the millennial post-punk revival, which was by now on the slide. Credit to them that their album Voices of Animals and Men was nominated for the 2007 Mercury Prize in the face of this. 'The Decision' contains the lines, 'I'm your monarch, your supreme monarch. That decision was mine,' which I take to be a comment on the illusory nature of monarchy: as if to say, 'I am the Queen's subject, but might I not make the same claim for myself: that actually the Queen is in fact my subject.'

Have you seen the documentary Dig!? If you haven’t, and if you like music, which you doubtlessly do if you’re reading this, then I recommend you watch it. Its subject is the trials and tribulations of bands The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols from the mid ‘90s through to the early 2000s. I was done with The Dandy Warhols but had heard nothing by The Brian Jonestown Massacre, so I bought the double compilation album Tepid Peppermint Wonderland: A Retrospective which gathers together 38 tracks spanning a period of nine years. The Brian Jonestown’ sound is various but can be categorised roughly into three parts: melodic folk rock numbers, like 'Servo', 'Prozac v Heroin', 'Nevertheless'; tripped out psychedelia of the kind you hear on 'Anemone' or 'Whoever You Are'; and, especially early on, a kind of lo-fi take on shoegaze. 'Evergreen' is from the band’s first album, Methodrone, and sounds like Slowdive jamming with Yo La Tengo. The common thread running through their work is lead singer and multi-instrumentalist Anton Newcombe, who comes across as a sort of malevolent genius and wears his heart and influences on his sleeve. His obsession with the 1960s is not parodic; making use of 12 string guitars, tablas and sitars does not exempt ingenuity. 'The Beatles were for sale. I give it away,' Newcombe tells us 20 minutes into Dig!. You can be cynical towards that, but it’s not the sentiment of someone interested in pastiche.

I used to listen to a taped copy of The Wedding Present's Bizarro during my second year at university. I’d got rid of all my old cassettes by now and didn’t have anything to play them on anyway. Cue Bizarro, completely remastered and repackaged with seven bonus tracks and extensive sleevenotes, on compact disc. This time around it was the tune 'What Have I said Now?' that stood out – specifically the moment when, after chugging along in F (with transient forays into A#, A and C), it crashes into E after the second verse.

Cologne

It took a while to compile this compilation. The reasons might be: my continued indifference to current music; a temperamental MiniDisc player and my decision to switch over to MP3; the difficulty of converting vinyl to the MP3 format; training for the Fuller's Thames Towpath Ten (mile) run; vacations to Cologne, Istanbul, Lisbon and New York; handing in my notice in July 2008; a five week sojourn in Southeast Asia and the period of unemployment that followed; apathy. I’d also taken to making ‘best of ‘ playlists of individual artists: Best of… Stereolab, Best of… Talking Heads, Best of… The Fall, and so forth. Putting together the best of The Fall was especially rewarding for I had added the records Perverted by Language and Grotesque (After the Gramme) to my collection, as well as acquiring digital copies of The Wonderful and Frightening World of…, The Frenz Experiment, Extricate, Code: Selfish and Shift-Work to supplement what I already possessed on vinyl. Such was the weight of material that I felt it necessary to divide my anthology into two parts. (The only other artist that has bid the same approach of me is David Bowie.) I took five tracks from the album Perverted by Language alone, although two of these – 'The Man Whose Head Expanded' and 'Wings' – were singles tacked on the end of the re-issued CD in the form of bonus tracks. For the sake of this compilation, I went with 'Wings', whose tempo and monotonous groove is consistent with the tunes I’ve placed before and after. In this respect, this playlist is more calculated than many of my others, which is the benefit of working with MP3. Although MiniDisc certainly provides for a cut-and-paste approach to recording, with MP3 it's almost compulsory, and so one pays more attention to the order of things. 'House of Cards' by Radiohead does a good job of following on from 'Wings' but works even better as a precursor to 'The Rip' by Portishead. (Footage of Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead playing an acoustic version of 'The Rip' appeared on the internet shortly after.)

I received my copy of Decade by Neil Young at the end of 2006, so by rights 'Sugar Mountain' should have kicked off this compendium. It wouldn’t have worked. 'Sugar Mountain' is a lament for lost youth (written when Neil Young had freshly turned 21) and nearly six minutes’ long, and it’s not going to get any party started.

Atheism, as it is currently understood, may one day prove to have been a passing fad, if only because its antithesis – theism – might itself lapse. Such a narrow view of things is problematic, not least because the subject is rooted firmly in semantics. The scientific and the religious – and I refer to the religious in the theological sense rather than the dogmatic, which is merely the realpolitik of organised religion – are interested in the same thing and destined to converge upon ontological grounds. Whether this terrain will be defined as Cartesian or monistic remains to be seen.

Jesus has a firm hold on our collective consciousness and his presence looms large within the realm of contemporary music, through gospel, blues, country, soul, and thus rock and roll. 'You don't want to walk and talk about Jesus, you just want to see his face,' incants Mick Jagger on 'I Just Want to See His Face', and he’s not alone: The Byrds, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Big Star, The Velvet Underground, The Doors, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Manassas, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, Felt, Spaceman 3, The Vaselines, Teenage Fanclub, The Verve, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Half Man Half Biscuit… The Nazarene turns up in the most unlikely places.

Not a moment too soon, I discovered Minus Zero/Stand Out Records off Portobello Road. What’s this they’re playing? 

'The Factory, Lowell George’s first band – you know, the guy from Little Feat.' 

I didn’t. After releasing but two singles, Lowell George joined Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention as rhythm guitarist and co-vocalist. His tenure was short lived and after contributing to Hot Rats, Burnt Weeny Sandwich and Weasels Ripped my Flesh he left to form his own band, called Little Feat. Not long after clarifying this chronology, I returned to Minus Zero / Stand Out Records and purchased the Little Feat and Dixie Chicken albums, paired together as part of WEA’s slightly weird ‘2 Originals’ series, which repackaged two albums by the same artist in a gatefold format. The music is reminiscent of that I heard playing in the Eiffel Bar in Copenhagen more than a year earlier, although persons I’ve played it too have tentatively asked if it might be the Rolling Stones – songs like 'Strawberry Flats' can give that impression.

The title and the lyrics to 'The Brides of Jesus' suggest the Parable of the Ten Virgins [Gospel of Matthew 25:1-13], yet the reference in the final line to ‘entertaining angels unawares’ is attributable to Hebrews [13:2]. It could be that Lowell is playing one proverb off against the other, saying that the ‘five foolish virgins’ who did not bring surplus oil for their lamps, and were denied entrance to the ‘wedding’ as punishment for being ill-prepared, should have been treated better, for they may have been actual angels. Lowell Gorge died of a heart attack in 1979, and I can find no evidence that he ever expatiated upon the song’s subject.

'The Pink Room' is from the soundtrack to the David Lynch film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. According to the credits, this swampy, instrumental dirge was written by Lynch himself, rather than Angelo Badalamenti who composed the film’s score. I once listened to 'The Pink Room' in a static caravan on a campsite in the New Forest, with The Wilkinsons, the guy who used to own a pager and Roz Childs, surrounded by conifers and pines.

The Sexual Life of the Savages is a compilation of São Paulo post-punk that I requisitioned from my Cornish friend. I must have kept hold of it for a while because it made more of an impact on the anthology I put together over 2009/2010. In the meantime, I recorded 'Pânico' by Mercenárias, which sounds a bit like very early The Fall fronted by The Slits, only sung in Portuguese. I wouldn’t ordinarily have followed on from something like this with anything by Field Music, but 'Give It Lose It Take It' is one of their livelier numbers. 

New Forest

Like a lot of people, I’m not too bothered about New Year’s Eve. Ideally, I’d attend someone’s house party, preferably not mine, but for three years running I spent New Year’s Eve at the Hawley Arms in Camden. It was all down to the girl who used to live with my partner on the Isle of Dogs who’d met the proprietors on a beach in Southeast Asia, kept in touch, and extended a repeated invitation to see in New Year’s at their fashionable establishment. In 2004, rolling into 2005, there had been enough room to spray a celebratory bottle of champagne around without getting in anyone's way. By the time 2007 was imminent, there was barely enough room to raise a glass. I don’t remember much else about that night but I do remember enjoying Elton John’s 'Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting' playing. Mr Wilkinson advised I buy the 1974 album Greatest Hits, which I subsequently did. Rather than go through the laborious process of recording 'Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting' from vinyl onto our laptop, in real time, I picked up a copy of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road on CD from a charity shop for a couple of quid, introducing me to the delights of 'Bennie and the Jets' in the process. 'Bennie and the Jets' is a strange song in that it’s made to sound like it was recorded live, which makes me wonder whether it sounds much different when it is played live.

I wandered into Beyond Retro in Soho and found something I hadn’t bargained for: not an item of clothing but a sound. A lot of people would have asked what was playing, but I’m not one for talking to people unnecessarily so instead memorised key components of the song and looked them up on the internet when I got home. I didn’t have much to go on: it was sung in French, sounded like it was more than likely recorded in the 1960s, and exhibited a one-word chorus that exclaimed ‘Contact!’. It was French chanteuse Brigitte Bardot, with a little help from Serge Gainsbourg.

If not French psychedelic pop then what had I expected to find in Beyond Retro? Not sure but it won’t have been jeans, because fashion had finally caught up with itself. That is to say that the slimmer profile appropriated by purveyors of the post-punk and garage rock revival had begun to permeate the mainstream. Enter the Levi’s 504/514, a comparatively slim-fitting jean with a tapered leg offering a welcome alternative to the bootcut 507/517/527. The 504 would probably be considered fairly loose by today’s standards but in the mid-to-late 2000s was about as skinny as you could get. In 2007 I purchased a light blue pair of Levi 504s, which my partner ridiculed, and then a darker pair. In 2008, we flew to New York City and I picked up a black pair of corduroy 514s for a little more than $20, on sale in Urban Outfitters, which worked out at around £12. The 514s were slightly less tapered than the 504s and I had them altered to match.

Slimmer fitting knitwear was also now easier to come by. I’d been merrily buying my jumpers from Marks and Spencer since 2005 – specifically their Collezione range – and I was fine with that, but now I could find things in any high street store I’d be comfortable wearing: Fred Perry, Farah, Uniqlo, even Gap. Peacoats were all the rage too, whereas a few years earlier I’d been sifting through army surplus stock to find them. But it wasn’t as simple as that. Men’s mainstream fashion may finally have been shedding the boyish, post-Britpop baggy-isms that had preoccupied it for the last ten years but in its place was something almost schizophrenic. Whereas American groups such as Arcade Fire, Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, and even Kings of Leon, were moving towards a leaner, more rugged sort of look, British groups like Hot Chip, Mystery Jets and Klaxons dressed like an explosion in American Apparel – tight jeans and baggy T-shirts in dayglo colours, with crazy hair. Ultimately, the boots, brogues and beards of our American cousins would win the war, but there was a very confused period in between where some of the worst offences of the 1980s threatened to take hold.

I got wind of 'Lucky Number' by Lene Lovich somehow – in another shop maybe. It was the brevity of the chorus that caught my ear: four dissonant chords sung in rapid succession and the ostinato that comes after. I found a copy of Singles Going Steady by Buzzcocks on CD for £3 – the same album the chap who got me into Sarah Records had lent to me in 1994/95 – and so reacquainted myself with that. The guy who used to own a pager was now playing guitar in a ska/two-tone covers band. Among other things, they’d play 'On My Radio' by The Selector and 'Gangsters' by The Specials, and so I downloaded them (from iTunes). These four songs were all released in the year 1979.

NYC

The laptop I was working from was not my own: it was my partner's and a mere repository for my music which I would then transfer across to my newly acquired MP3 player. The problem with interfacing directly with a mobile device is that you have direct access to everything stored upon it. You don’t even need to make playlists: just ‘play all’ or select ‘shuffle’ and let the hits keep on coming. The shuffle function is particularly pernicious. You find yourself continuously skipping tracks until something shows up worthy of your immediate attention. Furthermore, there’s nothing random about the algorithm that drives the shuffle function. Certain groups will make remarkably frequent appearances, whereas others will be conspicuous by way of their absence.

So I stopped using the shuffle function and set about putting together a compilation. I’d have normally done this with a certain amount of pre-planning, but found it simpler to make it up as I went along: Add to > playlist, notionally entitled ‘2007’, to be renamed at a later date when I felt suitably inspired. I listened to my incomplete playlist as I was compiling it, changing the running order here and there and re-transferring it across to my MP3 player as and when I added new songs. The problem was this mutable approach did not foment the urgency required to finish it. By the time 'Pull up to the Bumper' by Grace Jones and 'Let’s Dance' by David Bowie had been appended to the running order, I’d reached what would under usual circumstances have been my limit – the 80 minutes of time available on a MiniDisc. I had no problem adding to this duration, but where would I draw the line? At what stage would I stop subsuming music gathered in 2008 to a compilation intended to reflect 2007?

As it was, I felt the playlist worked well, so I decided to defer the tracks I had left over until the year after. It was not to be. The recording of vinyl continued to be an issue: the stupid device I had bought necessitated I record in real time and use software to isolate the individual tracks that then had to be saved as individual files of questionable quality. iTunes wasn’t as comprehensive as I’d been led to believe either, so I couldn’t source as much material as I would have liked. It’s conceivable that the reason why I included 'Pull Up to the Bumper' and 'Let’s Dance' is a direct result of this – as filler.

I have identified a number of tracks that might have originally featured on Harmony in my Head in less troubled circumstances, or could have gone towards a playlist for 2008.

American singer Santigold's second single 'L.E.S. Artistes' had been getting airplay, culminating in an appearance on Jools Holland. Her album, Santogold, was voted 2008's 7th best by the NME, while Rolling Stone deemed 'L.E.S. Artistes' to be the second best single. (MGMT and Beyonce topped the magazines' respective polls.)

'Black Magic' is off of Jarvis Cocker’s debut solo album Jarvis, which I have on vinyl. I was disappointed with it, if I'm honest, but the artwork's good and the price of vinyl had yet to go through the roof.

'Prodigal Son' is taken from Beggars Banquet, the record that kicked off the Rolling Stones’ golden age. The guy who used to own a pager brought it to Exmoor with us in 2003, but it had been overshadowed by Their Satanic Majesties Request. This seems odd because I’m now of the opinion that Beggars Banquet is second only to Exile on Main Street in the Rolling Stones’ canon.

In 2008 I bought, in fairly quick succession, the Stevie Wonder albums Music of My Mind and Fulfillingness' First Finale, and was more satisfied with the latter. I recall being enamoured with 'Boogie On Reggae Woman', but nowadays I err towards 'Bird of Beauty'.

In September 2007, I went to see a David Bowie tribute band, at the Grey Horse in Kingston, called The Thin White Duke. The keyboard player resembled the actor Ian Smith, who played Harold Bishop in the Australian soap opera Neighbours. They were actually quite good and their rendition of 'Cracked Actor' motivated me to add Aladdin Sane to my collection.

Back in April 2007, I picked up a vinyl copy of Tom Tom Club by Tom Tom Club on a visit down to Plymouth (from Really Good Records?). It’s a cool record to have and a good album to put on if you have people around. The Tindersticks tune, meanwhile, was another offering from the lad lent me The Sound of the Suburbs, taken from the album of the same name – their best since Curtains and one I don't think they've bettered since.

There were other purchases, most notably records by Black Sheep, Main Source and Public Enemy (all that stuff's already covered in my 'Golden Age of Hip Hop' tetralogy). Maybe that’s why I never got around to creating a separate playlist for 2008. Not because I was unemployed, spent five weeks in Asia or couldn't be bothered, but as a result of rediscovering a taste for the music I listened to in my youth after wandering into a bar in Cologne playing old-school hip hop.

[Listen to here.]

LINER NOTES: SOMETIMES A PONY GETS DEPRESSED [2006]

1. These are the Ghosts – The Bees
2. Stagger Lee – Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
3. You Don’t Miss Your Water – The Byrds
4.     It’s All in My Mind – Teenage Fanclub
5. What Goes On – The Velvet Underground
6. Her Name is Melody – Adrian Pride
7. Come See About Me – The Supremes
8. Animal Farm – The Kinks
9. I Can’t Be Me – Eddie Hinton
10. Guilty – Barbra Streisand
11. Enough Said – Devo
12. Red Sails – David Bowie
13. Sometimes a Pony Gets Depressed – Silver Jews
14. The Lower the Sun – Tom Vek
15. Outlines – Clor
16. When You Get Home – The Research
17. Andy’s Chest – Lou Reed
18. Time Will Show the Wiser – Fairport Convention
19. Baby Please Don’t Go – The Amboy Dukes
20. Sway – The Rolling Stones
21. Draw a Smile Upon an Egg – Comet Gain
22. The Partisan – Leonard Cohen

'These are the Ghosts' introduces the album Free the Bees, and so it does Sometimes a Pony Gets Depressed, a ploy that will be recognisable to anyone familiar with my compilations. You can take it from this that I acquired Free the Bees in 2005, not 2006. This does not always follow but applies in this instance; in 2005 the song narrowly missed the cut.

The way The Bees presented themselves disappointed me. As a band, they were more overtly influenced by the 1960s than many of their contemporaries, wrote better tunes than many of their contemporaries. There was an opportunity begging. Instead they elected to collectively dress like Badly Drawn Boy, as a bevy of hard-drinking skaters. Not important, just a shame, and it didn’t stop me from playing Free the Bees relentlessly for a period of time.

Copenhagen with No Eyes and her husband. It’s a bit in late in the day to be coining new nicknames but her husband probably deserves a sobriquet of his own. After all, he did introduce me to Boozoo Bajou’s 'Night Over Manaus', which appears on 2000’s compilation The Ladies of Varades, as well as 'Happiness' by Teenage Fanclub, which I included on the following year’s The Boys of Summer, and he came on both the associated holidays – at which he would mysteriously disappear and then re-appear, earning him the epithet ‘Teleport Man’.

Copenhagen with No Eyes and Teleport Man. Teleport Man has been shouted at for taking photographs in Freetown Christiania by one of its free-spirited natives. It is February, so fairly cold, and we’ve been out for much of the day. Everything points towards stopping somewhere for a drink. The Eiffel Bar is nearby, a locals’ sort of place, dank but possessing character. There’s country rock playing in the background but my attempt to extract from the landlord the artist responsible leads nowhere.

Two days later and it’s just me and my partner. We would like a cup of coffee and find a café on Larsbjørnsstræde. Music is playing. I'm fairly sure it's Nick Cave but I don't know which record - something about a guy called Stagger Lee. The proprietor speaks English. It is Nick Cave (with the Bad Seeds) and the album playing is called Murder Ballads.

It’s March. We’ve hired a cottage near Abergwesyn in Wales to belatedly celebrate the 30th birthday of the friend who dropped in Debenhams. It snowed on the drive in and it’s more than a foot deep in places. The lad who lent me The Sound of the Suburbs is with us. Turns out he’s a big fan of Murder Ballads. He takes me to his car so we can listen to 'Stagger Lee' on his new car-stereo, at volume, late at night in the privacy afforded by Abergwesyn Valley.

It was the 1994 record Let Love In that first aroused my interest in Nick Cave but it was Murder Ballads that stepped it up. It’s literally an album of ballads concerning murder, and it betrays a humour in Cave’s work that had until now escaped me.

Wales

Having enjoyed the first two Flying Burrito Brothers – The Gilded Palace of Sin and Burrito Deluxe – I got around to buying Sweetheart of the Rodeo. I covered a bit of the back-story in my liner notes to Aka ‘Devil in Disguise’. I wrote thusly: '1968 was a period of transition for The Byrds. Having removed David Crosby from the fold, they were struggling to perform The Notorious Byrd Brothers in a live setting to a satisfactory standard. Enter Gram Parsons, initially on keys and then guitar. Gram had already cultivated a country-rock sound with his group The International Submarine Band, so it was a willing combination. By August, The Byrds had recorded and released their next album, Sweetheart of the Rodeo, regarded by some as the first pure country-rock record.' I also remarked that Sweetheart of the Rodeo consists mostly of covers. 'You Don’t Miss Your Water' was a soul record released on Stax, written and recorded by William Bell. It also appeared as the final track on Otis Redding’s Otis Blue, so it has good pedigree and the Byrds do a fine job on it.

I’m fairly sure it was me who used to play Bandwagonesque by Teenage Fanclub back in the day, but my Cornish friend seems to have taken over the mantle. After enjoying Four Thousand Seven Hundred And Sixty-Six Seconds - A Short Cut To Teenage Fanclub in 2003, in 2005 he bought their new album, Man-Made, and in 2006 he let me borrow it. I normally prefer Raymond McGinley’s songs but 'It’s All in My Mind' is one of Norman Blake’s.

Back in Copenhagen, looking for somewhere to eat. It’s one of those evenings where you’re unsure of your appetite. After a few beers, proceeded by too much walking, we decide to take a chance on a place called Bang & Jensen. The gamble pays off: the food is good, the interior décor pleasing to the eye, the prices reasonable for a city with Copenhagen’s reputation, and they’re playing The Best of The Velvet Underground: Words and Music of Lou Reed. I know this because the CD case is propped up in front of the CD player. I am unfamiliar with tracks 9 and 10 – 'What Goes On' and 'Beginning to See the Light' – but they strike me as very much worth having. Within four days of my return to London, I will have bought both Murder Ballads by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds and The Velvet Underground by The Velvet Underground.

My regard for the 1960s, and for psychedelic garage rock in particular, persisted. I procured Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-68 prior to buying My Mind Goes High: Psychedelic Pop Nuggets from the WEA Vaults, but it’s the latter that makes the first appearance on this playlist in the form of Adrian Pride. 'Her Name is Melody' alone justifies the purchase: a psychedelic raga with an exquisite vocal, it deserves to be more well known.

I’d probably watched Catholic Boys again, because I’d resolved to include 'Come See About Me' by The Supremes on my next compilation. I was able to do so after finding 20 Golden Greats, credited to Diana Ross & The Supremes, among the detritus of my parents’ record collection. 'Come See About Me' originally appeared on The Supremes’ LP Where Did Our Love Go, released 1964. Catholic Boys (aka Heaven Help Us) is set in Brooklyn, circa 1965. 'Come See About Me' serves as the backdrop to a scene where Mary Stuart Masterson’s soda shop is raided by the ‘brothers’ who teach across the road at St. Basils. Andrew McCarthy hangs back to help her clean up the mess, and romance ensues.

If I’d converted to MiniDisc a few years earlier than I eventually did, it’s possible that 'Death of a Clown' by the Kinks would have ended up on one of my compendiums. A borrowed greatest hits collection was knocking around our flat in Brentford for a while, but, as is typical of so many self-serving anthologies, it lacked the necessary context to sustain my interest. By the time I’d got back into the habit of making annual compilations the opportunity had passed. It took an advert for digital imaging products for me to think about the Kinks, featuring the song 'Picture Book'. I’d neither heard it nor heard of it, but the album it heralded from was available from my local high-street record store for a mere six pounds. Most Kinks’ greatest hit compendiums completely sidestep The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society – unless you count 'Days', which never appeared on the original record but gets tacked on whenever the album’s reissued – but I can identify at least five tunes from it that are up there among the group’s best. When it came to selecting material for my annual playlist, I found it almost impossible to choose between two of them: 'Animal Farm' and 'Starstruck'. Consider these interchangeable.

No Eyes and Teleport Man were living in Brighton and Hove. In 2005 my lady friend and I visited four times. I don’t know on which stay it was, but I identified a tune on a compilation they owned called Country Got Soul Volume Two as worth having: 'I Can’t be Me' by Eddie Hinton. Primarily a session musician, Eddie Hinton played on the records of Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge, and Otis Redding. Muscle Shoals progenitor Jerry Wexler described Hinton as, 'a white boy who truly sang and played in the spirit of the great black soul artists he venerated.'

I’d all but exhausted my parents’ record collection by this point. I made a final pass anyway and annexed their copy of 'Guilty' by Barbra Streisand, featuring Barry Gibb. I don’t buy into the concept of guilty pleasure (no pun intended) but this is the sort of thing people are alluding to when they make a claim for it. There’s nothing to be remotely embarrassed about. Even if there was, why not just concede to having philistine taste and be done with it? But 'Guilty' is not that. It is a flawless pop song, as good as anything contrived by the genre’s archetypes: The Beatles, Beach Boys, Rolling Stones. Time signatures are constantly changing, from 5/4 to 4/4 and back to 5/4 during the verse, and alternating between 3/4 and 4/4 in the midst of the chorus. There are some ingenious chord changes too. My favourite is the shift from Dm to Ebmaj7 and the way Barry Gibb vocally segues into it:

Dm        Am         Dm

You got a reason for livin'

Ebmaj7

You bat-tle on_with the love you're building on.

There’s nothing wilful about these unexpected deviations – the song’s mode is strophic: introduction, verse, bridge, chorus, instrumental breakout, verse, bridge, chorus, refrain, fade – and each deflection serves to move the song towards its resolution (there aren’t the episodic digressions of, say, 'Good Vibrations' by the Beach Boys). But it’s hard to call. Almost every line leads where you’d least expect it to, an exercise in suspense, patient with itself.

Secondhand vinyl can be surprisingly inexpensive. Rare pressings in mint condition, of the sort secondhand dealerships like to hang on their walls, might set you back a bit, but for anything else I wouldn’t expect to pay more than a cockle. Most of my David Bowie records cost around this, their popularity ensuring that supply continues to exceed demand. I think I paid the same for New Traditionalists by Devo, whereas Duty Now for the Future cost me a paltry £3. New Traditionalists is the better album and often overlooked. 'Through Being Cool', 'Soft Things', 'The Super Thing', 'Beautiful World', 'Enough Said'… there’s barely a bad song on there.

David Bowie had championed Devo in their earlier years, to the extent that he co-produced their first album alongside Brian Eno (although by all accounts it wasn’t the most satisfying of partnerships). Might it have been this that directed me back towards David Bowie? More likely it was my trip to Berlin in October 2004, although before completing Bowie’s so-called ‘Berlin Trilogy’ with Lodger I first bought Station to Station, the album he recorded in Los Angeles before absconding to Europe. Station to Station is clearly the better album but its songs possess an epic quality that would have felt out of place on this compilation. That being said, Lodger could be Bowie’s most underrated work. To complement the nature of the previous track – Devo’s 'Enough Said' – I wanted to follow up with something urgent and was torn between 'Red Sails' and 'Look Back in Anger'. Bowie’s slightly more tempered vocal on 'Red Sails' swung it.

I purchased the LP Tanglewood Numbers by Silver Jews almost on the strength of its front cover. That’s not quite true. I knew a little about them – the fact that it was David Berman’s band but that Stephen Malkmus and Robert Nastanovich of Pavement sometimes helped out. Apart from providing my compilation with its title, I take great pleasure from the lyrics to 'Sometimes a Pony Gets Depressed'.

My Cornish friend had already introduced me to Tom Vek the previous summer and by the end of the year I owned a vinyl pressing of We Have Sound. This album hinted at a change in the musical landscape, relief from the dross that had pervaded throughout 2005: Bloc Party, Arctic Monkeys, Kaiser Chiefs, Razorlight, Franz Ferdinand, The Futureheads, Bambyshambles – the fag-end of the garage rock revival. A new sound was emerging that incorporated synthesisers and would come to be known roughly as electro-pop. Whether Tom Vek fell exclusively within this genre is moot: he was making an interesting noise that incorporated abrasive guitars and keyboards, recorded in his parents’ garage.

Clor’s record was cut from if not the same cloth as Tom Vek’s then certainly a fabric exhibiting similar properties, perhaps of a more melodic denier. I first encountered them on MTV around the house of The Wilkinsons in Acton, and we then went to see them supporting Stephen Malkmus at the Koko in Camden. Clor split up not long after, which was a great shame.

The Research released their first album, Breaking Up, in early 2006, managed a second in late 2008 and then went the same way as Clor. Their electro-pop was looser and more shambolic than Tom Vek’s or Clor’s. Lead singer Russell 'The Disaster' Searle would hammer away at a keyboard while bassist Georgia Lashbrook churned out Wedding Present-esque grooves. My Cornish friend took me to see them play at Bush Hall in Shepherd’s Bush for my 31st birthday, so I guess I was engaging with the contemporary music scene to some degree.

Come April I was abroad again, this time in Budapest. On our last day there, killing time before the flight home, my lady friend and I went for coffee in a cafe called Katapult Kavazo. What should be playing but Transformer by Lou Reed. I've never really liked the song 'Walk on the Wild Side', and can’t abide 'Perfect Day', so it was never an album I'd ever bothered with. But I hadn’t heard 'Vicious' or 'Andy’s Chest' or 'Hangin’ Around' or 'I’m So Free', so it was well worth a fiver to add the CD to my burgeoning collection.

I have no idea what inspired me to buy the first Fairport Convention album. If I was expecting something along the lines of The Wicker Man soundtrack then I was to be disappointed; folk rock, as I have touched on before, is very different to country rock. At the time Fairport Convention’s debut was written, however, folk-rock was more ‘rock’ than it was ‘folk’, taking its lead from Bob Dylan, The Byrds and Jefferson Airplane, as 'Time Will Show the Wiser' amply demonstrates.

Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-68 was released in 1972 and has been reissued on numerous occasions since. This assemblage of music has been offered up as the antecedent of punk. Dubious proto-punk credentials aside, it’s the perfect place to start for anybody interested in exploring the genre. The Amboy Dukes’ cover of 'Baby, Please Don’t Go' is a marked highlight, and at over double the length far better value than Them’s version.

What made me hark back to Sticky Fingers by the Rolling Stones and include 'Sway' on this compilation? I couldn’t say, but 'Sway' is assuredly one of my favourite Stones’ tunes, so there’s no harm in it being here. It might also be Mick Taylor's finest moment as a Rolling Stone, and he deserves the credit that Jagger denied him. The Comet Gain track is off of City Fallen Leaves, which I consider to be their best album. It would be some while before they released another.

Budapest

In the summer of 2005, the Former Cohabitant from Brighton was house-sitting for his parents and invited me and the friend who foundered in Debenhams to pay him a visit. I came early, and we made arrangements to hook up with our Cornish friend later that evening for a spirited pub crawl around Brighton’s Lanes. Back at the house, the former cohabitant had a few things he wanted to show me (footage from our trip to the States; works in progress), and while doing so played whatever had been last listened to on the CD player.

After overhearing them playing in my room, my mother once suggested that the Tindersticks sounded like Leonard Cohen. They don’t, but at some point Leonard started singing in a tone approximating that of Stuart Staples. What I was hearing now did not sound remotely like the voice of Stuart Staples. It was the song 'Who by Fire', taken from Cohen’s fourth album, 1974’s New Skin for the Old Ceremony. I read somewhere that Ian McCulloch thought that Greatest Hits was Cohen’s best record, so I took him at his word and bought a copy from a second-hand record store, I don’t recall which.

On the inner sleeve there are liner notes recounting the back story to every song. For example, of 'Famous Blue Raincoat' Leonard Cohen has this to say:

I had a good raincoat then, a Burberry I got in London in 1959. Elizabeth thought I looked like a spider in it. That was probably why she wouldn’t go to Greece with me. It hung more heroically when I took out the lining, and achieved glory when the frayed sleeves were repaired with a little leather. Things were clear. I knew how to dress in those days. It was stolen from Marianne’s loft in New York sometime during the early seventies. I wasn’t wearing it very much toward the end.

Taking an opportunity to invite the chap who got me into Sarah Records back to my flat, I played the record and directed his attention to this specific annotation. He understood. 'The Partisan' is a cover of an homage to the French Resistance in World War II, written by the French journalist Emmanuel d'Astier de La Vigerie.

[Listen to here.]