LINER NOTES: THE LOCKDOWN TAPES [2020]

 

    1.     Side Street Walker – Dolly Mixture
    2.     Splashing Along – Jesse Garon & The Desperadoes
    3.     Bad Night at The Whiskey – The Byrds
    4.     I am So Blue – The Poets
    5.     Four Women – Nina Simone
    6.     George Hamilton’s Dead – The Golden Dawn
    7.     The Helicopter Spies – Swell Maps
    8.     No (Personal) Connection – Soft Walls
    9.     Stepping Stones – Johnny Harris
    10.   A Ra – Joao Donato
    11.   Nonstop Disco Powerpack – Beastie Boys
    12.   McFlurry – Sleaford Mods
    13.   Dry the Rain – The Beta Band
    14.   French Press – Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever
    15.   Televised Mind – Fontaines D.C.
    16.   In Dreams – Peggy Sue
    17.   Black and Brown Blues – Silver Jews
    18.   Plastic Bird – Galaxie 500
    19.   Sand – Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood
    20.   Old World – The Modern Lovers
    21.   Broadway Jungle – The Maytals
    22.   Glue – Bicep
    23.   Leave the Planet – Galaxie 500

 
 
It happened quickly. On Tuesday, the 17th of March, I was advised that my place of work was likely to close within a week, by the afternoon this became a certainty, then on Wednesday it did. At the same time the Government was advocating that the public avoid communal spaces. The pubs around my way were noticeably quieter, although in central London they were reportedly as busy as ever. Come Friday, pubs, bars, restaurants, cafes and gyms were ordered to shut up shop. You could still walk the streets freely, but then that changed too. On the 23rd it was announced that you could only leave the house for the purpose of buying victuals or for daily exercise. In other words, lockdown. Airplanes continued to offload passengers unchecked.

In December, before COVID-19 officially became a thing, Dolly Mixture reissued the album Demonstration Tapes and also put out Other Music, a collection of alternative takes and unreleased demos. By the end of the month these limited pressings had sold out, but not before I got my hands on a pair. They are splendid records and it was hard to choose just one song for inclusion on my annual compilation. 'Side Street Walker' is as good a choice as any and functions well as a lead-off track.

Lockdown coincided with a bout of unseasonably warm weather. This was something of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, being out of doors in the sunshine kept people's spirits up, on the other it meant that parks and greens were mobbed, which defeated the object. The roads, though, were clear and I cycled into town regularly on a single-speed bike I'd purchased in February. I also found myself going to the supermarket on an almost daily basis, savouring the reduced capacity. By night the streets were deserted and the air smelt fresh. In these respects, lockdown was a rather pleasant experience.

There’s only so much cycling and shopping you can do in a day, under any circumstances, so when my partner was summoned back to school in late April, to supervise the children of key-workers and provide online lesson plans for everyone else’s, I had to contrive alternative ways to while away the days. One idea was to re-watch My Secret World: The Story of Sarah Records, which prompted a series of email exchanges between myself and the chap who introduced me to Sarah Records, who then passed on a link to a website screening Teenage Superstars. This documentary focuses on the independent music scene in Glasgow from 1982 to ’92 and features the likes of Teenage Fanclub, The Pastels, The Vaselines, BMX Bandits. A group called The Shop Assistants are mentioned along the way, and I asked the chap who introduced me to Sarah Records whether they were worth bothering with. He thought not, which surprised me, and instead pointed me in the direction of Jesse Garon & The Desperadoes, an Edinburgh band from the same era. I was indifferent to the song he provided as an example but found another that I liked a lot: 'Splashing Along', the group’s debut single, dating back to October 1986.

I uncovered 'Bad Night at the Whiskey' by The Byrds in April. I was trying to track down one of Roger McGuinn’s better haircuts and found it on a programme called Playboy After Dark, hosted by Hugh Hefner. The Byrds play 'You Ain't Goin' Nowhere' and 'This Wheel's On Fire', the latter taken from the 1969 album Dr. Byrds & Mr. Hyde, a record I had ignored; Chris Hillman and Gram Parsons had recently left The Byrds to form The Flying Burrito Brothers and only McGuinn remained from the original line-up, so I doubted its quality. The band’s performance on Hefner’s show corrected my mistake. Clarence White, who had worked as a session musician on The Byrds’ previous three albums, was by now a fully paid-up member, while John York replaced Hillman on bass and Gene Parsons took over from Kevin Kelly on drums. The Whiskey in question is a club called Whisky a Go Go in West Hollywood, California, where The Byrds once performed badly. We don’t know what was so bad about it because the lyrics pertain to something else entirely.

I’d been furloughed and made the decision to sell some of my lesser played records, effectively so I could purchase others. One of the discs I elected to get shot of was a compilation entitled The Clouds Have Groovy Faces, released via the Bam-Caruso imprint in 1986. As the title suggests, it’s a compendium of 1960s psychedelia, and fairly obscure psychedelia at that, but not the best. 'I Am So Blue' by The Poets is the standout track, so I added it to this playlist for posterity. (Readers of my liner notes might recall that The Poets kicked off my 2005 anthology with 'That’s the Way It’s Got to Be'.)

The Nina Simone tune came later after listening to BBC Radio 6 in the company of my Cornish friend on a Sunday afternoon, drinking cans of lager and a parting shot of Drambuie, which became a kind of (socially distanced) lockdown ritual. I’d always found Nina Simone intriguing but never came across anything by her that especially appealed. In June I did. 'Four Women' is the only song on the 1966 album Wild is the Wind that she wrote herself – a perfectly normal state of affairs within the genre. It’s an emotive tune but delicately rendered, until Nina lets rip with the last line: 'MY NAME IS PEACHES!'

 
Early May, and there is cause for optimism. Despite the Government’s manipulation of the statistics (in which direction remains unclear), reported deaths ‘with’ COVID-19 have been on a downward trend getting on for three weeks. In other news, the gormless article we call our Prime Minister is back at work having spent a week in intensive care, and another two recuperating, after an attack of the covoids.

There are generally two schools of thought concerning the efficacy of lockdown. The first – and it seems to be where most people stand – is that we were a good two weeks late in shutting things down but have managed to contain the virus and less people are now dying. The other is that COVID-19 has been doing the rounds since the turn of the year, many of us have already had it asymptomatically, that the whole thing is a waste of time and we’re going to be worse off for it in the long run; we will be poorer and more people are going to die as an indirect result of lockdown than would’ve otherwise perished from the disease itself.

I’ve just been into Richmond to post Stevie Wonder’s Music of My Mind to someone and to pick up groceries, and it looked like an awful lot of people had the same idea. Yet we’re only in what I’m calling the second phase of lockdown and we’re told there’s still a very real threat lurking out there. Is everybody bored of staying in, or has there been a shift in their thinking?

Placing 'George Hamilton’s Dead' by The Golden Dawn directly after 'Four Woman' works surprisingly well. It’s one of a number of tracks that stood out when re-watching My Secret World: The Story of Sarah Records. I cannot understand why the chap who introduced me to Sarah Records never made me aware of it, for it amuses in a way that satisfies the both of us. The song also dispels the myth that Sarah was all about jangly guitars and heightened sensitivity. (The same goes for 'Dirty Mags' by Blueboy, another new find that I came very close to including on this compilation.)

I’d been meaning to look into Swell Maps for ages, so when Stephen Pastel alluded to them in Teenage Superstars I got on the case. They only recorded two albums, the second being 1980’s …In “Jane from Occupied Europe”, which I’d like to buy on the strength of the title alone. I can’t find a copy on-line, so for now I’ve downloaded 'The Helicopter Spies', the fifth track from its first side. Sounds like Magazine, but better.

In 2020 Soft Walls released Not as Bad as it Seems on vinyl. (You could get it on cassette in 2019.) I pre-ordered the record in December and it arrived late January. This was supposed to tally with seeing them in April but the gig was cancelled outright. Perhaps when all this is over I’ll try and get down to Brighton and see them, because they don’t come to London very often.

 

June: the weather has become unsettled, and it seems that lockdown is entering its third phase. Pubs and cafes are still shut, although some are offering take-outs. Non-essential shops have yet to open but are preparing for it. Museums, galleries, cinemas, theatres, hairdressers and sports and leisure facilities remain resolutely closed. On the streets, however, life appears to have returned to how it once was. A number of factors have contributed to this: a declining infection/death rate; a relaxing of the rules regarding meeting up with other households in an external setting; Dominic Cummings showing a disregard for the regulations and the Government sticking by him, the social contract broken.

Richmond Green is proving to be a particularly pleasing environment. Despite the heavy clouds and occasional rain, it is fairly warm and there’s a pent-up energy about the place. The Cricketers is selling takeaway draught, although financially it makes sense to bring your own. Towards the end of the month the heat begins to build again. While I cycle to Parsons Green to meet up with a couple of my bouldering buddies, half a million people travel down to Dorset to hang around on beaches. That’s the price the Conservatives pay for letting their PR man keep his job.

I don’t really get the point of Twitter, but I’m on there nonetheless. If I wasn’t then I may never have found out about the Scottish composer/arranger/producer Johnny Harris. Someone had been playing the album Movements in their car and tweeted a link to Harris’s impressive cover of 'Paint it Black' by the Stones. Further investigation proved another track, the self-penned 'Stepping Stones', to be more so. It's hard to know what to call this sort of music but there are elements of jazz, rock and even funk, all with a psychedelic undertone. You can imagine it appearing on the soundtrack to a film set in the swinging sixties.

The guy who used to own a pager now owns a boat. Prior to lockdown we saw Das Boot on it and the other day we watched Jaws. After watching Jaws we put on music. The guy who used to own a pager was under the impression that he introduced me to Joao Donato around the period we were listening to the Blue Brazil series (Blue Note in a Latin Groove). That was approximately 20 years ago so it’s possible he did, although of the two of us I have the stronger memory. I don’t recall having heard 'A Ra' so it can go on this compilation.

In between watching films documenting obscure indie-pop and hanging out on boats, I’ve been reading the Beastie Boys Book, its hard-backed 570 pages having remained undisturbed on my shelf since December 2018. The parts that reference the trio’s final record, Hot Sauce Committee Part Two, made me realise how little I’ve listened to it, which is something else I’ve put right. The album's concept was to use invented samples that were subsequently credited to fictional songs by imagined artistes. 'Nonstop Disco Powerpack' is the exception, which is a shame because it’s the best track on the album.

It was my birthday the other week so I’ve got the Sleaford Mods’ compilation All That Glue to listen to, personally delivered by one of the chaps from Eel Pie Records. I’m familiar with about half the double-album's content. I know and like 'Fizzy', and contemplate including it on this compendium, but decide that the novelty of either 'Snake It' or 'McFlurry' would be more appropriate, and opt for the latter.
 

Das Boot

Pubs have been permitted to re-open as of the 4th of July. Some will but others won’t, perhaps because they’ve not been given enough notice to sufficiently prepare, or maybe because they want to see if it’s worth the hassle. Many people are against it. Others – myself included – are enjoying drinking in parks, on greens, in gardens, and feel ambivalent. Moreover, this latest liberty comes with terms and conditions: table service, no standing, strict social distancing and prodigious amounts of hand sanitizer.

A few weeks before lockdown, Mr Wilkinson and I were climbing at Urban Ascent near Parsons Green when a song played we both recognised but couldn't name. It came to me later: 'Dry the Rain' by The Beta Band. Smashing tune and the way it starts off allows it to follow on from Sleaford Mods quite freely.

'French Press' by Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever sounds like Shaun Ryder singing over War on Drugs if Shaun Ryder could actually sing a bit. They’re an Australian 5-piece incorporating three guitarists, not counting bass, and 'French Press' is the title track of an EP they issued in 2017. I discovered them at the beginning of April by way of another track of theirs called 'Cars in Space'. I preferred 'French Press' and decided early on that I wanted this tune to appear further down the running order, due to its uplifting nature (musically at least; the lyrics concern estranged siblings).

Since the release of their debut LP a little more than a year ago, Fontaines D.C. have told us they’ve been kicking back to the sounds of the Beach Boys. You wouldn’t know it from the single 'Televised Mind', nor from the two singles that preceded it. 'Televised Mind' is a ridiculously simple ditty, but I kept hearing it on the radio throughout the summer and was slowly won over by its sheer doggedness.

I happened upon 'In Dreams' by Peggy Sue listening to the radio with my Cornish friend just days before lockdown. Peggy Sue are in fact two ladies from Brighton, and their music sounds a bit like Dolly Mixture as if produced by Phil Spector. As with 'French Press', it occurred to me that this tune would be better placed towards the end of this compilation, marking the point at which I begin to wind things down.

The actor and musician John Henry Westhead – best known for playing 'Olaf the Russian Metalhead' in the art-house comedy film Clerks – lives somewhere around my way. I know this because he’s posted songs relating to Isleworth on YouTube, and there’s footage of his band, The Shed Dwellers, paying tribute to the late David Berman down at the Cross Lances in Hounslow. This is how I came by the song 'Black and Brown Blues' by Berman’s old band, Silver Jews.

Dissatisfied with my Levi’s denim jacket I started looking on eBay for another. I searched specifically for the slimmer fitting 70500, identified one that was 'new with tags', made an offer, was counter offered, paid for it and then sold my 72334 to someone in Aberdeen for the same price – a neat piece of business. For some reason I associate denim jackets with a certain type of indie music, and I ended up mulling over the gaps in my knowledge regarding the group Galaxie 500 and then buying their second album, On Fire. An ostensibly dull turn of events, but it's worth pondering how one seemingly innocuous thing can lead to another. Consider also the possibility that anyone reading this might go about acquiring On Fire and be equally affected by the song 'Plastic Bird' as I am, all because I fussed over my wardrobe while on furlough.

Actually, by the time I received the denim jacket I was back at work. This coincided with the Government postponing a number of lockdown-easing measures scheduled to start at the beginning of August and simultaneously introducing this thing called Eat Out to Help Out. I didn’t think anything of it back then, but as the rate of infection slowly began to rise, and quarantine measures were introduced for people returning from selected foreign territories, the absurdity of the scheme became retrospectively apparent.

Apropos of nothing, I decided to put on a CD my partner gave to me some years ago: These Boots Are Made For Walkin' - The Complete MGM Recordings by Lee Hazlewood. The songs therein predate Hazlewood’s partnership with Nancy Sinatra but include some that were later re-recorded with her. 'Sand' is one such tune, appearing first on 1966’s The Very Special World of Lee Hazlewood, featuring the vocal of Suzi Jane Hokum, and in 1968 on Nancy & Lee. The collaboration with Nancy Sinatra edges it, not so much because of her intonation but more the song’s bizarre arrangement and orchestration. Producer and guitarist Billy Strange was responsible for this, and I assume it's his deranged guitar playing backwards during the instrumental breakout.

In August I resolved to sell my copy of The Original Modern Lovers and replace it with The Modern Lovers, the version released in 1976 five years prior to the so-called original. It’s generally accepted that the ’76 iteration is the definitive article, and I wouldn’t disagree with that. 'Someone I Care About', 'Pablo Picasso' and 'Old World' are all missing from the Kim Fowley produced record, although he does give us 'I Wanna Sleep in Your Arms', but it’s John Cale’s superior production that makes the real difference.

Frederick 'Toots' Hibbert passed away on 11 September 2020, the same day as stage 13 of what turned out to be an enthralling edition of the Tour de France. At some point in the stage Stefan Kung, wearing number 54, was out front, which got ITV presenter Gary Imlach thinking: if Kung finished first and Dries Devenyns, sporting number 46, came in second, it would present the perfect opportunity to play out with '54-46 Was My Number'. In the event, Daniel Martinez won the stage and so 'Broadway Jungle' was used instead – or 'Dog War' as it was originally known when The Maytals cut the tune in 1964. Unbeknown to them, the track was leased to Island Records who retitled it 'Broadway Jungle', credited it to The Flames and put it out in the UK. The new name stuck but has been re-attributed to (Toots &) The Maytals whenever it's appeared on any ska and reggae anthology.
 

The summer ended abruptly: temperatures pushing 30 degrees one weekend, scraping 15 the next. Nights drawing in, falling leaves, jumpers on. If that wasn't bad enough the Government imposed a ten o'clock curfew on all pubs and restaurants and made it a requirement that customers wear masks until they sat down at their table. Such measures made little sense. If public houses were that dangerous then they shouldn't have been open at all, and the curfew merely encouraged people to head out an hour or so earlier. What's more, because pub owners were overly mindful of the new arrangements, everybody was forced to leave at exactly the same moment, whereupon they loitered in streets and maybe accepted an invitation to continue drinking back at someone's house – the night was young, after all.

On the 24th of September – the date these restrictions came into effect – I tried to have a drink with my partner in the pub over the road. Twenty minutes after our arrival we were still trying, and so departed. As we waited, 'Glue' by Bicep came on. My Cornish friend introduced me to this tune in early March and it took a while to decide how much I really liked it. I understood that this was dance music, but was it too repetitive? In the end it grew on me, and there’s a wistful quality to it that felt pertinent to the situation.

And I was going to leave it at that, but I like odd numbers and fancied more Galaxie 500 – undoubtedly the discovery of the year. A lot of this has to do with the rhythm section: Damon Krukowski’s irregular drum patterns and Naomi Yang’s counter-melodies on bass. I’ve heard On Fire described as an ‘ambient’ rock record, and it’s not a bad way of putting it – certainly more indicative than terms like slowcore or dreampop. 'Leave the Planet' is mellower than 'Plastic Bird', and shorter too, which is a good note to end on before we're all locked down again.

[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.]