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.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exmoor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Grosvenor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rotorua

[Listen to here.]

LINER NOTES: THE LADIES OF VARADES [2000]

1. Zambezi – The Fun Company
2. Rocks Off – The Rolling Stones
3. Golden Gaze – Ian Brown
4. Night Over Manaus – Boozoo Bajou
5. Reflexos – Quinteto Villa Lobos and Luiz Eca
6. Ali Baba – John Holt
7. Untouchable Sound – Make Up
8. D.C.B.A.-25 – Jefferson Airplane
9. Sagittarius Black – Timothy McNealy
10. 90% of Me is You – Gwen McCrae
11. Blips Drips and Strips – Stereolab
12. Ain’t’ it Funky Now – Grant Green
13. Soul Power – Lil Ray & The Fantastic Four
14. Hercules – Aaron Neville
15. Queen St. Gang (Soul Thing) – Arzachel
16. Holy Are You – The Electric Prunes
17. Loving Cup – The Rolling Stones
18. Every Baby Cries the Same – Make Up
19. Outer Bongolia – Stereolab
20. White Light/White Heat – The Velvet Underground

I became acquainted with the guy who owned a pager in 1996 after discovering that he was into jazz. I established this while browsing through his record collection and finding a copy of London Jazz Classics, which features 'Atlas' by The Robin Jones Seven and 'Ta Caliente' by Patsy Gallant, both of which are included on the notional compilation I imagined putting together in 1993. Another indicator was that he headed a Latin jazz-funk outfit called The Multi Headed Vibe Set, who played in and around our university.

The guy who owned a pager no longer owned a pager, he had a mobile phone. For a while we worked together at the Excelsior Hotel outside of Heathrow Airport where we’d drink whiskey tops at the end of 12 hour shifts – bottles of Budweiser with a shot of whiskey dispensed into them when our manager’s back was turned. We might then repair to his flat, on the border between Hounslow and Isleworth, and listen to the jazz, funk, ska and reggae he was accumulating onto MiniDisc. It was the ease with which he put together such compilations that would eventually persuade me to invest in the format.

The guy who now owned a mobile phone also introduced me to The Dive Bar in Chinatown on Newport Place, below what was then The King’s Head. Every Saturday, the Trojan Sound System selector Earl Gateshead would play a mixture of deep funk, soul, ska, rocksteady and Latin jazz. It made a nice change from our more regular haunts – Brentford (White Horse, The Griffin), Isleworth (Town Wharf, London Apprentice) or Hounslow (Shannons, The Rifleman) – and might sometimes be followed with a night out at Blow Up at the Wag on Wardour Street.

The Ladies of Varades gets its name from the former commune in the Loire-Atlantique department of Western France where a group of us hired a gite: myself, my lady friend, my Cornish friend who feinted, the guy who used to own a pager, his lady friend Roz Childs (not real name), No Eyes, her man friend, and Galleon (not real name), a girl from North Yorkshire we knew from university. We pronounced Varades to rhyme with ladies, giving rise to the title of my compilation, and referred to the nearby town of Ancenis as Ants-nest – went to an outdoor music festival there and behaved like buffoons. The rest of the holiday was spent having barbecues, taking trips to la supermarché, lounging about in the sun and drinking bottled beer and plastic flagons of red wine mostly to the sounds myself and the guy who used to own a pager brought with us.

White Horse

It was a good time to be buying vinyl. Independent records labels were compiling all sorts of musical obscura, and I would journey to places such as Intoxica on Portobello Road in search of it (followed by a pint or two in the Portobello Star). 'Zambezi' by The Fun Company is the first track on Keb Darge’s Legendary Deep Funk, an excellent compendium of soulful funk and rare grooves that was to provide this playlist’s backbone.

Around the same period, I made it my mission to acquaint myself with the ‘golden age’ of The Rolling Stones and took myself to a second-hand record shop in Twickenham intent on picking up any one of the four albums that comprise the canon. I came away with Exile on Main Street and was instantly smitten. I bought into it totally – the music, the production, the artwork, the fact this was the Stones’ only double album, what they were wearing at the time, that it was recorded on the French Riviera. 'Rock’s Off' is the opening track; it would also have been mine if not for The Fun Company.

'Night Over Manaus' by Boozoo Bajou originally came next, which is essentially chill-out music released not long before the term became ubiquitous (No Eyes’s other half was the source). I wasn’t happy with the transition and retroactively slipped in 'Golden Gaze' by Ian Brown from his album Golden Greats, which received a fair amount of play during our week in the Loire (supplied by Galleon). This allows for a more satisfying connection with the next track – 'Reflexos' by Quinteto Villa Lobos and Luiz Eca, taken from Blue Brazil Volume 2 (Blue Note In A Latin Groove), a compendium of jazz-inflected bossa nova and samba that the guy who used to own a pager introduced me to.

'Ali Baba' has established itself as something of a reggae classic over the years, but it was relatively obscure back in the year 2000 and I had great difficulty finding a copy on vinyl. If you can lay your hands on it, Hottest Hits Volume 3 on Treasure Isle also contains the excellent John Holt tune 'Stealing Stealing' and Joya Landis’s equally impressive 'Moonlight Lover'. If not then you're looking at one of the many Greatest Hits collections out there.

Although the Make Up were current (only just: the band dissolved this same year) I felt they were mining something distinctively retrospective and assuredly not in keeping with current trends. I could sense in them the same sort of louche abandon I was getting from Exile-era Stones, less the drug induced decadence. Ian Svenonius’s hair augmented the impression. 'Untouchable Sound' comes as a shock after the previous tune, but I didn't know where else to put it.

When I bought my copy of Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow I fully expected using 'White Rabbit' for my next anthology. Instead 'D.C.B.A.–25' made the cut. I could have included both, but I had no shortage of material to work with and 'D.C.B.A.–25' carried less psychedelic baggage.

'Sagittarius Black' by Timothy McNealy is the second track off of Keb Darge’s Legendary Deep Funk and probably the best. I’d sometimes accompany the guy who used to own a pager to see Keb Darge play at Madame Jojo's on a Sunday evening, which is where the term deep funk originated. I'd have gone more often if I didn't have to work the next day.

I seem to recall that All Back To Mine, compiled by a disc jockey named Sean Rowley, was not cheap compared to some of the other compilations I’d been buying. Still, I filched two tracks from it so maybe it was money well spent. The first is '90% of Me is You' by the American soul singer Gwen McRae. The other is 'Holy Are You', which comes later.

With its jerky rhythms, 'Blips, Drips and Strips' carries off where Stereolab’s last LP, Dots and Loops, left off, although the album that spawned it – Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night – is not quite as good, although that’s like saying Rubber Soul isn’t quite as good as Revolver. Maybe, maybe not, but not much in it either way.

Gite Camp

I had by now left the hotel and was working for an audio-visual wholesaler in Brentford who sold plasma screens and LCD/DLP projectors to high-end retailers and private customers, such as the television and radio presenter Jamie Theakston; he chucked his newly purchased, 40 kg plasma screen in the back seat of his open-top car and off he went.

I was situated in the warehouse, doing admin and taking stock, but it was expected that I muck in whenever goods were coming in or going out, which was often. I liked the people there and everyone tended to get on. Even management behaved reasonably. Every Friday after work, half the company seemed to descend on the Coach & Horses in Isleworth, and if you hung around for long enough the directors would start buying everybody drinks. It might be the best job I've ever had.

Grant Green’s cover of James Brown’s 'Ain’t it Funky Now' is taken from another series of Blue Note albums that were doing the rounds: precisely, Blue Break Beats Volume Two. This one was relatively inexpensive, and a little hit and miss as many of these sort of records often are.

'Soul Power' by Lil Ray & The Fantastic Four is Keb’s final contribution to my playlist. It's stuff like this that Earl Gateshead liked to play down at the Dive Bar, although that goes for Grant Green too. It's also typical of the records they'd drop down at the Wag.

'Hercules' by Aaron Neville had been in my possession for some time, on the Acid Jazz collection Totally Wired 6 I purchased in 1992. Like 'Ali Baba' it has since become ubiquitous, the type of thing that will be played in the type of pub that's stripped back the plaster to reveal the brickwork underneath, ripped out the carpets and dimmed the lights. In other words, a gentrified one.

'Queens St. Gang' by Arzachel is a peculiar number I found on a peculiar compilation entitled Battle For The Planet Of The Breaks. It was written by the guy who composed the theme music for Grandstand and the BBC’s coverage of Wimbledon – Keith Mansfield – although he was never actually a member of the band, and how he came to make his contribution is unclear. File under psychedelic progressive rock, perhaps?

The Electric Prunes are probably better known for the psychedelic garage-rock of tunes such as 'I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)'. Come their third album the group had been coerced into working with classically trained composer and arranger David Axelrod, whose vision was far more progressive than their own. By the time of their the fourth album, Release of an Oath, the original line-up had departed, to be replaced with session players, effectively leaving Axelrod in complete control. This was psychedelic rock of a very different kind. The garage elements completely gone and lavish string arrangements put in their place, 'Holy Are You' becomes the climax of this compilation.

Or does it?

Mick Jagger is an under-rated lyricist. I don’t actually hold song lyrics in the high regard that some people do; they are beholden to the meter of the song and subservient to it. Mick Jagger understands this, which is why he can write lyrics like this:

I'm the man who walks the hillside in the sweet summer sun.

I'm the man that brings you roses when you ain't got none.

Notice how he’s the man who walks the hillside, and yet the same man that brings you roses. This is the correct emphasis but many lyricists would have missed it. Also observe the double negative in ‘ain’t got none’, which is a perfectly acceptable idiom within the vernacular of the blues but would be wholly inappropriate if Jagger was writing for the page. Lyrics are written to be sung, not read or spoken.

More Make Up, then the endlessly repetitive instrumental groove of Stereolab’s 'Outer Bongolia', taken from the EP The First of the Microbe Hunters released in May 2000, which forced itself onto my playlist at the last moment. Lasting 9 minutes and 29 seconds, I figured it might be a good tune to drink to late at night in France, which proved to be the case.

Dive Bar

I finish with The Velvet Underground’s 'White Light/White Heat', but it was never my intention. The fact is this compilation began life as a mix-tape – it was compiled before I’d bought a MiniDisc player – and the original cassette had about two thirds of 'Sister Ray' tacked on the end of the first side (I reasoned that if any tune could tolerate truncation it was that one.) The tapes I used were 90 minutes long, whereas my new MiniDiscs granted just 74 minutes of playing time, so 'Sister Ray' had to go. To accommodate 'Ali Baba', 'Golden Gaze' and 'White Light/White Heat', I also omitted 'Outer Bongolia' (since reinstated – I decided against reintroducing 'Sister Ray'). The singularity of the format also allowed me to re-arrange the running order to create a more balanced playlist. Older compilations were recalibrated to taste. In its own quiet way MiniDisc was revolutionary.

[Listen to here.]