Everything Must Go

The Manic Street Preachers are about my age, and grew up some seven or eight miles down the road from where I did. The first time I saw them they were on TV, and I felt an acute - misplaced - embarrassment on their behalf. They were gawkily, earnestly pretentious, gabbling away in their broad valleys accents - the same accent I'd striven to mask and suppress during my student years in London. Their presence showed up the folly of my own pretentions to urbane sophistication.

I've always been interested in their career by virtue of the local-boys-made-good angle, but only some of their music has ever grabbed me - I wouldn't quite call myself a fan. I do have a soft spot for Everything Must Go, however. I bought it on cassette soon after its release in mid-'96, which was a painfully difficult time for me. I was in Rome, ostensibly living the cosmopolitan dream, but felt isolated, stressed & depressed thanks to my awful job.

This album, together with an unwise excess of alcohol, espresso and Toscanelli cigars, afforded a therapeutic catharsis that helped drag me from one difficult day to the next. Even then, I didn't like it all: churlish as it may be to complain about their presence, Richey Edwards' lyrics just aren't my cup of tea. Not all of the anthemic moments fully connected with me either, but the high-points, which, to my mind include 'Enola/Alone', the title-track, 'Australia' and 'No Surface All Feeling' more than made up for that. I'll always be grateful to the band for this record.

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All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...

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Bananas Are Not Created Equal

I knew Jay Berliner's name from his contributions to Van Morrison's Astral Weeks and Charles Mingus' The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady , so when I saw this curiously-titled LP at the local charity shop I was intrigued, and bought it even though I had no idea what kind of music it might contain. This was after the days when one could still buy records there for a pound apiece, but I don't think I paid more than a fiver for it. The music turned out to be an all-instrumental blend of funk, soul & jazz. Berliner's virtuoso lead guitar is only one of many attractions here. The band of first-rate session musicians behind him are all uniformly excellent too, and, crucially, sound like they're having a blast. Cornell Dupree's supporting guitar work, while less showy than Berliner's, is beautifully-judged, and the rhythm section is terrific. Arranger/conductor Wade Marcus was no slouch either, judging from the way everything comes together. Two of the funk...

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