This is a Recording

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...

Among my favourite songs of 1981 was The Teardrop Explodes' breakthrough single 'Reward', a UK No, 6 hit in March of that year. I was thinking it was as good a song as Julian Cope ever wrote, so was surprised to see on the label that it's credited to "Gill and Balfe", the band's guitarist and keyboardist at the time it was recorded. While Alan Gill reportedly came up with the memorable bassline and blaring trumpet fanfare, it seems Cope did provide the lyrics, and was responsible for shaping the song's final frenetic sound. According to Cope, "Gary [Dwyer] could only drum two ways, reggae and soul, so he played it soul and we had a song..." The B-side, 'Strange House in the Snow' is a rather more experimental concoction, with something resembling scraped violin strings prominent in the mix, along with piano (plus the usual guitar, bass & drums) and an unhinged-sounding vocal performance from Mr Cope. Drugs may have been involved.

I distinctly recall seeing Jeffrey Daniel's famous 1982 appearance on Top of the Pops promoting 'A Night to Remember': which introduced "body-popping" to a fascinated British public. The song, and the three other hit singles that followed it ('I Can Make You Feel Good', 'There It Is' and 'Friends') were very often on the radio and TV that year - and I found them pleasant enough, but my musical attention (such as it was, when I glanced up from my new Sinclair ZX Spectrum home computer) focussed more on the likes of Madness, Soft Cell, The Fun Boy Three, XTC and Yazoo. Why then should it be that on picking up a copy of Shalamar's Friends at a charity shop six months ago, seeing those song-titles in the track-listing should provoke such a heady surge of affectionate nostalgia? Snippets of the music began playing in my head, and I thought that for the £1 asking price it was well worth taking it home to see how I'd enjoy the album. I ...

For a few years I was haunted by a song I could not identify. On the infrequent occasions I listened to the radio during my time in Rome, whichever station it was I'd settled upon as the least objectionable might play a jazzy-sounding number in which a deep male voice sang in Italian, but with some words of English in the chorus: "It's wonderful... good luck my baby...I dream of you... chips, chips". It was the kind of song where it seemed likelier that these were the chips one might be given in a casino, and not any potato-based foodstuff. I grew to love the song, but each of the half dozen or so times I heard it I never caught the artist or track-title being announced. I resigned myself to its remaining a mystery. But then I heard a snippet of it again a few years later in Amsterdam, issuing from a hotel-room TV as the soundtrack to an ad. On returning from that trip back to the UK, I resolved to see if the internet might be able to solve the puzzle for me. This w...

Between his stint as XTC's keyboard player ('78-9) and co-founding Shriekback ('82), Barry Andrews released a solo EP ('Town and Country') and this 7" single ('Rossmore Road'): the latter in 1980; and then again in '81 with a different B-side ('Pages of my Love'). It's the B-side of the first version, however (' Win a Night Out with a Well-Known Paranoiac '), that led me to buy the record. I'd known and loved it from the mid '80s, having heard it a number of times on Anne Nightingale's request show on BBC Radio 1. Where 'Rossmore Road' is a deadpan evocation, with a mellifluous chrous, of the titular London thoroughfare (in Lisson Grove, not far west of Regent's Park); 'Win a Night Out...' is an extravagant six-minute-plus fantasia with an agitated & appropriately paranoid-sounding narration alternating with the track's title repeated as a sung refrain.  The rear of the picture sleeve lists...

A part-smoked Sobranie cigarette with lipstick on the filter tip perched on a fancy ashtray; a single long-stemmed red rose; a bottle of costly-looking booze (cognac?) and a glass poured from it; a cup of coffee and something resembling a half-eaten chocolate truffle; two glasses of Dom Perignon champagne, one of them, again, marked with lipstick; and the open champagne bottle and its cork; a bowl of beluga caviar; a single uneaten prawn; and a pair of high-heeled shoes. Exactly how these these signifiers of affluence and romance relate to the music on Bill Withers' Greatest Hits (1981) isn't obvious, but it is an interesting and eye-catching cover design. I was familiar with the biggest of these hits: 'Just The Two Of Us', 'Ain't No Sunshine', 'Lovely Day' and 'Lean On Me', from radio play back in the '70s and '80s, but at that time these songs, as with most soul music, seemed as if it were a language I didn't quite understand a...

Used reggae records are few and far between in this particular corner of South Wales. I can't even recall the last time I saw a copy of Bob Marley's Legend hereabouts. That goes some way towards explaining why I only own a grand total of three reggae LPs: two by Black Uhuru and this one, Changes , by The Mighty Diamonds. I'd long imagined my copy, which has 'MADE IN JAMAICA' printed on the rear of the sleeve, to be an import; but, on closer inspection, I now think it's the 1982 UK re-press. To be fair, the two variants are very similar. It's a very enjoyable album with strong songwriting throughout (with six of the ten tracks written by one or more of the Diamonds), and is one of many benefitting from the presence of Sly Dunbar on the drums, and Robbie Shakespeare on bass. As one might expect from a group that originated as a vocal harmony trio, the singing is first rate too. Oddly, the record has never been issued on CD. I was half-familiar with the open...

I knew and loved The Only Ones' 'Another Girl, Another Planet' when I was in my late teens, but wasn't aware of the band's catalogue beyond their best-known song. At some point during my university years I took a chance on a cassette copy of their Peel Sessions Album , then newly-released. At first hearing I wasn't sure I liked the session version of 'Another Girl...' as much as the single version; but subsequent listens changed my mind, and I grew to love many of the other tracks too. When, at length, I found a cassette copy of the band's third album Baby's Got a Gun , I was disappointed by it: I did not care for the production on it at all. I later tried again with their compilation The Immortal Story , but again, found I liked it much less than the Peel Sessions , which, as one Discogs commenter pithily put it, is "like a 'best of' but with even better versions of all their best songs". I let the matter rest there, but then t...

The cover says 'I Love Rock-n-Roll', the label 'I Love Rock 'N Roll, while the Wikipedia page about the song is headed 'I Love Rock 'n' Roll'. Confusion reigns. Whatever the ultimate truth may be, I bought a dusty copy of the UK version of the single in a picture sleeve, along with some other classics of its era, about six months ago. I don't recall hearing The Arrows' original version of the track in 1975. The remake certainly has some of that mid-'70s platform-soled glam stomp still in it. The line "I knew she/he must a been about seventeen" hasn't aged too well - the song's writer Alan Merrill was twenty-four when it was first released, at a time when Jett herself was about seventeen and just getting started with The Runaways. The B-side is a Jett original 'Love is Pain', an undistinguished number which is nevertheless delivered with conviction by Joan & her Blackhearts.

Of the couple of hundred albums I bought on cassette between the ages of 18 and 21, some I've been glad to re-acquire on vinyl and others I've been content not to revisit. In the latter category are the likes of Licensed to Ill , The Best Of The Doors and Lou Reed's Berlin ; in the former, Purple Rain , Fisherman's Blues and In My Tribe by 10,000 Maniacs. It's a record that, if it were made today, might be characterized as "woke" (in the UK of the late '80s, "right-on" would perhaps have been the equivalent designation). It includes socially-conscious songs touching on child abuse ('What's The Matter Here'); illiteracy ('Cherry Tree'); alcohol abuse ('Don't Talk'); militarism ('Gun Shy'); and environmentalism ('A Campfire Song'). And Natalie Merchant was ahead of her time in taking an acutely critical look at "The Beat Generation" authors in 'Hey Jack Kerouac' - in those day...

It's doubtless no accident that the majority of my 7" singles date back to the few years either side of 1980. Had I been a better-adjusted youngster, the period ca. '79-'82 might well have have been when I'd have bought singles with my pocket-money, instead of obsessing over aeroplanes, imaginary spaceships and, later, computers. For example: acquired three or four years ago, this 1980 copy of Martha and the Muffins' big hit single 'Echo Beach' in a picture sleeve. I'm a little surprised to learn it only reached No. 10 in the UK - it seems like it ought to have been more successful than that. Had the likes of eleven-year-old me actually bought it back then, who knows, that might have made a difference. The faintly sci-fi undertones of the phrase "far away in time" were likely a part of what attracted me to the song in the first place. I still love the images it conjures up, and, of course, it's a very catchy tune. The B-side, 'Te...

Fittingly for an album so much concerned with the seamy and the sleazy, the LP copy of Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret I picked up seven or eight years ago was in decidedly mucky condition. While the sleeve is still tatty, after a couple of cleans the record now plays a lot better, despite clearly (and, again, appropriately) having been well used. I knew and loved the singles ('Tainted Love', 'Bedsitter', 'Say Hello, Wave Goodbye') from when they were first released, and had been introduced to the notorious 'Sex Dwarf' at University, via some acquaintances who'd got their hands on a copy of the original banned version of the video. Tracks like 'Frustration' and 'Seedy Films', on the other hand, I'd seldom heard, if ever, and it was a delight to belatedly make their acquaintance. Now over forty years old, this is an album that, for me, still sounds vivid and compelling with its very British combination of camp comedy, 'kitchen sink ...

I was unaware, on seeing the exotic figure of Steve Strange in Bowie's video for 'Ashes to Ashes', and then, more prominently, in the one for Visage's 'Fade To Grey', that he was a South Wales Valleys boy like me, from Newbridge, about twelve miles' drive away from my grim home town. I was very much taken with both the song and its video at the time, though the latter looks more than a little ridiculous now. The song, however, still sounds great - which perhaps owes more to the talents of Billy Currie and Midge Ure than Strange himself, who wasn't that much of a singer. He was, however, the focal point of the band, and of a broader moment in pop culture, in his brief tenure as arbiter of all that was fashionable in London. On the B-Side, 'The Steps' is a moody instrumental incorporating heartbeat-like drums and synths suggesting organ chords and brass fanfares. I had always supposed 'Fade To Grey' was the debut Visage single, but no - w...

I caught Frankie Goes to Hollywood's debut TV appearance when a performance of 'Relax' was aired on The Tube in February 1983. I was impressed by the song, and meanwhile conscious of its being daringly risqué for early evening viewing. After it had been reworked and polished up by Trevor Horn et al , it sailed to No. 1 despite a temporary ban by the BBC. I found my copy of it in a Swedish junk-shop about twenty years later. Thanks to Discogs I know it's a 3rd press UK version of the 12" single on which the A side is misidentified as the 'Sex Mix' rather than the so-called 'New York Mix' it really is. The 12" single was issued in a money-grabbing plethora of versions with a variety of sleeve designs, this one being known as the "Two Bodies" sleeve. On the B-Side are the band's version of Gerry & The Pacemakers' 'Ferry Across the Mersey' along with the original version of 'Relax'. One hopes drugs were invol...

Last year someone donated a carefully-curated collection of vinyl to my local charity shop, including a variety of '70s and early '80s electronica, much of it obscure enough that I'd never heard of the artists before. There was some new-age stuff, Moog-based compilations, numerous LPs by Kitarō and Tomita, etc. Given the music involved, I'd not be surprised if there had also been Tangerine Dream and Jean-Michel Jarre albums that had been snapped up before I got to see what was left over. I must have bought eight or nine of those albums in all, and found about half of them to my liking, donating the remainder back to the same shop. Among the successes was Prisms , by Michael Garrison, a 1981 release, the artist's second. Garrison, it seemed, had been a great admirer of "Berlin School" electronica, but, hailing from Oregon rather than Central Europe, he was very far removed from the action. In isolation, he nevertheless acquired a variety of synthesizer equi...

Between lockdowns in 2020 I purchased a pre-owned vinyl copy of The Singles compilation by Pretenders. It includes sixteen of their golden greats. I always liked the sound of Chrissie Hynde's voice and enjoyed many of these songs when they were new, while being ambivalent about others (notably 'Brass in Pocket', and some of the later hits). I wasn't enough of a fan to investigate their albums, so its a case of a "Best Of" being ideal. In general I prefer the less polished stuff on side A to the glossier material on side B, but I can sit back and enjoy almost all of it, with the exception of the closing track, the version of 'I Got You Babe' Hynde did with UB40 - an interloper in my estimation that doesn't really belong. Hynde wrote or co-wrote eleven of the sixteen tracks, so the album's a testament to her top-notch songwriting skills. A further two songs are from the pen of her one-time partner Ray Davies, and another two, besides 'I Got ...

I've always loved The Jam's swansong single, and was delighted to find a 7" copy of it in a picture sleeve about four years ago. Back in the '80s my sister had a copy of the 'Start!' single, and, later, the Snap! double-album compilation. The latter, despite my affection for many of the songs thereon, never quite gelled for me as an LP: I seem to enjoy their music better in smaller portions; a single is ideal. Besides this one, I also have 'That's Entertainment' and 'The Bitterest Pill' as 45s. The core trio were augmented on this number by piano, trumpet & saxophone, and by Tracie Young's backing vocals. Bruce Foxton also joined in the singing. Paul Weller was obviously half-way to The Style Council by this point, not only on the soulful A-side, but on the B-side too. 'Shopping' is a moodily shuffling number that includes a splash of brass and some lovely guitar work, and isn't far short of coming together very nicely. ...

I was a little young to be fully enamoured with The Passions' 'I'm in Love with a German Film Star' at the time it was released, but it's a distinctive song that kept turning up on the radio over the following years as it meanwhile stuck tenaciously in my mind, as it has done in many others'. Having repeatedly sought it out on YouTube, last year I eventually got around to ordering a 7" copy in a plain paper sleeve from an ebay seller. A simple, steady arrangement with a perfectly-judged guitar part undepins Barbara Gogan's pretentious yet heartfelt lyrics. To a provincial 12-year-old who'd barely even seen a German film, it all seemed terribly sophisticated and cosmopolitan. Only years later did it become common knowledge that the object of Gogan's affection was from Coventry, and had been a roadie for The Clash and The Sex Pistols before going on to do bit-parts in German films & TV. The song still sounds great to this day, with producer Pe...

One of my earlier vinyl acquisitions, The Raw and the Cooked isn't an album I've played very often, despite its "all killer, no filler" strength in depth. It's startling to think that it was something like fifteen years old when I bought it, more than fifteen years ago. No fewer than six of its ten tracks were released as singles in the UK, with all but the last of them top 40 hits: it felt inescapable in 1988/89 and left a large footprint. For all that, it didn't seem to have a great deal of influence on what came next. FYC guitarist/keyboardist Andy Cox was quoted as saying it was "30 years of pop music condensed into 30 minutes": perhaps it was more a concise summation of what had preceded it than a sign of things to come. I'd say my favourite tracks are the third and fourth on side A: 'I'm Not The Man I Used To Be' and 'I'm Not Satisfied'. The striking graphic design of the credits on the inner sleeve is easy on the e...

When I found a vinyl copy of Infected by The The in the wild last summer, I was in two minds as to whether I should bring it home or not. It's an album I liked and admired when it was new, enough that I bought it on cassette at the time. But it was never a record I unreservedly loved. I did bring it home and had the peculiar pleasure of hearing it all for the first time in what must have been at least twenty five years, if not thirty. Why then had I hesitated to pick it up? I doubted I'd revisit it - and, sure enough, since then I've yet to play the LP a second time. I had misgivings about the state-of-the-art mid-'80s production when it was still the mid-'80s. The songs still stand up pretty well, but I didn't always enjoy how they were dressed up, and nor do I now. The political concerns it addressed, sharply here; clumsily there; are largely still relevant, yet it's such a serious record, to the extent of being po-faced. My favourite tracks on it are ...